Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Such an outcome would have satisfied the Francophobes in Cairo for whom the campaign was a golden opportunity to dish the French and bring Syria within an Anglo–Arab orbit. This was nothing less than an attempt by subordinates to reverse official policy, and Lawrence was an enthusiastic accomplice. Osmond Walrond, an official attached to the Arab Bureau who had served under Viscount Milner in Egypt and South Africa, reported their activities to his former master, now Secretary for War. On 22 September he wrote of how Faisal was being badly advised (presumably by Lawrence) and of the anti-French views prevalent within the Arab Bureau.2 For the time being Allenby was unaware of Lawrence’s feelings and his fellow conspirators’ plans.

  Just how deep Lawrence’s feelings were on this matter was revealed in the Seven Pillars. Its sub-title ‘A Triumph’ could only be justified in terms of the final chapters in which the Arabs advance on and capture Damascus unaided. From the start, Lawrence had presented Damascus as the only goal worthy of the Arabs, for the liberation of the city would symbolise the release of the entire Arab world from Ottoman bondage. In purely literary terms the entry into Damascus represents the end of Lawrence’s personal quest; the vindication of his faith in the Arabs; the reward for sacrifice; and incontrovertible evidence of what had been achieved by his and their willpower. All the major and minor themes introduced in the narrative are drawn together in the Damascus chapters to give the work an artistic completeness. In striving for artistic effect, satisfying to himself and his readers, Lawrence was forced to jettison historical authenticity.

  His account of much that occurred before and after the capture of the city was a fabrication and demonstrably so. ‘I was on thin ice when I wrote the Damascus chapter,’ he later admitted, ‘and anyone who copies me will be through it, if he is not careful. S.P. [Seven Pillars] is full of half-truth: here.’3 There were political reasons for Lawrence’s tinkering with historical truth. By concocting a version of the Damascus campaign in which the exertions of British, ANZAC and Indian troops are scarcely mentioned, even in passing, Lawrence manufactured potent political propaganda, turning the Arabs into what they were not, the first emancipators of Damascus. The distortion was perpetuated in Rattigan’s Ross and Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.

  Damascus was not Lawrence’s official objective in September 1918. His primary task was to make sure that the Arabs did what Allenby required of them. He was the link between Arab detachments and Allenby’s HQ and, after British and Arab units had made contact near Dera, he took charge of the arrangements for their future co-operation. On 26 September, Allenby appointed Lawrence political liaison officer to General Sir Harry Chauvel whose Australian Mounted Division was under orders to move on Damascus.4

  The Arab army assigned to the Dera sector was commanded by two able and experienced commanders, Nuri es Said and Nasir. It was small, mobile and well-equipped. There were 450 regular camelry with twenty light machine-guns, Pisani’s Algerian gunners, two Rolls-Royce armoured cars, a Ghurka machine-gun company, and Peake’s Egyptian camelry. Air support was provided by two machines from X Flight, for which an airstrip had been levelled at el Azraq, which Lawrence had chosen as the force’s base. The first phase of the operation was the march from Bir el Lasan to el Azraq, where the column found supplies and was augmented by 4,000 or so Beduin already hired by Lawrence. They comprised Rwallah under Nuri Shalaan, who had finally come off the fence, Huweitat under Awda, and Arab peasantry from the Hawran. From el Azraq the column advanced to its forward base at Umtaiye from where it would launch a series of railway raids scheduled to begin on 16 September. These attacks would both disrupt rail communications and trick the Turks into thinking that the main offensive would fall in this region.

