Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  The first objective of the raiding party lay seventy miles south of Maan at Mudowwara station. The plan was to destroy the well that had fed the steaming locomotives that plied the nearby track. The column reached Guweira several miles north of Aqaba on the morning of September 9, where they met Auda, who had somehow drawn the wages for the Howeitat. He was using his new role as paymaster to coerce various clans of the great tribe to his leadership. The tribal majority, including three southern clans whose participation in the next phase of the revolt had been counted on, resented this challenge and threatened to break away immediately. Feisal had sent Sherif Mastur to negotiate a solution to the impasse. After long hours of talking in the unwelcome heat had sapped all patience, the three clans were ready to return home. Upon hearing the news, Lawrence lost his temper and rushed into Auda’s tent to prevent his continued meddling. Here he found the troublemaker in the arms of his new wife. As Lawrence recounts the story: “To gain ground with him, I began to jeer at the old man for being so old and yet so foolish like the rest of his race, who regarded our reproductive processes not as unhygienic pleasure, but as a main business of life. Auda retorted with his desire for heirs. I asked if he had found life good enough to thank his haphazard parents for bringing him into it, or selfishly to confer the doubtful gift upon an unborn spirit?”

  Auda, maintaining his cool, replied, “Indeed, I am Auda and you know Auda. My father—to whom Allah be merciful—was master, greater than Auda; and he would praise my grandfather. The world is greater as we go back [in time].”

  “But, Auda,” replied Lawrence, “we say honor our sons and daughters, the heirs of our accumulated worth, fulfillers of our broken wisdom. With each generation the earth is older, mankind more removed from its childhood.…”

  The sudden separation from his wife’s embrace was not placing Auda in a humorous mood. He squinted his eyes at Lawrence and gestured toward his youngest son. Outside the tent, he was trying to ride a camel like a racehorse, striking its neck with a stick to move it along. Flicking his chin at the boy, Auda said to Lawrence, “Oh world’s imp, if Allah please he has inherited my worth, but thank Allah not yet my strength; and if I find fault with him I will redden his tail.” After a long pause, he said very slowly with irony, “But no doubt you are very wise.” Lawrence’s take on the brief discussion was that he “should go off to a clean spot, to await events.”

  AFTER WAITING OUT several more Turkish air strikes, Lawrence and his escort turned east toward the Valley of Rumm, watering area of the Beni Atiyeh. The place was a Grand Canyon of breathtaking beauty—three hundred yards wide in some places—reminiscent of the outback country of southern Utah, where jagged gorges splinter into fiery embers under a setting sun. It became Lawrence’s favorite place of all.

  They reached a watering place shared by the disaffected clans angry with Auda. The nominal leader of the party, Sherif Aid, had gone sun-blind and was unable effectively to lead the negotiations. Lawrence attempted in his stead but seemed only to raise their ire all the more. On the next morning, September 12, the situation had changed little, though the crusty Zaal arrived and was seen merely as the main henchman of Auda. Hot words were exchanged, the men shuffled about, glared, clicked prayer beads, and otherwise grew restless. Sensing a crisis brewing, Lawrence decided to return quickly to Aqaba to inform Feisal of the high drama simmering at Rumm. He hoped a word from the emir would cool the hotheads. After meeting with Lawrence, Feisal promised to send his best negotiator, Abdullah el Feir. Abdullah and Lawrence returned the following afternoon, and the negotiator began to work his magic with the malcontents: “He began to smooth over their griefs with the ready persuasiveness which was the birthmark of an Arab leader, and which all experience served to whet.”

  While Feisal’s “fixer” soothed over the tense situation, Lawrence wandered off to explore the exquisite beauty of Rumm. He climbed one of the citadel-like ledges to reach a splashing waterfall the Arabs called El Shellala. Here he decided to take a refreshing shower to wash away the frustration and tension of the past few days. Lawrence had laid his clothes in the hot sun to drive away the infestations of lice and destroy the agglomeration of nits he had collected over the many days of travel. As he was enjoying his cool cleansing, a desert beggar—seemingly from nowhere—shuffled up a path and sat himself nonchalantly on Lawrence’s baking clothes. He was a “gray-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness.… He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes.… After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, ‘The love is from Allah; and of Allah; and towards Allah.’ ” The words of the holy man stunned Lawrence, for it was the first time he had heard an Arab rejoice in simple human love: “The old man of Rumm loomed portentous in his brief, single sentence and seemed to overturn my theories of the Arab nature.”

