After the tactical briefing, matters turned to Nuri’s complaint about Auda, that he had contributed nothing all day long to his attack in the south. At that moment, as if on cue, Auda entered the tent and denied Nuri’s charge. Then Lawrence recalled the incident at Aba el Lissan, before Aqaba, and Auda’s reluctance to charge the Turks, and how Lawrence had had to shame the old warrior into the attack after a series of mischievous taunts. Feisal was a bit surprised to learn of the incident, and Auda was deeply wounded by the dredging up of this old news: “He swore vehemently that he had done his best today, only conditions were not favorable for tribal work: and, when I withstood him further, he went out of the tent, very bitter.” This rebuke seemed to mobilize Auda’s men, who captured two nearby outposts the next day. By this time the positions dominating Maan had been captured by the Arabs, giving them great freedom of action to rove around the entire town and prepare for the final assault.
Lawrence had been moving around the battlefield in a Ford, flitting from one position to the next. He observed Jaafar massing his artillery on Semna ridge to the southwest of Maan and watched with Nuri as his men charged the sheds of the railway station. When the artillery fire suddenly abated, Nuri sent Lawrence back to Pisani with an urgent request for more fire. When Lawrence drove up to the artillery position, he found the Frenchman “wringing his hands in despair, every round had been expended. He said he had implored Nuri not to attack at this moment of his penury.” As a consequence, the Turks counterattacked and winkled the Arabs out of their positions around the rail yard. Despite the initial setback, an important lesson was learned concerning the improving quality of the Arab regular forces. It was now apparent from the fight that the Arab infantry was becoming better than its Turkish counterpart, requiring less British stiffening. Tactically, it meant that the force would be more flexible in employment and require fewer leaders.
On the morning of April 18, Jaafar decided to pull back to the Semna ridge to rest and recoup his losses from the previous week of fighting. He then urged the garrison to surrender, when he discovered that the commander was an old military college friend. The friend protested, and in the meantime Jemal Pasha was able to reinforce the garrison with a pack train of food and ammunition from Amman. But the railway remained smashed for weeks to come. Lawrence, anxious that Dawnay was out alone fighting his first battle with mixed guerrilla and regular troops, left the front at Maan and drove down to link up with Dawnay and his southern column near Tell Shahm. Here Lawrence diplomatically offered his services as an interpreter, since Dawnay had no command of the Arab language.
Lawrence was amazed to find everything deployed as though Dawnay were in the midst of a staff college field exercise. Dawnay continued to outline the elaborate plan, something Lawrence had never felt necessary during his entire raiding experience. The plan limited the natural chaos of guerrilla operations and constrained the scope for seizing unplanned and unforeseen opportunities. Dawnay, great planner that he was, was operating from the regular, pattern-induced paradigm of the conventional fighter: it was all that he knew. Lawrence then asked Sherif Hazaa, the Arab adviser to Alan Dawnay, if he knew what was expected of him. He looked dumbly at Lawrence and after much eye blinking confessed that he had no watch with which to synchronize his movements with the evolutions of the plan. Lawrence handed him his own timepiece and then crept off under a rock for a few brief winks of sleep.
At dawn, everything went into motion with the precision of steel vault doors slamming shut, one after the other. The first two posts surrendered almost immediately. Lawrence rushed on in the third Rolls-Royce, now playing the role of assistant engineer to Captain Henry Hornby. The two watched Hazaa’s Arabs assault the last post as though on a “steeplechase” instead of attacking in a series of covered rushes. The exhausted Turks quickly threw in the towel after witnessing the élan of the Arab charge. The final act of the battle was the attack on the station itself. After an initial air strike coordinated by Dawnay’s plan, all the forces converged madly on the station house like iron filings to a magnet. Lawrence was one of the first to be drawn in, lifting the station bell as a worthy souvenir. Someone next copped the ticket punch, and last, Hornby grabbed the office stamp. All the while, the Turks looked on with chagrin and amazement as their prisoner status came to have less merit than these seemingly worthless trinkets of office. “A minute later, with a howl, the Bedouin were upon the maddest looting of their history. Two hundred rifles, eighty thousand rounds of ammunition, many bombs, much food and clothing were in the station, and everybody smashed and profited. An unlucky camel increased the confusion by firing one of the many Turkish trip-mines as it entered the yard. The explosion blew it arse over teakettle, and caused a panic.”4 While the Arabs were in their looting frenzy, the Egyptians found a food storehouse that they guarded as their own, causing consternation among Hazaa’s Arabs. Weapons were drawn, and Lawrence offered to mediate the dispute to prevent an unnecessary gunfight. It was finally agreed that the Egyptians could have first dibs on the food stores and then turn the loot over to the guerrillas. Lawrence’s role in mediation—“like the hypnotic influence of a lion-tamer”—may have saved several lives.
