Part 22

So far as I know, he only once used the privileges of his rank for other than travelling. Once at a rest-camp he stopped to watch a bullying officer bawling at two wretched privates, battle-wearied men, who were passing on the far side of the barrack square: ‘Come here, you two loungers! Take your hands out of your pockets! Why the hell didn’t you salute me? Don’t you know I’m a Major?’ The poor fellows mumbled something. ‘Now stand over there,’ said the major, ‘and let me see you march past and salute.’ They obeyed and were walking off hurriedly when the major recalled them. ‘Now come back and do it again properly.’ They did it again. ‘One moment, Major,’ said a voice behind him; ‘there is something you have forgotten.’ The major wheeled round and saw a rather haggard-looking bareheaded boy in a tunic starred and crowned, on the shoulders, with badges of rank: Lawrence. The major saluted in confusion; the soldiers, happier now, were shuffling off, but Lawrence beckoned them to stop. ‘The thing that you have forgotten, Major,’ Lawrence went on gently, ‘is that in this army the salute is paid not to the man but to the rank, and the officer saluted is ordered by the King, whom he represents, to return the salute. But of course you know that.’ The major was speechless. ‘You will therefore salute those men,’ said Lawrence, ‘whose salutes just now you failed to return.’ The major saluted, choking with rage. But the merciless Lawrence continued: ‘Major, those private soldiers saluted you twice. You will therefore return their salutes a second time.’ And the Major had to obey.... This story recalls another: Lawrence, shortly after the War ended, was in Oxford Street, London, one night, walking head-down in the drizzling rain. He was pulled up by a lieutenant-colonel for not saluting him. The lieutenant-colonel was accompanied by a woman, obviously a new acquaintance. Lawrence slowly peeled off the badgeless rain-coat that he was wearing and showed his rank. The lieutenant-colonel grew red in the face. Lawrence said, ‘You can go away.’ ... The woman went a third way.

To return. Allenby and Lawrence exchanged news and plans together. Allenby would be kept inactive until February, when he intended to push down to Jericho, which lies just north of the Dead Sea. Lawrence said that the Arab army could link up with him there if the daily fifty tons of supplies that were usually landed at Akaba were sent to Jericho instead. Akaba could be abandoned as a base now that there was no more danger from the Turks in that quarter (they had soon to withdraw from Aba el Lissan to trenches just outside Maan). Allenby agreed gladly. It was important for the Arabs to move up to Jericho, for on the way they could stop the food that was reaching the Turkish army from villages south of the Dead Sea, being taken up to the north end in boats from a little below Kerak in the south.

Back in Akaba with a month to wait before the move could begin, Lawrence decided to try the armoured cars in an experimental raid on the railway. They were now in Guweira, to which a motor-road had been built from Akaba by Egyptian labourers and the cars’ crews; from thence it was an easy run across dry mud-flats to the railway near Mudowwara. The trip was a holiday for Lawrence; there was little danger because the cars were proof against machine-guns and rifles and went very fast. The expedition consisted of three armoured Ford cars mounted with machine guns, a half-battery of two ten-pounder guns carried by three more cars, Talbots, and open Rolls-Royces for scouting. The crews were all British and there was bully-beef, biscuit and tea, with two warm blankets for each man at night. Lawrence, with no Arabs about, was content to be as English as ever he had been and enjoyed for once being present at a fight in which he had not to take the leading part; he could stand on a hill watching through field-glasses. It was these friendly outings with the Armoured Car and Air Force fellows that persuaded him, even then, that his best future, if he survived the War, was to enlist. The cars came up close to a Turkish post at the station next above Mudowwara and shelled and machine-gunned the trenches, but since the Turks did not surrender and there was no Arab force handy for charging, went off again to do the same at another station higher up. Lawrence only wanted to test the possibility of using the cars against the railway and as they were clearly a success came home to Guweira the same day.