  Lawrence coaxed the desert apparition down from the rocky bastion to the camp in hopes of finding the source of this ancient’s wisdom. Mohammed brewed the coffee, and they fed the man. He was familiar to the Howeitat, known to them as a wandering ascetic, exclaiming mysterious pronouncements among the sheep and goats. He never seemed to require shelter or nourishment along his doddering journeys. Lawrence continued to probe his disconnected utterings late into the night, until “he rose painfully to his feet and tottered deafly into the night, taking his beliefs, if any, with him.”5 He listened as the old man—an Arab “Leibowitz”—pattered off, bone white under the waning moonlight and bone thin under his cloak of rags, into the desert darkness, proclaiming his canticle of love.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the rebellious clans had been brought to heel thanks to the efforts of Abdullah the “fixer.” Although calm returned, an underlying resentment lingered so that Lawrence had only a third of the men he had planned for the mission. His biggest challenge, however, was a leadership concern. Sherif Aid’s blindness rendered him hors de combat. Zaal was the natural leader, but he was too closely aligned with the rapacious Auda to carry the proper authority and legitimacy with the men.

  So on September 16 the party rode out of camp “like a broken necklace.” There were four tribal “jewels” in the necklace: the Zuweida, the Darausha, the Togatga, and the Zelebani. Another group soon joined them: the Dhumaniyeh, out of embarrassment for whiling away their time with the women instead of raiding. None of the groups would ride or mingle with the others; no words were exchanged. Lawrence rode among the groups trying to generate some cohesion and found it impossible. The only point of common agreement was that they trusted Zaal no farther than they could throw him. In the end, Lawrence assumed the role of leader himself.

  The next day they arrived at the Mudowwara well, two or three miles west of the station. The well was a broad pond covered with an icing of emerald slime. Islets of pink scum floated dead in the water. These turned out to be the rotting remnants of perished camels the Turks had thrown in to pollute the pool. Fortunately, the passage of time had rendered this form of biological warfare ineffectual. With no other choice, the men reluctantly filled their water skins. The disturbed water sent a yellow, cloying haze into the still air that lingered, perhaps the common spirit of the dead animals.

  At dusk Lawrence, Zaal, and some others crept toward the station under a new moon, trying to move to within the three-hundred-yard range of the Stokes mortar. Lawrence and Zaal moved closer, leaving the rest of the raiders with the mortar. A brief reconnaissance revealed an enemy strength of at least two hundred rifles and a machine gun. Lawrence had 116 disunited irregulars and perhaps the shock of surprise. After a quick consultation with Zaal, he decided against an attack. The men were waved off and returned to camp.

  The following morning, they headed south along the railway hidden in some dead ground, idly following the tracks of a leopard. The group followed the line until they came to a place where the tracks crossed over a culvert, an ideal location to set a heavy charge. A rocky ledge to the rear of the target offered a stable firing platform for the mortar and machin
e guns. After securing the camels, Lawrence hefted his fifty pounds of explosives, wire, tools, and firing magneto into position. Burying the gelatine was extremely difficult, because the site dipped off into a steep slope. The watercourse also had to be carefully camouflaged to disguise any signs of tampering under the culvert. Lawrence dug and prepped the site for a full five hours before the charge was finally set. All the while the sun-baked gelatine leaked from its sandbag and mingled with his sweat, creating a cocktail of acrid stench. When the task had been completed, Feisal’s favorite slave, Salem, asked for the honor of firing the mine at the appropriate time.

  Leaving a guard to watch the track below for any signs of a train, Lawrence returned to camp to find his men crouching on a steep ridge, highlighted against the setting sun like crows on a telephone line, visible for all to see. The Turks saw them and opened a heavy, though inaccurate, fire in their direction. Night quickly descended to hide them from the enemy and their own tactical embarrassment—and Lawrence’s anger.

