Regular detachments athwart the track were, for Newcombe, the only way in which the Damascus-Medina railways could be fractured. Lawrence disagreed and his view of the matter prevailed. It was defended in the Seven Pillars and later uncritically approved by Liddell Hart, for whom it was one of the essential principles of guerrilla warfare. What Lawrence favoured was a war of attrition waged by irregulars who would deliberately avoid pitched battles with Turkish units even when the latter were outnumbered. This was making a strategic virtue out of a tactical necessity. The experience of the first six months of 1917 had shown that whenever Turkish forces fought back, the Arabs flinched, even when they possessed superior numbers. British and French officers were disheartened by displays of Beduin cowardice and panic. On 14 April 1917, 1,000 Beduin refused to charge a blockhouse manned by 100 during an attack on the line between Muadham and Sana. Afterwards, Garland discovered Ageyl tribesmen skulking in a ravine. In May, Newcombe requested that future raids be undertaken by himself, Hornby and their servants rather ‘than a gang of men who will abandon us’. The following month, Adjudant Lamotte and his British colleagues were abandoned by Beduin and Egyptians the moment it was clear that the Turks would fight back.21
Even when pressed home, the raids were accomplishing little. The eyewitness record of a Turkish officer serving in Medina throughout the siege presents a picture of a garrison resolutely facing hardship and untroubled by occasional delays in rail services from Damascus.22 Fahreddin Pasha, now known as ‘the Tiger of the Desert’, was unfrightened by the railway war and confident of eventual victory. Rations dwindled, but the men made do, in June 1918 even consuming locusts after their commander had assured them that a locust was ‘just a sparrow without feathers’. Trains came and went even when the line came under pressure from Lawrence’s saboteurs: the last reinforcements, a detachment from the 17th Railway Division, arrived in Medina on 4 March 1918. Only on 10 August 1918, when Qalat el Mudawarrah station was occupied, did Fahreddin concede that his rail link with Damascus had been finally broken.23 This much was known to British intelligence which had intercepted his message.
The picture of a determined commander and his men making do in rough conditions was well known to British officers serving in Hejaz and to the Arab Bureau in Cairo. Starvation was no problem for there were local Beduin, including the Beli, El Fakir and Shammar tribesmen, who were loyal to the Sultan and willing to send food to Medina. So too was Ali Rashid and, Garland discovered, some venal tribesmen serving with Abdullah’s besieging forces.24 There was no consistent surveillance of the line to discover exactly what was being achieved by the raids. The intelligence which was collected indicated that the damage inflicted was marginal; on 29 April 1917 a crated aeroplane reached Medina and a fortnight after a battalion of infantry was said to have travelled from Damascus to el Ula.
Looking back on the war, Garland, whose experience was at least equal to Lawrence’s, summed up the operations as a failure:
I do not think the raids inconvenienced them until their communications were finally severed between Maan and [Qalat el] Mudawarrah in April 1918, by imperial armoured cars and camels corps who destroyed 60 miles of line which were never repaired [my italics].
This judgement was upheld by H.St.J. Philby who had watched the war from the sidelines as Britain’s representative to Ibn Saud. After the war he challenged the strategic assumption, which he took to be Lawrence’s, that the campaign against the Medina line had been of any practical value.25 The city survived both the interruption of rail traffic and the siege by Abdullah’s ‘feeble and unenterprising army’.
Lawrence had already served a brief apprenticeship as a railway saboteur during March and early April when he was undertaking liaison duties between Faisal and Abdullah. It was then, while tormented by boils and a victim of the dysentery epidemic which was gripping Abdullah’s army, that he formulated his theories of guerrilla warfare. He translated theory into practice on the night of 29-30 March when he derailed a train, one of whose two engines was damaged by the shellfire of Egyptian gunners. The attack was not pressed home since tribal machine-gunners had deserted their posts because they were lonely, but their behaviour did not discountenance him, for he had never subscribed to the professionalism of his colleagues Newcombe and Garland. Shortly after, he undertook two further demolitions.
