Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Indeed, Auda’s bitterest enemy was Hammayd ibn jazi, a descendant of ‘Ar’ar, with whom he had disputed a point of honour. A scion of ibn Jazi had taken a camel from a certain Sharari tribesman who happened to be under the protection of Auda’s family. Auda and some kinsmen had arrived at ibn Jazi’s tent demanding restitution, whereupon they had been fired on: Auda had shot dead the son of one of his opponents and seized the camel. From that moment, the ibn Jazi and the Abu Tayyi had been at each other’s throats, and the feud had resulted in the murder of Annad, Auda’s son, who had been cut down by five riders of the Motalga ibn Jazi at Bair in the Ard as-Suwwan. Auda’s only remaining son, Mohammad, from whom he was rarely parted, was a little boy of eleven. In 1914 the various branches of the Howaytat had made an uneasy truce, and moved east of the railway to the desolate Jefer plain near the Wadi Sirhan, from where they had plundered Turkish caravans and raided the Bani Sakhr – a powerful Bedu tribe to the north. They were also at war with the Shararat – the despised clan of camel-herders – to the south. Finally, around the beginning of April 1917, Auda had turned up in the camp of Feisal near Wejh, with eleven-year-old Mohammad as his only protector, and declared in favour of the Hashemites. This was a great victory for Feisal, for to have such a man as Auda with him not only added to his prestige, but gave him the key to the crucial region of Ma’an and the hinterland of Aqaba – now the only major Red Sea port still held by the Turks. Moreover, the Howaytat were accustomed to menacing the railway – in 1909 they had threatened to destroy all the bridges in the Ma an district unless the Governor paid protection-money. Although the blackmail had been paid, Howaytat raiders continued sporadically to attack and loot stations. When Lawrence returned to Wejh in mid-April 1917, bursting with his new guerrilla doctrine, and convinced that Medina should hereafter be ignored, he found in Auda the very ally he required.

  The idea of capturing Aqaba was not Lawrence’s: it had been discussed from the very beginning of the war. In August 1916, before Lawrence had even arrived in Arabia, General Murray had broached the idea with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Robertson, in London: ‘As for Aqaba,’ Robertson cabled him, ‘the thing to do is to work out your scheme and let us know what it means – and then we will decide whether it should be undertaken or not.’2 However, all the schemes mooted for the occupation of the port envisaged an assault from the sea – an approach which Lawrence had realized as ineffective, probably as early as 1914: he had certainly argued against it in a report he wrote in 1915. On 1 March 1917, Charles Vickery sent a telegram to Clayton to sound out his attitude to the question of taking Aqaba with troops from Feisal’s army. ‘Sharif Feisal is very anxious to occupy the town,’ Vickery wrote, ‘as he thinks …that its capture and occupation by him would have an excellent political effect on the Syrians.’3 However, Feisal clearly had in mind a seaborne landing with the support of British troops and naval artillery. Clayton’s reply, which came a week later, stressed political rather than military objections: ‘… it is questionable,’ he wrote, ‘whether, in the present circumstances, the presence of an Arab force at Aqaba would be desirable, as it would unsettle tribes which are better left quiet until the time is more ripe.’4 In May, though, he revealed the true nature of his reservations in a report to McMahon: ‘the occupation of [Aqaba] by Arabic troops might well result in the Arabs claiming that place thereafter and it is by no means improbable that after the war [Aqaba] may be of considerable importance to the future defence scheme of Egypt. It is thus essential that [Aqaba] should remain in British hands after the war.’5 On his return to Wejh, Lawrence found Feisal depressed and disheartened. The Sharif had originally been intent on Medina, but now planned to press on into Syria as soon as possible, for in late March he had heard the disturbing rumour that 60,000 French troops had already landed or were about to land in Syria. Since he believed that the arid Hejaz could not exist as an independent country without the support of fertile Syria, the prospect of the country falling into French hands at this eleventh hour was tragic. Lawrence agreed. He went to see the British OC Wejh, Pierce Joyce, in his tent by the beach, to persuade him to drop the strike against al-‘Ula which he was planning, with the object of cutting off the Medina garrison. Lawrence now saw this plan – originally devised by Newcombe – as folly: to hold a middle point on the railway would mean exposing it to a pincer attack from the Medina force and the strong garrison in Tebuk. He explained the epiphany he had had in Wadi ‘Ais – his sudden insight that it was to the advantage of the Arabs if the Turks stayed in Medina. He expressed again his fears that if there were large casualty lists, the Bedu would lose heart. To keep the railway just crawling along and to induce the Turks into passive resistance, he felt, would be the most rewarding strategy. Joyce refused to listen. Plans for the assault at al-‘Ula were already in progress: Garland and Newcombe were both poised to strike, and if Medina were captured Feisal could then move north very quickly.