  The men were awakened the next morning around nine o’clock with an alarm from the night sentinels: a platoon of forty Turks was advancing on their position from Hallat Ammar, a train station to the south. Lawrence immediately ordered a patrol to feign a retreat to the east. The ruse worked, drawing off the enemy into the hills, while the engineering party continued its vigil for any unsuspecting train that was sure to come. At noon, another warning was raised when one of the local rail repair detachments wandered down the line but completely missed seeing the carefully hidden mine and Lawrence’s hideout. Just as the repair party trudged south, Lawrence spotted another serious threat from the direction of Mudowwara. Through his captured Zeiss binoculars, Lawrence saw a hundred Turkish soldiers approaching. Though moving at a snail’s pace, the company would be upon them in less than three hours. This would place his raiders between two fires: the party of a hundred men advancing from the north and the forty men who had been taken on a wild goose chase into the hills. He had to make a swift decision, and in a moment he decided to retreat, leaving the mine in place with the hope of returning later at a more auspicious time.

  Just as he was about to issue the order, another cry of alarm was raised. One of the sentinels excitedly brought news that the train they had been waiting for was finally approaching from Hallat Ammar. The news immediately halted all thoughts of retreat. Lawrence quickly gave orders for the Arabs to man their firing positions and fire. Stokes and Lewis, battling dysentery from the slime pool, soon forgot their ailments and hurtled into position. Salem, the designated triggerman, rushed to the exploder, muttering an echo of prayers to Allah granting him beneficent success.

  The train was big: two locomotives pulling ten heavily laden boxcars bristling with rifle fire. Atop the roof, sandbagged rifle nests poured forth a hot but inaccurate fire. Lawrence had not expected two engines and quickly made an assessment that he would blow the mine under the second locomotive. The train continued to chug toward its unsuspecting doom when, just at the precise moment, Lawrence chopped down his arm in signal to Salem. He squeezed the charger, and after three heartbeats Allah blessed Salem with a tremendous, deafening roar. The concussion of the blast knocked him out of his dancing jubilation. Then everything went black.…

  • • •

  “OUT OF THE darkness came shattering crashes and long, loud metallic clangings of ripped steel, with many lumps of iron and plate; while one entire wheel of a locomotive whirled up suddenly black out of the cloud against the sky, and sailed musically over our heads to fall slowly and heavily into the desert behind. Except for the flight of these, there succeeded a deathly silence, with no cry of men or rifle-shot, as the now gray mist of the explosion drifted from the line towards us and over our ridge until it was lost in the hills.” The silence was suddenly shattered by the chatter of machine guns firing from atop the ridge into the gray cloud. Salem picked up his rifle and charged into the mist, where he was enveloped and seemingly spirited away. The bullets struck heavily against the rifle nests on top of the boxcars. The Stokes mortar then opened up, seeking the Turks who were hidden farther down the line. The second burst scored a direct hit and scattered bodies along the track like old rags. The train began to empty its human cargo, which ran across the desert toward the station at Mudowwara, sweeping away the oncoming patrol. The gunners now reaped a bloody harvest amid the panic, while Lawrence rushed to the crushed culvert to assess the damage. The front boxcar, filled with sick and wounded, had fallen into the mine’s crater. Peering into the unbelievable carnage, he saw three or four dazed survivors. One cried out, “Typhus!” Lawrence quickly backed away and looked farther down the track: “Succeeding wagons were derailed and smashed: some had frames irreparably buckled. The second engine was a blanched pile of smoking iron. Its driving wheels had been blown upward, taking away the side of the fire-box. Cab and tender were twisted into strips, among the piled stones of the bridge abutment.” The first engine was in better shape and possibly salvageable. Lawrence dragged a box of gun cotton over to the boiler and lit a thirty-second fuse: enough time for him to drive off the horde of plunderers from the devastating explosion.

  In Lawrence’s recollection, the valley had become a surreal, brightly colored apocalyptic scene: “The Arabs, gone raving mad, were rushing about at top speed bareheaded and half-naked, screaming, shooting into the air, clawing one another nail and fist, while they burst open trucks and staggered back and forward with immense bales, which they ripped [open] by the rail-side and tossed through, smashing what they did not want.” The train was full of civilians, mostly refugees and the sick, as well as the wives and children of Turkish officers returning to Damascus. “There were scores of carpets spread about; dozens of mattresses and flowered quilts; blankets in heaps, clothes for men and women in full variety; clocks, cooking-pots, food, ornaments and weapons.”6

  A group of women charged at Lawrence, begging protection, but their husbands threw them aside to grasp Lawrence’s feet and beg for mercy. He kicked them off with his bare feet and ran over to a group of Austro-German troops—instructors of the new Skoda mountain guns about to be deployed in the theater. They asked for quarter, but a dispute broke out with the marauding Arabs and all but a handful were killed before Lawrence could intervene again.

