Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  Zaal returned the next morning from his scouting mission and confirmed their worst fears: the seven wells at Jefer were indeed destroyed. It was apparent that the Turks were alert to some impending, though unspecified, threat. Along with Zaal’s arrival, the Ageyli scouts came in with new information. Evidently, the Turks were focusing their concerns to the north, toward Deraa and Damascus. The rail junction at Deraa was pivotal to the whole Turkish defense. Its loss would mean a pell-mell withdrawal from Palestine and the Hejaz to new positions just south of Damascus. In Lawrence’s mind, the helter-skelter work of Nesib’s mad scheme and his own covert operation through the region a few days earlier had stirred up a hornets’ nest of concern for the Turks. The uncertainty facing them was compounded by the fact that Newcombe, back at Wejh, contrived to plant false plans of a major attack against Aleppo and Damascus with Lawrence and his raiders as the vanguard. The discovery of Nasir, Feisal’s masterful outrider, with the caravan reinforced the ruse’s validity. At the same time, Nuri Shaalan, while maintaining a guise of friendship with the Turks, warned them of the column’s movements—to the north. To Lawrence’s thinking, everything now revolved around the stupidity of the Turks themselves. His study of them encouraged his belief that the deception plan might just work.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a war council gathered around the ashes of the previous night’s cook fire. Although the plans for Aqaba had been finalized the previous night, the question of the deception scheme had yet to be addressed. Lawrence sat cross-legged in the sand and with his riding crop drew a long gray line, running from north to south, through the burned remnants of the fire. “Here is Deraa,” he said, pointing to the northern end of the line. “And here is Aqaba”—tapping the southern point—“a stretch of more than 250 miles.” Then he drew two sides, first one from the southern tip and a second one from the northern tip, extending them to the east to form the apex of a triangle. Indicating the eastern point with a gesture, he said, “And here we are at Bair, roughly equidistant between Deraa and Aqaba. Now”—he paused, patting his stick midway along the Deraa-Bair side—“here is Azrak. We must make the Turks believe we are here”—the ashes flying—“while we make our strike here,” more silver and black dust, now flying at Aqaba. The essential geometry of Lawrence’s design was grasped immediately by Nasir and Auda, who were standing directly behind him, looking down from above.

  After some further elaboration, a basic tactical deception plan was put into execution: Nasir would ride with the small merchant caravan and journey the sixty miles to Tafileh, as previously planned. In addition to his logistics and intelligence mission, he would spread rumor and misinformation. Next, Auda ordered the formation of a small detachment of a hundred men under the command of Lawrence and Zaal. The raiders would attack the rail line near Deraa, giving the impression all the while that they had debauched recently at Azrak after a long march through the Sirhan. They would return within a week to coincide with Nasir’s arrival from Tafileh.

  Lawrence’s detachment left shortly before noon, riding hard day and night for six hours at a time, stopping briefly for one- or two-hour breaks in order to cover swiftly the 175 miles to Deraa. By the second afternoon, they had ranged over a hundred miles and reached the Circassian village of Zerga, just north of Amman. Here they watered their camels among the ancient cisterns below the ruins of an old Roman village. They waited until dark, fully aware of the local hatred of the Circassians toward most Arabs. Nearby was the heavy bridge at Dhuleil. Zaal and Lawrence scouted the bridge and discovered it was in the process of being rebuilt and at the moment was inoperative. Cursing their luck, the pair ordered the column to the small village of Minifir farther north at a vulnerable rail line. Lawrence explained to Zaal that blowing the track would have greater strategic—and therefore greater “deceptive”—effect than blowing the bridge anyhow, and besides, the town was on a direct route from Azrak, some fifty miles to the southeast.

  The party rode until dawn and found a suitable place to lay a mine under the tracks. The men then waited on a height above the site, looking down at the few unsuspecting guards dozing in the heat. The mining would have to wait until evening and cover of darkness; so the raiders rested, watched, and waited. Suddenly, about mid-morning, a troop of cavalry appeared out of nowhere, riding hard, straight for their position on the hill. Perhaps the local Belga shepherds had reported them. Left with no other choice, Lawrence and his men quickly scampered off to the east to seek cover among the shepherd hills, where they waited in ambush. The Turkish cavalry, however, was totally ignorant of the Arab location, since they had no native scouts. Instead, they seemed out and about on a morning joyride.