  Seeing that he would make no convert of Joyce, Lawrence turned to Auda. A seaborne landing at Aqaba was out of the question, and he had long been meditating on an alternative course. Aqaba’s defences and the fortifications at the mouth of the Wadi Ithm faced the sea – that was the direction from which the enemy was expected. A deep infiltration raid by a small force of picked men, who would appear suddenly out of the desert in the Turkish rear, would certainly take them by surprise. It was an original and audacious plan – the model for all the deep penetration raids later undertaken by Special Forces units throughout the century. It was also incredibly hazardous. To reach Aqaba by way of Wadi Ithm required a circuitous route of 600 miles across some of the worst desert in Arabia, including a stretch called al-Houl – literally ‘The Terror’ – where not even a fly or a blade of grass could survive. There would be no sophisticated equipment – no artillery, no machine-guns, no wireless – and no supply caravan or trained regulars.6 Such a raid required hardened desert men who could live off the land. Ironically, the Bedu were ruled out because they would not fight beyond their tribal districts. This left only Feisal’s ‘Agayl, the tough professional mercenaries recruited from the oases of the Najd. Only a small party – no more than squadron strength – would be viable in these waterless wastes if the supply problem were to be solved, but with such limited firepower the long-range patrol would have to avoid contact with the enemy, for once behind hostile lines they would be at the mercy of any larger force and without a clear escape route. Within striking distance of their target, they would be obliged to recruit local volunteers, for such a small patrol could not, on its own, capture Aqaba. Thus the mission would entail some persuasive preaching as well as great hardship and danger. They decided to adopt a circuitous turning movement through the Wadi Sirhan, a major corridor of communication between Arabia and Syria, where the Howaytat grazed their camels. Even if the patrol were spotted by Turkish spies in Sirhan, its objective could not be accurately guessed – the direction of march would suggest an attack on Ma’an, Dara a or even Damascus rather than Aqaba, and Lawrence would launch lightning raids on the railway as far north as the Yarmuk valley in order to confirm this suspicion. At the very last moment, his force would turn sharply to the south-west and dash across empty desert to the gates of Wadi Ithm. This, Lawrence guessed, was where the key battle would be fought.

  Without Auda Abu Tayyi, though, the plan would be doomed. Auda’s Howaytat controlled the Aqaba region, and not only their good will, but also volunteers from the tribe would be needed if the assault were to come off. Fortunately, Lawrence found Auda receptive, and together they formulated the details of the raid. With his British colleagues, he remained vague as to the actual nature of the operation, for he had read Clayton’s reply to Vickery and was perfectly aware that the British intended to keep Aqaba in their sphere of influence. However, he reasoned, the capture of Aqaba by the Arabs, once a fait accompli, would satisfy everyone. For the British it would place the last Ottoman Red Sea port in Allied hands, thus securing Murray’s right
flank as he pushed into Palestine; for the Arabs, it would provide a supply-base for operations in Syria, and for Lawrence it would provide the master-stroke which vindicated the Arabs and his work amongst them in the eyes of his masters. He could not risk a direct order to desist, and did not specify his plans in any report to GHQ. Wilson clearly believed that Ma an was the objective, for on 1 May he telegraphed Cairo: ‘in about 10 days time …Sheikh Auda Abu [Tayyi] of the eastern [Howaytat] will proceed to his country east of [Ma an], probably accompanied by Captain Lawrence, he is at once to commence demolition work against the railway… his first objective will be the capture of [Ma an] and consequent clearing of the posts from there to [Aqaba].’7

  Lawrence was now on his own: his operation had not been authorized, and its true aim was not even known. The risk was huge, but Lawrence satisfied his conscience by reflecting that he was not subtracting anything from the railway operation at al-‘Ula apart from himself and a small group of men. He spent his last few days in the Wejh area travelling in aircraft and armoured cars, locating a plane which had crashed in the desert. On 8 May, he and Sharif Nasir took charge of the £25,000 in gold they would need to raise the Bedu levies on the other side. Nasir, whom Lawrence thought the most able guerrilla fighter of all the Hashemites, would command the mission, and he would be accompanied by two Syrians, Nasib al-Bakri and Zaki Drubi, who would help recruit the Syrian peasants to the Hashemite cause. The Howaytat included Auda, his cousin the highly capable strategist Mohammad adh-Dhaylan, and his nephew the notorious raider Za’al Abu Tayyi. With them were only seventeen ‘Agayl fighters under their chief, ibn Dgaythir. Lawrence presented revolvers to Nasir, Auda and Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and the following day each of them drew half a sack of flour, filled their waterskins, crammed spare cartridges into their belts, and roused their camels, groaning and spitting, to begin one of the most daring raids ever attempted in the annals of war.

