Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  The raiders marched out the next day in great haste, crossing into Wadi el Harith, bearing the namesake of Sherif Ali. A halt was made at lunch, and several of Lawrence’s bodyguards went off in search of gazelle. The party was successful, but the success quickly turned deadly when a feud broke out between Ahmed and Awad. Awad blew off Ahmed’s head rope with a stray shot, while Ahmed tattooed Awad’s cloak with an eight-millimeter “needle.” Lawrence threatened the men with mutilation of the right thumb and index finger, which immediately caused Ahmed and Awad to throw themselves at his mercy and publicly repent and reconcile their blood feud. Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein el Harith meted out the ritual Bedouin punishment by striking several blows to their heads with the blunt edge of a heavy dagger, causing blood to gush forth as the true sign of tribal justice.

  After driving on a few miles farther, the party found the perfect base for their bridge raid: a long trough of clear rainwater that had just been scouted out by a troop of Circassian cavalry. The next morning, they filled their water bags and pushed into the foothills below Deraa. Here they waited for night’s cloaking embrace, fully cognizant of the fact that they would have no more water until they accomplished their mission and returned. In the darkness, Lawrence and Fahad scouted the two-hour stretch to the bridge. Here they found a hollow full of thick vegetation at Ghadir el Abyadh, the perfect place to rest until dawn. As the sky turned pink, the two crept from hiding to look directly at the bridge below, less than a rifle shot away. The Turkish guards appeared to be in an amiable mood, evidence that Abd el Kader had ridden by without revealing any sinister intent toward the bridge, or at least the usual Turkish incompetence kept hidden its own secrets.

  The rest of the party slowly infiltrated the gardenlike depression at Abyadh. Lawrence and Ali went over the plan one last time. They would first have to wait through the heat of the day until nightfall to conduct the demolition. If the feat could be accomplished, the real challenge lay ahead in having to ride eighty miles in thirteen hours to get east of the rail line by morning. The Indians were beyond such a task: their animals were already spent, despite the light march Lawrence had imposed on them. Lawrence decided, therefore, to pick the six best riders and give them the six best camels under their best leader, Hassan Shah. They would take just one Vickers machine gun, dramatically reducing their firepower. The rest of the machine-gun company would remain behind.

  The bridge itself would have to be assaulted on foot. The Beni Sakhr under Ali would lead the charge, while the distrusted Serahin would watch the camels and hump the explosives. The blasting material had to be repacked into more manageable thirty-pound units and placed in easily recognizable and more visible white bags for the night attack. Engineer Wood repacked the gelatine, shrugging off the annoying nitrous-induced headaches with ease. The final task left Lawrence to rearrange his bodyguard so that each man was buddied up with one of the Serahin. The final organization of the striking force consisted of seven Indians, Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein el Harith and six of his servants, twenty Beni Sakhr, forty Serahin, and Lawrence’s bodyguard. Two of Lawrence’s men had a sudden attack of jitters and were immediately relieved of all duties. The remaining men were instructed to retreat to Abu Sawana at nightfall to await eventualities.

  AT DUSK, LAWRENCE led his raiders west, scuttling down a steep ridge, when all of a sudden the lead detachment charged ahead of the main body: they had stumbled upon a frightened raisin peddler leading his two wives on a pair of donkeys. The situation proved awkward, since the merchant was heading to the nearby railroad station at Mafrak. Lawrence quickly decided to have the three encamp under the supervision of one of the Serahin. Lawrence regrouped to follow the track of an old pilgrim trail: “It was the same road along which the Arabs had ridden with me on my first night in Arabia out by Rabegh. Since then in twelve months we had fought up it for some twelve hundred kilometers, past Medina and Hedia, Dizad, Mudowwara and Maan.… But we were apprehensive of tonight: our nerves had been shaken by the flight of Abd el Kader, the solitary traitor of our experience. Had we calculated fairly we should have known that we had a chance in spite of him: yet dispassionate judgment lay not in our mood, and we thought half-despairingly how the Arab Revolt would never perform its last stage, but would remain one more example of the caravans which started ardently for a cloud-goal, and died man by man in the wilderness without the tarnish of achievement.”4

