V
(1888–1935)
“LAWRENCE OF ARABIA”
LAWRENCE is included here because of his mastery of guerrilla warfare. His operations and accounts of them have been praised by military writers, beginning with B. H. Liddell Hart in the 1920s. He is admired by such as General Vo Nguyen Giap, who was a guerrilla before organizing the Army of the People’s Republic of (North) Vietnam, 1 and by many in special operations worldwide. Though only a temporary British colonel, he looms important today in an era of limited or small wars and antiterrorist operations.
Though not for the reasons cited above, “Lawrence of Arabia” was and is the most celebrated figure of the “Great War,” rivalled only by the German Flying Ace, Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron.”2 An eccentric genius and a quintessential British intellectual, Lawrence led Arab Bedouin guerrillas against the Turks for less than two years, but became their hero, greeted by shouts of “Orens!Orens!” [Lawrence! Lawrence!] when he appeared. In the name of his king (in good faith), he promised the Arab leaders, Grand Sherif Hussein of Mecca and his son Emir Feisal, that in return for their support of the British campaign against the Turks (allied with the Germans) in the Middle East, they would have an Arab state after the war—covering most of the Middle East, at the time populated principally by Arabs. The Arab chieftains understood, but not their followers. They were nomadic people who identified with their tribes—as Billi, Juheina, Ateiba, How-eitat, or Ageyl—not as “Arabs.” Lawrence could only unite them by preaching a “crusade” against their common enemy, the Turks, but clung to the dream of an Arab nation. When no such nation was created after the war, Lawrence took it personally, as a betrayal of himself and the Arabs by his government.
Lawrence’s background made him an improbable leader of Bedouin guerrillas, except that he knew Arabic. Son of a British aristocrat, 3 educated at exclusive schools and Oxford, he had spent most of the years 1909–14 in the Middle East at archeological digs. When the war began (August 1914), he volunteered, was rejected, then posted to Egypt as an Army Intelligence lieutenant. Until late 1916,he manned a desk in Cairo.
Meanwhile, the British had encouraged Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz to revolt against the Turks, allies of the Germans and a threat to the Suez Canal. Hussein ruled much of western Arabia, held the Muslim Holy City of Mecca, and was a descendant of Mohammed, which gave him royal status with Muslim Arabs.4 In July 1916 he finally launched an Arab revolt, led by his son, Sherif Feisal, who took the coastal cities of Rabegh and Yenbo with help from the British Royal Navy in the Red Sea. The Turks began a campaign to take Mecca. In October 1916,Lieutenant Lawrence was sent to report on the situation, made friends with Feisal, and was sent back “permanently.”
By that time the Arab revolt had strong support from the British in Egypt; Sir Reginald Wingate was British high commissioner at Cairo, and General (later Field Marshal) Edmund H. H. Allenby was in command of British forces. Money and weapons got to the fighting tribes (past embezzling sheikhs) thanks to Lawrence and Feisal.
Lawrence (55 tall) reported to the giant Allenby in July 1917. The general, Lawrence later wrote, was unprepared “for anything so odd as myself—a little bare-footed silk-skirted man offering to hobble the enemy . . . if given stores and arms and . . . two hundred thousand sovereigns [pounds sterling].”5 Actually, Lawrence was wearing the robe of an Arab sheikh, a mark of Feisal’s respect. Lawrence and the Arabs had just captured Akaba, a feat thought impossible for them. Thus Allenby gave him an attentive hearing. The general knew that Lawrence was eccentric and often insubordinate, but, Allenby reasoned, he had worked a sort of miracle—uniting Arab tribes, often at war with each other—to fight the Turks.
Lawrence’s secret lay in influencing the actions of Sheikh Feisal. He had won over Feisal—and the wild Bedouin (desert nomads)—by becoming one of them. He spoke Arabic, showed the Arabs that he could match them in going long distances by camel with little or no food and water, and became an Arab in dress and diet.
Lawrence persuaded Feisal to take Wejh, where he could be supplied from the sea. Meanwhile, they concentrated on attacking the Hejaz railway, the lifeline of the Turks in Medina—hitting trains in isolated, unguarded spots. Lawrence brought in British explosives experts, who taught the Arabs to demolish railroad bridges and tracks, and in January 1917,began leading raids in person. Feisal’s forces swelled, partly because of the rich booty from the trains.
As more tribes joined the fight, Lawrence, with the likable old thief and fabled warrior, Sheikh Auda abu Tayi, took Akaba, a key Red Sea port, handing it to the British. When Allenby’s army attacked into Syria in 1917,Lawrence and Feisal pinned down some 27,000 Turks in the Hejaz who otherwise might have attacked the flank of the British army. In 1918,Allenby put Lawrence’s Arabs on his flank for his final drive for Damascus. Victory made them more ruthless; on one day they killed 5,000 Turks, including prisoners and wounded, which sickened Lawrence. Then shortly Allenby told him there would be no single Arab state. Lawrence wrote later: “My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.”6
1919,Lawrence joined Feisal at the Paris Peace Conference to press, in vain, for an Arab state. Disillusioned, Lawrence refused proffered government employment, and lived under aliases until his death in a motorcycle accident in 1935.
Lawrence’s exploits were glamorized during the war by Lowell Thomas, a leading American radio personality and adventure writer. He has since been the subject of scores of books, none of which, as history or literature, match his own Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935).7
The passages below are from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, (1935) with a few from Revolt in the Desert (1927), an abridgement of an early version of the book.8
Feisal
[Lawrence’s first visit, October 1916.]
