On that day, Lawrence and his raiding party were actually some eighty miles to the east of Yarmuk, hoping to salvage at least some small accomplishment from a mission where everything had gone wrong.
Reaching the desert fortress village of Azraq a few days after parting with Lloyd, Lawrence had found the Serahin tribesmen he hoped to enlist for Yarmuk reluctant to join; a chief reason was their deep mistrust of Abd el Kader, whom they too suspected of being a traitor. Swayed by an impassioned speech by Lawrence, the tribesmen finally joined on to the mission, but then Abd el Kader had abruptly disappeared en route to Yarmuk, last seen heading for a Turkish-held town. Still, Lawrence refused to turn back.
Despite it all, he very nearly succeeded. Reaching the railroad bridge at Tell al Shehab on the night of November 7, Lawrence and his demolition team had been hauling the gelignite down into the gorge under the very nose of a Turkish sentry when someone dropped a rifle against the rocks. Alerted by the sound, the half dozen Turkish guards rolled out of their guardhouse to begin firing wildly in all directions. Possessed of the unpleasant knowledge that gelignite explodes if hit by a bullet, Lawrence’s porters summarily tossed their loads into the ravine and scrambled for safety. With little alternative, Lawrence joined them.
Men in war are among the most superstitious of people, but even one welded to pure rationality might have decided it was now time for the Yarmuk raiding party to call things off, to count its blessings at having survived for this long and make for safety. Instead, Lawrence seemed gripped by an almost demonic determination to wring at least some small shard of success from his mission. He decided to launch another train attack.
To do so, though, meant raising the danger stakes yet again. With his entourage running desperately short of food, he ordered some of its members away. This included the Indian machine-gun crews, which meant that even if the train attack came off, the raiders would have no heavy weaponry to protect them. What’s more, due to the amount of electric cable lost at the Yarmuk bridge, whoever triggered the detonation would be positioned a mere fifty yards from the blast site. That person would be Lawrence.
The site he chose was an isolated stretch of track outside the village of Minifir on the main trunk line of the Hejaz Railway below Amman. Crouched behind a small bush to conceal his detonator but in plain view of the track, Lawrence first tried to blow up a long troop transport train. To the great good fortune of himself and the sixty men in his retinue hiding in nearby gulleys, the electric connection failed—they surely would have been massacred by the overwhelming Turkish force—and for agonizing minutes, Lawrence endured the puzzled stares of the Turkish soldiers on the slowly passing train, occasionally waving to them in forced friendliness.
Not that the odds of survival were much better with the somewhat smaller troop train Lawrence succeeded in striking the next day. Positioned so close to the explosion site, he was sent flying by the blast’s concussion—a very lucky thing since a large chunk of the destroyed train engine landed directly atop the detonator mechanism that moments before had been between his knees. Dazed, Lawrence staggered to his feet to see that his shirt was torn to shreds and blood dripped from his left arm. As the dust and smoke cleared, he also saw just before him “the scalded and smoking upper half of a man,” ripped in two by the blast; that portion of his body had flown fifty yards through the air.
“I duly felt that it was time to get away,” Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, “but when I moved, I learnt that there was a great pain in my right foot, because of which I could only limp along, with my head swinging from the shock. Movement began to clear away this confusion, as I hobbled toward the upper valley, whence the Arabs were now shooting fast into the crowded coaches.”
As Lawrence stumbled toward safety, the Turkish soldiers on the train took aim at him—albeit not very good aim; by his account, he was grazed by at least five of their bullets, “some of them uncomfortably deep.” As he went, still in a state of shock, he willed himself on by chanting an odd refrain: “Oh, I wish this hadn’t happened.”
In the capture of Wejh ten months earlier, Lawrence had excoriated a British officer who had led an assault party ashore, an action that resulted in some twenty Arabs being killed, rather than simply waiting for the stranded Turkish garrison to surrender. “To me,” he wrote of that engagement, “an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.… Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation, and our men were volunteers—individuals, local men, relatives—so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army.”
