That was the purpose which Lawrence had come all the way from Wejh to persuade Abdulla to attempt. The Medina garrison must be destroyed. But how was it to be done? Spurred on by the urgent appeal from Cairo he had set out from Wejh to carry the message, without pausing to think out its implications. But now in his tent, with the fever subsiding, he could cogitate the problem at leisure, as far as the flies permitted. His mission began to seem rather unreal, if it had a spice of humour.
Lawrence sought to find, and it was not easy to find, “an immediate equation between my book-reading and our present movements.
“However, the books gave me the aim of war quite pat, ‘the destruction of the organized forces of the enemy’ by ‘the one process, battle.’ Victory could only be purchased by blood. This was a hard saying for us, as the Arabs had no organized forces, and so a Turkish Foch would have no aim: and the Arabs would not endure casualties, so that an Arab Clausewitz could not buy his victory. These wise men must be talking metaphors, for we were indubitably winning our war—and as I thought about it, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. We were in occupation of 99 per cent of the Hejaz. The Turks were welcome to the other fraction till peace or doomsday showed them the futility of clinging to our windowpane.”
It was a satisfying thought, and a surprising one, yet the more he turned it over in his mind the clearer it shone. But then what about Medina? And the answer flashed out from reflection—“why bother about Medina?” Even if it could be captured, which was clearly impossible with present means, what would be the good of capturing it? Indeed—here was a further thought—would it not be harmful to do so?
“It was no base to us, like Rabegh, no threat to the Turks, like Wejh: just a blind alley for both. The Turks sat in it on the defensive, immobile, eating for food the transport animals which were to have moved them to Mecca, but for which there was no pasture in their now restricted lines. They were harmless sitting there; if we took them prisoners they would cost us food and guards in Egypt: if we drove them northward into Syria, they would join the main army blocking us in Sinai. On all counts they were best where they were, and they valued Medina and wanted to keep it. Let them!
“This seemed unlike the ritual of war of which Foch had been priest, and so I began to hope that there was a difference of kind between him and us. He called his modern war ‘absolute.’ in it two nations professing incompatible philosophies set out to try them in the light of force. A struggle of two immaterial philosophies could only end when the supporters of one had no more means of resistance. An opinion can be argued with: a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo the classical text-book instance.” Foch seemed to have gone back to the old wars of religion. His philosophy might apply to the struggle between France and Germany, but not to the British attitude, “for all efforts to make our men hate the enemy, just made them hate war . . .” Moreover, any war that stopped short of the extermination of the enemy people, as even the World War would, obviously fell short of “the Foch ideal.” Thus although Foch and his fellows of the 19th century school of military thought talked as if “absolute” war was die only kind, Lawrence now began to realize that it was “only a variety of war: and I could then see other sorts, as Clausewitz had numbered them, personal wars for dynastic reasons, expulsive wars for party reasons, commercial wars for trading reasons.
“Then I thought of the Arab aim, and saw that it was geographical, to occupy all Arabic-speaking lands in Asia. In the doing of it we might kill Turks: we disliked them very much. Yet ‘killing Turks’ would never be an excuse or aim. If they would go quietly, our war would end. If not, we would try to drive them out: in the last resort we would be compelled to the desperate course of blood, on the maxim of ‘murder’ war, but as cheaply as possible for ourselves, since the Arabs were fighting for freedom, a pleasure only to be tasted by a man alive.”
This new realization of the narrow horizon of the accepted teachers of the 19th century, the men who had formulated the doctrines which the armies of Europe were now trying to carry out, with rather poor result, led Lawrence’s thought back to those 18th century teachers, whose “broader principles” had long ago impressed him. It gave him a new appreciation of Saxe in particular, and of those Reveries which Carlyle, the devotee of Frederick, had scornfully dismissed as a “strange military farrago, dictated as I should think, under opium.” if Lawrence had ever had any inclination to accept such a verdict he lost it now. Through experience he now saw Saxe, not as a dreamer, but as a supreme realist.
It was Saxe, he remembered, who had written—“I am not in favour of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war. I am even convinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so.” Foch had held Saxe up to ridicule for that remark, contrasting it with Napoleon’s remark in 1806—“There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle.” in scornful comment Foch had added, “The one wants to avoid battle his whole life, the other demands it at the first opportunity.”
Lawrence, freed by contact with experience from the metaphysical spell of Clausewitz, could now appreciate Saxe’s practical point of view. He saw that Saxe had kept his mind on the ultimate aim of war, to which battle is only a means. Saxe himself had fought several battles, all victories. But he did not fight battles for battle’s sake, like Napoleon and his heirs were inclined to do, Lawrence began to wonder whether, having been compelled to cut adrift from Foch’s theory, he could not instead apply Saxe’s. Where Foch’s had, obviously, no relation to the actual conditions, Saxe’s might be adapted.
