“Impossible!” Young said with defiance. “The Camel Brigade will only hinder the baggage camels, which otherwise might enable the Deraa force to reach its goal. By trying to do two greedy things we shall end in doing neither.”
Lawrence pondered a long while, gazing steadily first at Young, then at Joyce, then back at Young, where his eyes finally rested. “Look: consider the whole deception element. First of all, Buxton will suddenly show up at Aqaba one fine day without any warning and quickly vanish on his way to Rumm. His force will be miles away from any Arab army unit and from any village. In the resultant vagueness the enemy intelligence can only conclude that the whole of the defunct camel brigade is now on Feisal’s front. Such an accession of shock-strength to Feisal will make the Turks very tender of the safety of their railway: while Buxton’s appearance at Kissir, apparently on preliminary reconnaissance, will only put credence into the wildest tales of our long-held intention shortly to attack Amman.” Joyce began to nod thoughtfully but said nothing for the moment.
Lawrence turned to Young and regarded the transporter with veiled irony for a long time, his head cocked slightly to the right. Here was the logistician heaven-sent by the British gods to help the Arabs move. Lawrence was contemptuous of his staff obstinacy and planning pettiness: “He, a new comer, said my problems were insoluble: but I had done such things casually, without half his ability and concentration; and knew they were not even difficult.” In Lawrence’s assessment, Young was a typical “loggie”: someone who “would never promise anything except that it could not be done, yet of course done it was, and two or three days before the necessary time.” This contretemps with Young over logistics would simmer slowly until the very end of the campaign and cause some resentment between him and Lawrence. Even more contentious was the raid on Deraa itself.
“As for Deraa we can dispense with logistics once we reach Bair,” Lawrence argued.
“I see. The camels must have grown more patient over the months,” Young replied with heavy irony.
“Not at all. The pasturage has been spectacular in the region and the beasts have grown quite fat,” Lawrence said casually. “In fact we can cut off the men’s food for the attack on Deraa and live off the land on the return journey.”
“Truly? The men will fight all the more, hungry in that desolate land,” responded Young with even more irony. “The ten days’ march home after the attacks will be quite a long fast indeed.” But Lawrence had no intention of returning all the way back to Aqaba. Then Young said, “Are you sure you have victory in mind and not defeat?”
Lawrence winced; this last cut deeply, but he maintained his cool. “If each man has a camel under him, and if we kill only six camels a day the whole force will feed abundantly.” Still, Young was dissatisfied. Then Lawrence began to point out that Young had estimated the fuel, ammo, and other matériel beyond the normal safe planning levels. He became angrier, overtaken by his planning fetishness.
Lawrence smiled now and began to pontificate on his guerrilla wisdom. He observed, “We’ve lived by our raggedness and beat the Turks by our uncertainty. Young, your scheme is faulty because it is precise.” Lawrence had sufficient “slop” in his plans to account for virtually any eventuality and was agile enough to turn the circumstances into golden opportunities. Only one element of precision was required: the timing. Lawrence would “march a camel column of one thousand men to Azrak where their concentration must be complete on September the thirteenth. On the sixteenth we would envelop Deraa, and cut its railways. Two days later we would fall back east of the Hejaz Railway and wait events with Allenby. As a reserve against accident we would purchase barley in Jebel Druze, and store it at Azrak.”2
Old Nuri Shaalan would provide reinforcement with a column of Ruwalla, along with contingents of Serdiyeh, Serahin, and Haurani peasants from the “Hollow Land” under Talal el Hareidhin. Young was now convinced that the whole plan was just a “deplorable adventure,” but Joyce was excited and ready for any adventure, deplorable or not. Lawrence reminded them that Dawnay had loaned them the services of Major W. F. Stirling. His skill and knowledge of horses would provide entrée into the tents of Feisal and his sheikhs.
Nuri Said was selected to command the regulars in the Deraa operation, and he picked his four hundred best men. Allenby had also showered the Arab regulars with the baubles of victory and honor, while Lawrence’s raiders merely wanted more gold. Pisani, the erstwhile French Lothario, had been awarded the Military Cross and now hungered after the Distinguished Service Order. He worked closely with Young to organize the four Schneider guns newly received from the departing Colonel Brémond.
The family spats were inevitable, but thanks to the professionalism of Young and especially Joyce, enough team cohesion was preserved to prevent a complete collapse of cooperation. Lawrence’s arrogance appeared high-handed, even by his own admission. It was merely a manifestation of his own self-confidence and the long erosion of tolerance that led to his apparent posturing. Even before the war, Lawrence was never one to suffer fools gladly.
WHILE THE DERAA expedition was preparing for its early September debut, Lawrence hastened down to Aqaba to greet Buxton and his Imperial Camel Brigade remnant. He would guide them to Rumm. The march was uneventful, and Lawrence found his charge an amusing chap. Buxton was an old Sudan hand; he spoke Arabic fluently and understood the culture. He was also a good leader. Stirling came along, as did Dr. Marshall, the physician. After leading Buxton to Rumm, Lawrence headed back to Aqaba to organize his bodyguard. El Zaagi was in charge of organizing the band, numbering again near sixty men—mostly Ageyli. He put the singers and bards on the wings so that the singing kept the march to a musical cadence. He was disappointed, though, that Lawrence refused to have a banner grace his column. They rode for Guweira, Lawrence atop the heroic Ghazala and Abdullah alongside. When Lawrence arrived, planes were circling to speed him on to Jefer, where Feisal was urgently waiting.