  The party trudged onward, only to be plinked at by some careless shepherd boy firing an antique rifle, wildly missing Lawrence’s army. Mifleh el Gomaan, who piloted the caravan over the rough terrain, seemed to find every possible impediment along the way: a barking dog, arcing flares, a screaming mad gypsy woman, twinkling tracers. The dark night melded with the heavy smell of black ashes as they came upon a deep leafy depression. The raiders creaked along to the other side and halted. Just off to the north was Deraa station, emitting an eerie glow as a presentiment of the future. They crested the lip of the hollow and plunged down a narrow valley leading to the plain of Remthe. Here the ground was half plowed and sticky to the camels’ tread, slowing the advance to a shambling crawl. Lawrence turned around on his red camel and went down the ragged line, urging the men forward. The Indians were riding their camels like horses, exhausting both to man and beast; the others stuttered manfully through the furrowed clods of mud. Lawrence decided to maintain his position in the rear, while Ali took the lead with his superb racing camel.

  By nine o’clock, the riders left the muck of the plowed field and the pace increased. But just as the party started to regain its momentum, a light rain began making the furrowed fields greasy and slick. Several of the camels slipped, throwing their riders and pitching the column into a jumble of camel flesh and cursing men. The drizzle soon stopped and the raiders quickened their stride, this time with greater determination. Up ahead, Mifleh suddenly reached up high in the air and cracked the darkness with his riding crop: a taut twang revealed the overhead telegraph line running up to Mezerib. The plucking noise of the wires faded into the empty night to give way to another, more subtle sound: a hushing, breathless whisper off in the gray distance, which finally uncovered the great cataract beneath Tell el Shehab, feeding the wide maw of the Yarmuk gorge.

  A short ride later, Mifleh halted the column. They were now just above the sixty-foot bridge that lay off to their right, a steely gray skeleton under the rising moon. Lawrence quickly organized the raiders for the impending raid, doling out the precious gelatine among fifteen of the Serahin sappers. Adhub led the Beni Sakhr as the advance guard to recon a safe way to the bridge. The brief drizzle had rendered the steep ridge wet and slippery. Some of the men were fearful that the explosives would blow them to Allah in a fall. “When we were in the stiffest part, where rocks cropped out brokenly from the face,” Lawrence recalled, “a new noise was added to the roaring water as a train clanked slowly up from Galilee, the flanges of its wheels screaming on the curves and the steam of its engine panting out of the hidden depths of the ravine in white ghostly breaths. The Serahin hung back. Wood drove them after us. Fahad and I leaped to the right, and in the light of the furnace-flame saw open trucks in which were men in khaki, perhaps prisoners going up to Asia Minor.” Engineer Wood took command of the Indians, deploying the lone machine gun to cover both the guard tent and Lawrence’s raiding party as it crept silently along the old abandoned construction trail to the closest abutment. The dirty ragged raiders shaded perfectly into the shadowed limestone walls, becoming all but invisible. As Lawrence touched the cold steel of the bridge, he saw a guard on the other side casually pissing into the wild stream below. “I lay staring at him fascinated, as if painless and helpless, while Fahad shuffled back by the abutment wall where it sprang clear of the hill-side. [But] this was no good, for I wanted to attack the girders themselves; so I crept away to bring the gelatine bearers. Before I reached them there was a loud clatter of a dropped rifle and a scrambling fall from up the bank. The sentry started and stared up at the noise
. He saw, high up, in the zone of light with which the rising moon slowly made beautiful the gorge, the machine gunners climbing down to a new position in the receding shadow. He challenged loudly, then lifted his rifle and fired, while yelling the guard out.”5

  Suddenly, all hell broke loose. The Beni Sakhr flattened, firing away at the lucky sentry. The rest of the guard mount spilled into a nearby trench and blazed away at the Arab muzzle flashes. The Indian machine gunners were maldeployed and could not get the Vickers into action in time to rake the guard tent. Bullets ricocheted and echoed off the canyon wall in shrieking reverberations. Almost immediately, the Serahin bomb bearers came under direct and intense raking fire. In their limited engineering training, they learned well the lesson that if gelatine is struck by a bullet, they could kiss their callused arses goodbye. Holding that thought uppermost in their minds, they tossed the deadly cargo over the abutment into the raging water below and fled for their lives.

