Tactically, the units were also gaining effectiveness as they gained experience. Lawrence mused, “In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in the hills would stop a dozen Turks.… We were yet too breathless to turn our hasty practice into principle: our tactics were empirical snatchings of the first means to escape difficulty. But we were learning like our men.”8
If Lawrence was learning, he was also teaching. A key attribute of his great leadership was his ability to be a powerful teacher. He had humility and tolerance as a leader, but as a great teacher he had empathy: he could sense the ignorance and even the stupidity of his pupils as if it were his own and then share in the joy of mutual illumination, as if seeing the world with new eyes in childlike wonderment.
And Lawrence continued his education in the leadership arts. He learned that the customary Western military style of leadership did not and could not work among the Arabs. The traditional cleavage between officer and enlisted man made no sense in a tribal culture and warrior tradition. “To have privacy … was ten thousand times more restful than the open life, but the work suffered by the creation of such a bar between the leaders and men. Among the Arabs there were no distinctions, traditional or natural, except the unconscious power given a famous sheikh by virtue of his accomplishment; and they taught me that no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks’ food, wore their clothes, lived level with them and yet appeared better in himself.”9
AND SO IT came to pass that in the middle of January 1917, the bulk of the Arab army prepared to slip away from Rabegh and steal by stages behind the coastal hills to Bir Waheidi, halfway to the port of Wejh still a hundred distant miles to the north. The army also had to reorganize itself to better cooperate with the British Royal Navy. Feisal’s force now included some fifty-one hundred camelry and fifty-three hundred infantry: a large force to cover two hundred miles of desert. It was necessary that the Royal Navy transport the baggage and, especially, water along the sea flank of the Arab land march. Even with the additional sea beasts of burden, Feisal needed 380 camels to haul his baggage and other “ash and trash.”
On January 18, all was readied. Lawrence recounts the march-out of the insurgent army: “After lunch the tent was struck. We went to our camels, where they crouched in a circle, saddled and loaded, each held short by the slave standing on its doubled fore-leg. The kettle-drummer, waiting beside Ibn Dakhil, who commanded the bodyguard, rolled his drum seven or eight times, and everything became still. We watched Feisal. He got up from his rug … caught the saddle-pommels in his hands, put his knee on the side and shouted: ‘Make Allah your agent!’ The slave released the camel, which sprang up.… As his camel moved we had jumped for ours, and the whole mob rose together.”
By most accounts, the seizure of Wejh on January 24, 1917, was the turning point of the Arab Revolt. It struck a severe blow against Turkish morale, not just in the desert, but across the whole Ottoman Empire, even shaking Germany’s Triple Alliance. At the same time, the victory at Wejh reinvigorated Arab morale with renewed belief in the righteousness of their cause. It also consolidated the gains of the previous months into a viable base for success and demonstrated to the world that the revolt was a serious effort worthy of support.
After the victory, Lawrence wrote an after-action report to British military headquarters in Cairo, citing the words of Feisal, leader of the assaulting Arab army: “Yes, we are no longer Arabs, but a nation.” Lawrence continued, “He was proud, for the advance on Wejh by the Juheina [tribe] was the biggest moral achievement of the new Hejaz government. For the first time the entire manhood of a tribe, complete with its transport and food for a 200-mile march, has left its own divan, and proceeded (without plunder or the stimulus of inter-tribal feuds) into the territory of another tribe with a detached military aim.”
Lawrence was also concerned with what he saw as the needless loss of life that ensued in the capture of Wejh and saw every death in battle as a challenge to the leader’s personal authority and legitimacy, for it called into question the sacred contract between the leader and his men. In a tribal culture, the contract was more tenuous and less formal: “To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin. I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army.”10 Lawrence was reminded again about the essential difference between leading in the military mess and leading in the tribal community.
The success at Wejh only raised the obvious question: With the possession of the port, what was to be done with it? The initial plan was to use the base as a means to strike at the Turkish rail lifeline fifty miles to the east—but to what strategic end? The adventurous idea of destroying a few miles of rail line and a couple of locomotives appealed to all. The high councils of war demonstrated that there was still no strategic coherence between the Arab Revolt and the British operations in Egypt. Four months later, the same condition persisted. The British had yet to weave their operations into a seamless strategic pattern. In two months, Lawrence would have to ponder deeply this enigma and offer a completely novel and revolutionary solution.
CHAPTER THREE
A Flash of Genius
In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.… Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.
—T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The story is told that shortly after the capture of Aqaba in July 1917, a British colonel from Cairo general headquarters (GHQ) came to visit Lawrence, who was none too fond of rear echelon visitors and disdained interruptions to his normal routine. Upon arrival, the colonel eventually found Major Lawrence feeding his camels near the shoreline. The colonel sidled up to Lawrence to better observe the feeding. At length he asked, “I say, Lawrence, what do you give these beasts for lunch?” Without entirely acknowledging his intrusive guest, yet with exquisite timing, Lawrence thought a moment and said, “Half an hour, same as the donkeys.” Whether or not the unnamed colonel realized he had been the brunt of one of Lawrence’s many jokes is unrecorded. We can see, however, that different assumptions, presumptions, and perspectives can lead to humor and irony as well as serious misunderstanding. This idea of hidden assumptions, beliefs, and habits of mind—like cultural perceptions of time—is exactly what came to constitute the core notion underpinning historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm. Lawrence not only had to overcome Arab social culture, he also had to overturn the predominant military culture of the day.
