To explore the theoretical questions, Lawrence began the inquiry from his perspective as commander and “began to unravel command and analyze it, both from the view of strategy … and from the view called tactics.… In each I found the same elements: one algebraical, one biological, a third psychological.” This became his simple conceptual framework: a kind of mental pegboard on which to hang key concepts or ideas in relation to one another, yet with sufficient structure to analyze and think of the ideas altogether in a coherent whole. Lawrence’s “pegboard” thus had three conceptual “hooks”: the algebraical, the biological, and the psychological.
By algebraical, Lawrence meant those factors subject to mathematical calculation, fixed in time and place, and generative of military power: the means of war. Thus he began to calculate the size of the area that the rebellious Arabs would have to conquer and how many Turks it would take to defend it. Assuming a fortified post with twenty men, staged at four-mile intervals, he calculated it would require a Turkish army of six hundred thousand men to defend adequately the whole Arabian Peninsula. Yet he knew the enemy possessed only one hundred thousand men, and most of these were concentrated around Medina or defending the long rail lifeline. Lawrence further recognized that the Turks, with their mental baggage stuffed with ideas about climactic decisive battles, would approach the insurgency from the perspective of a strategy of annihilation. But this would be a mistake, because making “war upon a rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”
The second element in his framework was the biological, a term he later refers to as “bionomics,” a reference to the wear and tear and friction within a military system. Lawrence concluded that rather than destroy the Turkish army, the Arabs merely needed to wear it down. A strategy of exhaustion, not destruction, was the way that would bring this about indirectly through tactical attacks on the enemy’s matériel: “The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun, or high explosive was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk.” Thus, the weakness of the irregular—his inability to stand toe-to-toe with the regular in battle—could be rendered moot provided the Arab attacked the enemy’s readily accessible matériel. But the key to such a strategy was the possession of nearly perfect intelligence—both timely and accurate. Lawrence, himself a practiced intelligence officer, argued that knowledge of the enemy had to be “faultless, leaving no room for chance. We took more pains in this service than any other staff I saw.”
A war driven by a strategy of exhaustion meant to the Arabs “a war of detachment: we were to contain the enemy by silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves til the moment of attack. This attack need be only nominal, directed not against his men, but against his materials: so it should not seek for his main strength or his weaknesses.… In railway cutting this would be usually an empty stretch of rail. That was a tactical success. We might turn the average into a rule … and at length we developed an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving the enemy’s soldier a target. Many Turks on our front had no chance all the war to fire a shot at us, and correspondingly we were never on the defensive, except by rare accident.”
The final factor of analysis was the psychological. Lawrence understood that in an insurgency, the real battle resided within the minds of the opponents. To be successful, the Arabs had “to arrange their [own] minds in order of battle, just as formally as other officers arrayed their bodies.” This also meant that moral support among the populace had to be mobilized for the rebellion. In their amateurish ignorance and naïveté, Lawrence and the Arabs saw the revolt as a conflict of infinite possibility and opportunity. Nothing was dismissed from useful consideration that a serving regular officer might reject out of hand. This was especially true with regard to the supporting role of the media during the uprising. “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.… The regular officer has the tradition of forty generations of serving soldiers behind him, and to him the old weapons are the most honored. We had seldom to concern ourselves with what our men did, but much with what they thought, and to us the [psychological] was more than half [of] command. In Europe it was a little aside and entrusted to men outside the General Staff. In Asia we were so weak physically that we could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. We had won a province when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom: the presence or absence of the enemy was a secondary matter.” Freedom was the motivating spark that turned the tinder of discontent into a raging flame of revolution. Lawrence had written that “conviction needed shooting to be cured.” Every Arab fortified with a conviction of freedom had the heart of a soldier and was thus a menace to every Turk.
In light of his analysis, Lawrence developed a basic war plan that he adhered to until virtually the end of the conflict in the desert. It rested upon a foundation of a realistic reframing of the Arab irregular and his Turkish adversary. The object was to impose upon the Turks the burden of a long, protracted defense that would eventually exhaust them. The method of accomplishing this was through the employment of small, highly skilled and motivated mobile raiding units.
FOUR DAYS INTO his desert reverie, Lawrence suffered a further physical setback. Around March 21, “a great complication of boils developed out, to conceal my lessened fever, and to chain me down yet longer in impotence upon my face in the stinking tent.” Even during this period of relapse, Lawrence never stopped his revolutionary thinking. Strategy had to be brought into existence through tactical action. He recognized that the problem of conventional and unconventional warfare reflected two great streams of military culture. The conventional soldier embodied the long tradition of the yeoman warrior, fighting for hearth and home. The insurgent rebel espoused an ethos of the homeless raider, fighting to seize the labored fruits of a sedentary civilized foe. The raider from his temporary base fought only for a thief’s booty and a pirate’s fellowship. The yeoman was always shackled with an urban chain to a common good. The raider had to move to survive; for the yeoman, movement meant displacement, loss, and defeat. To Lawrence, the raiding culture perfectly described the Arab nomad and made him the ideal instrument for his raiding strategy of exhaustion.
