With Turkish resistance rapidly collapsing, the Arab fighters—just over one hundred men—dashed forward to begin their looting. Anxious to check on the damage to the engines, Lawrence scrambled down from his perch to join them.
Reaching the train, he discovered it had been carrying a mixed cargo, that along with the soldiers, several of its carriages were filled with civilians. Some of these were the families of Turkish officers returning to Damascus, others simple refugees. “To one side stood thirty or forty hysterical women,” Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, “unveiled, tearing their clothes and hair, shrieking themselves distracted. The Arabs, without regard to them, went on wrecking [their] household goods, looting their absolute fill.” Spotting Lawrence, the women fell on him to beg for mercy. They were soon joined by their husbands, who “seized my feet in a very agony of terror of instant death. A Turk so broken down was a nasty spectacle; I kicked them off as well as I could with bare feet, and finally broke free.”
On his way to the train engines, Lawrence checked on the one carriage that had tumbled into the ravine. He found it had been a medical car, the wounded and ill laid out on stretchers for the journey, but all were now bunched in a bloody tangled heap at the bottom of the upended wagon. “One of those yet alive deliriously cried out the word ‘typhus.’ So I wedged shut the door and left them there, alone.”
He was only slightly more helpful to a group of Austrian military advisors who had been on the train, and “who appealed to me quietly in Turkish for quarter.” Intent on finishing up his demolition work, Lawrence left them under an Arab guard; moments later, the Austrians were killed, “all but two or three,” as the result of some dispute.
In his official report on the engagement below Mudowarra, Lawrence estimated the number of Turkish dead at about seventy, at a cost of one Arab fighter. He lamented that amid the pandemonium, he’d had to rush his vandalism to the first train engine, and feared it was still capable of repair. “The conditions were not helpful to good work.” He made no mention of dead civilians in the report, although considering the fusillade of bullets fired into the unarmored train in the first few minutes of the battle, their number must have been considerable. Similarly, he offered no explanation for the discrepancy between the ninety Turkish soldiers taken prisoner and the sixty-eight ultimately delivered to Aqaba.
For most who experience it, combat triggers a contradictory duel of emotions: horror at its gruesomeness, exhilaration at its unmitigated thrill. Reconciling these dueling reactions is probably more difficult for the soldier than for the civilian given the element of braggadocio that exists within his fraternity, and he is likely to be more candid about the complexity of his feelings—to the degree that candor is even possible—with a nonsoldier.
Upon his return to Aqaba from Mudowarra, Lawrence wrote to a military colleague, Walter Stirling. In the letter, he recounted the train attack in gleeful detail, noting the “beautiful shots” of the Stokes gun that had killed twelve Turks on the spot, and how his own share of the loot was “a superfine red Baluch prayer-rug.” He continued, “I hope this sounds the fun it is. The only pity is the sweat to work [the Arabs] up, and the wild scramble while it lasts. It’s the most amateurish, Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the Bedouin.”
The day before, September 24, a seemingly very different Lawrence had written to his old friend Edward Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: “I hope when the nightmare ends that I will wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them, and you know that you have done hundreds in the same way before, and must do hundreds more if you can.”
If Lawrence was already having difficulty reconciling this psychic divide, it was about to get worse.
Chapter 15
To the Flame
I only hope and trust TEL will get back safe. He is out and up against it at this moment. If he comes through, it is a V[ictoria] C[Cross]—if not—well, I don’t care to think about it!
DAVID HOGARTH TO HIS WIFE, NOVEMBER 11, 1917
They had met several times before in Palestine. Back then, Aaron Aaronsohn had been an eminent scientist, a pioneer in the field of agronomy, and William Yale the regional representative of the Standard Oil Company of New York. Now, in late September 1917, both had added considerably to their résumés, Aaronsohn a leader in the international Zionist movement, Yale a special agent for the U.S. State Department. But what Yale didn’t know about Aaron Aaronsohn—at least not yet—was that he was also the mastermind of one of the most extensive spy rings in the Middle East. And what Aaronsohn didn’t know about William Yale was that, his vague job title aside, he too was essentially a spy. As might be expected, all this lent their meeting in Paris on September 25 a certain circumspect quality.