The siege of Medina was still maintained in Central Arabia by Feisal’s brothers, Abdulla and Ali; Yenbo was being used again as a base. Lawrence could not persuade the British advisers there, who were still under the High Commissioner of Egypt and not, like him, under Allenby, that there was no point in making Medina surrender. And when they asked him to cut the railway permanently at Maan because it was difficult for them to cut it where they were, he had to pretend that the troops with him were too cowardly to attempt the operation.

XXII

At Akaba Lawrence began increasing his body-guard, which had started with Farraj, Daud and the Syrians. (It may be as well to point out here that the names of most of the _subsidiary_ characters in Lawrence’s account, such as Farraj, Daud, Sergeants Lewis and Stokes and so on, are disguised. The names of the more important people such as Auda, Tallal, Colonel Wilson, are not.) It was advisable to do this because the price put on his head by the Turks—as also on Ali ibn el Hussein’s—had risen to twenty thousand pounds. He chose followers who could live hard and ride hard, men proud of themselves and of good family. Two or three of these had joined him already and set a standard by which to judge new candidates. One day Lawrence was reading[4] in his tent when one of the Ageyl noiselessly entered. He was thin, dark, short, but most gorgeously dressed, with three black plaited love-locks hanging on each side of his face. On his shoulder he carried a very beautiful, many-coloured saddle-bag. Greeting Lawrence with respect, he threw the saddle-bag on the carpet, saying: ‘Yours,’ and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. The next day he brought a camel saddle with its long brass horns exquisitely engraved. ‘Yours,’ he said again. The third day he came empty-handed in a poor cotton shirt, to show his humility, and sank down as a suppliant, asking to enter Lawrence’s service. Lawrence asked, him his name. ‘Abdulla the Robber,’ he answered (the nickname was, he said, inherited from his honoured father), and told his story sadly. He had been born in a town of the Central Oases and when quite young had been imprisoned for impiety. Later he had left home in a hurry, owing to an unlucky scandal about a married woman, and taken service with the local Emir, Ibn Saud, the present ruler of Mecca. For hard swearing in this puritanical service, he had suffered punishment and deserted to the service of another Emir. Unfortunately, he had then come to dislike his officer so much that he struck him in public with a camel-stick. After recovering in prison from the terrible beating that he got for this, he had taken a job on the pilgrims’ railway which was then being built. A Turkish contractor docked his wages for sleeping at midday and he retaliated by docking the Turk of his head. He was put into prison at Medina, escaped through a window, came to Mecca, and for his proved integrity and camel-manship was made carrier of the post between Mecca and Jiddah. Here he settled down, setting his parents up in a shop at Mecca with the bribe-money that he alternately got from merchants and robbers. After a year’s prosperity, he was waylaid and lost his camel and its consignment. His shop was seized in compensation. He joined the Sherif’s camel police and rose to be a sergeant, but for his hard swearing and dagger-fighting was reduced again. On this occasion he accused a tribesman of the Ateiba of bringing about his downfall through jealousy and stabbed the man in court in front of Feisal’s cousin, Sharraf, who was trying the case. He nearly died of that beating. Then he entered Sharraf’s service. When war broke out he became orderly to the captain of the Ageyl, but after the mutiny at Wejh, when the captain resigned and became an ambassador, the Robber missed the companionship of the ranks and now applied to enter Lawrence’s service. He had a letter of recommendation from the captain. Lawrence read it. It said that Abdulla the Robber had been two years faithful but most disrespectful; that he was the most experienced of the Ageyl, having served every Prince in Arabia and having always been dismissed after stripes and prison for offences of too great individuality; that he was the best rider of the Ageyl, next to the writer of this letter, a great judge of camels and as brave as any son of Adam. Lawrence engaged him at once as captain of half the body-guard and never regretted it. This was only informal rank: his pay was the same as the rest.

[4] It has been said that besides Malory, Aristophanes and _The Oxford Book of English Verse_ he also carried Doughty’s _Arabia Deserta_, but this is untrue, though his memories of the book were most helpful to him, in the absence of maps, for the first part of the campaign.

