Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  A few days later I was working in the Manuscripts Room of the British Museum when an attendant put a small blue box on my desk. I almost got up to protest a mistake. I thought I had ordered Lawrence’s wartime journals – written in a military signals-pad: but this box, no wider than the hand, obviously did not contain them. I examined the contents out of curiosity, and found two tiny pre-printed Letts’ pocket-diaries, which I had never seen before. In fact, they were Lawrence’s ‘Skeleton Diaries’, which he carried with him, and in which he entered the place he had slept every night of the campaign. They were, I suddenly realized, the most genuinely contemporary of all sources. Idly, I turned to 6 July, the day Lawrence had ridden into Aqaba. What I read astonished me:

  Friday 6th July

  Entered Akaba 10 am. Read letter from Newcombe.

  Left in afternoon. Slept at the head of Negb Akaba

  Saturday 7th July

  Watered at Themed. [Bir] Mohammad sunset.

  Sunday 8th July

  Passed Nekhl [illeg] Medifeh (Sudr Heitan)

  Monday 9th July

  Slept in Suez, very well.5

  Lawrence had not made the journey in forty-nine hours! In fact he had slept at the head of the pass, ‘Nagb Akaba’, and far from reaching Themed at midnight as he had claimed, he had made it to the well just before sunset on the following day – for Bir Mohammad, traceable on the map, lay only a few miles farther on. This meant that we had actually arrived at Themed a good six hours before Lawrence: those hours he had spent sleeping at the top of the pass, we had been trekking stupidly into the night, trying to catch up with him. The diary entry made it clear that he had arrived in Suez not on the second but on the third day out of Aqaba – the forty-nine hour saga of Seven Pillars had been a lie. Why Lawrence had lied in Seven Pillars I could not fathom, for I realized that he had not lied to his superiors. When I re-read the report he had made to Clayton on 10 July – the day he arrived back in Cairo – I noticed that it ran: ‘We entered Akaba on July 6th… I rode the same day for Suez with 8 men and arrived at El Shatt on July 9th.’6 This report, published in Garnett’s letters in 1938, had been staring me and almost every other biographer in the face all the time.7 It had taken an agonizing night ride across part of Sinai – and very nearly the death of one old man – to bring it out. Lawrence must have realized that some day someone would notice the discrepancy, and this led me to suspect it had been deliberate – part of the great game of ‘whimsicality’ he had been playing since he had been a child, intriguing others by a cloak of mystery, ‘hoping [they] would wish to know whom that odd creature was’.8 How effective his ploy had been, I thought: here we were, eighty years on, still trying desperately to find out.

