‘Chuck it’ clearly suggests that he had in mind a suicide-mission, and such a reaction would be in keeping with the ‘flight-forward’ tendency he had displayed so markedly even as a youth. Riding alone – or with a small escort – deep into Turkish-held lands was the psychological equivalent for Lawrence of diving through the ice into the frozen Cherwell: ‘a bodily wound would have been a grateful vent for my internal complexities,’ he wrote, ‘a mouth through which my troubles might have found relief.’21 Before leaving, though, he scribbled a melodramatic note to Clayton in a journal he was to leave behind, suggesting that his motive was simply frustration at being expected to raise the Bedu on a fraud: ‘Clayton,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.’22 No doubt Lawrence thought the note would make a suitably noble epitaph, but his true motivation for this flight-forward is much more likely to have its origin in his unusual psychological make-up – his ‘internal complexities’ were less the martyrdom of ‘lying for the cause’ than the perennial pressure of overwhelming fear which had blighted all his days.
There was certainly method in Lawrence’s recklessness too. He guessed that Nasib al-Bakri would soon be visiting the principal Arab leaders around Damascus, and was terrified that he would goad them into rising too soon. As Feisal’s emissary, he believed he might be able to persuade them to hang fire until the time was ripe. He left Nabk some time on 5 June with two tribesmen, and rode at furious pace across the Syrian Desert to Burga, Seba Biar and ‘Ain al-Barida, near Palmyra, averaging more than forty miles a day. The going was too hard for Lawrence’s camel, which had foundered by 9 June, when he arrived at the tents of the Kawakiba ‘Anaza, pitched beneath the crags of the Tadmor hills. Lawrence’s objective here had been to compose the blood-feud between the Bishr – another section of the ‘Anaza – and the Howaytat, but he realized now that time was against him. Instead, he turned to the Kawakiba Sheikh, Dhami, whom he found ‘a good man’, and an ardent pro-Hashemite. Lawrence thought that Dhami would make a suitable middle-man between the Howaytat and the powerful ‘Anaza, and could provide men to destroy the railway bridges on the Orontes river when the time was right. Dhami not only gave Lawrence a replacement for his exhausted camel, but also helped him enrol thirty-five Bedu for an immediate attack on the railway at Raas Baalbek. Though Lawrence had no intention of cutting the line at this northern latitude, he reasoned that a small demolition would have untold propaganda value, not only suggesting to the Turks that an attack was imminent, but also exciting the local Arabs of the Metawila sect, whom Lawrence had first encountered years before at Nabatiyyeh. The Bedu brought up their camels and left almost at once, heading due west towards the Anti-Lebanon range, whose white peaks seemed to float insubstantially above the desert as they padded on. They skirted the mountains, and drove straight in to the railway, coming up on a plate-girder bridge which Lawrence blew with a four-pound charge. The effect on traffic, he wrote, was slight, but the alarm was tremendous. A report obtained by British Intelligence a month later made clear that the Turks believed the Metawila responsible for the assault, and claimed that they had ‘burned the station’ at Raas Baalbek. While this was an exaggeration, the threat of a Metawila insurrection was considered serious enough to divert no less than six battalions of Ottoman troops from the front line at Gaza – an incredibly profitable return on only four pounds of explosive.
