Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Some stiff claims have been made for the effects of Lawrence’s treatment at Dara’a: ‘After the homosexual rape …’Jeremy Wilson writes, ‘the consummation of a marriage would have been utterly abhorrent to him. The incident had left him with an aversion to physical contact, which was noticed by many of his friends.’31 It has also been said that the horrific experience warped his character for ever, giving him an obsession with cleanliness and bathing, and perhaps turning him into the full-blown masochist he became later. However, all these traits are manifest in Lawrence’s early life. He himself wrote that his aversion to physical contact was the result of a struggle he had endured in his youth – most probably with his mother. He displayed masochistic behaviour in his self-deprivation at an early age, frequently showed an inordinate concern with cleanliness and bathing in his letters home, and always seems to have preferred men to women. Even a cursory reading of Seven Pillars shows an unmistakable approval and acceptance of the idea of homoerotic sex and a rejection and disgust for the heterosexual variety. As early as the second page of the main text, indeed, he commends the youths who reject the ‘raddled meat’ of women to ‘[slake] one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that by comparison seemed sexless and even pure …’32 The ideology is clear. It is very difficult to see how, by any conceivable convolution of logic, the experience of homosexual rape could have created an aversion to heterosexuality and an apparent warm approval of the ‘purity’ of homosexuality, unless Lawrence had some predisposition to it. As for ‘warping him for ever’, Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnie, wrote that he ‘had always been a person of remarkable control and poise … Well, this all went on after the war and in addition he developed a tremendous zest for anything comic. He had obviously gone through tremendous difficulties and done so by seeing the funny side of them.’33 If this does not sound like a man whose spirit had been shattered by horrific experiences during the war, then neither does the Lawrence who, in December 1917 – a month after the supposed torture at Daraa – joined Allenby at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate for his triumphal entry into the old city: ‘He was gay that day,’ wrote A. P. Wavell, who walked beside him at the procession, ‘with jests at his borrowed uniform and at the official appointment that had been loaned him for the ceremony – staff officer to Bertie Clayton. He said as usual little of himself, and barely mentioned that great ride to, and unlucky failure at, the Yarmuk valley bridge, from which he had just returned.’34

  18. The Most Ghastly Material to Build into a Design

  Tafilah and Tel ash-Shahm January-April 1918

  Lawrence had arrived at GHQ expecting some sort of rebuke for his failure to carry the Yarmuk bridge, to find that Allenby had already moved on. The Gaza-Beersheba line had been breached, Jerusalem had fallen, and Sir Edmund’s thoughts were already encompassing the Dead Sea. When the EEF had gathered its strength, transport and supplies – by February 1918 – he planned to unleash it on Jericho. The Hashemite base at Aqaba was now behind his own lines. If the Arabs could take Tafilah, in the wheat-growing Belqa uplands on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, then they could link up again with the British right flank. Lawrence thought they could move even farther – as far as the north end of the Dead Sea – as long as Allenby could supply them through Jericho once it had fallen. The Arab base would then shift from Aqaba to Jericho, which would be defended by the Arab Northern Army under Ja’afar Pasha – now 3,000 strong. Considered indisciplined and inefficient, Ja’afar’s regulars had astonished everyone with their tenacity when, in October 1917, the Turks had finally mounted a sledgehammer attack against the Hashemite outpost at Wadi Musa, near Petra, in brigade strength. The regulars had numbered only 350: two companies of camel-corps, and two of mule-mounted infantry under the savagely competent Maulud al-Mukhlis. Yet they had proved once and for all that trained Arab troops could hold a position against superior numbers, and had thrown back the enemy so decisively that the Turks never attacked an entrenched force of Arab regulars again.

