Even Marshal Saxe might have questioned Lawrence’s extreme standard of economy, yet Marshal Foch would surely have approved his paramount aim of conserving every possible man to expend, if necessary, at Aqaba. Lawrence, however, had further motives. He did not want to burden himself with two hundred prisoners, and he feared that a bag of two hundred mules would be so rich a meal that it might spoil the Arabs’ appetite for Aqaba. Although his restraint was not appreciated by the Arabs he gained his way, through the forceful aid of their leader, Zaal.
No train, however, appeared to compensate the forfeit, and for lack of water the party could, wait no longer. So after dark they went down to the line and blew up rails, choosing the most curved ones as the most difficult to replace. They left the mine to catch the repair-train. Then they rode south, moving across the chord of the great Amman bend in the railway, until they came near Atwi station. Here the sight of a Turkish soldier driving a Hock of sheep proved too strong for the hungry Arabs to resist. Zaal with a small party stalked a cluster of officers and officials who were drinking coffee outside the booking-office. Zaal’s shot that killed the fattest of them was the signal for a rush to plunder the station yard, and under cover of the turmoil the sheep were driven off to the hills. The Turks defended themselves successfully in a part of the station, but the Arabs set fire to the other part and also cut rails and telegraph wires over a long stretch of line, without losing any men. Then, retiring a few miles, they settled down to kill and cook the sheep, and afterwards marched through the night to Bair.
Here they had good news. Mask had obtained a week’s supply of iour, which would secure them freedom of manœuvre, and also promises of support from the clans on the route to Abu el Lissal. A messenger also arrived from Nuri Shaalan to say that four hundred Turkish cavalry had been sent down the Sirhan in search of them, but were being guided by the most time-wasting route.
It was, clearly, important to proit by the grace thus provided. So on June 28th the Arab expedition left Bair for El Jefer. They found the wells demolished but were able to open up the shaft of one, and thus enjoyed not only the water but the humour of picturing the Turks’ false sense of security. The attack was planned to take place two days before the Turks’ weekly caravan of supplies set out from Ma‘an to revictual the posts on the Aqaba route. Meantime the blockhouse that covered the approach to Abu el Lissal was stormed by the local Dhumaniyeh tribesmen as arranged.
The moment that this news came, on July 1st, the expedition moved out from El Jefer and headed for the railway, sending a party to hinder the Ma‘an garrison by stampeding its camels. On reaching the railway they blew up the bridges on a long stretch of the line, with the particular idea that the Ma‘an garrison would move south down the line instead of south-west to Abu el Lissal. This hope, however, was dissipated by the discomfiting report that a Turkish column had already appeared at Abu el Lissal, forcing the Dhumaniyeh to abandon the blockhouse.
The Turks’ arrival was sheer accident; a Turkish relief battalion had just arrived at Ma‘an and was forming up in the station yard ready to march into barracks when the news of the attack on the blockhouse reached them. A mountain-gun was added and the battalion marched off to the rescue—before the news of the attack on the railway could arrive. Finding the blockhouse a shambles, the commander encamped at the spring of Abu el Lissal.
This ill-stroke of fortune was a lesson to Lawrence in the accidents of war that may wreck the best-laid plan unless it has variants. And here a variant was difficult.1 But a sense of time and an instinct for surprise may change the balance of fortune. And here both were shown. The moment that the ill-news came, Nasir’s men threw their baggage on the camels and were on the march instantly. They rode all night and at dawn reached the hills near Abu el Lissal, where they were met by the rather dejected Dhumaniyeh. No waiting strategy could now avail, and action was promptly planned.
The Arabs extended, moving along the encircling hills until they had surrounded the still-sleeping encampment, while Zaal rode off with the fifty horsemen to cut the telegraph and telephone wires to Ma‘an. Then they began to snipe the Turks, hoping to goad them into an uphill charge. The Arabs kept continually in movement, disappearing and reappearing at ever fresh points, so that the Turkish riflemen had no targets and their mountain-gun expended its shells fruitlessly. The heat of the day was so great that such activity became a strain and ultimately a torture, to skin and throat. But if the Turks were able to sit still in their hill-cupped camp, they were sitting in a furnace, and were less fit to withstand the fiery test. Thus as the day prolonged the stratagem that won many an ancient battle was here repeated, whether consciously or not. The Turks were being ripened for the sickle.
