Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

The Beni Sakhr hospitality was even richer than that of the Howeitat. Lawrence, Ali and the rest ate ravenously, for good manners, at mutton and rice which was soused in so much liquid butter that they splashed their clothes and greased their faces in their first polite haste. The pace was slackening somewhat, though the meal was far from its end, when Abd el Kader grunted, rose to his feet, wiped his hands on a handkerchief and sat back on the carpets by the tent wall. Lawrence and the rest did not know whether to rise too, for the custom was for all to rise together. They looked to Ali their leader, but he merely grunted ‘the boor!’ and the eating went on until everyone was full and had begun licking his fingers. Then Ali cleared his throat as the usual signal, and they went back to the carpets, while the next relay fed and then the children. Lawrence watched one little five-year-old in a filthy smock stuffing with both hands until at the end, with swollen stomach and shining face, it could manage no more. Then it staggered off speechlessly, a huge unpicked mutton-rib hugged to its breast. In the corner the chiefs slave was eating his customary portion, the sheep’s head; splitting the skull and sucking the brain. In front of the tent the dogs crunched their bones.

As for Abd el Kader, he had not been behaving badly according to his own standards or indeed those of the border, which allowed the full-fed man to go off at his own time. But Ali was a sherif and a hero and therefore the good manners of the central desert ruled for that feast. So Abd el Kader was ashamed. He tried to carry it off by worse behaviour. He sat spitting, grunting and picking his teeth, and to show his grandeur further, sent a servant for his medicine chest and poured himself out a dose, grumbling that such tough meat gave him indigestion. This was abominable. Lawrence had once met a chief with a scar right across his cheek which he had come by in this way: he had been politely gulping food at a feast when he had begun to choke; unable to speak but anxious to explain that this was not meant as an insult, he had slit his mouth to the ear with his dagger to show that it was only a piece of meat stuck behind his back teeth.

As the party sat about the tribal coffee-hearth, all but Abd el Kader who had gone off to a fire of his own, they heard the guns again thudding away in preparation for the second day’s bombardment of Gaza. It was a good moment for telling the chief why they had come. Lawrence said that they proposed a raid near Deraa and asked him for help. He did not mention the bridge, after his failure to get Zaal and his men; it might seem too forlorn a hope. However, the chief agreed to come himself and chose out fifteen of his best men and his own son Turki, a brave boy of seventeen, though ambitious and greedy like his father. He was an old friend of Ali’s. Lawrence gave Turki a new silk robe, and he strutted among the tents in it, without his cloak, crying shame on any man who held back from the adventure.

That night they rode out from Bair, in company with the Beni Sakhr men. Their chief had first to pay his respects to his dead ancestor whose grave was near that of Auda’s son. He decided that, as there was great danger ahead, he would make a propitiatory offering of a head-cord to add to the ragged collection looped round the gravestone. And as the raid was Lawrence’s idea, he thought he might ask Lawrence to provide one. Lawrence handed over a rich red silk and silver ornament, remarking with a smile that the virtue of the offering lay with the giver. The thrifty chief man pressed a halfpenny on Lawrence to make a pretence of purchase and get the virtue for himself. A few weeks later Lawrence passed by again and noticed that the head-cord was gone. The chief cursed loudly in his hearing at the sacrilege. Some godless Sherari, he said, had robbed his ancestor: but Lawrence could guess where it really was.

Lawrence nearly succumbed to the idleness that the weather invited the next day. But he had to be busy learning to recognize the tribal dialect of the Beni Sakhr, and making mental notes of the bits of family-history that the tribesmen gave him in casual conversation. Family-history and tribal custom were to these desert people in place of books. Nothing was so wearing, and yet nothing so important as the detailed memory that Lawrence had in good manners to cultivate, whenever he met a new tribe, for relationships and feuds and ancestry and the ownership of camels and similar matters. When they halted that night the noise of Allenby’s guns was very loud and clear, possibly because the hollows of the Dead Sea sent the noise echoing up to their high plateau. The Arabs whispered, ‘They are nearer. The English are advancing. God deliver the men under that rain!’ They were thinking of the Turks, so long their weak and corrupt oppressors whom now they loved more, in their moment of defeat, than the strong foreigner with his blind unswerving justice, their victor.

