Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (48 page)

A general who had made his name carrying out frontal attacks against the Germans on the western front, in the style approved and demanded by General Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the BEF, Allenby nevertheless decided not to repeat the frontal attacks against Gaza that had failed under Maxwell and Murray. Instead, he would feint a frontal attack against Gaza, which was where the Turks would expect it, and support it with heavy artillery and a naval bombardment, while at the same time sending the bulk of his forces, led by the British and imperial cavalry, far to the right to attack Beersheeba and capture intact the vital wells there, then turn west and roll up the Turkish line from Beersheba to the coast. Alan Dawnay’s older brother Guy, on Allenby’s staff, was an enthusiast for “dirty tricks” in warfare, despite a formal manner and appearance. He busied himself building roads designed to mislead the Turks about the direction of the attack, raising dust by moving phantom divisions and corps, and he sent Major Richard Meinertzhagen, a soldier almost as unconventional as Lawrence himself, riding out too close to the Turkish lines to trick the Turks. As he galloped for home under fire Meinertzhagen dropped a satchel containing a forged set of maps and orders encouraging the Turks to expect that the attack on Gaza would be preceded by a feint toward Beersheba, and giving a date for the attack several days later than it would actually take place. Meinertzhagen, for some time a rival of Lawrence’s, was a very different kind of man: tall, violent, a world-famous ornithologist48 who took great pleasure in bashing in the heads of cornered Germans with his “African knobkerri” instead of taking them prisoner, and who, unlike Lawrence, enjoyed deceiving his friends as much as his enemies. He and Lawrence eventually became friends of a kind, but neither altogether trusted the other.

THE NORTHERN THEATER

While Lawrence was eager to help Allenby’s attack, he had his own goal in mind: “the navel,” as he called the vital junction of “the JerusalemHaifa, Damascus-Medina railways … the only common point of all their own fronts,” the town of Deraa. He was convinced that he could seize Deraa, and thereby cut all Turkish lines of communication and supply, and that once he had it, Damascus would fall to the Arabs like a ripe fruit, before the British or, more important, the French could reach it. His great concern was that there would be only one chance to do it, for it involved persuading the Syrians to rise against the Turks; but the Syrians were not Bedouin who could retreat back into the desert and strike again; they were town dwellers, farmers, people with fixed abodes and families in place. If Feisal authorized them to rise in his name and was unable to hold Deraa or Damascus, the Turkish reprisals would be cruel, savage, and brutal, and directed against people and families who had nowhere to flee. There was no margin for error—the risings must take place to coincide with Allenby’s attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line, but Allenby was still an untried factor, commanding troops who had twice failed to take Gaza. In the end, Lawrence reached the decision that it was too risky, and put Deraa in the back of his mind—though his strategic interest in the town and his decision to examine its railroad yard with his own eyes would lead very soon to the single greatest crisis of his life.

Instead, he decided to use what forces he had to attack the vital Turkish bridges at Yarmuk. The railway from Deraa to Haifa, Jerusalem, Gaza, and El Arish passed through the steep, winding valley of the Yarmuk River from a point about twenty miles east of Deraa to the southern tip of Lake Tiberias, and followed the twisting turns of the river as closely as possible, crossing and recrossing it where necessary “on a series of identical steel bridges each fifty metres, one hundred and sixty-two feet, in span.” Of these bridges, the farthest west and the farthest east, numberstwo and thirteen, would be the most difficult to repair—indeed impossible to repair in any reasonable length of time. If either of the two bridges was destroyed at the same time as Allenby’s attack, the Turks holding the Gaza-Beersheba lines would be instantly cut off from supplies and reinforcements from Damascus, and forced to retreat—and the retreat would almost certainly turn into a rout if at the same time the population of Syria rose against them. A complete and decisive victory over the Turks could occur as soon as early November 1917, with incalculable effects on the war on the western front and in Russia.

Allenby gave Lawrence his blessing for the operation, which he requested should take place on November 5, “or one of the three following days,” to coincide as closely as possible with his own attack. As at Aqaba, Lawrence’s advantage was that the Turks didn’t think it was possible, so the bridges were lightly guarded. Still, Lawrence would need to march his force 320 miles across the desert from Aqaba to Azrak, make that his base of operations, then cover more than 100 miles from Azrak to Yarmuk undetected, over rough terrain, securing the assistance of tribes along the way, any of which might prefer to sell their knowledge of the raid to the Turks. For that matter, any of those who rode with Lawrence could betray the raid. Though he writes about it almost without emotion, he was proposing to ride deep into country that was tightly held by the Turks, where there were plenty of people who were waiting for a British victory before committing themselves, and not a few who preferred a Muslim master to a European, Christian one.

Given the elaborate steel structure of the bridges he hoped to destroy, Lawrence appealed to the gunners on board HMS
Humber
, who made him up a network of canvas straps and buckles to quickly attach “a necklace of blasting gelatine” around the key girders. Since destroying the bridges would be a more precise job than destroying a train, the chief engineer at Aqaba, C. E. Wood, an officer of the Royal Engineers, agreed to come along, although he had been wounded in the head in France, was “unfit for active service,” and had never ridden a camel. In case Lawrence was wounded or killed, Wood would act as his deputy and place thecharges. Lawrence’s friend from the Arab Bureau, George Lloyd, MP, who was visiting Aqaba, agreed to come along part of the way, more as a companion for Lawrence and out of curiosity than for any practical reason.

Lawrence added a company of Muslim Indian cavalrymen as a machine gun section, under the command of Jemadar
^*
Hassan Shah; a carefully picked bodyguard of his own; and his two riotous young servants, Farraj and Daud, whom he described as “capable and merry on the road,” but whom most others seemed to find troublesome, insolent, and too fond of practical jokes. Childhood friends, Farraj and Daud seem to have filled a role somewhere between body servant and court jester, and shared an intense and feudal loyalty to Lawrence.