At Minifir, Lawrence had picked a fight with a Turkish force of some four hundred soldiers with a mere sixty followers; incredibly, some of these didn’t even have weapons, and were reduced to throwing rocks at the hobbled train. About twenty were quickly shot down, including at least seven from among the group sent down to the tracks to rescue Lawrence. Of the contradiction between his response to the British officer’s actions at Wejh and his own at Minifir, Lawrence seemed to remain quite oblivious—or perhaps, in the passage of those brutal ten months, he simply no longer cared.
“Next day,” he wrote of Minifir’s aftermath, “we moved into Azrak, having a great welcome and boasting—God forgive us—that we were victors.”
Chapter 16
A Gathering Fury
With reference to the recent publication of your Excellency’s declaration to Lord Rothschild regarding Jews in Palestine, we respectfully take the liberty to invite your Excellency’s attention to the fact that Palestine forms a vital part of Syria—as the heart is to the body—admitting of no separation politically or sociologically.
THE SYRIAN COMMITTEE OF EGYPT TO BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY BALFOUR, NOVEMBER 14, 1917
The British Authorities have replied to the Syrian Committee … that the telegram to Mr. Balfour could not be transmitted at this time, but that the British Authorities were pleased the Syrians in Egypt had made known their sentiments in regard to the Zionist Question.
WILLIAM YALE TO STATE DEPARTMENT, DECEMBER 17, 1917
For the traveler venturing east from the Jordanian capital of Amman, there is little to relieve the eye. Within a few miles, the hilly contours of Amman are left behind and the land settles into an undulating plain of gravel and coarse sand. As a consequence, one’s first thought upon coming to the high stone walls of the citadel of Azraq, some fifty miles across that dreary desert, is apt to be wonderment at its improbability. On this vast and empty landscape, how to account for such a massive fortress, its thirty-foot walls crowned by even higher watchtowers at its corners, ever having been built?
The answer is water, of course, an oasis that in ancient times provided the only source of sustenance over a surrounding area of nearly five thousand square miles. It was the Romans who first appreciated Azraq’s strategic importance, erecting a small fort beside the oasis in the second century AD, but it was Saladin’s Ayyubid empire a thousand years later that created the impressive monolith that still stands. Even today, the citadel dominates the town that shares its name, but in November 1917, when Lawrence and his small band of raiders fled to Azraq after their train attack at Minifir, that settlement consisted of a few stone huts, and the fortress must have risen up from the plain before them like an apparition.
Azraq was where Lawrence had met Nuri Shalaan, the emir of the Rualla tribe, the previous June, and he had noted at the time that it made for a perfect hideout. Along with water and shelter, the fortress provided a commanding view of the desert in all directions. Consequently, Lawrence had sent the Indian machine-gun crews there just prior to the Minifir attack, so that by the time he and the rest of the raiding party arrived on November 12, those guns were already mounted in the citadel’s watchtowers, making the place all but invincible. So ideal was the oasis, in fact, that Lawrence quickly decided to make it the forward base for bringing the Arab Revolt to the Syrian heartland; with
in a day of arriving, he sent a courier on the two-hundred-mile journey to Aqaba with instructions for Faisal to begin bringing the vanguard of his army north.
Setting up shop in Azraq served a more cunning purpose, too. The settlement marked the northwestern boundary of Nuri Shalaan’s dominion. Despite the repeated entreaties of Faisal, and Lawrence himself back in June, Shalaan continued to straddle the centerline of the war, quietly lending support to the Arab rebels one day, openly trading with the Turks the next. In Azraq, the rebels would be placing themselves squarely between the Rualla heartland and the Turkish-controlled Syrian market towns. “He hesitated to declare himself only because of his wealth in Syria,” Lawrence wrote of Shalaan, “and the possible hurt to his tribesmen if they were deprived of their natural market. We, by living in one of his main manors, would keep him ashamed to go in to the enemy.”