  It was now high summer and the days suffocatingly hot. On the second morning they were so dazzled by the blazing reflection of the sun on the rocks that they halted at eleven o’clock, despite Auda’s wish to press on, and lay at the foot of some acacia bushes, slinging blankets over the thorns to provide a few square feet of shade. By the third day, Lawrence’s fever, boils and swellings had returned. As at almost every crucial juncture in his life, the great enterprise was to be marred by physical weakness. The going soon became execrable, and in the narrow valleys Lawrence and his men were forced to dismount and pull their camels by the headropes, then to work in tandem, one man dragging, the other driving from behind. The sun rained down hammer-blows like bitter steel, and Lawrence staggered along, almost fainting from the heat, the fever and the effort. Finally, the way followed a ledge by overhanging rocks, so perilous that two camels, already weakened by mange, slipped and fell, smashing their legs in the pass. The Howaytat slithered down to them and slaughtered them with their razor-sharp daggers, butchering the meat expertly and doling it out among the men. To avoid any further casualties, though, they were obliged to dump the camels’ loads and repack them. After a few days of slow progress they reached the pool at Abu Ragha, and by now Lawrence’s terrible fear of the risks ahead, dormant while safely in Wejh, came out to haunt him: ‘The weight is bearing down on me now,’ he wrote in his pocket diary on 13 May, ‘ …pain and agony today.’8 He became frustrated by the slow ponderousness of the march: accustomed to running about on lightly laden camels, this slow desert trekking was irksome to him. The camels were feeble with mange, and Auda knew that they must be spared if they were to reach journey’s end. To the Bedu, the camels must come first, for to lose them meant certain death. Lawrence, faced with the most fearsome experience of his life, though, was pushed instinctively to flee forward to the fear, and the constant delays sickened him: ‘[if we could] only get on …’ he wrote on 14 May.9

  His mood was temporarily alleviated, however, when, camping at the water pool, he met two young ‘Agayl boys named ‘Ali and Othman, who were due to be punished for having set fire to the camp. Although Lawrence later wrote in Seven Pillars that the pair had implored him to take them with him, evoking the reply that he, Lawrence, was a simple man who had no desire for servants, he wrote in his field diary that he had actually ‘begged them’ from Sa’ad al-Gharm – chief of Sharif Sharraf’s Agayl escort – which they met at the pool. ‘Othman soft-looking,’ he wrote, ‘‘Ali fine fellow. Both apparently plucky.’10 Lawrence insisted in Seven Pillars that he had never been ‘lofty’ and had never had cooks or body-servants, only his guards, who were fighting men. This was untrue: in the Hejaz he had travelled with a Syrian cook called Arslan; Hamad the Moor – whether or not Lawrence had executed him – was clearly a servant of some kind. When Lawrence met ‘Ali and Othman, he had already had a substantial entourage of his own: three ‘Agayl named Mukhaymar, Marjan and ‘Ali: Mohammad, a fat peasant from the Hauran in Syria, and Gasim, a bad-tempered, yellow-toothed fellow from Ma an, who had lived among the Howaytat. Lawrence noted on his equipment list for the Wejh–Aqaba trek that he had provided four revolvers for his ‘servants’. He wanted the ‘Agayl boys simply because they were attractive, or ‘clean’, as he put it, but he justified himself by maintaining that Gasim and Mohammad were useless, and declared that he must have extra men.

