Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence left Rum at dawn on 16 September, with 116 Bedu and his two British NCOs, each protected by a pair of Feisal’s personal body-slaves, who were prepared to die in their defence. He guarded these British soldiers with solicitous care, first because their skills were crucial to the coming battle, secondly because their loss would have reflected badly on the Arabs, and thirdly because it was in his nature to care for others: ‘He was ever thoughtful of us,’ Brook remembered, ‘and careful to see that the intense heat was not proving too much for us.’17 They travelled along al-Ga’a – a vast swath of salt sehbha dividing Rum from the plateau of Shirah, whose bed of hard, flat clay made it a natural highway. Within a few hours, the gnarled sandstone blocks whose theme reached its crescendo in Rum mountain were playing out smaller and less distinct by degrees until the last outlying blocks stood no higher than a man. Sandstone gave way to cut-glass limestone slopes, and they rode towards a hogsback where the ridge drooped to a saddle between two bookends, marking the entrance to another clay sehkha on which they spent the night. The following day they crossed wilder country – intersecting limestone ridges relieved by knots of tamarisk and rattam trees. In the evening they came upon Mudowwara well, set in a valley between huge limestone plinths, no more than three miles from the station. Today, a few stunted palm-trees grow in that spot, indicating the presence of water, but the well itself is a sandy pit, completely dry. In 1917 there was abundant water, but it had been deliberately fouled by the Turks, who had hurled into it the carcasses of dead camels. Their bloated flesh was nauseatingly apparent to Lawrence and his party, but they filled their waterskins anyway – for it was the only water available to them – and both Yells and Brook later went down with severe diarrhoea.

  At sunset, Lawrence, with Za’al and the two NCOs, stole forward on foot to the last ridge overlooking the station, where the Turks had built guard-sangars from the flaky grey rock. The sangars are still there, and one warm night, having arrived at Mudowwara riding a camel called ‘Alyan, I crawled up the same crest to see the same station buildings, standing by the ghost of the line, from which the tracks and sleepers had been torn and piled up. On 17 September 1917, though, the line remained very much intact, and Lawrence looked down from the crest on the series of blockhouses along the station platform and saw their windows lit by cooking fires, and a host of tents in the foreground inhabited by about 200 milling Turks. Lawrence wrote later that the station was about 300 yards from the ridge, and thus out of range of the Stokes mortar. He decided that they must creep even nearer to find a better site. They crawled so close to the enemy, in fact, that they could hear them talking, and clearly saw the face of a young officer who left the camp to relieve himself, and lit a cigarette with a match. They withdrew to the shelter of the hill and discussed the prospect of an assault in whispers: the garrison was 200 compared with their 116 men, and Lawrence felt that the station buildings were too solid for the mortar shells. He decided not to chance storming the station, but to mine the railway down the line instead.

  Looked at after an interval of eighty years, Lawrence’s stated motives for aborting the attack seem less than justified. On the morning after my arrival, I paced out the distance between the hill crest and the station buildings, and found that it was less than the 300 yards he claimed – and in any case, the Stokes probably would have been effective from such a range. As for the station buildings being ‘too solid’ – I examined them closely and found that they were built of precisely the same basalt blocks from which all the other stations were constructed – a fact of which Lawrence must have been perfectly aware. The main obstacle was the disunity of the Arabs, and though Lawrence only hinted that this was a major consideration in the 1935 text of Seven Pillars, saying ‘we were not a happy family’, he was more explicit in the earlier Oxford text, explaining that the Howaytat were so rancorous and feud-ridden that every Bedui feared lest another deserted him or even shot him in the back. It was his unsureness about the Howaytat which finally dissuaded him from the attack. Mining a train was not only easier to control, it was also much more to the Arabs’ taste, since it involved easy looting. Lawrence later noted that the Bedu put more enthusiasm into blowing up a train than almost anything else.