Since arriving in the French capital four days earlier, Aaronsohn had been trying to get a sense of where matters stood with the Zionist cause before moving on to London. To that end, he’d first sought out his old benefactor, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who he knew was playing a key behind-the-scenes role in the ongoing discussions with the French and British governments. He’d come away disappointed.
“He listened very interestedly all the time I spoke to him,” Aaronsohn would inform his brother Alex in a letter, “and asked me questions which I answered, but he would not let me touch on certain subjects, did not wish to speak about them, so that it was impossible for me to learn from him what I wished to know.… He feels, as we all do, that if Great Britain would only rule over our land, we could obtain great things, but as nothing certain is known [yet], he cannot allow himself to speak.”
He’d had far better luck when Mark Sykes showed up in town. The two had a long meeting on September 23, followed by another the next morning. “He told me everything,” Aaronsohn told his brother, “and showed me what a lot of enemies we have. Most of the opponents [are] from among our own people, and that is dangerous to our organization.”
Evidently, one reason Sykes had sought out Aaronsohn in Paris was to play peacemaker. The British War Cabinet was once again taking up the debate over supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and it was vital that the leading Zionists speak with one voice. That meant ending the ongoing friction between Aaronsohn and Chaim Weizmann’s English Zionist Federation; as Sykes explained, Aaronsohn’s angry letters to Weizmann of mid-September had been “like a thorn in the latter’s eye.”
Which frankly suited Aaronsohn just fine. As he haughtily told his brother, “Mark Sykes begs me to make peace with them and wants me to promise not to quarrel. He says that I should listen to Weizmann and to Sokolow. I told him that I was not going to London to quarrel, only to tell them their mistakes and to show them the way to do things properly. If they accept, well and good; if not I will go my own way.”
William Yale may have gleaned something of this rift within the Zionist camp from his own interviews in London, but it likely was mere background noise to the more overt struggle between the British Zionists and anti-Zionists, and between the competing camps within the British government. If in seeking out Aaronsohn in Paris, Yale hoped for edification on all this, he didn’t get it. As he noted in his diary that night—and would eventually report back to Leland Harrison in Washington—Aaronsohn “does not wish to see Jewish autonomy or a Jewish state at this time, saying that nothing would be more harm [sic] to the Zionists than that. [Rather,] he wishes to see either English, American or International government control of Palestine.” What’s more, Yale could report, after seeing to his business in London, Aaronsohn intended to continue on to the United States to call on his influential American Jewish contacts to press the point. What made this rather baffling was that while in London, Yale had met with one of Aaronsohn’s closest allies, a businessman named Jack Mosseri. Even while extolling Aaronsohn’s clear-eyed insights on the matter, Mosseri was advocating the establishment of a
n outright Jewish government in Palestine, and the adoption of Hebrew as its official language. Following his meetings in Paris, Yale left for Cairo undoubtedly even more confused about where things stood on the Zionist question than before.
But he also left with something else. Either oblivious to Yale’s job responsibilities or just a peculiarly credulous sort, Aaronsohn had entrusted his American visitor with a letter to be delivered to his brother Alex, now back in Cairo. Other than the rudimentary safeguard of being written in Hebrew, the letter was not encrypted in any way, and it was in this highly indiscreet dispatch that Aaronsohn detailed his meetings with Edmond de Rothschild and Mark Sykes and outlined all he knew of the current status of British-Zionist negotiations in London.
The spy chief hadn’t ended there, though. Along with listing by name “our friends” in the British military hierarchy in Cairo who should be kept abreast of developments, Aaronsohn instructed his younger brother to put Georges-Picot, the French political agent who was on his way to Egypt, under surveillance. “Pascal,” he wrote, referring to his chief assistant in Cairo, “will tell you how we can watch his movements.” Aaronsohn had even imparted some advice to his brother about William Yale: “Get as pally as you can with him and watch him, for you will be able to get information from him which you need, especially about happenings in Egypt.”