After the fall of Tell Shahm, the next station in line was Ramleh, but Dawnay’s complex plan had not allowed for this opportunity. Many of the Bedouin had already bolted after the looting, and only Hazaa’s men remained. Two armored cars were sent down to reconnoiter the station and found it abandoned. The place was turned over to Hazaa and his faithful Arabs for looting in recognition of their loyalty and fighting spirit. The rest of April 19 was spent tearing up the track toward Medina. The third day of the plan was devoted to the seizure of Mudowwara. This was just as problematic as Ramleh and for the same reason: not enough combat power available.
The hope appeared that perhaps the sudden rush of Arab success would stun the Turks into surrender. Though hope is seldom a method, it was the only plan available. On the morning of April 20, they set out in their vehicles toward the station, riding like Viking marauders through the sealike desert. As they stormed out of the east, the rising sun held them safely in its shadows until they were close enough to Mudowwara to see a long train huffing and puffing at the station. The smoking engine obscured most of the activity and left Lawrence and his party to wonder whether the place was being abandoned or reinforced. A few seconds later, their curiosity turned to consternation as a battery of Austrian mountain guns let loose with a barrage of high-explosive shells. With their question answered, the column swung on a wide arc out of range and proceeded to destroy as much of the track as possible, including the mining of the bridge Lawrence and Zaal had worked over the previous fall. The work ended the mission: eighty miles of line from Maan to Mudowwara was totally destroyed. From that moment forward, Medina was geographically and logistically isolated from the rest of the Turkish effort.
With the mission complete, Lawrence was about to leave for Aqaba and return to Allenby’s headquarters when he received a new officer. Major Hubert Young had been sent from Mesopotamia to reinforce the effort in Syria. He had complete mastery of the Arab language and was selected to mirror the work of Lawrence in the broadening scope of operations. He was immediately sent to work with Zeid and Nasir to cripple the railroad north of Maan. The entire rail network from Deraa down to Medina had become a vulnerability for the weakening Turkish presence in Arabia.
THE ONE NIGHTMARE that stalked Allenby’s waking dreams finally appeared on March 21, 1918. The Germans unleashed their great counteroffensive on the western front. Within a few days, the Allies lost a huge swath of territory in France and forced the War Cabinet to suspend all operations in the Middle East. Within two days of the assault, Allenby was ordered to swap out one of his British divisions with an Indian division and send it to France immediately. On April 9, the Germans launched a second great attack along the Lys River to broaden the scope of the offensive, making immediate and sustained progress. A week later, two more divisions were ta
ken from Allenby and prepared for movement to Europe. Although most of the British units were eventually replaced by Indian units from Mesopotamia or France, they lacked the combat experience unique to the operations in Palestine. Moreover, the new units had to be reintegrated, reorganized, and retrained for assimilation into the larger Egyptian Expeditionary Force under Allenby. The upshot of the German attack was to force Allenby to abandon all plans for the late spring, early summer, phases of the campaign. Allenby was thus limited for the time being to small tactical actions that might set the stage for a larger campaign in the near future.