  ‘Ali and Othman were to become immortalized in Seven Pillars as ‘Farraj and Da ‘ud’ – the puckish figures whose mischief seems to counterpoint the grimmer side of the action in the text with remarkably opportune timing. So opportune, indeed, Lawrence’s friend Vyvyan Richards observed wryly, that ‘had all the Arab campaign been planned by some Shakespearian dramatic genius he could not have imagined a more delightful human relief for the great story than this astonishing pair’.11 Lawrence represented them as homosexual lovers with a deep devotion to one another – an example of the Eastern ‘boy and boy affection’ which, he said, the segregation of women made inevitable. He suggested that such coupling was commonplace, and on the second page of Seven Pillars launched into a lengthy description of homosexuality among the Arabs, illustrated by passages of an overtly sensual character: ‘friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace’.12 The story of ‘Farraj and Da’ud’owes much more to Lawrence’s Uranian connections than to Arab culture: even the ‘fleshiness’ of the prose is evocative of Uranian novels, such as Rolfe’s Don Tarquinio, which Richards listed as one of Lawrence’s favourite books while an undergraduate. The homoerotic theme in Seven Pillars, while purporting to be ethnographical, is actually an expression of Lawrence’s own suppressed desires: it is possible that the idea of ‘friends quivering together’ is what he imagined was happening, but it is unlikely to have been the truth. Homosexuality, accepted only tacitly among Arab townsmen and villagers, was taboo among the Bedu, for whom merest suggestion of it would be likely to bring out daggers. The explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who travelled among them for five years in the 1940s, living closely with his companions day after day, far from their womenfolk, recorded that he had never encountered among them a single instance of homosexuality. No doubt it existed, but it was so much frowned upon as to be carefully hidden – certainly it was never flaunted in public as Lawrence claims was the case with ‘Farraj and Da’ud’.

  ‘Ali and Othman were only two of a new contingent of ‘Agayl Lawrence’s column borrowed from Sharif Sharraf at Abu Ragha, bringing their numbers up to thirty-five. On 16 May, the day Lawrence acquired his new servants, he reported himself ‘still waiting and still savage’.13 The following day, though, much to his relief, the enlarged patrol finally mounted their camels and drew off across volcanic harra – a maze of basalt clinkers so thick and angular that the camels were obliged to travel in single file. Lawrence’s internal desolation was now matched by the surreal strangeness of the landscape: it was as if they had passed into another dimension. Nothing here was reassuring or ordinary – everything seemed other-worldly, odd, hostile, inimical to life. At last they crossed a fifty-foo
t ridge of vast, twisted columns, and came into the sandy bed of the Wadi Aish, where there were scattered thorn-bushes and waterholes. They couched their camels, unloaded and piled up their baggage, then sent the beasts out into the scrub to fill their bellies on the green stuff. No sooner were they out than someone screamed ‘Raiders!’ and Lawrence glanced up to see riders racing towards them, hanging together in the heat-haze like a swarm of flies. There was the chilling crack of rifles and the sound of bullets buzzing through the air, and whanging off the stones around him. Some of the ‘Agayl fell flat and fired back at once, while others rushed hazardously towards the enemy, whooping out challenges. The raiders had not been expecting so large a party or so aggressive a defence. Almost at once they reined in their camels, and pulled away. Auda identified them from the cut of their clothes as a party of Shammar, whose Emir, ibn Rashid, had taken the side of the Turks.

  On 19 May, ten days after setting out from Wejh, they filled their water-skins at the pools at Dira’a, and in the evening crossed the railway at ad-Dizad. There was a Turkish fort nearby which seemed to have been abandoned, and the trained dynamiters among the ‘Agayl quickly got to work on the rails, setting up a relay of gun-cotton and gelatine charges which they detonated in sequence, filling the valley with deafening explosions and billows of smoke. Auda, who had never seen explosives before, burst into delighted laughter and made up a verse about it spontaneously. The ‘Agayl lunged for their camels, and while they were mounting up, Lawrence cut three telegraph wires and dragged the poles down by attaching them to half a dozen mounts. They trotted on for five miles until the going became too difficult, then made camp on a ridge. Lawrence lay in the darkness listening to the shouts of Turkish soldiers in the stations and outposts down the line, and the occasional salvo of shots they fired at imaginary raiders in the shadows. He dared not light a fire or send up a signal-flare to contact the baggage-party, which had become separated from his riders in the darkness. Later, two scouts returned and led Lawrence and his men on to where the main body were encamped, safe behind a sand-dune. They managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, but it was still dark when they mounted again, and Auda guided them across hills and dunes until, at dawn, they found themselves on the edge of a vast, shimmering plain which stretched endlessly to the east, falling steadily until it merged with the haze of the eastern sky. This was al-Houl, ‘The Terror’ – a vast anvil of sand and stone without a tree, a bush or a single blade of grass.