Lawrence parted with the Kawakiba after the raid, and, having received Dhami’s promise to meet him at Bair with a force of tribesmen in a few days, he rode south with a small escort towards Damascus. At the village of al-Qabban, three miles outside the city, he met with ‘Ali Ridha Pasha ar-Rikabi, a covert Arab nationalist who was then mayor of Damascus, and whom Lawrence had once met at Carchemish. He warned ar-Rikabi not to take any action prematurely, though the Pasha replied that as he had only 500 Turkish gendarmes and three unarmed labour battalions in the city, he was in no position to do anything even though he might have wished to. Lawrence then rode south again, meeting Sa’ad ad-Din, Sheikh of the Leja, and Hussain al-‘Atrash, leader of the Druses, who informed him of the terms on which his people were prepared to rise against the Turks. Finally he rode to Azraq, an oasis standing on a lake where the Wadi Sirhan debouched into the Syrian desert, and where he hoped to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan of the Rwalla, and his son, Nawwaf. In 1927, the Arabist Carl Raswan, who lived among the Rwalla, heard a story that Nuri’s scouts had found Lawrence asleep in a wadi near Azraq, and had identified him as an Englishman. Nuri had by this time got wind of the Sykes-Picot agreement, revealed to the world by the Bolsheviks, who had just seized power in Russia. He was inclined to regard Lawrence as a dangerous spy, and debated whether to kill him or not. Though the Bedu considered it cowardly to kill a sleeping man, Nuri posted guards with instructions to shoot or capture him as soon as he made a move, to prevent him claiming daakhil – the Bedu right of protection, which could be gained by touching a tent-rope, spitting on a slave, or various other ploys. The guards watched him for three hours, and in that time Nuri decided to spare him. When he awoke the Emir called him into his tent, and slapped a fat file of documents in front of him, demanding to know which of the contradictory British promises was to be believed. Nuri was the most powerful Bedu chief in Syria, and Lawrence realized the success or failure of the Hashemites might depend on his answer. It was with some agony of mind, he said, that he told Nuri to trust the most recent of the contradictions. Lawrence said later that Nuri was inclined to sit on the fence: he did not wish to commit himself to the Hashemite cause, but was circumspect enough to countenance the possibility that they might defeat the Turks, in which case he ought to be on the winning side. For now, his support would remain tacit: ‘he is willing now to compromise himself to any extent short of open hostilities,’ Lawrence wrote in his journal, ‘pending the collection of his year’s food supply.’23
Lawrence arrived back in Nabk on 17 June, having made a trek of 560 miles through enemy-held territory. He had blown a bridge and caused the Turks to move six battalions from the front, had met many of the principal leaders in the region, and had surveyed the prospective battlefields. It was a magnificent achievement – certainly one of the great intelligence-gathering missions of the war – and deserved the highest accolade. Yet if the northern ride is shrouded in uncertainty, Lawrence himself bears much of the blame for his incorrigible habit of self-mystification. In Seven Pillars he alluded only fleetingly to the expedition: ‘the results,’ he said, ‘were incommensurate with the risks, and the act artistically unjustifiable, like the motive.’24 Vyvyan Richards suggested that there was a purely literary motive in Lawrence’s skating over the ride: to have described it in detail would have detracted from the action in the Aqaba mission, and produced an anticlimax. Several biographers have concluded that the story was a fabrication, and Nasib al-Bakri, speaking forty years after the event, told Suleiman Mousa that he was certain Lawrence had never left Wadi Sirhan even for a day, and accused him of ‘double-dealing, slander and dissemination of discord’. The tone of the denial, though, suggests strongly that Nasib’s memory was coloured with anger at Lawrence’s remarks about him in Seven Pillars.25 Nasib also reported that while Auda and Nasir had asked for the return of the £7,000 given to him by Feisal, on the grounds that their own funds had run out, he had refused to give it back. Nasir, he said, had revealed confidentially that Lawrence lay behind the demand, and they had pretended that Nasib had surrendered the money, whereas in fact he never returned a single pound. Against Nasib’s insistence that he never left camp, though, there is Lawrence’s diary, which, while the writing is often illegible and the entries sometimes incomprehensible, makes it clear beyond reasonable doubt that he did visit Raas Baalbek and the other places mentioned in his later report. Why, then, did he later tell Robert Graves: ‘in my report to Clayton… I gave a sho