  Lawrence’s perverse games do not, of course, lessen the fact that the capture of Aqaba was a brilliant achievement. It was the single great coup of his life. Though he was never to enjoy such an astounding success again, the Aqaba operation established him. It was imperative that Lawrence should have brought the news himself, for a messenger might not have been believed, but more than this, Lawrence was now able to convince his superiors that he was the indispensable conduit through which arms and money must flow to the Arabs. This, in turn, made his position among the Hashemites indispensable. Through Aqaba he became, as he himself put it, the ‘principal’ of the Arab Revolt. In Cairo he was feted by his superiors. Clayton sent a special message to the CIGS, General Robertson: ‘Captain Lawrence has arrived after a journey through enemy country which is little short of marvellous …He started at Wejh on 9th May with 36 Arabs and marched via Jauf and Nebk, crossing and dynamiting the railway en route.’9 Robertson returned his personal commendation, and shortly Lawrence, the ‘Temporary Second-Lieutenant Interpreter’, found himself a full-blown major. Fortunately, his arrival in Cairo also happened to coincide with the appointment of General Sir Edmund Allenby as GOC. In early 1917, Murray’s forces had twice attacked Gaza in Palestine, and had been thrown back with almost 6,000 casualties. Allenby, it was hoped, was made of sterner stuff. Lawrence, who was given an audience with the great man, wandered into his office barefoot, dressed in his soiled Arab clothes, and played his customary game of mystification. He had produced a detailed report based on his secret journey to the north, claiming that he could deploy no less than seven forces of Arab levies in various key positions, which could, by the end of August, threaten the lines of communication of the Turkish army in Jerusalem. This amounted to a general Arab rising in Syria, including the capture of Damascus – though Lawrence stressed that it could only take place if the main Turkish force was held down by Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force on the Gaza-Beersheba line, and thus prevented from drafting new battalions to the Hauran. It was an ambitious – almost fantastic – proposal, and Allenby watched Lawrence curiously, unsure ‘how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan’.10 For Lawrence, the General was imposingly paternal, and would join the roster of father-figures which he spent his life compiling – a list which included Hogarth, and would one day include Thomas Hardy and Lord Trenchard. He would later complain that while service – ‘voluntary slavery’ – was his deepest desire, he had never found a chief capable of using him – it was Allenby, though, who came nearest to his ‘longings for a master’: ‘What an idol the man was to us,’ he wrote, ‘prismatic with the unmixed self-standing quality of greatness, instinct and compact with it.’11 Allenby’s reaction to Lawrence is less easy to gauge. He later wrote that he thought Lawrence a brilliant war leader, and noted that his work was invaluable throughout the campaign. Yet he is also on record as saying that in reality the Arabs were no more than a distraction for the Turks, and that there were other officers who might have done an even better job than Lawrence. This was post factum speculation, of course. For now, Lawrence had just captured Aqaba, and even if his Arabs were simply a distraction, such a distraction was a million times better than having them join the enemy. Allenby was a realist, and knew that anything Lawrence did in Syria – even if it failed – would tie up Turkish forces. The General’s massive inscrutability made it hard for Lawrence to judge how much he had ‘caught’ him, but as usual the performance worked, and Allenby promised to do what he could for his Arab allies.

  Within days of the victory, Euryalus, the flagship of the Red Sea fleet, had anchored off Aqaba as a token of British support, and by 13 July Dufferin was disgorging arms and supplies. Feisal’s forces were to be moved from the Hejaz to Aqaba – the camelry on the hoof, the Arab Regular battalions, now under the command of Ja’afar Pasha, by sea from Wejh. Feisal was to be put under Allenby’s command, and from now on his forces would operate as the British right flank. Lawrence travelled to the Hejaz at the end of July, where he saw Feisal, and met Hussain for the first time. It was while in Jeddah that he received an intercept from Cairo apprising him that Auda Abu Tayyi was about to defect to the Turks: ‘It is reported by Agent “Y”,’ the message read, ‘that Auda [Abu Tayyi] who was Captain Lawrence’s right hand man during the recent operations in the [Ma ’an-Aqaba] area has written to the Turks giving as his reason for rebelling that presents had been given to Nuri [ash-Sha’alan – chief of the Rwalla] not to him but that he was now willing to come in under certain conditions and had twice written to the GOC 8th Army Corps asking for a present.’12 Lawrence was alarmed, and by 4 August he was back in Aqaba, where he bought a famous camel called Ghazala and rode fast up the Wadi Ithm to Auda’s camp at Guweira. The loyalty of the Howaytat remained crucial to the defence of Aqaba, for the Turks had already recaptured Aba 1-Lissan and were bombing along the Wadi Ithm. A counter-attack on Aqaba was expected within two months, and Sharif Nasir had established four defensive outposts to protect the crucial pass of Shtar. One of these was Wadi Musa, at the gate of Petra, another at Dalagha in the Balga hills, a third at Batra, the highest point on the Shirah plateau, and the fourth at Guweira on the plain beneath, where, in the shadow of a single weathered crag of rock, there lay an ancient water-cistern. Until the Arab r
egulars arrived in Aqaba, these outposts were vital, and their continued viability depended on the Howaytat and Auda Abu Tayyi. Lawrence was received as a friend in Auda’s camp, and when he touched on his correspondence with the Turks, Auda told him a cock-and-bull story about having pretended to go over to them in order to obtain money. Lawrence divined, though, that Auda was angry with the British. He had received no reward for taking Aqaba, and they had not yet sent troops or guns. Lawrence guessed that Auda’s approach to the enemy had been more serious than he maintained. Though he wrote with romantic lyricism in Seven Pillars that Auda’s heart somehow ‘yearned for the defeated enemy’, the prosaic fact was that the Howaytat, like the Hejaz tribes, were working for money rather than ‘independence’and saw little farther than the solidarity of the tribe. Lawrence solved the problem by describing to Auda the vast amounts of arms which would soon be pouring into Aqaba, and by explaining that Feisal – who would soon be there too – would be ‘extremely grateful’ for his services. Finally, he offered Auda an advance on the large sum he could certainly count on receiving when Feisal arrived. Lawrence rode back to Aqaba the same night, hoping his gambit had secured the Howaytat at least until the regulars occupied the port. He resolved to keep the secret of Auda’s betrayal to himself: the British, with their feudal values, would not understand the nature of Arab loyalty: they wanted ‘story book heroes’, he believed. He would present Auda as the brave Bedui raider, just as he had presented Feisal as the noble Arab leader, manipulating the British image of the Arabs to the advantage of the Arabs, the British, and Lawrence himself. He maintained that it irked him to have to serve two masters. He was, he wrote, one of Allenby’s officers, and Allenby expected him to do his best for the British. But he was also Feisal’s adviser, and Feisal expected honesty and competence from him. He played one role off against the other: ‘I could not explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation,’ he wrote, ‘nor disclose the full British plan to Feisal.’13

