Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

Two sergeant-instructors were sent from Egypt to teach the Arabs at Akaba how to use these weapons. The one in charge of the Lewis guns was an Australian; reckless, talkative, tall and supple. The Stokes-mortar sergeant was an English countryman; slow, stocky, workmanlike and silent. Lawrence knew them as Lewis and Stokes, naming them after their guns. They were excellent instructors and though they knew no Arabic taught the tribesmen by dumb-show, until in a month’s time they could use the guns reasonably well.

Lawrence decided that his raid might include an attack on Mudowwara station. It was not strongly held, and three hundred men might rush it at night and destroy the deep well there. Without its water, the only plentiful supply in the dry hot section below Maan, the trains would have to waste their wagon-space in carrying water-tanks. Lewis was anxious to join in the raid; he was sick of being a mere instructor at the base in Egypt and wanted to do some fighting. Stokes said that he would come too. Lawrence warned them what to expect, of hunger, heat and weariness, and explained that if anything happened to him it might go badly with them alone with the Arabs. This warning only excited Lewis and did not put off Stokes. Lawrence lent them two of his best camels.

So they started on September the seventh, riding up to Guweira where they collected some of Auda’s Howeitat tribesmen. Lawrence was at first afraid that the heat would be too much for the sergeants. The granite walls of the valley down which they rode were burningly hot; a few days before in the cooler palm-gardens of Akaba beach the thermometer had shown a hundred and twenty degrees. It was now even hotter. As neither of the sergeants had ever been on a camel before he let them take the ride easily. He was amused at the way that they behaved with the Arabs. Lewis, the Australian, seemed at home from the first and behaved freely towards the Arabs, but was astonished when they treated him as equals; he could not have imagined that they would forget the social difference between a white man and a brown. This race prejudice, however, would soon wear off: meanwhile the joke was that Lewis was burned a good deal browner than any of the Arabs. On the other hand, Stokes, the Englishman, remained insular and his shy correctness reminded the Arabs all the time that he was not one of them. They treated him with respect and called him ‘sergeant,’ whereas Lewis was merely ‘the long fellow.’ Lawrence found them typical of the two opposite kinds of Englishmen in the East: the kind that allowed themselves to be influenced by native customs and thought in order to be able the more easily to impose their will on the country; and the kind that became more English by reacting against native customs and thought. Lawrence being an extreme instance of the former type, to the point of identifying himself at times with the Arabs rather than with the English, seems to have felt a sneaking regard for the John Bull constancy of Sergeant Stokes.

When they came near Guweira a Turkish aeroplane droned over and the party at once rode off the open road into bushy country where the camels would not be seen. It was a daily aeroplane that never did much damage but provided the idle Guweira camp with excitement and conversation. They halted, still in the saddle, until the aeroplane had dropped its three bombs and returned to its own lines near Maan. Lawrence found the Howeitat all at odds. Auda who drew the wages for the whole tribe, only a clan of which he ruled personally, was using his power to compel the smaller clans to accept him as their leader. This they resented, threatening either to go home or to join the Turks. Feisal had sent up a sherif, a close kinsman, to settle the dispute, but Auda was obstinate, knowing how much the success of the Revolt depended on him. Now some of the clans from the south towards Mudowwara were about to desert the cause, and they were the very men on whom Lawrence was counting for help in his operations; but Auda would not give way. However, he told Lawrence to ride forward some miles with his twenty baggage-camels and halt to wait events.

They went, glad to leave behind the swarms of flies that plagued them at Guweira. Lawrence much admired the way that the sergeants stood the stifling heat, the worst that they had ever experienced; it was like a metal mask over the face. Not to lower themselves in the Arabs’ estimation, they did not utter a word of complaint. They were, however, ignorant of Arabic or they would have known that the Arabs were themselves making a great fuss about it. Rumm, a place of springs, half-way to Mudowwara, should have been their first halt, but they went on by easy stages, stopping the night in a grove of rustling tamarisk under a tall red cliff. In the very early morning, while the stars were still shining, Lawrence was roused by the Arab commander of the expedition, one of the Harith, a poor member of the Prophet’s family. He crept up shivering and said, ‘Lord, I have gone blind.’ Blindness for an Arab was a worse fate than for a European and the sherif must now look forward to a life of complete blankness. However, he would not go home; he could ride, he said, though he could not shoot, and he would make this his last adventure and, with God’s help, would retire from active life at least with the consolation of a victory.

They rode for hours the next day through the valley of Rumm, a broad tamarisk-grown avenue two miles wide between colossal red sandstone cliffs. They rose a sheer thousand feet on either side, not in an unbroken wall, but seemed built in vertical sections like a row of skyscrapers. There were caverns high up like windows and others at the foot like doors. At the top were domes of a greyer rock. The pygmy caravan passing down this street for giants felt awed and kept quite silent. Towards sunset there was a break in the cliffs to the right, leading to the water. They turned in here and found themselves in a vast oval amphitheatre floored with damp sand and dark shrubs. The entrance was only three hundred yards wide, which made the place more impressive still. At the foot of the enclosing precipices were enormous fallen blocks of sandstone, bigger than houses, and along a ledge at one side grew trees. A little path zigzagged up to the ledge and there, three hundred feet above the level of the plain, jetted the water-springs. They watered their camels here and cooked rice to add to the bully beef which the sergeants had brought, with biscuits, as their ration.