All of this might have been of tremendous interest both to Yale and to the agency he now represented. While the American government had been apprised of Britain’s deliberations on the Jewish homeland question, no one from President Wilson on down was aware of the contentiousness it had spawned there—and they certainly didn’t know of the behind-the-scenes role being played by Mark Sykes. But if Aaron Aaronsohn was shockingly careless in handing such a document to William Yale, he was also lucky. In his role as an intelligence agent, Yale fully intended to open and translate the letter before passing it on to Alex Aaronsohn, but, new to the spy game, he apparently didn’t appreciate that these matters tended to be time-sensitive. By the time he got around to having Aaronsohn’s letter translated and sent on to the State Department, it would be mid-December. By then, most of the explosive information he’d had in his possession for nearly three months would be rendered moot.
WITH THE AIRPLANE still a rarity in the Middle East in 1917, the one sent to collect Major Lawrence from Aqaba on the morning of October 12 was a clue to the importance being placed on his mission. Another was the identity of those waiting for him at the military field headquarters outside El Arish: Generals Allenby and Clayton, as well as Lawrence’s old mentor from Oxford, David Hogarth, now the titular head of the Arab Bureau. Lawrence had barely alit from the ninety-minute flight—in 1917, a plane’s cruising speed was barely over one hundred miles per hour—before learning why he’d been summoned.
At very long last, a date had been set for Allenby’s offensive against the Turkish line: October 28, or just a little more than two weeks away. It would take very different form from Archibald Murray’s two failed attempts. In hopes of convincing the Turks that was not the case, the British would conduct a preliminary three-day bombardment of Gaza—the classic World War I prelude to a frontal assault—but then strike at the far more lightly defended town of Beersheva, thirty miles to the east. Once in possession of Beersheva and its vital water wells, the British would then push north and west, severing Gaza’s supply lines to the Palestine interior. If all went accordingly, the Turkish army entrenched at Gaza would either be surrounded or forced to withdraw to avoid being trapped. The question for Lawrence was how the Arab rebels might assist in this great effort.
That was a question with no easy answer, because the very cleverness of the Beersheva scheme derived from its modesty. In a corner of the world where access to water was a general’s first tactical consideration, one of the chief reasons for Murray’s unimaginative frontal assaults at Gaza had been the need to quickly get his army to the water sources that lay behind the Turkish lines. Of course, this imperative had also made Murray’s efforts all-or-nothing propositions—no lolling about on a desert battlefield in hopes of incremental gains—that he had lost. By contrast, once in control of Beersheva’s water wells, Allenby’s army had the luxury of closing on Gaza at a methodical pace; operational plans called for an offensive stretched out over at least a week. The downside—and this was where the modesty aspect played out—was that the deliberateness of the British advance would also give the Turks time to regroup. Allenby obviously hoped for more, but in all probability a successful offensive meant gaining a toehold in southwestern Palestine and little else; no race up the coastline, no dash for Jerusalem.
Consequently, it was very difficult to see what role the Arabs might play. If their contribution was to be in shutting down the Turkish supply line into Palestine, the logical place for them to strike was the rail junction town of Deraa in central Syria; from there, a railroad spur ran west off the Hejaz Railway and served as the Turks’ principal lifeline in and out of the battle zone. Furthermore, from his June intelligence foray across Syria, Lawrence knew there were thousands of tribesmen in the Deraa region ready to join the revolt. On the other hand, any large-scale operation at Deraa would be to invite the tribesmen’s slaughter if the British army advanced no farther than their Palestinian toehold 120 miles to the southwest.