  Lawrence had told Clayton frankly that Aqaba had been captured on his initiative, and asked for command of ‘Operation Hedgehog’ – the British Mission to the Arabs. This Clayton could not grant, because although Lawrence was now promoted major, he was still a relatively junior officer and could not be put over men like Newcombe and Joyce. Officially, Joyce would be in command, but since Lawrence would remain liaison officer with Feisal he would in practice have as much power as he wished. On 18 August Ja’afar Pasha arrived at Aqaba with two battalions of Arab regulars, consisting mainly of Meccan townsmen or former Syrian soldiers in the Turkish army. Six days later Hardinge landed Feisal with more supplies and troops. The regulars, now about 2,000 strong, were supported by the French Mission from Wejh under Captain Pisani, with a battery of mountain-guns manned by Algerian artillerymen. Nasir had occupied his time in recruiting the local Bedu, who had flocked to Aqaba in droves to declare for the Hashemites. In late August a flight of aircraft was sent to a temporary airfield at Quntilla in Sinai, from where a continuous series of bombing raids was launched against Ma an. To initiate the campaign in Syria, the Hashemites were granted £200,000 in gold, 20,000 rifles, twenty Lewis machine-guns, eight Stokes mortars, 50 tons of gun-cotton for demolitions, and a squadron of armoured cars.

  The arrival of Ja’afar Pasha and his regulars at Aqaba, together with the comforting guns of HMS Humber, meant that the town was now defended, and freed the Howaytat for raids against the railway. No one expected Ja’afar’s troops to be able to stop a determined onslaught from the Turks, but they were an unknown quantity to the enemy and therefore a deterrent. By the end of August a Turkish offensive against Aqaba had, anyway, begun to look increasingly unlikely, for the Turks had a transport problem: their camels were few and weak and the pasture poor. Intercepted orders from the Ottoman HQ in Damascus revealed that the Ma’an garrison, 6,000 strong, had been instructed only to cut Feisal’s units off from the fertile highlands of Balqa, whose grain supplies were needed by the Turkish army in Palestine, and whose timber was required as fuel for locomotives on the railway. A ‘sitrep’ from Clayton advised Joyce – now OC Aqaba – that the only offensive action the Turks envisaged was the occupation of Wadi Musa, near Petra, with two infantry battalions, a cavalry unit and some Mule Mounted riflemen. Clayton suggested that Feisal’s irregular forces should ‘raid the railway south of [Ma an] and demolish it as far as possible in order to keep the [Turkish garrisons at Tebuk and Medina] cut off from their base’.14 Demolitions on the line would also deter the Turks from a major offensive by diluting their forces. Many railway-cutting operations were planned for September, and for his own target Lawrence chose Mudowwara – a station south of Ma an which possessed the only water in a long arid stretch: ‘There are seven waterless stations here,’ he wrote in a dispatch to Clayton from Aqaba, on 27 August, ‘and I have hope that with the Stokes and Lewis guns we may be able to do something fairly serious to the line. If we can make a big break I will do my best to maintain it, since the need for shutting down [Wejh] altogether is becoming urgent.’15 On 7 September, he rode out of Aqaba with two British gun-instructors, Sergeant Yells and Corporal Brook, and two Sheikhs of the Bani Atiya – a Bedu tribe inhabiting the Mudowwara area. His plan was to recruit 300 Bedu of the Howaytat at Guweira, ride to Mudowwara and take the station. At Guweira, however, he encountered opposition. The Howaytat were owed two months’ pay, and were querulous. Auda, who was now trying to assert his authority over the entire tribe, did little to ease the situation. Instead, Lawrence rode five miles south-east across the Guweira plain to Wadi Rum, where, he reported, there were good springs, some pasturage and some beautiful sandstone-cliff scenery.

