What of Lawrence meantime? He had been less fortunate than Newcombe in his mission if more lucky in his escape from a danger worse than capture. The omens were inauspicious. As he was setting out from Jefer, on October 31st, Auda whispered in his ear—“Beware of Abd el Kader.” Next day there was another disquieting incident when a band of Beni Sakhr appeared from several quarters and closed round them menacingly, firing over their heads. When the hostile tribesmen found Lawrence’s party well-posted for defence their manner changed, and they pretended that the lapse was due to ignorance, saying that it was a Beni Sakhr custom to shoot over strangers. Changed suddenly from prospective prey into honoured guests, the party were received at Bair by a parading swarm of horsemen, who hailed Ali with the shout: “God give victory to our Sherif,” and cried to Lawrence—“Welcome, Aurans, harbinger of action.” Abd el Kader, feeling the need to emphasize his presence, mounted his horse and “began to prance delicately in slow curves, crying out ‘Houp, Houp’ in his throaty voice, and firing a pistol unsteadily in the air.” His seat and his aim were so obviously uncertain that his solo performance went unappreciated. At the feast which followed he again tried to assert his dignity by rising before the others had finished and then grumbling that the meat was tough.
Reinforced by the chief, Mileh, and sixteen of his followers, the party moved on northward next day, fortified by the distant drumming of the British guns whose echoes floated across the Dead Sea hollow. But the Arabs’ reaction was mixed. Lawrence heard them whispering—“They are nearer; the English are advancing; God deliver the men under that rain.” Their own dislike of artillery fire gave them a throb of sympathy for the Turks. But it was not only that. “They were thinking compassionately of the passing Turks, so long their weak oppressors; whom, for their weakness, though oppressors, they loved more than the strong foreigner with his blind indiscriminate justice.” Lawrence himself was qualified to interpret that feeling.
When still a little short of Azrak they met a band of the Serahln who were just starting out to swear allegiance to Feisal. But when invited to share in an operation nearer home their enthusiasm cooled. They declared that to attack the western bridge was out of the question, as the Turks had just filled the district with hundreds of military wood-cutters. They also showed deep suspicion of Abd el Kader, and so were unwilling to trust themselves in his section of the Yarmuk Valley. Yet without their aid the venture was hopeless, and in an effort to overcome their hesitations Lawrence addressed them round the camp-fire, seeking “to combat in words this crude prudence of the Serahln, which seemed all the more shameful to us after our long sojourn in the clarifying wilderness.”
Like the orations which Livy and other classical writers put in the mouths of generals before battle, that address, as remembered, may not be of verbatim accuracy but it has the value of retrospective judgment. It deserves quotation, not so much for its direct historical relation to the issue, but for Its light on Lawrence’s philosophy.
“We put it to them, not abstractedly, but concretely, for their case, how life in mass was sensual only, to be lived and loved in its extremity. There could be no rest-houses for revolt, no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit was accretive, to endure as far as the senses would endure, and to use each such advance as base for further adventure, deeper privation, sharper pain.”
“To be of the desert was . . . a doom to wage unending battle with an enemy who was not of the world, nor life, nor anything, but hope Itself; and failure seemed God’s freedom to mankind.” Life could only be mastered by holding it cheap. In order to bring forth spiritually creative things, men must avoid being hampered by physical ties and wants. With most men the soul aged long before the body. “There could be no honour in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat. Omnipotence and the infinite were our two worthiest foemen, indeed the only ones for a full man to meet, they being monsters of his own spirit’s making; and the stoutest enemies were always of the household. In fighting Omnipotence, honour was proudly to throw away the poor resources that we had, and dare him empty-handed; to be beaten, not merely by more mind, but by its advantage of better tools.” To those who attained clear-sight, failure was the only goal. By believing utterly that there was no victory, and by inviting blows one might alone conquer Omnipotence.
“This was a halting, half-coherent speech, struck out desperately, moment by moment, in our extreme need, upon the anvil of those white minds round the dying fire; and hardly its sense remained with me afterwards: for once my picture-making memory forgot its trade and only felt the slow humbling of the Serahin, the night-quiet in which their worldliness faded, and at last their lashing eagerness to ride with us whatever the bourne.”
