The severe weather continued its relentless assault on the victors. The men should have exploited their success and swept all the way to Kerak and even beyond to Amman, but cold and exhaustion had already settled in like the blanketing snow. Operationally, Lawrence saw the victory as a meaningless outcome. He sent over a report to Allenby’s headquarters primarily for the interest of the planning staff.
Lawrence was later awarded the Distinguished Service Order by Allenby for his leadership at the battle of Tafileh, but despite the medal, he despised the tactical orientation of the heroic leaders and their fascination with battle. Yet he demonstrated again that his tactical acumen as a guerrilla leader extended to a conventional fight. Ironically, he had chastised Auda in the hills before Aqaba for his seeming unwillingness to engage the enemy in a conventional fight. It appeared to Lawrence that fighting, whether conventional or unconventional, was solely a necessary evil: that Sun Tzu was correct in his wisdom that the acme of a leader was to win without fighting. Such skill requires tremendous forethought and foresight that did not readily emerge from purely tactical considerations.
THE MATTER OF closing off Turkish shipping on the Dead Sea still remained. Lawrence contacted Arabs down along the warm shores of the sea for assistance. Here he found a willing ally among the Beersheba Bedouin. On January 28, 1918, a detachment of seventy of them under Abdullah el Feir attacked the small eastern shore port of El Mezraa. They thoroughly trashed the place, taking sixty prisoners and ten tons of corn and sinking six dhows and a motorboat. This effectively ended the active campaigning for the time being. They had achieved Allenby’s objective in shutting down the Dead Sea commerce two weeks ahead of the general’s timetable. They had also made inroads along the east coast of the sea, disrupting the Turkish grain supply, but to Lawrence’s great regret they had not completely linked up with the British forces in Palestine north of the sea, near Jericho. But for the weather, they would have succeeded. For now, Lawrence would have to consolidate his gains around Tafileh and bring the villagers under the silken hand of Feisal.
Elsewhere, the dead hand of cold and darkness continued to press down upon the Arab garrison at Tafileh. The camels were worthless in the ice-encrusted snow and to their own embarrassment slid around like hulking wardrobes. Their natural fodder was under a hard heel of ice, impervious to the mouthings of their sensitive lips. As barley ran low in the town, even this ersatz feed was denied the beasts. Lawrence was therefore forced to range the camels to grazing land five thousand feet below their present location by a long, circuitous route of dangerous switchbacks. Life in the town was no better for the men. The place was crawling with vermin chased by the howling winds. The sky was always a deathly slate gray, tinged with a mournful umber. Lawrence whiled away his time reading Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and nursing another flesh wound to his hip, a memento of the recent battle.
Soon boredom, the true ghost of winter, stole in among the bodyguard, laying hold of the men in its usual disharmonious fashion. Awad, one of the Sherari, struck at Mahmas, a camel driver, and though not formally of the bodyguard, Mahmas fell under its law. The discordant clash of knives brought the two men under the severest punishment of the bodyguard. El Zaagi meted out the sternest retribution as Lawrence listened nearby. Through a tearful refusal, Mahmas resisted his manful punishment and slunk away from the fellowship highly disgraced. Awad had been a good fighter, and the incident upset Lawrence’s sense of justice and “what’s right.”
Lawrence realized that the continued boredom would rot the moral cohesion of his “fellowship of the dagger.” He decided, therefore, to disband the men temporarily and scatter them to their own devices until better weather prevailed. On February 4, Lawrence left Tafileh and headed south for Aqaba to get more gold for the spring campaign season. With a greatly reduced bodyguard, Lawrence slogged through the gooey ground aboard footloose camels that continually slid along the slushy trails toward his goal. The next day, they reached Maulud’s camp at Aba el Lissan, feeling “filthy and miserable; stringy like shaven cats.” The regulars in the camp had lost half their combat strength because of the hideous weather. Lawrence recalled: “These men of Maulud’s had been camped in this place, four thousand feet above the sea, for two months without relief. They had to live in shallow dug-outs on the hillside. They had no fuel except the sparse, wet wormwood, over which they were just able to bake their necessary bread every other day. They had no clothes but khaki drill uniform of the British summer sort. They slept in their rain-sodden verminous pits on empty or half-empty flour-sacks, six or eight of them together in a knotted bunch, that enough of the worn blankets might be pooled for warmth.” Though half the men had perished, the other half remained active and exchanged rifle fire with the Turkish outposts on a daily basis. Lawrence and the whole Arab effort on this front “owed much to them, and more to Maulud, whose fortitude stiffened them in their duty.” Reflecting on Maulud’s model of Arab leadership, Lawrence wrote: “The scarred old warrior’s history in the Turkish army was a catalog of affairs provoked by his sturdy sense of Arab honor and nationality, a creed for which three or four times he had sacrificed his prospects. It must have been a strong creed which enabled him to endure cheerfully three winter months in front of Maan and to share out enough spirit among five hundred ordinary men to keep them stout-heartedly about him.”5
As they pressed on toward Aqaba, a new, familiar scent was now in the air: the humid, salted breath of the Red Sea tugged warmly at their caked nostrils. The next day they reached Guweira; here Lawrence discovered Joyce and Alan Dawnay. They had been operating with Feisal to attack Mudowwara, but in the end the offensive failed for the usual reasons: failure to properly coordinate and synchronize operations between regular and irregular troops. Lawrence spent three nights with the officers discussing the new staff arrangements made to better integrate the Arab activities with Allenby’s operations in Palestine. An intermediary headquarters group—the Hejaz Operations Staff—had just been established under Dawnay with the code name “Hedgehog.”