  The Wadi Rum was, in fact, one of the most spectacular sights in the whole of Arabia: a maze of sandstone whose continual process of evolution was so clearly visible that the vast boulevards and buttresses of red rock appeared to be part of a living organism. No matter how many times Lawrence visited Rum, he never ceased to be transported by these great bastions of rock, skewered and scrolled and fissured and wrinkled by salt and sand and wind into shapes that no delirious mind could invent – delirium tremens embodied in rock and stone: the landscape of the unconscious mind. For Lawrence, Rum was a gateway to the cosmos – a road down which he might ride to that far-off, alluring sunlit space of eternal sleep: ‘often …’ he wrote, ‘my mind used to turn me from the direct road, to clear my senses by a night in [Rum] and by the ride down its dawn-lit valley towards the shining plains, or up its valley in the sunset to that glowing square which my anticipation would never let me reach. I would say, shall I ride on this time, beyond the Khazail, and know it all?’16

  For now, though, a war had to be won, and a railway had to be wrecked, and Lawrence rode between the grand walls of the wadi only as far as the great natural amphitheatre in the rock beneath Jabal Rum. This was the ideal hideout and base for guerrilla operations. Protected by sheer cliffs on three sides, it was invisible to anyone coming up the wadi until they literally rode into it, and here, fifteen minutes’ climb up the hillside, lay the natural spring called Shallala, known to modern visitors as ‘Lawrence’s Spring’. The tents of the Howaytat were pitched in the lee of the sheer rock walls, hidden among thick rattam bush near the ruins of an ancient Nabataean temple. Lawrence’s party camped there after dark and received visitors from various Howaytat clans, all of whom were disgruntled by what they saw as a Hashemite attempt to promote the Abu Tayyi. Of all the Bedu, none were so jealous of their personal integrity as the Howaytat – Lawrence wrote that every fourth or fifth man considered himself a Sheikh. The Dumaniyya clan under Sheikh Gasim Abu Dumayk – the valiant warrior who had led the fighting at Fuweilah – were openly rebellious. Lawrence realized that he could not win Gasim over, and declared furiously that he would enrol members of any other clan but the Dumaniyya for his raid on Mudowwara. Gasim stormed off, bellowing that he would join the Turks.

  Feeling that he lacked authority to handle this mutiny himself, Lawrence returned to Aqaba, consulted
Feisal, and rode back to Rum with a Sharif – ‘Abdallah ibn Hamza – to smooth over the troubles. ‘Abdallah managed to bring some of the Dumaniyya round, but Gasim himself remained defiant, not least because Za’al Abu Tayyi – whom Lawrence considered ‘the finest raider alive’ – was to accompany the raiding party, together with twenty-five tribesmen of the Towayha. None of the other clans of the Howaytat would accept Za’al’s authority, neither would the separate clans even talk to one another. As ‘Abdallah had returned to Aqaba, and the other Sharif with the party, Nasir al-Harithi, went blind on the first day out, Lawrence was the only individual sufficiently impartial to assume the direction of the raid, and, for the first time, he had to abandon his habit of working through a Sharif, and take on direct leadership himself.