Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence thought of Hafira as a passageway between Arabia and Syria, between heat and cold, between tamarisk and wormwood. Indeed, the plateau was a very different world from the sandy swaths of Rum – a stony yellow moorland undulating almost featurelessly into the distance. In a cleft beyond the first undulation, I came upon a batch of Bedu tents. Dogs barked at me as I walked by, and a Bedui in a pitch-black dishdasha came out and invited me to stay the night. He showed me where to couch my camel, and five or six Bedu in ragged shirts helped me unload. They welcomed me into the tent where a fire of rimth was flickering in the square hearth and made a place for me. After dark they slaughtered a sheep, and we squatted by the fire, drinking tea and coffee, talking for hours, until the meat was carried in on a tin tray a yard in diameter – haunches and ribs of mutton, with the sheep’s head set on top as centrepiece with its gaping maw frozen in a diabolic grin. This reminded me of the great food-tray Lawrence had described as a shallow bath, five feet across and set on a single foot, which had belonged to Auda Abu Tayyi. My Bedu hosts were Howaytat, and I asked after Auda’s great tray. They told me that when the Jordanian army had occupied Jefer in the 1930s, they had looted much of Auda’s property. Perhaps the tray had gone with them. My host, Mohammad ibn Salem, who had once served in the Desert Police camel-corps, told me that he remembered seeing an engraved tray at Jefer as a boy, ‘but it wasn’t five feet across,’ he said, ‘it was just the usual size.’ I wondered if this was another of Lawrence’s elaborations. In his original diary entry, he had written that the vessel was ‘3 feet wide’, then crossed it out and written ‘5 feet wide’. Later, I read a report by Alois Musil, who had dined with Auda in 1910, and who described the dish – presumably the same one – as being of the standard size – about three feet across. If Lawrence had exaggerated about such a trivial thing, what of the Hafira pass, I wondered? I asked the Howaytat their opinion. The older men laughed, and Mohammad told me: ‘In Lawrence’s time Hafira was different. There were no roads and no cars then, and the pass was on the main caravan route from the Hejaz to Ma’an: it was used by hundreds of camels every day. The local Howaytat used to keep it in good trim – clearing away the stones that were washed down by the rains. But now, everyone has motor cars. There are roads which take you around to Naqab ash-Shtar. Only shepherds use the path now, and nobody bothers to clear it up. That’s why you found it difficult. In the old times it was just like a motorway – you could easily ride up and down!’

  I went to sleep in the tent that night, satisfied that these Howaytat had vindicated both Lawrence and myself.

  My hosts were from the Dumaniyya section of the Howaytat – the people of Sheikh Gasim Abu Dumayk, who before the Mudowwara raid had raged that he would join the Turks. He had not carried out the threat, and when Lawrence had returned to Rum he placated Gasim by recruiting only the Dumaniyya for his next railway raid at Kilometre 589 south of Ma an. It was during the march-in to this strike, on 1 October 1917, that he had climbed the Hafira pass for the first time. The raid lasted six days, and at last, after several days of waiting, Lawrence had mined and destroyed a train at Imshash al-Hesma, and claimed to have been injured in the hip when a Turkish officer had fired at him. In the following months his trained dynamiters destroyed seventeen locomotives and seriously hampered the working of the railway, precisely as he had planned. In mid-October, though, he was flown back to Ismaeliyya to meet Allenby for the second time.

  Allenby was planning his major offensive against the Gaza-Beersheba line for November. In July, Lawrence had promised him a general revolt in Syria to secure the entire British flank, but now, three months later, he was loath to take such an irreversible step: the detailed report made to Clayton after the taking of Aqaba was, he said, ‘ancient history’. It had achieved its immediate object – massive British support for the Arab Revolt – but now Lawrence realized he could not deliver, for if Allenby’s offensive failed, or failed to reach Jaffa and Jerusalem, the rebel Arabs would be cut off and massacred by the Turks. The Arabs of Syria were not nomads but cultivating peasants, who lived in populous villages and would not be able to fade back into the desert like Lawrence’s cameleers – they were a one-time weapon, and if fired off prematurely would be entirely wasted. To Allenby, perhaps, the Arabs were expendable, but not to Lawrence, whose passionate desire was that the Revolt should succeed. Instead, he decided to put his efforts into a proposal which had originally been but a small part of his master-plan – an attack on the westernmost bridge in the Yarmuk valley, at Jisr al-Hemmi – a complex steel structure spanning a plunging ravine, protected by only half a dozen sentries. The destruction of this bridge would, he calculated, stop railway traffic for two weeks. If the Arabs could blow the Jisr at precisely the moment when Allenby was driving the Turks before him, then their main line of retreat from Jerusalem to Damascus would be entirely cut off. They would be forced to withdraw on foot, and this would, perhaps, be the correct moment for the Syrian peasantry to rise and harass their retreat. Allenby approved the plan and asked Lawrence to cut the railway on 5 November, or one of the three succeeding days.

