Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (57 page)

Lawrence’s plan for the spring campaign was at once ambitious and simple. He would support Allenby’s raid on Amman with three separate operations: in the center, Jaafar’s regulars, whose numbers were increasing, would seize the railway north of Maan; in the south, Joyce would attack Mudawara with the armored cars, and cut the railway line to Medina once and for all; in the north, Lawrence would join Allenby at Salt, raising the tribes all along the way. Although Lawrence himself still had doubts about whether Jaafar’s men could really take Maan, he finally deferred to the optimism of Feisal and Jaafar, and temporarily returned to his position as “an advisor,” though he “privately … implored Jaafar not to risk too great a disaster.”

Conveying more optimism than he felt, Lawrence rode north with his bodyguard and “an immense caravan of … camels, carrying five thousand rifles, great quantities of ammunition, and food, for the adherents in the north,” only a week after a furious blizzard had covered the ground with snowdrifts. In the last light of day, Lawrence rode alone close to the railway line and surprised a solitary Turkish soldier, who had left his rifle a few yards away while he took a nap. Lawrence had the soldier, “a young man stout, but sulky looking,” covered with his pistol, but after a moment, he merely said, “God is merciful,” and rode off, faintly interested to see whether the Turk would grab the rifle and shoot him. This is Lawrence at his best—not just the moment of mercy toward an enemy, but the moral courage (and perverted curiosity) to test whether the “Turk was1 What the czar actually said, during a conversation reported by the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg in 1853-in the course of which the czar raised the possibility that Russia and Great Britain might split up the Ottoman Empire between them-was: “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made. man enough not to shoot me in the back.” Note too Lawrence’s careful distinction—the
right
thing for the Turkish soldier to do would of course have been to shoot Lawrence, but the
manly
thing for him to do was to spare Lawrence, as he himself had been spared. How many British officers would have felt that way? How many would have put their lives at risk to see what the outcome would be? It is one of the most interesting and consistent parts of Lawrence’s character that he continually set himself these moral tests, in which he risked everything to see whether he could live up to his own ideals.

On the fourth day Lawrence arrived in the Atara region, just south of Amman, where the various clans of the Beni Sakhr were gathering, to take advantage of the “flood-ponds” of water and of the “succulent greenstuff” of the spring. Lawrence’s opinion of those on whom he was relying tells its own story: “Mitfleh with honeyed words came out to welcome us, his face eaten up by greed and his voice wheezy with it.” The plan was to cross the railway line and meet the rest of the Beni Sakhr at Themed. Turki, one of the tribal leaders, had agreed to serve Feisal while his brother continued to serve the Turks, to keep them from suspecting what was about to happen. Turki would take the four nearest railway stations south of Amman—Lawrence did not think this would be difficult—and bring their garrisons in as prisoners, giving them a safe-conduct to reach British prisoner-of-war camps; then the whole force would move toward Salt to make contact with the British. Salt would then become the center of operations for both the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and the Arab army, which could be supplied by means of a new road from Jericho, and both armies would take advantage of the chaos spread along the Turkish lines of communication south of Amman to advance toward the north and threaten Damascus.

The British often complained that the Arabs did not live up to what they had promised to do, but in this case it was the British who let the Arabs down badly. The weakening of Allenby’s forces was fatal, and in addition, the Germans had sent out as many units and specialists as possible to stiffen Turkish resistance. Lawrence seems to have relaxed and enjoyed himself “with every hollow a standing pool and the valley-beds tall with grass and painted with flowers,” while waiting for news. Both he and the Arab chieftains were worried about Allenby’s intention to fall back on Salt after taking Amman, and they were right. A report that Allenby had taken Amman was followed almost instantly by the news that it was untrue, and more alarming yet, that he had lost Salt, was in full retreat, and might actually have to give up Jerusalem. The Beni Sakhr would be exposed to the Turks’ revenge. The Turks were already using improvised gallows to hang those who had greeted the arrival of the British with too much enthusiasm. The Beni Sakhr prudently returned their 1,200 Turkish prisoners to the four railway stations from which they had been captured, after giving them back all their personal possessions and arms.