MEANWHILE, FEISAL HAD sent gold in the sum of thirty thousand British pounds, saving Lawrence the full trip to Aqaba. He meant to get the gold back up to Tafileh as soon as possible. As security, Lawrence recruited the ever-useful Sheikh Motlog along with fourteen other retainers. The gold was stashed in one-thousand-pound bags, each bag weighing twenty-two pounds. Every man carried two bags, making the dense weight difficult for the camels slopping through the bottomless mud back to Tafileh. Motlog arrived ceremoniously riding atop the baggage of a Ford Model T. Because of the severe road conditions, the skid caused him to bounce off on his head. The driver, Private Marshall, jumped out of the car and apologized profusely, whereupon old Motlog, gaining his senses, said bemusedly, “Don’t be angry with me. I have not learned to ride these things.” After which he traded in the Ford for a used camel.
Lawrence left on February 8. Because of the ever-increasing elevation, the trudge back up to Tafileh was twice as hard as the trek down. Although ice-skating dangers were less likely, camel traction along the switchbacks became more difficult. They rode directly into the wind, now blowing hard like the Chicago “hawk,” dipping and diving from ridge to ridge and digging its icy claws into flesh, always hoping to strike at an uncloaked eye. Lawrence pushed the party at a relentless, slush-bound pace: six miles in seven hours—unimaginable on the desert plain. He left Motlog by the wayside to rest his detachment, while he pressed on with the two Ateiba horsemen. Long out of their desert element, the horsemen soon collapsed, leaving Lawrence to plunge ahead on his own with his trusted camel, Wodheiha, camping several times along the way at various tribal garrisons and raising curious eyebrows at his cargo of 120 pounds of fifty-five hundred British gold pounds.
Toward the end of the journey, Lawrence encountered several frozen snowdrifts that Wodheiha bolted through like a snowplow. He finally reached Tafileh on the bright morning of February 11, tears streaming down his face from a case of encroaching snow
blindness. There he found Emir Zeid and informed him of the boon of gold. Grateful, Zeid introduced him to a new English guest just recently arrived. Lieutenant Alec Kirkbride, sent by the inscrutable Wyndham Deedes to assist in the intelligence efforts among the Arabs, came to make use of his Arab-speaking skills. After a brief respite, Lawrence took him in tow and went on a recon mission to scout a passage toward the Jordan and Allenby’s right flank. It appeared to Lawrence that as the weather improved, it would be possible to conduct a fighting linkup with the Palestine front in a month at most. He returned to Zeid to convey his plans. By now, Motlog had appeared with the rest of the gold. As Zeid listened to Lawrence, the prince slowly shook his head and shrugged. “But that will need a lot of money,” he said.
And Lawrence replied, “Not at all,” reminding the emir that he had just brought him thirty thousand pounds of British gold.
Zeid raised his hands upward in an outstretched, empty gesture. “What gold?” After a pause, he mumbled sheepishly that he had spent it—all of it.
Lawrence’s eyes grew wide, astonished. “You must be joking!”
“By Allah, it is true,” said Feisal’s half-brother. “I have given thousands to el Dhiab, the sheikh of Tafileh, thousands to the villagers; thousands to the Jazi Howeitat; thousands to the Beni Sakhr.”
The more Lawrence listened, the more “aghast” he became. His entire plan had just been shot to pieces. Moreover, his promise to support Allenby had now been completely compromised. He ran to find Nasir, whom he found on his sickbed. Nasir explained the inner workings of tribal politics by offering that the young, inexperienced Zeid had been duped by his rapacious advisers, who certainly received some sort of kickback from the many beneficiaries of the emir’s goodwill. As Lawrence pondered the situation throughout the night, he found no resolution short of getting the money back from all the recipients. He approached Zeid with the solution, but Zeid merely gave Lawrence a statement of the expenditures.
That was the last straw. Lawrence immediately decided to go to Allenby and ask to be relieved of his duties. He left that very afternoon with four bodyguards, riding hard for Beersheba, eighty miles distant. He reached the place by noon the next day, February 20. Here he learned that the British had just taken Jericho. On his way to Allenby’s headquarters, he passed the train station and was amazed to find his old mentor, David Hogarth, just stepping off a train. He grabbed Hogarth and told him everything: “I had made a mess of things: and had come to beg Allenby to find me some smaller part elsewhere. I had put myself into the Arab business, and had come to wreck because of my sick judgment.… I now had no tricks left worth a meal in the Arab market-place, and wanted the security of custom: to be conveyed; to pillow myself on duty and obedience: irresponsibly.”