In Azraq, Lawrence’s small retinue quickly became less a band of warriors than a pickup construction crew as they set to work making the citadel habitable for the much larger force soon to be on its way. They repaired its tumbled stone walls and fallen roofs, even refurbished the small mosque in its courtyard that had most recently been used as a sheep pen. As word of the rebels’ presence spread through the district, their labors were interrupted by visits from tribal delegations, visits that invariably led to feasts and an atmosphere of general merriment. Lawrence found a pleasant respite from it all by taking up residence in the repaired watchroom of the southern tower.
Even for a book saturated with detail—some might say drowned by it—there is something quite remarkable about Lawrence’s account of Azraq in Seven Pillars. For five pages, and in some of the most heartfelt writing of the entire memoir, he lingered over the idyll of his time there, the happy camaraderie that existed between his group of followers and their visitors, lyrically described the mysterious wolves or jackals that howled outside the citadel’s walls at night but were never seen. Even when the winter rains started, turning the fortress into a leaking, clammy prison where the only recourse was to huddle for warmth beneath sheepskins, misery took on a distinctly heraldic quality. “It was icy cold as we hid there, motionless, from murky daylight until dark, our minds seemed suspended within these massive walls, through whose every shot-window the piercing mist streamed like a white pennant. Past and future flowed over us like an uneddying river. We dreamed ourselves into the spirit of the place; sieges and feasting, raids, murders, love-singing in the night.”
Making all this rather more remarkable is that, at most, Lawrence stayed just six days in Azraq on this November visit, and possibly as few as three.
Perhaps the place took on its idyllic trappings in his mind because of what he had just endured. For the preceding month, ever since coming up with the plan to attack the Yarmuk bridge, Lawrence had lived in the constant shadow of the knowledge that he might soon die. In Azraq, that shadow had abruptly lifted.
Or perhaps it was due to what lay immediately ahead. Just days after reaching Azraq, Lawrence set off into the desert again in the company of three men. Their destination was the crucial rail junction town of Deraa, seventy miles to the northwest. There, Lawrence would endure the most horrific—and among his various biographers of the past half century, most fiercely debated—ordeal of his entire wartime experience.
THE DOUBLE CROSS, for this was certainly how Aaron Aaronsohn viewed it, was revealed on the afternoon of November 16, on the very eve of his departure from London. It was then that he finally received Chaim Weizmann’s letter of instruction concerning his mission to the United States. The two had discussed that mission at such exhaustive length in recent days that Aaronsohn almost didn’t bother to read the letter—but he did.
Weizmann’s note instructed him, essentially, to shut up. “The carrying out of these complicated duties,” he wrote, “makes it desirable for you to avoid making public speeches and journalistic interviews, and in order to prevent your being pressed to undertake such work we, in accordance with your desire, formally request you to confine yourself to the duties already specified.” In case the point could be missed, Weizmann further ordered Aaronsohn to refrain from all “direct action, either by speech or letter, except through the medium of Mr. Brandeis,” the leader of American Zionists.
Aaronsohn was made furious by the letter, not least by Weizmann’s contention that he himself had asked for such a muzzle. “The old man is not a fool,” he angrily noted in his diary that night, “but I am not so naïve either.… Verily, every day brings me another proof of Weizmann’s hypocrisy.”
Since arriving in London six weeks earlier, Aaronsohn had spent a good deal of time with the British Zionist leader. Their relationship was a complicated one, rooted in both mutual respect and mutual distrust, and they had developed a habit of getting along famously one day, falling to bickering the next. Just prior to Weizmann’s demeaning letter of instruction, there had been much more of the former, and for a simple reason: in a matter of days, there had unfolded before their eyes the most dramatic and consequential events in the history of Zionism.