  Lawrence planned to approach Yarmuk by the same gradual turning movement he had used to such great success at Aqaba. As on that operation, he would march in with fifty men, hopefully from Auda’s Howaytat – the only Bedu he thought aggressive enough to capture the bridge in frontal attack. The route would hug the desert, from Rum to Azraq – the oasis in the Syrian desert where he had met Nuri ash-Sha’alan – and from there, having recruited a ladder of local Bedu tribes, the Bani Sakhr, the Bani Hassan, the Serahiyyin and the Sirhan, he would push quickly into the sown land of Syria and strike at the bridge. It was to be as close a facsimile of the Aqaba operation as conditions would allow, though this time the Bedu would be strengthened by a squadron of Indian machine-gunners, under their Jemadar Hassan Shah, who were already hardened to camel-riding, having spent some months mining the railway in the Hejaz. Lawrence would be accompanied by Lieutenant Wood of the Royal Engineers, who would lay the mine if he was hit, and part of the way by George Lloyd, the former Welsh banker to whose conversation Lawrence had become addicted. In place of the charismatic Nasir, who was away on another job, OC Mission was to be Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain al-Harithi, the brave, handsome ‘young lord’.

  There can be little doubt that Lawrence was attracted to Sharif’Ali: ‘No-one could see him without the desire to see him again,’ he wrote, ‘especially when he smiled, as he did rarely, with both mouth and eyes at once. His beauty was a conscious weapon.’1 It has even been suggested that the ‘SA’ to whom Lawrence dedicated his book was not ‘Salim Ahmad’ at all, but ‘Sharif ‘Ali’. Like Dahoum, he was ‘physically splendid’, and while Lawrence’s Syrian boy had been a ‘wonderful wrestler’, ‘Ali was also as strong as an ox, capable, according to Lawrence, of kneeling down and rising to his feet with a man on each hand. Lawrence claimed that ‘Ali could not only overtake a running camel over half a mile and ‘leap into the saddle’, but would have no one on his operations who could not do the same ‘holding a rifle in one hand’.2 The Sharif, wrote Lawrence, was ‘impertinent, headstrong, conceited; as reckless in word as in deed; impressive (if he pleased) on public occasions, and fairly educated for a person whose native ambition was to excel the nomads of the desert in war and sport.’3 He was, in short, a younger and more desirable version of the heroic Auda Abu Tayyi. Lawrence referred to the Sharif affectionately as ‘Little ‘Ali’ and represented him as having had at least one homosexual lover – a seventeen-year-old Bedui of the Bani Sakhr called Turki:’… the animal in each called to the other,’ he wrote, ‘and they wandered about inseparably, taking pleasure in touch and in silence.’4

  Lawrence left Aqaba on 24 October with Lloyd, Wood, a yeomanry trooper called Thorne, and the Indian machine-gun company. They spent the night at Rum, where they were joined by Sharif ‘Ali and an Algerian Emir named ‘Abd al-Qadir, who was known to Feisal, and who owned several villages of Algerian exiles on
the bank of the Yarmuk river. Lawrence thought that ‘Abd al-Qadir’s peasants might be of great use, and, since they were foreigners and hated by the local Arabs, might be able to strike at the Turks without causing a general rising, which he was keen to avoid. Lawrence had already received a telegram from Colonel Bremond of the French Mission, however, warning him that ‘Abd al-Qadir was a Turkish spy. Lawrence saw no reason to suspect this. He put it down to mutual distrust, for ‘Abd al-Qadir’s grandfather had led Algerian resistance against the French – a qualification which did not diminish him in Lawrence’s eyes at all. On the morning of 26 October, the raiding force climbed the Hafira pass. They crossed the railway with little incident on the 27th and arrived at Jefer the following day.

