Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

Early in May Lawrence went up to Palestine to discuss the future with Allenby, leaving the Arabs and English to make another eighty-mile break north of Maan. On arrival he found to his disgust that Allenby’s chief of staff had decided on a raid against Salt, with the help of Beni Sakhr tribesmen. This was trespassing on Lawrence’s ground, and clumsy trespassing. He asked who was to lead the Arab forces and was told: ‘Fahad, at the head of twenty thousand tribesmen.’ It was ridiculous. Fahad was never able to raise more than four hundred of his own clan and, in any case, he had now moved south to help the new operations just above Maan. Some of his greedy relations must have ridden over to Jerusalem to screw money out of the English by giving these impossible promises. Of course no Beni Sakhr appeared and the raid miscarried with heavy losses; the survivors only just escaped being cut off and captured.

The Arabs now found that there were disadvantages as well as advantages in being tied to the English. Allenby could not make his intended great attack because the Germans had begun their last big offensive and his best troops were being taken from him and hurried to France to save a break-through. The Arabs had to wait, too, until new troops reached Allenby from India and his army was reorganized—a delay of perhaps four or five months. Meanwhile Allenby was lucky if he could hang on to his Jerusalem-Jaffa line. He told Lawrence so on May the fifth, the very day chosen for the great joint advance north. It was bad news for the Arabs besieging Maan with forces only half the size of the garrison. Maan was well supplied with stores and ammunition—the Turks had sent down a supply column of pack animals—and now that the pressure from the English was relaxed, big forces of Turks would probably come down from Amman, raise the siege and push the Arabs out of Aba el Lissan.

However, Allenby said that he would do his very best for Lawrence in helping the Arab army in every way but with men. He promised repeated aeroplane raids on the railway and these turned out most useful in hindering the Turks in their advance. As Allenby was giving Lawrence tea that day, he happened to remark that he was sorry that he had been forced to abolish the Imperial Camel Brigade, which was in Sinai, but men were short and he had to use them as cavalry up at Jerusalem. Lawrence asked what was going to be done with the camels. Allenby told him to ask the Quartermaster-General. So Lawrence left the tea-table and went to the Quartermaster-General’s office with the question. The Quartermaster-General, who was very Scotch, answered firmly that the camels were needed as transport for one of the new divisions which were on their way from India. Lawrence explained that he wanted two thousand of them. The Quartermaster-General answered briefly that he might go on wanting. So Lawrence went back and said aloud at the tea-table that there were for disposal two thousand two hundred riding camels and thirteen hundred baggage camels. All, he said, were earmarked for transport, but of course riding camels were riding camels! The staff whistled and looked wise, as if they doubted whether riding camels could carry baggage. Lawrence had known that a technicality might be useful, even a sham one, for every British officer had to pretend that he understood animals, as a point of honour. So he was not surprised that night at dinner to find himself on one side of Allenby, with the Quartermaster-General on the other.

With the soup, Allenby began to talk of camels, and the Quartermaster-General immediately said how lucky it was that the Indian Division’s transport would now be brought up to strength by the disbanding of the Camel Brigade. It was a bad move; Allenby cared nothing for strengths. He turned to Lawrence and said with a twinkle: ‘And what do you want them for?’ Lawrence answered hotly: ‘To put a thousand men into Deraa any day you please.’ Now Deraa junction (the secret of whose weakness against surprise Lawrence had bought at great cost to himself) was the nerve-centre of the Turkish army. Its destruction would cut off, from Damascus and Aleppo, both the line south to Amman and Maan and the line east to Haifa and Northern Palestine. So Allenby turned to the Quartermaster-General again and smilingly said: ‘Q, you lose.’

It was a princely gift, for now the Arab army could move about freely far from its base and could win its war when and where it pleased. Lawrence hurried back to Feisal, who was at Aba el Lissan, and teased him by first talking at length about histories, tribes, migrations, the spring rains, pasture, and so on. At last casually he mentioned the gift of two thousand camels. Feisal gasped with delight and sent his slave running for Auda, Zaal, Fahad, and the rest of his chiefs. They came in anxiously asking: ‘Please God, is it good?’ He answered with shining eyes: ‘Praise God!’ The chiefs heard the news with astonishment and looked at Lawrence, who said: ‘The bounty of Allenby.’ Zaal spoke for them all: ‘God keep his life and yours.’ Lawrence replied: ‘We have been made victorious.’ The chiefs were as delighted as Feisal.

But before the camels could be used against Deraa the nearer danger must be settled. There was a big Turkish force gathering at Amman for the relief of Maan. Nasir was asked to delay it by another big breach of the railway at Hesa, half-way between the two towns. He succeeded by the old method of blowing up bridges north and south, the night before, and at dawn bombarding the station, with a camel-charge to follow. As usual, there were no losses at all. Hornby and others with explosives then hurriedly demolished fourteen miles of railway.

This was excellent: the Turks would be delayed at least a month and it would be the end of August before they could patch up the railway just north of Maan and be ready to attack Aba el Lissan. By that time, for it was now early June, Allenby would be nearly ready to advance again and the Turks might not dare to make the attempt. The Arab forces could then be divided into three main parties: a thousand camel-men to take Deraa, and two or three thousand infantry to join up with Allenby at Jericho, the remainder to continue to keep watch above Maan. Lawrence decided to get Sherif Hussein, as nominal commander-in-chief of the Arab armies, to send Feisal all the regular troops besieging Medina under his brothers, Abdulla and Ali. Medina was in a pitiful state now, with short rations and scurvy, cut off from Damascus by the railway-breach between Maan and Mudowwara, and needed no more harrying; while the Arab troops were urgently needed for the advance north. But the old man was jealous of Feisal’s success and made difficulties. Lawrence went down to Jiddah to talk him over, bringing letters from Feisal, Allenby and the High Commissioner of Egypt, the Sherifs paymaster. But the Sherif, pleading the fast of Ramadan, retired to Mecca, a holy place where Lawrence could not follow him. The Sherif consented to talk over the telephone, but sheltered himself behind the incompetence of the Mecca exchange whenever he did not like the conversation. Lawrence, in no mood for farce, rang off and came away.

Allenby was going to begin his attack on September the nineteenth and, to make sure that the Turks did not begin their move on Aba el Lissan before it started, something new was needed. Dawnay was then inspired to remember the surviving battalion of the Imperial Camel Corps, the one that had been in the Amman raid, three hundred men under their capable officer, Major Buxton. Allenby’s chief-of-staff agreed to lend this battalion to the Arabs for a month, on two conditions: the first that a scheme of operations should be provided, the second—a quaint one—that there should be no casualties. The actual operation-orders made out by Dawnay and Lawrence are, as a matter of interest, to be found in an appendix at the end of this book.

Buxton’s march was to be the diversion; three weeks later the real blow was to be struck at Deraa. Lawrence calculated that the two thousand new camels would supply the necessary transport for five hundred Arab mule-mounted regulars, the battery of French quick-firing mountain-guns that had at last been sent from Suez, machine-guns, two armoured cars, engineers, camel-scouts and two aeroplanes. They would strike at Deraa, destroying the junction and paralysing the Turkish communications three days before Allenby launched his attack. Allenby had said that he would be content if ‘three men and a boy with pistols’ were before Deraa on September the sixteenth. This expedition was a liberal interpretation of the phrase. The arrangements for equipping this force would be made by the British officers at Akaba, while Lawrence went off with Buxton.

Of the part played by Lawrence in relation to these British officers, one of them, Major Young, has written clearly enough: