Part 20

The first thing was to help Auda to settle the money disputes and to light again in the Howeitat the flame of enthusiasm now nearly extinct after months of hardship. At dark Lawrence sat by Auda’s camp-fire, an Arab once more, talking in the hot persuasive tones that he had caught from Feisal, gradually kindling them to remember their oath, their promise to put the war with the Turks before all disputes and jealousy. He won them over, man by man, addressing them by name, reminding them of their ancestral glories, of their own brave deeds, of Feisal’s bounty, of the baseness and the approaching collapse of the Turks. He was still at work near midnight when Auda held up his camel-stick for silence. They listened, wondering what the danger was, and after a while heard a rumble, a muttering like a very distant thunderstorm. Auda said: ‘The English guns.’ Allenby, a hundred miles north across the hills, was beginning the preparatory bombardment for his next day’s successful attack on Beersheba, with Gaza to fall five days later. This sound closed the argument. The Arabs were always convinced by heavy artillery. When Lawrence and his party left the camp the next day in a happier atmosphere than they had found it, Auda gratefully came up and embraced Lawrence with ‘Peace be with you.’ But he also took the opportunity of the embrace to whisper windily, while his rough beard brushed Lawrence’s ear: ‘Beware of Abd el Kader.’ He could not say more; there were too many people about.

They continued that day, the thirty-first of October, towards Bair. The winter was approaching; it was now a time of peaceful weather with misty dawns, mild sunlight and an evening chill. The Indians were such bad camel-masters that they could manage no more than thirty-five miles a day—fifty was the least that an Arab would think of doing on a long march—and had to stop to eat three meals a day. The midday halt brought an alarm. Men on horses and camels were seen riding up from the north and west and closing in on the party. Rifles were snatched up and the Indians ran to their machine-guns. In thirty seconds the defence was ready; Ali ibn el Hussein cried out, ‘Hold the fire until they come close.’ Then one of Lawrence’s body-guard, belonging to a despised clan of serfs, the Sherarat, but a devoted servant and brave fighter, sprang up laughing and waved his sleeve in the air as a signal of friendship. They fired at him, or perhaps over him. He lay down and fired back, one shot only over the head of the nearest man; that perplexed them, but after awhile they waved back in answer. Then he went forward, protected by the rifles of his party, to meet a man of the enemy, also advancing alone; it was a raiding party of Arabs of the Beni Sakhr tribe who pretended to be much surprised on hearing whom they had been about to attack, and rode in to apologize.

Ali ibn el Hussein was furious with the Beni Sakhr for their treacherous attack: they answered sullenly that it was their custom to shoot over the heads of strangers in the desert. ‘A good custom,’ said Ali, ‘for the desert. But to come on us suddenly from three sides at once seems to me more like a carefully prepared ambush.’ Border Arabs like the Beni Sakhr were always dangerous, being not villagers enough to have forgotten the Bedouin love of raiding, not Bedouin enough to keep the strict desert code of honour. (There is a Scottish proverb that I learned from Lawrence’s mother, who speaking of another Border, quoted: ‘The selvage is aye the warst part o’ the web.’) The Beni Sakhr raiders, ashamed, went forward to Bair to give warning of the approach of the party. Their chief thought it best to make up for the bad reception that such important men as Ali ibn el Hussein and Lawrence had been given, by preparing a great feast for them. First there was a public reception, every man and horse in the tribe turned out, and there were wild cheers of welcome, volleys in the air, gallopings and curvetings: and clouds of dust. ‘God give victory to our Sherif,’ they shouted to Ali, and to Lawrence, ‘Welcome, Aurans, forerunner of fighting!’

Abd el Kader grew jealous. He began to show off, climbing up on the high Moorish saddle of his mare, and with his seven Algerian servants behind him in a file began the same prancing and curveting, shouting out ‘Houp! Houp!’ and firing a pistol unsteadily in the air. The Beni Sakhr chief came up to Ali and Lawrence, saying, ‘Lords, please call off your servant. He cannot either shoot or ride, and if he hits someone, he will destroy our good luck of to-day.’ The chief did not know Abd el Kader’s family reputation for ‘accidental’ shootings in Damascus. His brother Mohammed Said had had three successive fatal accidents among his friends, so that Ali Riza, the Governor of Damascus and a secret pro-Arab, once said: ‘Three things are notably impossible. The first, that Turkey should win this war. The second, that the Mediterranean should become champagne. The third, that I should be found in the same room with Mohammed Said, and he to be armed.’

Ali had a little business to settle before dinner. A party of negro workmen had been sent by Feisal to re-line the blasted well from which Lawrence and Nasir had picked the gelignite on the way to Akaba. They had been here for months, living on the forced hospitality of the Beni Sakhr and doing no work. Feisal had asked Ali to see what was happening. Ali hurriedly held a court, tried them, found them guilty and had them beaten, out of sight, by his own negroes. They returned stiffly, kissed hands to show repentance and respect, and soon the whole party, including the masons, were kneeling down at the feast.

The Beni Sakhr hospitality was even richer than that of the Howeitat. Lawrence, Ali and the rest ate ravenously, for good manners, at mutton and rice which was soused in so much liquid butter that they splashed their clothes and greased their faces in their first polite haste. The pace was slackening somewhat, though the meal was far from its end, when Abd el Kader grunted, rose to his feet, wiped his hands on a handkerchief and sat back on the carpets by the tent wall. Lawrence and the rest did not know whether to rise too, for the custom was for all to rise together. They looked to Ali their leader, but he merely grunted ‘the boor!’ and the eating went on until everyone was full and had begun licking his fingers. Then Ali cleared his throat as the usual signal, and they went back to the carpets, while the next relay fed and then the children. Lawrence watched one little five-year-old in a filthy smock stuffing with both hands until at the end, with swollen stomach and shining face, it could manage no more. Then it staggered off speechlessly, a huge unpicked mutton-rib hugged to its breast. In the corner the chiefs slave was eating his customary portion, the sheep’s head; splitting the skull and sucking the brain. In front of the tent the dogs crunched their bones.

As for Abd el Kader, he had not been behaving badly according to his own standards or indeed those of the border, which allowed the full-fed man to go off at his own time. But Ali was a sherif and a hero and therefore the good manners of the central desert ruled for that feast. So Abd el Kader was ashamed. He tried to carry it off by worse behaviour. He sat spitting, grunting and picking his teeth, and to show his grandeur further, sent a servant for his medicine chest and poured himself out a dose, grumbling that such tough meat gave him indigestion. This was abominable. Lawrence had once met a chief with a scar right across his cheek which he had come by in this way: he had been politely gulping food at a feast when he had begun to choke; unable to speak but anxious to explain that this was not meant as an insult, he had slit his mouth to the ear with his dagger to show that it was only a piece of meat stuck behind his back teeth.

As the party sat about the tribal coffee-hearth, all but Abd el Kader who had gone off to a fire of his own, they heard the guns again thudding away in preparation for the second day’s bombardment of Gaza. It was a good moment for telling the chief why they had come. Lawrence said that they proposed a raid near Deraa and asked him for help. He did not mention the bridge, after his failure to get Zaal and his men; it might seem too forlorn a hope. However, the chief agreed to come himself and chose out fifteen of his best men and his own son Turki, a brave boy of seventeen, though ambitious and greedy like his father. He was an old friend of Ali’s. Lawrence gave Turki a new silk robe, and he strutted among the tents in it, without his cloak, crying shame on any man who held back from the adventure.

That night they rode out from Bair, in company with the Beni Sakhr men. Their chief had first to pay his respects to his dead ancestor whose grave was near that of Auda’s son. He decided that, as there was great danger ahead, he would make a propitiatory offering of a head-cord to add to the ragged collection looped round the gravestone. And as the raid was Lawrence’s idea, he thought he might ask Lawrence to provide one. Lawrence handed over a rich red silk and silver ornament, remarking with a smile that the virtue of the offering lay with the giver. The thrifty chief man pressed a halfpenny on Lawrence to make a pretence of purchase and get the virtue for himself. A few weeks later Lawrence passed by again and noticed that the head-cord was gone. The chief cursed loudly in his hearing at the sacrilege. Some godless Sherari, he said, had robbed his ancestor: but Lawrence could guess where it really was.

Lawrence nearly succumbed to the idleness that the weather invited the next day. But he had to be busy learning to recognize the tribal dialect of the Beni Sakhr, and making mental notes of the bits of family-history that the tribesmen gave him in casual conversation. Family-history and tribal custom were to these desert people in place of books. Nothing was so wearing, and yet nothing so important as the detailed memory that Lawrence had in good manners to cultivate, whenever he met a new tribe, for relationships and feuds and ancestry and the ownership of camels and similar matters. When they halted that night the noise of Allenby’s guns was very loud and clear, possibly because the hollows of the Dead Sea sent the noise echoing up to their high plateau. The Arabs whispered, ‘They are nearer. The English are advancing. God deliver the men under that rain!’ They were thinking of the Turks, so long their weak and corrupt oppressors whom now they loved more, in their moment of defeat, than the strong foreigner with his blind unswerving justice, their victor.

The next day they went forward over ridges of sun-browned flints so closely grown over with a tiny saffron plant that the whole view was golden with it; and about noon saw from the top of a ridge a party of trotting camels coming fast towards them. Turki cantered forward, with carbine ready cocked, to see who the strangers were, but while they were still a mile off the Beni Sakhr chief recognized his kinsmen Fahad and Adhub, famous fighters, the war-leaders of the clan. They had heard the news of the raid and ridden at once to join it. Lawrence was glad of them. The next halt was Ammari in Sirhan where there were water-pools among the salty hummocks. They were mostly too bitter to drink, though there was one which was thought very good by contrast. It lay in a limestone hollow and the water, which tasted of mixed brine and ammonia, was of a deep yellow colour. Into this pool, for a joke, Daud pushed Farraj fully dressed; he sank out of view and then rose quietly to the surface at the side of the pool under an overhanging rock-ledge and lay hid: Daud waited for him to rise, but when there was no sign of him, got into an agony of anxiety about his friend and, tearing off his cloak, jumped in after him. There was Farraj smiling under the ledge. They were fine swimmers, having once been pearl-divers in the Persian Gulf. Afterwards they began scuffling in the sand beside the water-pool. They returned to Lawrence’s camp-fire, dripping wet, in rags, bleeding and covered with mud and thorns, most unlike their usual foppish selves. They then had the impudence to say that they had tripped over a bush while dancing, and that it would be like Lawrence’s generosity if he gave them new clothes. He did nothing of the kind, but sent them off at once to clean themselves up.

The next day there was another alarm, which again proved a false one. It was only a party of a hundred Serahin tribesmen on their way to offer allegiance to Feisal. Now that they could give the oath to Ali ibn el Hussein instead and be spared the long dangerous journey through the territory of other tribes and across the Turkish railway, they turned about with joy. They came back singing to their tents the same day as they had started out, and there was a great welcome for the combined party. After more mutton and bread and some sleepless hours on the verminous rugs offered them, which they could not politely refuse, Lawrence and Ali ibn el Hussein roused the old chief and his lieutenant, and explained the intentions of the raid. They listened gravely but said that the western bridge at Gadara was impossible because the Turks had just filled the woods about it with hundreds of military wood-cutters; the bridges in the middle they would not like to visit under the guidance of Abd el Kader whom they mistrusted and who would be among his own villagers there; the eastern bridge by Tell el Shehab was in the country of their blood-enemies who might take the opportunity to attack them in the rear. Also, if it rained the camels would not be able to trot over the muddy plains on the farther side of the line between Azrak and the bridges, and the whole party might be cut off and killed.