  They slept near Mudowwara well, and the following morning moved south across a plain then barren, but today greened by an agricultural project, to a belt of low hills, where the railway curved eastwards to avoid the instep of a fifty-foot terraced ridge. This, Lawrence thought, would be an ideal place for mining. The train would slow down to take the bend, and the terraces provided an admirable position for the Stokes mortar. It was a little high for the Lewis machine-guns, but since it faced due north it looked directly down the track and would make a superb base for enfilade fire. They hid their camels among some rocks farther up the valley and carried their weapons and tools back to the ridge. About 300 yards away, the metals crossed a two-arched culvert, which Lawrence chose as the site for his mine. Previously, he had used pressure-switches, but this time he was trying out an electrically donated charge which would be attached to a cable and a plunger, and set off by hand. Instead of burying it beneath the arches, though, he laid his fifty pounds of blasting gelatine in the sand on top, so that the downward blast would smash the bridge and derail the coaches, whatever happened to the train. It took almost two hours to lay the charge and another three to bury the 200-yard cable which stretched to some hollows near the foot of the ridge, where the exploder would be concealed. The cable proved troublesome: no sooner had one part been buried than another would spring out of the sand. Finally, Lawrence had to weigh it down with heavy boulders, then sweep over the sand with his cloak to disguise the tell-tale marks. Unfortunately, the culvert could not be seen from the firing position, so Lawrence decided that he would have to stand half-way between the track and the exploder in order to give the signal to Salem – one of Feisal’s slaves – who had volunteered for the task of pressing the plunger. This, of course, meant that Lawrence would be in full view of the soldiers on the train.

  All was set for the ambush, when things suddenly began to go wrong. The Bedu who had been left to guard the camels had climbed to the top of the ridge, merely to ‘sniff the breeze’, and could be seen clearly both from Mudowwara station, about nine miles to the north, and from Hallat Ammar station – four miles to the south. Lawrence shouted to them to come down, but the Turks had already spotted them, and an outpost opened fire from two and a half miles away. The Arabs were saved by the sunset, however, and Lawrence’s party slept confident that the Turks would not come looking for them in the dark. Not long after dawn the next day, though, a detachment of forty Turks was observed advancing up the line from Hallat Ammar. Lawrence sent thirty Howaytat to engage them and draw them off, but at noon a much larger force – about 100 strong – left Mudowwara station and moved menacingly down the line to the south. Lawrence decided to pull out and leave the mine for another occasion. At that moment, however, the sentry on top of the ridge shouted out that there was a train standing in the station at Hallat Ammar. Lawrence rushed up to see, and as he did so the locomotive began to steam slowly towards them. He and Za’al screamed to the Bedu to get in position, and the tribesmen and the British NGOs jogged from their camping-place to the terrace on the ridge. Yells and Brook took their positions on the shelf, while the Bedu riflemen fanned out in niches and crannies along the track. As the train came up, Lawrence saw that it consisted of not one but two coupled locomotives and about twelve box-wagons crammed with Turkish troops, who, anticipating an attack, were shooting blindly into the desert from loopholes and sangars on the roofs. Lawrence was amazed to see the two engines and decided on the spur of the moment to fire the mine under the second, so that it would not be able to draw the carriages away if the first was derailed. At precisely the instant when the cab of the second engine crossed the culvert, Lawrence raised his hand. Down went the plunger, there was a thunderclap and a plume of smoke and dust 100 feet high through which lumps o
f mangled iron whanged towards them, including one complete locomotive wheel which whizzed past Lawrence’s head and clanged into the desert. The culvert had been blown, the first engine derailed and the second smashed to smithereens. At once Sergeant Yells and the Arab crew opened up with the two Lewis guns, raking with deadly plunging fire along the roofs of the box-wagons, bowling the Turks over like ninepins, and cutting away the planking in showers of chips. According to Corporal Brook, Lawrence strolled calmly back to the gun-position on the ridge, ‘with a complete disregard of flying bullets’. ‘His bearing,’ wrote Brook, ‘made us feel that the whole thing was a picnic.’18 From the terrace, Lawrence and the NCOs saw the Bedu, stripped down to their baggy trousers, leaping out of their holes and rushing towards the train. This was an unscheduled move, but it was too late to prevent them. The Turks were falling out of the doors on the eastern side of the wagons and taking shelter behind the embankment, firing point-blank at the leaping brown figures of the Bedu. They were huddled together, making a perfect target for the mortar, and Corporal Brook lobbed two shells at them, the second of which found its mark, killing a dozen men instantly. The terrified survivors began to run away across the desert, exposing themselves once again to the Lewis guns. Drum after drum of bullets throbbed into the retreating horde, until the sand was streaked with blood and littered with scores of bodies. The smoke and dust drifted away, the Turkish rifles fell silent. The battle was over, and, glancing at his watch, Lawrence was shocked to see that the whole engagement had lasted only ten minutes.