The sickle fell under the Impulsion of an insult. Lawrence, exhausted with the heat and depressed with the prospect, had crept Into a hollow where there was a trickle of muddy water from which he could moisten “his lips. There Nasir joined him. After a time Auda appeared, and smiled rather scornfully at their frailty, retaliating for some of Lawrence’s past criticisms by the question what he thought of the Howeitat now. But Instead of amends Lawrence angrily offered a new Insult—“By God, Indeed they shoot a lot and hit a little.”
Auda tore off his headcloth, threw it on the ground, and rushed back up the hill like a madman, calling to his men, who assembled round him and then scattered downhill. Lawrence, now disturbed as to what he had done, hurried after Auda whom he found alone on the hill top. But the only thing that Auda would say was, “Get your camel if you want to see the old man’s work.” By the time Nasir and Lawrence had reached the lower “step,” where the camelry had now assembled, Auda and his fifty horsemen had disappeared. Lawrence rode forward to the edge and saw them charging down the last slope into the valley at full gallop, firing from the saddle at the Turkish infantry, who had just formed up to force their way back to Ma‘an. The charge came in their rear; they swayed at the sight, and then suddenly broke.
Nasir screamed to Lawrence, “Come on!” The four hundred camelry poured down the slope. The Turks’ attention was all on Auda, “so we also took them by surprise and in flank; and a charge of ridden camels going nearly thirty miles an hour was irresistible.”
As Lawrence himself was on a racing camel, he outstripped the others and was alone when he charged into the Turks’ ranks. The camel suddenly fell and he was shot out of the saddle like a rocket, travelling far before he hit the ground. Luckily, however, the body of his camel behind served as a boulder, dividing into two streams the charging mass that would otherwise have surged over his own body, stamping it flat.
By the time he recovered the fight was over. It only lasted a few minutes, and like most mounted successes was more truly a massacre achieved by surprise and velocity. Three hundred of the Turks had been slaughtered before the Arabs’ lust for vengeance was sated, and a further hundred and sixty, mostly wounded, were then taken prisoner. The Arabs had only two men killed. Auda was intoxicated with the rapture of battle and came up crying, “Work, work, where are words,.work, bullets, Abu Tayi”—he had shown Lawrence what his tribe of the Howeitat could achieve. His clothes, his holster, his scabbard, and his field-glasses had all been riddled, but he was unscathed—a miracle which he ascribed to an eighteenpenny Glasgow reproduction of the Koran, for which he had been gulled into paying a hundred and twenty pounds many years earlier.
From prisoners they learnt that Ma‘an at the moment was occupied by only two companies, not enough to hold its defensive perimeter. The news was a temptation to turn aside and take it. Such a chance would not come again, for the Turks were sure to send early reinforcements. The Howeitat clamoured to seize the opportunity, and Auda himself inclined towards the idea.
But Lawrence here proved in practice, as already in theory, that the strategist in him was master of the tactician. He refused to be drawn away from his strategic end by a tactical success, following the precept of Foch instead of anticipating the practice of Ludendorff. But unlike Foch h
e sought a strategic end that was tactically attainable, and to that extent was more in accord with Ludendorff’s intention, if happier in its application.
A base was necessary for the successful continuation of his strategic design, and only by taking Aqaba could he obtain it. If the Arabs went to Ma‘an now, they would soon be thrown out, and then be stranded without supplies or support. The Arabs were, in fact, thrown out of Abu el Lissal soon afterwards.
While it was Lawrence’s strategic reasoning that checked them from turning back against Ma‘an, it was Auda’s tactical instinct, coupled with his superstitious fear of lying among the dead, that got the Arabs on the move again the same night. Lawrence was feeling “the physical shame of success, a reaction of victory, when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done.” in search of some covering for the wounded prisoners he went back to the battlefield to take some of the dead men’s clothes, only to find they had all been stripped. An impulse moved him to straighten out the heap of corpses, laying them side by side as if in a sleep that gave him a longing to share their company rather than that of the triumphal plundering mob.