  After the threat passed, the raiders made a circuitous move to attack another portion of the rail line. This time they sent out scouts to reassure the Belga that they weren’t robbers after all, but in fact the advance guard of Feisal’s army of liberation riding up from Azrak. They camped by a nearby Belga village for the evening, feasting on bartered Belga bread, a fine respite from the usual fare of bleached raw corn. After the meal, Lawrence and Zaal crept down from their location to plant a Garland mine in a culvert underneath the adjacent rail track. The device was set with a pressure fuse that would detonate under the weight of the unsuspecting train. The pair retreated back to the encampment to reap the fruits of their labors. But when dawn broke, the mine still had not been triggered. After investigation, Lawrence found that the triggering device was defective and had to be replaced, and the interminable waiting resumed. Then shots were heard off in the distance, in the dead space under the hill. After several minutes, a ragtag pair of deserters from the harassing Turkish cavalry appeared, urged on by their captors. Both men were wounded, one severely, the other shot through the foot. The first died of his mortal wounds in the late afternoon. His death was particularly unmanly, thought Lawrence, who had seen most dying men accept death stoically: this Turk died hard in misery. The other trooper was weak and exhausted, as much from the wound as from generous doses of Turkish discipline that had left its telltale purple marks on his frail body. As his condition worsened, he was forced to lie in a facedown position to ease the pain. Lawrence’s men offered him the last of their bread and the soldierly comfort that always seemed universally to transcend the enmity of strife.

  Another scare intruded later in the afternoon when a large Turkish force mounted on mules approached their position out of the west. Zaal and Lawrence were immediately confronted with a tactical decision. Should they attack the unsuspecting cavalry or let them ride away unscathed? Zaal argued that his heavier camels with their downhill momentum would have the advantage of raw physical force and surprise on their side. He pressed Lawrence: “No Turk can withstand the collision nor endure a running fight with my raiders.” The decision had to be swift, the threat was imminent, and Zaal’s men were already mounting for action. Quickly Lawrence posed a question that was also a threat: “How many men will we lose?” “Five or six,” was Zaal’s guess. Lawrence assessed the situation in a flash: all along his eye had been on Aqaba; at the moment, his detachment was part of a larger deception operation. If any of his men were captured in the charge, interrogation would give away the whole game. Besides, his five or six dead men would be five or six fewer rifles at the decisive point in Aqaba. Lawrence said quietly but firmly, “No, let them pass.” For a moment Zaal was stunned, frozen midstride as he was about to mount his camel; he started to speak. Then he stopped with a foot caught in the stirrup and turned oddly sideways toward Lawrence. A cunning grin flashed across his face. In that instant, Zaal became a true leader as his struggling mind overcame the irrational urge to seize short-term personal gain for the sake of strategic profit. He threw up his arms and waved off the attack, beating back a deluge of insults and outrage. Zaal and Lawrence both knew that only three things mattered to the raiding culture: arms, mounts, and clothes; money itself was of little use in the desert. The pair also reckoned that if the raiders triumphed in the charge, they wou
ld all ride off victoriously with their two hundred captured mules back to their tents and to their women as heroes, never to be seen again. They also knew that Nasir would hardly welcome two hundred new prisoners: they would have to be shot out of hand. Yet only by the force of Zaal’s leadership was Lawrence able to restrain the raiders from reacting naturally to thousands of years of bandit culture. And for this Lawrence was exceedingly grateful; he would later write in his diary: “We sat there and gnashed our teeth at them and let them pass: a severe ordeal, from which we only just emerged with honor. Zaal did it. He was on his best behavior, expecting gratitude from me later; and glad, meanwhile, to show his authority over the Bedouin. They respected him as Auda’s deputy and as a famous fighter, and in one or two little mutinies among the men he had shown a self-conscious mastery.”7

