The following day was July 4, and two more obstacles still remained at the back door to Aqaba. Kethera happened to be the next post, and it doggedly refused to surrender. The clans then drew lots to see who would have the difficult task of seizing the garrison by direct assault. Ibn Jad drew the lucky straw but demurred, saying he could not possibly attack under the bright full moon. But as luck would have it, Lawrence had made a previous note in his diary indicating that a partial eclipse would occur on that very night. When the eclipse happened as predicted, the forecast heartened ibn Jad’s men and they seized the post without loss. There they found the superstitious Turks in a state of high excitement, clanging pots and pans to scare off the moon-devouring spirits.
The success at Kethera unlocked the way into the Itm gorge the next morning. The gorge was like the pass at Thermopylae, so narrow that a determined platoon with several machine guns could have held the defile against several divisions. Here the garrison at Khadra stoppered the defense. By now, the defenders at Aqaba were aware of the advance into their rear. As a consequence, they had reinforced Khadra with three hundred infantrymen. As soon as the new troops arrived from Aqaba, a local clan surrounded Khadra and reported the situation to Nasir, who immediately sent demands for its surrender. The Turkish commander vowed to give up the place if he had not received reinforcements from Maan within the next two days. Nasir then asked to speak to the officer’s deputy. He reminded the Turk that resistance was futile and would only lead to their complete massacre. After more discussions, the Turks at last yielded, promising to surrender the very next morning.
During the night, however, news of the Bedouin success began to spread throughout the region, and soon more clansmen descended on the area to join the fight and share in the spoils of war. Several of the latecomers, unaware of the surrender arrangement, began to attack the garrison on their own. Heavy fighting immediately broke out at first light. Nasir marched out with a detachment of his retainers, careful to ride between the two sparring parties. After more negotiations, the shooting ceased and the Turks at last realized the hopelessness of their position and surrendered. The newcomers quickly swarmed over Khadra in search of loot. At that moment, Lawrence and Auda decided to rush past the confusion and chaos with the rest of the force and strike directly at Aqaba. By now the entire defense was depleted of its forces, drawn off to cover positions to their rear. Under cover of a brief sandstorm, Lawrence and his raiders sprinted the last four miles and stormed into Aqaba, reaching the shores of the Red Sea to find British and French naval forces waiting for them offshore.
The date was July 6, almost two months to the day since Lawrence had departed from Wejh with his raiders. During that time, Lawrence, Auda, and Nasir had demonstrated decisively that an active native contingent, provided it was well led, could achieve significant military results against a conventional enemy. For Lawrence, the triumph seemed anticlimactic. He had seized Aqaba but still had no idea what to do with it. He wrote in his diary: “In the blank light of victory we could scarcely identify ourselves. We spoke with surprise, sat emptily, fingered upon our white robes; doubtful if we could understand or learn whom we were. Others’ noise was a dreamlike unreality, a singing in ears drowned in deep water. Against the astonishment of this unasked-for continued life we did not know how to turn our gift to account.”9
Lawrence had reached the moment of personal catharsis, the washing away of success and triumph by the onrushing waters of loss, grief, and tragedy. These springs had slowly deepened over the past two months, drop by drop, until the final days when the fury and passion at Aba el Lissan burst into a rising tide of raw emotion. How well Lawrence stood against this moral and emotional torrent would be his next great test as a leader.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lawrence in LEGO-land
The beginning and ending of the secret of leading Arabs is unremitting study of them. Keep always on your guard; never say an inconsidered thing, or do an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain shall be saturated with one thing only, and you realize your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would undo the work of weeks. Your success will be just proportional to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
—T. E. LAWRENCE, “Twenty-seven Articles”
At Aqaba, Lawrence was finally driven from the lassitude of his success by the encroaching pangs of hunger. He had not eaten for two days, and the final assault on the port had sapped his full store of energy. Now he was strapped with seven thousand prisoners as well as his own troops. The twenty-five hundred Arab victors were essentially immobile with inadequate forage, while unripe dates swayed overhead, their funky taste yet concealed by an appealing green attraction. Cooking could do little to the green dates other than delay the inevitable gastric flagellation.
By evening, tactical matters had displaced the taste of unrequited gluttony. Forty-two Turkish officers had to be cared for immediately, but beyond the logistics of imprisonment Aqaba had to be secured militarily. The security of the port, it was decided, would be formed upon four stout defensive pillars. Auda would take his men to Guweira and protect the sandy Shtar gorge. A second outlying position would be established twenty miles farther up the valley at Petra. Auda would also send troops to a third location at Delagha. The final defensive linchpin would be at Batra. The four small forts were mutually reinforcing but independent: one post had to be taken before the next, and each assault would likely take the Turks weeks.
