Desert news seems for once to have travelled with curious slowness. For according to Lawrence’s account it was nearly a fortnight after the British had reached Amman that the Beni Sakhr, in their camp less than forty miles distant, heard of it and began moving towards Themed. Then, however, messages seem to have multiplied quickly, first to say that the British were retiring from Amman, and then that they had “£ed” from Es Salt. These reports were like a cold douche to the Arabs, who were not comforted by Lawrence’s hopeful denials. He himself “grew seriously disturbed in the conflict of rumour, and sent Adhub, who might be trusted not to lose his head, to Salt with a letter for Chetwode or Shea, asking for a note on the real situation.” This precautionary search for information seems to have been rather belated. “Very late at night Adhub’s racing horse-hooves echoed across the valley and he came in to tell us that Jemal Pasha was now in Salt, victorious, hanging those local Arabs who had welcomed the English. The Turks were still chasing Allenby far down the Jordan valley. It was thought that Jerusalem would be recovered. I knew enough of my countrymen to reject that possibility; but clearly things were very wrong. We slipped off, bemused, to the Atatir again.”
LAWRENCE, AT AQABA
“This reverse, being unawares, hurt me the more. Allenby’s plan had seemed modest, and that we should so fall down before the Arabs was deplorable. They had never trusted us to do the great things which I foretold; and now their independent thoughts set out to enjoy the springtide here.” The arrival of a band of gipsies gave them an opportunity to exchange the dubious prospects of war for the immediate pleasures of woman.
The presence of these gipsy women gave Lawrence a different outlet of his unexpended energy. He hired three of the women as companions on a reconnaissance of Amman, dressed up himself and Farraj in similar clothes, and walked through the town. The visit convinced him that the defences of Amman did not invite attack, but he also found that the appearance of himself and his companions was too inviting for some of the Turkish soldiers, so that they had to take to their heels to escape these unwelcome advances, doubtless to the surprise of the Turks. The adventure persuaded Lawrence that he would in future, as apparently on his Baalbek ride the previous June, wear British uniform when visiting enemy quarters—on the ground that it was too brazen to be suspected.
Seeing that prospects in the north were clouded for the time he now determined to rejoin Feisal, and also to send back the Indians from Airak, where the garrison had spent a trying winter. One of those who had died from the cold was Daud. His bosom friend, Farraj, did not survive him long, nor had he the wish to linger when shot through the body in a scuffle with a Turkish railway patrol on the way back. Finding him mortally wounded, Lawrence made an attempt to carry him away in a blanket, but he screamed so pitifully from the pain of his wound that they put him down. Then, rather than leave him to be tortured by the Turks before death, Lawrence forced himself to put a bullet through Farraj’s head.
More ill news greeted Lawrence when two days later he came in sight of Ma‘an. This time it was due to the folly of Arabs, but Arabs who, unlike the Bedouin, were steeped in a regular tradition of warfare. Feisal and Ja‘far had accepted Lawrence’s plan of indirect approach to Ma‘an, but it did not satisfy most of the officers of the new Arab Regular Army. Instead of being wise enough to lure the garrison out into the open by placing the Arab Army astride the railway, they clamoured for a direct onslaught. Joyce had argued in vain against blunting their untried weapon, whereat Maulud, eager for an assault, had complained to Feisal of English interference with Arab liberty—liberty in this case to imitate Western military follies. Then Joyce had fallen ill and been taken back to Egypt with pneumonia. By the time Dawnay arrived to reason with the Arab officers the chance for reason had gone because of their feeling that they must justify their boasts.
Dawnay had therefore devised a plan adjusted to their desires while still retaining indirect moves. The available force 1 was distributed in three parts; a centre column of Arab Regulars under Maulud’s command together with Auda’s Abu Tayi horsemen; a northern column also of Arab Regulars, under Ja‘far; and a southern column under Dawnay’s direct control, which comprised the armoured cars and the Egyptian camelry, together with some Bedouin. Maulud’s centre column opened the ball by storming Ghadir el Haj, the next station south of Ma‘an, on the night of April 11th, it then moved up to attack Ma‘an. On the night of the 12th Ja‘far’s northern column captured Jerdun station, the station immediately above Ma‘an, taking two hundred prisoners and two machine-guns. After burning the station the- column moved down the line during the day and destroyed three thousand rails. But the inherent weakness of the plan was that it allowed too little time for this railway bait to be swallowed by the Turks before the Arab Regular Army was committed to an assault on Ma‘an.
