As a leader, Lawrence had now learned to extend the range and scope of his leadership. Relying increasingly on outstanding local Arab leaders like Auda, Zaal, and Ali for their tactical leadership, he was free to migrate to the role of operational leader by empowering his subordinates to act under their own direction. Where the tactician leads through his sheer physical presence, as an operational leader Lawrence demonstrated the force of ideas as the key source in providing purpose, direction, and motivation. In this instance, the idea of the Arab Revolt was worth a hundred Napoleons on the battlefield. Lawrence was like a sweeper in the sport of curling, enabling the other players on the team to succeed through their own efforts. Still, Lawrence was beginning to doubt that the burning idea of the Arab Revolt could be nurtured through the long winter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Grief of Leaders
People surmount tragedy when they use themselves up fully, when they use what they have and what they are, whatever they are and wherever they find themselves, even if this requires them to ignore cultural prescription or to behave in innovating ways undefined by their roles. The tragic sense does not derive from the feeling that people must always be less than history and culture demand; it derives, rather, from the sense that they have been less than they could have been, that they needlessly betrayed themselves.…
—ALVIN GOULDNER, The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology
The renewal of the advance against Jerusalem began all across the front on November 18. Movement into the Judean Hills was stymied by the extremely heavy winter rains that descended upon the forces. The hills consisted of high ridges sometimes soaring to two thousand feet. The hills created deep valleys, which meant that the high ground had to be cleared before assaults could be made through the dale lands. The sudden change in weather affected the troops, as well, as they confronted the cold, damp winds instead of the dry desert heat. The muddy roads and tracks slowed movement to a crawl and gave the defenders a significant advantage. In some cases, the advantage was short-lived as thick blankets of fog obscured the advance of British infantry in the low-lying areas among the hills. By the second day of the attack, it was clear that the mastermind behind the Turkish defense, General von Falkenhayn, was conducting a delaying withdrawal to give the defenses about Jerusalem time to dig in. The key to the British offensive was predicated upon a quick seizure of the Nablus-Ramallah-Jerusalem road. Here the assault stalled after almost a week of heavy fighting. Allenby quickly realized that his tired men were in need of rest and reinforcement and that the one-day pause provided on November 17 was hardly sufficient for the troops to recover after three steady weeks of tough fighting. Reluctantly, he ordered a halt to the offensive on November 24.
In the ensuing lull, the weather improved considerably, allowing British engineers to solidify their supply lines. While the British were refitting, the Turks discovered a five-mile gap between Allenby’s forces arrayed in the hills and the troops fighting along the coast. They attempted to exploit this opening and did so with limited success. By December 3, Turkish spoiling attacks had ceased as fresh English reinforcements were brought to the front. On December 7, British forces had completed a major redeployment of troops, which saw XX Corps swap its position along the coast with XXI Corps in the Judean Hills. This was completed with utmost secrecy and thoroughly confused the demoralized Turks, who despite their dogged resistance continued to suffer from the weather and the intense fighting.
During the hiatus, Allenby reconsidered his plan and changed it significantly. Instead of fighting to cut the Nablus road so far north of Jerusalem and into such rugged terrain, he decided to shorten his swing by attacking closer in to Jerusalem, through the suburbs around Jericho, and then around to the east side of the holy city. The initial attack kicked off during the night of December 7, followed by the main assault at first light. Again, poor weather played a role in diminishing the force of the attack. Heavy rain turned into a shroudlike mist that slowed the advance, but by now the usually tenacious Turks seemed more willing to give up ground than in the past. Although unbeknownst to the British at the time, several fortified positions had been lost by the Turks. The cumulative moral effect upon them, however, was largely out of proportion to the posts’ real value. Nevertheless, the anxiety began to push the Turks toward a defensive crisis point. That point arrived when the British made another attempt to seal the Nablus road later in the day. On the evening of December 8, the Turks began a massive, almost panic-driven pullout from Jerusalem. The last official to leave was the Ottoman governor-general, riding in a purloined cart seized from a local American. Order was quickly restored as the mayor of the city handed over the holy keys to Major-General Sir John Shea. Although a sharp fight occurred at the Mount of Olives, the entire city was surrounded as darkness fell on December 9.
JUST AS JERUSALEM was about to fall, Lawrence was urgently recalled from Aqaba to Allenby’s headquarters. He arrived in time to be the guest of Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton at the official entry into the city. Lawrence had to scramble to get in proper uniform, and when the time came Allenby made the entry on foot through the Jaffa Gate. Allenby was quite conciliatory to the occupying Turks, noting the importance of Jerusalem to the faiths of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. For Lawrence, the fall of the great city of the Crusades was “the supreme moment of the war.” As the luncheon ceremony commenced afterward, Lawrence was able to hear the French representative, François Georges-Picot, say rather demurely to Allenby, “And tomorrow, my dear general, I will take the necessary steps to set up civil government in this town.”