With the defensive plans complete and after a frugal supper, Lawrence realized that news of the desert triumph had yet to reach Suez. He decided to carry information of the victory to headquarters himself, leading a party of eight Howeitat warriors and riding the best camels in the army. The journey of some 150 miles was immediately essential, not only to bring vital information about the success, but also to dispatch a greatly needed supply ship to Aqaba. On the evening of July 6, the messenger set out, covering fifty miles a day, now totally at the limits of endurance. By the second night, a crisis was reached when one of the camels collapsed and had to be sent back. Only a mechanical resolution seemed to drive the party forward, passing through a silver-shadowed moonlight: the gray light shone on the sand and glittered, cold, like speckles of ice. Above the riders, silvered clouds spilled through the night sky like great beads of mercury blown before a powerful wind. On the final day, they came to a field of melons: like the dates, they lay unripened in an unripened desert land. Finally, forty-nine hours after leaving Aqaba, Lawrence, the herald, reached the Suez Canal. He had a real story to tell, but with Murray gone, who would listen?
Lawrence and his Arabs had achieved the ultimate strategic trifecta: they were able to seize Mecca the previous summer, opening the Arab Revolt; they captured the port of Wejh in January 1917; and now the important harbor at Aqaba was theirs. The great victory at Aqaba would introduce a number of important changes to the whole conduct of the war in the Middle East. One of the most important changes was the arrival of a new visionary commander who would replace the ponderous General Murray. The incoming leader would also bring a completely new relationship among Lawrence and the Arabs and offer a reimagined vision of British strategy and victory. The new dynamic broadened the entire strategic canvas for Lawrence that would create unique leadership opportunities and offer full scope to his theories of guerrilla warfare.
EARLIER IN MARCH, as Lawrence lay on his sickbed in Wadi Ais contemplating his new theory of guerrilla warfare, the War Committee in London convened a thorough review of imperial strategy generated by cataclysmic events in Russia and British successes in Mesopotamia. On March 9, the Russian Revolution erupted, and two days later an army under General Sir F. S. Maude seized Baghdad. With the initi
al reports from Gaza arriving in a positive light, the committee saw an opportunity to press the advantage against the Turks throughout the Middle East. The events in Russia were at first viewed with hope. Alexander Kerensky vowed to continue the fight, and many saw a revitalized Russian army springing from the new regime. Strategically, this meant that a potential Russian offensive south toward Mosul could link up with Maude’s planned advance north from Baghdad. Murray’s apparent success at Gaza could be exploited into an opportunity to pluck Jerusalem from the reeling Turks. As more information flowed into Murray’s headquarters, it was apparent that the first battle of Gaza was an unmitigated defeat. This reality, however, was slow to reach London, which pressed Murray to continue the attack. Reluctantly, he prepared for another offensive, and on April 17 he launched the attack. The Turks had used the time to prepare heavily fortified positions, and this made the second battle of Gaza very different from the first. In its outcome, though, the result was the same. The defeat was a severe blow to the morale of the British Army and offered a tremendous boost to the disheartened Turks, who had just delivered two major defeats to their opponent in less than a month.
The Turkish success encouraged the reinforcement of more troops to southern Palestine, including more German and Austrian contingents. Both sides now settled down into a trench-style posture reminiscent of the western front. The second defeat also led to another, more sober assessment of the strategic realities in Palestine. In May, the failure of the major offensive in Champagne, France, led to a fundamental confrontation in Whitehall between the “Westerners” under William Robert Robertson and the “Easterners” led by David Lloyd George. Perhaps not since the war leadership of Abraham Lincoln had the leader of a democracy recognized the fundamental changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution in strategy and the conduct of war. Much as Lawrence had reconsidered the conduct of modern campaigns during his March epiphany two months earlier, Lloyd George realized that in an industrialized protracted war, psychological mobilization of the civilian populace was at least as important as the fighting morale of the troops in the field. As Lincoln understood during the American Civil War, a war leader had to sustain the morale of his civilian forces on the assembly line as much as the soldiers on the battle line. According to the new industrial paradigm, Lloyd George had to secure military triumphs wherever and whenever he could, even if that meant fighting for victories in places as far away from France as Palestine. The prime minister’s argument fundamentally changed the entire conduct of the war from the British strategic perspective. From now on, sideshow or not, if the operations brought victory and boosted the morale of the civilian population, then he would support the fight. From a grand strategic point of view, decision makers began to consider the relationship of Palestine and the Middle East critical to the economic stability and strategic integrity of the entire British Empire. Palestine would act as a buffer to Egypt and the Suez Canal and ensure a tight link to the eastern reaches of the empire. It also provided an entrée to the oil-laden regions of the Middle East that were beginning to have huge implications as naval and transportation technology advanced beyond the coal-burning stage.
