Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

When they arrived at the repaired wells at El Jefer, the caravan spent the whole day of June 29 watering the animals, and by June 30 all was ready to initiate the tactical actions that would carry them to Aqaba. The first fight would be against the blockhouse at Fuweilah, a cork in the bottle of the Aba el Lissan pass. A detachment of raiders under Zaal linked up with some of the Dhumaniyeh to stage the assault. The plan was to launch the attack two days before the scheduled arrival of the weekly supply column coming down from Maan. In case the house couldn’t be stormed, then perhaps the garrison could be starved into submission. While the attack was being executed, Lawrence was with Auda and the others, waiting for news from Zaal and continuing with preparations for the final maneuver on Aqaba. Later in the morning, they received full details concerning the Fuweilah affair.

  The assault, after making some initial progress to the main line of breastworks, was driven off by a strong Turkish defense. Zaal’s detachment then withdrew to lick its wounds and decide on a reframed course of action. Meanwhile, the Turks, wholly ignorant that they had just been victims of the opening moves of a major offensive operation, believed the action was simply the usual manifestation of local Arab discontent. The Turks, therefore, responded in the usual manner: they sent out a punitive sortie against the nearest Dhumaniyeh encampment. The site they chose was virtually abandoned, save for one old man, six women, and seven children. The Turks began to trash the camp and, outraged at not finding any worthwhile targets, proceeded to slit the throats of the fourteen innocents. Only after they rode off did Zaal’s forces in the hills realize that the atrocity had taken place. They immediately became enraged and pursued their murderers back to Fuweilah, where they were caught and cut down to the last man. With the garrison now seriously depleted, Zaal and his forces stormed into the place and seized it, adding to the scorecard of revenge by taking no prisoners.

  The eventual success at Fuweilah tripped the next domino. On July 1, the entire attack force under Lawrence, Auda, and Nasir mounted up and headed toward Ghadin el Haj, the first railroad station south of Maan and directly on the road to the pass at Aba el Lissan. At the same time, another domino was tipped in the direction of Maan: here a small column was sent north of the town to create a diversion there. The mission was to harass the herds of wounded camels on the Shobek plain. The beasts had been brought down from the Palestine front to recuperate for further action and were especially dear to the Turks, whose chronic shortage of camels would impede their operations throughout the war.

  Now, since all the actions of war take place in a fog of misinformation, disinformation, and missing information, certain assumptions must be made. Lawrence made a key assumption that it would take the Turks at least one entire day to react to their defeat at Fuweilah. Unfortunately, Lawrence’s assumption was little more than a hope and would soon be dashed. While the Turks continued to bask in their ignorance, the main Arab force attacked at Ghadin el Haj and was successful. However, knowing the garrison would have notified its higher headquarters at Maan, Lawrence expected a relief force would not arrive until the following night. A night march would also expose the reinforcements to ambush. With that case in mind, Lawrence with a few others worked feverishly to set explosive devices along the approach route of the relief column. After the engineer work was complete, the raiders moved a bit to the west to cover the road and await the Turks, who were expected to arrive the following evening.

  At their new location, the men began to bake bread and relax under the setting sun. The mood was suddenly upset when three scouts rode furiously into camp with vital news: Lawrence’s assumption had been proved wrong. Instead, it turned out that a newly arrived motorized column was already in Maan when the news of Fuweilah was received. Since the column had just arrived at Maan, it was ready for immediate action. The garrison commander merely added a battery of pack artillery and sent the men south. And since the force was motorized it took a route by road, but it was the route by rail that Lawrence had anticipated. What the scouts reported next disturbed the whole command group. Not only had the relief force already arrived, it had retaken Fuweilah, without firing a shot, from Zaal’s disorganized detachment. Now the pass was lost and in the hands of a fresh garrison with artillery. To Lawrence, it now seemed that the Turks had unexpectedly just untipped one of his critical dominoes.

