Chauvel did not seem to relish the idea of postponing his triumphal entry, but having no clear-cut instructions as to his course he yielded, like Barrow at Deraa, to the superior authority of Lawrence’s “certainty,” that quiet but resistless air of assurance which all who know him know so well.
He then went back to the town hall to deal with the Algerian usurpers. They had’ not returned, and when he sent a summons for their presence he received a curt reply that they were sleeping. He then told a relative of theirs that he would fetch British troops to search for them—“it was tactics only, not meant.” When the man had gone back with this message Nuri Shaalan asked him quietly if the English were likely to come, to which Lawrence replied—“Certainly; but the sorrow was that afterwards they might not go.” Nuri Shaalan reiected for a moment and then promised him the support of his Ruwalla. Soon the Algerian brothers appeared, full of menace, with their retainers. But they hesitated when they saw the superior weight of armed force that lay ready to do Lawrence’s bidding. Then he, as deputy for Feisal, and, for the ghost of Cromwell, pronounced their Government dissolved and appointed Shukri as acting military governor. Mohammed Said, violently denouncing him as a Christian and an Englishman, tried to appeal to Nasir, who seemed miserably uncomfortable in this unwonted political issue. Lawrence was unmoved. Then Abd el Kader burst into frenzied curses which Lawrence ignored so contemptuously that, maddened, the fanatical Moslem drew his dagger. But Auda saw the action and leapt forward with such tigerish fury that Abd el Kader hastily recoiled. He and Mohammed now saw the futility of further protest, and swept out of the chamber. “I was persuaded they should be seized and shot; but could not make myself fear their power of mischief, nor set the Arabs an example of precautionary murder as part of politics.” Happy the statesman who has an historical sense to curb him.
As soon as the brothers had left, Lawrence turned the meeting to the consideration of constructive policy. “Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into the terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality, upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.
“Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s sorry duty would be to. rid, himself of his war-friends, and replace them by the elements which had been most useful to the Turkish Government. Nasir was too little of a political philosopher to feel this. Nuri Said knew, and Nuri Shaalan.” it is a tribute to Lawrence’s historical understanding, and a triumph of knowledge over instinct, that he realized it first and most fully.
Under his urge and direction the frame of an administration was constructed. Sagely, the formation of a police force came first. Officers were appointed, districts allocated, provisional conditions of service determined. An Australian detachment, which had taken the surrender of the Turkish troops in barracks, sent guards to some of the public buildings, and thus helped to bridge the gap until the Arab regulars arrived to take over. If these, because of their relative slowness, had played little part in the defeat of the Fourth Army, they were invaluable for consolidating the position—politically.
The water supply also received attention, and steps were taken to cleanse the conduit, fouled by dead men and animals. The light supply came third, and that evening the streets were lit from the powerhouse, a potent sign of the return of peaceful conditions. Gangs of scavengers were formed by Nuri Said to clear the streets of the débris, material and human, of the Turkish retreat, as a first step towards combating the pestilential conditions that prevailed and restoring sanitation. Parties were also told off to prevent the burning stores from spreading their sparks into the city. And another danger was forestalled by curtailing the display of firearms.
Beyond these immediate dangers lay the shadow of hunger looming over the population. As first aid the food that could be salvaged from the Turkish stores was distributed to the destitute. Then the Arab force converted its transport animals to civil use so that supplies could be fetched from the surrounding countryside. More permanent provisioning depended on the railway, and urgent efforts were made to find and re-engage the staffs so that they might resume running as early as possible. The telegraph, too, was restored. And the currency. Notes were printed and new prices fixed. Another problem was that of finding forage to meet the needs of the Desert Mounted Corps, To this Lawrence was specially impelled by his fear that otherwise Chauvel might seize both forage and government.
By the following day the greater part had been arranged and great things achieved, if those who only saw the city then for the first time were naturally more conscious of the ragged edges. Of his own part Lawrence has told me, simply, “I got the other fellows to take a subject each and put it on its feet. There were three days of rush—with pits of silence intervening, and into them one fell unconscious.” Stirling, who saw it from the outset, remarks—“A thousand and one things had to be thought of, but never once was Lawrence at a loss.” in setting the wheels in motion Nuri Said’s political gifts, Young’s power of organization, Stirling’s knack in handling men, were all invaluable, but Lawrence was the mainspring. The machinery of government was working, even though it creaked.
Before dawn on the 2nd there was a momentary clatter. Lawrence was awakened to hear the news that Abd el Kader was attempting a revolution with the support of his obedient Algerian followers and a section of greedy Druses, who were angered by Lawrence’s refusal to reward their belated assistance and hopeful of compensating the loss of plunder.
