Part 24
They then rode down towards Maan to see how the attack there was getting on. The Arabs had done well; under Jaafar they had cut the line north of Maan, destroying a station and three thousand rails; and south of Maan Nuri Said had accounted for another station and five thousand rails. They were making an attack now on Maan itself. Lawrence came upon old Maulud badly wounded, his thigh-bone splintered above the knee; but he called to Lawrence in a weak voice from the litter, ‘Thanks be to God, it is nothing. We have taken Semna.’ ‘I am going there,’ said Lawrence. Semna was the crescent-shaped hill overlooking Maan from the west, and Maulud, though hardly able to see or speak for exhaustion, craned over the side of the litter to point backwards to the hill and explain the best way of defending the place against counter-attack. Two days later, when Auda’s Abu Tayi had taken two Turkish posts on the farther side of the station and Jaafar, now in command, had massed his guns on the south, Nuri Said led an attack on the railway station. They captured it, but unfortunately the ammunition of the artillery covering their advance gave out and the station was retaken. This was disappointing, but the Arab troops had behaved so well under machine-gun fire and made such good use of ground, that it was clear that they could be used safely in future without a stiffening of British troops. This discovery was something to set off against defeat.
The next move was against the eighty miles of railway north of Mudowwara. Colonel Dawnay was in charge of the attack which was to be made by the armoured cars, with aeroplanes to drop bombs and Egyptians and Arab tribesmen to do the hand-to-hand fighting. He issued formal typewritten operation-orders with map references and an accurate programme of times and objectives. This rather amused Lawrence, whose fighting hitherto had all been of the careless verbal sort, (‘Let’s attack that place over there; you go round this way and I’ll go round the other, and afterwards we’ll blow something up if we can’), and who did not regard the present operations as on a big enough scale to justify the use of the typewriter.
As Dawnay knew no Arabic, Lawrence came along as interpreter to look after the tribesmen and the Egyptians. He knew that one misunderstanding would spoil the delicate balance of the Arab Front and that such misunderstandings would be bound to occur unless somebody responsible was continually on the watch. As he was himself about the only man intimate enough with the Arabs to be ceaselessly with them without boring them into sulks, he tried to god-father every mixed expedition. The programme worked out exactly except that the Turks at the post north of the first station to be attacked surrendered ten minutes too soon and that the Arab tribesmen who took the south post did not advance in alternate rushes with covering fire, as they were expected, but made a camel-charge, steeplechasing across the Turkish breastworks and trenches. Then the station itself surrendered and the Arabs enjoyed the maddest looting of their history. Lawrence himself broke his no-looting rule by taking off the brass station-bell (which, after the War, I once heard him ring out of his window in the quadrangle of All Souls College at Oxford, to wake up someone he wanted in the place). He was called in to settle a dangerous dispute about loot between the Arabs and the Egyptians. However, this was arranged, for nearly all the Arabs were, for once, completely satisfied with what they had got. They moved off home; only a few faithful ones were left behind for the attack on the next station. These few were rewarded. There was no fighting—the Turks had run away—and plenty of loot; so they praised themselves loudly for their loyalty. Mudowwara itself was the next objective, but there was a troop-train in the station and the Turks opened on the armoured cars with accurate gun-fire at four miles’ range, so the attack was not pressed. Meanwhile, Lawrence and Hornby in Rolls-Royces were running up and down the line, blowing up bridges and rails. They used two tons of gun-cotton. Lawrence visited the place south of Mudowwara where he had mined his first train, and destroyed the long bridge under which the Turkish patrol had slept on that adventurous day in the previous September.
Mohammed el Dheilan (the victim of Auda’s pearl-necklace story) and the Abu Tayi tribesmen then took five more stations between Maan and Mudowwara and so eighty miles of line were cut beyond repair. That settled the fate of Medina, four hundred miles to the south.