  The capture of Tafilah did not prove a difficult task. When Sharif Nasir and Auda Abu Tayyi appeared on its doorstep at dawn on 16 January 1918, having ridden all night with some Towayha and Bani Sakhr horsemen, they captured it without difficulty. Their only opposition came, not from the 180-strong Turkish garrison, but from the local Muhaysin peasantry, whose Sheikh was an anti-Hashemite partisan. When Auda rode down to the houses, and declared: ‘Dogs! Do you not know Auda Abu Tayyi?’ the peasants capitulated at once. By that evening the Arabs had been augmented by a contingent of Auda’s rivals, the ibn Jazi Howaytat, who had long since deserted the Turks for the Hashemite cause, and four days later Lawrence arrived with Sharif Zayd, Ja’afar Pasha, Zayd’s household Agayl, Bishah and ‘Utayba, and a small force of regulars with two mountain-guns. They had left their main force at Shobek, where it was stuck for lack of supplies. Auda and his clan were sent back to Jefer to prevent strife between them and the ibn Jazi, who stayed behind under their young chiefs Mata’ab and Annad. In a report written on 22 January, Lawrence wrote that the Hashemites had about 500 men in the town, but that the local peasants were bitterly divided and terrified of each other and of the Hashemite force. That the capture of Tafilah was regarded simply as a stepping-stone to the towns of Moab is indicated by his observation that ‘Tafil[ah] will not ease up till we take Kerak, and Kerak till we take Madeba.’1 Zayd took steps to police the town and appointed a governor, then sent cavalry scouts north along the road to Kerak to probe Turkish strength, with a quick push into Moab in mind. It was in the chasm of Sayl al-Haysa – the great wadi that divides Edom from Moab – that on 23 January his pickets fell foul of a Turkish cavalry screen outriding a force of three infantry battalions with two howitzers. Astonishingly, and against all logic, Lawrence thought, the Turks were coming back.

  It was his vexation at this sudden reprise, Lawrence said, that made him determined to break his rule and fight a pitched battle for the first time. According to him, the engagement went off like a travesty of a classic regular battle out of Clausewitz or Foch. First, a tiny unit composed of peasants and Bedu horsemen, with two machine-guns, drove the Turkish vanguard off the plateau to the north of Tafilah and back into Sayl al-Haysa, where they ran slap into the main body of Turkish troops, who had just struck camp, and who opened up immediately with howitzers and machine-guns. The Arabs lost their own gun, and backtracked to the plateau, sheltering behind a four-foot ridge and firing desperately until their ammunition had almost run out, trying to duck the ricocheting spray of bullets from at least fifteen machine-guns directed at them from the Turkish lines. At this point, Lawrence appeared up in the eye of the battle, having strolled unarmed and barefoot across the plateau amid falling shells which the Turkish gunners had as yet failed to range correctly. On the way, he had coolly inspected the skin of an unexploded round to see what calibre of artillery the Turks were using. He saw the position was hopeless, and ordered the Arab riflemen to withdraw to a ridge three kilometres behind them, which he had already manned with twenty ‘Agayl of Sharif Zayd’s bodyguard. He begged the few horsemen of the ibn Jazi to hang on for ten or fifteen minutes to cover the retreat. He ran back, pacing out the ground, and was soon overtaken by the retreating cavalry, whose leader, Mata’ab, picked him up. Zayd’s force now crossed the ravine, and the whole Arab contingent was concentrated on his ‘Reserve Ridge’, from where they so dominated the terrain with mountain-guns and machine-guns that the Turks were obliged to halt their advance. Lawrence wrote that the battlefield was wedge-shaped with the Reserve Ridge as the flat side, and eastern and western ridges converging on the edge of the Haysa escarpment about three miles before them. The Turkish H Q and reserve lay beyond the apex of the wedge, with infantry and machine-guns deployed along the spines of the ridges to the left and right. For the Arabs, the obvious solution was to slip around the sides, under cover of the ridges, and catch the Turks in a pincer movement. Accordingly, Rasim Sardast, the artillery officer, was sent around the
back of the eastern ridge with eighty riders, while Lawrence sent a contingent of new recruits – peasants from a neighbouring village called ‘Ayma – to creep round the ridge to the west. Just before four o’clock in the afternoon, the ‘Ayma men came over the ridge suddenly, taking the Turkish machine-gun nests from behind. They rushed them from only 200 yards, put them to flight, and captured the guns. On the enemy’s left flank, Rasim and his horsemen charged in almost simultaneously, while all the Arabs left behind the Reserve Ridge rushed forwards. The Turks were now streaming off the battlefield, abandoning their machine-guns and howitzers. The Ottoman commander, Hamid Fakhri, who was heard to say that in forty years he had never seen irregulars fight like this, mounted his horse to rally his troops but was struck down by an Arab bullet and mortally wounded. This was the final straw for the demoralized Turks, who withdrew in panic into Sayl al-Haysa, with the Arabs after them. Only about fifty, it was later reported, succeeded in getting back to Kerak. It was a resounding victory: of the 600 Turks who had set out from Kerak two days previously, almost 200 had been killed, including the commander, and 250 taken prisoner. The Arabs had also captured two Skoda mountain howitzers, twenty-seven machine-guns and 200 horses and mules. The official war history, whose account of the battle was – like every other European account – taken directly from Lawrence himself, called it ‘a brilliant feat of arms’.2 Yet Lawrence wrote later that his report on the battle was a deliberate parody whose intention was to mock his superiors’ rigid belief in the dicta of military thinkers such as Clausewitz and Foch. The biggest joke of all, he wrote, was that, far from recognizing this mockery, they swallowed it all gravely and awarded him the D S O: ‘We should have more bright breasts in the army,’ he chuckled, ‘if each man was able, without witnesses, to write out his own despatch.’3 Lawrence claimed in Seven Pillars that he, and he alone, had deliberately and voluntarily decided to fight a pitched battle at Tafilah, yet since he also mocked his own account of the engagement, I found myself wondering what part he had really played in its phenomenal success.