  Detailed plans for the railway operations had been devised by Lawrence, who, impatient with regular procedures, had left Joyce and Young to arrange the logistical support. This was a source of some disagreement, for Lawrence imagined that the regular Arab forces could get by in the desert in the same way as the Beduin. He was therefore dismissive of his colleagues’ meticulous arrangements for transport lines and supply dumps, forgetting that the regulars were the pith and essence of his little army. They very nearly did not leave Aqaba, for at the end of August there had been a small-scale mutiny caused by Hussain’s public denial of Jafar al Askari’s title ‘Commander-in-Chief of the Arab armies’. This insult was compounded by a claim that no Arab could hold a rank higher than captain. Furious at these characteristically boneheaded statements, the entire officer corps of Faisal’s army resigned their commissions. The dispute turned ugly during the night of 1–2 September when the Arab other ranks threatened to turn their field-guns on the officers’ lines. Sensing the men’s temper, Joyce had ordered the guns’ breech-blocks to be removed and he, Faisal and Lawrence mediated. The officers’ commissions were restored, but the tension remained; on 9 November HQ instructed the guard ship to stay off Aqaba in case of further unrest. There were rumours in Cairo that the trouble was connected with the Arab Bureau’s policy of paying too much to the irregulars and not enough to the regulars.5

  The unrest at Bir el Lasan and el Quweira delayed the Dera column’s departure by two days. It left on 4 September and took six days to reach el Azraq. The journey was marred by an unpleasant incident in which Awda demanded £10,000 from Peake’s camelry for access to previously stored rations and wells. Greed mingled with spite for Awda alleged he had been insulted by a British officer who had refused him a lift. Lawrence was hurriedly summoned and delivered a golden placebo. But Peake’s woes continued as soon after the Beduin attached to his unit mutinied for no apparent reason.6 Neither hitch is mentioned in the Seven Pillars.

  On 11 September Lawrence was forced to revise his operational plans. He decided that his force was too small to attack Dera unless it had been heavily bombed first.7 HQ approved his request for air support, but, not wishing to alert the Turks to the coming offensive, the bombing was postponed until the 16th. Then and on the following day DH9s from 144 Squadron dropped 3,000lbs of bombs on Dera, severely damaging a wireless transmitter, the station and rolling stock.8 From the start, air-power was the key to Arab success.

  While Dera was being bombed, the railway came under attack from raiding parties. The raids continued intermittently from the 16th to the 22nd. Lawrence was omniscient. He travelled by car and directed and co-ordinated operations, supervised demolitions and on several occasions laid charges. He commanded the attack on the line north of Jabir station on the 16th and the next day he went with the detachment which swung north of Dera and fell upon the line between it and Samakh. In sum, two stations were wrecked and a section of track was put out of action for six days.9 A third raid on the 18th ran into difficulties when Peake’s camelry and the Ghurkas were misled by their Rwallah guides. Taken to Zerka instead of Mafraq, the raiders were halted by Bani Sakhr tribesmen still loyal to the Turks.10

  Regular Turkish resistance was stiff everywhere and the raiders were grateful for the mobility and firepower of the armoured cars. Von Sandars, the Commander-in-Chief in Syria, had grasped the importance of Dera as the nodal point of his rail communication and had placed its reinforced garrison under the command of an energetic German, Major Willmer.11 The first wave of Arab raids and the RAF bombing convinced von Sandars that a major offensive against Dera was imminent, and on the 17th he strengthened its defences with eight aircraft which were flown from Jenin.

  As a diversionary tactic, Lawrence’s operations had been a success, but the arrival of the German planes tipped the balance against his forces. One of his own machines had been forced down on the 16th and the other was lost four days later, leaving the Arabs at the mercy of the Dera flight. By 20 September, German air supremacy had forced the abandonment of attacks on the railway. Checkmated, Lawrence acted swiftly and decisively. He radioed for an aeroplane which flew him to HQ where he pleaded with Air Commodore Geoffrey Salmond for help. He got a DH9 and two Bristol Fighters from No.1 Squadron of the Royal Australian
Air Force. Early on the morning of the 22nd he flew back to Umtaiye in a Bristol piloted by Captain Ross Smith, the future air pioneer who made the first London to Australia flight. Umtaiye was deserted and so he was then flown south to discover the new camp which the Arabs hoped was beyond the range of the Dera flight.