  THE LOSS OF the pass at Aba el Lissan was a shock to the leadership and a potential blow to the entire operation. Yet despite the Turkish thunderbolt now thrown in their direction, Lawrence, Auda, and Nasir recovered and demonstrated the most important attribute of all great leaders: presence of mind. Their force of character, their determination, and their native intellect prevented a spiral into despair and defeat. Instead they refused to take council of their fears and quickly began to reframe the new situation. Immediately they assessed the nature of the emerging threat from Maan and discovered that the relief column was in no mood to take part in any kind of active operations against the Arab force. Rather, they formed a defensive perimeter around the watering places nearby, placing themselves out of direct tactical reach of the pass itself. It was clear that the Turks were still unaware of the magnitude of the fight they had on their hands, still imagining that they had to contend with a few disgruntled tribesmen. The tactical maldeployment was quickly recognized by Lawrence and offered a possible solution to his problem.

  The raiders quietly vanished into the night, slipping off to the east toward Batra. The mood was upbeat during the move, with Auda leading the men in song. Soon the whole column became animated with the tune and carried a renewed sense of success. When they reached Batra, Gasim abu Dumeik, leader of the Dhumaniyeh, was anxiously waiting their arrival with the rest of his clan. The inactivity of the Turks continued, a few miles off to the west. There was no question but that the Turkish column would have to be dislodged or somehow neutralized if the drive on Aqaba was to succeed. The leadership all agreed that the Turks were sitting ducks where they were, so in small squads the Bedouin crept back toward the Turkish position and began a sniping action that lasted the whole day. As the day passed, shooting soon became as intense as the hot sun, with more men collapsing from heat exhaustion than from enemy fire. The rifles became so hot that they cooked off rounds in the ammunition chambers of the weapons. What was worse was the fact that no uncommitted men were free to return to Batra for water: every man was required in the firing line.

  As bad as it was for the raiders, the Turkish situation was infinitely worse. The unit was newly arrived in the theater from the cool Caucasus far to the north and was poorly acclimated to the heat. They fired wildly in all directions. Their mountain howitzers were useless and ineffective: all the shooting was arcing well over their opponents’ heads.

  At noon, the battle reached a crisis. Lawrence, who himself was on the verge of heatstroke, crawled off the field in search of water and found a puddle of mud to quench his thirst. Nasir joined him, his lips bleeding, cracked, and parched from the blazing sun. Then Auda suddenly appeared, an apparition seemingly materialized from the ground, striding toward them, his eyes bloodshot and transfixed on a point that seemed to pass beyond the two men; his face was knotted up in berserker exhilaration and anticipation. His mouth cracked into a sneer and he said in a mocking tone, looking at Lawrence, “Well, boys, how are we doing? All talk and no work?” Since the very beginning of the operation when the caravan left Wejh, there had been developing an underlying unspoken tension between Lawrence and Auda over the capabilities of the Bedouin to stand and fight against the Turks in a conventional action. Now, under the stress of combat, this pressure erupted to the surface. Lawrence detected a veiled challenge in Auda’s query and replied angrily, “By God, indeed, they shoot a lot and hit a little.” In the heat of battle, Auda took the reply as an insult. He impetuously ripped off his head cloth in a fiery rage and threw it in a pile beside Lawrence. Without a further word, he turned on his heel and ran up to higher ground, calling all his troop leaders together. Nasir and Lawrence lo
oked at each other in horror and growing dismay, watching Auda give unheard orders to his men. Then the pair struggled up the hill, exhausted. Auda ignored their arrival and stood—hand on hips—glaring at the Turks. Then finally he turned to the breathless Lawrence and said, “You—get your camel if you want to see the old man’s work.” At that Auda seemed to disappear into a mirage of heat. Lawrence and Nasir lurched off to find their camels and came upon the rest of the army, now mounted and huddled behind a protective knoll. Nasir asked Shimt, one of Auda’s bodyguards, where Auda was. “Over there with the horsemen,” he said, pointing to the far side of the Turkish position. Auda had somehow managed to maneuver a hundred men, mounted on horseback, around to the rear of the enemy, using the hilly terrain as cover. The Turks had gradually migrated from their initial position to huddle beneath a limestone cliff, out of reach of the hot fire raining down from above. All at once, Auda came thundering up the hill into the exposed rear of the Turkish defense. In the initial rush, several of the horsemen immediately fell dead from their saddles as the Turks realized their mortal danger. As the charge crested the hill, it began to gain momentum and began slowly to dislodge the Turks fighting beneath the limestone wall. The Turks, however, continued to maintain some cohesion, fighting and retreating slowly toward the north.