Abdulla the Robber and Abdulla el Zaagi, the captain of the other half, a man of more normal officer type, examined all candidates for service between them, and a gang of desperate-looking villains grew about Lawrence: the British at Akaba called them cut-throats, but they only cut throats at Lawrence’s order. Most of them were Ageyl, wonderful camel-masters who would call their beasts by name from a hundred yards away and make them stand guard over the baggage. Lawrence paid them six pounds a month and provided them also with their camels and rations; whereas the ordinary Arab in Feisal’s ranks had to provide his camel out of the same pay. So Lawrence had the pick of the countryside at his disposal. They spent their wages chiefly in buying clothes of every possible colour—only they did not presume to wear white, which was what Lawrence himself always wore. They fought like devils with Turks and outsiders, but not among themselves. The Robber and El Zaagi kept them in order with punishments so severe that they would have been monstrous had not the men, who were at liberty to resign whenever they liked, taken a perverse pride in them. They had for Lawrence a blind, half-superstitious devotion, and in his service nearly sixty of them died. The bravest individual deed of the war was performed by one of them who twice swam up the subterranean water-conduit into Medina and returned with a full report of the besieged town. Lawrence had to live up to their standard of hardness. He had learned to keep himself fit by breaking all civilized habits, eating much at one time, then going without food for as many as four days and afterwards over-eating. The same with sleep—doing without it for days except for drowsy naps taken while still riding, and riding carefully, on long night journeys. The men with him suffered less than he did from the heat, but he less than they in the frost and snow of the short winter that they passed in the mountains. In physical endurance there was equality between them, but in spirit and energy he outdid them. Throughout the campaign, it goes almost without saying, Lawrence had a secret personal motive, stronger than patriotism, religion, personal ambition, love of adventure or of justice, in the light of which alone his extraordinary feats become intelligible. But shortly before the capture of Damascus this motive was, it seems, removed, and this is one explanation, I believe, of his coming so quickly away from the scene of his triumph, leaving the work of consolidating the Arab achievement to other hands; and of much that has happened to him since.

On the eleventh of January, 1918, Nasir, the usual pioneer leader for Feisal, made an attack on Jurf, the nearest railway station to Tafileh, the group of villages commanding the south end of the Dead Sea. He took with him some Beni Sakhr tribesmen, some Arab regulars under Nuri Said (the chief-of-staff to General Jaafar, Feisal’s commander-in-chief of the regular forces), a mountain-gun, and some machine-guns. They had luck in capturing the station, which the tribesmen camel-charged before Nuri Said intended them to, with a loss of only two killed. Two engines, the water-tower, the pump and the railway points were then blown up by the engineers. They took two hundred prisoners with seven officers and much booty, including weapons, mules and seven trucks of Damascus delicacies intended for the officers’ messes at Medina. The regulars, mostly Syrians, then tasted olives, sesame paste, dried apricot and other sweets and pickles for the first time since they had left home three or four years before. There was also a whole truck of tobacco. When Feisal heard that the Medina garrison was now quite without anything to smoke, he was so sorry for the Turks, being a confirmed smoker himself, that he sent a number of pack-camels loaded with cheap cigarettes straying into their lines, with his compliments.

Lawrence was glad to see how well the army could manage without his personal direction. This was a raid merely, but Nasir and Lawrence soon followed it up by marching from Jefer to Tafileh with Auda and his tribesmen. Nasir appeared at dawn on a cliff above the valley, threatening to bombard the place if it did not surrender. It was only a bluff, because Nuri Said with the guns had gone back to the base, and the Turkish garrison may have known this. Supported by most of the villagers, they began to fire at the Howeitat, who spread out along the cliff and fired back. All except Auda. He rode in anger alone down the cliff-path, and reining in close to the houses bellowed out: ‘Dogs, do you not know Auda?’ When they heard the terrible name of Auda, the villagers’ hearts failed them and they compelled the Turks to surrender.