  He ran down to the line to inspect the damage, and found the Bedu in a feeding-frenzy, ripping off the doors of the box-wagons, smashing cargo, tearing about yelling, shooting dementedly, plunging into the train and reappearing with bales and carpets. They had gone so wild that they pretended not to know Lawrence and three times Bedu snatched at his headcloth and his dagger, obliging him to fight them off. He found the first engine lying half on its side, and detonated a gun-cotton charge on its cylinder so that it should never be used again:’I fear, however,’ he wrote in his dispatch, ‘that it is still capable of repair. The conditions were not helpful to good work, for there were many prisoners and women hanging on to me.’19 Lawrence joined the looters, and chose for himself a fine Baluch prayer-carpet. The Bedu were beyond all control, grabbing at the nearest camel, whoever it belonged to, loading their booty on to it and making off. The Turkish patrols from the two stations were now closing in, shooting, and the Bedu began to streak off into the desert. Lawrence, Yells and Brook, who had returned to the ridge to retrieve the guns and the cable, suddenly found themselves alone. They were on the verge of abandoning the guns when Za’al Abu Tayyi and his cousin Howaymil rushed back on their camels, and helped to load them. Yells and Za’al made a fire of the spare drums and ammunition, laid twenty loose mortar-shells on it, then ran. The Turks, advancing on the train, were met by a barrage of fire from the detonating shells and cartridges.

  The Bedu regrouped in safer ground, and were about to withdraw when, Lawrence wrote, he discovered that the slave, Salem, who had fired the charge, was missing. He asked for volunteers to go back for him, and the rest of the lost kit. Za’al, and twelve of his Towayha, agreed. They cantered back to the line on their camels to find the wreck crawling with Turks, and, realizing that Salem must be dead – for the Turks took no wounded Arab prisoners – made for their former camping ground, but were obliged to abandon the kit under heavy fire, and retired ridge by ridge covered by a Lewis gun manned by Sergeant Yells. They pulled back to the well at Mudowwara, where they watered, and then rode directly to Rum, arriving there the following evening. They had lost one Arab killed and two wounded, and had killed seventy Turks, wounded thirty, and taken ninety prisoner.20

  The Mudowwara raid was one of Lawrence’s most spectacular and most successful attacks on the railway: ‘I beg to call attention once again to the gallantry displayed by Major Lawrence,’ Clayton wrote in a message to Allenby, ‘and the successful manner in which he managed his small force. I would also bring notice to the good work and steadiness of Sgt. Yells AIF and Cpl. Brooks RWF both of whom were relatively new to the work …the success of this small operation should have effects …beyond the importance of the action. It will raise the spirit of the Arabs …and will without doubt be reported and its magnitude will not lose as the news travels.’21 Today, the ridge on which Lawrence sited his Lewis and Stokes guns stands on the border of Saudi-Arabia and Jordan, but, if you are willing to risk the hostility of the border-guards, you may climb it, lie on the rocky shelf in a stone sangar which may itself be a relic of that battle, and gain the same view of the track which Sergeant Yells saw through his sights on 19 September 1917. You will see, too, 500 yards away, the wreck of a railway wagon on its side. Sadly, this is probably not part of the train Lawrence mined, for it is an open wagon, whereas Lawrence specified in all his reports that the train drew ten box-wagons. At the foot of the ridge you may search in vain for the remains of the bridge on which he laid his charge. It is no longer there: but if you are patient enough to pace out the distance from the ridge to the embankment, you will find, buried in the sand, the broken masonry of a two-arched culvert, which may or may not be the one which Lawrence demolished on that day in September, eighty years ago, when, within the space of ten minutes, he and his men cut down seventy Turks. Lawrence’s reaction to this killing is difficult to judge. On 25 September he wrote a letter to Major Frank Stirling, a colleague in Cairo who was about to be posted to the Arab front, describing the attack in the kind of gung-ho, boy scout language which he must have believed appropriate to the professional soldier: ‘I hope this sounds the fun it is,’ he commented. ‘It’s the most amateurish Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the [Bedu]. Only you will think it’s heaven, because there aren’t any returns, or orders, or superiors; no doctors, no accounts, no meals and no drinks.’22 Lawrence was always adept at bluster and bravado, but beneath the surface lay a sensitive soul. A very different picture of his feelings emerges in a letter he wrote only a day earlier to Edward Leeds: ‘I hope when this nightmare ends that I will wake up and come alive again …I’m not going to last out this game much longer: nerves going and temper wearing thin …This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them …and know that you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can.’23 Whether one or both of these letters displays the ‘real’ Lawrence, or whether both are simply reflections of the contrasting characters of their recipients, is a question which cannot satisfactorily be answered.