Early in May Lawrence went up to Palestine to discuss the future with Allenby, leaving the Arabs and English to make another eighty-mile break north of Maan. On arrival he found to his disgust that Allenby’s chief of staff had decided on a raid against Salt, with the help of Beni Sakhr tribesmen. This was trespassing on Lawrence’s ground, and clumsy trespassing. He asked who was to lead the Arab forces and was told: ‘Fahad, at the head of twenty thousand tribesmen.’ It was ridiculous. Fahad was never able to raise more than four hundred of his own clan and, in any case, he had now moved south to help the new operations just above Maan. Some of his greedy relations must have ridden over to Jerusalem to screw money out of the English by giving these impossible promises. Of course no Beni Sakhr appeared and the raid miscarried with heavy losses; the survivors only just escaped being cut off and captured.
The Arabs now found that there were disadvantages as well as advantages in being tied to the English. Allenby could not make his intended great attack because the Germans had begun their last big offensive and his best troops were being taken from him and hurried to France to save a break-through. The Arabs had to wait, too, until new troops reached Allenby from India and his army was reorganized—a delay of perhaps four or five months. Meanwhile Allenby was lucky if he could hang on to his Jerusalem-Jaffa line. He told Lawrence so on May the fifth, the very day chosen for the great joint advance north. It was bad news for the Arabs besieging Maan with forces only half the size of the garrison. Maan was well supplied with stores and ammunition—the Turks had sent down a supply column of pack animals—and now that the pressure from the English was relaxed, big forces of Turks would probably come down from Amman, raise the siege and push the Arabs out of Aba el Lissan.
However, Allenby said that he would do his very best for Lawrence in helping the Arab army in every way but with men. He promised repeated aeroplane raids on the railway and these turned out most useful in hindering the Turks in their advance. As Allenby was giving Lawrence tea that day, he happened to remark that he was sorry that he had been forced to abolish the Imperial Camel Brigade, which was in Sinai, but men were short and he had to use them as cavalry up at Jerusalem. Lawrence asked what was going to be done with the camels. Allenby told him to ask the Quartermaster-General. So Lawrence left the tea-table and went to the Quartermaster-General’s office with the question. The Quartermaster-General, who was very Scotch, answered firmly that the camels were needed as transport for one of the new divisions which were on their way from India. Lawrence explained that he wanted two thousand of them. The Quartermaster-General answered briefly that he might go on wanting. So Lawrence went back and said aloud at the tea-table that there were for disposal two thousand two hundred riding camels and thirteen hundred baggage camels. All, he said, were earmarked for transport, but of course _riding camels were riding camels!_ The staff whistled and looked wise, as if they doubted whether riding camels could carry baggage. Lawrence had known that a technicality might be useful, even a sham one, for every British officer had to pretend that he understood animals, as a point of honour. So he was not surprised that night at dinner to find himself on one side of Allenby, with the Quartermaster-General on the other.
With the soup, Allenby began to talk of camels, and the Quartermaster-General immediately said how lucky it was that the Indian Division’s transport would now be brought up to strength by the disbanding of the Camel Brigade. It was a bad move; Allenby cared nothing for strengths. He turned to Lawrence and said with a twinkle: ‘And what do you want them for?’ Lawrence answered hotly: ‘To put a thousand men into Deraa any day you please.’ Now Deraa junction (the secret of whose weakness against surprise Lawrence had bought at great cost to himself) was the nerve-centre of the Turkish army. Its destruction would cut off, from Damascus and Aleppo, both the line south to Amman and Maan and the line east to Haifa and Northern Palestine. So Allenby turned to the Quartermaster-General again and smilingly said: ‘Q, you lose.’
