The obvious danger to the British plans in Palestine led to an urgent appeal from Cairo to Feisal, to take Medina if possible or otherwise intercept the garrison on its retreat up the railway. A messenger was sent down to Wejh by a special ship to tell the British mission of the intercepted telegram and urge prompt action. Newcombe was up country, operating against the railway, so Lawrence took the responsibility of urging instant action. To meet the appeal Feisal hastened to move forward detachments to a chain of four advanced bases near the railway, against which the raids were now multiplied. And Lawrence himself decided to set out for the Wadi Ais, to spur Abdulla to attack Medina as the General Staff desired. He was ill with dysentery at the time the message came from Clayton, but he refused to let his weakness baulk him, and he set out with a small escort of mixed tribesmen on the long camel-ride through the hills. But the effort taxed his strength so hardly that he could scarcely keep his seat, and twice suffered from fainting-fits. In this pitiable state his mind was haunted by the ever-present thought that he might collapse completely on the way, and be handed over to the worse than unmedical care of the desert tribesmen, his mission unfulfilled.
FEISAL’S AGEYL BODYGUARD. JANUARY, 1917
To add to these physical and mental trials, at the first evening’s halt a quarrel occurred among the party in which one of them, a Moor, murdered an Ageyli. It was settled with primitive justice by an informal court-martial on the murderer. The other Ageyli demanded the desert law of blood for blood, and Lawrence in vain tried to dissuade them. Finally, seeing that if baulked they would take vengeance privately, which would start a new blood feud, Lawrence forced himself to carry out the summary execution of the murderer, shooting him with his own hand.
Somehow, he scarcely knew how, Lawrence succeeded in holding out against his weakness until Abdulla’s camp was reached on March 13th. There he delivered his message and then staggered to a tent, where he lay ten days recovering his strength. As his head cleared, while still too weak to be on his legs, he had time to think. More time than he had ever had since the Revolt began, and with experience behind him on which he could reason. His thoughts went back to the many books of military theory he had read in pre-war days. They worked forward from these to the actual conditions of the campaign in which he was engaged. The contrast between that theory and present reality were so great that, gradually, startling new ideas took form in his mind—ideas that would be revolutionary in effect.
CHAPTER IX
MARTIAL REVERIES
March, 1917
IN 1757 Marshal Saxe’s Reveries on the Art of War was published posthumously. The book became a military classic of the 18th century; it was translated into English in the very year of it publication. Its immediate success may have owed something to Saxe’s fame as a commander, the man who had beaten the English in Flanders. But it owed more to the originality of Saxe’s military ideas, which had already made their mark in the actual practice of war. Now, more developed in his book, and generating a greater force, they came like a shattering blast to the encrusted conventions of his time.
In an age of regularity he introduced irregularity as a lever. In an age of immobility he coiled the spring of a new mobility. In an age of professional pedantry he showed’ more freedom from custom—and more of the scientific spirit of inquiry—than any of the generals of the French Revolution, who were able to operate in much freer conditions.
He was, perhaps, fortunate to be not only Maurice of Saxony but the most successful of all the Marshals of the century. He certainly showed discretion in withholding publication of his Reveries until after his death. For his manner of criticism was no less devastating than his proposals. He prefaced them by the remark—“War is a science so obscure and imperfect” that “custom and prejudice confirmed by ignorance are its sole foundation and support.” He described the prevailing theory of War and its sacrosanct dogmas as no better than “maxims blindly adopted, without any examination of the principles on which they were founded . . . our present practice is nothing mere than a passive compliance with received customs to the grounds of which we are absolute strangers.”
In seeking to rescue his successors from the bondage of convention which had reduced 18th century warfare to a draught-board formality, he saw that the conditions which produced immobility and rigidity must first be remedied. And he saw most of the ways in which to remedy them, though not all of his ideas were applied even in the Wars of the Revolution. Some waited for the 20th century.
In his dictum that the “whole secret of the art of war rests in the legs and not in the arms,” he anticipated Napoleon’s well-known saying that his victories were won by the legs of his soldiers. Saxe also saw like Sherman in Georgia, and in contrast to Napoleon and his 19th century disciples, that there is a limit, determined by mobility, to what one may call the “economic size” of any particular army. And that the effective strength of an army may cease to increase when its numbers cause a decline in mobility, unless it is engaged in passive defence or is within fortified lines.
Saxe declared that “a general of parts” with an army of such economic size would be able to dominate an enemy double the size—“for multitudes serve only to perplex and embarrass.”
The army of his dream took its inspiration from the Roman Legion, that remarkable blend of strength with flexibility, but he did more than merely adapt this to the 18th century conditions, suggesting innumerable improvements in armament, equipment, and tactics all tending to develop the power of manœuvre and apply fire in manœuvre, especially through releasing the independent action of the individual. In particular, he proposed to cut down transport and rid himself of the encumbrances of magazines. But the significance of Saxe’s legionary organization was greater as a whole than in its parts. For here in embryo was the “divisional system”—the organization of an army in separate divisions capable of moving and acting independently. It meant that an army, hitherto a limbless trunk, grew arms with which it could grip the enemy at different points while it struck him at others. Through this, above all, strategy was to be revolutionized in the Wars of the Revolution.