  It was not. Soon after Lawrence had landed, the Germans appeared. Ross Smith was immediately airborne and drove off two Pfalz scouts and forced down a pair of DFW two-seaters, one of which was destroyed. A second sortie was repelled half an hour later when three Pfalzs were sent packing and a fourth shot down. The Germans returned in the afternoon and a DWF was shot down: control of the air was back in British hands. Once again, British air-power had got the Arabs out of a tight spot.12

  The dog-fights over the desert restored Arab morale. It soared the next day when, in response to Lawrence’s request, a four-engined Handley Page V 1500 bomber landed at the camp. It carried supplies, including petrol for the fighters, and filled the Arab onlookers with wonderment. They imagined that this huge machine was the stallion which had sired the smaller aircraft they were with, and fancied that the food taken on board for its crew was fodder to sustain this flying monster. During his stay at HQ Lawrence had persuaded Salmond and the bomber’s pilot, Major Amyas (‘Biffy’) Borton, to employ the Handley Page for attacks on Dera and Mafraq. Six tons of bombs fell on Dera on 23 September and three tons on Mafraq the day after.13

  The aircraft not only rescued the Dera campaign, they also brought news of Allenby’s victories and the collapse of the Turkish front in Palestine. Lawrence picked up further details of the campaign’s progress which he passed on to Faisal, who had just joined his men at the front. There was also heartening news from the south where the Arabs’ old adversary, the 4th Army Corps, had been defeated by Dominion troops commanded by General Sir Edward Chaytor. In less than a week Chaytor had overrun Turkish outposts in the Moab Hills and Amman had fallen to New Zealand and West Indian forces on 25 September. The line to the north had been destroyed by the Auckland Horse on the night of 23–24 September, closing the Turks’ escape route to Dera.

  When detachments of the Australian Light Horse reached Mafraq on the 28th, they found the station in ruins and the line blocked by stranded trains. Several wagons marked with the Red Crescent contained the bodies of Turkish wounded who had been robbed and murdered by Beduin.14 Broken Turkish units in disorderly retreat and burdened with wounded were opponents the Beduin could cope with. Now the hard fighting was over, they swarmed towards the battlefields to kill the unarmed and wounded. Those weathercocks the Bani Sakhr, hearing that Maan had been abandoned on the 23rd after a year’s gallant defence, tried to intercept the 4,000-strong garrison as it hobbled north. Discovered by a RAF reconnaissance aircraft and threatened with an aerial attack, the Turkish commander, Ali Bey Wakkabi, offered to surrender his force to the 5th Australian Light Horse. His offer was accepted by the Australians who, on Chaytor’s orders, deployed to protect the column from Arab marauders who had already murdered wounded stragglers. Deterred by occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, the skulking Bani Sakhr withdrew to find easier pickings. As the Turks marched off into captivity, some were allowed to keep their rifles as protection against Arab looters.15

  Everywhere Arabs killed and plundered indiscriminately. British personnel were not immune. Lieutenant Gitsham of 144 Squadron was threatened and robbed by Beduin after his machine crashed. Another officer from this squadron, Lieutenant Thomas, held prisoner in Dera, was robbed and stripped of his tunic by Arabs nominally attached to Faisal’s forces.16 British soldiers were appalled by the Arabs’ brutal treatment of Turkish fugitives. For many, the Arabs were no more than brigands, whereas the Turks were soldiers like themselves and widely admired as tough, plucky fighters.

  Such sentiments were wormwood to Lawrence. He believed that the abuse, robbery and killing of exhausted men or prisoners was retribution for past cruelties. In the Seven Pillars he recorded an encounter outside Dera where Arab irregulars were ‘herding a drove of stripped prisoners towards Sheik Saad’. ‘They were,’ he noticed, ‘driving them mercilessly, the bruising of their urging blue across their ivory backs; but I left them to it, for these were Turks of the police battalion of Dera, beneath whose iniquities the peasant-faces of the neighbourhood had run with tears and blood, innumerable times.’ Lawrence does not reveal how he was able to recognise these unfortunate policemen without their uniforms.

  Other British officers did not share Lawrence’s crude tit-for-tat philosophy or the callous principle of random retribution. When General Sir George Barrow, commanding the 4th Cavalry Division, entered Dera on the morning of 28 September, he was horrified by what he saw. Anazah tribesmen had stolen into the town the previous evening and, according to Barrow’s official report, ‘murdered in cold blood every Turk they. came across’.