Chief among these was the Balfour Declaration, of course, but neatly coinciding with that had been news of the British army’s rapid advance in Palestine. After breaking through at Beersheva, Allenby’s forces had continued to push north, scattering the disorganized Turks before them. Although Aaronsohn didn’t know it yet, on that very day of November 16, a British vanguard was marching unopposed into the coastal city of Jaffa, fifty miles from their starting point, even as other units closed on the foothills below Jerusalem. With astounding speed, what had seemed a distant, even theoretical, dream for nineteen hundred years—the return of the Jewish diaspora to their ancient homeland—was hurtling toward reality.
Understandably, the combination of these events was having an electrifying effect on the international Zionist community. From Jewish enclaves around the world, messages of gratitude for the Balfour Declaration had flooded into the British Foreign Office. That outpouring seemed to instantly affirm the argument that Chaim Weizmann and his allies in the British government had been pressing for months, that by declaring support for a Jewish homeland and working to make it happen, the Allies would find the world’s Zionist community rushing to its side.
This reaction wasn’t universal, however, and the fervency of support elsewhere made the muted reaction among American Zionists all the more striking. By mid-November, few American newspapers had seen fit to even mention the declaration—the New York Times dispensed with it in three very short paragraphs—while many noted American Jewish leaders had yet to publicly comment on it. Most conspicuous was the silence emanating from the Wilson administration, a situation Weizmann and the British government found particularly galling since the declaration had been rewritten—and substantially delayed—specifically to gain the American president’s approval.
As Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, had informed the British back in September when the proposal was first explicitly put to the Americans, the president was prepared to go no further than a vague statement of “sympathy” for the Anglo-Zionist plan, and only this “provided it can be made without conveying any real commitment” on his part. By subsequently watering down the declaration’s original proposed language, the British had managed to bring Wilson fully on board, but with a major caveat still attached; as House told London in mid-October, the president “asks that no mention of his approval shall be made when His Majesty’s Government makes [the] formula public, as he has arranged that American Jews shall then ask him for his approval, which he will give publicly here.”
Except that Wilson’s silence had contributed to the hesitation of American Zionists on the matter, which in turn had enabled the president to maintain his silence. It was in hopes of countering this standoff that Aaron Aaronsohn, a familiar figure to many of those Zionists, was being dispatched to the United States.
The goals of his mission had been worked out at a high-level meeting at the British Foreign
Office a few days earlier, one attended by both Weizmann and Mark Sykes. It was a highly ambitious agenda. As the officially designated liaison between the English Zionist Federation and its American counterpart, Aaronsohn was to “help our United States Organization to appreciate the actual significance of various political and military developments” in the Middle East, as well as to promote the “the rousing of Zionist enthusiasm, the stimulating of pro-Entente propaganda,” and, in furtherance of Sykes’s fanciful notion of a Jewish-Arab-Armenian consortium in the Middle East, “the consolidation and alliance of the Zionist forces with those of the Arabs and Armenians.” In addition, Aaronsohn was to act as the official channel of communication between Weizmann and the leader of the American Zionist community, U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.
As daunting as this agenda was, Aaronsohn had accepted the assignment wholeheartedly, and he’d let his Zionist contacts in the United States know he was on his way. That simply added another layer of humiliation to Weizmann’s letter of instruction on November 16.
But many people had tried to silence Aaron Aaronsohn over the years, and to precious little success. Quickly coming to regard Weizmann’s strictures as something of a dare, the next morning the agronomist boarded a train at London’s Euston station for the run up to Liverpool and the ship, SS St. Paul, that would take him to New York.
In Weizmann’s defense, it wasn’t merely a controlling nature that led him to try to muzzle Aaronsohn. While appreciative of the scientist’s extensive contacts in the American Zionist community, Weizmann had spent enough time around Aaronsohn over the previous six weeks to grow apprehensive of his hotheaded personality. That was especially worrisome considering that there was actually something of a hidden agenda to his mission to the United States.
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