But once back with the force the strategist revived within him. While the force rested in a hollow, letters were dictated to the sheikhs of the coast tribes, telling them the news of victory and inviting them to keep the Turkish garrisons engaged until the force arrived. There was grand strategy, not merely strategy, in the further series of letters to the commanders of the three Turkish posts, Guweira, Kethira, and Khadra, on the way to Aqaba, telling them that “if our blood was not hot we took prisoners, and that prompt surrender would ensure their good treatment and safe delivery to Egypt.” Lawrence was treading in the path of Scipio and Saxe in smoothing the enemy’s path to surrender.
Close on the heels of the messengers followed the army. It looked like a Turkish army, for the Arabs, following the habit of primitive victors, had donned the tunics of their dead foes. After a five mile ride from Abu el Lissal across the plateau they came to the edge and saw the Guweira plain far below them, as a man looks down from the gallery of a vast amphitheatre. As the column wound down the precipitous corkscrew descent of the Negab Pass they could appreciate the hopelessness of any advance from the sea, even if, by a miracle, the road from Aqaba to Guweira had been opened.
Hampered by the fatigue of victory and their prisoners, the march was slow. Only ifteen miles had been covered when the force halted for the night short of Guweira. But here they were met by the local sheikh, Ibn Jad, with the news that the garrison of Guweira, a hundred and twenty strong, had surrendered. This removed one of the most serious obstacles in their path, for Guweira was the northern gateway to the gorge of the Wadi Ithm.
Resuming the march next day, July 4th, they came to Kethira, eighteen miles on. Here to their disappointment they found that the commander of this cliff-top post, commanding the valley, was bent on resistance. They suggested that their new ally, Ibn Jad, might prove his worth by attacking it, after dark. Misliking the prospect, he argued that the full moon would mar the attempt. But Lawrence had noticed in his diary that an eclipse was due, and so “cut hardly into this excuse; promising that tonight for awhile there should be no moon.” The eclipse came, and while the superstitious Turkish soldiery were firing rifles and clanging copper pots “to rescue their threatened satellite,” the Arabs climbed into the post and took the place by surprise. Seventy infantry and fifty mounted men were taken prisoner.
Next day the Arab force descended the Wadi Ithm gorge, so narrow that in places the bottom, was only a few yards wide. There were many places where, as Sir Hubert Young has remarked—“one company with two or three machine-guns could have stopped an army corps.” To meet the oncoming menace, the Aqaba garrison, three hundred strong, had hastily marched inland to reinforce the post at Khadra. But all their entrenchments faced seawards, so that they were laid bare by the unexpected approach from the rear. And the local tribesmen, eager for a share of the plunder, had already risen and were surrounding the Turks.
Twice, a summons was sent to them to surrender, and repelled by bullets. Many of the Bedouin clamoured for an assault. Lawrence’s reasoned preference for relying on hunger-pressure was affected by the shortness of food in his own force. However, a third attempt was made with moral suasion. This time it produced a promise of surrender in two days, if help did not come from Ma‘an. It was pointed out to a Turkish officer that the Arabs could not be restrained so long. Delay would mean massacre. The Turk yielded, promising to surrender at daylight.
But during the night fresh tribesmen swarmed to the scene, like flies to the jampot, and, not knowing the arrangement, opened fire on the Turks as soon as it was light on the 6th. Nasir, however, intervened, and his march down the valley with the Ageyl checked both sides. Firing ceased, and the Turks at once surrendered.
While the post was being looted, Lawrence raced on to Aqaba, only four miles farther, and splashed into the cooling sea. Historical aptness should have called to his lips the cry of the Ten Thousand—“Thalassa, Thalassa.” But, in fact, his thoughts were entirely “on his feet” at this moment of triumph.
Two months had passed all but three days since the little expedition had left the sea-coast at Wejh. Since then it had covered a vast elliptic curve through the depths of Arabia before returning like a boomerang, and with snowball increase of force, to strike the neighbour-port of Wejh in the back. But the longest way round had proved the easiest way there.