Free of sickness, he reported to Wilson that he found the work congenial. ‘The results of the trip were to show me the rare value of the Dakhilallal. Their humour makes railway breaking a pleasure to them.’ So it was for all Beduin whose lands bordered on the railway. For them it was a hateful innovation which stripped them of the incomes they had formerly enjoyed from pilgrims, and it was an instrument of tighter Ottoman control. A derailed train presented wonderful opportunities for plunder which Lawrence, even if he had wished to, could not prevent.
Always an enthusiast for gadgetry, he began to pick up the recondite skills of the demolition engineer, thanks in part to the tuition of Garland, whom he found an agreeable instructor. Over the next fifteen months he learned on the job and, in January 1919, published a brief paper on railway demolition in the Royal Engineers’ Journal. It was crammed with practical details on gun cotton, gelatine, mines, electrical detonators and the wayward habits of fuses, as well as advice on the best places to lay charges. Lawrence’s experience had also taught him that damage to or removal of track was a fruitless enterprise. ‘Speaking as a rule,’ he wrote, ‘rail demolitions are wasteful and ineffective unless the enemy is short of metal or unless they are only made adjuncts to bridge-breaking.’ This was an acknowledgement of the efficiency of Turkish repair gangs.
In September 1917 Lawrence began his systematic campaign against the northern sector of the Hejaz line in fulfilment of his obligation to Allenby. His first objective was a stretch of track north of Qalat el Mudawarrah station. Attached to him and under the command of Awda were 116 Beduin from various tribes whose squabbling and cussedness gave the expedition the flavour of an outing by an unruly class of schoolboys. Tribal antics, Lawrence reported, ‘threw upon me a great deal of detailed work, for which I had no qualifications and throughout the expedition I had more preoccupation with questions of supply, transport, tribal pay, disputes, division of spoil, feuds, march order, and the like.’26 The ‘cranky, quarrelsome’ Huweitat gave the most trouble and Lawrence had to settle fourteen tribal feuds, a dozen assaults, four camel thefts, a row over a marriage portion, one case of bewitchment and two of the evil eye. Also in the company were two specialists, Sergeant Yells, a Lewis-gun instructor, and Brooks, an Australian who managed the Stokes mortar. They spoke not a word of Arabic and were nicknamed Lewis and Stokes.
The company may at times have been irksome, but the scenery was magnificent. The party passed up the Wadi Yutm and headed eastwards towards the line, finding on the way that the Turks had soured a water hole with the corpses of camels. A crepuscular reconnaissance of Qalat el Mudawarrah station revealed a garrison of about 200, which ruled out a direct attack by Lawrence’s small, disharmonious force. Instead Lawrence chose to place an electronically detonated mine under the double-arched bridge. Setting the device and hiding his traces took five hours. The following morning, 16 September, brought a bonus for the company: a northward-bound train was seen getting up steam in the station. At the same time Turkish patrols fanned out and, to draw them away from the mine, thirty Arabs were detached to engage them in an extended skirmish.
Lawrence mistakenly feared that the discovery of hostile Arabs near the station might make the local commander delay the train, but he took no notice of the nearby marauders and the train of twelve carriages, pulled by two engines, steamed out of Qalat el Mudawarrah on its journey north towards Maan. Lawrence pressed the detonator and blew up the bridge under the second engine. The Arabs, deployed on a ridge overlooking the line, opened fire and then rushed the wagons under cover of Lewis-gun and mortar fire. Resistance crumbled and they got down to the looting.
There
were many prisoners [Lawrence reported] and women hanging on to me, I had to keep the peace among plunderers, and the Turks from the south opened fire on us at long range just as the train surrendered, since our covering fire on that side came in to share the booty.
There were seventy Turkish dead and ninety prisoners of whom sixty–eight reached Aqaba alive. Two German officers were among the captured, and five Egyptians who had been taken a month before during a raid further south. It had been a close-run thing and disaster had been averted only by the coolness of Yells and Brooks. Afterwards Lawrence wrote, ‘I do not think the Arabs could possibly have carried the train before Turkish relief came, had they not been present.’ Their fire accounted for half the enemy’s casualties.