[Feisal] was a man of moods, flickering between glory and despair, and just now dead-tired. He looked years older than thirty-one; and his dark . . . eyes, set a little sloping in his face, were bloodshot, and his hollow cheeks deeply lined and puckered with reflection. His nature grudged thinking, for it crippled his speed in action. . . . In appearance he was tall, graceful and vigorous . . .[with] a royal dignity of head and shoulders. Of course he knew it, and a great part of his public expression was by sign and gesture. . . .
His [service with Turkish officials] had made him past-master in diplomacy. His military service with the Turks had given him a working knowledge of tactics. His life in Constantinople and in the Turkish Parliament had made him familiar with European questions and manners. He was a careful judge of men. If he had the strength to realize his dreams he would go very far, for he was wrapped up in his work and lived for nothing else; but the fear was that he would wear himself out . . . or . . . die of too much action. His men told me after a long spell of fighting, in which he had to . . . lead the charges . . . he had collapsed physically and was carried away . . . unconscious, with the foam flecking his lips.9
Later I saw Feisal again, and promised to do my best for him. My chiefs would arrange a base at Yenbo, where the stores and supplies he needed would be put ashore for his exclusive use. . . . We would form gun crews and machine-gun crews . . . and provide them with such mountain guns and light machine-guns as were obtainable in Egypt. Lastly, I would advise that British Army officers . . . be sent down to act as advisers and liaison officers with him in the field.10
Arab Views of an Arab Nation
[Lawrence is back to stay.]
The Semites idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages. . . . Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of the [Turkish] Empire, not to win it.11
The Arab “Troops”
The men received me cheerfully. Beneath every great rock or bush they sprawled like lazy scorpions, resting from the heat, and refreshing their brown limbs with the early coolness of the shaded stone. Because of my khaki they took me for a Turk-trained officer who had deserted to them, and were profuse in good-humoured but ghastly suggestions of how they should treat me. Most of them were young, though the term “fighting man” in the Hejaz meant anyone between twelve and sixty sane enough to shoot. They were a tough-looking crowd, darkcoloured, some negroid. They were physically thin, but exquisitely made, moving with an oiled activity. . . . It did not seem possible that men could be hardier or harder. They would ride immense distances day after day, run through sand and over rocks bare-foot in the heat for hours without pain, and climb their hills like goats. Their clothing was mainly a loose shirt . . . and a head-shawl usually of red cloth, which acted towel or handkerchief or sack as required. They were corrugated with bandoliers, and fired joy-shots when they could.
The Power of British Money
They were in wild spirits, shouting that the war might last ten years. It was the fattest time the hills had ever known. The Sherif was feeding not only the fighting men, but their families, and paying two pounds a month for a man, four for a camel. Nothing else would have performed the miracle of keeping a tribal army in the field for five months on end. . . . The Turks cut the throats of their prisoners with knives, as though they were butchering sheep. Feisal offered a reward of a pound a head for prisoners, and had many carried in to him unhurt. He also paid for captured mules or rifles.
The actual contingents were continually shifting, in obedience to the rule of flesh. A family would own a rifle, and the sons serve in turn for a few days each. Married men alternated between camp and wife, and sometimes a whole clan would become bored and take a rest. Consequently the paid men were more than those mobilized, and policy often gave to great sheikhs, as wages, money that was a polite bribe for friendly countenance. Feisal’s eight thousand men were one in ten camel-corps and the rest hill-men. They served only under their tribal sheikhs, and near home, arranging their own food and transport.Nominally each sheikh had a hundred followers. Sherifs acted as group leaders, in virtue of their privileged position, which raised them above the jealousies which shackled tribesmen.
Blood feuds were nominally healed, and really suspended in the Sheriflan area: Billi and Juheina, Ateiba and Ageyl [tribes] living and fighting side by side in Feisal’s army. All the same, the members of one tribe were shy of those of another. . . . Each might be . . . against the Turk, but perhaps not quite to the point of failing to work off a . . . grudge upon a family enemy in the field. Consequently they could not attack. One company of Turks firmly entrenched in open country could have defied the entire army of them; and a pitched defeat, with its casualties, would have ended the war by sheer horror.
The Use of Bedouins and Others
I concluded that the tribesmen were good for defence only. Their acquisitive recklessness made them keen on booty, and whetted them [sic] to tear up railways, plunder caravans, and steal camels; but they were too free-minded to endure command, or to fight in team. A man who could fight well by himself made generally a bad soldier and these champions seemed to me no material for our drilling; but if we strengthened them by light automatic guns of the Lewis type, to be handled by themselves, they might be capable of holding their hills and serving as an efficient screen behind which we could build up, perhaps at Rabegh, an Arab regular mobile column, capable of meeting a Turkish force (distracted by guerilla warfare) . . . and of defeating it piecemeal. For such a body of real soldiers no recruits would be forthcoming from Hejaz. It would have to be formed of . . . Syrian and Mesopotamian towns-folk already in our hands, and officered by Arabic-speaking officers trained in the Turkish army.12
Artillery Problem
The sole disquieting feature was the very real success of the Turks in frightening the Arabs by artillery. . . . [T]he sound of a fired cannon sent every man within earshot behind cover. They thought weapons destructive in proportion to their noise. They were not afraid of bullets, not indeed overmuch of dying: just . . .death by shell-fire as unendurable. It seemed to me that their moral confidence was to be restored only by having guns, useful or useless, but noisy, on their side. . . .
