Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

On the fourth of February, 1918, Lawrence started towards Akaba with five men, on camels, across the hills; a most painful ride in bitter cold and whirling snow. At a night halt in the shelter of the rock the four men with him, lying on the frozen ground beside their camels, resigned themselves to death. They would not speak or move when he called to them and he could only rouse them by pulling one of them up by the love-locks, which startled him painfully to life, and the others then woke up too. From Feisal in Akaba he got thirty thousand pounds in gold, two attendants of the Ateiba tribe and a party of twenty men under a sheikh to carry the gold. The gold was in £1,000 bags, each bag weighing about twenty-two pounds. Two were enough weight for each camel, swung on either side of the saddle. They had hardly started before the sheikh stopped for hospitality at the tent of a friend and said that perhaps he and his men might come on with Lawrence the next day, if the weather improved. Lawrence knew what delay this would mean and decided that the best way to get the party moving for sure the next day was to ride on ahead and shame them into following. So he went forward with his own attendants. The wind blew so bitter, that the men, who, being from Central Arabia, had never experienced cold like this before and now saw snow for the first time in their lives, thought from the pains in their lungs that they were strangling. The party rode behind the hill where old Maulud and his regulars were besieging the Turks at Maan: for Lawrence wanted to spare his men the unhappiness of passing a friendly camp without a halt.

Maulud’s men had been here for two solid months in dugouts on the side of the hill. Their only fuel was wet wormwood, on which they with difficulty baked bread every other day. They had no clothes but khaki drill uniform; and when Feisal’s supply officer had applied on their behalf to Egypt for ordinary khaki serge the answer had been that Arabia was a tropical country and that therefore only tropical kit could be issued. Nor could he get them sufficient army boots. (The regulars got boots, most of them. The irregulars did not, though their need was as great.) They slept in wet verminous pits on empty flour sacks, six or eight huddled together in a bunch to make their few blankets go as far as possible. More than half of them died or were broken in health by the cold and wet. But Maulud, by his great heart, somehow kept the survivors in their places, daily exchanging shots with the Turks. Their camp was four thousand feet above sea-level.

Lawrence’s journey grew worse, with frequent falls and a wind so violent that they could do no more than a mile an hour against it. They had frequently to dismount and pull the camels up mud-banks and through icy streams. After many hours the men flung themselves, weeping, on the ground and refused to go farther, so they camped there for the night in the slush between their camels. The next day, coming on a Howeitat camp, the two Ateiba tribesmen refused to go farther with Lawrence. They said that it would be death. Lawrence called them cowards and swore that he would go the rest of the journey alone with their four bags of gold, in addition to his own two. He had a very fine cream-coloured camel, by name Wodheiha, who saved his life that day: she refused to take a short cut over some frozen mud-flats, but, when he fell through the cat-ice and got bogged to the waist, came close so that he could pull himself out by grabbing at her fetlock. He did ten miles that afternoon, travelling all the time, and stopping the night at an old Crusaders’ castle where a friendly chief was encamped. The old man was hospitable but mentioned, as he blessed the meal, that the next day his two hundred men must starve or rob, for they had neither food nor money and his messengers to Feisal were held up by the snow. Lawrence immediately gave him five hundred pounds on account until his subsidy came.

In the morning he rode out again on the last stage of his journey to Tafileh. With him came two men from the castle as escort, but they soon deserted him and he went on alone. That afternoon, climbing uphill through snowdrifts that completely hid the path, Wodheiha grew very tired, missed her footing and slipped eighteen feet, with Lawrence, down the steep hill-side into a frozen snowdrift. After the fall she rose trembling and stood still. He was afraid that she had come to the end of her strength and vainly tried to tow her out, up to his neck in snow. Then he hit her from behind but could not budge her. He mounted her and she sat down. He jumped off and heaved her up, wondering if the drift was too deep for her. With his bare hands and feet he scooped her a road. The crust was sharp and cut his wrists and bare ankles till they bled over the snow, but he carried the little road back to the path, mounted Wodheiha again and rushed her successfully up the hill-side. They went on cautiously, Lawrence sounding the path with his stick or digging new roads through the deeper drifts. In three hours they were on the mountain-ridge overlooking the valley of the Dead Sea. Thousands of feet below he could see village-gardens green and happy in their summer-like weather. Towards evening Wodheiha balked at a snow-bank and he was afraid that she would not manage it this time and would have to be left there to die. So he led her back a hundred yards and charged her over at a canter. The other side of the bank was slippery, having been exposed to the sun all the afternoon. Wodheiha lost her footing and went slithering down on her tail, with locked legs, for about a hundred feet; Lawrence still in the saddle. There were stones under the snow and she sprang up in rage, lashing her tail, then ran forward at ten miles an hour, sliding and plunging down the path towards the nearest mountain-village. Lawrence was clinging to the saddle, in terror of broken bones. Some men of Zeid’s were weather-bound at this village, and came out much amused at the distinguished entry. Lawrence made the last eight miles to Tafileh in safety, gave Zeid some money and his letters and went gladly to bed.