It was a princely gift, for now the Arab army could move about freely far from its base and could win its war when and where it pleased. Lawrence hurried back to Feisal, who was at Aba el Lissan, and teased him by first talking at length about histories, tribes, migrations, the spring rains, pasture, and so on. At last casually he mentioned the gift of two thousand camels. Feisal gasped with delight and sent his slave running for Auda, Zaal, Fahad, and the rest of his chiefs. They came in anxiously asking: ‘Please God, is it good?’ He answered with shining eyes: ‘Praise God!’ The chiefs heard the news with astonishment and looked at Lawrence, who said: ‘The bounty of Allenby.’ Zaal spoke for them all: ‘God keep his life and yours.’ Lawrence replied: ‘We have been made victorious.’ The chiefs were as delighted as Feisal.
But before the camels could be used against Deraa the nearer danger must be settled. There was a big Turkish force gathering at Amman for the relief of Maan. Nasir was asked to delay it by another big breach of the railway at Hesa, half-way between the two towns. He succeeded by the old method of blowing up bridges north and south, the night before, and at dawn bombarding the station, with a camel-charge to follow. As usual, there were no losses at all. Hornby and others with explosives then hurriedly demolished fourteen miles of railway.
This was excellent: the Turks would be delayed at least a month and it would be the end of August before they could patch up the railway just north of Maan and be ready to attack Aba el Lissan. By that time, for it was now early June, Allenby would be nearly ready to advance again and the Turks might not dare to make the attempt. The Arab forces could then be divided into three main parties: a thousand camel-men to take Deraa, and two or three thousand infantry to join up with Allenby at Jericho, the remainder to continue to keep watch above Maan. Lawrence decided to get Sherif Hussein, as nominal commander-in-chief of the Arab armies, to send Feisal all the regular troops besieging Medina under his brothers, Abdulla and Ali. Medina was in a pitiful state now, with short rations and scurvy, cut off from Damascus by the railway-breach between Maan and Mudowwara, and needed no more harrying; while the Arab troops were urgently needed for the advance north. But the old man was jealous of Feisal’s success and made difficulties. Lawrence went down to Jiddah to talk him over, bringing letters from Feisal, Allenby and the High Commissioner of Egypt, the Sherifs paymaster. But the Sherif, pleading the fast of Ramadan, retired to Mecca, a holy place where Lawrence could not follow him. The Sherif consented to talk over the telephone, but sheltered himself behind the incompetence of the Mecca exchange whenever he did not like the conversation. Lawrence, in no mood for farce, rang off and came away.
Allenby was going to begin his attack on September the nineteenth and, to make sure that the Turks did not begin their move on Aba el Lissan before it started, something new was needed. Dawnay was then inspired to remember the surviving battalion of the Imperial Camel Corps, the one that had been in the Amman raid, three hundred men under their capable officer, Major Buxton. Allenby’s chief-of-staff agreed to lend this battalion to the Arabs for a month, on two conditions: the first that a scheme of operations should be provided, the second—a quaint one—that there should be no casualties. The actual operation-orders made out by Dawnay and Lawrence are, as a matter of interest, to be found in an appendix at the end of this book.
Buxton’s march was to be the diversion; three weeks later the real blow was to be struck at Deraa. Lawrence calculated that the two thousand new camels would supply the necessary transport for five hundred Arab mule-mounted regulars, the battery of French quick-firing mountain-guns that had at last been sent from Suez, machine-guns, two armoured cars, engineers, camel-scouts and two aeroplanes. They would strike at Deraa, destroying the junction and paralysing the Turkish communications three days before Allenby launched his attack. Allenby had said that he would be content if ‘three men and a boy with pistols’ were before Deraa on September the sixteenth. This expedition was a liberal interpretation of the phrase. The arrangements for equipping this force would be made by the British officers at Akaba, while Lawrence went off with Buxton.
Of the part played by Lawrence in relation to these British officers, one of them, Major Young, has written clearly enough:
‘The British officers who were helping the Arabs were at first all under political control, but as soon as the revolt took definite military shape a special liaison staff was formed at Allenby’s Headquarters to deal with what were known as the Hejaz operations and a number of officers were attached to the Arab forces. Dawnay was officially the chief staff officer of the Hejaz liaison staff (the telegraphic name for which was “Hedge-hog”), just as Joyce was officially the senior British officer with Feisal’s army. But Lawrence really counted more than either of them with Allenby and Feisal. He used to flit backwards and forwards between the two as the spirit moved him.