When I told them of the landing of the five-inch howitzers at Rabegh they rejoiced. . . . The guns would be of no real use to them: . . . it seemed to me that they would do the Arabs positive harm; for their virtues lay in mobility and intelligence, and by giving them guns we hampered their movements and efficiency. Only if we did not give them guns they would quit.13
Picking Up Arab Allies
[To the north] lay various tribes owning obedience to Nuri Shaalan, the great Emir of the Ruwalla, who, after the Sherif [Hussein] and ibn Saud and ibn Rasind, was the fourth figure among the precarious princes of the desert. . . . His favour would open to us the Sirhan, a famous roadway, camping ground, and chain of water-holes, which . . . extended from Jauf . . . in the south-east, northwards to Azrak, near Jebel Druse, in Syria. It was the freedom of the Sirhan we needed to reach the tents of the Eastern Howeitat, those famous abu Tayi, of whom Auda, the greatest fighting man in northern Arabia, was chief. Only by means of Auda abu Tayi could we swing the tribes from Maan to Akaba so violently in our favour that they would help us take Akaba and its hills from their Turkish garrisons.14
Lawrence Works Out a “Doctrine”
[Thoughts while lying ill in a hot tent on an extended raid.]
War Aim
I began to drum out the aim in war. The books gave it pat—the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy by the one process—battle. Victory could be purchased only by blood. This was a hard saying for us. . . . The Arabs would not endure casualties. How would . . . Clausewitz [win this war]? Von der Goltz had [said it] . . . was necessary not to annihilate the enemy, but to break his courage. Only we showed no prospect of ever breaking anybody’s courage.
However [I concluded] these wise men must be talking in metaphors; for we were indubitably winning our war; and as I pondered slowly, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. Out of every thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now free. . . . If we held [most of the Hejaz] the Turks were welcome to the tiny fraction on which they stood, till peace or Doomsday showed them the futility of clinging to our window-pane.
Strategy and Tactics
When it grew too hot for dreamless dozing, I [began] considering now the whole house of war in its structural aspect, which was strategy, in its arrangements, which were tactics, and in the sentiment of its inhabitants, which was psychology; for my personal duty was command, and the commander, like the master architect, was responsible for all.
The first confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim in war . . . and tactics, the means towards a strategic end. . . . They seemed only points of view from which to ponder the elements of war, the Algebraical element of things, a Biological element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas.
The algebraical element looked to me a pure science, subject to mathematical law, inhuman. . . . My wits, hostile to the abstract, took refuge in Arabia again. Translated into Arabic, the algebraic factor would first take practical account of the area we wished to deliver, and I began idly to calculate how many square miles: sixty: eighty: one hundred: perhaps one hundred and forty thousand square miles. And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners; but suppose we were . . . an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas?. . . We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed.
Then I figured out how many men they would need to sit on all this ground. . . . I knew the Turkish Army exactly, and even allowing for their recent [greater use of] aeroplanes and guns and armoured trains . . . still it seemed they would have need of a fortified post every four square miles [with not fewer] than twenty men. If so, they would need six hundred thousand men to meet the illwills of all the Arab peoples, combined with the active hostility of a few zealots.
Advantages of the Arab Side
How many zealots could we have? At present we had nearly fifty thousand:sufficient for the day. It seemed the assets in this element of war were ours. If we [used them properly], then climate, railway, desert, and technical weapons could also be attached to our interests. The Turks were stupid, the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
This was enough of the concrete; so I . . . plunged into the nature of the biological factor in command. . . . The war-philosophers had properly made an art of it, and had elevated one item, “effusion of blood,” to . . . an essential. . . .A line of variability, Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates, making them irregular. The components were sensitive and illogical.
Intuition in Commanders—Improvision
The “felt” element in troops, not expressible in figures, had to be guessed at . . .and the greatest commander of men was he whose intuitions most nearly happened. Nine-tenths of tactics were . . . teachable in schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by Instinct (sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a reflex. There had been men whose [intuition] so nearly approached perfection that by its road they reached certainty.
Men vs. Material
My mind seesawed back to apply this to ourselves, and at once knew that . . . it applied also to materials. In Turkey things were scarce and precious, men less esteemed than equipment. Our cue was to destroy, not the Turk’s army, but his minerals [sic]. The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun or charge of high explosive, was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk. In the Arab Army at the moment we were chary both of materials and of men. Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but Individuals. An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widened out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.
Materials were easier to replace. . . . Orthodoxy had laid down the maxim, applied to men, of being superior at the critical point and moment of attack. We might be superior in equipment in one dominant moment or respect; and for both things and men we might give the doctrine a twisted negative side, for cheapness’ sake, and be weaker than the enemy everywhere except in that one point or matter. The decision of what was critical would always be ours. Most wars were wars of contact. . . . Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked. The attack [should be] directed not against him, but against his stuff . . . his most accessible material. In railway-cutting it would be usually an empty stretch of rail; and the more empty, the greater the tactical success. We might . . . develop a habit of never engaging the enemy. This would chime with the [rule of] never affording a target. . . . We were never on the defensive except by accident and in error.
Intelligence and Propaganda
The corollary of such a rule was perfect “intelligence”, so that we could plan in certainty. . . . When we knew all about the enemy we should be comfortable. We must take more pains in the service of news than any regular staff.
I was getting through my subject. . . . There remained the psychological element to build up into an apt shape. I went to Xenophon and stole, to name it, his word diathetics which had been the art of Cyrus before he struck.
Of this our “propaganda” was the stained and ignoble offspring. It was the pathic [sic], almost the ethical, in war. Some of it concerned the crowd, an adjustment of its spirit to the point where it became useful to exploit in action. . . . Some of it concerned the individual, and then it became a rare art . . . transcending, by purposed emotion, the gradual logical sequence of the mind. It was more subtle than tactics . . . better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds. . . . We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them, then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle.