A latecomer to the group, and something of a question mark, was Emir Abd el Kader, grandson and namesake of the man who had fought against the French occupation of his native Algeria from 1830 to 1847, and took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after his defeat. The great Abd el Kader had been an authentic hero throughout the Muslim world, and indeed was admired by many outside it. The French occupation of Algeria and the suppression of the Algerian insurgency had been lengthy, bloody, and violent, a protracted scorched-earth policy involving the destruction of villages, crops, and livestock. Against this, Abd el Kader fought a brilliantly conducted guerrilla war, and demonstrated a capacity for the chivalrous gesture altogether lacking in his French enemies. Many in Europe and America had regarded him as a hero, and once he reached Damascus his friends included many Europeans, including the British explorer and translator of that notorious classic of Victorian pornography
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
Sir Richard Burton, and Burton’s wife Isabel.

Abd el Kader lived on to save thousands of Christians from massacre at the hands of the Druses, to become a Freemason, and, ironically, to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor by France, as well as being honored by Abraham Lincoln and having a town in America named after him—Elkader, Iowa. The family lived on in Damascus, and a number of Abd el Kader’s loyal followers, either exiled by the French or fleeing Algeria as refugees, also settled in the Ottoman Empire, many of them in villages not far from the bridges Lawrence planned to destroy.

The grandson of Abd el Kader seems to have had from the beginning something of what we would now call a love-hate relationship with Lawrence. Later on, when writing
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Lawrence would describe him as “an Islamic fanatic, half-insane with religious enthusiasm, and a most violent belief in himself"; but there was no shortage of Islamic fanatics in the Arab Revolt, and King Hussein had been impressed enough by Abd el Kader when the latter visited Mecca to give him a blood-red banner and his blessing. Whatever his father thought, Feisal did not hide his own doubts about Abd el Kader from Lawrence. But Lawrence—a man who certainly shared “a violent belief in himself"—seems to have been more impressed with Abd el Kader than he was later willing to admit, and believed that this famous name would be useful in rallying the descendants of the Algerian exiles to the revolt when he got to the Yarmuk River.

Lawrence set off from Aqaba on October 24, and at first made slow progress—not surprisingly, given the number of people he had with him who were new to camel riding, which involves not only getting used to a completely different gait from that of a horse, but also accustoming oneself to the equivalent of a lady’s sidesaddle. Some of his party fell behind and got lost, while Lawrence rode on at a leisurely pace chatting pleasantly with Lloyd—perhaps a mistake, since he might have done better to cultivate the excitable Abd el Kader, whose dislike of Europeans and contradictory desire to be accepted as Lawrence’s companion and equal were both strong. Lloyd was a man Lawrence liked, and it is revealing that their conversation involved many of the things that were on Lawrence’s mind at the time: the exact text of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which neither Feisal nor his father had yet seen; Lawrence’s misgivings about his meeting in Cairo with the Zionist agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn, leader of a British spy ring in Palestine, who had expressed the intention of acquiring “the land rights of all Palestine from Gaza to Haifa,” a position that even then Lawrence recognized would cause many problems (the Balfour Declaration was just about to be published in London, though neither Lloyd nor Lawrence knew about it); even the basic question of whether the Allies would be justified in partitioning the Arab lands without the consent of the inhabitants. Lloyd would later express his fear that Lawrence was taking too great a risk—Lawrence planned to use his Indian machine gunners to fight the guards on the bridges and thus keep the Turks’ attention fixed elsewhere while he laid the explosive charges, and his plans for escaping back to Azrak after the bridges had been blown seemed to Lloyd to leave too much to chance. Lloyd wanted Lawrence to ride a fast horse for his escape, but Lawrence was no horseman—an unusual gap in his father’s attempt to provide his sons with knowledge of his own gentlemanly pursuits, like sailing and shooting, presumably because riding lessons for five boys would have been too expensive.

In the event, the stragglers eventually joined the main party in dribs and drabs, and they camped for the night in the extravagant landscape of Wadi Rumm, with its towering multicolored cliffs, where they were joined the next day by Abd el Kader, accompanying Sharif Ali ibn Hussein of the Harith and his men. This was not a good mixture; Abd el Kader may have resented being separated from Lawrence’s party, and the two men were arguing furiously when they arrived, since Abd el Kader also resented the amount of attention paid to Sharif Ali. This was inevitable; Ali was a legendary figure, both as a warrior and as a leader, who “could outstrip a trotting camel on his bare feet, keep his speed over half a mile, and then vault with one hand into the saddle, holding his rifle in the other,” as well as kneel down, put his arms on the ground, and rise to his feet lifting two men, one standing on each of his hands. Lawrence described him with admiration as “impertinent, headstrong, conceited … reckless [and] impressive,” all adjectives which might have been applied to himself, except perhaps “conceited.”

In Lawrence’s account, the long journey from Aqaba to Azrak seemsmore like a sightseeing tour than a hardship, but they were still moving slowly day by day in deference to the saddle-sore Indians and British, and eating what were by Bedouin standards lavish feasts: rice cooked specially to Lawrence’s taste by Farraj and Daud, and bully beef (the British army’s equivalent of canned corned beef) and biscuits for the rest of the British. Their route was not without danger; as they crossed the railway it took them past Turkish blockhouses, close enough so that Lawrence called a halt and sent Lloyd’s soldier-servant to climb up the pole and cut the telegraph wires. This created another grave problem for the Turks, since it obliged them to use radio messages, which the British could intercept and decode. In the distance, Lawrence could hear Turkish rifle and machine gun fire, a sign that Abd el Kader and Ali were encountering difficulties as they crossed the railway line a few miles away.