That directive placed Lawrence in another difficult spot. On the one hand, focusing on the railway played very much into his personal effort to get Faisal to concentrate on inland operations and to turn away from the attractive trap of Aqaba. On the other, taking Medina had been a primary objective of the Arab Revolt from the outset, and an Ottoman withdrawal from that city would be nearly as great a psychological victory to the rebels as an Ottoman surrender. Now the Arabs were being asked not only to forgo the prize they had fought so long for but to commit men to battle to prevent its delivery.
This, of course, was the motive behind Clayton’s call for secrecy, but it raised at least two morally troublesome issues. If the Arabs were persuaded to occupy a stretch of the railway between Medina and Maan as a blocking force without being told why, then they also wouldn’t know that they stood squarely in the path of the redeploying Medina garrison—and there could be few illusions about the outcome of the lightly armed Arab tribesmen crashing up against one of Turkey’s best-equipped armies in the open desert. There was also the point that the Arabs were now being asked to fight—and, inevitably, to take casualties—in the Hejaz so as to lighten the burden and death toll of British troops in Gaza. Certainly, that came with the territory of membership in a military alliance, but just as certainly, in Lawrence’s estimation, the British owed it to their Arab allies to tell them why.
Since he had technically committed treason just weeks earlier with his divulging of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, this edict was much easier for Lawrence to disobey. “In spite of General Clayton’s orders,” he wrote Cyril Wilson that evening, “I told [Faisal] something of the situation. It would have been impossible for me to have done anything myself on the necessary scale.” As he would later recount in Seven Pillars, Faisal “rose, as ever, to a proposition of honour, and agreed instantly to do his best.”
The immediate task was to get word of the new directive to Abdullah—with his followers massed near the Hejaz Railway at Wadi Ais, it would be they who would carry or lose the day—but given the past lassitude of Hussein’s second son, Lawrence was convinced that both delivering that critical message and seeing it carried out had to be done by a British officer. With Stewart Newcombe and the handful of other British officers who knew the Hejaz interior already out on scouting or demolition missions, that left him. In the same hurried note he scribbled out for Cyril Wilson that evening, Lawrence explained that his plans were quite ad hoc given how little time he had to prepare:
“I think the weak point of the Turk [evacuation] plans lies in the trains of water and food. If we can cut the line on such a scale that they cannot repair it, or smash their locomotives, the force will come to a standstill.… If only we can hold them up for ten days. I’m afraid it will be touch and go. I am taking some Garland mines with me, if I can find instantaneous fuse, and if there is time, I will set them as near Medina as possible: it is partly for this reason that I am going up myself.”
Under the cover of darkness on the night of March 10, Lawrence set out with an escort of just fourteen fighters for the grinding five-day trek to Abdullah’s camp.
It was a brutal journey from the outset. Lawrence was already in the grip of a severe bout of dysentery, and by noon of the following day was also afflicted with boils that covered his back. It was all he could do to stay in his camel’s saddle as the small party plodded through one of the more desolate landscapes to be found in western Arabia. By the next day, March 12, his condition had worsened still, the dysentery twice causing him to faint “when the more difficult parts of the climb had asked too much of my strength.”
Preoccupied by his own torments, Lawrence apparently failed to notice the growing friction among his small entourage, which was drawn from a fragile assortment of previously feuding tribes. What had been good-natured ribbing between them at the journey’s outset had steadily escalated to the exchange of insults and veiled threats, a simmering stew of tension. Matters came to a head that same evening.
Taking shelter for the night in a mountain close known as Wadi Kitan, Lawrence fell into exhausted rest among the rocks. That ended with the report of a gunshot echoing through the canyon. Roused by one of his escorts, Lawrence was led over the rocks to view the body of a member of the traveling party, an Ageyl tribesman named Salem, dead with a bullet through the temple. With the skin around the entry wound burnt, it was clear the killing had been done at close range, which meant by another member of the group. Very quickly, the finger of suspicion fell upon a Moroccan named Hamed. During an ad hoc trial, Hamed ultimately confessed, and Salem’s Ageyl brethren demanded blood for blood.
Over the preceding months, Lawrence had watched in fascinated admiration as Faisal had acted as peacemaker in scores of tribal feuds, disputes running the gamut of questions over foraging rights to decades-old—even centuries-old—blood vendettas. It was a role Faisal would continue to fulfill throughout the war. “An account of profit and loss would be struck between the parties,” Lawrence later recalled, “with Faisal modulating and interceding between them, and often paying the balance, or contributing towards it from his own funds, to hurry on the pact. During two years Faisal so labored daily, putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tiny pieces which made up Arabian society [that] there was no blood feud left active in any of the districts through which he had passed.”
What made the system work was a collective faith in the mediator’s impartiality, but it was an arrangement that came with a harsh side: when necessary, the peacemaker also had to act as the dispenser of justice.