  From here on, the good fortune which had so marked Lawrence’s progress to Aqaba became conspicuous by its absence. First, the Towayha Howaytat, whom he encountered at Jefer, could not be persuaded to join the raid: even the notorious raider Za’al Abu Tayyi had become complacent since Mudowwara. Lawrence was obliged to recruit fifteen Bani Sakhr at Bair and thirty Serahiyyin at Azraq, none of whom expressed genuine enthusiasm for the attack. The Serahiyyin, indeed, told him that his target, the bridge at al-Hemmi, was out of the question because the nearby Ibrid hills were swarming with woodcutters in Turkish pay. He was now forced to change his plans, and agreed reluctantly to ‘bump’ Tel ash-Shehab – the nearest bridge geographically to Azraq, yet a dangerous objective since it would take them through inhabited country and cultivated land whose dampness would be hard going for camels and might prevent a hasty retreat. Then, on 4 November, ‘Abd al-Qadir and his men suddenly disappeared from Azraq. Lawrence was astonished and troubled, but though he later wrote that he suspected the Algerian had gone to Dara’a to warn the Turks of their imminent attack, at the time he put his desertion down to simple cowardice:’ ( much talk and little doing,’ he wrote to Joyce later; ‘neither ‘Ali nor myself gave him any offence.’5

  The starting-point of the raid was the water-pool at Abu Sawana, where the patrol arrived on 5 November, just missing a scouting party of Circassian cavalry which had been sent by the Turks to reconnoitre the area. They left on the morning of the 7th, lay up until sunset on the plain two hours east of the railway, and crossed the line after dark, riding west until they dropped into a shallow depression at Ghadir al-Abyad, where they snatched some sleep among their still laden camels until first light. They could not move before dusk in case they were spotted, and then they must infiltrate forty miles to the bridge, ‘bump’ it, and exfiltrate across the railway by dawn the following day. They had thirteen hours of darkness in which to complete the operation, and Lawrence felt that the Indian machine-gunners were generally incapable of making the eighty miles required within that time. He selected six of their best riders to accompany him, under Jemadar Hassan Shah, with one Vickers machine-gun. He believed that the bridge could be taken with only twenty good men: the Indians could have done it, but they were too few in number. He mistrusted the Serahiyyin, and placed his faith in the Bani Sakhr under their Sheikh Fahad, whom he designated as storm-troops for the assault. To make the demolition easier, Wood repacked the blasting gelatine into thirty-pound loads which would facilitate its handling on the steep hillside in the darkness.