The Seven Pillars included a few adornments to the plain tale of Lawrence’s official report, with a grim account of how the prisoners, including women and Austrian officers and NCOs, pleaded for their lives. Recognising him as a European, several clung to Lawrence–‘A Turk so broken down was a nasty spectacle: I kicked them off as well as I could with my bare feet, and finally broke free.’ A row broke out between the prisoners and Lawrence’s Agayl bodyguard, presumably over loot, and a shot was fired at an Arab which was the signal for a massacre from which only two or three Austrians were saved. Something of the same sort had occurred when a train had been derailed in February, which no doubt explains the terror of the passengers who sought Lawrence’s protection. Arab pitilessness may also explain but not excuse Turkish cruelty to captured or wounded guerrillas. There was no mention of this incident in Lawrence’s official report.
A second raid followed, this time against Kilo 475 south of Maan. On this expedition Lawrence was joined by Captain Pisani, a Corsican ex–ranker who ‘looked like a brigand disguised, unconvincingly, as a French officer’. Brave and lusty, he spoke freely about his sexual adventures, which entertained his British colleagues but must have vexed Lawrence, who abhorred ribaldry.27 Pisani’s crudeness apart, he was peeved by the presence of French officers at Aqaba, even though they had been requested by Faisal. Pisani’s courage impressed Lawrence, who recommended him for a Military Cross after he had seen him lead the Arabs in a charge against a derailed supply train.28 During the fighting, a Turkish officer recognised Lawrence and Pisani as European officers and deliberately fired at them. One shot grazed Lawrence’s hip. In the Seven Pillars he wrote ungallantly of his adversary’s percipience: ‘I laughed at his too-great energy, which thought, like a regular officer, to promote the war by the killing of an individual.’
The attack over, Lawrence returned to Aqaba to start preparations for the next and most vital phase of his programme, railway sabotage and mischief-making in Syria to coincide with Allenby’s imminent offensive. First, he had to visit HQ to receive Allenby’s orders and discuss his plans with Clayton and Hogarth. Time was now short; the offensive was due to begin on 27 October, so Lawrence left Aqaba for Ismailia on 11 October in one of the newly arrived aircraft of X Flight.
When he arrived on the 12th, later than expected thanks to engine trouble, he set to work on future arrangements for Arab forces at Aqaba. Affairs there had languished over the past eight weeks. Faisal was gloomy and, in Lawrence’s absence, had unburdened his woes to Commander Snagge of the Humber. He was fearful that Aqaba would be retaken by the forces based on Maan and was disheartened by the attitude of the Syrian tribes, who refused to move until he did. Hussain and Abdullah had both urged him not to go to Aqaba and he now wished he had heeded their words. If he failed, he would have to kill himself.29 So much for the man whom Lawrence would later call ‘A Modern Saladin’.
Taking their cue from their leader, his soldiers were in poor heart. Aqaba was suffering a cholera epidemic and there was endless wrangling between Syrian and Iraqi regulars which exploded into violence when a Syrian tried to assassinate Jafar al Askari.30 Colonel Joyce, doing his best to impose order on what he called a ‘Harry Lauder’ show (music-hall comparisons were commonly used by regular officers when seeking ways of describing the Arab armies), realised that it would take time to transform Jafar’s men into ‘a fighting unit of much military value’.31 He and Lawrence knew Jafar’s qualities, and their faith in him, if not his men, was vindicated on 27 October when 350 mounted infantry under his command were attacked near Petra. In an inconclusive engagement, they endured artillery fire and aerial bombardment and held off their attackers.
The first Turkish response to the seizure of Aqaba had been to bring three Pfalz bombers of the Ottoman Air Force to Maan from the Caucasus front and use them for intermittent raids against Arab encampments. These attacks continued throughout September and worried Joyce, not so much for the casualties they inflicted as for the harm they did to fragile Arab morale. At Lawrence’s request, counterattacks were launched against Maan by RFC machines based on Kuntilla. He took a keen interest in these air raids, showing the pilots specific targets.32 The resolution of the Turkish pilots was not matched by that of the Maan commander, Muhammad Jamal Pasha, whose thrust towards Aqaba lacked sufficient momentum to get far. By early November and the onset of cold weather, warfare south and west of Maan came to a temporary halt, allowing the Arabs some respite.