The horror of what lay before him in Wadi Kitan seemed to slowly dawn on Lawrence. If the Ageyl insisted on Hamed’s death, then it had to be so; this was the law of the desert. But while his execution by Salem’s Ageyl kinsmen might ensure short-term peace on the journey to Abdullah’s camp, once word of it reached the larger rebel community it was sure to spark a blood vendetta between the Ageyl, a very important and numerous tribe, and the many Moroccans who had joined the revolt. The only real solution, then, was for an impartial third party to carry out Hamed’s execution, and in Wadi Kitan that night there was only one person who was “a stranger and kinless.” As Lawrence would recall in Seven Pillars, “I made [Hamed] enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain.… I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments’ delay, which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest.”
But the first bullet failed to kill the man. Instead, Hamed fell to the ground shrieking and thrashing, the blood spreading over his clothes in spurts. Lawrence fired again, but was so shaky he only struck Hamed’s wrist. “He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body shivered a little.”
It was the first man Lawrence had ever killed. Stumbling his way back up to his perch among the rocks, he immediately lay down and fell into exhausted sleep. By dawn, he was so ill that the others had to hoist him into his saddle to continue the journey.
AARON AARONSOHN HAD arrived—or at least he was sufficiently susceptible to kind words and respectful audiences to imagine so.
By the middle of March 1917, the man who had so long wandered the bureaucratic wilderness of Cairo was finally being recognized by the British intelligence community as one of their most important assets, the conduit for a fount of information beginning to come in from enemy-held Palestine. With tremendous satisfaction, the agronomist could note the steadily expanding number of British officers who had once given him short shrift, whether due to his temperament or his outsider status or his Jewishness—perhaps in some cases a combination of all three—but now sought his counsel, extending invitations for him to join their dinner table.
This breakthrough had begun in earnest in mid-February, when he had gone on board the spy shi
p Managem for yet another attempt to reach Athlit. This time, the weather had cooperated, and they had picked up one of Aaronsohn’s confederates, a man named Liova Schneersohn. Best of all, the spy ring had been alerted to the British effort to make contact by the couriers left ashore on previous runs, and Schneersohn brought on board with him a trove of recent intelligence reports in a waterproof satchel.
“We left at once,” the agronomist noted in his diary of February 20, “happy.”
With that run, the link to the Athlit spy ring was finally firmly established, and in the weeks and months ahead, couriers on board the British coastal runners would collect a steady supply of reports on conditions inside Palestine. The British could only be amazed at the wealth of intelligence they received—as well as rueful at not having availed themselves of the opportunity first presented a year and a half earlier. With the Jewish spy ring gradually expanded to some two dozen operatives throughout Palestine, and many of them holding prominent positions in the local government, the Athlit ring detailed everything from the location of Turkish military supply depots, to the precise number of railway troop cars passing through the crucial junction town of Afuleh; in this last effort, they were helped by an enterprising agent who thought to open a refreshment stand alongside the train station. For their part, the Jewish conspirators finally gave their ring a code name, NILI, the Hebrew acronym for a passage from the Book of Samuel, Nezah Israel Lo Ieshaker, or “the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or relent.” That was all a bit too exotic for the British, who continued to officially refer to Aaronsohn’s spy ring simply as “Organization A.”
Given the fast-approaching timetable for Murray’s offensive in Palestine, just as welcomed was the detailed analysis of the region that Aaronsohn provided the British. A nineteen-page paper on the Palestinian economy authored by William Ormsby-Gore in February drew heavily on the agronomist’s earlier reports; Reginald Wingate was so impressed, he sent a copy on to the new foreign secretary in London, Arthur Balfour. Aaronsohn was also enlisted to make additions and corrections to The Military Handbook for South Syria, a primer British officers would carry with them as they advanced beyond Gaza. When that primer began circulating in mid-March, its breadth of information was quickly noted, as well as its source. As Aaronsohn wrote in his diary on March 20, a military acquaintance had “congratulated me on my contribution to the Handbook, saying that everybody was talking about it at headquarters. It must be so, as [his official liaison, William Edmonds] told me today they were receiving reports from everywhere saying how delighted everybody was with my work.”
Naturally, Aaronsohn was also pursuing his own agenda in all this. Part of that agenda was very overt—certainly, he’d never hidden the fact that his overriding motive for joining with the British was out of concern for the future of the Jewish settlers in Palestine—but some of it was a good deal subtler. In The Military Handbook for South Syria, for example, Aaronsohn included a detailed description of most all the Jewish settlements in Palestine, along with their adjacent Arab villages. In the quick character sketches he provided of the leaders in these communities was an element of score-settling, his allies invariably described as “intelligent” and “trustworthy,” his enemies as just the opposite. Thus Aaronsohn’s chief Arab nemesis in Athlit was marked down as an “extortionate parasite” and “fanatical Moslem,” while a Jewish banker in Tiberias with whom he’d crossed swords was skewered for his “Oriental standard of honesty.” The effect was to both preemptively steer the British toward his Zionist allies and to lend the Jewish settlers in Palestine a prominence far beyond the tiny fraction of the population they actually composed. Perhaps most crucially, Aaronsohn painted a very rosy picture of the reception General Murray was likely to receive once he’d broken through at Gaza and advanced into the Palestine heartland. “The attitude of the Jews all the world over towards the British regime is easy to be guessed,” he wrote in late February. “Palestine under the British flag will draw steadily Jewish idealism, Jewish intelligence, Jewish capital and Jewish masses.”