The Power of Confidence and an Aggressive Attitude
As we had seldom to concern ourselves with what our men did, had they thought, the diathetic for us would be more than half the command. In Europe it was . . . entrusted to men outside the General Staff. In Asia the regular elements were so weak that irregulars could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. Battles in Arabia were a mistake, since we [gained] only by the ammunition the enemy fired off. Napoleon had said it was rare to find generals willing to fight battles; but the curse of this war was that so few would do anything else.
Speed and Time, Not Power
We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and to shoot nothing. Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power. The invention of bully beef . . . gave us strategical . . . strength, since in Arabia range was more than force, space greater than the power of armies.
Summary of Principles
I had now been eight days lying in this remote tent. . . . The fever passed: my dysentery ceased; and with restored strength the present again became actual to me. . . . So I [listed] my shadowy principles, to have them. . . . precise before my power to evoke them faded.
It seemed to me proven that our rebellion had an unassailable base, guarded not only from attack, but from the fear of attack. It had [an] . . . alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts. It had a friendly population, of which some two in the hundred were active, and the rest quietly sympathetic. . . . The active rebels had the virtues of secrecy and self-control, and the qualities of speed, endurance and independence of arteries of supply. They had technical equipment enough to paralyse the enemy’s communications. . . . Final victory seemed certain.15
[Lawrence had formulated classic rules for guerrilla fighting. He tried to persuade the regulars16that they should not take Medina, but let the Turks keep it, and the Hejaz railway, which he could keep cutting, forcing the Turks to fritter away their strength. He lost the argument to the British regulars. However, since the Arabs (as he had predicted) could not get organized enough to take Medina, he was allowed to keep raiding in 1917,but in 1918,when the British invaded Syria, his Arabs became the right wing of Allenby’s army—if in swarms of semi-independent semi-mobs rather than disciplined ranks.]
[In 1917,] Our ideal was to keep [the Turks’] railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort. The factor of food would confine him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hejaz Railway, and the Trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and Syrian railways . . . so long as he gave us the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world.17
Raid on a Railway Junction
[In the Turkish camp.] We could see about three hundred men in all. We had heard that the Turks patrolled . . . actively at night. A bad habit this: so we sent off two men to lie by each blockhouse, and fire a few shots after dark. The enemy, thinking it a prelude to attack, stood-to in their trenches all night, while we were comfortably sleeping; but the cold woke us early with restless dawn wind blowing across the Jurf [sic], and singing in the great trees round our camp. As we climbed to our observation point the sun conquered the clouds and an hour later it grew very hot.
We lay like lizards in the long grass round the stones of the foremost cairn upon the hill-top, and saw the [Turkish] garrison parade. There were a hundred and ninety-nine infantry, little toy men, [who] ran about when the bugle sounded, and formed up in stiff lines below the black building till there was more bugling: then they scattered, and after a few minutes the smoke of cooking fires went up. A herd of sheep and goats in charge of a little ragged boy issued out toward us. Before he reached the foot of the hills there came a loud whistling down the valley from the north, and a tiny, picture-book train rolled slowly into view across the hollow sounding bridge and halted just outside the station, panting out white puffs of steam.
The shepherd lad held on steadily. . . . We sent two Juheina down behind a ridge beyond sight of the enemy, and they ran from each side and caught him. [The shepherd had to be held captive while the raid proceeded. Most of the details are omitted, as well as a long, poetic aside by Lawrence on the lives of shepherds and a description of the countryside.]
At dusk we climbed down again with the goat-herd prisoner, and what we could gather of his flock. Our main body would come this night; so that [Sherif] Fauzan and I wandered out across the darkling plain till we found a pleasant gun-position in some low ridges not two thousand yards from the station. On our return, very tired, fires were burning among the trees. Shakir [Hussein’s youngest son] had just arrived, and his men and ours were roasting goat-flesh contentedly.18 The shepherd was tied up . . . because he had gone frantic when [they killed his goats]. [He was eventually set free.]
After supper [Sherif] Shakir told me that he had brought only three hundred men instead of the agreed eight or nine hundred. However, it was his war . . .so we hastily modified the plans. We would not take the station; we would frighten it by a frontal artillery attack, while we mined the railway to the north and south in the hope of trapping that halted train. Accordingly we chose a party of Garland-trained dynamiters19 who should blow up something north of the bridge at dawn, to seal that direction; while I went off with high explosive and a machine-gun with its crew to lay a mine to the south of the station, the probable direction from which the Turks would seek or send help, in their emergency.
Mohammed el Khadi guided us to a deserted bit of line just before midnight. I dismounted and fingered its thrilling rails. . . . Then, in an hour’s busy work, we laid the mine, which was a trigger action to fire into twenty pounds of blasting gelatine when the weight of the locomotive overhead deflected the metals. Afterwards we posted the machine-gunners in a little bush-screened watercourse, four hundred yards from and fully commanding the spot where we hoped the train would be derailed. They were to hide there; while we went on to cut the telegraph, that isolation might persuade [the station at] Aba el Naam to send the train for reinforcements, as our main attack developed.
So we rode another half-hour, and then turned in to the line, again were fortunate to strike an unoccupied place. Unhappily four remaining Juheina [tribesmen] proved unable to climb a telegraph pole and I had to struggle up it myself. It was all I could do, after my illness; and when the third wire was cut the flimsy pole shook so that I lost grip, and came slipping down the sixteen feet upon the stout shoulders of Mohammed who ran in to break my fall. . . .We took a few minutes to breathe, but . . . were able to regain our camels. Eventually we arrived in camp just as the others had saddled up to go forward.
