Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  There was a further stretch that night, and at dawn they reached Bir ibn Hassani, the village of Ahmad al-Mansur, one of the great sheikhs of the Harb. As they passed, a camel-rider came loping out of the village and tagged along with them, asking a string of questions, to which Obeyd and his son made short, unwilling, answers. The Arab, whose name was Khallaf, insisted on them eating with him, and forced them to couch their camels. He brought an iron pot out of his saddle-bag, full of baked bread, crumbled and sprinkled with sugar and butter, and offered it to them. Once they had eaten, he told Lawrence that Feisal had been pushed back the previous day from Bir Abbas to Hamra, a little way ahead of them, and he listed the names and injuries of each tribesman who had been hurt. He tried to engage Lawrence in conversation, inquiring if he knew any of the English in Egypt. Lawrence replied in the Aleppo dialect, and Khallaf began asking him about Syrians he knew, then shifted to politics and asked what he thought Feisal’s plans were. Obeyd cut in abruptly and changed the subject, and shortly the man left them. They discovered subsequently that he had been a spy in Turkish pay.

  By noon they had come to Wasta, a large village of the Bani Salem, consisting of 1,000 mud houses set on earth mounds and long rocky ridges across the wadi-bed, and above the thick palm groves. Lawrence learned that many of the houses were empty. This year a flood like a tidal wave had broken through the embankment, destroyed many of the palmeries and leached away the carefully preserved topsoil. To cap it all, there had been a terrible plague of locusts which had reduced the harvest still further, driving many of the inhabitants away. They rested in Wasta until early afternoon, then rode up the wadi. Almost at once they began to pass squadrons of Bedu crouching around cooking fires or sitting, smoking in the shade of the trees, and there were caravans laden with provisions on the move. These were Feisal’s men – many of them Bani Salem – who called out greetings to Obeyd as Lawrence’s party passed. Shortly, they saw the village of Hamra before them. They crossed a small stream, and were led up a walled pathway, couching their camels in front of one of the houses. A slave with a scimitar led Lawrence inside, to a smoky room where Feisal was holding court with his military aide, an Iraqi cavalry officer named Maulud al-Mukhlis, and Sheikhs of several Bedu tribes, including the Faqir, the Billi, and the Rwalla – a tribe based in Syria. According to Lawrence, Feisal was already standing at the door when he approached, ‘waiting for him nervously’ – but this is not the Arab way. It is far more likely that when Lawrence entered, the Sharif and his company merely rose to their feet in customary fashion – this was the manner in which they greeted kings and tribesmen alike – while Lawrence shook hands with each of them in turn. He was impressed by the Sharif’s stately appearance, which, he said, reminded him of the monument to Richard the Lionheart – the hero of his youth – at Fontevraud in France. He found Feisal more regal and imposing than his brothers, and this was important: Lawrence’s first reaction to the Arabs had always been aesthetic and the propagandist in him knew that, to appeal to the British, the Arab Revolt should have a leader who at least looked like the European idea of the ‘noble Arab’. While ‘Abdallah was too round and jolly, and ‘Ali too sickly and effete, Feisal fitted the bill admirably. For all his noble appearance, though, Lawrence also thought the Sharif looked dog-tired, much older than his thirty-one years, with bloodshot eyes and hollow cheeks, his skin shrivelled with lines of pain. He smoked incessantly. Lawrence claimed in Seven Pillars that he had known instinctively that this was ‘the man who would bring the Arab revolt to full glory’,8 yet he told Liddell Hart that in reality he had simply thought that Feisal could be ‘made into a hero of revolt’ more easily than his elder brothers. According to Lawrence, they sat down together among the Bedu, and Feisal asked him: ‘How do you like our place here in the Wadi Safra?’

  Lawrence answered: ‘Well; but it is far from Damascus.’

