XXIII
Spring had come and the war was starting again in earnest. The Arab army was now very well provided with transport and everything else it wanted except enough guns; it had a special branch of Allenby’s staff to look after its interests, under Colonel Dawnay. He was the only British officer, Lawrence writes, who ever learned to understand the difference between national revolt, with the irregular fighting it entailed, and modern warfare between large regular armies, and to keep the two going together without confusion.
The plan that was worked out for the taking of Maan was for the armoured cars to go to Mudowwara and permanently cut the railway there while the Arab regulars seized the railway, a day’s march north of Maan, and compelled the Turkish garrison to come out to fight if they would not starve. The Arab regulars were now easily a match for the Turks and would have the help of irregulars on their flanks. Feisal and Jaafar liked the plan but, unfortunately, the other officers wanted to make a direct assault on the town and old Maulud wrote to Feisal protesting against British interference with Arab liberty. Then, though the supplies, arms, pay and transport were all now being supplied by the British, Lawrence and Dawnay saw that it would be wise to give the Arabs their way even if it was a foolish way. The Arabs were volunteers in a far truer sense than the British Army, in which enlistment by every able-bodied man had now for some months, though ‘deemed voluntary,’ been in fact compulsory; (for, as Lord Carson said with perhaps unconscious humour, ‘the necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs’). Arab service was literally voluntary, for any man was at perfect liberty to return home whenever he liked.
A large number of the Arab irregulars were going to Atara, seventy miles due north of Bair, there to wait for news of Allenby’s attack on Amman, fifty miles to the north-west. Lawrence went, too, with his body-guard. On the fourth of April the army started with its train of two thousand baggage camels and reached Atara four days later without loss. At the crossing of the railway, Lawrence happened to be ahead of his body-guard. It was near sunset and everything seemed peaceful enough; but as he rode up the embankment the camel’s feet scrambled in the loose ballast and out of the long shadow of a culvert on the left, where no doubt he had slept all day, rose a Turkish soldier. He looked wildly at Lawrence, who had a pistol in his hand, and then with sadness at his own rifle yards away out of reach. Lawrence stared at him and said softly, ‘God is merciful.’ The Turk knew the sense of the Arabic phrase and a look of incredulous joy came over his fat, sleepy face. However, he made no answer. Lawrence pressed the camel’s shoulder with his foot; she went carefully over the metals and down the bank on the other side. The Turk had enough good feeling not to shoot him in the back, and he rode away with the warmth of heart that a man always has towards a life he has saved. When, at a safe distance, he looked back, the Turk had his thumb to his nose and was twinkling his fingers in farewell.
At Atara everything was green and fresh with spring, and the camels were enjoying themselves greatly. News came that Amman was taken; the Arabs were making an immediate move farther north to join them, but further reports said that the British had been driven out again with heavy losses. Lawrence, who had lately impressed on the Arabs that the British never failed in their attacks, refused to believe the story, but it was true. Major Buxton’s battalion of English camel-corps had taken the town, but the Australian cavalry, who were to have attacked on his right, had their animals so wearied after the fighting at the Jordan-crossing and a long march over the central mountain range, that they were forced to leave Buxton to carry on the battle on his own. He was driven out with a loss of over half his force and a second attack the next day had to be called off; other British troops that came up to help him had, as one of their officers has informed me, been drinking too much ration-rum on empty stomachs.
This meant no advance for the Arabs. They turned south. But first Lawrence went spying into Amman in company with three gipsy women and Farraj disguised, like himself, as one of them. He had a good look round and decided that the place should be left alone as too strong for Arab attack. As they were returning some Turkish soldiers stopped them and made love to them; they only escaped by running away at top speed. Lawrence decided in future to use British khaki uniform again as the best disguise because too brazen to be suspected. Farraj was a changed person. Daud had died of the cold and wet that terrible winter, and Farraj went about heavy-eyed and restless, alone. He took greater care than ever of Lawrence’s camel, saddles and clothes, and of the coffee-making, but never made another joke and began praying regularly three times a day. A week after this Amman visit he was himself dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish railway-patrol.