The general thread in Allenby’s mind was to repeat the raid across the Jordan to feign a strike at the rail junction at Deraa and the seizure of Amman. Although the first raid was unsuccessful, it did divert significant attention and troops to that area. He was prepared to repeat the gambit, even with his limited resources, after a large emissary of Beni Sakhr arrived to offer a hand in the effort. While Lawrence was in Jerusalem visiting with Allenby, word was received that this second raid across the Jordan had failed. One reason for the failure was that the planning staff was incapable of coordinating the intricacies that Allenby demanded of the forces, especially in the joint arena of regular and irregular operations. With the departure of Guy Dawnay, architect of the Jerusalem plan, for Haig’s staff in France, Allenby had lost his best planner. Another reason was that the Turks had heavily reinforced the whole Trans-Jordan sector. The actions of Lawrence’s guerrillas, though largely unsuccessful at the tactical level, had finally convinced the Turks of the serious threat to the Amman area. From the Arab perspective, the British appeared fumbling in their efforts toward Amman, so much so that the Beni Sakhr considered withdrawing its support to Feisal’s efforts east of the Jordan.
On May 5, Lawrence met again with Allenby to discuss the general’s revised plans in light of the debacle in France. Insofar as the Arabs were concerned, it was Allenby’s intent to maintain Arab pressure upon the Turks around Maan. He offered as much support as he could spare, including for the first time the promise of continuous aerial bombardment against the Hejaz railway and against Amman. This greatly uplifted Lawrence’s spirit as an indication of the strength and commitment of Allenby’s continued support for the Arab cause. During afternoon tea, Allenby idly mentioned that the Imperial Camel Brigade operating in the Sinai would have to be disbanded because of the new manpower requirements. Unlike the Camel Corps manned mostly by Egyptians, the Camel Brigade was a mobile shock unit comprised of British and Australians mounted on the finest Sudanese camels. Lawrence casually asked, “What are you going to do with their camels?”
Allenby laughed and said, “I don’t know; why not ask ‘Q’?” “Q” was Sir Walter Campbell, Allenby’s quartermaster-general. After a bit, Lawrence excused himself and strolled across a rather dusty garden walk and found Q filling out march tables. He repeated his question, and Campbell said that the camels were being assigned to the divisional transport of the newly arriving Indian divisions. Lawrence directly requested two thousand of them. Without looking up from his work, Q offered that Lawrence was out of his mind, and he should go bother someone else with a similar impairment.
Lawrence “returned to Allenby and said aloud, before his party, that there were for disposal two thousand two hundred riding-camels, and thirteen hundred baggage camels. All were provisionally allotted to transport; but, of course, riding-camels were riding-camels. The staff whistled, and looked wise; as though they, too, doubted whether riding-camels could carry baggage. A technicality, even a sham one, might be helpful. Every British officer understood animals as a point of honor.”
That night, Allenby asked Sir Walter Campbell to dine with him, Lawrence, and the rest of the staff. Campbell sat at the general’s right hand and Lawrence sat at his left. As soup was being served, Allenby casually opened a general disquisition on the nature of camels. Sir Walter immediately took up the theme and mentioned the fortuitous acquisition of hundreds of baggage camels from the old Imperial Camel Brigade that brought the Indian divisions’ transport up to regulation strength. Allenby “cared nothing for strengths, the fetish of administrative branches.” He cared instead about results, howsoever obtained.
Allenby then turned to Lawrence with a knowing gleam in his eye and asked: “And what do you want them for?” Lawrence leapt at the bait and replied with panache, “To put a thousand men into Deraa any day you please.” The promise was shocking, and Lawrence meant every word of it, and by now Allenby readily believed him. He turned back to Sir Walter with a sad smile, paused, then said simply, “ ‘Q,’ you lose.” For Lawrence, Allenby’s boon was enormous: “It was an immense, regal gift; the gift of unlimited mobility. The Arabs could now win their war when and where they liked.”