Lawrence decided to ride south to see Feisal, but not before examining for himself what had happened in Amman, and how strong its defenses were. He and Farraj eventually made their way into the town with three Gypsy women Lawrence had hired, dressed like them in long robes with flowered veils. Even so, they attracted the attention of the Turkish soldiers, who chased after them, imagining them to be prostitutes. They fled, though not before Lawrence reached the depressing conclusion that the British had not done enough to damage the railway seriously, and that Amman was too heavily defended to be taken easily. Dangerous as all this was, it was also a kind of high-spirited prank, one that Lawrence could play only with someone like Farraj as his companion.

The next day, on the way south, following the railway line, Lawrence’s small group of Arabs saw a patrol of Turkish soldiers, perhaps eight in all. Lawrence saw no reason to bother with them—he could easily continue his march out of their sight or range—but his Arabs, including Farraj, wanted to attack and he let them do so. In the brief fight that followed, Farraj was shot, and fell from his camel. Lawrence found the boy “sunken in that loneliness which came to hurt men who believed death near.” The Turkish bullet had passed through his spine, and he could not move. Then one of the Arabs shouted an alarm—fifty more Turkish soldiers were coming toward them, and a motor trolley could be heard on the line. The tribesmen tried to pick Farraj up, but he screamed in pain so terribly that they had to give up the attempt.

One senses Lawrence’s sadness in this passage—perhaps the saddest and most moving in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
He could not leave Farraj there alive for the Turks to find. They treated European prisoners of war with cruel neglect, but they tortured Arabs unmercifully, sometimes mutilating them or burning them alive. “For this reason,” Lawrence wrote, “we were all agreed before action to finish off one another, if too badly hurt to be moved away, but I had never realized that it might fall upon me to kill Farraj.”

“I knelt down beside him, holding my pistol near the ground by his head, so that he should not see my purpose, but he must have guessed it, and clutched at me with his harsh, scaly hand…. I waited a moment, and he said, ‘Daud will be angry with you,’ the old smile coming back strangely to his grey face. I replied, ‘Salute him from me,’ and he gave the formal answer, ‘God give you peace,’ and shut his eyes to make my work easier.”

The number of people with whom Lawrence had a lighthearted and intimate relationship is very small, and there were very few among the Arabs in the two years that he fought with them. However close he may have felt to Feisal, Feisal was a prince and a major political figure with ambitions to win his own crown. Even Auda, with whom Lawrence got along well, was an older man, shamelessly avaricious and ambitious. None of these were people with whom Lawrence could indulge in his own undergraduate high jinks, or who would have responded well to playfulness. Only with his two servants, Daud and Farraj, could he let that side of him appear, and now they were both dead, one by his own hand, the other because he had been left in Azrak to freeze to death. Of Dahoum, the only other young man with whom Lawrence felt totally at ease, little is known. All evidence suggests that Dahoum died of typhus in 1916, along with much of the workforce remaining at Carchemish, though some have speculated that he worked as a spy for Lawrence behind the enemy lines in Syria. Indeed, one of Lawrence’s British machine gunners, Thomas Beaumont, claimed to have met Dahoum, and alleged that his real name now that he was “a grown man and past the nickname stage” was Salim Ahmed, but since Beaumont frequently made up stories about Lawrence to sell to the press later on, this is doubtful. In any case, Dahoum was unreachable to Lawrence. Daud and Farraj had played something of the same role as Dahoum for him, though on Lawrence’s part there was never the same intensity of feeling that he had for Dahoum, who was almost certainly the only person that Lawrence loved in every possible way except sexually. Now he was alone.

When Lawrence arrived “in sight of Maan,” on April 13, he found that Jaafar’s Arab regulars had indeed captured a nearby railway station in the hope of tempting the Turkish garrison out into the desert to fight; but, carried away by their success, they had decided to make a full-scale assault on the town, despite the fact that they had neither the forces nor the artillery shells to carry it off. It was another military failure. The plan was too complicated, involving three columns: the center one composed of Arab regulars and Auda’s horsemen; the northern one, of more Arab regulars under Jaafar himself; and the southern one, of armored cars and Egyptian camelry, under Dawnay, since Joyce had been evacuated to Egypt with pneumonia at the last minute. When the British had failed to take Amman and had retired beyond Salt, the attack on Maan should in any case have been canceled, but it went forward anyway and miscarried badly, in the absence of a single commander who could pull the disparate forces together. Feisal himself was present, but did not attempt to fill a role as a battlefield commander. Lawrence went forward to watch the battle from a Ford car, instead of riding his usual camel, and was disappointed to see that even his old warhorse Auda Abu Tayi had done little to help the Arab regulars—Lawrence soon realized that it was a mistake to mix regulars and Bedouin forces, though he did not forgive Auda. The next day, when Auda entered Feisal’s tent, and said, “Greetings, Lurens,” Lawrence merely replied coldly, “Greetings for yesterday evening, Auda.”