Lawrence was at the moment of personal crisis. His belief in himself was being shattered by the failed trust he had placed in others: he expected them to act by the same standards meted out to himself. Once Lawrence started with Hogarth, the stream of disaffection became a seething torrent of leaders’ anguish and grief: “I complained that since landing in Arabia I had had options and requests, never an order: I was tired to death of free-will, and of many things beside free-will. For a year and a half I had been in motion, riding a thousand miles each month upon camels: with added nervous hours in crazy airplanes, or rushing across country in powerful cars. In my last five actions I had been hit, and my body so dreaded further pain that now I had to force myself under fire. Generally I had been hungry: lately always cold: and frost and dirt had poisoned my hurts into a festering mass of sores.”
Yet the physical pain was only secondary to the betrayal of his own self-respect that had been fraudulently engineered from the very beginning: “that pretense to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech: with behind it a sense that the ‘promises’ on which the Arabs worked were worth what their armed strength would be when the moment of fulfillment came. We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths at [Tafileh]. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstances, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.”6 There was more to mention: certainly the deaths of his two brothers, but the deadness in his soul could but conjure a silent cry that only the dead could hear.
Hogarth remained quiet, stunned and deeply moved. He took Lawrence by the arm and led him, carefully, to breakfast with Clayton. Slowly, unbeknownst to the protagonists, Lawrence was coming under the spell of an unknown illness that would take generations to recognize and many battles to acknowledge: post-traumatic stress disorder. Lawrence would struggle the rest of his life, single-handedly and alone, against this silent demon.
LAWRENCE’S GRIEF OPENS a further window onto an understanding of tactical leadership. He seems to assert that leadership is a fundamental human need: that every human being possesses both a desire to lead and a desire to follow, but these desires are never in balance. In fact, on balance most humans desire to follow. The Confucian project, for instance, was an effort to establish in the East a doctrine of followership as a way to order a just society. The West took a different path. Here the idea of heroic leadership came to reside at the center of Western culture, and the myth of the warrior king became its exemplar. In literature, the epic of Homer’s Iliad and its two heroes, Achilles and Hector, express the heroic paradigm better than any other work, with this style of leadership dominating Western culture to this day. Essentially, the heroic leader is a man of quality whose worth and worthiness are reflected in his personal honor and reputation: a man of low honor has little worthiness, small esteem, no reputation. The hero is a physically strong man, for a weak man is an unworthy man. The heroic leader manifests all the exterior qualities that enable the force of his physical presence, and this presence represents his personal core identity, which he projects vigorously among his followers and protects with utmost savagery. He has little time for self-reflection, since reflex and passion dominate his action. Indeed, long reflection is counterproductive when immediate action dominates the idea of tactics. The projection of his identity as a kind of physical magnetism becomes registered among his followers as the leader’s charisma. This, of course, has significant implications on a battlefield, and the premium leaders must pay is denominated in courage, valor, bravery, and, after the rise of Christianity, lip-service virtues like chivalry, fairness, and moderation. Self-identity through reputation thus serves a core human need. As followers, our identification with the leader serves the same psychological need and so completes an essential symmetry.
But there is an alternative to the heroic leader, which could be described as the autonomous leader who seeks to transcend the level of psychological need and gain personal autonomy from human desire. The idea is exemplified in the leadership of T. E. Lawrence. Again, literature offers a model in Homer’s Odyssey. Here Odysseus breaks fundamentally with the heroic tradition. The human qualities that Odysseus strives to foster are interior and intellectual. This is not to say that he eschews physical prowess. Instead, his actions are shaped by due consideration and self-reflection, trying to hold reflexive action at bay through careful design and planning. Only then is action appropriate. It should come as no surprise, then, that Lawrence would personally identify with Odysseus and spend over two years translating The Odyssey while on active duty with the RAF in India.
The autonomous leader asks the central question that the heroic leader chooses to ignore: If I am to lead others, how do I first lead myself? There is only one answer: He must overcome the leadership of his desires and passions and become independent—autonomous—of them. But practically, how does he accomplish this? For the heroic leader, there is no issue. He has been anointed to lead by right of succe
ssion or through some other social legitimation. The autonomous leader can overcome his desires only through learning and self-knowledge, hence the Socratic imperative “Know thyself.” But this is a struggle of a lifetime, and it is precisely in this struggle that character and competence are built. As Lawrence said to Liddell Hart in 1932: “I was not an instinctive soldier, automatic with intuition and happy ideas.… When I took a decision, or adopted an alternative, it was after studying (doing my best to study) every relevant—and many an irrelevant—factor. Geography, tribal structure, religion, social customs, language, appetites, standards—all were at my fingertips. The enemy I knew almost like my own side. I risked myself among them a hundred times, to learn.” The autonomous leader becomes an expert learner. The struggle to learn creates the dynamic tension between character and competence. And here character develops beyond the trivial sense of virtue as a checklist from a Boy Scout manual to mean strength of character and its natural corollary, strength of mind. Character is about respect and not reputation: it is society’s signal and lasting embrace to the members of its community. Character revolves around living in accordance with certain key ethical and moral values, but in the enduring paradox and tragedy of our existence, war subverts this centrality and places martial competence at its heart. Thus the military leader gains respect in direct proportion to his prowess.
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