Lawrence and Allenby’s staff appreciated that the future security of Aqaba rested on the presence of the promised armoured cars, motorised artillery and flight of bombers, whose transfer had to be accelerated. Turning to the campaign against the Hejaz railway, Lawrence was optimistic. Clayton reported his views to Wingate:
As regards Lawrence’s proposals for future action, he has paved the way and gained the necessary experience by means of his recent train breaking raids and his plan now is to make a serious attack on [Qalat el] Mudawarrah with three forces–one to the north and one to the south to prevent the arrival of reinforcements, and the third to attack [Qalat el] Mudawarrah station and destroy it and its water supply which is essential to that section of railway.33
The timing of this operation lay with Allenby, who would need Lawrence for behind-the-lines sabotage in Syria. If, as Clayton guessed, this would take precedence, then the Qalat el Mudawarrah ‘stunt’ would have to be left to Joyce. Still, Lawrence was keen to be there to see it ‘thoroughly and successfully done’. He predicted the swift fall of Medina once the station had been knocked out and he hoped that Hussain would accordingly increase Faisal’s allowance to £100,000 monthly.
Lawrence’s recent experiences had taught him that tip-and-run raids by Beduin achieved little, save filling Beduin saddlebags with loot. Larger, more substantial forces were needed to do damage which could not be repaired by the 1,500 railway troops the Turks were now deploying along the line. This had already been affirmed by Newcombe further south after a successful raid undertaken by Indian and Algerian regular troops.
II
A Covert Operation
Two behind–the–lines operations were planned to coincide with Allenby’s offensive in Palestine. The first, undertaken at his own suggestion, was by Newcombe. On 30 October, he took twenty Arabs, got behind Turkish lines and briefly severed the Beersheba-Hebron road before being taken prisoner. The second operation was Lawrence’s attempt to destroy a bridge on the Haifa-Dera railway at Tell el Shehab. While it was impossible to keep to an exact timetable in such hazardous operations, Lawrence had been briefed to carry out the demolition on 5 November in order to cause the maximum damage to Turkish communications during a crucial stage in the campaign. According to GHQ plans, the attack on Beersheba would begin on 30 October and that on Gaza on 1-2 November and, once they had fallen, mounted forces would chase retreating Turkish units northwards and prevent them from regrouping. If Lawrence destroyed the bridge the line would be closed for at least fourteen days. Reinforcements would be delayed and fleeing troops thrown into greater confusion.
His tactical objective achieved, Lawrence was free to turn his attentions towards the second stage of his mission. This involved an attack by Druze and Anazah irregulars on Dera which would distract Turki
sh forces in the region and hamstring their communications with Damascus. Such a coup, and the knowledge that British forces were advancing northwards, might encourage a rash of uprisings across Palestine and southern Syria which would further hinder the Turks.
These plans were discussed by Lawrence, Clayton, Wingate and Allenby during a series of meetings on 16 and 17 October. The general arrangements having been made, it was up to Lawrence to devise his own operational plans and schedule. ‘Lawrence’s venture is a side show which of course must be undertaken entirely independently and timed by him,’ Clayton told Joyce on 24 October.1 The responsibility was intimidating, the hazards vast, and Lawrence, already overworked, feared he might not measure up. Clayton sensed his secret apprehensions:
I am very anxious about Lawrence. He has taken on a really colossal job and I can see that it is well-nigh weighing him down. He has a lion’s heart, but even so the strain must be very great. Well, he is doing a great work and as soon as may be we must pull him out and not risk him further–but the time is not yet, as he is wanted just now. The first real issue in this theatre of the war is at hand and much will depend on the doings of the next month. We shall then see the future and its possibilities more clearly.2
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