  When the Goyan scene was over, the audit of battle was reckoned: seventy dead Turks, just teeth and smoking boots; ninety captured; and apparently not one Arab casualty. In the hysteria, Lawrence had to defend himself at least three times from his own men. The Arabs suddenly dispersed with their loot without a word of leave. Lawrence was alone at the wreck with Lewis and Stokes when suddenly Zaal galloped up with a comrade to find their lost leader. The five men found enough straying camels to load their weapons and engineering equipment for the trek back to Rumm.

  The journey to Rumm was uneventful. There Lawrence learned that one man was killed and three lightly wounded, but Salem was missing. Lewis had seen him lying near one of the shattered engines severely wounded but in the excitement had forgotten to give notice. Lawrence became angry when he discovered that half the party knew the same information but had said nothing. Salem had been placed in the personal charge of Lawrence by Feisal: it was his responsibility to recover Salem—or his body. Lawrence immediately asked for volunteers to go back with him and rescue Salem. After a few moments, Zaal volunteered with twelve of his outriders.

  The party raced back to the wreck and came atop the ridge overlooking the disaster. Below, they could see almost two hundred Turks crawling over the scene like ants. The prospect of finding Salem alive now seemed hopeless: the Turks always mutilated and killed any Arab they might capture. After recovering more of their gear under Turkish fire, the rescue party reluctantly returned to Rumm. At the camp, the Arabs had reorganized themselves in Lawrence’s absence. They looked like a band of gypsies. He looked over the image and reflected: “Victory always undid an Arab force, so we were no longer a raiding party, but a stumbling baggage caravan, loaded to
the breaking with enough household goods to make rich an Arab tribe for years.”

  Lawrence stood at the side of the “caravan” as it moved past him, and to his utter astonishment he saw Salem strapped to the crupper of the saddle of one of Feisal’s slaves. After his first rush into the explosive torrent, Salem had been shot. Again Allah smiled upon him: though he’d been shot through his back, the slug narrowly missed his spine. Salem recovered, but Lawrence felt that he always bore him a small grudge for being left behind. Salem had taught him another lesson in leadership: “I had failed in staunchness. My habit of hiding behind a Sherif was to avoid measuring myself against the pitiless Arab standard, with its no-mercy for foreigners who wore its clothes, and aped its manners. Not often was I caught with so poor a shield as blind Sherif Aid.”7

  LAWRENCE’S ROLE IN the desert meant a direct intellectual engagement with the form and substance of planning for future military operations set within a fundamentally different social and military culture. Controlling the future of the desert revolt began as an act of thought sustained by Lawrence’s will and shaped by his leadership. The disembodied will crystallized into the form of a design. The crystal of planning provided a laserlike focus for all action in a manner that was efficient and surgically precise. Lawrence’s leadership provided five essential elements of direction and regulation to the Arab planning effort, especially with respect to time.

  First, planning became more than simply a mechanical checklist that, when followed, automatically led to the fulfillment of set goals. A plan became a blueprint for the future, imposed on the future. When Lawrence spoke of an “end state,” he was able to translate that into a narrative vision of the Arab future. Second, Lawrence was able to integrate thoroughly British planning staff and procedures into the Arab cause. Third, he was able to provide an element of flexibility in all his plans and operations. Fourth, Lawrence was able to create ad hoc Arab units organized for the immediate task at hand. Finally, Lawrence and his staff were able to address one of the central problems of warfare in the desert: the visualization of the theater of operations in all its many dimensions. The days of the omniscient, omnipresent commander leading on his horse while surveying the battlefield were gone when Lawrence arrived in the desert. Even the proverbial “glance at the map” provided him with much less information than it did during preindustrial times. Not only had the theater of war exploded in scale, it had also expanded in scope. Beginning with the American Civil War and certainly by 1917, the military dimensions of space, time, energy, and mass began to embrace the social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of mass industrialized warfare. Lawrence had to fuse and synthesize all this complex information into a coherent whole. He was able to fill in the mosaic of missing information with synthetic leaps of intuition. From a cognitive standpoint, it clearly demonstrated strength of mind and strength of will.