This was very bad. The Serahin were Lawrence’s last hope and, if they refused to come, it would be impossible to destroy the bridge by the day that Allenby asked for it to be destroyed. So Ali ibn el Hussein and Lawrence collected the better men of the tribe and set them round the camp-fire with the chief of the Beni Sakhr and Fahad and Adhub to break cold prudence down with desperate talk. Though duty to Allenby provided the occasion, Lawrence was true Arab now, preaching with a prophetic eloquence the gospel of revolt. Its glory, he urged, lay in bitterness and suffering, and the sacrifice of the body to the spirit. Failure was even more glorious than success; it was better to defy a hostile Fate by choosing out the sure road to death, proudly throwing away the poor resources of physical life and prosperity and so making Fate ashamed at the poorness of its victory. To honourable men the forlorn hope was the only goal, and if by chance they escaped alive, then the next forlorn hope. They must believe that there was no final victory except at last after innumerable hazards to go down to death, still fighting. The Serahin listened entranced; their worldliness vanished and before daylight came they were swearing to ride with Lawrence anywhere.

Now, Lawrence was as sincere as he ever had been in his life, and this speech struck out in an hour of need gives the clue to much of his strange history. His has been the romantic love of failure, of self-humiliation, of poverty. A habit of mind caught from the desert: though perhaps latent in his blood, of which the Spanish strain—and Spanish is half-Arab—shows in the severity of his jaw and the cruel flash of his rare and quickly appeased anger. And yet with all his love of failure Lawrence has been queerly dogged with success. As Miss Gertrude Bell said of him once, ‘Everything that he touches flowers.’ His forlorn hopes all come off, he casts his bread magnificently upon the waters and is peevish to find it again (much swollen) after many days. The more deeply he abases himself the higher he finds himself exalted. So hostile Fate revenges itself neatly by refusing to take his sacrifices; and provokes him to a philosophic bitterness which is hourly contradicted by his natural impulse towards gentleness and affection.

They called Abd el Kader and taking him aside among the thickets shouted into his ear that the Serahin were coming with the party and would be guided by him to the bridges near his home. He grunted that it was well, but Lawrence and All ibn el Hussein swore never again, if they survived, would they take a deaf man as a conspirator with them. Exhausted, they rested for an hour or so, but soon had to rise to review the Serahin. They looked wild and dashing, but blustered rather too much to be quite convincing. And they had no real leader; the chief’s lieutenant was more a politician than a soldier. However, they were better than nothing, so the increased party went forward to Azrak.

Azrak was a place of ancient legends; like Rumm and the vast ruins of Petra, most strangely haunted. It had been the home of ancient shepherd kings with musical names whose chivalrous memory lived in the Arab epics, and before that of a garrison of unhappy Roman legionaries. There was a great fort on a rock above rich meadows and palms and water-pools. Ali from the ridge that overlooked the place yelled out ‘Grass!’, leaped off his camel and flung himself down among the harsh green stems that were so exciting to him after the salt and stony desert. Then with his Harith war-cry he raced along the marsh, his skirts girded up and his feet splashing among the reeds.

Soon they noticed that Abd el Kader had vanished. They looked for him in the castle, among the palms, everywhere. At last they heard that he had ridden off northward not long after the start from the Serahin camp, making for the Druse mountains. The tribesmen had not known what the plans were, and, hating the man, had been glad to let him go without saying anything. But it was bad news. They must now give up the thought of destroying the middle bridges, and if Gadara was impossible because of the wood-cutters, the only bridge left for attack was Tell el Shehab. But Abd el Kader had certainly gone to the enemy with information of their plans and strength, and surely the Turks would trap them at the bridge. They took counsel with Fahad, who advised going on with the plan, trusting to the usual incompetence of the Turks. But the decision was not confidently taken.