  17. Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra

  The Yarmuk operation and the Dara’a incident October 1917–January 1918

  On a morning in April I rode a bull-camel called Shaylan – a famous racer of the Howaytat – under the serried pagodas of Umm Salab, the ‘guardian of Rum’, and across the sebkha called al-Ga’a, towards the gash of Wadi Hafira. I carried Seven Pillars in my saddle-bag, and if Lawrence was correct, I should find, at the end of the wadi, a steep pass which would take me up 2,000 feet to the head of the Shirah plateau. I had felt the heat in the air long before the sun was up, and just after dawn long tongues of lemon and fire-orange shades had licked across the brownness of the hills, picking them out like sugared cakes, and gleaming on the mirror salt-licks of the Ga’a. Wadi Hafira itself lay in a haze which had steamed out from its thick green pastures of rimth and rattam. I reached the foot of the pass by noon, and climbed through the bed of a wadi which curved gently towards a snow-white pimple thousands of feet above. The wadi grew narrower and the walls steeper until I was hauling the camel by his headstall through a crack in the rocks which was only just wide enough to let us through. On and on I staggered, and suddenly the walls were so tight that when Shaylan passed, one of my jerrycans was scraped and punctured so that the water began to trickle out maddeningly. Since entering
the wadi, doubts had nagged at me. Surely, this could not be the way Lawrence had come, I thought, with an entire army of Arabs, a squadron of Indian machine-gunners and hundreds of camels? They simply would not have got through. I was afraid that the wadi would become so narrow that I would not be able to turn the camel, yet for some reason I continued, stalking on through basting heat that bounced between the walls of the chasm, until I found that it ended abruptly beneath a towering cliff. This, certainly, had not been Lawrence’s path. Cursing myself, I turned Shaylan about and headed back, but no sooner had I done so than there was a sudden savage peal of thunder. For a moment I stood stock still: there was a surge of cold air, and rain came slinging down, gouging up the sand in the wadi bed. I was gripped with terror. If the rain was heavy on the plateau, a wave of water might roll down the wadi and catch me here, imprisoned between its sheer walls. I looked about me, thinking that I should have to abandon the camel and climb as high as I could. Seconds later, though, the rain stopped, and, thanking providence, I almost ran the rest of the way back to the foot of the pass, pulling the recalcitrant Shaylan after me.

  I realized now that Lawrence’s route must have followed the shoulder of the wadi, but here the going was no easier. There was no clearly marked path, and often I stumbled over boulders, fell sprawling, cut my feet. I shimmied, half skating, down loose screes, balanced on ledges no more than eighteen inches wide, worked my way down into a weird broken water-course of purple stones and white felspar. Once I came so near to the edge of the precipice that Shaylan, bucking and shying, almost pulled me over. Again, I wondered that Lawrence’s army could have come this way. True, he had reported that, on one of his ascents, two of the camels had been lost when they had slipped and fallen down the hillside, but on the other hand he had also described how, on another occasion, he had ridden down the pass without descending from his camel except in one or two difficult places. I shuddered at the thought of riding a camel over these sharp boulders and precipitous paths today. Yet it clearly was the same ‘zig-zag broken pass’, for gazing back down hundreds of feet, I could see the grassy street of Hafira terminating in a cone-hill which appeared to stand in the centre of the wadi, with the diaphanous mass of Rum brooding over it, exactly as Lawrence had described. Getting up that hill with a camel in tow was one of the most exhausting experiences I have ever had, and by the time I reached the top it was almost sunset. The ascent had taken me six hours. I could not believe that Lawrence had ever managed to ride up or down the steep, stony hillside virtually without getting out of the saddle – but perhaps, I thought, despite my years of experience, he had simply been a better camel-man than me.