Our mine-laying had taken four hours longer than we had planned and the delay put us in the dilemma either of getting no rest, or of letting the main body march without us. Finally by Shakir’s will we let them go, and fell down under our trees for an hour’s sleep, without which I felt I should collapse utterly. The time was just before daybreak, an hour when the uneasiness of the air affected trees and animals, and made even men-sleepers turn over sighingly. Mohammed, who wanted to see the fight, awoke. To get me up he came over and cried the morning prayer-call in my ear, the raucous voice sounding battle, murder, and sudden death across my dreams. I sat up and rubbed the sand out of red-rimmed aching eyes, as we disputed vehemently of prayer and sleep. He pleaded that there was not a battle every day, and showed the cuts and bruises sustained during the night in helping me. By my blackness and blueness I could feel for him, and we rode off to catch the army. . . .
A band of trodden untidiness in a sweep of gleaming water-rounded sand showed us the way, and we arrived just as the guns opened fire. They did excellently, and crashed in all the top of one building, damaged the second, hit the pump-room, and holed the water-tank. One lucky shell caught the front waggon of the train in the siding, and it took fire furiously. This alarmed the locomotive, which uncoupled and went off southward. We watched her hungrily as she approached our mine, and when she was on it there came a soft cloud of dust and a report and she stood still. The damage was to the front part . . . [and] while the drivers got out, and jacked up the front wheels and tinkered at them, we waited and waited in vain for the machine-gun to open fire. Later we learned that the gunners, afraid of their loneliness, had packed up and marched to join us when we began shooting. Half an hour after, the repaired engine went away towards Jebel Antar, going at a foot pace and clanking loudly; but going none the less.
Our Arabs worked in towards the station, under cover of the bombardment. . . . Smoke clouds from the fire trucks screened the Arab advance which wiped out one enemy outpost, and captured another. The Turks withdrew their surviving detachments to the main position, and waited rigorously in their trenches for the assault. . . . With our advantages . . . the place would have been a gift to us, if only we had had some of Feisal’s men to charge home.
Meanwhile the wood, tents and trucks in the station were burning, and the smoke was too thick for us to shoot, so we broke off the action. We had taken thirty prisoners, a mare, two camels and some more sheep, and had killed and wounded seventy of the garrison, at a cost to ourselves of one man slightly hurt. Traffic was held up for three days. . . . So we did not wholly fail.
We left two parties in the neighbourhood to damage the line . . . while we rode to [Feisal’s brother] Abdullah’s camp on April the first. Shakir, splendid in habit, held a grand parade on entry, and had thousands of joy-shots fired in honour of his partial victory.20
Auda Abu Tayi
[British weapons instructors had arrived; all was going well] and I was about to take my leave [of Feisal at Wejh] when Suleiman, the guest-master, hurried in and whispered to Feisal, who turned to me with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said, “Auda is here”. I shouted, “Auda abu Tayi”, and at that moment the tentflap was drawn back, before a deep voice which boomed salutations to Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful. There entered a tall, strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. This was Auda, and after him followed Mohammed, his son, a child in looks, and only eleven years old in truth.
Feisal had sprung to his feet. Auda caught his hand and kissed it, and they. . . looked at each other—a splendidly unlike pair, typical of much that was best in Arabia, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each filling his part to perfection, and immediately understanding and liking the other. They sat down. Feisal introduced us one by one, and Auda with a measured word seemed to register each person.
We had heard much of Auda, and were banking to open Akaba with his help; and after a moment I knew, from the force and directness of the man, that we would attain our end. He had come down to us like a knight-errant, chafing at our delay in Wejh, anxious only to be acquiring merit for Arab freedom in his own lands. If his performance was one-half his desire, we should be prosperous and fortunate. The weight was off all minds before we went to supper.21
The Great Prize: Taking Akaba
Fortunately the poor handling of the enemy gave us an unearned advantage. They slept on, in the valley, while we crowned the hills in wide circle about them unobserved. We began to snipe them steadily in their positions under the slopes and rock-faces by the water, hoping to provoke them out and up the hill in a charge against us. Meanwhile, [Sheikh] Zaal rode away with our horsemen and cut the Mann telegraph and telephone in the plain.
This went on all day. It was terribly hot—hotter than before I had felt it in Arabia—and the anxiety and constant moving made it hard for us. Some even of the tough tribesmen broke down under the cruelty of the sun, and crawled or had to be thrown under rocks to recover in their shade. We ran up and down to supply our lack of numbers by mobility, ever looking over the long ranges of hill for a new spot from which to counter this or that Turkish effort. The hillsides were steep, and exhausted our breath, and the grasses twined like little hands about our ankles as we ran, and plucked us back. The sharp reefs of limestone which cropped out over the ridges tore our feet, and long before evening the more energetic men were leaving a rusty print upon the ground with every stride.
Our rifles grew so hot with sun and shooting that they seared our hands; and we had to be grudging of our rounds, considering every shot, and spending great pains to make it sure. The rocks on which we flung ourselves for aim were burning, so that they scorched our breasts and arms, from which later the skin drew off in ragged sheets. The present smart [sic] made us thirst. Yet even water was rare with us; we could not afford men to fetch enough from Batra, and if all could not drink, it was better that none should.
We consoled ourselves with knowledge that the enemy’s closed valley would be hotter than our open hills: also that they were Turks . . . little apt for warm weather. So we clung to them, and did not let them move or mass or sortie out against us cheaply. They could do nothing valid in return. We were no targets for their rifles, since we moved with speed, eccentrically. Also, we were able to laugh at the little mountain guns which they fired up at us. The shells passed over our heads to burst behind us in the air. . . .