XX

The next day, the fourth of November, they were off again, through rich pasture valleys where gazelle were shot. The flesh was toasted on ramrods over the fire until the outside of the lumps was charred but the inside was juicy and sweet. At this midday halt two of Lawrence’s body-guard quarrelled. One shot off the head-rope of the other, who fired back, putting a bullet through the assailant’s cloak. Lawrence sprang between them and knocked their weapons up, ordering in a loud voice that the right thumb and forefinger of each should be cut off. This had the desired effect; they violently embraced and their companions offered to answer with their own lives that the quarrel was ended. Lawrence called Ali ibn el Hussein in as judge and he bound them over to good behaviour. But first they must seal their promise by the curious old penance of striking their own heads sharply with the edge of a heavy dagger until the blood trickled down to the waist. The wounds were not dangerous but ached for some time as a reminder of the promise given.

At Abu Sawana they found a long pool of delicious rainwater where they filled their water-skins. In the distance they saw a retreating party of Circassian horsemen sent by the Turks to see if this water was occupied—the two parties had missed each other by five minutes; which was lucky for both. On the fifth of November they reached the railway and, Lawrence and Fahad scouting ahead, crossed at dusk without interruption and rode five miles beyond. They camped in a hollow fifteen feet deep where there was grazing for the camels, but it was inconveniently near the railway, and they had to keep a close watch on the camels to prevent them from straying into view, and on the tribesmen to make them keep their heads down when patrols passed along the line.

At sunset, Lawrence and Ali ibn el Hussein decided that they would have to reach Tell el Shehab, blow up the bridge and get back east of the railway by the next dawn. This meant a ride of eighty miles in the thirteen hours of darkness with an elaborate mining operation thrown in. It was too much for the Indians, whose camels were tired out by bad handling—the fault of the Indians’ cavalry training. So Lawrence only took the six best riders on the six best camels and Hassan Shah, their admirable officer, with a single machine-gun. The Serahin were doubtful fighters, so Ali and Lawrence decided, when the time came, to use them to guard the camels while a storming party of the Beni Sakhr, who could be trusted, went forward with the blasting gelatine to settle the bridge. The fighting force then consisted of Fahad and twenty Beni Sakhr, the seven Indians, forty Serahin, Ali ibn el Hussein with six slaves, Wood, and Lawrence with eight of his own men. The other two of Lawrence’s men developed sudden illnesses which prevented them coming: Lawrence excused them for the night and afterwards of all duties whatsoever. They and the rest of the party to be left behind were told to ride to Abu Sawana and wait there for news.

It was a nervous ride. First they stumbled on a terrified pedlar with two wives, two donkeys and a load of raisins, flour and cloaks on the way to the nearest Turkish railway station. One of the Serahin had to be left behind to guard them in case they gave the alarm. He was to release them at dawn and then escape over the line to Abu Sawana. Next a shepherd heard the party coming and fired shot after shot into the middle of them, but without hitting anybody. Then a dog barked. Then a camel loomed up suddenly on the track—but it was a stray and riderless. Then, in a hollow, they came on a woman, probably a gipsy, who ran off shrieking. They passed a village and were fired on while yet distant. These incidents delayed them and in any case the Indians, riding woodenly like cavalrymen, were going much too slowly. Lawrence and Ali rode behind urging on the lagging animals with camel-sticks.

Then it began to rain and the fertile soil of the plain grew slippery. A camel of the Serahin fell, then one of the Beni Sakhr, but the men had them up in a moment and trotted forward. One of Ali ibn el Hussein’s servants halted and dismounted. Ali hissed him on and, when the man mumbled, cut him across the head with his cane. The camel plunged forward and the man, snatching at the hinder girth, managed to swing himself into the saddle; Ali pursued him with the cane. At last the rain stopped and their pace increased as they trotted downhill. They heard a vague rushing sound in the distance; it would be Tell el Shehab waterfall. So they pressed forward confidently. A few minutes later they stopped on a grassy platform by a cairn of stones. Below them, in the darkness, lay the Yarmuk River in its deep gorge. The bridge would be on the right. They unloaded. The moon was not yet over Mount Hermon, which stood before them, but the sky was bright with its rising. Lawrence served out the gelatine—four hundred and fifty pounds in thirty-pound bags—to the Serahin porters. They then started down.