The Arabs had gone raving mad. They were running about at top speed, bareheaded, half-naked, screaming, shooting in the air, clawing at each other, as they burst open trucks and staggered off with immense bales which they ripped open by the side of the railway, smashing what they did not want. The train had been packed with refugees, sick men, volunteers for boat-service on the Euphrates, and families of Turkish officers returning to Damascus. To one side of the wreck stood thirty or forty hysterical women, unveiled, tearing their clothes and hair, shrieking together. The Arabs paid no attention to them, busy looting their absolute fill for the first time in their lives. Never was such a litter of household goods—carpets, mattresses, blankets, clothes for men and women, clocks, cooking-pots, food, ornaments and weapons. Camels became common property: each man loaded the nearest with what it would carry and shooed it westward into the desert while he turned to his next fancy. The women, seeing Lawrence unemployed, rushed and caught at him, howling for mercy. He comforted them that there was no danger, but they would not let him go until they were knocked away by their husbands, who in turn grovelled at Lawrence’s feet in an agony of terror, pleading for their lives. He kicked them off with his bare feet and broke free. Next a group of Austrian officers and non-commissioned officers, artillery instructors to the Turks, quietly appealed to him in Turkish for quarter: he answered in German. Then one of them, mortally wounded, asked in English for a doctor. There was none, but Lawrence said that the Turks would soon be there to care for him. The man was dead before that, and so were most of the others, for a dispute broke out between them and the Arabs; an Austrian foolishly fired at one of Lawrence’s Syrians, and before Lawrence could interfere all but two or three were cut down.
Among the passengers were five Egyptian soldiers captured by the Turks in a night-raid of Davenport’s two hundred miles down the line. They knew Lawrence and told him of Davenport’s efforts in Abdulla’s sector where he was constantly pegging away without much encouragement from the Arabs and forced to rely mostly on imported Egyptians like these. Lawrence set the five to march off the prisoners to the appointed rallying-place behind the hills westward. Lewis and Stokes had come down to help Lawrence, who was a little anxious about them. The Arabs in their madness were as ready to attack friend as enemy. Three times Lawrence had to defend himself when they pretended not to know him and snatched at his things. Lewis went across the railway to count the thirty men he had killed and to find Turkish gold and trophies in their haversacks. Stokes went into the hollow behind the embankment, where he saw the effect of his second shell and turned back hurriedly. One of Lawrence’s Syrians came up with his arms full of booty and shouted to Lawrence that an old woman in the last wagon but one wished to see him. Lawrence told the man to put down the booty and go at once for Ghazala and some baggage-camels to remove the guns; for the Turks were coming close and the Arabs were escaping one by one towards the hills, driving their staggering camels before them. Lawrence was annoyed with himself for not having thought of moving the guns earlier. Meanwhile he went to the last wagon but one, found a trembling old invalid, the Lady Ayesha by name, a friend and hostess of Feisal’s, who wanted to know what was happening. Lawrence reassured her that no harm would come to her and found the old negress, her servant, whom he sent to bring a drink from the leaking tender of the first engine. The grateful Lady Ayesha later sent him secretly from Damascus a charming letter and a little Baluchi carpet as a remembrance of their odd meeting. Later still—as I hear from an indirect but trustworthy source—Lawrence, who made it his principle to get no spoils of any sort from the War, sent the carpet with an equally charming letter to Lady Allenby, who now has it in her bedroom.
The Syrian never brought the camels. All of Lawrence’s servants, overcome with greed, had escaped with the Bedouin. No one was now left but the three Englishmen. They began to fear that they must abandon the guns and run for their lives, but just then saw two camels cantering back. It was Zaal and Howeimil, who had missed Lawrence and returned to find him. Lawrence and the sergeants were rolling up the cable, their only piece. Zaal dismounted and told Lawrence to climb up, but he loaded the camel with the wire and exploder instead; Zaal laughed at the quaint booty. Howeimil was lame from an old wound on the knee and could not walk, but couched his camel while the Lewis guns were hoisted across behind him, tied butt to butt and looking like scissors. There remained the mortars, but Stokes appeared unskilfully leading a stray baggage-camel which he had caught. Stokes was too weak to run, so he was given Zaal’s camel with the mining apparatus; the trench-mortars were put on the baggage-camel, and Howeimil went off in charge of them. Meanwhile Lawrence, Lewis and Zaal, in a sheltered hollow behind the old gun-position, made a fire of cartridge-boxes, petrol and wreckage, banked the Lewis-gun drums and spare rifle ammunition round it, and gingerly laid some Stokes shells on top. Then they ran. As the flames reached the cordite and ammonal there was a colossal burst of fire, thousands of cartridges exploded in series like machine-guns, and the shells roared off in columns of dust and smoke. Both parties of Turks were impressed by this noise, and decided that the Arabs were posted strongly. They halted and began to send out flanking parties according to rule. Through the gap between the main body of the northern party and their flankers working round on the western side, the three men ran panting away into concealment among the farther ridges.
