Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (59 page)

A few days later they reached Muaggar, only fifteen miles southeast of Amman, and within easy reach of the railway bridge and tunnel. Here they were discovered by a Turkish airplane. There were Turkish mule-mounted infantrymen near the bridge, and Lawrence, mindful of the fact that he and Dawnay had promised to avoid casualties among the Imperial Camel Brigade, seven of whose troopers had already been killed, decided to send them back to Azrak. They left enough evidence behind them of fires, “empty meat-tins,” and crisscrossing armored car tracks to make the Turks fear that Amman would be attacked.

Leaving his explosives buried at Azrak for future use, Lawrence raced back across the desert to Abu el Lissal to put out a blazing row between King Hussein in Mecca and the officers of the Arab army in the field. This particular tempest in a teacup had been caused by the fact that Jaafar had received a British decoration and had been referred to as “the general commanding the Arab Northern Army,” and King Hussein had thereupon announced in the official Mecca newspaper that no such rank existed. As a result of this insult, all the senior officers of the Arab army resigned, as did Feisal himself after receiving a “vitriolic” message from his father. The fact that most of these ranks were bogus in the first place did not reduce the tension between Abu el Lissal and Mecca. Feisal was styled a lieutenant-general and corps commander by the British, even though on a good day, counting regulars and Bedouin irregulars together, he seldom commanded more than the equivalent of a division; Jaafar Pasha was styled a major-general, although the number of his regulars seldom exceeded that of a brigade; and everyone else was ranked accordingly. It was an army with a disproportionate number of senior officers, and hardly any trained junior officers or NCOs. Lawrence, who had a certain respect for Hussein’s stubborn defense of his own prerogatives as a self-made king, and who was privy to both codes, adopted the novel technique of editing and altering Hussein’s messages to his son, simply eliminating any paragraphs that would offend Feisal, thus saving honor and, more important, avoiding the disintegration of Feisal’s army. Feisal very likely saw through this stratagem, but was wise enough not to question it. The episode also shows the degree to which Lawrence was involved in the politics and the differing ambitions of the sharifian family. For better or worse, he was not only Feisal’s military adviser, but his friend, political counselor, and confidant, the young Thomas à Becket to the young Henry II, with the addition of all the danger of being a foreigner and an unbeliever. Lawrence could play the role of courtier in an eastern court perfectly: as he himself put it, “I could flatter as well as flutter.” His position and his safety depended on Feisal’s trust. He never lost it, and he sacrificed what would have been, to anyone else, a comfortable and well-rewarded career, with every prospect of a knighthood or better, to secure thrones for Feisal and for Feisal’s older brother Abdulla.
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In the meantime, his objective was to get the Arab army and Feisal to Damascus before the British reached it. By the first week of September, “the desert had become a military highway, dotted with northern-moving columns that headed steadily for Azrak.” Lawrence, who rode past the long columns in his Rolls-Royce, had achieved a kind of double deception:the Turks believed that he was aiming for Amman, reinforced it accordingly, and even sent a column farther south to recapture Tafileh; the British believed that he was obeying Allenby’s orders to take Deraa and destroy the vital railroad junction. In fact, Lawrence had begun moving the bulk of the Arab forces away from Medina and the Hejaz, and from Aqaba and the sea, moving north unseen in the desert that only they could cross, toward Damascus. “The climax of the preaching of years had come, and a united country was straining towards its historic capital,” Lawrence wrote, something of an overstatement.

In the meantime, every Turkish soldier sent toward Amman weakened the forces that faced Allenby in the north, and every raid, smashed railway line, or smashed bridge to the south and east kept the Turks looking in the wrong direction. Allenby was a master of bluff—he had used it to persuade the Turks that he would attack Gaza, instead of moving to his right and enveloping Beersheba, and now he used Lawrence to persuade them that the crucial blow was coming from the east side of the Dead Sea toward Amman. Lawrence had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and countless hours in securing the cooperation, or at least the temporary neutrality, of the tribes from Aqaba to Damascus. In Liddell Hart’s words, “He had removed the obstructions and paved the way,” and this was already something of a miracle. His exact plans were unclear, even to his staff and his superiors. Essentially, he would play cat and mouse with the Turks, hitting them where they least expected; then retreating back into the desert, hoping to destroy the railway junction at Deraa; then moving north from there to take Damascus. But “it was ever [his] habit, while studying alternatives, to keep the stages in solution.” In other words, his plans would remain flexible, and he would exploit opportunities as they arose, having secured a firm base deep in the desert at Azrak.