Nor was there much the Arab rebels massed in Aqaba could do. Frankly—even though Lawrence was probably less than frank with his questioners at El Arish on this score—the situation there was a mess. For well over two months, the forces gathered there had been awaiting word on when the British army would finally strike at southern Palestine, the cue for their own foray into the Syrian heartland, and this wait had led to a spiraling logistical nightmare. With thousands of prospective warriors idling away in the port, an ever-greater amount of supplies had needed to be shipped in from Egypt to equip and feed them—as well as ever more British gold to keep them paid—which in turn had drawn in even more recruits. The situation had grown so bad that by early October, transport ships were being devoted to hauling in Egyptian forage just to feed the camels and horses, the hills around Aqaba having been stripped bare. As if matters weren’t grim enough, a recent cholera outbreak had now brought the entire supply system to a virtual standstill as quarantining procedures were introduced.
But probably even more deleterious was the effect this holding-pattern existence was having on morale in Aqaba, for a sense of gloom had now begun to permeate the rebel ranks. With no one was this more evident than in Faisal himself. As the delay in pushing north extended, he had sunk into a deepening depression, convinced that the chance to wrest Syria for the Arab cause was slipping away. In his more bitter moments, he even accused the British of imposing this inaction deliberately, a maneuver to hand Syria to the French, and while the harried Major Joyce bore the brunt of Faisal’s complaints, Lawrence had frequently been compelled to lend his soothing influence in meetings with the emir. To maintain the notion that some progress was being made, and perhaps also to at least temporarily escape the unhappy town, Lawrence had continued his raiding forays over the mountains—he’d just returned from another train attack when the summons to El Arish came—but it was all very pale stuff when set against the grand vision he had laid out in Cairo three months earlier.
Yet for political reasons—and maybe personal ones too—Lawrence felt it was vital that the Arabs contribute in some way to the upcoming offensive. And so in El Arish he came up a new plan.
If not by an attack on Deraa itself, there was another place where the railroad spur into Palestine could potentially be severed. It lay fifteen miles to the west of Deraa, where the line passed over a number of high bridges as it navigated the rugged Yarmuk gorge; if just one of those bridges could be destroyed, the effect would be the same. The further advantage to such an operation was that it could be conducted very much along the lines of the “traditional” train attack, a hit-and-run mission by a small and highly mobile Arab force.
Th
ere the similarities ended, however. The Yarmuk gorge was over two hundred miles from Aqaba, and in a comparatively densely populated region. On such a mission, any force coming from Aqaba would be negotiating an alien landscape, constant prey to Turkish army patrols and Turkish-allied local tribes. Those dangers would only multiply if they actually succeeded in the mission. As they tried to make their escape, the one certainty was that the raiders would be completely on their own, far beyond the reach of either the British or fellow rebels to come to their aid.
To these concerns, Lawrence offered a refinement: he would do it himself. Just as he’d done in taking Aqaba, he would set out with a small, handpicked force, one hopefully resourceful and unobtrusive enough to avoid detection, and he would recruit whomever else he needed along the way. After the operation, the local recruits could melt back into their villages as those in Lawrence’s party scattered in search of safe haven.
To most who heard it in El Arish, Lawrence’s idea seemed less a battle plan than a suicide mission. Moreover, these were men to whom Lawrence was not some faceless soldier, but a friend, a protégé, a young man they admired. Weighing against this, though, were the exigencies of war.
By mid-October 1917, the Entente war effort lay everywhere in tatters. Over the previous summer, the French army had been riven by mutinies, with entire regiments refusing to march into their trenchwork slaughter pens; while that crisis had now abated, the army of France remained a shaken, traumatized force. On the Eastern Front, the Germans had smashed yet another Russian offensive, a last desperate gamble by the dying Kerensky regime; before the end of that month of October, the Bolsheviks would seize power and sue for peace with Germany. On the Southern Front, the Italians had recently failed in their tenth and eleventh offensives against the Austrians in the Isonzo valley, and were about to experience a colossal collapse in the battle of Caporetto. Since July 31, the British commander on the Western Front, Douglas Haig, had been building on his reputation for callous butchery by persisting with an offensive even more futile than his previous outing at the Somme. By the time the battle of Passchendaele was finally called off in early November, the seventy thousand British soldiers who had perished in its mud fields would equate to one dead man for every two inches of ground gained.
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