The rare man who attains wisdom is, by the very clearness of his sight, a better guide in solving practical problems than those, more commonly the leaders of men, whose eyes are misted and minds warped by ambition for success. But to give such guidance he must for the moment cease straining after the infinite and become, in a relative sense, short-sighted. Lawrence seems hitherto to have made this adjustment. But now, one feels, he had for some months so strained himself, in conquest of his physical being, that his power of practical guidance may have been affected. Here, to some degree, if still more in the adverse conditions of the problem, may lie the explanation of what followed. At the same time, it is only fair to quote Lawrence’s own comment: “We were only a cat’s whisker off success—and it was the boldest thing we ever tried.”
Next day, November 4th, they reached Azrak, a magic place, peopled by the ghosts of poets, kings and Roman legionaries. But the inclination to dream was dispersed by the news that Abd el Kader had disappeared, heading for the Jebel Druse. It meant a limitation of their target as well as a threat of betrayal. “Of our three alternatives, Um Keis had been abandoned: without Abd el Kader, Wadi Khalid was impossible: this meant that we must necessarily attempt the bridge at Tell el Shehab.”
Lack of alternatives, as Bourcet had been the first to point out clearly, meant a greatly increased chance of the enemy blocking or accident stopping the single path. The very fact that their now inevitable target was the nearest bridge made discovery more likely, especially as to reach it they would have to cross the open country between Remthe and Deraa. Abd el Kader had probably gone over to the enemy and “the Turks, if they took the most reasonable precautions, would trap us at the bridge.”
Nevertheless, after taking counsel, they decided to gamble on the incompetence of the Turks. On the night of the 6th they slipped across the Hejaz railway a little below Deraa at a stony place where their passage would leave no signs. And there did not seem to be any unusual activity among the Turkish railway patrols, which was somewhat reassuring as to Abd el Kader’s action. A short way beyond they found a pit where they lay up in hiding. It would serve as the jumping-off point for their actual raid across the open, which would have to be made under cover of darkness.
To reach Tell el Shehab on the Palestine branch, blow up the bridge, and get back into safety east of the Hejaz line between dusk and daybreak meant a ride of 80 miles in thirteen hours. Lawrence regretfully decided that this was beyond the capacity of most of the Indian soldiers—“the discipline of their cavalry training had tired out them and the animals in our easy stages.” He picked out six of the best under Jemadar Hassan Shah so that he could have one machine-gun available. Apart from his own small bodyguard the party was made up of twenty of the Beni Sakhr as the storming party and forty of the Serahin, less dependable as fighters, to guard the camels and carry the explosives.
As the party crossed the white furrows of the pilgrim road in the dark Lawrence had a momentary thrill as he remembered that it was the same track he had seen a year ago nearly eight hundred miles farther south on his first ride inland from Rabegh. Those miles were the measure of accomplishment, and Damascus but a little way off. Yet the slight distance might suffice for the proverbial slip betwixt the cup and lip. In Lawrence’s present mood th
e feeling overcame him that the Arab Revolt was doomed to be one more of those caravans which set out for a cloud-goal and perished in the wilderness “without the tarnish of achievement.”
His reverie was broken by sudden shots from some shepherd frightened by the stealthy approach of the caravan. There was another momentary alarm when a gipsy woman rushed shrieking out of a bush beside the track. Away to the north the station flares of Deraa gleamed like a lighthouse at sea. At last they began to go downhill, then heard “a faint sighing, like wind among the trees far away, but continuous and slowly increasing.” it told them they were near the great waterfall below Tell el Shehab, and so, near their goal. They drew rein on a grassy ledge. “Before us from a lip of darkness rose very loudly the rushing of the river which had long been dinning our ears. It was the edge of the Yarmuk Gorge, and the bridge lay just under us to the right.”