Thomas Kuhn sought to emphasize the personal significance and magnitude of a paradigm shift. He wrote, “The transfer of allegiance from one paradigm to another is a conversion experience that cannot be forced” [my emphasis].1 Kuhn’s epiphany was precisely the same sort of “transformation” that Lawrence would undergo in his tent in Wadi Ais during March 1917: a profound intellectual experience unique in the annals of war.
Of course, in a broader sense scientists are like any other community of practitioners. Lawrence himself was one such practitioner within a military community and operating inside a distinctive paradigm generally based on conventional military operations. He would struggle mightily to overturn the conventional paradigm and lead a new rev
olution in military art: the conduct of irregular warfare under modern industrial conditions.
A DOZEN OR so years after the death of Lawrence, Sir Karl Popper wrote, “Institutions are like fortresses. They must be well designed and properly manned.” Lawrence would have added, “They must be properly led as well.” At this stage of the Arab Revolt, native leaders were beginning to emerge who would eventually lead—but lead what? The Arabs had no military institutions, no state institutions to speak of. They were still a nation of tribes. The institutional blocks would have to be hewn slowly with Lawrence’s razor-edged mind, slab by slab, brick by brick, and integrated into a coherent whole, cemented by leadership. By the end of January 1917, Lawrence’s masonry was still operating at the level of straw-made bricks. The straws of tactical leadership were readily at hand to mix with tribal clay. The kiln of combat had hardened them, but they still needed to be set together with strategic form and operational function. Fortunately, Feisal ignored his father’s desires: the Arab army would have its mason.
As fast as Lawrence and Feisal sought to build up their fragile revolutionary edifice, others were ready to smash it down. French colonel Eduard Brémond, an artilleryman by profession and wrecker by trade, began to undermine the Arab efforts. At all costs he had to prevent the Arabs from ever reaching Damascus and laying claim to territory that would compromise French interests. Since the Arabs were desperate for artillery, his first sapping efforts were to prevent French artillery from reaching the Arab army, even though the guns were sitting idle at Suez. For a whole year, the Arabs would be denied these assets. His other political aim, at the direction of the French government, was to ensure British troops became sidetracked in the Arabian Peninsula, where they would have less influence on French designs in Syria. To this end, he struggled greatly to get English troops committed to the defense of Rabegh.
Soon after the capture of Wejh, Colonel Brémond came to Lawrence to cast a spell of deception. “Monsieur Lawrence, I have a proposal of the utmost strategic importance for you: the port of Aqaba is now ripe for the plucking. A combined Anglo-French brigade with naval support could easily seize it and of course you’re well aware of its importance: it is now the only Turkish port left on the Red Sea, the nearest to the Suez Canal, the nearest to the Hejaz Railway, the nearest to the flank of the British Army. We could easily take the port and drive up Wadi Itm and crush Ma’an.”
Of course Lawrence knew the area quite well from before the war and realized the concept was militarily infeasible. “We could take the beach of the gulf; but our forces there, as unfavorably placed as on a Gallipoli beach, would be under observation and gun-fire from the coastal hills; and these granite hills, thousands of feet high, are impracticable for heavy troops: the passes through them being formidable defiles, very costly to assault or to cover. In my opinion, Aqaba, whose importance is all and more than you say, would best be taken by Arab irregulars descending from the interior without naval help.”2
Lawrence knew the real political reasons behind the proposal—and he knew that Brémond knew he knew. The Frenchman concluded the discussion with a thinly veiled warning that he would take his case to Feisal himself. Of course Feisal was unaware of this intrigue, assuming, perhaps naively, that the French and British were acting in complete concert as true allies. After Brémond left, Lawrence rushed to Wejh by boat, arriving two days later to warn Feisal, who now began to understand the duplicitous game of the French. When Brémond appeared ten days later, Feisal was ready, with Lawrence silent and Polonius-like at his side. The colonel’s opening gambit was to offer six Hotchkiss machine guns. Feisal replied that the “noble gift” would be better appreciated if it came with a battery of quick-firing mountain guns. The Frenchman decried the use of guns in the desert, saying it would be much better “if Feisal made his men climb about the country like goats and tear up the railway.” Ignoring Lawrence’s stifled guffaw—from the shadows—at the colonel’s cultural gaffe about goats, Feisal angrily wondered if Brémond’s fat ass would allow him to “goat” around hills as easily. Oblivious to the insult, the wrecker pressed his argument, only to have Feisal replay a variant of Lawrence’s original rejoinder.
For now, Brémond’s sapping efforts had been countermined, though Lawrence knew he would try again. In the meantime, he would spend a week in Cairo offering Sir Archibald Murray a new appreciation of the situation.