The agronomist surely knew that very little of this assertion was necessarily true. Among international Jewry, Zionism remained a deeply divisive issue, and within Palestine the vast majority of Jews continued to be either loyal to the Ottoman regime or resolutely apolitical. That didn’t matter; Aaronsohn’s audience was British military and political leaders, and extremely rare is the war-planning staff that can resist a tale which has its own soldiers being greeted as liberating heroes.
So greatly had Aaronsohn’s star risen that on March 26 he was granted a prize that had eluded him since arriving in Egypt: an audience with General Gilbert Clayton. This meeting went so well it was followed by a far lengthier one a week later. In the interim, General Murray had at last launched his Palestine offensive, and first reports told of a smashing success—“a great victory over the Turks,” Aaronsohn noted in his diary on March 29. On April 3, Clayton called the agronomist back to his office to hear his thoughts on how the British might drive home their advantage in the next stage of battle.
Aaron Aaronsohn was rarely bashful about sharing his opinions, and he wasn’t that day with Gilbert Clayton. After asserting that at no time in history had Jerusalem been captured from the south or west, he advocated that the British army continue a northern sweep along the coastal plain, and then hook back to fall upon the city from the north. In contrast to other armchair generals, of course, Aaronsohn could draw upon his encyclopedic knowledge of the land—its trails and terrain and water sources—to lend weight to his advocacy. As he noted in his diary that night, “General Clayton listened to me with much interest. I left him dreaming over the map after an invitation to come back and see him every time I had such good suggestions to make.” In the same entry, the scientist allowed himself a moment of exultation. “I have succeeded in making the right party understand that it is useless to beat around the bush. Palestine is a ripe fruit. A good shaking‑up and it will fall in our hands.”
Left unclear was just who this “our” might consist of: the Allies, the British, or the Zionists alone.
AT SUNSET ON March 28, Lawrence and his vanguard of rebel fighters climbed to the top of a rocky crag to peer over its edge. In the flat valley below, perhaps three miles away, lay Aba el Naam, a principal station and watering depot for the Hejaz Railway. In the failing light, Lawrence watched the Turkish army garrison—some four hundred soldiers, by best estimate—go through their evening drills.
It was reported that the Turks made frequent nighttime patrols around the perimeters of their railway garrisons to compensate for their sense of isolation. This was unpleasant news to Lawrence; his vanguard consisted of a mere thirty men, and they needed to rest after their three-day journey from Wadi Ais. A solution came to him. At nightfall, several men were dispatched to sneak close to the station and fire a few random shots in its direction. As Lawrence recounted, “The enemy, thinking it a prelude to attack, stood- to in their trenches all night, while we were comfortably sleeping.”
It was a sleep Lawrence probably required more than his companions, for he was still recovering from the dysentery and fever that had held him in its grip for weeks. He also needed to have both his wits and strength about him for the assault he was planning on Aba el Naam.
After the ghastly events in Wadi Kitan, he had forced himself on, increasingly ill, until finally they made Abdullah’s camp at Wadi Ais on the morning of March 15. There, after a brief conference with Abdullah in which he explained the need to immediately move against the railway, Lawrence excused himself to take a brief rest. Instead, he lay in his tent, racked with malaria, for the next ten days.
Adding to Lawrence’s torment during those long days had been his knowledge of what was happening—or rather, not happening—during his incapacitation. Given Abdullah’s reputation for indolence, Lawrence had figured all along that if any determined action were to be taken against the railroad, he would need to lead it himself—and this calculation p
roved prescient. In the infrequent moments when he was able to rally enough to venture outside his tent, Lawrence observed that Abdullah’s camp had retained its climate of frivolity and relaxation just as before, that nothing like a military mobilization was taking place.
What’s more, it became clear that Lawrence wasn’t particularly welcome in Wadi Ais. Among Abdullah’s inner coterie was a barely concealed distrust, even an animosity, toward the visiting British officer that their chief did little to dispel. For his part, Lawrence’s once rather favorable opinion of Abdullah, tepid though it had been, steadily hardened into a contemptuous dislike: “His casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims,” he wrote, “his friendliness became caprice, his good humor [a] love of pleasure.… Even his simplicity appeared false upon experience, and inherited religious prejudice was allowed rule over the keenness of his mind because it was less trouble to him than uncharted thought.”
On March 25, at last sufficiently recovered from his illness to function, Lawrence strode into Abdullah’s tent to announce he would lead an attack against the railway himself. That announcement was warmly received, for Abdullah “graciously permitted anything not calling directly upon his own energies.” By approaching some of the sheikhs in Wadi Ais whom Lawrence perceived as actual warriors, he quickly won commitments for a tribally mixed assault party of some eight hundred men to fall upon the isolated train depot at Aba el Naam. The next morning, he set off ahead with his small vanguard to assess the site and work up a battle plan.
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