Part 23

General Foch had somewhere advised attack only from one flank, but Lawrence decided to improve on him. He sent the herdsmen to work round on the left with three automatic guns. Knowing well every ridge and hollow, they managed to crawl unseen to within three hundred yards of the extreme Turkish right. The Turks had arranged their machine-guns in line right along the crest of the ridge with no post set out on either flank and no supports; it was lunacy. Lawrence, knowing the range, set four machine-guns to fire along the Turkish ridge-crest and keep the enemy busy. The crest was rocky and the flying chips of stone were as alarming as the bullets that scattered them.

It would soon be sunset and the Turks were losing heart at the unexpected resistance. ‘Never have I seen rebels fight like this in my forty years of service,’ said their general. ‘The force must advance.’ But he spoke too late. Rasim on the right and the herdsmen on the left attacked simultaneously and wiped out the crews of the machine-guns on each Turkish flank with a burst of fire from their automatics. That was the signal for the main body of the Arabs. They charged forward, headed by Zeid’s chief steward on a camel, his robes billowing in the wind, and the crimson standard of the Ageyl flapping over his head. Lawrence stayed behind with Zeid, who was clapping his hands for joy to see the Turkish centre collapse and stream back towards Kerak. Behind the Arabs followed a body of Armenian villagers, deported here some years before after the Turkish massacres; they were armed with long knives and howling for vengeance on the Turks.

Then Lawrence realized just what he had done: to avenge a personal spite against the Turks and to parody the usual farce of a regular battle, he had caused a wanton and useless massacre. And, worse, he had carelessly thrown away the lives of many of his Arab friends. It would have been quite possible to have refused battle, even without yielding the village, and by manœuvring about to have drawn the Turks into a trap from which they would have escaped with some loss and great irritation. But this was ghastly. The Turkish survivors were pouring down a steep defile back towards Kerak, with the whole force of Arabs in pursuit. It was too late now for Lawrence to run after and call the Arabs off, and he was too tired to try. In the end, only fifty exhausted Turks of the whole brigade got safely back. For though the Arab army did not pursue the broken enemy for more than a mile or two, the peasants farther along the Kerak road shot them down one by one as they ran.

The Arabs had captured the two mountain howitzers (very useful to them afterwards), the twenty-seven machine-guns, two hundred horses and mules, two hundred and fifty prisoners. But twenty or thirty dead Arabs were carried back across the cliff to Tafileh and the sight filled Lawrence with shame. Then it began to snow and the wind blew to a blizzard. Only very late and with great difficulty they got in their own wounded; the Turkish wounded had to lie out and were all dead the next day. The blizzard continued and Lawrence was unable to follow up his success. He amused himself by writing a report of the battle, in his boyish handwriting, to the British Army Headquarters in Palestine. It was a parody, like the battle itself, and full of all the usual military catchwords used in official despatches. It was taken quite seriously. Lawrence was thought to be a brilliant young amateur doing his best to imitate the great models and the bad joke was turned against him by the offer of another military decoration, the Distinguished Service Order this time.

He partly regained his self-respect three days later by a far more important piece of work, which was the stopping of the transport of food up the Dead Sea, which Allenby had asked him to undertake. He had arranged with a chief of the Beersheba Bedouin, encamped near by, to raid the Turkish ships that were at anchor in a little port below Kerak at the south-east end of the Dead Sea. This was one of the two occasions in British military history when mounted men have fought and sunk a fleet. The Bedouin, in a sudden charge at dawn, surprised the sailors asleep on the beach, then scuttled the launches and lighters in deep water and looted the port. They took sixty prisoners, burned the storehouse, and came away without any loss to themselves.

Lawrence in making his report ironically countered the award of the military D.S.O. by recommending himself for a naval D.S.O., which has a different coloured ribbon. But this time Headquarters saw the joke; which he hammered away at later in a further ridiculous self-recommendation.

At Tafileh it was colder than ever and though there was food enough Lawrence could not stand the squalor of crowding with his twenty-seven men in two tiny rooms. It was the fleas and the painful smoke of green wood on the open fire, and the dripping mud roof. And his men’s tempers. One of the Syrians who had given trouble before on the ride to the Yarmuk bridge had a dagger fight with Mahmas, a camel-driver. In Europe, Mahmas would have been called a homicidal maniac, so possibly it was not the guardsman’s fault. If Mahmas was worsted in argument or laughed at, or even for a mere fancy, he would lean forward with his little dagger and rip the other man up. Three men at least he had killed so; once Lawrence had the unpleasant task of disarming him when he was running amok. After the War when Eric Kennington, who has edited the illustrations of this book, was in Transjordania drawing portraits of Arabs, one of the men he chose out, without knowing his history, was Mahmas. As he was working on the portrait he noticed the whites of Mahmas’s eyes turning up queerly and his face going insane; and suddenly he was on Kennington with his dagger raised. Kennington pretended to pay no attention but stooped carelessly to pick up a piece of chalk. This saved his life. The madness died and Mahmas was as friendly as he had been before the attack. Kennington sketched in the dagger as a comment on the occasion.