Lawrence and the Arab leaders waited for daybreak, wisely preferring not to forfeit the advantage of superior weapons by becoming immersed in dark street scrimmages. At the first streak of light Nuri Said moved armed parties to the upper suburbs and carried out a drive that herded the rioters towards the centre. The Arab regulars swept the riverside parades with continuous machine-gun barrages. Only a few would-be revolutionaries were foolish enough to make contact with this lethal current. The rest broke up and fled along the side alleys. It was an effective way of dispersing a rebel band. Mohammed Said was then arrested and imprisoned; his brother escaped into the country.
Although sporadic looting continued, the attempted revolution was broken—without the need of accepting Chauvel’s offer of troops. The consolidation of the new regime was helped by the return of Ali Riza, who took over from Shukri the reins of government.
With the passing of this emergency Lawrence was able to return to the task of organizing the public services. At midday he went, in answer to an appeal, to the Turkish barracks where he found two companies of Australians mounting guard over a channel house. All the Turks capable of walking had been removed, but on entering Lawrence found the place littered with stinking corpses and with rows of dysentery cases dying in their own filth. Taking vigorous action, with such poor aid as he could muster, he brought a semblance of decency into the place and had the dead sorted out for burial in a trench.
When he returned next day the place and its inmates were in process of being cleansed, yet it was still so unpleasant that an army doctor, who apparently mistook Lawrence for an Arab attendant, abused him vehemently for permitting such an outrage on humanity. Lawrence, seeing the grim humour of the charge, gave vent to a strained laugh, whereupon the medical major smacked him in the face. And Lawrence took the buffet without protest, feeling so unclean from his part in the whole chain of events that one more stain could make little difference, but rather had a symbolical fitness.
His depression was the deeper because of a factor that had nothing to do with politics. In the haunting poem that prefaces the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and again in the brief epilogue, he has confessed to a personal motive that, like a magnet, had drawn him along the road to Damascus. Death had outpaced him on the road, and brought the dissolution of his dream. Damascus was his, but Damascu
s was an empty pitcher, shattered on the well of his desire. This may explain the feverish energy with which he threw himself into the task of bringing order into Damascus, a work of creation that drowned chilling reflections.
Whatever flaws may subsequently have appeared in the new Arab State that he so briefly constructed, they arose from the nature of the materials rather than from the building. This had to be done quickly if it was to be done at all, and in its rapidity lies the remarkable feature of Lawrence’s achievement. Other dictators and State-creators have had a foundation to build upon and time to repair their mistakes, time extending into years. He had twenty-four hours.
Yet on October 3rd when Allenby arrived in Damascus, Lawrence was able, in Stirling’s words, “to hand over to him an ordered town purged of almost all trace of war, a government functioning with ease and rapidity, and a population filled with joy and relief at the passing of Turkish rule.” His achievement was sealed and his audacious initiative justified when Allenby informed Feisal, who made his entry an hour later, that he was prepared to recognize the Arab administration of enemy territory east of the Jordan from Ma‘an to Damascus inclusive.
When Feisal had left, Lawrence turned to Allenby with a personal request—the first he had made and his last. It was for permission to hand over his burden. Allenby demurred, wanting him to go on to Aleppo, but in the end his persuasion prevailed over Allenby’s reluctance. On the following day he took his departure for Cairo. With peculiarly deep truth one may say that he shook the dust of Damascus off his feet.
It remained with him as a memory—“one of the clearest memories I have, the silky coolness of the Damascus dust, as it lapped over my sandals and powdered my feet. Those white deep paths, under the trees or shaded by the house walls were heavenly quiet and soft.”
As Lawrence was travelling south, the Campaign was rolling on to Aleppo, two hundred miles distant. The 5th Cavalry Division reached the outskirts on October 25th, while an Arab force under Nasir and Nuri Said advanced on its right flank. A combined attack was arranged for next morning, but during the night the Arabs slipped into the town, and the Turks abandoned it. On the 29th the Arabs, by a fresh bound, captured Muslimiya station, the junction of the Baghdad and Syrian railways. The life-line was severed, and the Turkish Army in Mesopotamia isolated. Two days later Turkey was out of the war. Eleven days more, and then, on November 11th, Germany herself capitulated. That same day Lawrence arrived back in England, after four years’ absence. It was an aptly timed arrival for the man who had counted for more than an army corps in “knocking away the props.”
In the crucial weeks while Allenby’s stroke was being prepared, and during its delivery, nearly half of the Turkish forces south of Damascus were distracted by the Arab forces; pinned east of the Jordan by the subtle feints and nerve-paralysing “needle-jabs” that Lawrence conceived and directed. Those Turkish forces comprised the 2nd and 8th Army Corps as well as the garrisons along the Hejaz railway between Ma‘an and Amman; these together totalled some 2,000 sabres and 12,000 rifles. The ration strength appears to have been about three times as large, i.e., about 40,000–45,000 out of a total ration strength of 100,000 south of Damascus.
The most remarkable feature is that, with some relatively light assistance from Chaytor’s force, these Turkish masses were paralysed by an Arab contingent that counted less than 3,000 men, and of which the actual expeditionary core was barely 600 strong.