  At that tipping point, success, quantumlike, turned into disaster: it was now every man for himself. The raiders scattered and ran back up the hill. In the melee, Lawrence took one last longing look at the bridge and ran. Along the way, he and Ali stumbled into Wood and the Indians, aghast, and told them “it was all over.” The mad dash continued back to the camels, where the Serahin were already mounting the beasts and fleeing, while the Turks continued to blaze away in the darkness below. With the plan now in shambles, the retreat was turning into a frenzied rout. The ashen rags of cloud began a race with the gray light of dawn, both trying to catch the panic-stricken raiders. The tumult and noise started to awaken the neighboring villages; the closest was Turra. The other homesteads on the plain twinkled alive in the wake of the routing mass of riders. As the men crested the plain, they overran a group of peasants on their way from Deraa. The Serahin now became desperadoes in fact as well as appearance as they began, in a frustrated rage, to waylay the peasants and rob them blind. The victims ran screaming across the plain, spreading the ululating Arab alarm: now every village in Remthe for miles around was alerted. Sharpshooters appeared on rooftops firing at shadows, friend and foe. The bullets cracked and whistled sharply overhead.

  The robbers were left in the distance heavily laden with their ill-gotten loot, while the raiders pressed on in glum silence and despair. Lawrence’s “trained men did marvelous service helping those who fell, or mounting behind them those whose camels got too hurt to canter on. The ground was still muddy, and the ploughed strips more laborious than ever; but behind us was the riot, spurring us and our camels to exertion, like a pack hunting us into the refuge of the hills.… Gradually the noise behind us died away, and the last stragglers fell into place, driven together, as on the advance, by the flail of Ali ibn el Hussein and myself in the rear.”

  They reached the telegraph line at dawn and began to cut it seemingly for no purpose but general principle. The irony struck Lawrence immediately: “We had crossed the line the night before to blow up the bridge at Tell el Shehab, and so cut Palestine off from Damascus, and we were actually cutting the telegraph to Medina after all our pains and risks! Allenby’s guns, still shaking the air away there on our right, were bitter recorders of the failure we had been.… We were fools, all of us equal fools, and so our rage was aimless.… Our minds were sick with failure, and our bodies tired after nearly a hundred strained miles over bad country in bad conditions, between sunset and sunset, without halt or food.”6

  THE RAIN BEGAN again and added more darkness to an already black mood. The rations would give out in the evening. The question of food soon broke the reflective silence, but the talk quickly passed from concern for restoring empty bellies to the need for restoring personal honor. The Beni Sakhr hungered especially, while the disgraced Serahin sought salvation. Ali, now become a true believer in the revolt, said to Lawrence, “Let’s blow up a train.” There was a great shout of approval, and all eyes flashed upon Lawrence the dynamiter. In anticipation, a heavy stillness fell like a shroud.

  Lawrence was overwhelmed: the selfless acclamation of the follower toward his leader is a rare expression of love few leaders experience and seldom savor. For Lawrence, this was a validating moment of his trial of leadership; it was an act of forgiveness proffered the leader by the follower, who knows intuitively that the leader must always bear the ultimate responsibility for failure. Even though the follower may be the cause of ultimate disaster, he is instantly absolved through the absolution of leadership. His sins become the sins of the leader; yet, paradoxically, his triumphs are his own. The men wanted another chance, and Lawrence could not deny his children.

  He still had a spare bag of gelatine: thirty pounds, and just enough to do the job. There was still the problem of food, however. Though the Arabs would happily eat their camels in a pinch, the Indians, also Muslim, found the thought abhorrent. Of course, this meant detaching the Indians and leaving no machine-gun support. Ali immediately stood up and vowed that his Arabs would double their efforts to make up for the loss of the machine gunners. Lawrence still mulled over the idea in his head. There was a strong possibility that the train they might encounter would be a logistics train armed with incapable reservists; there was just adequate explosives, no margin for error; they would be without the Indian machine guns. In the balance, he decided to take the risk for the sake of leadership. The men were in a dismal psychological state. If they didn’t gain a success, they would never find redemption. He announced his decision and the men rejoiced again. Their uplifted hearts made the evening meal taste doubly good.