For his fight—quarrelling in the guard was an unforgivable offence—Mahmas was heavily whipped by El Zaagi, his captain, so was the other contestant. Lawrence, in the next room, could not endure the noise of the blows after his Deraa experience and stopped El Zaagi before he had gone very far. Mahmas was weeping before the punishment started and when it was over was in disgrace as a coward. To the Syrian, who had endured without complaint, Lawrence gave an embroidered silk headcloth next morning for his faithful services; but did not tell the man the real reason of the gift. After this, Lawrence decided to scatter his body-guard among the other houses. The men were too high-spirited to be shut up together in two small rooms with nothing to do. He went off himself on a journey to get the gold that Zeid would need, when the fine weather came, for enrolling the new tribesmen through whose territory the Arabs were to advance.

On the fourth of February, 1918, Lawrence started towards Akaba with five men, on camels, across the hills; a most painful ride in bitter cold and whirling snow. At a night halt in the shelter of the rock the four men with him, lying on the frozen ground beside their camels, resigned themselves to death. They would not speak or move when he called to them and he could only rouse them by pulling one of them up by the love-locks, which startled him painfully to life, and the others then woke up too. From Feisal in Akaba he got thirty thousand pounds in gold, two attendants of the Ateiba tribe and a party of twenty men under a sheikh to carry the gold. The gold was in £1,000 bags, each bag weighing about twenty-two pounds. Two were enough weight for each camel, swung on either side of the saddle. They had hardly started before the sheikh stopped for hospitality at the tent of a friend and said that perhaps he and his men might come on with Lawrence the next day, if the weather improved. Lawrence knew what delay this would mean and decided that the best way to get the party moving for sure the next day was to ride on ahead and shame them into following. So he went forward with his own attendants. The wind blew so bitter, that the men, who, being from Central Arabia, had never experienced cold like this before and now saw snow for the first time in their lives, thought from the pains in their lungs that they were strangling. The party rode behind the hill where old Maulud and his regulars were besieging the Turks at Maan: for Lawrence wanted to spare his men the unhappiness of passing a friendly camp without a halt.

Maulud’s men had been here for two solid months in dugouts on the side of the hill. Their only fuel was wet wormwood, on which they with difficulty baked bread every other day. They had no clothes but khaki drill uniform; and when Feisal’s supply officer had applied on their behalf to Egypt for ordinary khaki serge the answer had been that Arabia was a tropical country and that therefore only tropical kit could be issued. Nor could he get them sufficient army boots. (The regulars got boots, most of them. The irregulars did not, though their need was as great.) They slept in wet verminous pits on empty flour sacks, six or eight huddled together in a bunch to make their few blankets go as far as possible. More than half of them died or were broken in health by the cold and wet. But Maulud, by his great heart, somehow kept the survivors in their places, daily exchanging shots with the Turks. Their camp was four thousand feet above sea-level.

Lawrence’s journey grew worse, with frequent falls and a wind so violent that they could do no more than a mile an hour against it. They had frequently to dismount and pull the camels up mud-banks and through icy streams. After many hours the men flung themselves, weeping, on the ground and refused to go farther, so they camped there for the night in the slush between their camels. The next day, coming on a Howeitat camp, the two Ateiba tribesmen refused to go farther with Lawrence. They said that it would be death. Lawrence called them cowards and swore that he would go the rest of the journey alone with their four bags of gold, in addition to his own two. He had a very fine cream-coloured camel, by name Wodheiha, who saved his life that day: she refused to take a short cut over some frozen mud-flats, but, when he fell through the cat-ice and got bogged to the waist, came close so that he could pull himself out by grabbing at her fetlock. He did ten miles that afternoon, travelling all the time, and stopping the night at an old Crusaders’ castle where a friendly chief was encamped. The old man was hospitable but mentioned, as he blessed the meal, that the next day his two hundred men must starve or rob, for they had neither food nor money and his messengers to Feisal were held up by the snow. Lawrence immediately gave him five hundred pounds on account until his subsidy came.