  I travelled to Tafilah with my ex-Special Forces friend Mohammad al-Hababeh to see the battlefield for myself, and found the town’s setting far more lovely than I could have imagined. The old part of Tafilah – the Muhaysin quarter – was a tightly packed neighbourhood of stone houses clustered around a small, square fort, which stood on a panhandle promontory, overlooking the deep rift of the Sayl az-Zarqa. To the south, across the ravine, lay the village of Busayra, and to the north, the great plateau on which the battle itself had been fought. Directly west, looking along the cleft of the Sayl, you could glimpse the gleaming green valley of the Dead Sea.

  First, we called in at the Tourist Office. The officer there was very friendly and ordered us tea, but no, he couldn’t tell us where the battle of Tafilah had been fought. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘Lawrence had nothing to do with the battle. He was just a British spy.’ We thanked him, and drove down to the oldest building in the town – the Ottoman fort. This, we decided, was the correct place to start, for it was marked on the plan of the battle I had photocopied from the official war history. From there, I located Lawrence’s Reserve Ridge by a simple compass-bearing and Mohammad drove me around the gorge to the foot of the steep chalky escarpment, where we left the car and climbed up. There were newly planted Aleppo pines and cedars on the terraces, and near the top I saw masonry blocks among the stones which Lawrence had identified as Byzantine – the local name for his ‘Reserve Ridge’ was Khirbat Nokheh: ‘the ruin of the resting-place’. Along the spine of the ridge were pits which might well have been gun-emplacements from the battle itself, and a view across undulating volcanic heath with waving yellow goatgrass and nests of black stones and boulders, but scarcely a single tree. Below me to the left I could clearly see the western ridge on which the Turkish machine-guns had been placed, and which had been taken by the ‘Ayma men from the rear. The rest of the battlefield, however, was not as I had expected. From the plan, and from Lawrence’s account, I had imagined a triangular plain bounded by ridges on two sides. Instead I saw an undulating hillside of field and stubble tilting up to the right, to the base of a great buttress hogsback along the base of which ran the Kerak-Tafilah road. The far edge of the plateau, where the Turkish H Q had stood, appeared to be in sight from the map, but in practice it was hidden by high ground which lay directly in front of me. The final charge from Reserve Ridge, therefore, had been down a slope into dead ground, and then over another ridge before falling on the Turks – quite a different impression from that given by Lawrence of a charge downhill. Mohammad examined the map carefully and squinted at the ground, then pointed out to me a note stating that the map was based on ‘an oblique aerial photograph’ – possibly the photo shown in the same report, taken in 1929, which looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the town. In fact the official report had been made in the same year, for I later traced two letters from Lawrence to its author, Major Archibold Becke, dated 1929: ‘You want me to check the affair now, on my twelve year old memories,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘against air-photos of the ground. Isn’t that overdoing what was originally meant… to be a joke? … The whole thing’s absurd.’4 Although Lawrence subsequently wrote that Becke’s map ‘squared substantially with his memories’, there was plainly some discrepancy between the map and the ground. We began to walk down the hillside, pacing towards the end of the western ridge, where Lawrence had met the Muhaysin and the ibn Jazi and ordered them to withdraw. As I walked, I had a vivid vision of bullets whining past me, of the boom and crash of falling shells, the tang of cordite, the rattle of machine-guns. I was still engrossed in my reverie when a voice said, ‘Peace be on you,’ and I saw an old shepherd, a brown-skinned man with a face like cured vellum, dressed in a dirty sheepskin cloak and a tattered headcloth, scuffling over a stony fold with about ninety scrawny brown and white sheep. Mohammad asked him if he knew anything about Lawrence and the battle of Tafilah. ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘But there was fighting up here, because we find shells and bullets sometimes.’ It took us almost an hour to reach the far tip of the western ridge where the Turkish machine-gun battery had supposedly been sited, which would bear out Lawrence’s statement that the distance was roughly two miles. We climbed to the top through soft ploughed soil, and saw from there a deep cleft in the ground, cut by water, long ago, which ran all the way down into the ravine. This, I thought, must have been the secret path by which the Ayma men had sneaked up behind the Turks, and thus changed the whole course of the battle: ‘the main Turkish effort,’ Lawrence wrote to Major Becke, ‘was along the ridge afterwards cleared by the men of [‘Ayma].’5