The explosives were silently distributed among the carriers, while the Beni Sakhr reconnoitred ahead. “A little further; and at last, below our feet, we saw a something blacker in the precipitous blackness of the valley, and at its other end a speck of lickering light.” it was the bridge, and the guard-tent on the far bank. Wood posted the Indian machine-gunners ready to spray the guard-tent with bullets, while the rest of the party pushed on to the abutment of the bridge. The solitary sentry, to Lawrence’s annoyance, stayed at the opposite end.
Suddenly there was the clatter of a falling rifle. The sentry jumped; his yell brought the guard tumbling out. The Indians were too late to catch them before they took cover. The Beni Sakhr exchanged volleys with them ineffectively, while the Serahin porters dropped their loads into the ravine and bolted, fearing to be blown up if a bullet hit the blasting gelatine.
With the means of demolition lost, the raid had lost its purpose. The only thing was to get away while there was time. The clamour aroused the villages for miles around, but after a tense ride the party reached the railway at dawn, cutting the telegraph wires where they crossed in petty compensation for the prize they had missed. The bitterness of the contrast was gall to Lawrence.
“We were fools, all of us equal fools, and so our rage was aimless. Ahmed and Awad had another fight; young Mustafa refused to cook rice; Farraj and Daud knocked him about until he cried; Ali had two of his servants beaten: and none of us or of them cared a little bit. Our minds were sick with failure, and our bodies tired after nearly a hundred strained miles over bad country in bad conditions, between sunset and sunset, without halt or food.”
None of the Arabs cared to return to Azrak empty-handed, so there was a general shout of approval when Ali suddenly said—“Let’s blow up a train.” They all looked to Lawrence, the expert. He did not share their delight. “Blowing up trains was an exact science when done deliberately, by a sufficient party, with machine-guns in position. If scrambled at it might become dangerous.” He felt that the Indians, who were the machine-gunners, had suffered enough from cold and hunger. His stand on their behalf was accepted by the Arabs, but as they still were eager for a chance at a train Lawrence yielded to their desire.
At dawn, on the 9th, Wood led the Indians back to Azrak while Lawrence took the sixty Arabs back to the railway, near his old site at Minifir, and laid an electric mine beneath the rebuilt culvert. But he had only sixty yards of cable which left the firing point perilously close to the line. A tiny bush about a foot high served to conceal the wires, but not the firer. One train passed before they were ready, and another in the morning, owing to the mist and rainstorms hiding its approach from the man on watch. Everything seemed to be going wrong. However, the bad weather offered Lawrence the consolation that Allenby was unlikely to finish the war before the Arabs were ready for a better effort.
On the 10th the rain still swept the landscape. About noon a train was signalled, and Lawrence hurried over to the embankment to fire the mine. When the train eventually came along, panting up the gradient, he saw that it was packed with troops. It seemed too late to change his plan, so when the engine reached him he pushed down the handle of the exploder. Nothing happened. And then he realized that he was kneeling in the open in full sight of the troop train as it crawled past fifty yards away. “The bush, which had seemed a foot high, shrank smaller than a figleaf.” His only chance was that the Turks might take him to be a casual Bedouin, not worth shooting. The miracle happened. Mud and rain had fortunately dimmed the splendour of his white and gold dress. As soon as the train had passed he pushed the wires quickly but deftly under the earth and bolted like a rabbit for cover. A few hundred yards on, the train stuck, and while it was raising steam an officers’ patrol came back to have a look at the ground—but failed to discover the wires.
Then followed another cheerless day for the party, hungry and sodden, yet not too sodden to quench their exasperation. And when a new morning came, the luck had changed, as Ali had predicted. A two-engined train with a dozen passenger coaches appeared and Lawrence touched off the mine under the leading engine. So close was he to the explosion that he was hurled backwards, with clothes torn, arms scratched and a toe broken. As, half stunned, he staggered away from the wrecked train, the Arabs on the slope and the Turks on the line blazed at each other over him. Seven of the Arabs were hit in a rush to bring him in. The train was carrying the new commander destined to take over the defence of Jerusalem, and his escort, several hundred strong, checked any hope of rushing the train once the first shock of surprise passed off. The Arabs had now cause to regret their lack of machine-guns. They barely held off the Turkish pursuit until they reached the hill-top and, each man jumping on the nearest camel, fled into the desert where they rallied. The only booty to compensate them for the loss of several lives consisted of some sixty odd riles seized in the first rush, but these counted for much. “Next day we moved into Azrak, having a great welcome and boasting—God forgive us—that we were the victors.”
