Everywhere he went there was Arab hospitality, guestings and coffee-fires at which he preached revolt, until he had made sure of all the clans in the ladder of his advance. On the way back, the party was mistaken for Turks by some British aeroplanes which, swooping low, emptied drum after drum of Lewis-gun ammunition at them. Fortunately, the shooting was bad. (Later, in reporting the affair to Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, Lawrence ironically recommended himself for the Distinguished Flying Cross, ‘for presence of mind in not shooting down two Bristol Fighters which were attempting to machine-gun my party from the air.’ He had made the regulation signal agreed upon for such cases; and had twenty automatic rifles in the party.) As soon as the aeroplanes had disappeared, a party of Turkish policemen tried to chase them.
Next day, near Jurf, where Lawrence was going to inspect the ground for an attack by Arab regulars—Jurf was the only water-supply for the Turks on that part of the line—much worse happened. A party of mixed horse and foot from the railway cut off his retreat and more troops appeared in front. There was no escape and the Arabs with Lawrence, taking cover, resolved to hold out to the last. Lawrence, half-glad, saw that all was over. He decided to imitate Farraj and end it quickly. He rode alone against the enemy. The mounted Turks came forward to meet him, finger on trigger, calling out ‘Testify!’ He answered: ‘There is no god but God; and Jesus is a prophet of God’—a queer statement which no Mohammedan could make, and yet no Christian could make either; the sort of tactless thing that a nervous man might blurt out by mistake. They did not shoot; they gasped, stared and cried out: ‘Aurans!’ They were friends, a party of Arab regulars, raiding the railway, but dressed in the uniforms of slain Turks and mounted on captured horses. Their rifles, too, were Turkish. They had never seen Lawrence before and had mistaken his party for members of an unfriendly Arab tribe with whom they had just been fighting.
The following letter was written by Lawrence from Cairo on the fifteenth of July, 1918, to his Oxford friend Mr. V. Richards, whose eyesight had hitherto debarred him from active service. The hastiness of its style would probably make Lawrence repudiate it; but the contents are valuable as contemporary evidence of his state of mind at this critical point in the campaign.
‘15. 7. 18.
‘Well, it was wonderful to see your writing again, and very difficult to read it: also pleasant to have a letter which doesn’t begin “Reference your G.S. 102487b of the 45th.” Army prose is bad, and I have so much of it that it makes me fear contamination in my own.
‘I cannot write to anyone just now. Your letter came to me in Aba el Lissan, a little hill-fort on the plateau of Arabia S.E. of the Dead Sea, and I carried it with me down to Akaba, to Jidda, and then here to answer. Yet with all that I have had it only a month, and you wrote it three months ago. This letter will be submarined, and then it is all over for another three years.
‘It always seemed to me that your eyes would prevent all service for you, and that in consequence you might preserve your continuity. For myself, I have been so violently uprooted, and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal. I have dropped everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity, snatching chances of the moment when and where I see them. My people have probably told you that the job is to foment an Arab rebellion against Turkey, and for that I have to try to hide my Frankish exterior, and be as little out of the Arab picture as I can. So it’s a kind of foreign stage, on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one’s head if the part is not well filled.
‘You guessed rightly that the Arab appealed to my imagination. It is the old old civilization, which has refined itself clear of household gods, and half the trappings which ours hastens to assume. The gospel of bareness in materials is a good one, and it involves apparently a sort of moral bareness too. Arabs think for the moment, and endeavour to slip through life without turning corners or climbing hills. In part it is a mental and moral fatigue, a race trained out, and to avoid difficulties they have to jettison so much that we think honourable and brave: and yet without in any way sharing their point of view, I think I can understand it enough to look at myself and other foreigners from their direction, and without condemning it. I know I’m a stranger to them, and always will be: but I cannot believe them worse, any more than I could change to their ways.
‘This is a very long porch to explain why I’m always trying to blow up railway trains and bridges instead of looking for the well at the world’s end. Anyway, these years of detachment have cured me of any desire ever to do anything for myself. When they untie my bonds I will not find in me any spur to action. However, actually one never thinks of afterwards: the time from the beginning is like one of those dreams which seems to last for aeons, and then you wake up with a start, and find that it has left nothing in your mind. Only the different thing about this dream is that so many people do not wake up in this life again.
‘I cannot imagine what my people can have told you.[5] Until now we have only been preparing the groundwork and bases of our revolt, and do not yet stand on the brink of action. Whether we are going to win or lose, when we do strike, I cannot ever persuade myself. The whole thing is such a play, and one cannot put conviction into one’s day dreams. If we succeed I will have done well with the materials given me, and that disposes of your “lime light.” If we fail, and they have patience, then I suppose we will go on digging foundations. Achievement, if it comes, will have a great disillusionment, but not great enough to wake me up.