  The assault of the ‘Ayma men was clearly the decisive moment in the battle, but whether it was Lawrence himself who sent them forward, as he later told Liddell Hart, is disputable. Another participant in the battle, Subhi al-Amari, a regular Arab officer commanding a machine-gun section, recalled that the peasants of ‘Ayma had gathered on a hill called Khirbat as-Saba ah, about a kilometre to the right of the Turkish flank. According to Subhi, the Turkish position was out of range from Reserve Ridge. This is evidently so, for though Lawrence told Becke that he had to put up the sights of his Vickers to 3,000 yards to spray the retreat, the sights of a Vickers actually only extended to 2,900 yards, which was the weapon’s maximum range. As Richard Aldington correctly pointed out, a machine-gun duel at 3,000 yards was unthinkable in that era. Subhi had the sudden idea of moving his two guns around the western ridge in order to get in range. He and his men had sprinted across the dead ground and crawled to the base of the ridge, where they were joined spontaneously by the ‘Ayma peasants. His machine-gunners clambered up the slope and opened fire on the Turks from point-blank range, and were swiftly followed by a rush from the ‘Ayma men. The Turkish unit nearest the Arabs was badly hit, and the commander ordered his men to turn their line and face the peasants. It was at this point, Subhi wrote, that an unexpected thing happened. When the Turks stood up to change the l
ine, the ‘Ayma men thought they were about to retreat and launched an impulsive attack, shouting and cheering. The Turks, taken aback, simply abandoned their guns and ran, and their panic spread to the nearby units, who did the same. Subhi later learned from a prisoner that at this precise moment, most of the Turkish officers had withdrawn from the line to attend an orders-group with the CO, and thus there was no one to rally the Turkish rank and file in their retreat. This was why, when the Turks fell into disorder, Hamid Fakhri had, as Lawrence also recorded, instructed his officers, too late, to take a rifle each and return to the line.

  The Arab historian Suleiman Mousa told me that he had spoken with a number of veterans of the battle, most of whom remembered seeing Lawrence on the battlefield, but all of whom confirmed that the engagement was a highly haphazard affair, as Subhi’s report suggests. Lawrence himself hinted at this when he told Liddell Hart that as the ‘Ayma men had arrived from the west (their village lay a few miles west of the battlefield), ‘it is possible that geography had as much part as strategy in deciding the form of their attack’.6 What of Lawrence’s other claims? He wrote that he had decided to fight a pitched battle out of anger at the Turks’ stupidity in coming back, sent machine-guns forward to support the peasants, chose the Reserve Ridge as a last defensive line, ordered the spearhead back to the ridge, and urged Zayd to move his main body there. The evidence, though, is that it was neither Lawrence nor Sharif Zayd who decided to confront the Turks on the plateau, but the Muhaysin peasants of Tafilah, who were loath to let them back in their town: the action of a few dozen of them had obliged Lawrence to make a stand. There is no reason to suppose that he did not send the machine-guns to support them on his own initiative, nor that he did not choose the Reserve Ridge, counsel Zayd to move, or order the vanguard to withdraw. Evidently, then, he played a major part in the battle. Why the self-mockery, the peppering of aphorisms from military history in his account? What was the joke? The answer, surely, is that Lawrence realized the impossibility of reducing a series of chance events, by which most military engagements are decided, to some kind of logical pattern, which could be expressed in a brief report: ‘Throughout it I was quoting to myself absurd tags of Foch and the other blood fighters,’ he wrote to Major Becke in 1929, ‘and in every movement I was parodying the sort of thing they recommended, but exaggerating just enough to make it ridiculous. The account I wrote of it afterwards was in the same vein: a parody of a proper despatch. The Palestine staff took it seriously: I hope [you are] not going to follow their mistake.’7