Saxe was no less creative when he passed on from these “branches” of an army to what he styled the “sublime branches of the art of war.” Here his teaching is distinguished by its variety yet continuity of ideas on the art of playing upon the enemy commander’s mind, upsetting his balance and dislocating his dispositions,. In his imaginary cases one can trace Napoleonic combinations in embryo mingled with a Hannibalic guile—every plan hides a trap.
Saxe’s fame was obscured, and his influence thereby diminished, by the spectacular successes that Frederick the Great achieved so soon after his death—victories that for all their brilliance brought Frederick to the verge of ruin and cast the shadow of bankruptcy over a strategy which, in its pursuit of decisive battle, lost sight of the goal of war. As a creative military mind Frederick’s cannot compare with Saxe’s. It is an irony of history—and also a tragedy—that his reputation should have overshadowed Saxe’s. But in France, at least, and by his criticism no less than his construction, Saxe paved the way for that renaissance of military thought which in turn, through the more developed ideas of men like Bourcet and Guibert, gave birth to what is erroneously termed the Napoleonic method. Napoleon certainly applied it, within the limits of his understanding. He did not create it.
In the glare of his triumphs, however, the source of his system was lost to sight. Nor was that all. The very system itself that was the source of his success became obscured, first, by his gradual distortion of it. The difference between the system to which he was the fortunate heir, and the theory which became his legacy, might be expressed by drawing a distinction between Bonaparte and Napoleon. General Bonaparte applied a theory that created an empire for him. The Emperor Napoleon developed a practice which wrecked his empire. It wrecked other empires a century later.
From 1806 onwards the superiority of numbers which Napoleon enjoyed, from the vast r
esources of imperial power, had a growing influence on his conduct of war. If he still exploited mobility, he unconsciously pinned his faith to mass, and subordinated his art to his weight. In his campaigns after Jena he was too apt to rush at his opponents, confident that his machine would crush them if he could only bring them to battle. His victories were won less by surprise than by sheer offensive power, expressed in his new artillery tactics of a massed concentration of guns to blast a selected spot. At Eylau he suffered a check, and at Aspern his first defeat.
His victories, moreover, were purchased at a cost which caused an increasing drain on his military bank-balance of man-power. The intoxication of success had upset his balance of mind. In 1813 his bankruptcy was declared and in 1815 an undischarged bankrupt, in debt again, went to serve his sentence at St. Helena—a world debtor’s prison.
He paid the penalty of violating the law of economy of force, which depends on mobility and surprise. The new mobility—as conceived by Saxe, Bourcet and Guibert—had the purpose of concentrating superior strength against the enemy’s weak points, of concentrating it unexpectedly at vital points that the enemy had been deceived into weakening. It was abused when employed merely to form a superior mass—to multiply numbers at unweakened points. The true virtue of the new power of mobile concentration lay in its variability, not in its density. It meant the power to shuffle a hand so deftly that a trump could always be produced at the critical point: not merely a quickened power to assemble a hand.
But Napoleon had tended increasingly to forget his early sleight of hand, and to rely on the hand that fortune dealt him, trusting in the mere strength of his cards. Thus he lost points and finally the rubber.
The lesson was lost on the generations that followed, blinded by the glamour of his colossal gamble. The original Napoleonic system was obscured by the Napoleonic legend. In this darkening of military thought there developed a swing of the pendulum back to immobility—due to the new theory of mass, on which fresh weights were piled by Napoleon’s disciples, beginning with Clausewitz and culminating with Foch. Gathering momentum the pendulum continued with fatal force until it crashed on the hard realities of 1914 and buried itself in the immovable trenches of the Western Front, from which it was only extracted after four years of effort that left Europe exhausted.
Only in the East, especially the Middle East, was mobility given opportunity, and the opportunity taken. But there, more significantly, arose a new and extreme theory of mobility, which was applied with dramatic success and had a far-reaching effect in irregular warfare. But it has, also, a message for regular warfare, of still greater potential range.
That theory evolved from the reveries of Lawrence as he lay on his sick-bed in Abdulla’s camp.
His thoughts travelled back to the military books he had read while at Oxford. They were an astonishingly wide collection for a man whose main interests were mediæval architecture and pottery, a far wider course of study than almost any regular soldier had undertaken, certainly in England. He began when about fifteen or sixteen, on what he calls—“the usual school-boy stuff,” Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Coxe’s Marlborough, Mahan’s Influence of Sea-Power on History, Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson. Tough matter for a schoolboy’s digestion—and Henderson was the bounds of many a Staff College student’s horizon. Mixed with these Lawrence read many technical treatises on castle-building and sieges—old ones such as Procopius, Vegetius, and about Demetrius Poliorcetes.
A little later he came to Clausewitz and his school, to Caemerrer and Moltke, Goltz and some of the post-1870 French military writers. These seemed to him “very partial books,” even Clausewitz, and so, being dissatisfied, he worked back to Napoleon himself. On the way he had a look at Jomini and Willisen, and in the latter at least struck a definition of strategy that made a deep impression—“the study of communication.” Then he was drawn, through reading a French study of Napoleon’s Italian campaign, to “browse” in Napoleon’s correspondence—a series of thirty-two volumes!