  Yet the danger was far from over. As the Turks passed unaware, not more than three hundred yards to their front, Hubsi, one of Auda’s cousins, impulsively leapt off his camel and ran toward the mules, yelling and waving his arms. Zaal reacted in an instant with a furious body tackle that left Hubsi in a muffled heap, defending himself against Zaal’s savage blows. With Zaal’s sudden display of tough discipline, the man’s outrage abruptly vanished and he regained composure and self-control. One by one the men stood down, now willing to embrace the command of reason. As the enemy rode off in the distance, Lawrence tallied another stroke of luck to the credit side of his gambling ledger, hoping fate’s audit would be long deferred.

  By evening, still no train had passed, and the camels by now needed watering. Zaal and Lawrence decided to plant thirty charges of dynamite along the rail track and create a lasting footprint of their presence. The blasts were successful, severing the rail link between Damascus and Deraa for three days.

  In the morning, Zaal’s detachment prepared for the three-day journey back to Bair. They left behind the lone wounded soldier after leaving a sign attached to a downed telegraph pole. The pole was tumbled onto the track with a note in French and German giving the location of the prisoner. As the column headed off, Lawrence glanced back at the Turk and wondered if he would ever be found alive.

  SLIPPING INTO THE night, the force continued along the route but soon became lost in the dark among the rocky ridges along the Dhuleil Valley. At dawn, after some more floundering, they finally located a previous watering place near ancient Khau. The camels would need extra food and water to make the eighty-mile-per-day sprint back to Bair. Only the low hills provided reasonable cover for the raiders under a rising sun. Within a few hours, the camels were ready to carry the men on the ride home. Along the way, they passed a small railway station at Atwi lying low beneath some limestone cliffs. Two stone blockhouses were in easy reach of attack, one lined up behind the other. Turkish soldiers could be heard from within singing some obscure provincial melody. Behind the stone houses a lone soldier could be seen urging a flock of sheep to higher pasture. The sheep made a mouthwatering sight to the famished riders, who had eaten no meat for days. Zaal slowly counted out loud the number of animals in the flock, the men’s hunger all the while increasing with each tally. He stopped at twenty-seven, enough sheep to feed the entire detachment at one sitting. He then decided that as recompense for the dismissed opportunity of the previous day, the men should at least feast amid their sorrow. Zaal crept down the rough slope with a file of picked men until they faced the station across an open grassy meadow. Lawrence remained, reluctantly, on the heights with the others to provide cover fire if needed. Some officers had by now emerged in front of the nearest blockhouse to drink their coffee and prepare for the daily troop harassment they understood as training. The officers sat in the shade nearest the ticket window. One particularly fat officer leaned heavily in his chair against the stone building. As it happened, Zaal had a special loathing for obese Turks. He crouched and rested the muzzle of his rifle atop a tall anthill, taking precise aim at his well-fed target. He squeezed the trigger and a bullet ripped into the man’s large chest, knocking him over; his hobnailed boots crashed into the table as he toppled. The other officers stood up in disbelief, and only then did they appear to hear the report of the rifle. And as they rose, their reflex seemed to act as a signal to unleash a lethal volley from the heights above. Immediately, steel shutters clanged open and the unseen Turks inside the building returned a ragged fire. The exchange lasted a few minutes until both sides realized neither had the advantage. Though the Turks were outgunned, seemingly they had the advantage of an impregnable defense. During the stalemate, several of the raiders snuck behind the fight and captured the wayward sheep, now frightened and dispersed after their cowardly shepherd had run off at the first shot. A contingent of Sherarat clansmen herded the lost sheep skillfully back to the camels to the rear of the firing.