Tafileh was a great anxiety to Feisal’s brother Zeid, whom Feisal now sent up, with more guns and machine-guns, to take charge of the Dead Sea operations. Auda’s Abu Tayi were in occupation alongside their former blood-enemies, another clan of Howeitat, the Motalga. The Motalga were twice as numerous as the Abu Tayi. Among them were two boys of good birth whose father had been killed by Auda’s son, Annad. Auda pretended a great magnanimity towards these boys, forgiving them for Annad’s death at the hands of their uncles. But they had not forgotten their dead father and muttered of further vengeance. Auda laughed at the boys and threatened to whip them round the market-place; so to stop further mischief Zeid thanked him for his services and paid him a large sum in gold; and Auda went back to his tents for a while. Things then quieted down in Tafileh, for Zeid had plenty of money to pay for the food he bought for the men, and the villagers, who had only sided with the Turks because some of their hated neighbours had sided with Feisal, consented to join in the Revolt.

Suddenly on the twenty-fourth of January came the news that the Turks were advancing from Kerak to retake the village. Lawrence was astonished and annoyed. Tafileh was no possible use to the Turks: their only hope of holding Palestine against Allenby was to keep every possible man for the defence of the River Jordan. Apparently the chance of surprising the Arabs for a change, instead of being surprised by them, was a temptation that made them forget commonsense strategy. And it was a real surprise. The Turkish General in command of the Amman garrison was in charge; he had with him about nine hundred infantry, a hundred cavalry, twenty-seven machine-guns and two mountain howitzers. Their cavalry drove in the Arab mounted posts guarding Tafileh on the north and by dusk were only about a mile off. Zeid decided to give the village to the Turks and defend the cliffs on the south side of the deep valley in which Tafileh lay. Lawrence objected strongly. To give up the village meant antagonizing the villagers and, in any case, the southern cliffs were dangerous to defend because a Turkish force could slip round from the railway on the east and cut off the defenders. Zeid listened to Lawrence’s advice and decided to hold the northern cliffs of the valley, but not before most of the villagers had cleared out with their movable goods in a midnight panic.

Tafileh was about four thousand feet above sea-level, and it was freezing and blowing hard; Lawrence, who was up all night seeing to things, was in a furious temper at the disturbance. He decided that the Turks should pay for their greediness and stupidity. He would give them the pitched battle that they were so eager for and obligingly kill them all. This was the one occasion in the War that Lawrence abandoned his principles of irregular mobility and fought a real battle, as a sort of bad joke, on the ordinary easy textbook lines. Zeid, who was a very cool young man and had learned much since his defeat by the Turks before Rabegh fourteen months previously, let Lawrence have his way.

There had been firing all night to the north. The local peasants were strongly resisting the Turks on the other side of the northern cliffs, and Lawrence had sent the young Motalga chiefs with whom Auda had quarrelled, to tell them to hang on, for help was coming. The boys galloped off at once on their mares, with an uncle and about twenty relations, the most that could be rallied in the confusion, and the Turkish cavalry were held up till the morning. Then Lawrence started his battle in earnest.

First he sent forward Abdulla, a Mesopotamian machine-gun officer of Feisal’s, with two automatic guns to test the strength and disposition of the enemy. He then found some of his body-guard turning over the goods lying in the street after the night’s panic and helping themselves to whatever they fancied. He told them at once to get their camels and ride to the top of the northern cliffs by the long, winding road, and to bring another automatic gun. He took a short cut himself, climbing barefoot straight up the northern cliffs to the plateau at the top. There he found a convenient ridge about forty feet high which would do well for a defence position if he could find any troops to put there. At present he had nobody. But very soon he saw twenty of Zeid’s Ageyl body-guard sitting in a hollow and by violent words managed to get them to arrange themselves on the ridge-top as if they were look-outs of a big force behind. He gave them his signet-ring to use as a token and told them to collect as many new men as they could, including the rest of his body-guard.