The next day they went forward over ridges of sun-browned flints so closely grown over with a tiny saffron plant that the whole view was golden with it; and about noon saw from the top of a ridge a party of trotting camels coming fast towards them. Turki cantered forward, with carbine ready cocked, to see who the strangers were, but while they were still a mile off the Beni Sakhr chief recognized his kinsmen Fahad and Adhub, famous fighters, the war-leaders of the clan. They had heard the news of the raid and ridden at once to join it. Lawrence was glad of them. The next halt was Ammari in Sirhan where there were water-pools among the salty hummocks. They were mostly too bitter to drink, though there was one which was thought very good by contrast. It lay in a limestone hollow and the water, which tasted of mixed brine and ammonia, was of a deep yellow colour. Into this pool, for a joke, Daud pushed Farraj fully dressed; he sank out of view and then rose quietly to the surface at the side of the pool under an overhanging rock-ledge and lay hid: Daud waited for him to rise, but when there was no sign of him, got into an agony of anxiety about his friend and, tearing off his cloak, jumped in after him. There was Farraj smiling under the ledge. They were fine swimmers, having once been pearl-divers in the Persian Gulf. Afterwards they began scuffling in the sand beside the water-pool. They returned to Lawrence’s camp-fire, dripping wet, in rags, bleeding and covered with mud and thorns, most unlike their usual foppish selves. They then had the impudence to say that they had tripped over a bush while dancing, and that it would be like Lawrence’s generosity if he gave them new clothes. He did nothing of the kind, but sent them off at once to clean themselves up.

The next day there was another alarm, which again proved a false one. It was only a party of a hundred Serahin tribesmen on their way to offer allegiance to Feisal. Now that they could give the oath to Ali ibn el Hussein instead and be spared the long dangerous journey through the territory of other tribes and across the Turkish railway, they turned about with joy. They came back singing to their tents the same day as they had started out, and there was a great welcome for the combined party. After more mutton and bread and some sleepless hours on the verminous rugs offered them, which they could not politely refuse, Lawrence and Ali ibn el Hussein roused the old chief and his lieutenant, and explained the intentions of the raid. They listened gravely but said that the western bridge at Gadara was impossible because the Turks had just filled the woods about it with hundreds of military wood-cutters; the bridges in the middle they would not like to visit under the guidance of Abd el Kader whom they mistrusted and who would be among his own villagers there; the eastern bridge by Tell el Shehab was in the country of their blood-enemies who might take the opportunity to attack them in the rear. Also, if it rained the camels would not be able to trot over the muddy plains on the farther side of the line between Azrak and the bridges, and the whole party might be cut off and killed.

This was very bad. The Serahin were Lawrence’s last hope and, if they refused to come, it would be impossible to destroy the bridge by the day that Allenby asked for it to be destroyed. So Ali ibn el Hussein and Lawrence collected the better men of the tribe and set them round the camp-fire with the chief of the Beni Sakhr and Fahad and Adhub to break cold prudence down with desperate talk. Though duty to Allenby provided the occasion, Lawrence was true Arab now, preaching with a prophetic eloquence the gospel of revolt. Its glory, he urged, lay in bitterness and suffering, and the sacrifice of the body to the spirit. Failure was even more glorious than success; it was better to defy a hostile Fate by choosing out the sure road to death, proudly throwing away the poor resources of physical life and prosperity and so making Fate ashamed at the poorness of its victory. To honourable men the forlorn hope was the only goal, and if by chance they escaped alive, then the next forlorn hope. They must believe that there was no final victory except at last after innumerable hazards to go down to death, still fighting. The Serahin listened entranced; their worldliness vanished and before daylight came they were swearing to ride with Lawrence anywhere.

Now, Lawrence was as sincere as he ever had been in his life, and this speech struck out in an hour of need gives the clue to much of his strange history. His has been the romantic love of failure, of self-humiliation, of poverty. A habit of mind caught from the desert: though perhaps latent in his blood, of which the Spanish strain—and Spanish is half-Arab—shows in the severity of his jaw and the cruel flash of his rare and quickly appeased anger. And yet with all his love of failure Lawrence has been queerly dogged with success. As Miss Gertrude Bell said of him once, ‘Everything that he touches flowers.’ His forlorn hopes all come off, he casts his bread magnificently upon the waters and is peevish to find it again (much swollen) after many days. The more deeply he abases himself the higher he finds himself exalted. So hostile Fate revenges itself neatly by refusing to take his sacrifices; and provokes him to a philosophic bitterness which is hourly contradicted by his natural impulse towards gentleness and affection.

They called Abd el Kader and taking him aside among the thickets shouted into his ear that the Serahin were coming with the party and would be guided by him to the bridges near his home. He grunted that it was well, but Lawrence and All ibn el Hussein swore never again, if they survived, would they take a deaf man as a conspirator with them. Exhausted, they rested for an hour or so, but soon had to rise to review the Serahin. They looked wild and dashing, but blustered rather too much to be quite convincing. And they had no real leader; the chief’s lieutenant was more a politician than a soldier. However, they were better than nothing, so the increased party went forward to Azrak.