  On the next morning, November 9, the Arabs bade farewell to the stalwart but disconsolate machine gunners. Lawrence sent Engineer Wood with the Indians “to soften the blow with honor.” Wood was also showing signs of the early stages of pneumonia, and the weather would only make his symptoms worse. The column was now reduced to fewer than sixty men. None of the men knew the area. Lawrence was familiar with the region because of his operations with Zaal in the spring. He took them to the old crime scene at Minifir, an ideal site for their mischief. At twilight, they crept down to the rebuilt culvert at point 172. As they were laying the mine, a train suddenly appeared out of the darkening mist, sending them fleeing for cover under the masonry arch. As the train rolled over them, Lawrence inspected the target. The span was over sixteen feet long, running across a gully that had been chiseled deeply by the recent rains. The cut was at least four feet deep, creating a winding path of cover a hundred yards beyond the rail line. Lawrence embedded the charge painstakingly under the crown of the arch, though this effort took longer than usual because of the muddy condition of the gulch. The demolition wires were carefully paid out into the concealment of the ravine. Unfortunately, logistical problems arising all the way back in Egypt left them with a length of wire only sixty yards long. Apparently, a shortage in insulated wire had not been made good by the time the party left Aqaba. Because of the dampness, the detonator could not be left connected to the charge in the normal fashion. Lawrence would have to make a last-minute connection and then run down to the exploder to fire off the charge. This left little time for preparation, forcing Lawrence to spend a miserably cold night under the wind- and rain-blasted arch. Unable to sleep, he spent most of the time covering over the evidence of the mining.

  Dawn was interrupted by a patrol of Turks on their routine guard tour. Lawrence raced out of hiding and up the gully to huddle with the others. Just then a lookout alerted him that another train was approaching the culvert, but yet again the short notice left them unprepared to deal with the mist-enshrouded train. By now frustration was beginning to settle over the raiders with the same gloomy effect as the damp mist and clammy chill. Ali began to curse the fate of the entire mission, wondering if any good at all could come of it. Lawrence took quick notice of this despair: perhaps an indication of an evil eye. He tried to divert attention from this general mood of hopelessness by giving the men something to do. He ordered them to redeploy their lookouts and then make a game of being
hungry by pretending not to be. They clustered together for warmth, their backs up against the steaming camels. Thoughts of a failed mission surrounded the party like the swirling damp wind. Gnawing hunger seemed a mocking reminder, as though from Allenby, of their incompetence.

  JUST AS LAWRENCE was fleeing from the Tell el Shehab bridge, Allenby was finally beginning to make progress across his whole front, especially at Gaza. Despite German efforts to stiffen the Turkish defense, the enemy was pushed slowly north and northeastward. Allenby also was hopeful that Chauvel’s Desert Mounted Corps would be able to drive northwest and cut in behind the retreating Turks in front of Gaza. But again, lack of water slowed progress more than enemy bullets. The Royal Navy tried to ease the situation by off-loading supplies along the coast, but this had limited effect owing to the lack of motorized transport with which to distribute the matériel among the advancing troops. Though Lawrence had worried about the weather on Allenby’s front, in fact it was hot, dry, and windy, unlike the cold shower the Arabs were experiencing across the Jordan.

  By November 10, just as Lawrence was huddling with his mates among the camels, it was becoming clear to Allenby and Dawnay that the Turks fleeing from Gaza had escaped the cavalry trap they had set for them. From a broader strategic—or, more precisely, operational—perspective, both sides demonstrated Larry Addington’s old adage from military history that “railroads are the bones of strategy.” Like the great sweep of a pendulum, the momentum of the British advance was approaching the high arc of culmination. The Turkish Eighth Army was beginning to rally along the Nahr Sukhereir. The purpose was to defend the lines of communication that flowed along the rail network in Palestine. The establishment of a new front here meant that the Turks could protect the important rail nexus at Junction station, which fed into Jerusalem. Loss of this decisive point at Junction station would cut off Jerusalem from the integrity of the entire defensive scheme in Palestine and cut the Turks in two, isolating the Seventh Army in the Judean Hills. As long as the line held, Jerusalem would be safe. It was therefore a singular operational achievement that the Turks were able to establish a new front along the Nahr, tying it in with Wadi Surar and the numerous villages that afforded good defensive positions atop the hills. Allenby recognized the urgency of the situation. The more he delayed, the stronger the Turkish position would become; it was imperative, therefore, that he strike immediately.