  ‘The word had fallen like a sword in their midst,’ he wrote. ‘There was a quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where they sat, and held his breath for a silent minute …’It was Feisal, he said, who eased the tension. The Sharif lifted his eyes, smiling, at Lawrence, and said, ‘Praise be to Allah. There are Turks nearer to us than that!’9

  On the first night, Lawrence and Feisal sat in the smoky room and argued for hours, while the fire crackled and burned down, the dring-drang of the coffee mortar rang out, the coffee and tea went its rounds again and again, and Feisal stubbed out butt after butt. Lawrence found the Sharif most unreasonable. Feisal was indignant that few of the arms he had requested from Wilson had turned up, especially the artillery, and Lawrence became the target of his indignation. Lack of artillery, Feisal maintained, was the Arabs’ main problem: with two field-guns he could have captured Medina. The Bedu were terrified of the very sound of shells, and the merest hint of a barrage sent them scampering for cover like rats. This was not because they were cowards, the Sharif explained – for the Bedu would face bullets and swords steadfastly – but because they could not endure the thought of being blown to bits. Feisal talked about artillery endlessly, and Lawrence perceived that the power of the guns, and the carnage at Medina, had made an ineradicable impression on him. He saw that Feisal’s nerve had been shattered by what he had seen on that day: ‘At [the] original attack on Medina,’ he told Liddell Hart, ‘he had nerved himself to put on a bold front, and the effort had shaken him so that he never courted danger in battle again.’10 His spirit had been restored by the arrival of the Egyptian battery, but broken again when he saw that the mountain-guns were helpless against the Turkish heavy field-pieces – a shell from the Turkish guns had actually struck his own tent. Privately, Lawrence viewed his regard for artillery as ‘silly’, and felt that, guns or no guns, he had never been near capturing Medina. He also felt that the Sharif had not grasped how to use the Egyptian mountain-guns, whose main advantage was their mobility. He tried to persuade Feisal that irregular soldiers should never try to fight pitched battles, anyway, but should attack in small, self-contained mobile groups. The Turks were dogged defensive fighters, as the British defeat at Gallipoli had demonstrated to their bitter cost, and Lawrence reckoned that a single company of Turks, well-entrenched, could defeat the entire Hashemite army. But the Turks’ strength lay in concentration of numbers, while the strength of the Arabs lay in diffusion: the Bedu, in their tribal wars and forays, had always fought in this way. Feisal disagreed. For weeks now small parties of Bedu had been making lightning strikes on Turkish positions, trying to slow down their advance, and these flea-bites had failed to hold the Turks back: what the Arabs needed was artillery. The Sharif planned to make a massive assault on two of the stations of the Hejaz railway, Buwat and Hafira, just north of Medina, with a 3,000-strong force of Juhayna now stationed at Khayf Hussain. The Turks had concentrated at Bir Darwish, with no less than five battalions of infantry, two Mule Mounted companies, a camel-mounted mountain-gun battery, field-gun batteries, three aircraft and a regiment of ‘Agayl camel-corps. A diversion to the north, Feisal thought, might cause them to retire. Lawrence disliked the plan. He thought that, even with the support of ‘Abdallah to the east, and with Zayd’s force replacing him in the wadi, the Turkish force would only be drawn off by a third, and the remainder might seize the opportunity to push through the Wadi Safra to Rabegh.