  At sunset, they mounted their camels and padded silently out of their lying-up place towards Tel ash-Shehab, following the ancient Pilgrim Road. The mood was sombre. Lawrence himself had a bad feeling about this raid, and was miserable, disconsolate about ‘Abd al-Qadir’s desertion, and despairing of the success of the Arab Revolt. The going was sticky for camels: up and down gravelly ridges, and across ploughed fields or meadows riddled with rabbit warrens. The men were on edge. They came across a merchant and his family travelling with their donkeys, whom they were obliged to put under guard till dawn. Then a peasant fired a rifle at them again and again, taking them for raiders, and screaming out in the darkness. No sooner had they escaped him than they were starded by a stray camel and a barking dog. Suddenly, it began to drizzle and the ground became dangerously slippery, so that the camels slithered: two or three crashed down. The rain stopped and they passed under the telegraph line, to a place where they could hear the sound of water falling down the hillside at Tel ash-Shehab. They barracked the camels silently and Wood helped assemble the machine-gun, while Lawrence and his party carried the gelatine down a muddy slope towards the bridge. A train suddenly clanked past them, and Lawrence, flat on his stomach, had a momentary glimpse of uniformed soldiers, before continuing his crawl towards the bridge with Fahad. They snaked through the mud until they were almost within touching distance of the metals, and observed a single sentry on the opposite side, sixty yards away, clearly illuminated by a blazing fire. Lawrence and Fahad sneaked back to guide the men carrying the explosives, but before they could get to them one of the Serahiyyin dropped his rifle and fell noisily down the bank with a clang and a scuffle which shattered the silence as completely as a shot. Lawrence froze. The Turkish sentry shouted a challenge and snapped off a round in the direction of the noise, bawling for the rest of the guard, who rushed out of their tent and fired into the darkness. The Bani Sakhr blazed back out of the shadows, but the machine-gunners, who had been caught in the act of transferring the Vickers, could not get it into action. The Serahiyyin porters, terrified that the gelatine would go off if struck by a bullet, simply dumped it into the ravine. There was now general panic among the raiding party. The Serahiyyin rushed for their camels, quickly followed by Lawrence, Wood, the Indians and the Bani Sakhr. The shooting had alarmed the nearby villages, and lights began to go up, illuminating the dark countryside. The Serahiyyin came across a group of peasants and robbed them, only adding to the alarm. The villagers for miles around took to their roofs and began shooting volleys at Lawrence’s party, while a troop of Arab horsemen charged them from the flank. The ground was still sticky, bowling the camels over as their flat feet tried to get a purchase. Lawrence and Ali took up the rear and goaded them on. They moved fast, driven by the demon of fear, and before long the shooting fell behind them. By first light they had reached the railway, hungry and exhausted. Lawrence heard the boom of Allenby’s heavy artillery drifting across the landscape from the direction of Palestine, and took the sound as a reproach for his failure. If Allenby’s attack succeeded, the Turks would now have a clear line of retreat along the railway: if it had been cut, not a man, a gun or a wagon need have escaped. The way would have been open for a general Arab revolt in Syria. Though he successfully mined Jamal Pasha the Lesser’s train near Minifir the following day, Lawrence knew that all the great opportunities he had hoped for had now been lost. Dejectedly he returned to the castle at Azraq, arriving there on 12 November.

  Azraq castle had stood since Roman times on the shore of a vast, shallow lake, where the waters of the great Wadi Sirhan collected after the rains. Until the 1960s at least it lay in an oasis unique in the Syrian desert – a region of woods and marshes inhabited by every species of water-bird, by leopard, hyena, wild boar and even buffalo. Once, it attracted hunters from all over the Arab world. In Lawrence’s day the black basalt fortress must have stood out for miles across the sand-sheets and lava-fields. Today it is almost lost among ragged streets of breeze-block buildings, petrol-stations and barbed wire. The magic which Lawrence describes has gone, together with the waters of the lake, which have been siphoned off to Amman. I arrived in Azraq in a yellow taxi with my ex-Jordanian Special Forces friend, Mohammad al-Hababeh, and together we walked to the castle, and found it surprisingly well-kept inside. The guardian – an old Druse who seemed half crazy, and who was fond of interjecting English four-letter words into his conversation – showed us a photograph of his father, a Druse officer whom he claimed had served with Lawrence (though the Druses had not generally joined the Revolt until after the fall of Damascus). He shuffled around with us as we paced from wall to wall, following Lawrence’s description in my coverless old copy of Seven Pillars. The most remarkable fe
atures of the castle were its two stone doors – giant slabs of basalt a foot thick, weighing tons, which had been ingeniously poised on greased pivots so that they could be opened and closed easily by the effort of a single man. Lawrence wrote that the main door was blocked during his sojourn, and a sentry posted at the postern gate whose job was to slam the great door to at sunset, so that the walls of the castle reverberated. We saw the mosque which had been used as a sheep-fold, until Hassan Shah, the Jemadar of the Indian machine-gunners, had had it cleaned out and sanctified once more, inspected the corner tower which Sharif ‘Ali had chosen as his quarters, and even identified the breach in the wall – now restored – which Lawrence had had made so that the camels could be brought inside at night. Above the gate-house was the room Lawrence himself had occupied, a spacious garret with low windows through which shafts of light pierced the dust. I found Lawrence’s description of how his men would light a fire on the stone floor on cold nights and gather around in their cloaks to recite poems and tell stories, as the coffee-cups went their rounds. On such nights, with the wind ravaging the castle walls, they had heard a ghostly wailing and sighing along the battlements, which the Bedu had attributed to the dogs of the Bani Hillal – the mythical builders of the fort – endlessly questing the six towers for a trace of their lost masters.