Just after noon I had a heat-stroke, or so pretended, for I was dead weary of it all, and cared no longer how it went. So I crept into a hollow where there was a trickle of thick water in a muddy cup of the hills, to suck some moisture off its dirt through the filter of my sleeve. Nasir [Sherif of Medina] joined me, panting like a winded animal, with his cracked and bleeding lips shrunk apart in his distress: and old Auda appeared, striding powerfully, his eyes bloodshot and staring, his knotty face working with excitement.
Lawrence Leads by Wounding Pride and Enraging Auda
[Auda] grinned with malice when he saw us lying there, spread out to find coolness under the bank, and croaked at me harshly, “Well, how is it with the Howeitat? All talk and no work?” “By God, indeed,” spat I back again, for I was angry with every one and with myself, “they shoot a lot and hit a little.” Auda almost pale with rage, and trembling, tore his headcloth off and threw it on the ground beside me. Then he ran back up the hill like a madman, shouting to the men in his dreadful strained and rustling voice.
They came together to him, and after a moment scattered away down hill. I feared things were going wrong, and struggled to where he stood alone on the hill-top, glaring at the enemy: but all he would say to me was, “Get your camel if you want to see the old man’s work.” Nasir called for his camel and we mounted.
The Arabs passed before us into a little sunken place, which rose to a low crest; and we knew that the hill beyond went down in a facile slope to the main valley of Aba el Lissan, somewhat below the spring. All our four hundred camel men were here tightly collected, just out of sight of the enemy. We rode to their head, and asked the Shimt what it was and where the horsemen had gone.
He pointed over the ridge to the next valley above us, and said, “With Auda there”: and as he spoke yells and shots poured up in a sudden torrent from beyond the crest. We kicked our camels furiously to the edge, to see our fifty horsemen coming down the last slope into the main valley like a run-away, at full gallop, shooting from the saddle. As we watched, two or three went down, but the rest thundered forward at marvellous speed, and the Turkish infantry, huddled together under the cliff ready to cut their desperate way out towards Maan in the first dusk, began to sway in and out, and finally broke before the rush, adding their flight to Auda’s charge.
Nasir screamed at me, “Come on,” with his bloody mouth; and we plunged our camels madly over the hill, and down towards the head of the fleeing enemy. The slope was not too steep for a camel-gallop, but steep enough to make their pace terrific, and their course uncontrollable: yet the Arabs were able to extend to right and left and to shoot into the Turkish brown [sic]. The Turks had been too bound up in the terror of Auda’s furious charge against their rearto notice us as we came over the eastward slope: so we also took them by surprise and in the flank; and a charge of ridden camels going nearly thirty miles an hour was irresistible.
The Howeitat were very fierce, for the slaughter of their women [by Turks] on the day before had been a new and horrible side of warfare suddenly revealed to them. So there were only a hundred and sixty prisoners, many of them wounded; and three hundred dead and dying were scattered over the open valleys.
A few of the enemy got away, the gunners on their teams, and some mounted men and officers with their Jazi guides. Mohammed el Dheilan chased them for three miles into Mreigha, hurling insults as he rode, that they might know him and keep out of his way.
Auda the Warrior Redeemed
Auda came swinging up on foot, his eyes glazed over with the rapture of battle, and the words bubbling with incoherent speed from his mouth. “Work, work, where are words, work, bullets, Abu Tayi” . . . and he held up his shattered field-glasses, his pierced pistol-holster, and his leather sword-scabbard cut to ribbons. He had been the target of a volley which had killed his mare under him, but the six bullets through his clothes had left him scathless.
He told me later, in strict confidence, that thirteen years before he had bought an amulet Koran for one hundred and twenty pounds and had not since been wounded. . . . The book was a Glasgow reproduction, costing eighteen pence, but Auda’s deadliness did not let people laugh at his superstition.
He was wildly pleased with the fight, most of all because he confounded me and shown what his tribe could do. Mohammed’s wroth with us for a pair of fools, calling me worse than Auda, since I had insulted him by words like flung stones to provoke folly which had nearly killed us all: though it had killed only two of us, one Rueili and one Sherari.
It was, of course, a pity to lose any one of our men, but time [was of] importance to us, and so imperative was the need of dominating Maan, to shock the little Turkish garrisons between us and the sea into surrender, that I would willingly have lost much more than the two. On occasions like this Death justified himself and was cheap.
Auda Goads the “Army” Forward
Meanwhile our Arabs had plundered the Turks, their baggage train, and their camp; and soon after moonrise, Auda came and said that we must move. It angered Nasir and myself. To-night there was a dewy west wind blowing, and at Aba el Lissan’s four thousand feet, after the heat and burning passion of the day, its damp chill struck very sharply on our wounds and bruises. The spring itselfwas a thread of silvery water in a runnel of pebbles across delightful turf, green and soft, on which we lay, wrapped in our cloaks, wondering if something to eat were worth preparing: for we were subject at the moment to the physical shame of success, a reaction of victory, when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done.
Auda insisted. Partly it was superstition—he feared the newly-dead around us; partly lest the Turks return in force; partly lest other clans of the Howeitat take us, lying there broken and asleep. Some were his blood enemies: others might say they came to help our battle, and in the darkness thought we were Turks and fired blindly. So we roused ourselves, and jogged the sorry prisoners into line.