In the morning he rode out again on the last stage of his journey to Tafileh. With him came two men from the castle as escort, but they soon deserted him and he went on alone. That afternoon, climbing uphill through snowdrifts that completely hid the path, Wodheiha grew very tired, missed her footing and slipped eighteen feet, with Lawrence, down the steep hill-side into a frozen snowdrift. After the fall she rose trembling and stood still. He was afraid that she had come to the end of her strength and vainly tried to tow her out, up to his neck in snow. Then he hit her from behind but could not budge her. He mounted her and she sat down. He jumped off and heaved her up, wondering if the drift was too deep for her. With his bare hands and feet he scooped her a road. The crust was sharp and cut his wrists and bare ankles till they bled over the snow, but he carried the little road back to the path, mounted Wodheiha again and rushed her successfully up the hill-side. They went on cautiously, Lawrence sounding the path with his stick or digging new roads through the deeper drifts. In three hours they were on the mountain-ridge overlooking the valley of the Dead Sea. Thousands of feet below he could see village-gardens green and happy in their summer-like weather. Towards evening Wodheiha balked at a snow-bank and he was afraid that she would not manage it this time and would have to be left there to die. So he led her back a hundred yards and charged her over at a canter. The other side of the bank was slippery, having been exposed to the sun all the afternoon. Wodheiha lost her footing and went slithering down on her tail, with locked legs, for about a hundred feet; Lawrence still in the saddle. There were stones under the snow and she sprang up in rage, lashing her tail, then ran forward at ten miles an hour, sliding and plunging down the path towards the nearest mountain-village. Lawrence was clinging to the saddle, in terror of broken bones. Some men of Zeid’s were weather-bound at this village, and came out much amused at the distinguished entry. Lawrence made the last eight miles to Tafileh in safety, gave Zeid some money and his letters and went gladly to bed.

He went forward the next day to plan out the Arab advance to Kerak and so along the eastern side of the Dead Sea. The weather was improving and he was reassured that the steps of the advance would be easy. Jericho was still in Turkish hands, but would soon fall, and it would be as well to go forward at once to threaten the Turkish left flank on the eastern bank of the Jordan. He came back and told Zeid of his plans. But the Tafileh district had seen too many changes in the fortune of the Arab Revolt to decide on any more risks on its behalf. Zeid had to confess that to arrange a further advance was beyond his powers.

This was a facer for Lawrence, who had promised Allenby to fulfil a certain programme by certain dates and had drawn special credits for the operation. His scheme was now breaking down, not for military reasons, but because of a defect in propaganda, for the purpose of which Lawrence was attached to Feisal’s headquarters. It therefore reflected personally upon him.

There was nothing for Lawrence to do but go at once to Allenby at his Headquarters at Beersheba, confess to failure and resign. He started late the same afternoon with four men, cutting straight across country, first down five thousand feet from the Tafileh hills and then up three thousand feet into Palestine. At Beersheba he met his old friend, Hogarth, and explained the whole business to him. That his breakdown should have been with Zeid, a little man whom he liked, put a finishing touch to his general feeling of exhaustion. Lawrence went on to complain that never since he landed in Arabia had he been given an order, never anything more than requests and options. He was tired to death of free-will and responsibility, all he wanted now was to resign and be given a job in which he was not compelled to think or act for himself; any routine job would do. Also he had for the last year and a half ridden something like a thousand miles a month on camels, not to mention thousands of miles more in crazy aeroplanes and jolting cars. In each of his last five fights he had been wounded and he now so dreaded further pain that he had to force himself to go under fire. He had generally been hungry, and lately always cold. Frost and dirt had poisoned his wounds to a mass of festering sores. And the guilt of the fraud on the Arabs and of the deed of Tafileh was heavy on his mind.

However, it was not to be. Hogarth took him to the head of the Arab Bureau, who refused to let him resign. The Imperial War Cabinet was counting on Allenby to end the deadlock in the West by winning the war in the East. If Allenby could take Damascus and possibly Aleppo, Turkey would be forced to surrender and that might encourage Austria and Bulgaria to follow suit; the Germans could not then hold out longer. But Allenby could not win his war without a protected right flank and Lawrence was the only man with enough control of the Arabs to give him this. The matter of a few paltry thousand pounds was not going to stand in the way of victory. So he was actually ordered this time to take up the task, and quietly accepted the inevitable.

Allenby wanted to know whether Lawrence could still link up with him at Jericho, which had just been taken, and so continue the advance north to Amman. Lawrence said that he could not manage at present without a great deal of help. The first trouble was Maan, which was holding up the Arab Army. Maan must be taken and, now that the time had come, the pilgrims’ railway must be permanently cut. The Arab Army could do it but would want seven hundred baggage camels for transport, also money, more guns, more machine-guns and protection from a counter-attack from Amman. Allenby promised all this, and Lawrence promised in return that when Maan fell the Arab Army would move up to Jericho and join in Allenby’s great advance on Damascus from the Mediterranean Coast to the Dead Sea.