  Lawrence had been quartered with the Egyptian artillerymen, whose commander, Zaki Bey, had a tent pitched for him. He retired unsatisfied, however. At first light, Feisal and Maulud al-Mukhlis came to see him again, and they argued solidly for five and a half hours. Lawrence had slept well, and, rested after his journey, he made full use of his powers of persuasion. Today, he gradually began to feel that his arguments were telling. Privately, he perceived that Feisal, though highly intelligent, was by nature cautious, and a weaker character than his brother ‘Abdallah, of whom he was notoriously jealous. The Sharif told Lawrence later that when he had advised his father to delay his declaration of the revolt, ‘Abdallah had called him a coward: he referre
d to his elder brother as mufsid: ‘the malicious one’. Feisal was susceptible to advice, whereas ‘Abdallah was not; in fact, Lawrence told Liddell Hart, ‘his defect was that he always listened to his momentary adviser, despite his own better judgement.’11 This was a very different picture, of course, from the one Lawrence presented in his official dispatches, where he emphasized the fact that Feisal was regarded as a hero by his men, and had risked his life at Medina to hearten his troops. He represented him as impatient and impetuous, hot-tempered and proud, ‘full of dreams and the capacity to realise them’.12 It was not, Lawrence said, the fact that Feisal had been unnerved by a shell through his tent which had caused him to order his troops back from Bir Abbas, but because he was ‘bored with his obvious impotence’ – a languid emotion which smacks more of the Oxford common room than the heat of battle. In reality, he thought Feisal timid and terrified of danger, and this private view was echoed by others who knew Feisal well, such as Pierce Joyce, who wrote that Feisal was ‘not a very strong character and much swayed by his surroundings’.13 Lawrence felt that Feisal’s passion for Arab freedom had forced him to face risks he hated, and since his own masochistic nature obliged him to do the same, he had great empathy with the Sharif. For the British establishment, though, the leader of the Arab Revolt must appear heroic, and Lawrence resolved to ‘make the best of him’, even if this meant portraying his character falsely in his dispatches.14 He was no novice in manipulating the facts and the media to get his way, and he was as passionate about the Arab Revolt as Feisal was: ‘I had been a mover in its beginning,’ he wrote, ‘my hopes lay in it.’15 This was not pure altruism. Lawrence had been romantically attached to the Arabs since his experiences at Carchemish. He saw Feisal and the revolt as an expression of his own rebellion – the same emotions which had led him to bring Dahoum and Hammoudi to Oxford – the competitive spirit, the ‘beast’ within, which craved others’ notice, yearned for recognition that he was ‘different’ and ‘distinct’. His attitude to the Hashemites was an extension of his attitude to Dahoum, for just as he had written that he wished to help the boy help himself, so he would tell Graves that his object with the Arabs was ‘to make them stand on their own feet’.16 Lawrence felt he knew what was best for Dahoum, and now he knew what was best for the Hashemites. The problem of the Arab Revolt was lack of leadership, he concluded, and he, Lawrence, would provide that leadership through his proxy, the malleable Feisal. For his part, Feisal was moved by Lawrence’s masterly rhetoric, and encouraged that British GHQ were taking a closer interest in his affairs. He had the impression that Lawrence was empowered to make definite promises. Above all, Lawrence’s mysteriousness and whimsicality began to win the Sharif over. At the end of their second discussion, they parted amicably for lunch.

  In the afternoon, Lawrence made it his business to stroll around the wadi, chatting with Feisal’s troops. He felt that they were in fine fettle for a defeated army. The Bedu, who had made camp in the palm-groves, mostly belonged to the Juhayna, a large tribe based in the Wadi Yanbu’ to the north, and to the Harb, their deadly enemies. Lawrence saw that Feisal had done a remarkable job in reconciling the traditional foes to fight side by side for the Hashemite cause. He was under no illusion though: it was Hashemite money – ultimately from British coffers – which had bought the Bedu’s allegiance, and if things went badly, they might easily desert to the enemy. The British conception of the tribal levies as a feudal army under the noble Sharifs was quite wrong. In feudal Europe serfs had been the chattels of their lords and bound to military service when required. Not so the Bedu. They were not bound to anyone or anything but their own tribe, and for this reason would not consider it bowqa – treachery – to change sides, as long as such a defection were agreed by the tribe or the family as a whole. The people they served – Hashemites or Turks – were aliens. The Turks already had Bedu irregulars working for them. The Billi, a powerful and xenophobic tribe to the north, were still wavering, and one of their Sheikhs, Suleyman Rifada, had already declared for the Turks. If the Billi went over to the Turks en bloc, then the Juhayna might follow. Nevertheless, Lawrence reckoned that the Turks were spending £70,000 a month on attempts to buy the tribes, and were receiving mostly empty promises in return. He believed that ultimately the Hashemites had a sentimental appeal to the Bedu which the Turks could not equal.