Most had to walk. Some twenty camels were dead or dying from wounds which they had got in the charge, and others were over weak to take a double burden. The rest were loaded with an Arab and a Turk; but some of the Turkish wounded were too hurt to hold themselves on pillion. In the end we had to lead about twenty on the thick grass beside the rivulet, where at least they would not die of thirst, though there was little hope of life or rescue for them.
Nasir set himself to beg blankets for these abandoned men, who were half-naked; and while the Arabs packed, I went down the valley where the fight had been, to see if the dead had any clothing they could spare. But the Beduin had been beforehand with me, and had stripped them to the skin. Such was their point of honour.
Bedouin Spoils of Victory
To an Arab an essential part of the triumph of victory was to wear the clothes of an enemy: and next day we saw our force transformed (as to the upper half) into a Turkish force, each man in a soldier’s tunic: for this was a battalion straight from home . . . and dressed in new uniforms.
In the end our little army was ready, and wound slowly to the height and beyond into a hollow sheltered from the wind and there, while the tired men slept, we dictated letters to the Sheikhs of the coastal Howeitat, telling them of the victory, that they might invest their nearest Turks, and hold them till we came. We had been kind to one of the captured officers, a policeman despised by his regular colleagues, and him we persuaded to be our Turkish scribe to the commandants of Guweira, Kethei and Hadra, the three posts between us and Akaba, telling them that if our blood was not hot we took prisoners, and that prompt surrender would ensure their good treatment and safe delivery to Egypt.
Approach March
This lasted till dawn, and then Auda marshalled us for the road, and led us up the last mile of soft heath-clad valley between the rounded hills. It was intimateand home-like till the last green bank; when suddenly we realized it was the last, and beyond lay nothing but clear air. The lovely change this time checked me with amazement; and afterwards, however often we came there was always a catch of eagerness in the mind, a pricking forward of the camel and straightening up to see again over the crest into openness.
Shtar hill-side swooped away below us for hundreds and hundreds of feet. . . .
After days of travel on the plateau in prison valleys, to meet this brink of freedom was a rewarding vision, like a window in the wall of life. We walked down the whole zigzag pass of Shtar, to feel its excellence, for on our camels we rocked too much with sleep to dare see anything. At the bottom the animals found a matted thorn which gave their jaws pleasure; we in front made a halt, rolled on to sand soft as a couch, and incontinently slept.
Auda came. We pleaded that it was for mercy upon our broken prisoners. He replied that they alone would die of exhaustion if we rode, but if we dallied, both parties might die: for truly there was now little water and no food. However, we could not help it, and stopped that night short of Guweira, after only fifteen miles. At Guweira lay Sheikh ibn Jad, balancing his policy to come down with the stronger: and to-day we were the stronger, and the old fox was ours. He met us with honeyed speeches. The hundred and twenty Turks of the garrison were his prisoners: we agreed with him to carry them at his leisure and their ease to Akaba.
Final Palavers and Attacks
To-day was the fourth of July. Time pressed us, for we were hungry, and Akaba was still far ahead behind two defences. The nearer post, Kethira, stubbornly refused parley. . . . Their cliff commanded the valley—a strong place which it might be costly to take. We assigned the honour, in irony, to ibn Jad and his unwearied men, advising him to try it after dark. He shrank, made difficulties, pleaded the full moon: but we cut hardly into this excuse, promising that tonight for awhile there should be no moon. By my diary there was an eclipse. Duly it came, and the Arabs forced the post without loss, while the superstitious soldiers were firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue their threatened satellite. Reassured we set out across the strand-like plain. Niazi Bey, the Turkish battalion commander, was Nasir’s guest, to spare him the humiliation of Beduin contempt.
The narrows of Wadi Itm increased in intricate ruggedness as we penetrated deeper. Below Kethira we found Turkish post after Turkish post, empty. Their men had been drawn in to Khadra, the entrenched position (at the mouth of Itm), which covered Akaba so well against a landing from the sea. Unfortunately for them the enemy had never imagined attack from the interior, and of all their great works not one trench or post faced inland. Our advance from so new a direction threw them into panic.
In the afternoon we were in contact with this main position, and heard from the local Arabs that the subsidiary posts about Akaba had been called in or reduced, so that only a last three hundred men barred us from the sea. We dismounted for a council, to hear that the enemy were resisting firmly, in bombproof trench with a new artesian well. Only it was rumoured that they had little food.
No more had we. It was a deadlock. Our council swayed this way and that. Arguments bickered between the prudent and bold. Tempers were short and bodies restless in the incandescent gorge whose granite peaks radiated the sun. . . .
Our numbers had swollen double. So thickly did the men crowd in the narrow space, and press about us, that we broke up our council twice or thrice, partly because it was not good they should overhear us wrangling, partly because in the sweltering confinement our unwashed smells offended us. . . .
We sent the Turks summonses, first by white flag, and then by Turkish prisoners, but they shot at both. This inflamed our Beduin, and while we were yet deliberating a sudden wave of them burst up on to the rocks and sent a hail of bullets spattering against the enemy. Nasir ran out barefoot, to stop them, but after ten steps on the burning ground screeched for sandals; while I crouched in my atom of shadow, too wearied of these men (whose minds all wore my livery) to care who regulated their febrile impulses.
We had a third try to communicate with the Turks, by means of a little conscript, who said that he understood how to do it. We walked down close to the trenches with him, and sent in for an officer to speak with us. After some hesitation this was achieved, and we explained the situation on the road behind us; our growing forces; and our short control over their tempers. The upshot was that they promised to surrender at daylight. So we had another sleep (an event rare enough to chronicle) in spite of our thirst.