There was shock among the British officers unaware of the highlevel British-French diplomatic arrangements. Lawrence recorded with heavy irony that this was “the bravest word on record; a silence followed, as when they opened the seventh seal in heaven. Salad, chicken mayonnaise and foie gras sandwiches hung in our mouths unmunched, while we turned to Allenby and gaped.” The general was also momentarily at a loss for words. His entourage feared that perhaps its great idol might betray some hitherto unrevealed weakness. But just then “his face grew red: he swallowed, his chin coming forward (in the way we loved).” Allenby turned to Picot and said through clenched teeth, “In the military zone the only authority is that of the Commander-in-Chief—myself.”
“But Sir Grey,” the flustered Picot began, “Sir Edward Grey—”
Immediately Allenby cut him off with a chop of the hand: “Sir Edward Grey referred to the civil government which will be established when I judge that the military situation permits.” At that there were schoolboy nudges under the table and stifled grins; lingering winks into the chicken salad. Allenby had triumphed over the politicians: the food now tasted so much better.
After lunch, Lawrence sped by car with Allenby and Dawnay to the general’s headquarters to discuss strategy for the next phase of the campaign. Dawnay talked about the British triumph in Palestine. They had accomplished in five weeks what planners had expected to take six months. They had broken the Turkish army and seized territory that the Ottoman Empire had held for centuries. They had captured the holy city of Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people and their Christian allies. But for the supply and weather difficulties, the Allies could easily have overrun the fleeing enemy. Allenby—the Bull—had played a crucial role in the victory. His vision, commitment, and competence had energized the forces out of its desert malaise. A War Cabinet telegram captured the importance of the success: “The capture of Jerusalem … is an event of historic and worldwide significance and has given the greatest pleasure to the British and other Allied peoples.”
On the Turkish side, the blow reverberated throughout the empire, redounding upon the Germans as well. The loss of Jerusalem was now added in the audit of war to the defeats at Mecca and Baghdad. The loss of Jerusalem decisively forced the Turks to redeploy forces from other regions to defend the vulnerable line in Palestine. This secured the British gains already made in Mesopotamia and entailed
their continued advance from Baghdad. Turkish defeats would also weaken the empire’s hold on its indigenous masses, especially the Arabs. The material losses were staggering and difficult to replace. The Turks lost 28,443 men among the dead and wounded as well as nearly 12,000 captured, whereas the British lost substantially fewer with 18,928 troops. Operationally, the Turkish army was cut in two. One wing held positions in the hills near Jaffa and Ramleh overlooking a flat plain. The other wing had dug in four miles north of the holy city in the rugged hill country. The problem for the Turks was that they had no lateral (east-west) lines of communication between them. The nearest was almost thirty miles to the north at the rail line between Nablus and Tul Keram.
As the exchange turned to operations in the desert, Lawrence was keen to discover the new mission for the Arabs. It made obvious military sense for Allenby to link up with the Arabs at the Dead Sea. Lawrence and Feisal had already anticipated this move, with Feisal beginning an advance on Tafileh to the southwest of Azrak. Allenby still had some adjustments to his own line to make. These were minor operations that would enable a secure base from which to launch the next phase of the campaign. The general expected he needed two months of preparation until February in order to launch the next offensive. Meantime, as the railway moved up to Jerusalem, supplies could be staged near Jericho and shipped across the Dead Sea to the Arab forces. If Allenby could maintain a flow of fifty tons a day, Lawrence’s forces could abandon Aqaba and thus shorten their own lines of supply. The area east of the Dead Sea was also a significant economic resource to the Turks, providing grain for food and timber to feed the wood-eating steam engines. The Arab regular army was now at three thousand men and could be readily enlarged with this kind of logistical commitment. In fact, Feisal was now elevated to the equivalent British rank of lieutenant-general commanding the “Arab Northern Army.” It was agreed, then, that by the end of March the British and Arab lines would join just north of the Dead Sea by the river Jordan. With the plan already in motion, Lawrence decided to take a busman’s holiday in Cairo to learn and test new methods and types of explosives.
UPON LAWRENCE’S RETURN, he found that P. C. Joyce had procured some armored cars. They decided, with the extra time on their hands, to conduct a reconnaissance with the new toy. They left with eight cars, traveling from Guweira to Mudowwara, where they shot up the nearby train station. They learned, most significantly, that they could raid from Guweira virtually the entire length of the Hejaz railway south of Maan. As Lawrence saw it, “All the Turks in Arabia could not fight a single armored car in open country. Thereby the situation in Medina, already bad, became hopeless.” The German leadership recognized this as well and had tried to convince the Turks to shorten their lines and abandon everything south of Maan, but Falkenhayn was overruled by the necessity of the caliphate, for the sake of its religious authority and legitimacy, to maintain control of the line down to Mecca.
There was also an odd blind spot from the British viewpoint. They continued to press for the capture of Medina despite the cost in blood and treasure. Of course, Allenby understood this point perfectly and seemed to feel that as long as the Turks were willing to defend a position, the Arabs should earn their pay and improve their fighting qualities if nothing else than by attacking it.