This had inspired Lawrence with a desire to study the text-books that Napoleon himself had studied. Thus he came to Guibert and, going a step further back, to Bourcet and Saxe. So far as I have discovered there is only one copy in England of Bourcet’s treatise, and that lies in the War Office library. This, like other rare books, Lawrence tracked down through the advice of Reginald Lane Poole—“my most unpontifical official tutor at Oxford, who had read every book, and remembered the best ones.”
These writers pleased Lawrence because he found “broader principles” in them. Saxe stayed in his mind, yet at the back of his mind. Later Lawrence would regard Saxe as “the greatest master of his kind of War,” but that was after Lawrence himself had made war, and gained practical experience. At the time he felt that “Clausewitz was intellectually so much the master of them all that unwillingly I had come to believe in him.”
Apart from this intellectual interest in the theory of war, Lawrence had studied quite a number of battlefields—mainly for the interest of re-creating them on maps. Beginning with sieges, directly related to his pursuit of castles, he had “tried to get an idea of the bigger movements.” He had Visited Rocroi, Créy, Agincourt, Malplaquet, Sedan,” and one or two other battlefields of 1870. He also “saw Valmy and its neighbourhood and tried to re-fight the whole of Marlborough’s wars,” Then, when he went, to Syria, he followed step by step the campaigns of the Crusaders.
But these excursions were not undertaken with any conscious purpose of fitting himself for future command. Nor was his reading. “My interests were only in pure theory, I looked everywhere for the metaphysical side, the philosophy of war, about which I thought a little for some years.” Now in an unforeseen way he had been drawn into action and found himself “unfortunately as much in charge of the campaign as I pleased.”
In such circumstances the clear-thinking man is often more handicapped than the purely instinctive man, or at least more conscious of his handicap when suddenly called on to practise what he has casually thought about as a pastime. The strangeness of direct contact with an activity familiar at second-hand makes him acutely aware of his own deficiencies of training. He is apt to exaggerate the proficiency of fellow-workers whose air of naturalness in the little things they are used to doing effectively conceals from him, for a time, their limitations in that sphere outside the familiar routine that they fulfil without relection. But if he continues, and has leisure to reflect, his greater capacity for thought may provide an impulse to clear the ground of accumulated débris, and achieve a new construction on his wider foundations of study, which he can now check by personal experience of actual conditions.
Plunged suddenly into action at Yanbo, Lawrence’s immersion had been too complete hitherto for him to rise to the surface and get his head above water. Now, however, enforced inactivity served him as a life-buoy. It is true that after his first visit in October he had written a reasoned appreciation of the situation which showed a masterly treatment of the immediate problem, but there had been no time until now to ponder the course of future action or develop a theory on which to act.
His thought retraced the course of the campaign in the Hejaz, from the time that Rabegh had seemed in imminent peril. The professional soldiers had put their fingers on Rabegh as “the key of Mecca,” and had urged the importance of holding it. None of them, British or French, had regarded the Bedouin as of any value in defending it or any other fixed position. The course of events had justified their view.
Yet he himself, with no professional reputation to lose, had reported that “the tribesmen (if strengthened by light machine-guns and regular officers as advisers) should be able to hold up the Turks indefinitely, while the Arab regular force was being created.” The issue paradoxically, had justified his view also. Although the Arabs had given way whenever attacked, Rabegh was still intact.
This might be sheer luck. Indeed, the Turks had given his appre
ciation a rude shock by breaking through the belt of hills that he had deemed impregnable. Yet their advance, with its worst obstacles passed, had petered out. True, it might certainly have been renewed, and have reached Rabegh, if Feisal had not suddenly moved to Wejh, and produced a threat to the Turks’ communications that had sent them scurrying back. Perhaps it had been the mere prospect of this threat that had made them hesitate so long in their advance on Mecca. Even so, it looked as if this failure to reach Rabegh, when they began advancing, might be largely explained by the distance they had had to travel—by the one hundred and forty miles that separated Rabegh from Medina. So long as the Arabs had space to fall back, their delaying power might be equivalent to defensive power. And they could have the advantage of unlimited space so long as they had no vital point to cover. That advantage was possible with a nomadic people—hence a farther argument for transferring operations northwards. “The virtue of irregulars lay in depth, not in force.”
But merely to delay the enemy, and prevent them from winning, was not enough—according to the text books. Field Service Regulations said that “the defensive attitude must be assumed only in order to obtain or create a favourable opportunity for decisive offensive action” This meant that the Arab tribal forces could be only a strategic stop-gap until the Arab regular force was ready for action. “Irregulars would not attack positions and so they seemed to be incapable of forcing a decision.”
“As was almost inevitable in view of the general course of military thinking since Napoleon, we all looked only to the regulars to win the War. We were obsessed by the dictum of Foch that the ethic of modern war is to seek for the enemy’s army, his centre of power, and destroy it in battle.”
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