  From higher ground, Lawrence gazed down with awe and fascination as Auda unleashed his mad charge. Suddenly, Nasir screamed beside him, “C’mon!” Blood flecking from his torn mouth, Nasir realized that the Turks had been pushed beyond the cover of the cliffs and were now open to a charge from their front. At that moment, the other four hundred tribesmen mounted on their camels surged forth to add weight to Auda’s blow from a new direction. The sheer physics of a camel thundering downhill at thirty miles an hour was virtually unstoppable under the circumstances. Lawrence followed Nasir, racing downhill on Naama, his Sherari racer, who was running faster than she had ever run in her life. The Turks were now disintegrating fast, and Lawrence was soon in their midst. He threw away his clumsy rifle and began a heavy destruction with his Webley revolver. All of a sudden his great racer went down in a great heap, as if poleaxed by some unseen leviathan. Lawrence flew from the saddle in a high arc and landed hard, stunned and breathless. He lay there, calmly, waiting for the Turks to finish him off, reciting some long-lost poem, now half-forgotten: “For Lord I was of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world’s sad roses; And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind with sweat.” In another part of his mind, instead of fearing an angry Turkish bullet or bayonet, Lawrence was anxious about being crushed under a rampaging camel.

  After many minutes and many verses, the battle swirled away from him. He soon regained his senses and leaned up on one arm, surveying the dust-laden destruction. Then he saw his gentle Naama, lying beside a rock: staring up sightlessly, without reproach or blame, at Lawrence, who had shot her through the head during the frenzied charge; her forelegs, outstretched in midstride, were still striving to trample some hated Turk, now unseen.

  While he was recovering from the tragic accident and his fall, little Mohammed—Auda’s son—brought up Lawrence’s spare camel, Obeyd. Nasir rode past with the wounded Turkish commander in tow, rescued from the vengeance of Mohammed el Dheilan. For the wrathful Howeitat, yesterday’s slaughter of innocent women and children at the encampment revealed to them a whole new side to the horrors of war. When the battle was over, it became clear that the Reaper had exacted a heavy toll on the Turkish battalion, virtually destroying it: 300 dead and dying were strewn across the plain and another 160 were prisoners, mostly wounded, now in the hands of the victors.

  The vengeful Mohammed el Dheilan continued to pursue the remnants of the battalion for another three miles beyond the battlefield, chasing the mounted officers and lucky artillerymen whose distant perspective off the field permitted them a view of the unfolding disaster even before it happened. The fleeing Turks ran pell-mell to Mreigha with Mohammed’s rude insults biting at their heels. The fugitive Turks would soon infect the small garrison there with the virus of defeat and weaken the post’s ability to defend.

  Lawrence began to repack Obeyd when Auda suddenly materialized again, silently from behind. He began to speak incoherently: “Work … work … where are the words … work … bullets … abu Tayi.…”8 His babbling continued. Lawrence turned to him as he listened and was utterly stunned by what he saw: Auda, standing there like a veritable Bedouin god of war, his eyes glassy, red, and wild; his lips cratering into his toothless mouth at every heaving breath; his face dirty, dusty, a sepulchered white. His binoculars had been shot to pieces; bits were hanging from his neck on a strap, like some amulet of war; his holster and scabbard now hung tattered about him like strange ribbons of rank. His robes had been pierced and eviscerated by many bullets. At the very moment of culmination when his furious charge struck the cowering Turks with its greatest impact, his beloved mare had been shot from under him.

  Slowly, Lawrence was able to calm Auda and lead him back to his senses. Auda then reached under his robes and brought forth a small talisman of the Koran. He held it reverently in both hands and told Lawrence how it had saved him from death many times. Lawrence recognized the tiny book as a cheap Glasgow knockoff selling for 18 pence. Auda revealed in confidence that he had paid 120 pounds for it, and in his eyes the original was the counterfeit. Auda was ecstatic in his triumph, most of all because he had seemingly repudiated Lawrence’s thesis that Arab irregulars could not fight toe-to-toe, hand-to-gland, against a conventional Turkish force. Instead, Auda appeared to demonstrate how the force of inspired leadership could impart a transcendent, transformative power to this kind of war.