Abdulla’s arrival had encouraged the Motalga and the peasants; together they had pushed the Turkish cavalry from the ridge across the corner of a two-mile-wide plain, triangular in shape, with the ridge as its base, and over the nearer end of another low ridge that made the left-hand side of the triangle. At this second ridge the Arabs stopped and took up a defensive position, behind a rocky bank. Lawrence, who, from climbing up the cliff, was warmer than he had been, went forward towards them, across the plain, until he came under shell-fire. The Turkish main body were shelling the ridge where the Arabs were, but the shrapnel that they were using was bursting far beyond in the plain. He met Abdulla on his way back to Zeid with news. Abdulla had lost five men and an automatic gun from shell-fire and had used up all his ammunition. He would ask Zeid to come forward with all the available troops. Lawrence was delighted and went on to the ridge.

When he reached it, the Turks had shortened the range and the shrapnel was bursting accurately overhead. Obviously some of the enemy must have come forward where they could get observation and signal back to the guns. He looked about and saw that the Turks were working round on the right of the ridge and would soon turn them out. There were about sixty Arabs at the ridge: the Motalga, dismounted, firing from the top, at the bottom sixty peasants on foot, blown and miserable, with all their ammunition gone, crying to Lawrence that the battle was lost. He answered gaily that it was only just beginning and pointed to the men on the reserve ridge, saying that the army was there in support. He told the peasants to run back, refill their cartridge belts and hold on to the reserve ridge for good.

The Motalga held the forward ridge for another ten minutes and had nobody hurt, but then had to leave in a hurry. They overtook Lawrence, who had started back before them since he had no horse, and one of the young chiefs lent him a stirrup to hold as he ran. Lawrence was counting his steps (it was a distraction from the pain of running with bare feet over sharp sticks and stones) to discover the exact range from the part of the ridge that they had just left to the reserve ridge. Here he found eighty men, and new ones were constantly arriving. The rest of his body-guard turned up with their automatic gun, and a hundred more Ageyl and two more guns. The Turks were occupying the ridge that the Motalga had just left, and to delay their attack Lawrence ordered the three automatic rifles to fire occasional shots. They were to fire short, so as to disturb the enemy, though not too much, and so make them delay their attack. It was just noon and Lawrence went to sleep for an hour or two, knowing that the Turks would do nothing for a while. In the middle of the afternoon Zeid arrived with the rest of the army—twenty men on mules, thirty Motalga horsemen, two hundred villagers, five more automatic guns, four machine-guns and an Egyptian Army mountain-gun which had been right through the campaign since the battle of the date-palms. Lawrence woke up to welcome them.

He had all day long been making jokes about military tactics, quoting tags from the textbooks. At the ridge with the Motalga he had told the young chief that the great Clausewitz had laid it down that a rear-guard effects its purpose more by being than by doing. But the joke would have been lost on the boy, even had twenty Turkish machine-guns not been in action against the top of the ridge and distracted his attention. Now he had Turk-trained Arab regular officers to try his wit upon: he sent Rasim, Feisal’s chief gunner but a cavalry leader for this occasion, to envelop the enemy’s left wing, adding mock instructions to ‘attack them upon a point, not a line. By going far enough along any finite wing, it will be found eventually reduced to a point consisting of a single man,’ Rasim liked the joke and promised to bring back that man. With Rasim were five automatic guns and all the mounted troops, the Motalga horse, the mule-men and Lawrence’s men on camels. The senior Motalga chief drew his sword and made a heroic speech to it, addressing it by name (every good sword in Arabia has a name, as in the days of European chivalry). They rode off under cover round the right-hand side of the triangular plain, where there was another ridge corresponding with the one that the Turks were occupying. They would take a few minutes to get round and meanwhile a hundred peasants arrived who were the herdsmen of this district: they had quarrelled with Zeid the day before about war-wages, but hearing of the fighting had generously sunk old differences and come up to help.