The very next day, Lawrence was off early to give Feisal the astonishing news back at Aba el Lissan. Lawrence could hardly contain himself in Feisal’s tent after he arrived; he wanted desperately to spill the news but instead savored every second of his foreknowledge, like a parent about to spring a birthday surprise on a beloved child. He talked all around the subject, discussing “histories, tribes, migration, sentiments, the spring rains, pasture.…” Finally, Lawrence could no longer contain himself. He casually mentioned Allenby’s gift of hundreds of riding camels. Feisal looked at him as if struck dumb, amid a “toke” on his ever-present cigarette: the butt dangling from the prince’s lip, his mouth now wide-open in disbelief as he leaned and reached for Lawrence’s knee as though to catch his balance. Then he stood up instantly, the cigarette falling, spilling ashes on his beard, down his robes. He embraced Lawrence quickly, energetically, pushing him away almost immediately to look in his eyes. “How?” Feisal rasped.
After Lawrence recounted the whole story, Feisal called for his black slave, Hejris, saying, “Hurry, call them.”
“Who?” Hejris asked.
“Oh. Fahad, Abdullah el Feir, Auda, Motlog, Zaal …”
“And not Mirzuk?”
“Move!” Feisal shouted, and the black man disappeared.
Lawrence looked at Feisal with great affection and much satisfaction and said quietly, “It is nearly finished. Soon you can let me go.” But Feisal would not hear of it.
In an instant, numerous feet slapped in the dust outside the tent. There was a brief stirring as the sheikhs put on their “game faces” for the audience with Feisal and then swept into the tent. They each passed through with, “Please Allah, good?” and Feisal replied, “Praise Allah!”
When they were all settled in, Feisal at last made the announcement. There was utter astonishment. The old warriors struggled inwardly to control their joy, trying to maintain a certain suave disdain at the news, all the while eyeing Lawrence in estimation of his role in performing the miracle. When Feisal finished, Lawrence said expansively, “The bounty of Allenby.…”
Zaal was first to regain his composure: “Allah keep his life and yours.”
“We have been made victorious,” Lawrence said dramatically, and then left the tent with a flourish to tell Joyce of the news.5 As Lawrence retired, the entire tent erupted with elation. The leaders immediately began regaling one another with new promises of heroic deeds against the Turks and on behalf of their gracious benefactor, Allenby—Allah en Nebi, the Prophet of God.
Lawrence was now at the height of his personal cachet with Feisal, the tribesmen, and, for that matter, Allenby; the incandescence of his leadership never burned more brightly, shining upon the whole of the Arab Revolt. The dark tones of tribal culture created the conditions for this final fulmination. By now Lawrence was seen as a key benefactor, never mind that Allenby held the purse strings: it was Lawrence who delivered the goods. In a tribal culture, there was no government safety net, no social infrastructure, to fall back on in times of need. Self-reliance and the largesse of the tribal chief and one’s own familial generosity dominated the orbit of personal existence. In this milieu, Lawrence had learned his special existential role, and he played it
better than anyone else during the entire course of World War I. The enabling dimension of Lawrence’s leadership—whether as material provider or teacher—always formed the core of his success and the source of his personal satisfaction.
LAWRENCE FOUND THE excitement contagious. He and Joyce spun webs of strategic fantasy as they started to plumb the full operational significance of their newfound mobility. Of course they would have to get the camels to Aqaba, where they would fatten them up and wean them from the Egyptian barley. The disbandment of the Camel Brigade meant more labor available for the final push in the fall. The entire supply system in Arabia would have to be revamped to account for the new mobility. Young took over as Arab quartermaster. Feisal now had more leverage to ratchet up the grip of the revolt. All that was needed was the time to prepare everything for the final offensive. The Arabs about the plateau above Aqaba had to be protected from any stray Turkish attacks while they reconstituted and reorganized. This meant that Nasir would have to continue to apply the high heat around Maan and draw all attention there. The railroad would have to be the main carriage of the raider as it had been for the Turk. The kind of reorganization Lawrence had in mind was the most significant since January 1917, when Feisal moved from Yenbo to Wejh.
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