As a consequence, Allenby was able to concentrate three army corps, totalling 12,000 sabres and 57,000 rifles, against the other half, approximately, of the Turkish forces. And, in the sector chosen for the decisive stroke, to concentrate 44,000 rifles and sabres, against 8,000—odds of more than five to one. The total British ration strength, including Indian troops but excluding Egyptian labour personnel, required to develop this striking force numbered over a quarter of a million men.
Even as thus expressed in a purely arithmetical form of comparison, it would be difficult to find in the whole history of war as extraordinary a case of economy of force in distraction. Small as was the detachment which exercised this immense distracting power, only a fraction of it was truly a detachment from the main British forces—even counting the Gurkhas and the Egyptians it numbered barely a hundred men. Retained with the army in Palestine this handful would have been merely a drop in the ocean. Sent into the desert they created a whirlpool that sucked down almost half the Turkish army; indeed more than half if, as is just, we count the 12,000 Turks cut off in the Hejaz.1 And even this reckoning leaves out of account the Turkish troops in Southern Arabia.
What the absence of these numbers meant to the success of Allenby’s stroke it is easy to see. Nor did the Arab operation end when it had opened the way. For in the issue it was the Arabs, almost entirely, who wiped out the Fourth Army, the still intact force that might have barred the way to final victory.
But beyond the arithmetical was, to use Lawrence’s original classification, the biological factor. The wear and tear, the bodily and mental strain, that exhausted the Turkish troops and brought them to breaking point was applied by the Arabs, elusive and ubiquitous, to a greater extent than by the British forces—both before and during the final phase. The biological factor, however, embraces materials as well as men. And here the Arabs’ influence was still greater—while the Turks were more vulnerable. The maintenance of the Turkish armies depended on the railway, and on its maintenance. The Arabs alone, through their elastic radius of action, could operate effectively against this weak foundation of the Turkish resistance. First, they executed a strategy of material attrition that came far nearer to using up the enemy’s reserves than the strategy of physical attrition had done in other theatres. Then they severed the line of communication at the moment when it became the life-and-death line, when the fate of the enemy hung on this frayed threat. The Deraa demolitions were the death-knell.
But beyond the biological lies the psychological factor. In the profoundest sense, battles are lost and won in the mind of the commander, and the results merely registered in his men. It was primarily the Arabs, under the guidance of Lawrence’s mind, who prepared the mind of Liman von Sanders so that he arranged his forces in the way that produced their defeat. That fateful delusion was not merely the triumph of a detachment but of “a war of detachment”—which created a mirage for the Turks’ undoing.
* * *
1 Lawrence has commented to me on this incident as follows: “In the desert I shaved regularly. My burnt-red face, clean-shaven and startling with my blue eyes against white headdoth and robes, became notorious in the desert. Tribesmen or peasants who had never set eyes on me before would instantly know me, by the report. So my Arab ‘disguise’ was actually an advertisement. It gave me away instantly, as myself, to all the desert: and to be instantly known was safety in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred.
“The hundredth case was always the eventuality to be feared. If I saw it coming, I would get into a soldier’s cap, shirt and shorts, and get away with it, or draw my headcloth over my face, like a visor, and brazen it out.
“No easterner would ever have taken me for an Arab for a moment. Only the Bengal Lancers, and similar innocent foreign soldiery, here and at Deraa, and in Egypt, and at Allenby’s H.Q. They started the notion of my skill in disguise—which was nil.”
1 it was perhaps the crowning jest of the Arab Campaign, from Lawrence’s point of view, that the garrison of Medina did not surrender until January, 1919. Even then it was only when Fakhri Pasha fell sick that his starving subordinates seized the chance to hand over to the Arabs the now helpless man whose soldierly spirit in holding on obstinately to Medina had done so much to lose the war for his country.
BOOK IV
AFTER
CHAPTER XX
TROUBLES OF A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE
THE War was won, the Turkish Empire overthrown, an Arab state inaugurated, and the possibility of an Arab Confederacy, even a new empire, created. All this had been
achieved by the sword—or, to be more accurate, by the long-range bullet and blasting gelatine. Lawrence’s military task was completed. The political task remained, although for his own part he had no desire to participate beyond securing fair play for the Arabs—the freedom to do what they wished with the gift he had done so much to bring them.
The wheels of the machine spatter its servants with grease. Those who serve an organization, whether it be a nation or a firm, can hardly hope to escape staining their honesty, bound to it as they are by ambition or self-preservation. Like the overwhelming majority, Lawrence had. become stained in the course of his servitude. But he was different, in being more conscious of the stain. He was too clear-sighted for his own comfort. And he suffered accordingly.
Happy in his freedom from ambition, as commonly conceived; happier still in his freedom from the cares of livelihood, and from the ties that bind others to this concern, his mind was so uncommonly lucent that the stain had an iridescent persistency which he could never escape. I have never known a man more sensitive to the truth, from which mankind instinctively seeks protection in shaded glasses.
Lawrence of Arabia Page 36