The capture of Aqaba was like a sudden break in the clouds that overhung the Egyptian front in the spring and summer of 1917. From the point of view of moral effect it was the one definite achievement that could be set off against the double British failure before Gaza. Strategically, it removed all danger of a Turkish raid through Sinai against the Suez Canal or the communications of the British army in Palestine. It also opened up a new line of operation by which the Arabs could give positive assistance to a renewed British advance.
Tactically, the Aqaba operation had inflicted a permanent loss of some 1,200 men, prisoners and killed, on the Turks—at a cost of two men killed in the conquering force. There is, indeed, a slightly ironical flavour in the fact that Lawrence, in his first trial of the new bloodless, strategy, had levied a blood-tax on the enemy at the highest rate that modern “murder war” can perhaps show. By the strictest canons of orthodox strategy, by the World War standards of “killing Germans” or “killing Turks,” it was an unrivalled achievement. The British forces in trying unsuccessfully to capture Gaza in March and April had only succeeded in killing or capturing 1,700 Turks at a permanent cost to themselves of 3,000 men. In other words, they had sacrificed roughly two men to “kill” one Turk, the same number that the Arabs had sacrificed to “kill” twelve hundred Turks!
As an object-lesson in the abstract principle of economy of force the Aqaba operation was remarkable. For all this had been achieved by the use of less than fifty men from the Arab forces in the Hejaz. As practical economy of British force it was more notable still. For it was attained by the detachment of merely one unwanted officer from the forces in Egypt.
Greater still were the ultimate effects of Aqaba. For its capture ensured that the “Arab ulcer” would continue to spread in the Turks’ flank, draining their strength and playing on their nerves. Unlike their relation to the “Spanish ulcer” the British as an army had hitherto done little to assist the spread of this infection. They lacked a Wellington. But the sun that shone on Aqaba lit up a better prospect in Egypt. For on June 27th, nine days previous to the capture of Aqaba, a new commander arrived in Egypt, Sir Edmund Allenby. It was a prophetic significance that his arrival should thus coincide with Lawrence’s vindicatory triumph.
* * *
1 Is is noteworthy, however, that Lawrence had conceived one—a fresh testimony to the way he had absorbed the strategic wisdom of the ages. “My alternative plan—for I hardly expected to crash the battalion at Aba el Lissan—was to hold
them there on the defensive, and force them to fight their communications open again to Ma‘an. This would take all their reserve and transport. While so occupied they would not be able to look towards Aqaba: but half our force would have gone down via Batra towards Rumm, and fallen upon Guweira, and then marched down the [Wadi] Itm to Aqaba, which we would have taken while the [Turkish] force at Lissan was being contained. It was a feasible plan: but it was inferior to what we did, as the destruction of the Ma‘an garrison at Lissan gave us leisure, at Aqaba, to organize it as a base and for defence,” (cont. p. 158.)
Inferior, probably, in effect, but from the point of view of military art history is the poorer by its too successful avoidance.
CHAPTER XII
A NEW HORIZON
July, 1917
The capture of Aqaba was unknown to the British—To preserve his prize, Lawrence after making original dispositions for defence, rides across the Sinai desert to fetch succour and supplies—His achievement coincides with the arrival in Egypt of a new British commander—Allenby’s promise of support inspires Lawrence to put forward a new plan—The Drake of the desert, he would carry the war into the “Turkish Main,” and wage it on privateering methods
IT WAS over three years since Lawrence had seen Aqaba. He had come back to it under strangely different conditions, that lent piquancy to familiar landmarks. The Gull of Aqaba may be pictured as a croquet hoop laid lat. At the right-hand corner was the little town, now tumbled in abject ruins by repeated naval bombardments. At the left-hand corner was a clump of red rocks that caught the eye from the sea, and, by so doing, had earlier saved the life of a French air pilot who had staggered down to the shore after a crash in the interior. A short way down the left-hand edge was Jebel Faroun, the little island which long-dead Crusaders had garrisoned. The gulf itself was prolonged by a great dry trough, the Wadi Araba, that ran between high cliffs towards the Dead Sea. From it on the right-hand side, a few miles behind Aqaba, diverged the gorge of the Wadi Ithm, which led to Ma‘an.
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