When Lawrence arrived on the scene, early on April 13th, the centre column had just succeeded in capturing Jebel Semna, the low hill which overlooked Ma‘an from the south-west, but Maulud himself had been badly wounded. Lawrence hastened up to his litter and in response to his inquiries the old fighter muttered, like an Arabic version of Nelson at Trafalgar—“Yes, indeed, Lurens Bey, I am hurt; but, thanks be to God, it is nothing. We have taken Semna.” More happily, he recovered. But the attack made little further progress.
The success at Semna encouraged the hot-heads, and Feisal received a petition signed by all his officers in which he was “implored to allow the sons of the Arabs to hurl themselves against the Turkish trenches.” He and his British advisers felt that it was useless to expostulate. Where reason had already failed the Arab officers could only be cured by experience.
Ja‘far came down to Ma‘an to direct operations, and on the 16th Nuri Said led an assault on the station covered by the artillery. But as they reached it the French guns ceased fire. Lawrence, who was following the advance in a Ford car, hurried back to find the cause of this ominous lapse of artillery support, only to be told by Pisani that every round had been expended. Pisani bitterly added that he had begged Nuri Said not to attack when there was. such a deficiency of ammunition.
Thus the Arabs, who had taken seventy prisoners in their coup, were compelled to relinquish their hold on the station and, as so often happens, lost more heavily in their retreat across the open than in their successful advance. It was the more disappointing because of the fighting spirit they had shown and the skilful way they had used ground-cover in this first serious test of the new army. Auda’s Abu Tayi, however, had not lived up to their Abu el Lissal reputation, doing little to help Nuri’s attack. Even allowing for the difficulty of working regulars and irregulars together, the Abu Tayi had been disappointing, and when Auda came into Feisal’s tent and said—“Greeting, Lurens,” Lawrence retorted—“Greetings for yesterday evening, Auda.”
On the 18th Ja‘far withdrew to the Semna position and attempted to procure Ma‘an’s surrender by invitation. The Turks’ reply showed an inclination, to accept but regretted the necessity of complying with superior orders to hold out until the last cartridge. Ja‘far signified his readiness to facilitate this process of exhausting their ammunition, but in the interval Jemal Pasha, relieved of British pressure at Amman, was able to send down a force to reoccupy Jerdun station and pass a pack convoy of ammunition and food across the tailless gap into Ma‘an.
Meantime the British-Egyptian-Bedouin southern column had been breaking the railway south of Ma‘an. Dawnay had organized this himself on what Young terms “the most approved Staff College lines.” On April 12th a party had gone out by car from Guweira across the mud-flats to reconnoitre the ground near Tell esh Shahm station just above Mudauwara. Leaving the cars under cover, Dawnay took his subordinate commanders and liaison officer by a covered route to the top of a rocky hill from which they could observe the objective. The “gun sites, times for aeroplane co-operation, lines of approach for armoured cars, successive positions for the E.C.C. [Egyptian Camel Corps], even the general direction of the
Beni Atiya camel charge were planned out in the utmost detail.” Young, seeing the mere twenty Turks who formed the garrison, “could not help feeling that it was really not quite fair of Dawnay to make such up-to-date and elaborate plans for their destruction.”
On the return of the reconnaissance party to Guweira they found that this beautiful structure had already been chipped, as a message from the Beni Atiya announced that they had decided to attack Tebuk on their own and so would not be able to fill their destined part in the Tell esh Shahm plan. The vagaries of the Arab irregular were a trial to the Regular mind, if also refreshing to it. It was fortunate that Dawnay, for all his immaculateness of inward conception and outward appearance, possessed a sense of humour that made adjustment possible.
In the process Lawrence also had opportunity to exercise his humour. Immediately after the check at Ma‘an he had driven down to join Dawnay, feeling “uneasy at a regular fighting his first guerrilla battle with that most involved and intricate weapon, the armoured car.” He was dubious also whether Dawnay, who did not speak Arabic, would realize the possibilities of friction latent in the mutual antipathy of Bedouin and Egyptians, or be able to smooth it over. So he decided to offer his services “delicately, as interpreter.”