Coffee was also prepared for visitors: they had heard Arab voices shouting in the distance at the other end of the place. The visitors soon arrived, head-men of the several Howeitat clans, all boiling with anger and jealousy against Auda. They suspected Lawrence of sympathizing with Auda’s attempt to force them to offer him their allegiance; they refused to help Feisal further until he gave them assurance that they would be allowed complete independence as clans. Lawrence had to do the entertaining that night in place of the blinded sherif; the awkwardness of the occasion made his task doubly difficult. One of the head-men, by name Gasim abu Dumeik, a fine horseman who had led the hill-men at Aba el Lissan, was particularly furious in his denouncement of Auda. Lawrence singled him out for a verbal battle and finally silenced him. The other head-men, for shame, gradually veered round to Lawrence’s side and spoke of riding with him the next day to Mudowwara. Lawrence then said that Zaal would arrive the next day and that the two of them would accept help from all the clans except Gasim abu Dumeik’s. And that the good services of this clan would be wiped from Feisal’s book because of Gasim’s words and it would forfeit all the honour and rewards that it had earned. Gasim withdrew from the fireside, swearing to go over to the Turks at once. The cautious others tried in vain to stop his mouth. Next morning he was there with his men ready to join or oppose the expedition as the whim went. While he hesitated Zaal arrived and the pair had a violent quarrel. Lawrence and one or two more got between them and stopped the fight: the other chiefs then came quietly up in two’s and three’s as volunteers, begging Lawrence to assure Feisal of their loyalty.

He decided to go to Feisal at once to explain matters and, commending the sergeants to Zaal, who answered for their lives with his own, rode off hurriedly with a single attendant to Akaba. He found a short cut and reached Akaba in six hours. Feisal was alarmed to see him back so soon, but the affair was soon explained and Feisal at once appointed a distinguished member of his family to go to Rumm as mediator. The sherif rode back to Rumm with Lawrence and there, gathering together the Arabs, including Gasim, began to smooth over their difficulties and persuade them to peace. Gasim, no longer defiant but sulky, would not make any public statement, so about a hundred men of the smaller clans dared defy him by promising to join the raid. This was better than nothing, but Lawrence had hoped for at least a force of three hundred to deal successfully with the station. And there was no suitable leader now that the sherif was blinded. Gasim would have done, had he been willing. Zaal was the only other possible choice, but he was too closely related to Auda not to be suspected; and he was too sharp-tongued and sneering for even his good advice to be taken willingly. On the sixteenth of September, therefore, the party started out, without a leader.

At Rumm one curious incident had occurred which, though it had nothing to do with the war, made a profound impression on Lawrence. He was bathing in a little rock-pool, under one of the lesser springs—his first freshwater bathe for many weeks—lying in the clear water and letting the stream wash away the dirt and sweat of travel. His clothes were in the sun on the rock-ledge, put there for the heat to chase out the vermin. An old grey-bearded ragged man suddenly appeared, with a face of great power and weariness, and sat down upon Lawrence’s clothes, not seeming to notice them or him. At last he spoke and said: ‘The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.’ It was the strangest thing that Lawrence had ever heard in Arabia. The connection of God with Love was an idea quite foreign to the country. God was Justice, or God was Power or Fear, but never Love. Christianity was not a wholly Semitic creed, but a grafting of Greek idealism upon the hard Law of Moses, the typical Semite. It was this Greek element that had enabled it to sweep over non-Semitic Europe. Galilee, where Christianity originated, was half-Greek: at Gadara (of the swine) there was a Greek university of which St. James seems to have been a student, and with whose doctrines his Master was almost certainly familiar. But the old man at Rumm was a puzzle; he was a tribesman, a true Arab, and his brief sentence seemed to contradict all that seemed eternally fixed in the Semite nature. Lawrence afterwards invited the old man to the evening meal, hoping that he would utter doctrine, but he would only groan and mutter, and the riddle remained unsolved. The Arabs said that he was always so. All his life long he had wandered about, moaning strange things, not troubling himself for food or work or shelter. He was given charity by the tribes in pity of his poverty and madness, but never answered a word or talked aloud except when out by himself or alone among the sheep and goats.

The ride from Rumm began unpropitiously; though half an hour after starting some shamefaced men of Gasim’s clan rode out to join them, unable to endure the sight of others raiding without them. There was no common feeling between the different little parties that made up the force. Zaal was admittedly the most experienced fighter among them and yet the other sullen chiefs would not even allow him to settle the order of the march. Lawrence spent all his time riding up and down the column from one chief to the other trying to draw them together for the common purpose. He was treated by them with some respect, both as Feisal’s deputy and as the owner of Ghazala, though Ghazala was that day matched with the only other camel in Northern Arabia better than herself, a beast called El Jedha, ridden by one Motlog, her old owner. El Jedha had been a year or two before the sole occasion of a big tribal war.