At the rallying-place Lawrence found his missing camels and the Syrian servants with them. In his soft deadly voice he told the Syrians what he thought of them for their desertion. They pleaded that camels had become common property and that someone else had gone off with the right ones. But this did not excuse them for having found others for themselves and loaded them up with plunder. Lawrence asked if anyone was hurt and was told that a boy had been killed in the first Arab rush; three others were slightly wounded. The rush had not been ordered and was a mistake; the Lewis and Stokes guns could have managed the killing without Arab help, and Lawrence felt that he was not responsible for the boy’s death. Then one of Feisal’s freedmen said that Salem was missing, and others that he had been last seen lying wounded just beyond the engine. Lawrence had not been told and was angry, for Salem was under his charge. For the second time he had been put by Arab carelessness in the position of leaving a friend behind. He called for volunteers to rescue the negro. Zaal and twelve of his men said that they would try, but when they came near the train they saw that they were too late. A hundred and fifty Turks were swarming over the wreck and by now Salem would be dead, and not only dead but tortured and mutilated as the Turkish habit was. (The Arabs made a practice now of mercifully killing their own badly wounded to prevent them falling alive into Turkish hands.)
They had to go back without Salem, but took the opportunity of recovering some of the baggage, including the sergeants’ kits, which had been left at the camping-ground. The Turks caught them at this and opened fire with a machine-gun. Others ran to cut them off. Zaal, a dead shot, stopped with five others at a ridge-top and fired back, calling to the remainder of the party to escape while he held the Turks up. So they retired from ridge to ridge, hitting at least thirteen or fourteen Turks at the cost of four of their camels wounded. The Turks gave up the pursuit.
Victory always undid an Arab force: this was now no longer a raiding party but a stumbling baggage-caravan loaded to breaking-point with enough household goods to make an Arab tribe rich for years. Of the ninety prisoners, ten were friendly Arab women on the way to Damascus from Medina who had now decided to go instead to Mecca by way of Akaba. These and thirty-four wounded Turks were mounted in pairs on the spare camels that had been used for carrying the explosives and ammunition. The sergeants asked Lawrence to give them a sword each as a souvenir; and he was going down the column to look for something for them when suddenly he met Feisal’s freedmen and to his astonishment saw, strapped on the crupper behind one of them, the missing Salem. He was unconscious and soaked with blood from a wound through his back near the spine. Apparently he had been hit in his rush downhill and left for dead near the engine; where the tribesmen stripped him of his cloak, dagger, rifle, and head-gear. One of his fellows had found him alive and carried him off home without, as he should have done, telling Lawrence. Salem soon recovered but ever afterwards bore Lawrence an undeserved grudge for abandoning him when wounded and under his charge.
They had to water again at the evil-smelling well—the prisoners had drunk all their water—and its nearness to Mudowwara made this dangerous. However, they made what haste they could and found it unoccupied. So back safely to Rumm by the same long avenue; in the dark this time, which made the cliffs more terrifying still, for they were invisible except as a jagged skyline high overhead on either side. From Rumm to Akaba, entering in glory laden with spoil, and boasting that the trains were now at their mercy. The two sergeants hurriedly returned to Egypt, having had the adventure they wanted. They had won a battle single-handed, had dysentery, lived on camel-milk, learned to ride a camel fifty miles a day without pain. They were awarded medals by Allenby.
The success excited the camp at Akaba. Everybody wanted to try this new and profitable sport of train-mining. The French captain of the Algerian company of gunners at Akaba, by name Pisani, was the first volunteer, an active and ambitious officer on the look-out for decorations. Feisal provided three young noblemen of Damascus who were eager to lead tribal raids, and on the twenty-sixth of September the party rode to Rumm in search of tribesmen volunteers. Lawrence said that the next raid was especially intended for Gasim’s clan. This was heaping coals of fire on the adversary’s head, but the adversary was too greedy to refuse the chance. The difficulty indeed was to keep down the numbers. They took a hundred and fifty men and a huge train of baggage-camels for the spoils.
This time they worked in the direction of Maan, riding over the Syrian border into the high hills by Batra where the keen air of the northern desert came blowing at them through a pass at the top. From Batra they turned west and struck the railway, marching along it until they came to a convenient bridge in an embankment, as at Mudowwara. Here, between midnight and dawn, they buried an automatic mine of a new and wonderful lyddite type. They lay in ambush a thousand yards away among the wormwood thickets, but no train came that day or the following night. Lawrence found the waiting intolerable. The Arabs paid no attention to the leaders appointed by Feisal and would listen to no one but Lawrence, whose success was now beginning to have results very unwelcome to him. He was asked to act as judge and had to consent. With Feisal’s example and his own pre-war experience at Carchemish to help him out, he settled during that six days’ ride twelve cases of armed assault, four camel-thefts, a marriage, two ordinary thefts, a divorce, fourteen feuds, two cases of evil eye and a bewitchment.
The evil eyes he cured by staring at their possessors with his own for ten minutes (‘horrible blue eyes,’ as an old Arab woman once told him, ‘like bits of sky through the eye-holes of a skull’), the bewitchment by casting a mock-spell of his own over the wizard. Then he began to realize what he was doing—probably Pisani’s presence reminded him that he was only an Englishman playing at being an Arab. He went off on a long train of shameful thought about himself and the fraud that he was playing on the Arabs. Again Pisani’s presence reminded him that he was leading them into this war of freedom knowing well enough that the chances were heavily against their being allowed to keep the freedom if ever they won it. The agony of his mind’s conflict at Nebk returned to him in double force. The stings of a scorpion on his left hand kept him awake that night with an arm so swollen that at least he was distracted by the pain from further thinking, but by next morning his position began troubling him again, and he decided to renounce his leadership. He called up the sheikhs to tell them of his decision. But at that moment a train was reported, and as always happened with Lawrence, who was another Hamlet, sudden enforced action cleared away his philosophic doubts and hesitations. He jumped up to watch the success of the mine.