rt account of my excursions from Nabk northward. It was part of the truth. During it some things happened, and I do not want the whole story to be made traceable…’26 Why, if the story was true, did Lawrence not wish it to be traceable, and what did he mean by his earlier statement that the motive was ‘unjustifiable’? There are two possible answers – or rather two complementary answers representing two levels of Lawrence’s psyche. First, on the rational level the purpose of the ride was to prime the Syrian tribes for a general revolt which would coincide with any British invasion of Palestine. The information Lawrence gathered at so much risk to his life provided a detailed report for G H Q showing the various groups of Syrian Arabs ready to strike. It was partly on the basis of this report that vast funds and resources were eventually assigned to the Arabs. However, the Syrian revolt was never to come off completely, and not even partially until the last days of the campaign. The master-plan which Lawrence conceived on this northern ride went askew because, when the time was ripe, he lost his nerve and failed to call a general uprising in Syria. His feelings of guilt over this failure are clearly expressed in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars, and may have prompted him to cut the details of his northern ride. The second reason probably lurked on the shadow side of his mind. That the ride had actually been initiated by his masochism – his need to ease tension by fleeing forwards – is clear from the note in his diary stating that he was going north to ‘chuck it’. Afterwards, he could not forget the fact that he had been moved by fear rather than the more chauvinistic brand of courage others expected. He was later awarded the Companionship of the Bath on the strength of his own report, and might have had the Victoria Cross had another officer been present. The idea that he should be rewarded for what, in his own eyes, amounted to ‘cowardice’ amused him acidly: ‘A bit of a handicap, is funk,’ he wrote, ‘to people of the VC class, in which reputation would put me! Of course, I know in myself I’m not a brave person: and am not sorry. Most brave people aren’t attractive.’27 The idea that cowardice and bravery were two aspects of the same quality occurred to him later, when he declared that a man who could run away was a potential VC. His attitude to bravery is summed up in a letter to Charlotte Shaw: ‘When a VC… passes an army guard-room the guard turn out and salute,’ he wrote; ‘the poor shy soldier wearing it isn’t thereby puffed up to believe himself brave. He convicts himself of fraudulence …’28 Lawrence’s low self-esteem; the feeling that he was ‘not a brave person’, that he was ‘fraudulent’; the notion that he had been driven forward by fear rather than some idealistic notion of ‘higher courage’ caused him to coil his bravest act within a labyrinth of conundrums which would make it almost impossible for posterity to discover its exact nature.
All was now ready for the assault on Aqaba. Nasir, Nasib and Auda had recruited 535 men of the Towayha Howaytat, and 150 Rwalla and Shararat. Dhami was also there, with thirty-five of his Kawakiba from Tadmor. Nasir and Lawrence detached 200 of these Bedu to guard the tents in the Wadi Sirhan, and on 20 June the remainder loaded their camels and horses and turned south-west, riding to the ancient wells at Bair, set in a depression in the stony wasteland known as the Ard as-Suwwan. Here, they found that the three principal wells had been blown with gelignite, probably by Auda’s blood-enemies, the ibn Jazi Howaytat, under the supervision of the Turks. There were traces of perhaps 100 cavalry in the ruined khan. The work had been done badly, however, and though one of the wells had been filled in, the other two were only slightly damaged. The charges had been poorly laid, Lawrence concluded: ‘I took out two sets on the end of a rope,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘Nasty job, for all well-lining was very loose.’29 There was a fourth well, some distance from the others, however, which had not been blown at all, and since this well belonged to the ibn Jazi, Auda’s suspicions were confirmed. The party settled down to occupy Bair, while a scout was sent to the next group of wells, al-Jefer, to find out whether the Turks had destroyed these, too, and a small caravan of camels with local brands was dispatched to Tafilah in the hills of Edom, to buy flour. Nasir opened negotiations with the ibn Jazi Howaytat, hoping to bring them under the Hashemite umbrella and settle the feud with the Abu Tayyi, and put out feelers to the small sections of Howaytat whose tents were pitched in the Wadi Ithm. Meanwhile, Lawrence rode off with Za’al Abu Tayyi to visit several other Arab leaders and to dynamite a bridge near Minifir in the Yarmuk valley, as a further diversionary measure to convince the Turks that their objective lay farther north. The plan was unsuccessful, but on their return they attacked the lonely station of Atwi, killing three Turks and plundering a flock of sheep. They returned to Bair on 28 June to find that their food supply caravan had come in from Tafilah with a week’s ration of flour for the whole party. This meant that they must take Aqaba within a week or starve. Their funds had already run short, and Nasir had been obliged to pay the Bedu in promissory notes to be drawn ultimately on the British government. They pulled out of Bair the same day, and as they rode there arrived a messenger from Nuri ash-Sha’alan, informing them that a regiment of 400 Turkish horse with four machine-guns was now scouring the Wadi Sirhan for them. Nuri had lent the Turks his nephew Trad as a guide, to be certain they lost the way and made slow progress. This was a further incentive to hasten the attack on Aqaba, for until the cavalry returned from Sirhan, the Turks would assume that Lawrence’s party were still there, and would not be on their guard in the Aqaba district.