They decided to hold on to Azrak during the winter, using it as a base of propaganda and centre of intelligence. It would also drive in a new wedge, separating Nuri Shaalan from the Turks. They established their winter quarters in the old fort, which they repaired and made watertight. A caravan was sent to the Jebel Druse to collect provisions, and a stream of desert visitors poured in to exchange presents and hear tales of Aqaba, its forces and its riches. Ali’s mixture of reckless bravado and stately charm made him a potent representative of Feisal. He also had something of Lawrence’s uncanny detachment.
In the company of Ali and the atmosphere of Azrak, Lawrence could have rested content, living in imagination. It was with an effort that he pried himself apart in order to explore the country round. As Deraa was his future target he felt that he ought to examine it with his own eyes; so he put on bedraggled Haurani clothes, and walked through the defences, accompanied only by an old peasant follower.
For a time no notice was taken of him, but after passing the aerodrome a sergeant suddenly seized him by the arm saying that the Bey wanted him. Protest was vain, and Lawrence was marched off to an office where in reply to questions he “admitted” he was a Circassian. That might explain his white skin, but it drew him deeper into the mire. For the second time in his life be found himself forcibly incorporated in the Turkish Army, and this time for a purpose for which Turkish officers have notoriously been apt to use their recruits. That night the ordeal came and when Lawrence resisted he was handed over to the tender mercies of the guard to be brought to a suitable frame of mind. After various unpleasant forms of coercion had failed, he was thrashed into senselessness. But his gory state at least saved him from further attentions, and during the night he managed to escape from the hospital to which he had been carried. As he hobbled down the road a tribesman took pity on him, and, mounting him on a camel, carried him to Nisibin, where he found the rest of his party. By a grim irony, it was during this escape that he chanced on the concealed route of approach to Deraa which he had set out to discover.
Once back at Azrak the reaction came and the long strain on h
is nerves, followed by this last shock, made the place and the company unbearable. Propaganda palled on him—“conscious all the time of my strangeness, and of the incongruity of an alien’s advocating national liberty. The war for me held a struggle to side-track thought, to get into the people’s attitude of accepting the revolt naturally and trustfully. I had to persuade myself that the British Government could really keep the spirit of its promises.” Physical suffering had so accentuated the clearness of his sight that he could not induce the mild watering necessary for practical affairs. And the flattering obsequiousness of the Syrian townsmen seemed to coat him with slime. He decided to break away and go south in search of action.
He left late on November 23rd with only one companion, and despite his physical weakness rode hard—the harder, indeed, because of the sheer detachment of spirit from flesh that through suffering he had attained. He passed Bair on the second night and would not tarry. “I had a heavy bout of fever on me which made me angry, so that I paid no attention to Rahail’s appeals for rest. That young man had maddened all of us for months by his abundant vigour, and by laughing at our weaknesses; so this time I was determined to ride him out, showing no mercy. Before dawn he was blubbering with self-pity; but softly, lest I hear him.” At noon they reached Auda’s camp, but only paused for a greeting and to eat a few dates. Rahail was now past protest and rode as if grimly determined to outstay Lawrence. “Even had we started fair, he had the advantage anyhow over me in strength, and now I was nearly finished.” “I seemed at last approaching the insensibility which had always been beyond my reach: but a delectable land for one born so sluggish that nothing this side fainting would let his spirit free. Now I found myself dividing into parts. There was one which went on riding wisely, sharing or helping every pace of the wearied camel. Another hovering above and to the right bent down curiously, and asked what the flesh was doing. The flesh gave no answer, for, indeed, it was conscious only of a ruling impulse to keep on and on; but a third garrulous one talked and wondered, critical of the body’s self-inflicted labour, and contemptuous of the reason for effort.
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