They then rode down towards Maan to see how the attack there was getting on. The Arabs had done well; under Jaafar they had cut the line north of Maan, destroying a station and three thousand rails; and south of Maan Nuri Said had accounted for another station and five thousand rails. They were making an attack now on Maan itself. Lawrence came upon old Maulud badly wounded, his thigh-bone splintered above the knee; but he called to Lawrence in a weak voice from the litter, ‘Thanks be to God, it is nothing. We have taken Semna.’ ‘I am going there,’ said Lawrence. Semna was the crescent-shaped hill overlooking Maan from the west, and Maulud, though hardly able to see or speak for exhaustion, craned over the side of the litter to point backwards to the hill and explain the best way of defending the place against counter-attack. Two days later, when Auda’s Abu Tayi had taken two Turkish posts on the farther side of the station and Jaafar, now in command, had massed his guns on the south, Nuri Said led an attack on the railway station. They captured it, but unfortunately the ammunition of the artillery covering their advance gave out and the station was retaken. This was disappointing, but the Arab troops had behaved so well under machine-gun fire and made such good use of ground, that it was clear that they could be used safely in future without a stiffening of British troops. This discovery was something to set off against defeat.
The next move was against the eighty miles of railway north of Mudowwara. Colonel Dawnay was in charge of the attack which was to be made by the armoured cars, with aeroplanes to drop bombs and Egyptians and Arab tribesmen to do the hand-to-hand fighting. He issued formal typewritten operation-orders with map references and an accurate programme of times and objectives. This rather amused Lawrence, whose fighting hitherto had all been of the careless verbal sort, (‘Let’s attack that place over there; you go round this way and I’ll go round the other, and afterwards we’ll blow something up if we can’), and who did not regard the present operations as on a big enough scale to justify the use of the typewriter.
As Dawnay knew no Arabic, Lawrence came along as interpreter to look after the tribesmen and the Egyptians. He knew that one misunderstanding would spoil the delicate balance of the Arab Front and that such misunderstandings would be bound to occur unless somebody responsible was continually on the watch. As he was himself about the only man intimate enough with the Arabs to be ceaselessly with them without boring them into sulks, he tried to god-father every mixed expedition. The programme worked out exactly except that the Turks at the post north of the first station to be attacked surrendered ten minutes too soon and that the Arab tribesmen who took the south post did not advance in alternate rushes with covering fire, as they were expected, but made a camel-charge, steeplechasing across the Turkish breastworks and trenches. Then the station itself surrendered and the Arabs enjoyed the maddest looting of their history. Lawrence himself broke his no-looting rule by taking off the brass station-bell (which, after the War, I once heard him ring out of his window in the quadrangle of All Souls College at Oxford, to wake up someone he wanted in the place). He was called in to settle a dangerous dispute about loot between the Arabs and the Egyptians. However, this was arranged, for nearly all the Arabs were, for once, completely satisfied with what they had got. They moved off home; only a few faithful ones were left behind for the attack on the next station. These few were rewarded. There was no fighting—the Turks had run away—and plenty of loot; so they praised themselves loudly for their loyalty. Mudowwara itself was the next objective, but there was a troop-train in the station and the Turks opened on the armoured cars with accurate gun-fire at four miles’ range, so the attack was not pressed. Meanwhile, Lawrence and Hornby in Rolls-Royces were running up and down the line, blowing up bridges and rails. They used two tons of gun-cotton. Lawrence visited the place south of Mudowwara where he had mined his first train, and destroyed the long bridge under which the Turkish patrol had slept on that adventurous day in the previous September.
Mohammed el Dheilan (the victim of Auda’s pearl-necklace story) and the Abu Tayi tribesmen then took five more stations between Maan and Mudowwara and so eighty miles of line were cut beyond repair. That settled the fate of Medina, four hundred miles to the south.