Dawnay had no false pride and welcomed Lawrence gladly when he arrived on the 18th at the camp, now established north of Tell esh Shahm. Lawrence marvelled when he saw it. “The cars were parked geometrically here; armoured cars there; sentries and pickets were out, with machine-guns ready. Even the Arabs were in a tactical place behind a hill, in support, but out of sight and hearing: by some magic Sherif Hazaa and himself had kept them where they were put. My tongue coiled into my cheek with the wish to say that the only thing lacking was an enemy.”
Lawrence’s delicate irony had been stimulated by the sight of the sentries marching up and down—“they were giving us away across the quiet of the night.” So he took the liberty of posting them in concealment, telling them to listen and keep still. The comedy of “sentry go,” a costly production, has been many times performed in our irregular campaigns, and delights a hostile gallery even more than the Whitehall crowd. Subsequent performances in Ireland were greatly appreciated by the Sinn Feiners.
Still more impressive were the operation orders, “orthodox-sounding things with zero times and a sequence of movements.” Each unit had its appointed duty and time at which to perform it, all perfectly dovetailed so as to avoid hitches and ensure that each move was covered by proper fire support. The one difficulty was that Sherif Hazaa could not synchronize his watch, having none, but Dawnay overcame it by arranging that he should time his move by that of the cars. The first step would be to take the post which Joyce and Lawrence had engaged on New Year’s Eve; die second, after lunch, to take “South Post”; the third to converge on and capture the station.
At dawn on the 19th the armoured cars, which had “taken station” in the dark, rolled silently forward on top of the sleeping Turks in their trenches, and the astonished occupants promptly came out with their hands up. Hornby then dashed up with the Talbots, laden with explosives, and demolished “Bridge A,” which went up with a thunderous roar. Lawrence was shocked not only by the force of the explosion but by the lavish way guncotton had been used, so he ran forward with Dawnay to show Hornby his more economical method of stuffing guncotton into the drainage holes which he thus converted into mine-chambers, a use unintended by the bridge-builders. Subsequent bridges were dealt with more cheaply, but no less effectively, in consequence.
The program of attack on “South Post” was disturbed by the irregular behaviour of Hazaa’s Bedouin. While the Egyptians were advancing soberly according to the customary method of alternate section rushes, the Arabs instead “thought it was a steeplechase and did a camel-charge up the mound over breast-work and trenches. The war-weary Turks gave it up in disgust.”
The third and final step followed. Operation orders had said “the station will be taken at zero 11.30.” But “the Turks, ignorantly and in haste, surrendered ten minutes too won, and made the only blot on a bloodless day.” The Egyptians were coming down from the north, the guns covering them with a bombardment, the aeroplanes dropping bombs, the armoured cars working forward—when, through the haze, the Turks were seen waving the white flag in token of their desire for premature surrender. A race for the station followed. Lawrence won it and gained the station bell, the next man took the ticket punch, and the third the office stamp. The Turks looked on in amazement.
“A minute later, with a howl, the Bedouin were upon the maddest looting of their history. Two hundred rifles, eighty thousand rounds of ammunition, many bombs, much food and clothing were in the station, and everybody smashed and profited.” Egyptians and Bedouin came almost to blows over the food, and a camel suddenly set off a Turkish trip-mine, to its own demolition and the momentary distraction of the looters. He has told me that anticipation of such friction was the real reason that had impelled Mm to come down. “The antipathy of the Egyptians and the Bedouin were intense and the Egyptian effort to save some of the loot from private plundering nearly started a fight. I had a very near call, but just managed to keep the Arabs in hand. Otherwise all the regulars might have been killed.” But this explanation needs to be completed by the evidence of other eye-witnesses. They have told me that the way Lawrence stilled the tumult was uncanny—“like the hypnotic influence of a lion-tamer.”