A strategic reevaluation was occurring on the Turkish side as well. In Germany, General Erich von Falkenhayn was replaced as chief of the General Staff. His strategy of exhaustion had failed to yield the promised fruits of victory. Instead, it was Germany that was now near the brink of exhaustion. But Falkenhayn’s reputation as a field commander was outstanding, so on May 7 he was sent to Constantinople to determine the feasibility of recapturing Baghdad. His assessment suggested that Baghdad could indeed be retaken if a strong force could be marshaled at Aleppo. Such a deployment, however, could succeed only if the Turks held the southern gateway into Palestine. There was also concern that the British incursion across the Turco-Egyptian frontier posed a serious threat to Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites of Islam.
While the Germans and their Turkish allies began to implement their new strategy, General Murray’s fate was being weighed in Whitehall. Even after the first Gaza battle, questions were raised concerning his competence. The second defeat at Gaza sealed his fate. Murray was not so much incompetent as a victim of the changing paradigm of warfare. Like most generals of his day, he was guided by the dead hand of Napoleon and the idea of the central battle. Gaza demonstrated that modern battle would always be distributed—widely dispersed and spread out—without the privileged view of a Napoleon mounted on horseback surveying the whole field of battle. Those days were gone for good.
REFLECTING ON THE recent setbacks in the Middle East, Lloyd George remarked, “In Palestine and Mesopotamia nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.” But he not did relieve the General Staff; instead, the responsibility for defeat fell upon the head of the leader, Sir Archibald Murray. On June 11, 1917, Murray received his walking papers from Lord Kitchener. His replacement would be a relatively unknown, unremarkable (some might say mediocre) cavalryman by the name of Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby. He was nicknamed “the Bull” for his imposing size and predilection to tempestuous outbursts. As history would show, he would emerge as “the Hedgehog” to Lawrence’s “Fox.”
Allenby was not Lloyd George’s first choice to replace Murray. For political reasons, he had wanted the South African Jan Christian Smuts, but when he refused, Robertson suggested Allenby. Allenby was no political officer, but he had the confidence of Sir John French, though that support in some sense was negated by Sir Douglas Haig’s general dislike of the cavalryman. Allenby had commanded the Third Army under Haig, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force. In the end it was Allenby’s low-key style of leadership that seemed to attract the interest of Whitehall. He believed in the inextricable bond between the Victorian virtues of loyalty and discipline that he learned at the knee of his mother. He saw that loyalty extended down the chain of command as well as up. He was not a theoretically minded general. He took each problem as it came along and studied it intensely and deeply as a unique challenge without the preconceived bias of any past experience. He listened carefully to his subordinates, constantly trying to learn from them. When he made a decision, he gave them his full support, relying on the judgment of the local commanders on the scene. He was not a micromanager; instead, he was continually trying to maintain a balanced and synoptic view of the development of the campaign as a whole system. He was incessantly seeking to anticipate the next phase of the operations, rather than focusing on the tactics at the immediate front. It was perhaps the opportunity to command in an independent theater that gave him the scope to develop his own style and confidence as an operational commander. Few campaign commanders in World War I developed in four years as much as Allenby did in two. Although he is most remembered for his momentous dash toward Damascus in the latter months of the war, perhaps his greatest victory was the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in December 1917.
After Allenby assumed command on June 28, he spent most of his time getting familiar with the troops under his command. His tireless activity had a profound effect on the men in the theater. They saw him as a moral tonic that had been sorely lacking under Murray’s diffident manner of leadership. He took the men into his confidence, carefully explaining what had to be done and, more important, why it had to be done. As one officer wrote: “Everybody is in a great state of delight at getting a move on at last and, specially, as we know beforehand the general outline of the scheme. Why does no other commander realize that the men are capable of taking intelligent interest in things, and that if they know what is going on, are much more likely to hit on the right solution when things don’t go exactly to plan? Thank goodness, Allenby has some common sense. And understands his Tommy Atkins.” Major Richard Meinertzhagen, an intelligence colleague of Lawrence’s and recently arrived to the theater, remarked in his diary: “[I] was introduced to Allenby, to whom I talked on intelligence matters for a whil
e. My word, he is a different man to Murray. His face is strong and almost boyish. His manner is brusque almost to the point of rudeness, but I prefer it to the oil and butter of the society soldier. Allenby breathes success and the greatest pessimist cannot fail to have confidence in him.… The Egyptian Expeditionary Force is already awaking from its lethargic sleep under Murray, and I am happy to say GHQ will shortly move into Palestine and be near troops instead of wallowing in the fleshpots of Cairo.”
Allenby’s interest in the practical side of military science was also noted as “insatiable. Whether it was a fly expert from the British Museum, a railway engineer, an expert on town planning or a naturalist who could tell him something about the flora or fauna of the country, he had them all up and sucked their brains of anything they could tell him.” This last predilection of Allenby’s was what would most endear Lawrence to him: Lawrence’s agile mind, heretical outlook, and encyclopedic mastery of the Arab and his culture. The two men would meet within a week of Allenby’s appointment to his command.
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