Ignoring the warning of Frederick the Great—"He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing"—the Turks attempted to defend everything, in a huge arc from Medina to Maan to the Mediterranean, more than 300 miles long. Reacting violently to every pinprick on the periphery, the Turks were unable to maintain their lines of communication from one day to the next, thanks to Lawrence’s constant sabotage of their railway tracks and bridges.

Allenby compounded their confusion west of the Dead Sea by “creating dust columns with mule-drawn sleighs moving eastward by day, while troop columns marched [back] westward by night,” and by marching battalions toward the Jordan valley by day, then marching them back at night, so the Turks had the impression that Allenby’s whole army—"12,000 sabres, 57,000 rifles, and 540 guns"
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—was methodically moving, unit by unit, toward the east. Fifteen thousand dummy horses made of canvas “filled the vacant horse lines in the interior,” forcing the enemy to conclude that the British were preparing to attack in force to the east and take Jericho. Lawrence contributed by buying up all the forage he could find east of the Dead Sea, paying in gold even as the price soared, hiding from nobody the fact that he was buying it to support the British cavalrymen when they crossed the Jordan and advanced northwest toward Damascus.

At dawn on September 14, two days before Allenby’s attack was scheduled, the main body of the Arab forces, “about twelve hundred strong,” marched out of Azrak toward Umtaiye, “a great pit of rain water fifteen miles below Deraa and five miles east of the railway to Amman.” The day before, Lawrence had sent Captain Frederick Peake Pasha, commander of the newly formed Egyptian Camel Corps and an enthusiastic dynamiter, to break the railway near Amman; but Peake’s guides led him straight to a portion of the railway that was guarded by Arabs loyal to the Turks, and he was obliged to withdraw without accomplishing his mission. Had Lawrence been present, he might have won these Arabs over, or bribed them, but he was not. He did not blame Peake, but since he was determined to keep the Arab forces to their schedule he set off for Umtaiye across the desert in the Blue Mist; found a suitable bridge for demolition; then drove back and informed everybody that he would destroy the bridge himself, a “solo effort [which] would be rather amusing.” Young remarked that “it did not sound at all amusing. It sounded quite mad,” but then reflected that Lawrence’s madness had after all enabled him to take Aqaba, and might serve him as well here.

The next day, September 16, Lawrence set out for the railway near Jabir in a Rolls-Royce tender “crammed to the gunwale with gun-cotton [an explosive] and detonators.” He was accompanied by Colonel Joyce, ostensibly his commanding officer, but temporarily reduced to the role of an onlooker; and by Captain Lord Edward Winterton (the future sixth earl, and undersecretary of state for India), an officer from the disbanded Imperial Camel Corps, in a second tender, escorted by two armored cars. When they reached “the cover of the last ridge before the railway, Lawrence transferred himself and 150 lbs. of gun-cotton” to one of the armored cars, and drove straight to the bridge, while the other cars took on the Turkish redoubt protecting the bridge. After a brief firefight, in which two of the Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest surrendered, Lawrence set about the task of mining the bridge, fully justifying Wavell’s description of him as “a fastidious artist in demolitions.”

Despite his disappointment at being unable to remove, as a souvenir, a polished marble plaque with a florid inscription in Turkish, Lawrence proceeded to place his six charges “in the drainage holes of the span-drils … inserted zigzag, and with their explosion all the arches were scientifically shattered.” This demolition was all the more satisfying because it would leave “the skeleton of the bridge intact, but tottering,” so the enemy would “first have to tear down the wreckage before they could begin building a new bridge.” Lawrence was never one to rush the business of placing explosive charges, even under pressure, as he was here, since Winterton and Joyce were waving frantically to signal that enemy patrols were on the way.