The booty was so vast that the structure of Dawnay’s plan now broke under its burden. For in the morning most of the Arabs had gone off. The faithful remnant were repaid when the armoured cars occupied Ramleh station, which was found empty of Turks but not of their goods. But next day the cars alone went on to explore Mudauwara, which they found too strongly held for assault. However, Dawnay persevered so energetically with his railway destruction, helped by a contingent of Arabs sent down by Feisal, that eighty miles of line between Ma‘an and Mudauwara was utterly wrecked together with its seven small stations. As the Turkish reserves of rail were now used up, the Hejaz line was permanently severed and Medina isolated.
If Dawnay had learnt the necessity of adjustment he had also shown the value of thoroughness. Lawrence’s tribute to him deserves quotation—“Dawnay was Allenby’s greatest gift to us—greater than thousands of baggage camels. As a professional officer he had the class-touch: so that even the reddest hearer recognized an authentic redness. His was an understanding mind, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion; at the same time, his war-training enriched his treatment of this antithetic subject. He married war and rebellion in himself; as, of old in Yanbo, it had been my dream every regular officer would. Yet, in three years’ practice, only Dawnay succeeded.”
While Dawnay went back to Cairo, Lawrence discussed with Young, his newly appointed “double,” what further operations could be set on foot. It was decided that while a small part of the Arab Regular Army should be left to contain the Ma‘an garrison, the bulk should move north under Nuri Said to attack Jurf ed Derawish. Young was to go with Zeid, get in touch with Mirzuk and induce the Beni Sakhr to join in the attack on Jurf, co-ordinating their movements with those of Muri After the capture of Jurf the operations would be extended if possible so as to produce north of Ma‘an another eighty miles breach in the railway.
After obtaining Feisal’s approval for the plan, Lawrence sailed for Egypt to gain fresh light on Allenby’s intentions, Dawnay accompanied Mm to Allenby’s headquarters, and when they arrived there on May 2nd they heard more bad news; or, rather its augury. For Bols greeted them and blissfully remarked, “Well, we’re in Salt all right.” He went on to say that the chiefs of the Beni Sakhr had come to Jericho to offer the assistance of their “twenty thousand tribesmen” at Themed, and that in consequence he had worked out a new plan of operation against the Amman plateau. In the early hours of April 30th the British had advanced from the Jordan and that same evening the Anzac horsemen, slipping northward, had entered Es Salt.
> It sounded well, but Lawrence saw its hollowness. “I asked who the chief of the Beni Sakhr was, and he said Tahad’: triumphing in his efficient Inroad Into what had been my province. It sounded madder and madder. I knew that Fahad could not raise four hundred men; and that, at the moment there was not a tent on Themed; they had moved south, to Young. We hurried to the office for the real story, and learned that it was, unfortunately, as Bols had said. The British cavalry had gone impromptu up the hills of Moab on some airy promise of the Zebn sheikhs; greedy fellows who had ridden into Jerusalem only to taste Allenby’s bounty, but had there been taken at their mouth-value.”
Actually, there was more excuse for Bols than Lawrence suggests. For Mirzuk, Feisal’s representative in the north, had sent the sheikhs over the Jordan and had given them a letter for Allenby in which he said that he only needed a little assistance from the British to finish the Turks in Trans-Jordan. His vivid Imagination thus shares responsibility with Bols’ credulity—but does not excuse It. The neglect to consult Lawrence before chasing this bubble may perhaps be explained by the fact that some of the staff at General Headquarters were still sore from Lawrence’s comments on their neglect to blow up the railway bridges during the previous advance to Amman if so, their attempt to score off him proved a costly revenge.
Allenby was certainly led astray by his staff over this renewed move into Trans-Jordan. Guy Dawnay had left him for France, and Bartholomew, who was to work out the final operation of the war, had not yet left Chetwode’s staff for Allenby’s. Moreover, this operation is incorrectly described, even in the official history, as a “raid.” According to his subsequent dispatch his object was “to cut off and destroy the enemy’s force at Shunet Nimrin, and, if successful, to hold Es Salt until the Arabs could arrive and relieve my troops.” But beforehand he wrote to Chauvel, who was entrusted with the move, “As soon as your operations have gained the front Amman-Es Salt you will at once prepare for operations northwards with a view to advancing rapidly on Deraa.” it becomes clear that the operation was inspired by a vaulting ambition, and it is also one more instance of the difference, so familiar to the historian, between a commander’s intention and his subsequent explanation for history.
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