Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

The siege of Medina was still maintained in Central Arabia by Feisal’s brothers, Abdulla and Ali; Yenbo was being used again as a base. Lawrence could not persuade the British advisers there, who were still under the High Commissioner of Egypt and not, like him, under Allenby, that there was no point in making Medina surrender. And when they asked him to cut the railway permanently at Maan because it was difficult for them to cut it where they were, he had to pretend that the troops with him were too cowardly to attempt the operation.

XXII

At Akaba Lawrence began increasing his body-guard, which had started with Farraj, Daud and the Syrians. (It may be as well to point out here that the names of most of the subsidiary characters in Lawrence’s account, such as Farraj, Daud, Sergeants Lewis and Stokes and so on, are disguised. The names of the more important people such as Auda, Tallal, Colonel Wilson, are not.) It was advisable to do this because the price put on his head by the Turks—as also on Ali ibn el Hussein’s—had risen to twenty thousand pounds. He chose followers who could live hard and ride hard, men proud of themselves and of good family. Two or three of these had joined him already and set a standard by which to judge new candidates. One day Lawrence was reading[4] in his tent when one of the Ageyl noiselessly entered. He was thin, dark, short, but most gorgeously dressed, with three black plaited love-locks hanging on each side of his face. On his shoulder he carried a very beautiful, many-coloured saddle-bag. Greeting Lawrence with respect, he threw the saddle-bag on the carpet, saying: ‘Yours,’ and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. The next day he brought a camel saddle with its long brass horns exquisitely engraved. ‘Yours,’ he said again. The third day he came empty-handed in a poor cotton shirt, to show his humility, and sank down as a suppliant, asking to enter Lawrence’s service. Lawrence asked, him his name. ‘Abdulla the Robber,’ he answered (the nickname was, he said, inherited from his honoured father), and told his story sadly. He had been born in a town of the Central Oases and when quite young had been imprisoned for impiety. Later he had left home in a hurry, owing to an unlucky scandal about a married woman, and taken service with the local Emir, Ibn Saud, the present ruler of Mecca. For hard swearing in this puritanical service, he had suffered punishment and deserted to the service of another Emir. Unfortunately, he had then come to dislike his officer so much that he struck him in public with a camel-stick. After recovering in prison from the terrible beating that he got for this, he had taken a job on the pilgrims’ railway which was then being built. A Turkish contractor docked his wages for sleeping at midday and he retaliated by docking the Turk of his head. He was put into prison at Medina, escaped through a window, came to Mecca, and for his proved integrity and camel-manship was made carrier of the post between Mecca and Jiddah. Here he settled down, setting his parents up in a shop at Mecca with the bribe-money that he alternately got from merchants and robbers. After a year’s prosperity, he was waylaid and lost his camel and its consignment. His shop was seized in compensation. He joined the Sherif’s camel police and rose to be a sergeant, but for his hard swearing and dagger-fighting was reduced again. On this occasion he accused a tribesman of the Ateiba of bringing about his downfall through jealousy and stabbed the man in court in front of Feisal’s cousin, Sharraf, who was trying the case. He nearly died of that beating. Then he entered Sharraf’s service. When war broke out he became orderly to the captain of the Ageyl, but after the mutiny at Wejh, when the captain resigned and became an ambassador, the Robber missed the companionship of the ranks and now applied to enter Lawrence’s service. He had a letter of recommendation from the captain. Lawrence read it. It said that Abdulla the Robber had been two years faithful but most disrespectful; that he was the most experienced of the Ageyl, having served every Prince in Arabia and having always been dismissed after stripes and prison for offences of too great individuality; that he was the best rider of the Ageyl, next to the writer of this letter, a great judge of camels and as brave as any son of Adam. Lawrence engaged him at once as captain of half the body-guard and never regretted it. This was only informal rank: his pay was the same as the rest.

[4] It has been said that besides Malory, Aristophanes and The Oxford Book of English Verse he also carried Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, but this is untrue, though his memories of the book were most helpful to him, in the absence of maps, for the first part of the campaign.