  Both did agree, though, that the Reaper had been kind to them on this day: only two men were lost, one Rueili, the other Sherari. Mohammed el Dheilan, however, was vexed at Auda and especially at Lawrence—at Auda for initiating the mad charge and at Lawrence for insulting Auda in the first place. But time was now too short for vexations and recriminations. There was much more fighting to do.

  Lawrence went to the prisoners, who were virtually all incoherent, psychologically shattered by the crushing defeat. At length he was forced to be stern with one of the prisoners, an officer, who began to regain some of his former composure. Yes, the relief battalion was the only one in the area, and a reserve unit at that; there were only two weak companies left at Maan, and they would have difficulty defending their own wire, let alone attempting to sally out to reinforce the southern posts. The discovered vulnerability at Maan quickly created its own leadership crisis: the jubilant Howeitat now wanted to drive immediately against Maan and seize its rumored wealth. But again Lawrence and Nasir had to stay the Arabs’ recklessness and maintain focus on the objective at Aqaba. They argued: “We have no supports, no regulars, no guns, no base nearer than Wejh, no communications, no money even, for our gold is exhausted, and we’ve had to issue our own scrip, with promises to pay ‘when Aqaba is taken,’ for daily expenses. Besides, a strategic scheme must not be changed to follow up a tactical success. We must push on to the coast, and reopen sea-contact with Suez.”

  At the same time, pressure still had to be maintained at Maan. Paralysis, not destruction or capture, was all that was required. By the evening of the battle, shocks from all sides struck the Turkish headquarters at Maan: two small posts, one at Mreigha and the other at Waheida, were stormed by Howeitat mounted detachments; the camels at Shobek were lost; local tribes were in full riot; and an entire motorized battalion was destroyed. The news caused a panic in Maan, where planning commenced to consider evacuation of the entire place. On the strategic game board it appeared to Lawrence that perhaps, at last, the final dominoes were beginning to topple.

  THE ARABS CONTINUED to plunder the Turkish dead until well into the evening. Lawrence relaxed and tried to enjoy the cool west breeze blowing up at Aba el Lissan, four thousand feet above the Red Sea. He was near the quenching stream that now ran silver under the desert moon. Soon Auda ca
me by, seemingly renewed since the fight. He told Lawrence that the raiders must move from the position. After some heated discussion with Nasir joining in, Auda’s order made sense. First, he and the men were superstitious about camping through the night among all the dead. Auda was also concerned that now that the fight was over, some of the Howeitat clans who were still his blood enemies would turn against him in his sleep. His decision quickly stirred the men into action. They had to dress out some twenty-odd camels that had been killed in the fighting. They also had to prepare the prisoners for movement. Twenty or so were wounded and had to be left by the silver stream so as not to die of thirst. Nasir sought blankets for these few who were half-naked by now from the continuous plundering. Lawrence sought clothing from the dead still remaining on the battlefield. As a matter of raider honor, all the dead had been stripped naked. In the Bedouin culture, the victor was entitled to wear the uniform of the vanquished.

  Later, reflecting on the moonlit battlefield, Lawrence would write in his diary: “The dead men were wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory.… Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy aching mob up the valley, quarreling over the plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God knew how many toils and pains of this sort; with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to end the history.”

  The raiders finally began their slow departure from the field of strife. There were still three more garrisons between them and Aqaba: Guweira, Kethera, and Khadra. Lawrence found a Turkish officer and induced him to write letters of surrender that were dictated by Nasir. He promised them good treatment and a safe journey to Egypt; otherwise a vicious death would carry them all to Paradise. In the morning, Auda began leading the column to the top of the zigzag Shtar pass. From here the men could see the Guweira plain several hundred feet below, its pink sands and sparkling limestone holding the tiny garrison in its grip. The raiders rode fifteen miles down to the plain, greatly impeded by the slow prisoners. Auda was about to decide whether or not they should all be killed. At that moment, Sheikh ibn Jad rode up with news that he had accepted the surrender of the Guweira garrison, so all the prisoners were turned over to the sheikh for safekeeping in the garrison. The rest of the day was spent in confining the prisoners to their makeshift jail.