The two primary strategies—the ways—of war had been one of annihilation, the other of exhaustion. Lawrence rendered a third, a hybrid of exhaustion bent to the unique raiding style of the Arab guerrilla nomad. Accordingly, his assessment demonstrated “that the idea of assaulting Medina, or even starving it quickly into surrender was not in accord with our best strategy. We wanted the enemy to stay in Medina, and in every other nameless place, in the largest numbers. The factor of food would eventually confine him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hejaz railway [and to the other major] railways for the duration of the war, so long as he gave us the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world.… Our ideal was to keep his railway just working.”
The strategy of exhaustion and the implementing tactics of raiding were not about the direct concentration of solid mechanical force, but rather about the application of a kind of diffused gaseous pressure. The distribution of his desert corsairs in the “empty space” led Lawrence to consider that the ratio of troops to space would determine the ultimate nature of the war: “The ratio between number and area determined the character of the war, and by having five times the mobility of the Turks we could be on [equal] terms with them with one-fifth their number.” Thus Lawrence began to view desert warfare, in some sense, as more akin to naval warfare. He cites approvingly Sir Francis Bacon to that effect: “He who commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.”
For Lawrence, the camel was indeed the ship of the desert. It gave the desert guerrilla an incredible operational reach. In fact, the camel gave him and his Arab forces great operational mobility. With it, troops were able to carry a ration lasting six weeks. Even under the ho
ttest conditions, camels could travel three days without water. According to Lawrence’s estimation, this meant that the animals could cover nearly 250 miles between watering at a remarkable sustained rate of march of 3.5 miles an hour. It also meant that the Arab irregular had the operational reach of more than a thousand miles, sufficient to cast a threatening net over the entire Arabian Peninsula and beyond.
Having rejected the necessity to defeat the Turk through decisive battles, Lawrence was able to dispense with the need for organizing and maintaining dense, vulnerable field formations that characterized the force structure of conventional armies. The primary maneuver formation that he employed almost exclusively was the raiding party for the reasons previously mentioned. The Turks, however, used the unwieldy field division. Lawrence’s operational aim was to achieve “maximum articulation” of the Arab forces. If this purpose was to expand mistlike into the vast reaches of the Hejaz desert, then it only made sense that he employ clouds of raiders to occupy that vast territory. This approach, of course, exploited the innate independence of the Arab raider, and no one understood this better than Lawrence.
The Arab guerrilla was an independent force unto himself. Lawrence noted: “The Arab was simple and individual. Every enrolled man served in the line of battle and was self-contained. We had no lines of communications or labor troops. The efficiency of each man was his personal efficiency. We thought that in our condition of warfare the sum yielded by single men would be at least equal to the product of the compound system.… In irregular warfare if two men are together one is being wasted.”
TOWARD THE END of March 1917, Lawrence had recovered his strength and health—more or less. He strolled into Abdullah’s tent to share with him the practical implications of his revolutionary reframing of the Arab Revolt. He urged his host to strike against the Hejaz railway, but Abdullah was more interested in hearing about the gossip among the royal families of Europe, the slaughter that became known as the battle of the Somme: anything that would distract him from the boredom of his own small war.
At Abdullah’s side, though, was one who grew more and more interested in Lawrence’s recast strategy. The leader most prominent in Abdullah’s entourage was Sherif Shakir. He was the emir’s cousin and second in command, as well as head of the Ateiba. Without his support, Lawrence’s initial foray against the Turks would never have occurred. Shakir was an unusual Arab. His mother and grandmother were both Circassians, considered the “purest of white person.” The Circassians had been deported from the Caucasus Mountains by the Russians in the 1860s and 1870s to various parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially the Levant area. He was now twenty-nine and had been companion to Hussein’s sons, including Feisal and Abdullah. His fair face was sandblasted with smallpox, giving him an unnerving countenance: diminished eyelashes and eyebrows, large and penetrating eyes. Slim, tall, and athletic, he exuded authority and confidence; his voice had a calm and decisive tone about it. His facile wit came from the same source as his keen intellect. Though he had little book learning, he was worldly, knowledgeable, and even cunning, often being sent on key diplomatic missions by Hussein. He dressed simply yet elegantly. He would rather play backgammon than read the Koran; though devout, he disliked Mecca. As a warrior, he excelled above all else, and this most endeared him to the Bedouin. He wore his hair in long tresses down the sides of his pocked face. He washed his hair often in camel urine and set it to a high sheen with butter. Infected with the Englishman’s enthusiasm, he offered to lead his tribe with Lawrence against the Turks. The target chosen was the train station at Aba el Naam.
By March 26, Lawrence had all in readiness. An Algerian officer named Raho from Brémond’s detachment also offered his services. At eighteen, Mohammed el Kadhi was their guide. He had led the Turks down to Yenbo the previous December, but now he worked for the revolution. Twenty Ateiba and six Juheina freebooters formed their escort under Sherif Fauzan el Harith, the conqueror of Eshref. They left the Wadi Ais in the morning. Yet even the short three-hour ride was too much for the convalescent Lawrence, who stopped the party under the cloaking shade of a jujube tree. Spring was upon the valley, with white butterflies chasing one another through the sweet-scented wildflowers.