He went to Feisal at Akaba and explained that the Arabs would now soon be driven out of Tafileh by the Turks, but that Tafileh did not matter. Amman and Maan were the only important points from now on and a Turkish force in Tafileh would actually waste the Turkish strength. Feisal, anxious for Arab honour, sent a warning message to Zeid, but without avail; for six days later the Turks drove him out of the place.

XXIII

Spring had come and the war was starting again in earnest. The Arab army was now very well provided with transport and everything else it wanted except enough guns; it had a special branch of Allenby’s staff to look after its interests, under Colonel Dawnay. He was the only British officer, Lawrence writes, who ever learned to understand the difference between national revolt, with the irregular fighting it entailed, and modern warfare between large regular armies, and to keep the two going together without confusion.

The plan that was worked out for the taking of Maan was for the armoured cars to go to Mudowwara and permanently cut the railway there while the Arab regulars seized the railway, a day’s march north of Maan, and compelled the Turkish garrison to come out to fight if they would not starve. The Arab regulars were now easily a match for the Turks and would have the help of irregulars on their flanks. Feisal and Jaafar liked the plan but, unfortunately, the other officers wanted to make a direct assault on the town and old Maulud wrote to Feisal protesting against British interference with Arab liberty. Then, though the supplies, arms, pay and transport were all now being supplied by the British, Lawrence and Dawnay saw that it would be wise to give the Arabs their way even if it was a foolish way. The Arabs were volunteers in a far truer sense than the British Army, in which enlistment by every able-bodied man had now for some months, though ‘deemed voluntary,’ been in fact compulsory; (for, as Lord Carson said with perhaps unconscious humour, ‘the necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs’). Arab service was literally voluntary, for any man was at perfect liberty to return home whenever he liked.

A large number of the Arab irregulars were going to Atara, seventy miles due north of Bair, there to wait for news of Allenby’s attack on Amman, fifty miles to the north-west. Lawrence went, too, with his body-guard. On the fourth of April the army started with its train of two thousand baggage camels and reached Atara four days later without loss. At the crossing of the railway, Lawrence happened to be ahead of his body-guard. It was near sunset and everything seemed peaceful enough; but as he rode up the embankment the camel’s feet scrambled in the loose ballast and out of the long shadow of a culvert on the left, where no doubt he had slept all day, rose a Turkish soldier. He looked wildly at Lawrence, who had a pistol in his hand, and then with sadness at his own rifle yards away out of reach. Lawrence stared at him and said softly, ‘God is merciful.’ The Turk knew the sense of the Arabic phrase and a look of incredulous joy came over his fat, sleepy face. However, he made no answer. Lawrence pressed the camel’s shoulder with his foot; she went carefully over the metals and down the bank on the other side. The Turk had enough good feeling not to shoot him in the back, and he rode away with the warmth of heart that a man always has towards a life he has saved. When, at a safe distance, he looked back, the Turk had his thumb to his nose and was twinkling his fingers in farewell.

At Atara everything was green and fresh with spring, and the camels were enjoying themselves greatly. News came that Amman was taken; the Arabs were making an immediate move farther north to join them, but further reports said that the British had been driven out again with heavy losses. Lawrence, who had lately impressed on the Arabs that the British never failed in their attacks, refused to believe the story, but it was true. Major Buxton’s battalion of English camel-corps had taken the town, but the Australian cavalry, who were to have attacked on his right, had their animals so wearied after the fighting at the Jordan-crossing and a long march over the central mountain range, that they were forced to leave Buxton to carry on the battle on his own. He was driven out with a loss of over half his force and a second attack the next day had to be called off; other British troops that came up to help him had, as one of their officers has informed me, been drinking too much ration-rum on empty stomachs.

This meant no advance for the Arabs. They turned south. But first Lawrence went spying into Amman in company with three gipsy women and Farraj disguised, like himself, as one of them. He had a good look round and decided that the place should be left alone as too strong for Arab attack. As they were returning some Turkish soldiers stopped them and made love to them; they only escaped by running away at top speed. Lawrence decided in future to use British khaki uniform again as the best disguise because too brazen to be suspected. Farraj was a changed person. Daud had died of the cold and wet that terrible winter, and Farraj went about heavy-eyed and restless, alone. He took greater care than ever of Lawrence’s camel, saddles and clothes, and of the coffee-making, but never made another joke and began praying regularly three times a day. A week after this Amman visit he was himself dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish railway-patrol.