‘Besides being helped with munitions and rations Feisal was lent five armoured cars, a flight of aeroplanes, two 10-pounder guns mounted on Talbot cars, a detachment of twenty Indian machine-gunners, a section of French Algerian gunners armed with four “65” mountain-guns, an Egyptian Army battalion for guard duties at Akaba, and later on a detachment of the Egyptian Camel Corps and a company of the Egyptian Camel Transport to help him with his transport. All these were under the command of Joyce ... whose staff consisted of a chief staff-officer, a base-commandant for Akaba, a combined supply and ordnance officer, two medical officers and a works officer. Others drifted in and out helping with demolitions, ciphering and deciphering telegrams, landing stores, pegging down wire roads in the sand and doing a hundred other odd jobs.
‘Mr. [Lowell Thomas]’s cinema pictures were a triumph of journalistic composition. But they depicted only the earlier Lawrence of the heroic period and wrongly credited him with doing single-handed the whole of the later work of “Hedge-hog” and of Joyce and the British staff. I came too late, so that I practically never saw the real Elizabethan Lawrence who characteristically drew back into his shell during that long period of preparation after the taking of Akaba. Like the Bedouin with whom he rode he held aloof from regular soldiers and everything that they did. At the same time it is bare justice to give him the chief credit for the whole series of Arab operations which ended in the setting up of Arab rule in Damascus.’
To this account it should be added that Colonel Joyce, the senior British adviser to Feisal since Newcombe had been captured on a raid in Southern Palestine, was officially Lawrence’s superior officer throughout the campaign. He acted as commandant at Akaba until the work at the port became too heavy to be combined with his front-line duties, when he appointed a major from Egypt, Scott, to take on the duty. The Arab affair was run with great economy of British helpers; it was Lawrence’s policy to let it be managed with only one-twentieth of the staff that a more formal side-show would have expected. It was Joyce who decided on the main policy of the Revolt when Lawrence was off on raids or making plans for advances. Lawrence acted as his chief source of intelligence.
The supply and ordnance officer was Captain Goslett (who took one or two of the photographs in this book). His view of the Arab campaign was a very different one from Lawrence’s. The supply-question covered all Feisal’s supporters for hundreds of miles around, and was enormous. There were also huge trade-imports at Akaba, not directly concerned with the campaign, for the carriage and regulation of which he was responsible. Goslett was (and is again) a London business-man, whose organizing ability and patience were put to a most severe test. There were some hundreds of English at Akaba, but except for the Armoured-Car men they were not there for fighting. They suffered no casualties, except for the death of a corporal who was accidentally killed while doing amateur police-work on his own.
To encourage the regular Arab officers by recognizing their great services in the fighting about Maan and against the railway, Allenby distributed decorations. Jaafar, the commander-in-chief, was given a C.M.G., and Allenby delighted him by providing, as a guard of honour for the ceremony, the same troop of Dorset Yeomanry that had gained great credit two years before by galloping him down in the Senussi desert and taking him prisoner. Jaafar had also won the German Iron Cross in 1915. This double event in a single war is possibly a unique performance.
During these months of planning, Lawrence had not (in spite of Major Young’s account) interrupted his active adventures. One strange ride in July took him to Kerak, Themed and Amman, all held by Turkish troops. He was inspecting the ground for the coming Arab advance to Jericho. At Kerak, where he arrived at midnight with a party of camel-men, the Turks were terrified and locked themselves into their barracks, expecting the worst. But nothing happened. The sheikh with Lawrence merely swore that he was hungry and had a sheep killed and cooked for him by the villagers. Later, in the pitch-dark, they stumbled over some Turkish cavalry watering at a stream, and were fired on. Lawrence protested with fluent Turkish curses and the Turks replying bad-temperedly with a few more shots drew off.
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.