The ride continued early the next morning around the flanks of the rising Jebel Serd, zigzagging through Wadi Turaa and Wadi Yenbo. Another tree was found near a Juheina campsite that their guide visited. Along with the others, Lawrence slept on the ground and was awakened in the night by a nasty scorpion sting to his left hand, which by morning had swollen up, its venom causing a stiff and aching arm.
The party broke camp early in the morning, making the final leg to their objective at Aba el Naam across a wide, wavy landscape called the Jurf. The station lay behind a high hill, screening their new camp from sight. After a brief rest, Lawrence climbed the six-hundred-foot hill in careful stages, resting along the way. Finally, at the crest of the hill he could see the railway nearly three miles off in the distance. The station itself was on the near side of the railway, perhaps a half mile closer to their position. They could see a pair of two-storied basalt blockhouses looming large and darkly ominous near a round water tower, huts, bell tents, and other outbuildings. At least three hundred infantry manned lines of trenches.
Turkish tactical doctrine, inherited from their German advisers, ensured that the area would be actively patrolled at night. However, doctrine is only as good as the motivation and skill of the troops executing it, and as usual, the Turks were found wanting. At night, Lawrence sent two pair of skirmishers near the blockhouses and ordered them to open fire at dark. The ragged shooting spooked the enemy into thinking a large-scale attack was imminent, so they stood to in their trenches the whole night. In the windy morning, they found an empty desert under a gray sky. Beyond the ridge, the Arab party was still fast asleep. They soon roused themselves and crept back up the hill to observe their edgy foe as he began his reveille ritual: bugles were called, and men rushed about, transforming themselves into serried blocks of khaki flesh; more calls, and the blocks slowly dissolved around smoking breakfast fires. Just then the now distant bugle calls were answered by the sharp, shrill whistle of a locomotive steaming slowly toward the station. As the puffing train creaked to a halt over a rickety bridge, a sharp cry was heard from behind the party’s location. Lawrence looked back and saw a herd of sheep and goats leading a tattered little boy up the hill toward the Arabs. He immediately realized that the shepherd and his flock could unmask their concealed position. Two of the Juheina grabbed the youth, who began screaming and crying in fear at the sudden sight of the raiders. More terrifying to the boy, though, was the risk of losing his flock while seized by the men. It took all the powers of Sherif Fauzan to calm the lad and coax him to offer information about the Turkish defenses.
At dusk, the raiders left their hilltop position to return to the main camp with their shepherd captive. Shakir had arrived with the main body during light and had begun to roast some of the boy’s flock. Now inconsolable, the boy refused to eat. The men tried to comfort him with the thought that tomorrow the railway station of his Turkish masters would lie in rubble. Finally, they forced bread and rice into him under threat of death and tied him to a tree.
Meanwhile, Lawrence, Shakir, and Fauzan discussed the tactical situation. It had suddenly changed once Lawrence realized that Shakir had brought only three hundred men instead of the promised eight hundred to nine hundred tribesmen. The whole plan had to be recast. It was now impossible to seize the station. Instead the party would fix the Turks in their defensive position with the one artillery piece they possessed and with concentrated small-arms fire. Two smaller detachments would strike the rail line north and south of the station with explosives and sever the line. Lawrence would lead the southern group guided by Mohammed el Kadhi, who led them to a deserted part of the rail near midnight. This would be Lawrence’s first combat mission as leader. For the first time in the war he would lead offensive action against the enemy, and
he was thrilled at the thought as he laid twenty pounds of explosives under the line. The painstaking work took nearly an hour. A portion of the party set up a machine-gun position about four hundred yards from the mine in hopes of covering the train after it was derailed. Lawrence took the rest of the party up the line to cut the telegraph wire, hoping the isolation would induce panic among the garrison. After an hour of riding, they found an isolated telegraph pole. Unfortunately, the four remaining Juheina, being warriors of the desert, lacked the skill of shinnying up a tree, much less a telegraph pole. Despite his recent illness, Lawrence tried his hand. After he’d climbed up the sixteen-foot pole and cut the third wire, the loosened pole suddenly began to gyrate erratically, causing him to lose his grip and fall. Fortunately, Mohammed, catlike, ran forward to break Lawrence’s heavy fall. After a quick breather, the group found its way back to camp.
The entire mine-laying effort took four hours longer than expected. Lawrence realized that the delay meant the demolition party would either have to go out with the main body without rest or let it advance without them. After he consulted with Shakir, it was decided to stay behind and rest. Lawrence fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. An hour later, just when night and day in dreamlike struggle create the dawn, Mohammed crept over to the Englishman to awaken him by crying out the morning prayer in his ear. Lawrence pleaded for more sleep, but Mohammed was afraid of missing out on the one battle of his life. So Lawrence rolled over on his black-and-blue body and pushed himself into the new day, leaving the shepherd to tend his few remaining sheep.
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