Next day at dawn fighting broke out on all sides, for hundreds more hill-men, again doubling our number, had come in the night; and, not knowing the arrangement, began shooting at the Turks, who defended themselves. Nasir went out, with ibn Dgheithir and his Ageyl marching in fours, down the open bed of the valley. Our men ceased fire. The Turks then stopped, for their rank and file had no more fight in them and no more food, and thought we were well supplied. So the surrender went off quietly after all.
Akaba Falls—The Aftermath
As the Arabs rushed in to plunder I noticed an engineer in grey uniform, with red beard and puzzled blue eyes; and spoke to him in German. He was the well-borer, and knew no Turkish. Recent doings had amazed him, and he begged me to explain what we meant. I said that we were a rebellion of the Arabs against the Turks. This, it took him time to appreciate. He wanted to know who was our leader. I said the Sherif of Mecca. He supposed he would be sent to Mecca. I said rather to Egypt. He inquired the price of sugar, and when I replied, “cheap and plentiful,” he was glad. The loss of his belongings he tookphilosophically, but was sorry for the well, which a little work would have finished as his monument. He showed me where it was, with the pump only half-built. By pulling on the sludge bucket we drew enough delicious clear water to quench our thirsts. Then we raced through a driving sandstorm down to Akaba, four miles further, and splashed into the sea on July the sixth [1917], just two months after our setting out from Wejh.
We sat down to watch our men streaming past as lines of flushed vacant faces without message for us. For months Akaba had been the horizon of our minds, the goal: we had had no thought, we had refused thought, of anything beside.
Now, in achievement, we were a little despising the entities which had spent their extremest effort on an object whose attainment changed nothing radical either in mind or body.
Decision to Travel to Cairo
Hunger called us out of our trance. We had now seven hundred prisoners in addition to our own five hundred men and two thousand expectant allies. We had not any money [or anyplace to spend money]; and the last meal had been two days ago. In our riding camels we possessed meat enough for six weeks, but it was poor diet . . . indulgence in which would bring future immobility upon us.
Supper taught us the urgent need to send news over the one hundred and fifty desert miles to the British at Suez for a relief-ship. I decided to go across myself with a party of eight, mostly Howeitat, on the best camels in the force.22
Interview with General Allenby
[Lawrence rode 49 hours in the desert, then made his way across to Suez and Cairo, where he first met General Edmund Allenby, later Field Marshal Viscount Allenby.]
Before I was clothed the Commander-in-Chief sent for me, curiously. In my report, thinking of Saladin and Abu Obeida, I had stressed the strategic importance of the eastern tribes of Syria, and their proper use as a threat to the communications of Jerusalem. This jumped [sic] with his ambitions, and he wanted to weigh me.
It was a comic interview, for Allenby was physically large and confident . . .[and] the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. He sat in his chair looking at me—not straight, as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was newly from France, where for years he had been a tooth of the great machine grinding the enemy. He was full of Western [front] ideas . . . but, as a cavalryman, was already half persuaded to throw up the new school, in this different world of Asia, and [adopt a strategy] of manoeuvre and movement. . . .
Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it. He did not ask many questions, nor talk much, but studied the map and listened to my unfolding of Eastern Syria and its inhabitants. At the end he put up his chin and said quite directly, “Well, I will do for you what I can”, and that ended it. I was not sure how far I had caught him; but we learned gradually that he meant exactly what he said; and that what General Allenby could do was enough for his very greediest servant.23
Conclusions
Lawrence was a self-taught master of guerrilla warfare, though he knew the military exemplars and theorists from Xenophon through Napoleon to Clausewitz and Von der Goltz. His guerrilla methods are described in his “principles,” given above: Victory for his “army” required an unassailable base (he had most of northern Arabia, since the Turks could only control strong points); a friendly population, which would help his fighters or not hinder them (the Bedouin); a hated enemy (the Turks); sufficient men (the Sheikhs with British money assured that); a source of weapons (in this case the British); men who could keep secrets, and knew their weapons well enough to strike with confidence, speed, and violence.
Beyond question, his Bedouins contributed to the British victory in the Middle East—for all their studied leisureliness, disorganization, odd apprehensions, and greed for loot. As noted above, Lawrence felt they should have been awarded an Arab state. The British government, of course, had to consider the interests of the French, Arab chieftains other than Hussein, and the Jews of Palestine and the Zionist organization. Arabia proper went to him who then controlled Mecca, Ibn Saud (Saudi Arabia). France took Syria (including Leb-anon) under mandate. The British assumed mandates over Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. In time, the first two became the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq, under sons of Hussein. The British ruled Palestine and attempted, without unduly disturbing the Arab majority, to create a Jewish “homeland” there, as promised to the Zionist leaders.24
Winston Churchill, who admired Lawrence, employed him at the Colonial Office, but Lawrence was against British policy toward the Arabs and French, although he approved of Zionist (Jewish) aspirations. In 1917,he had written the diplomat Mark Sykes (negotiating with the French) to tell him what the Jews wanted, and that he would persuade Feisal not to oppose them. The Sherif had already assured the Arab-speaking Palestinian Jews that he would not move east of the Jordan River.25
Lawrence felt that his personal honor was soiled because he had kept the Arabs fighting on promise of an Arab state (although at all stages he had known there was doubt about it). He renounced all honors and medals, and spent the remainder of his life, under assumed names, as an enlisted man in the Royal Air Force or Army.26 On 13 May 1935,riding his motorcycle at high speed (a rare enjoyment), he suddenly came on two boys in a dip on a narrow road. He swerved to avoid them, crashed, suffered a concussion, and died six days later.