He went forward the next day to plan out the Arab advance to Kerak and so along the eastern side of the Dead Sea. The weather was improving and he was reassured that the steps of the advance would be easy. Jericho was still in Turkish hands, but would soon fall, and it would be as well to go forward at once to threaten the Turkish left flank on the eastern bank of the Jordan. He came back and told Zeid of his plans. But the Tafileh district had seen too many changes in the fortune of the Arab Revolt to decide on any more risks on its behalf. Zeid had to confess that to arrange a further advance was beyond his powers.

This was a facer for Lawrence, who had promised Allenby to fulfil a certain programme by certain dates and had drawn special credits for the operation. His scheme was now breaking down, not for military reasons, but because of a defect in propaganda, for the purpose of which Lawrence was attached to Feisal’s headquarters. It therefore reflected personally upon him.

There was nothing for Lawrence to do but go at once to Allenby at his Headquarters at Beersheba, confess to failure and resign. He started late the same afternoon with four men, cutting straight across country, first down five thousand feet from the Tafileh hills and then up three thousand feet into Palestine. At Beersheba he met his old friend, Hogarth, and explained the whole business to him. That his breakdown should have been with Zeid, a little man whom he liked, put a finishing touch to his general feeling of exhaustion. Lawrence went on to complain that never since he landed in Arabia had he been given an order, never anything more than requests and options. He was tired to death of free-will and responsibility, all he wanted now was to resign and be given a job in which he was not compelled to think or act for himself; any routine job would do. Also he had for the last year and a half ridden something like a thousand miles a month on camels, not to mention thousands of miles more in crazy aeroplanes and jolting cars. In each of his last five fights he had been wounded and he now so dreaded further pain that he had to force himself to go under fire. He had generally been hungry, and lately always cold. Frost and dirt had poisoned his wounds to a mass of festering sores. And the guilt of the fraud on the Arabs and of the deed of Tafileh was heavy on his mind.

However, it was not to be. Hogarth took him to the head of the Arab Bureau, who refused to let him resign. The Imperial War Cabinet was counting on Allenby to end the deadlock in the West by winning the war in the East. If Allenby could take Damascus and possibly Aleppo, Turkey would be forced to surrender and that might encourage Austria and Bulgaria to follow suit; the Germans could not then hold out longer. But Allenby could not win his war without a protected right flank and Lawrence was the only man with enough control of the Arabs to give him this. The matter of a few paltry thousand pounds was not going to stand in the way of victory. So he was actually ordered this time to take up the task, and quietly accepted the inevitable.

Allenby wanted to know whether Lawrence could still link up with him at Jericho, which had just been taken, and so continue the advance north to Amman. Lawrence said that he could not manage at present without a great deal of help. The first trouble was Maan, which was holding up the Arab Army. Maan must be taken and, now that the time had come, the pilgrims’ railway must be permanently cut. The Arab Army could do it but would want seven hundred baggage camels for transport, also money, more guns, more machine-guns and protection from a counter-attack from Amman. Allenby promised all this, and Lawrence promised in return that when Maan fell the Arab Army would move up to Jericho and join in Allenby’s great advance on Damascus from the Mediterranean Coast to the Dead Sea.

He went to Feisal at Akaba and explained that the Arabs would now soon be driven out of Tafileh by the Turks, but that Tafileh did not matter. Amman and Maan were the only important points from now on and a Turkish force in Tafileh would actually waste the Turkish strength. Feisal, anxious for Arab honour, sent a warning message to Zeid, but without avail; for six days later the Turks drove him out of the place.