TURKISH COMMANDER FAKHRI Pasha held a defensive position by Medina that dangled at the end of an extended rail line. Newcombe in the northeast and Major H. G. Garland southeast had gone off to blow bridges and rails along the length of the entire line. Like a long line of ants, the Turks spread themselves out trying to secure water points and other key installations. Meanwhile, the Arabs began to take Feisal’s successes seriously and offer military service. The Billi and the Moahib tribes were the first of the new enlistees, whose enrollment gave Feisal control of Arabia from the railway west to the Red Sea. He directed the Juheina to reinforce his brother Abdullah at Wadi Ais.
At present, neither Lawrence nor Feisal made a distinction in their strategic outlook between combat and persuasion. Intuitively, Feisal saw the need to use his leadership powers of argument to enlarge the enrollment of tribes. He already had the coastal Howeitat under his suasion and looked toward the northeast to the Beni Atiyeh and their chief, Asi ibn Atiyeh, who swore fealty to Feisal. Lawrence did not expect active participation from Asi, who was motivated through jealousy of his brothers, but he did expect a source of equal value: freedom of maneuver throughout the tribal lands. Farther afield lay the many tribes owing allegiance to Nuri Shaalan, the grand emir of the Ruwalla and fourth in stature after Hussein, ibn Saud, and ibn Rashid.
To ensure the well-being of his tribes, however, Nuri maintained close contact with the Turks, who still held Damascus and Baghdad, the focus of his tribal markets. Without this loose collaboration, the enemy could have shut down the trade and starved his tribes in less than three months. Lawrence and Feisal knew, though, that when the crunch came, they would be able to rely on Nuri and his men.
Strategically, Nuri’s tacit support would open up the entire Sirhan passage, an important axis of advance that offered campsites and water holes in a chain of linked depressions that would give cover during movement behind Aqaba. The passage through the Sirhan would further provide access to the eastern Howeitat under Auda abu Tayi, the fiercest fighter in all of northern Arabia. Only with the tactical leadership of Auda could Lawrence hope to wield the various tribes as a single weapon and strike at Aqaba from the rear. Thus it was on February 17, 1917, that Auda sent his cousin and chief retainer, ibn Zaal, to Feisal’s tent. As Lawrence recalls: “He kissed Feisal’s hand once for Auda and then once for himself, and, sitting back, declared that he came from Auda to present his salutations and to ask for orders. Feisal, with policy, controlled his outward joy, and introduced him gravely to his blood enemies, the Jazi Howeitat. Ibn Zaal acknowledged them distantly.” After several hours of intense but friendly negotiations, ibn Zaal offered the formal oath to Feisal on behalf of Auda, vowing “to wait while he [Feisal] waited, march when he marched, to yield obedience to no Turk, to deal kindly with all who spoke Arabic (whether Baghdadi, Aleppine, Syrian, or pure-blooded), to put independence above life, family, and goods.”
Finally, Feisal addressed the long-standing blood feuds among all those present. Feisal played the role of Solomon, wise judge in adjudicating and redressing the internecine hatred of decades, often paying his own money to achieve agreement and resolution. In all these efforts, Feisal rose from a tribal head to the true head of an Arab nation. For two years, Feisal would struggle mightily to put together the jigsaw puzzle of Arab society into one coherent vision for the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and freedom for his people. In the end, no blood feud existed anywhere in western Arabia. Of Feisal’s leadership, Lawrence would recall: “He never gave a partial decision, nor a decision so impracticably just that it must lead to disorder. No Arab ever impu
gned his judgments, or questioned his wisdom and competence in tribal business. By patiently sifting out right and wrong, by his tact, his wonderful memory, he gained authority over the nomads from Medina to Damascus and beyond. He was recognized as a force transcending tribe, superseding blood chiefs, greater than jealousies.”3 Feisal’s leadership would soon turn the revolt from a limp hand into a heavy fist.
FEISAL CONTINUED HIS diplomatic efforts toward the enlargement of the Arab Revolt for the next several weeks. Sometime around March 10, a wireless telegram was intercepted by British intelligence in Cairo under Brigadier Gilbert Clayton. The partially decoded intercept from Jemal Pasha, the Turkish commander in Syria, ordered Fakhri Pasha at Medina to begin the entire evacuation of his position around the town. The concept had been concocted by the German staff in Istanbul, supporting the nominal Turkish commander in chief, Enver Pasha. The message ordered the march of the Turks northward astride the railway, with the bulk of the rail transport chugging along in the center of the massed troops. Clayton feared that the bulk of the Medina force, perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand men, would now end up in the main theater facing the British at Beersheba. It was imperative, therefore, that this redeployment be halted at all costs. Clayton sent an order to Lieutenant-Colonel S. F. Newcombe to plan an attack, but the colonel was away operating against the railway farther north. Lawrence, on his own initiative, seized the mission and urged Feisal to take immediate action. On very short notice, Lawrence helped Feisal cobble together four loose detachments that were sent out to operate against the Turks out of a chain of forward-operating bases. Then Lawrence himself went out to see Abdullah at Wadi Ais and challenge him for not taking any serious action against the enemy for the past two months and to urge him that concerted action would now be necessary if the Turks moved north.
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