Abdulla the Robber and Abdulla el Zaagi, the captain of the other half, a man of more normal officer type, examined all candidates for service between them, and a gang of desperate-looking villains grew about Lawrence: the British at Akaba called them cut-throats, but they only cut throats at Lawrence’s order. Most of them were Ageyl, wonderful camel-masters who would call their beasts by name from a hundred yards away and make them stand guard over the baggage. Lawrence paid them six pounds a month and provided them also with their camels and rations; whereas the ordinary Arab in Feisal’s ranks had to provide his camel out of the same pay. So Lawrence had the pick of the countryside at his disposal. They spent their wages chiefly in buying clothes of every possible colour—only they did not presume to wear white, which was what Lawrence himself always wore. They fought like devils with Turks and outsiders, but not among themselves. The Robber and El Zaagi kept them in order with punishments so severe that they would have been monstrous had not the men, who were at liberty to resign whenever they liked, taken a perverse pride in them. They had for Lawrence a blind, half-superstitious devotion, and in his service nearly sixty of them died. The bravest individual deed of the war was performed by one of them who twice swam up the subterranean water-conduit into Medina and returned with a full report of the besieged town. Lawrence had to live up to their standard of hardness. He had learned to keep himself fit by breaking all civilized habits, eating much at one time, then going without food for as many as four days and afterwards over-eating. The same with sleep—doing without it for days except for drowsy naps taken while still riding, and riding carefully, on long night journeys. The men with him suffered less than he did from the heat, but he less than they in the frost and snow of the short winter that they passed in the mountains. In physical endurance there was equality between them, but in spirit and energy he outdid them. Throughout the campaign, it goes almost without saying, Lawrence had a secret personal motive, stronger than patriotism, religion, personal ambition, love of adventure or of justice, in the light of which alone his extraordinary feats become intelligible. But shortly before the capture of Damascus this motive was, it seems, removed, and this is one explanation, I believe, of his coming so quickly away from the scene of his triumph, leaving the work of consolidating the Arab achievement to other hands; and of much that has happened to him since.

ABDULLA EL ZAAGI

from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON

On the eleventh of January, 1918, Nasir, the usual pioneer leader for Feisal, made an attack on Jurf, the nearest railway station to Tafileh, the group of villages commanding the south end of the Dead Sea. He took with him some Beni Sakhr tribesmen, some Arab regulars under Nuri Said (the chief-of-staff to General Jaafar, Feisal’s commander-in-chief of the regular forces), a mountain-gun, and some machine-guns. They had luck in capturing the station, which the tribesmen camel-charged before Nuri Said intended them to, with a loss of only two killed. Two engines, the water-tower, the pump and the railway points were then blown up by the engineers. They took two hundred prisoners with seven officers and much booty, including weapons, mules and seven trucks of Damascus delicacies intended for the officers’ messes at Medina. The regulars, mostly Syrians, then tasted olives, sesame paste, dried apricot and other sweets and pickles for the first time since they had left home three or four years before. There was also a whole truck of tobacco. When Feisal heard that the Medina garrison was now quite without anything to smoke, he was so sorry for the Turks, being a confirmed smoker himself, that he sent a number of pack-camels loaded with cheap cigarettes straying into their lines, with his compliments.

Lawrence was glad to see how well the army could manage without his personal direction. This was a raid merely, but Nasir and Lawrence soon followed it up by marching from Jefer to Tafileh with Auda and his tribesmen. Nasir appeared at dawn on a cliff above the valley, threatening to bombard the place if it did not surrender. It was only a bluff, because Nuri Said with the guns had gone back to the base, and the Turkish garrison may have known this. Supported by most of the villagers, they began to fire at the Howeitat, who spread out along the cliff and fired back. All except Auda. He rode in anger alone down the cliff-path, and reining in close to the houses bellowed out: ‘Dogs, do you not know Auda?’ When they heard the terrible name of Auda, the villagers’ hearts failed them and they compelled the Turks to surrender.