Besides the Englishmen Lawrence would take his own body-guard and pick up sponsors from other Arab tribes as he went. The ride was a great responsibility for him. To take a large body of Christian troops in khaki through Arab tribal territory was at least as dangerous an adventure as the fighting that had to be done against the Turks. He asked Buxton’s leave to address the men, without their officers, before they started. I have had from one of them an account of his speech, and the extraordinary impression it made on him and his comrades. At first sight they had not trusted Lawrence in the least, disliking his Bedouin dress and Bedouin gestures; whispering that he was a spy and would betray them. But once he began to talk: ‘We are about to start on a trip so long and difficult that the Staff believe we won’t manage it ...,’ he captured their imaginations. He knew the value of the appeal to personal vanity. He told them that they had to ride a thousand miles in thirty days, nearly twice the set daily march of their brigade, through desert country, on short rations for man and beast, with two difficult night-attacks on Turkish posts thrown in. Any delay in the march would mean thirst or starvation, probably both, and if they wore out their camels by careless riding they would be stranded in the desert and would probably never return. He asked them to be very patient with the excitable Arabs, particularly at the wells.
THE CAMPAIGN IN THE NORTH
Buxton’s first impression of Lawrence can be given in a quotation from a private letter that he wrote home on the fourth of August. He was at Rumm watering the camels at the springs in the great amphitheatre; with great difficulty, for the Beni Atiyeh tribe were there too, watering a thousand camels a day, and jealousy for first turn might lead to disturbance and bloodshed:
‘August 4th, 1918. 4th Anniversary of War.
‘RUMM.
‘I am sitting between two rocks with a waterproof sheet overhead, somewhere in the middle of Arabia, between Akaba and the Euphrates. It is a place with rocky mountains on each side of me which last night in the evening light became a most wonderful rosy red colour growing purple as the shadow fell across them. The wells are about three hundred yards up a stiff cliff, and the difficulties of watering camels are terrific. We have been watering camels the last thirty-six hours continuously day and night, and I hope to get off with my column this evening. We are here very much under sufferance of the Sherif, and none of the inhabitants and Arabs here like us at all, and rifles which reverberate like a battle are continuously going off. Lawrence and his odd-looking cut-throat band have just left us to rejoin the Sherif near Maan, and we have now Nasir, a relation of the Sherif, who acts as intermediary between us and the Arabs.
‘Our first night attack against the Turks will take place about forty miles from here, two nights ahead. To-morrow about daybreak I go on with Nasir and two or three of my officers dressed as Arabs, or rather with Arab head-gear and coat, to give the proper “silhouette” effect, and we do a personal reconnaissance of the places to be attacked about sunset and then rejoin the column on the march after making plans for the attack.
‘Lawrence has started all this Arab movement. He is only a boy to look at, has a very quiet, sedate manner, a fine head but insignificant body. He is known to every Arab in this country for his personal bravery and train-wrecking exploits. I don’t know whether it is his intrepidity, disinterestedness and mysteriousness which appeal to the Arab most, or his success in finding them rich trains to blow up and loot. After a train success he tells me the army is like Barnum’s show and gradually disintegrates. At any rate it is wonderful what he has accomplished with the poor tools at his disposal. His influence is astounding not only on the misbeguided natives, but also I think on his brother officers and seniors. Out here he lives entirely with the Arabs, wears their clothes, eats only their food, and bears all the burdens that the lowliest of them does. He always travels in spotless white, and in fact reminds one of a Prince of Mecca more than anything. He will join us again later, I hope, as his presence is very stimulating to us all and one has the feeling that things cannot go wrong while he is there.....’
Lawrence had ridden off not to Maan, as Buxton’s letter says, but to Akaba where he collected his body-guard, sixty strong, and rode with them to Guweira. El Zaagi had sorted them out in Ageyl fashion to ride in a long line with a poet to right and a poet to left, each among the best singers. Lawrence was on Ghazala, whose calf had recently died and left her in great grief. Abdulla the Robber, riding next to Lawrence, carried the calf’s dried pelt behind his saddle. Ghazala in the middle of the singing began to tread uneasily, remembering her grief, and stopped, gently moaning. Abdulla leaped off his camel and spread the pelt before her. She stopped crying and sniffed at it three or four times, then whimpering went on again. This happened several times that day but in the end she forgot her grief. At Guweira he left his body-guard to wait. An aeroplane took him to Jefer—to Feisal who was there with Nuri, the Emir of the Ruwalla. It was Nuri who had given Lawrence and Auda leave a year before to ride through his territory on the way to Akaba. He had now to be asked a far greater favour, the passage through his country of British troops and armoured cars. If he consented it would mean war with the Turks toward whom, at Feisal’s request, he had so far kept up a show of friendship. Nuri was a hard, short-spoken old man of seventy, and it was with great relief that Feisal and Lawrence heard his plain ‘Yes.’ It came at the end of a great conference of all the Ruwalla chiefs where Feisal and Lawrence in the tent at twilight sat preaching revolt. The combination was irresistible; their method perfected after two years was to say just enough to set the Ruwalla imagination on fire so that the tribesmen almost believed themselves the inventors of the idea and began spurring Feisal and Lawrence to greater enthusiasm and more desperate action.