By 30 June they were at Jefer – Auda’s headquarters – a tiny oasis of thorn-trees in a plain of mud cracked into filigree patterns by the sun, and dazzling white with salt-licks, from which the railway station at Ma an was just visible on the horizon. Here, too, the wells had been blown by the Turks, but by carefully sounding them with a mallet, the Agayl discovered that one – the ‘King’s Well’: Auda’s own property – had not been damaged, but was merely plugged with earth. They spent hours digging it out in the sun, while Nasir dispatched a messenger to the Dumaniyyah Howaytat – the signal for them to attack the Turkish fort at Fuweilah, dominating Aba 1-Lissan, a watering-place at the mouth of the great pass at Nagb ash-Shtar, through which they must descend to reach Aqaba. This was the opening gambit in the carefully-laid plan for the advance, and the direction of the campaign depended on the success of this first attack. All day they waited tensely for news, crouching in the shadow of sparse bushes near the wells, with their camels and horses ready-saddled. In the evening an exhausted rider stalked into camp: Fuweilah had been taken, and the Ottoman garrison massacred to a man. The Howaytat, under their Sheikh, Gasim Abu Dumayk, had, in fact, opened fire as soon as word had reached them that morning, but at first the Turks had driven them off. Believing that this was merely a tribal outburst, the Turkish garrison had sent out a mounted pursuit-party which had come across an undefended Howaytat camp and had slit the throats of six women and seven children and stabbed to death an old man. Outraged, the Howaytat had rushed down from their hill-top, cut off the Turks’ retreat and slaughtered them all. They had then turned on the fort with renewed fury, taken it in a ferocious charge, and shot dead every Turk they could find, though a few had escaped and retreated back to Ma’an. This was the news Lawrence’s party had been waiting for, and within ten minutes they had mounted and were riding across the Jefer plain towards the station of Ghadir al-Haj on the Hejaz railway, en route for the head of the pass at Aba 1-Lissan.
The guerrilla column rode on through the miasma of dust, until the railway line with its telegraph poles like strange totems in the emptiness appeared suddenly before them. The Turkish patrols, seeing a horde of raiders coming silently and suddenly out of the mirage, were petrified, and retreated quickly to the blockhouses. Lawrence’s Agayl jogged from bridge to bridge laying charges, knowing that the thuds of their explosions would reach Ma an and bring a Turkish relief force down upon them. But by that time, they would have vanished back into the desert like a cloud. The ‘Agayl blew ten bridges and ruined scores of rails, and in the spreading dusk they moved five
miles into the plateau of Shirah, west of the line, intending to spend the night there. No sooner had they lit their cooking-fires, though, than three horsemen cantered into camp with the news that a Turkish battalion of the 178th Regiment had marched from Ma an and recaptured Fuweilah from the Howaytat. This was bad news, for unless the Arabs could clear the pass down into Wadi Ithm, the road to Aqaba would be denied them.
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