  Meanwhile, Zaal used the standoff to turn his attention toward a second, unguarded building and led his squad into the stone house. Here the men began to plunder the place at their leisure. Unbeknownst to everyone, a rail handcar operated by four Turkish engineers came casually down the track. A detachment of Ruwalla tribesmen spotted the innocent quartet and crept under a large culvert, waiting in ambush for the trolley to pass overhead. At that moment, Zaal and the rest of his looters crossed the track in front of the rail workers, who saw them with horror and attempted to jump off the car. They were greeted with such a vicious volley of fire from the Ruwalla that they were dead before they touched the dirt. The trolley then continued on down the line, in slow motion, the hand pump seemingly animated by the ghosts of its former operators. Soon a Ruwalla jumped aboard to ransack its load of copper wire, rail, and telegraph tools.

  Some of the former sheepherders returned with petrol to crown the raid by setting off a plume of fire in the gasoline-drenched blockhouse. Zaal considered a similar fate for the occupied position, but a stout defense held him off. The guts of the empty house were now burning furiously, sending forth telltale tongues of flame and pillars of smoke high into the air. The culvert was blown at the same time, causing great consternation among the tired sheep and knee-haltered camels. As if by design, a final loud blast signaled the end of the skirmish. All the raiders quickly rallied near the animals and rode off a few miles to the east. Here a hasty field slaughter was set up to render the sheep. The men soon discovered they were short of knives and had to set up an assembly line to carve up the animals, supplementing their shortage of cold steel with hot flint.

  With the meat quickly loaded, the column rode off toward Azrak, leaving as much offal in their wake as possible. Near nightfall, the raiders camped to partake of their victory feast. The victors consumed all the sheep in one sitting. The leftovers were given to the hardy camels, which had long been trained to appreciate well-cooked meat. Then on June 27, the deception force arrived back at Bair, where a week earlier 110 men had ridden out and now 110 men had returned.

  LAWRENCE, AUDA, AND Nasir spent the next morning in consultation, reevaluating the final plan. On its face the concept appeared fairly simple, but when considered in its broader context, the strike against Aqaba was exceedingly complex. Each objective could be seen as one block in a long row of dominoes: Lawrence had placed the first at Wejh and strung them all the way to Aqaba, and each one had to fall precisely and correctly to affect the next link in the chain of action. The failure of one coupling could affect all the rest and, therefore, the whole operation. The mission had now reached its final and most critical stage. Here and now at Bair, an apparent starburst of eccentric domino chains was extending outward in complicated configurations—chains that could shackle the Turks if they all toppled as planned or manacle the entire endeavor if they failed to fall properly.

  Fortunately, the part of the logistics nexus had been resolved by the steady work of Nasir. He had returned from Tafileh with his little caravan and a week’s worth of flour; whether or not Aqaba was successful, now at least the men would have food. Nasir had also applied his diplomatic skills brilliantly, securing three of the region’s key Ho
weitat clans: the Dhumaniyeh, the Darausha, and the Dhiabat. These alliances were crucial because they effectively controlled the critical pass at Nagb el Shtar along the Aqaba-Maan corridor. The clans also offered Nasir their help in a decisive blow at Aba el Lissan. Meanwhile, Nuri Shaalan continued to contribute to the deception scheme. He now sent a dispatch by fast courier to inform Auda of a new and clever ruse. The Turks had just ordered Nuri to provide one of his scouts to guide four hundred Turkish cavalry sent to track down Lawrence’s raiding party that had caused such mischief around Deraa. The Turks now believed the raiders were in the vicinity of Azrak at the mouth of the Wadi Sirhan. Nuri would send his nephew Trad as hostage-guide to lead the hapless squadron on an Alice-in-Wonderland ride through the canyon. The lost squadron would thus be unable to report the status and whereabouts of Lawrence’s detachment for some time. This lack of information would only serve to reconfirm the existing Turkish bias of expectation: that Lawrence was indeed in the Sirhan.

  At the time, the more troubling “domino” that appeared to hang fire was the water situation at El Jefer, where the King’s Well had been blasted to rubble. But again, Bedouin ingenuity helped set the plan back on track. Dhaif-Allah, chief of the Jazi Howeitat, was able to repair the key well by the time the raiders redeployed from Bair two days later. For his efforts, Dhaif-Allah and his diggers received a choice carcass of camel meat.