  This was the first time Lawrence had been close to the Bedu, and he was thrilled by their appearance, and awed by their toughness. Not all were nomads – most, indeed, were cultivators and semi-nomads, and many were armed slaves and retainers of the desert folk. Their ages ranged from twelve to sixty – small, dark, spare, bird-like, elegant men, clad only in loose dishdashas, baggy sirwals and headcloths, bristling with cartridge-belts and rifles which they would fire off at any excuse. They were superbly fit, and could run and walk in the sun for hours barefoot over rock and burning sand. They moved with a quick nervousness which gave the impression of the need to burn offboundless energy. Lawrence thought they would make superb guerrilla fighters and, when trained properly, excellent snipers. They would run and climb long distances in order to find themselves the right niche for a shot, though they were as yet more used to their slow old muskets than modern rifles with sights, and were accustomed to engage their enemies at short range. They had an intimate knowledge of the terrain and their tracking skills appeared almost supernatural. As conventional troops, though, Lawrence felt that they would be useless. For one thing, the actual personnel were constantly shifting as tribesmen returned home to visit their wives, handing their rifle to a brother or a cousin to take their place. Sometimes an entire clan would get bored and quit. They would not take orders from anyone but their own tribal Sheikhs, and would not serve beside an enemy tribe unless they were under the command of a Sharif, who was thought to be above tribal politics. As individuals they were brave and reckless, but the cult of reputation by which they lived made them poor team-players. Every man was his own master, and he would not readily obey commands, fight in line, or help strangers merely because they happened to be in the same army. The Bedu were obsessively clannish: ‘Me and my cousin against a stranger, me and my brother against my cousin,’ was their modus vivendi. Their traditional raid or ghazwa was fought to specific rules – an attack was never made by night; women, children and unarmed shepherds were inviolate; at least one camel was always left so that the victims could survive. It was also fought for property – usually camels – rather than life. Their way of fighting did not allow of high casualties, which the ancient rule of lex talionis – blood-feud – had for generations proscribed. Their way was the way of the individual warrior – this new-fangled method of warfare, of faceless armies and weapons that killed indiscriminately from afar, was beyond their ken. To the Bedu, each fellow-tribesman was a valued individual rather than just another soldier, which was why they had traditionally turned tail when faced with resolute opposition or greater numbers. As early as 1830, Burckhardt described Arab warfare as that of partisans whose main object was to surprise the enemy by sudden attack and plunder his camp:17 ‘I could adduce,’ he wrote, ‘numerous instances of caravan-travellers and peasants putting to flight three times their number of Arabs [Bedu] who attacked them: hence …they are reckoned miserable cowards and their contests with the peasants always prove them such.’18 C. S. Jarvis called them ‘very good ten minute fighters’ – and added, ‘there is nothing so savage and terrifying as Arab horsemen dealing with a demoralised enemy; and nothing quite so easy as the same Arabs with the “wind up” ‘.19 Pierce Joyce would write that the Bedu were ‘more of a bluff than a real menace’, and felt that the notion of working to a set programme was an impossibility for them.20 Alec Kirkbride would say later: ‘You could get a terrific charge out of them. If it came off, splendid, but if it didn’t, well, they ran away. That seemed the only sensible thing to do.’21 Lawrence thought that they would be good for dynamiting the railway, plundering Turkish caravans or stealing camels, and noted in his
report later that while one might sneer at their mercenary nature, despite considerable bribes from the Turks the tribes were not helping them, and the Hashemite supply caravans were still plying through the hills unmolested.