  When I came they were still at their ghoulish work, tearing the clothes off the wounded men in an indescribably brutish manner. I did my business with the sharifian commander [Nuri es Said ] and cleared out of the town with all my troops as soon as possible.17

  Barrow, a decent man, feared that many of the Turks he left behind would be slaughtered.

  Napoleon has been held up to execration for having shot his prisoners in this country. I wish our laws and customs allowed me to do the same. The misery of these poor Turks left to their fate and to the mercy of these cut-throat Beduin cannot be easily described.

  With a generosity which ought to have been reciprocated, Barrow omitted his exchange with Lawrence from his report.18 He met Lawrence and Nuri in Dera just after eight in the morning. In his memoirs, he recalled their conversation.

  I asked Lawrence to remove the Arabs. He said he couldn’t ‘as it was their idea of war’. I replied, ‘It is not our idea of war, and if you can’t remove them, I will.’ He said, ‘If you attempt to do that I shall take no responsibility for what happens.’ I answered, ‘That’s all right; I will take responsibility’ and at once gave orders for our men to clear that station. This was done and nothing untoward happened. All Arabs were turned off the train and it was piqueted by our sentries.19

  This was indeed what happened for half a squadron of the 2nd Indian Lancers was left behind to protect the wounded and to police Dera.20

  Lawrence never referred to the Arab atrocities in Dera and prudently forgot the excuse he had given to Barrow. But the memory of the encounter rankled and Barrow was roughly treated in the Seven Pillars. He was accused of showing disappointment on hearing that the Arabs had taken Dera and of treating them as ‘a conquered people’. His Indian cavalrymen were, ironically, accused of looting Dera and, in a passage of breathtaking arrogance, were compared unfavourably with the Beduin.

  My mind felt in the Indian rank and file something puny and confined; an air of thinking themselves mean; almost a careful, esteemed subservience, unlike the abrupt wholesomeness of the Beduin. The manner of the British officers toward their men struck horror into my bodyguard, who had never seen personal inequality before.

  They and Lawrence had clearly forgotten about the slaves far away in Aqaba and Hejaz.

  By refusing to write anything which diminished the Arabs, Lawrence condoned their sickening brutality. He did so by adopting an elastic morality which exculpated Arab cruelty towards the Turks on the grounds that it was a form of retributive justice. He employed this blanket dispensation in his official report on the killing of Turkish and German prisoners after an engagement north-west of Dera on 27 September. Forewarned that two Turkish columns, one 6,000 strong from Dera, the other numbering 2,000 from el Muzeirib, were escaping northwards, the Arabs intercepted the smaller. As they passed through Tura and Tafas, Turkish soldiers had raped Arab women and, at Tafas, the Lancer rearguard massacred the inhabitants, including women and children. The sight of their corpses unhinged Tala, the local sheik, who rode alone against the Turks and was shot down.

  The Arabs pressed home their attack, slicing the column into three se
ctions. One, including a German motorised machine-gun unit and Muhammad Jamal Pasha and his staff, fought its way out and escaped. The rest were overwhelmed and their last moments were described by Lawrence.

  We ordered ‘no prisoners’ and the men obeyed, except that the reserve company took a hundred and fifty men (including many German A [army] S[ervice] C[corps] alive. Later, however, they found one of our men with a fractured thigh who had been afterwards pinned to the ground by two mortal thrusts with German bayonets. Then we turned our Hotchkiss on the prisoners and made an end of them, they saying nothing. The common delusion that the Turk is a clean and merciful fighter led some of the British troops to criticise Arab methods a little later — but they had not entered Tura or Tafas, or watched the Turks swing their wounded by the hands and feet into a burning railway truck, as had been the lot of the Arab army at Jerdun. As for the villagers, they and their ancestors have been for five hundred years ground down by the tyranny of these Turks.21

  This was written ten days after the massacre when Lawrence was well aware of brother officers’ reactions to this barbarism and the possibility of complaints to his superiors. He was, therefore, quick to tell Allenby his version of events when they met on 3 October. The general told his wife that Lawrence had found forty women and between twenty and thirty children bayonetted ‘in plain wantonness’.22