Lawrence went south to join Dawnay in yet another attack on the railway station at Mudawara, which this time was captured by a joint Arab-Egyptian force, aided by British armored cars. The victory sparked an epic splurge of looting (in which Lawrence managed to walk off with the station bell), and prolonged fighting between the Arabs and the Egyptians over the spoils. Lawrence quelled the disorder without raising his voice, “like the hypnotic influence of a lion-tamer,” according to one witness. As usual the Arab force disintegrated as the men made for home with their loot, but Dawnay took his armored cars and the Egyptians south and destroyed nearly eighty miles of railway track, as well as seven stations and numerous causeways and bridges, severing the link to Medina. The town was now isolated; the Turks were left there until they chose to surrender.

Lawrence proposed to move north and destroy another eighty miles of railway line north of Maan, thereby isolating it like Medina; but first he and Dawnay sailed to Egypt, to meet with Allenby, only to learn to their dismay that, on the vague promise that “twenty thousand tribesmen” would come to their support, the British were proposing to advance on Salt again. Lawrence was infuriated that Allenby’s staff was dealing with the Arabs directly, instead of going through him, and he was right. The promised tribesmen did not appear, having been bought off by a higher bid from the Turks. The subsequent British attack against the well-prepared Turkish defense failed, and the British were obliged to retreat back to the Jordan valley.

Lawrence was neither surprised nor completely displeased. He felt this experience would teach Allenby’s staff a lesson—that communications with the Arab tribesmen were best left in his hands—and would reinforce the importance of Feisal as the one Arab leader the staff could trust. As for Allenby, he decided to make a virtue of necessity, and made plans to attack the Turks up the coast, while keeping their attention fixed on Salt and Amman.

While he was in Egypt Lawrence took advantage of the moment by persuading Allenby to give him 2,000 riding camels, which were made available by the imminent disbanding of the Imperial Camel Brigade and which would hugely improve the mobility of Feisal’s army. Lawrence also received a commitment to make more aircraft available to bomb Turkish strongholds and destroy their communications. By May 1918 Lawrence was already a master of “combined operations,” as they would become known in the next world war, involving irregular camel-mounted tribesmen and horsemen, armored cars operating far out in the desert, regular infantry, artillery, and “ground attack” aircraft. He was, in fact, one of the first to use aircraft to support ground attacks directly, with the enthusiastic help of Brigadier-General Geoffrey Salmond, commander of the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East.

From May through July the war in what is now Jordan went on in a steady succession of raids, train and bridge demolitions, and hit-and-run attacks against the Turks. While Allenby prepared for his big offensive—for he, like Lawrence, was determined to take Damascus in 1918—Lawrence continued to put his life at risk to keep the Turks on the defensive to the east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Much of this action was small-scale but desperate fighting. He wrote about one example with unusual frankness in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
“When combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand, I used to turn myself in. The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat…. Anyway I had not the instinct to sell my life dearly, and to avoid the indignity of trying not to be killed and failing, rode straight for the enemy to end the business, in all the exhilaration of that last and terrific and most glad pain of death.” In this case, it turned out that the “enemy” were friendly tribesmen: they had donned the clothes of Turks whose post they had rushed, and at the last minute they recognized “Lurens.” It is interesting that Lawrence was able to write so clinically about his revulsion at being touched, as well as the fact that he “felt fear, disgust, boredom, but anger very seldom,” or that “Only once or twice, when I was alone and lost heart in the desert, and had no audience, did I break down.” Lawrence apparently felt no revulsion at killing, except when he had to execute a friend. Long ago, he had set out to cut a notch in the stock of hisrifle for every Turk he shot, but he gave up after the fourth, either because he thought the notches boastful, or because this count no longer mattered to him—after all, he killed far more Turks with dynamite.