AFTER THE BRIEF tactical exercise and foray with armored cars, Lawrence returned to Aqaba and set about reorganizing his bodyguard. He argued that since the capture of Aqaba and the mining of Jemal Pasha’s train near Yarmuk, the bounty on his head had risen to ten thousand pounds alive or twenty thousand pounds dead. Obviously, it seemed, a beefed-up bodyguard was in order. Lawrence had already gathered quite a motley crew of bandits and cutthroats, though there was a core of honest riders. At this point, however, he “needed hard riders and hard livers; men proud of themselves, and without family.” His requirements read almost like an ad for the Pony Express: “WANTED. Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”
One of his first new recruits was Abdullah the Robber, a nickname, he insisted, acquired from his father. He came unannounced one day into Lawrence’s tent and, without a word, dropped a luxurious saddlebag of finely crafted workmanship at Lawrence’s feet and then quickly withdrew. The next day the Robber returned, this time with a camel saddle of exquisite beauty, graced with ancient Yemeni characters. Again, no word save a wave of the hand; then he vanished. On the third day he arrived without a gift, dressed plainly, almost shabbily, in a cheap cotton shirt. He threw himself at the feet of Lawrence, who took a closer look at his supplicant. He was slight, almost frail looking; he had a beardless face shriveled like a prune, the wreckage of smallpox. His eyes were concealed in a persistent squint, half-hidden by long, braided tresses; his lips twisted into a wry half-smile, almost cast with derision. In the ensuing conversation, Abdullah’s life story emerged. He grew up in Boreida. A certain incident in a married woman’s home forced him to leave in haste and seek employment with ibn Saud, the great emir of Nejd. Here his heavy cursing yielded constant beatings and jail time. He fled yet again, this time to Kuwait, and was imprisoned for being “amorous.” After his confinement, he enrolled in the army of Emir ibn Rashid, where he got into trouble again with a superior officer. The Robber intensely disliked the man to the point of beating him in public with his riding crop. He now turned, in desperation, to manual labor. The building of the Hejaz railroad offered him an opportunity for employment, which he seized immediately. And as it happened, he found trouble again: his foreman docked the unfortunate Abdullah for sleeping during the noon break. The Robber retaliated, in Lawrence’s words, “by docking the contractor of his head.” By now the Turkish authorities had set upon him and imprisoned him at Medina, where he quickly slipped away through a small window. Fortune found him in Mecca at a time when few questions were asked. He began a new life based on his riding abilities and curious character: he was given the mail route between Mecca and Jidda. Here he thrived and was able to send for his parents, who set up a simple sundries shop.
After a year of prosperity, the Robber was robbed of his camel and post on one of the mail runs. In retribution, the police claimed his family’s shop, but phoenixlike, he rose again and somehow managed to outfit himself as a constable in King Hussein’s camel police. Slowly he advanced through the ranks, but he was continually stymied by his knife play and dirty mouth: “a maw of depravity which had eaten filth in the stews of every capital in Arabia.” The last straw occurred when he knifed a troublesome Ateibi in court in front of a shocked Sherif Sharraf. Sharraf had Abdullah beaten to the point of death, but somehow Abdullah managed to cling to life. After a long recovery and displaying no hard feelings, he entered into the sherif’s entourage. With the start of the war, the Robber became the orderly of ibn Dakhil, chief of Feisal’s bodyguard. After Dakhil was appointed to an ambassadorship, he offered Abdullah a letter of recommendation to serve with Lawrence, who accepted his services and promoted him to the joint command of his bodyguard, a duty he shared with el Zaagi. In all the subsequent time serving Lawrence, the Robber’s only infraction was to be arrested for sitting in Allenby’s office, fully armed, waiting for his master.
Lawrence put his new applicant to work immediately, having him examine the most recent recruits. There was, however, some resentment toward Lawrence and his household “pets”: “The British at Aqaba called them cut-throats; but they cut throats only to my order. Perhaps in others’ eyes it was a fault that they would recognize no authority but mine.” By now Lawrence had ninety men rallying to his colors, the nominal strength of a British cavalry troop. Over half, fifty of them, were Ageyli, the same Nejdi villagers who thronged to Feisal’s bodyguard. They were expert “cameleers” who could spot their own mounts at three hundred paces and possessed a gift of the “camel whisperer.” Paid mercenaries, they fought best under the heavy and glittering motivation of gold. But pride also drove them, and one of the greatest feats of reconnaissance dur
ing the whole Arab Revolt was conducted by an Ageyli who twice swam through the deep sewer system at Medina to offer Feisal key intelligence of the besieged town.
Lawrence paid his retinue six pounds each a month, the going rate for a man with a camel. However, he provided them with his own mounts, so they were making a ransom of a profit and also receiving a bounty for new recruits. Lawrence bought the best possible camels he could find, chosen for swiftness, power, and endurance. He even established a kind of camel clinic where his beasts could recover at ease from the long campaign beatings they took. The men were likewise cared for under the stern gaze of el Zaagi, whose harsh discipline held every man accountable for the welfare of his mount and the condition of his equipment. Lawrence was clearly proud of his men and they of him: “They fought like devils, when I wanted, and sometimes when I did not, especially with Turks or with outsiders. For one guardsman to strike another was the last offence. They expected extravagant reward and extravagant punishment. They made boast throughout the army of their pains and gains. By this unreason in each degree they were kept apt for any effort, any risk.”
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