It was Saxe who had remarked—“there is more address in making bad dispositions than is commonly imagined, provided that they are intentional, and so formed as to admit of being instantaneously converted into good ones; nothing can more confound an enemy, who has been anticipating a victory, than a stratagem of this kind . . .” The remark might have been coined to fit the Hejaz campaign. So long as the Arabs had been concentrated in face of die Turks the scales had turned against them. Once they began to stretch out it had turned the other way. And the more they had become separated the worse had become their enemy’s plight.
Lawrence now turned to study his future problem in this new light. “My personal duty was command, and I began to unravel command and analyse it, both from the point of view of strategy, the aim of war, the synoptic regard which sees everything by the standard of the whole; and from the point of view called tactics, the means towards the strategic end, the steps of its staircase.” “In each I found the same elements, one algebraical, one biological, a third psychological. The first seemed a pure science, subject to the laws of mathematics, without humanity. It dealt with known invariables, fixed conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills,. and climate, and railways, with mankind in type-masses, too great for individual variety, with all artificial aids, and the extensions given our faculties by mechanical invention. It was essentially formidable.”
“In the Arab case the algebraic factor would take first account of the area we wished to conquer, and I began idly to calculate how many square miles . . . perhaps a hundred and forty thousand . . . and how would the Turks defend all that . . . no doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we were an army attacking with banners displayed . . . but suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind, and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target. He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.
“Then I estimated how many posts they would need to contain this attack in depth, sedition putting up her head in every unoccupied one of these hundred thousan
d square miles. I knew the Turkish Army inside and out, and allowing for its recent extension of faculty by guns and aeroplanes and armoured trains, still it seemed it would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than twenty men. The Turks would need six hundred thousand men to meet the combined illwills of all the local Arab people. They had one hundred thousand men available. It seemed the assets in this part of command were ours, and climate, railways, deserts, technical weapons could also be attached to our interests, if we realized our raw materials and were apt with them. The Turk was stupid and would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of absolute warfare. Analogy is fudge, anyhow, and to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
CAPTAIN LAWRENCE, EARLY IN 1917
“So much for the mathematical element, which I annoyed the others by calling hecastics. The second factor was biological, the breaking-point, life and death, or better, wear and tear. Bionomics seemed a good name for it. The war-philosophers had properly made it an art, and had elevated one item in it, ‘effusion of blood,’ to the height of a principle. It became humanity in battle, an. art touching every side of our corporal being, and very warm. There was a line of variability (man) running through all its estimates. Its components were sensitive and illogical, and generals guarded themselves by the device of a reserve, the significant medium of their art. Goltz had said that when you know the enemy’s strength, and he is fully deployed, then, you know enough to dispense with a reserve. But this is never. There is always the possibility of accident, of some iaw in materials, present in the general’s mind; and the reserve is unconsciously held to meet it. There is a ‘felt’ element in troops, not expressible in figures, guessed at by the equivalent of δóξα in Plato, and the greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen. Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher lashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensued by instinct, sharpened by thought practising the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex.
“Yet to limit the art to humanity seemed to me an undue narrowing down. It must apply to materials as much, as to organisms. In the Turkish Army materials were scarce and precious, men more plentiful than equipment. Consequently our cue should be to destroy not the Army but the materials. The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun, or high explosive was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk. The Arab Army just now was equally chary of men and materials: of men because they being irregulars were not units, but individuals, and an individual casualty is like a pebble dropped in water: each may make only a brief hole, but rings of sorrow widen out from them. We could not afford casualties. Materials were easier to deal with and put straight. It was our obvious duty to make ourselves superior in some one branch, gun-cotton or machine guns, or whatever could be made most decisive. Foch had laid down the maxim, applying it to men, of being superior at the critical point and moment of attack. We might apply it to materials, and be superior in equipment in one dominant moment or respect.
“For both men and things we might try to give Foch’s doctrine a negative twisted side, for cheapness’ sake, and be weaker than the enemy everywhere except in one point or matter. Most wars are wars of contact, both, forces striving to keep in touch to avoid tactical surprise. Our war should be a war of detachment: we were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till the moment of attack. This attack need be only nominal, directed not against his men, but against his materials: so it should not seek for his main strength or his weaknesses, but for his most accessible material. In railway cutting this would be usually an empty stretch of rail. That was a tactical success. We might turn the average into a rule (not a law—war is antinomian, said Colin), and at length we developed an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving the enemy’s soldier a target. Many Turks on our front had no chance all the war to ire a shot at us, and correspondingly we were never on the defensive, except by a rare accident. The corollary of such a rule was perfect ‘intelligence’ so that we could plan in complete certainty. The chief agent had to be the general’s head (de Feuquières said this first), and his knowledge had to be faultless, leaving no room for chance. We took more pains in this service than any other staff I saw.