After the demolition, he had a moment of dismay when one of the springs of his Rolls-Royce broke, stranding him about 300 yards from the ruined bridge. It was, Lawrence later remarked, the first and only time a Rolls-Royce had broken down in the desert, inconveniently just as the Turkish patrols arrived, leaving him in despair at losing both the car and his explosives kit; but Lawrence and the driver got out, and decided to “jack up the fallen end of the spring, and by scantling [planks] on the running-board wedge it into nearly its old position.” Rolls—the aptly named driver—and Lawrence managed to cut three pieces of wooden scantling to the right length—they had no saw, but Lawrence shot through each piece of wood with his pistol crosswise several times, until they could snap the end off each piece; then they jacked the car up, slipped the scantlings in to replace the spring, lashed them together with rope, and fastened them to the angle irons that held the running board. They then lowered the car back down onto the improvised spring, cranked the engine, and drove on.

Connoisseurs of Lawrence’s prose about machinery—he would later go on to write in great detail about engines, for example in the justly celebrated “User’s Guide and Notes to the 200 Class Royal Air Force Seaplane Tender"—will find a good example on page 720 of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Lawrence notes that he and Rolls performed this emergency repair as several companies of Turkish infantry were approaching. Apart from his crystal-clear description of how to repair the Rolls-Royce—one almost feels that by following his instructions, one could do it oneself—the passage shows Lawrence’s interest in and aptitude for fine machinery. This was another trait that separated him from other Englishmen of his class and generation, who were mostly happy enough to leave such things to the lower classes: chauffeurs and mechanics. Lawrence loved using his hands, and inventing his own ways of making machines work better; this was unusual, in those days, for a scholar and literary man.

Bouncing and lurching over the desert, they rejoined the main force (and his bodyguard) the next morning, September 17, “just as it was attacking the redoubt that guarded the bridge at Tell Arar.” The Arab regulars stormed the Turkish redoubt, at which point Lawrence “rushed down to find Peake’s Egyptians making breakfast. It was like Drake’s game of bowls and I fell dumb with admiration.” Lawrence, however much he admired their sangfroid, got them away from their breakfast fires and moving again, only to be attacked by Turkish airplanes. One British plane appeared, took on all eight of the Turkish airplanes, and drew them off, though the pilot had to crash-land; and with the kind of “British pluck” that usually appears only in boys’ novels of the period, he removed his machine gun from the wreck, lashed it to a borrowed Ford car, and set off on his own to attack the Turkish troops.

While the Egyptians demolished the bridge, Lawrence and Nuri as-Said (commanding the Arab regulars) set off for the nearest railway station and attacked it, cutting “the telegraph, thus severing the main communication between the Turkish armies and their home-base, before proceeding to dynamite the rails and points and wreck the station and its rolling stock,” all this despite the fact that Lawrence had been wounded by a bomb splinter in the arm. (This did not, apparently, discourage his habit of carrying in his pocket detonators that could have been exploded by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.) Undaunted, he moved his force on to attempt once more to destroy his old target, the railway bridge over the Yarmuk River at Tell el Shehab. Once again, he failed—just as he was about to lay his charges in the dark, a train filled with German reserves halted there. Although Nuri suggested a nighttime bayonet charge, Lawrence, for once cautiously realistic, pulled back, circled around in the desert back to the Deraa-Amman line, and sent a party to distract the Turks by machine-gunning the station at Nisib. Then Lawrence set out to blow up the important bridge north of the station. He was in a hurry now, and when the members of his bodyguard balked at walking out onto the bridge with their loads of blasting gelignite in a sack cast over the shoulder—since the gelignite could be detonated by a single bullet and would then blow them all to pieces—Lawrence set them an example, calmly walking to the center of the bridge by himself to test whether the guards had gone to help defend the station. Once the bodyguards had followed him, he methodically packed his explosives into the bridge’s critical structural points, placed the detonators, and laid the fuses, tumbling into the enemy’s deserted redoubt to set off the explosions. These produced “a lurid blaze,” shattering the abutment arch, sending “the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below,” and showering him with enormous chunks of masonry.