“The third factor in command seemed to be the psychological, that science (Xenophon called it diathetic) of which our propaganda is a stained and ignoble part. Some of it concerns the crowd, the adjustment of spirit to the point where it becomes fit to exploit in action, the pre-arrangement of a changing opinion to a certain end. Some of it deals with individuals, and then it becomes a rare art of human kindness, transcending, by purposeful emotion, the gradual logical sequence of our minds. It considers the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of what in them profits the intention. We had to arrange their minds in order to battle, just as carefully and as formally as other officers arranged their bodies: and not only our own men’s minds, though them first: the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them: and thirdly, the mind of the nation supporting us behind the firing-line, and the mind of the hostile nation waiting the verdict, and the neutrals looking on.
“It was the ethical in war, and the process on which we mainly depended for victory on the Arab front. The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander, and we, being amateurs in the art of command, began our war in the atmosphere of the twentieth century, and thought of our weapons without prejudice, not distinguishing one from another socially. The regular officer has the tradition of forty generations of serving soldiers behind him, and to him the old weapons are the most honoured. We had seldom to concern ourselves with what our men did, but much with what they thought, and to us the diathetic was more than half command. In Europe it was set a little aside and entrusted to men outside the General Staff. In Asia we were so weak physically that we could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. We had won a province when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom: the presence or absence of the enemy was a secondary matter.
“These reasonings showed me that the idea of assaulting Medina, or even of starving it quickly into surrender was not in accord with our best strategy. We wanted the enemy to stay in Medina, and in every other harmless place, in the largest numbers. The factor of food would eventually confine him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hejaz railway, and the Trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and Damascus and Aleppo railways for the duration of the war, so long as he gave us the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world. If he showed a disposition to evacuate too soon, as a step to concentrating in the small area which his numbers could dominate effectively, then we would have to try and restore his confidence, not harshly, but by reducing our enterprises against him. Our ideal was to keep his railways just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort to him. . . .
“The Arab war was geographical, and the Turkish Army for us an accident, not a target. Our aim was to seek its weakest link, and bear only on that till time made the mass of it fall. Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage. We must impose the longest possible passive defence on the Turks (this being the most materially expensive form of war) by extending our own front to its maximum. Tactically we must develop a highly mobile, highly equipped type of army, of the smallest size, and use it successively at distributed points of the Turkish line, to make the Turks reinforce their occupying posts beyond the economic minimum of twenty men. The power of this striking force of ours would not be reckoned merely by its strength. The ratio between number and area determined the character of th
e war, and by, having five times the mobility of the Turks we could be on terms with them with one-fifth their number.
“Our success was certain, to be proved by paper and pencil as soon as the proportion of space and number had’been learned. The contest was not physical, but mineral, and so battles were a mistake. All we won in a battle was the ammunition the enemy fired off. Our victory lay not in battles, but in occupying square miles of country. Napoleon had said it was rare to find generals willing to fight battles. The curse of this war was that so few could do anything else. Napoleon had spoken in angry reaction against the excessive finesse of the eighteenth century, when men almost forgot that war gave licence to murder. We had been swinging out on his dictum for a hundred yeans, and it was time to go back a bit again. Battles are impositions on the side which believes itself weaker, made unavoidable either by lack of land-room, or by the need to defend a material property dearer than the lives of soldiers. We had nothing material to lose, so we were to defend nothing and to shoot nothing. The precious element of our forces were the Bedouin irregulars, and not the regulars whose role would only be to occupy places to which the irregulars had already given access. Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power, and these gave us strategical rather than tactical strength. Range is more to strategy than force. The invention of bully-beef has modified land-war more profoundly than the invention of gunpowder.” 1
Here set out in his own words we have the new theory of irregular warfare as it took form in Lawrence’s mind. To paraphrase would be an impertinence, and also an injury to knowledge. For even though one may have come, by a different road, through larger fields of war, to a view of war wherein Saxe developed and Lawrence adapted would fit the picture of regular warfare, no similarity of view would justify the attempt to gild the lily—to interpret, with less command of words, what is so lucent as to repel the loan of a lens. No one could dare to “improve” Lawrence’s exposition of the theory that took form, if not perhaps final form, during his reveries in the Wadi Ais. It is, however, in the light of that exposition that we should interpret Lawrence’s initiative in the events that followed.
Lawrence of Arabia Page 16