Even after the long summer’s rest, Lawrence had not completely regained his emotional stamina or, indeed, his former reckless courage. He wrote: “Death in the air would be a clean escape; yet I scarcely hoped it, not from fear, for I was too tired to be much afraid: nor from scruple, for our lives seemed to be absolutely our own, to keep or give away; but from habit, for lately I had risked myself only when it seemed profitable to our cause.” Lawrence witnessed the internal war between instinct and reason, the turmoil within his mind as strong as ever. “Instinct said ‘Die,’ but reason said that was only to cut the mind’s tether, and loose it into freedom: better to seek some mental death, some slow wasting of the brain to sink it below these puzzlements. An accident was meaner than deliberate fault. If I did not hesitate to risk my life, why fuss to dirty it? Yet life and honor seemed in different categories, not able to be sold one for another: and for honor, had I not lost that a year ago when I assured the Arabs that England kept her plighted word?” For over a year now, fate had tugged at that loose thread in Lawrence’s character. The sense of justice or “what’s right,” in Jonathan Shay’s phrasing, had snipped the integrity of Lawrence’s character, and the long process of psychological unraveling began, exposing the fundamental paradox of leader’s grief in modern combat: The longer a leader successfully leads, the more exposed to emotional and psychological corrosion become the foundations of his leadership, competence, and most especially his character.3
LAWRENCE ARRIVED AT Jefer on August 7. All the sheikhs were there in their finest robes, meeting with Feisal. At the great council, Feisal and Lawrence double-teamed to preach the prospective tribesmen to their revolutionary cause. The prince would conjure up the Arab history, tradition, and culture and work it before their eyes into a new amalgam of Arab nationhood. Against these ambitions, Feisal raised the specter of the Turk as evil incarnate and their true and sworn enemy. All through the discussions, Feisal the leader was made manifest for all to see and appreciate as he motivated the disparate Arabs toward a common and higher goal, Damascu
s and the Arab Revolt.
The great gathering of the tribes caused Lawrence again to confront his original sin, the guilt of deceiving the Arabs to their own cause. He continued the relentless and brutal self-recrimination. “It might have been heroic to have offered up my own life for a cause in which I could not believe: but it was a theft of souls to make others die in sincerity for my graven image. Because they accepted our message as truth, they were ready to be killed for it; a condition which made their acts more proper than glorious, a logical bastard fortitude, suitable to a profit-and-loss balance of conduct.” Lawrence had sought a semblance of redemption in his struggle for Arab nationhood, but the more he contemplated his role through the perspective of historical distance, the more it all seemed a kind of personal vanity: “The self-immolated victim took for his own the rare gift of sacrifice; and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich as this choosing voluntarily another’s evil to perfect the self. There was a hidden selfishness in it, as in all perfections.… To endure for another in simplicity gave a sense of greatness. There was nothing loftier than a cross, from which to contemplate the world. The pride and exhilaration of it were beyond conceit. Yet each cross, occupied, robbed the late-comers of all but the poor part of copying: and the meanest of things were those done by example. The virtue of sacrifice lay within the victim’s soul.”
All original sin was a conspiracy, and Lawrence was at the center of it: he played Adam to the British Eve. In his guilt, so he believed redemption was denied, because “honest redemption must have been free and child-minded.” When he set himself upon a cross of vanity, Lawrence denied a place of honor for a man worthy. His “thought-riddled” personal struggle increasingly set him apart from those he led. He wouldn’t dare share his thoughts, his agony, his grief, with them. His shame was not their shame, his guilt was not their guilt; better “to incur the double punishment of ignorance.” Drawing a deep, shuddering breath, he thought: “There seemed no straight walking for us leaders in this crooked lane of conduct, ring within ring of unknown, shamefaced motives cancelling or double-charging their precedents.” At some point between his arrival to the Hejaz and his conquest of Aqaba, Lawrence moved from an accessory to his own guilt to its main culprit: “I bitterly repented my entanglement in the movement, with a bitterness sufficient to corrode my inactive hours, but insufficient to make me cut myself clear of it. Hence the wobbling of my will, and endless, vapid complaining.”4
A DAY OR two later, Lawrence flew back to Guweira and slipped into Aqaba in the night to meet with Dawnay. They learned the next day of Buxton’s extraordinary success on Mudowwara. Dawnay then continued on to meet with Feisal to deliver a warning order from Allenby’s hand: Be cautious in the move to Damascus until we are on the proper side of the Jordan to link up. In that conversation, Feisal revealed to Dawnay a new vision of Arab desperation. Feisal said he would try to seize Damascus with or without British help: it would be the last real chance the Arabs would have for the rest of the year. If that attempt failed, then he would open negotiations with the Turks. Feisal had been negotiating with the Turks for months, through Jemal Pasha. Lawrence saw an opportunity here. Why not continue the negotiations and extend them into the anti-German cabal led by Mustafa Kemal? There was a certain paradox in Kemal’s nationalism that could be exploited. As a true Turk, he could not logically deny the Arab claims beyond the traditional Turkish borders. There were other Turkish nationalists, mostly of a secular bent, who argued that Turkey was putting religious artifacts—like Mecca—before strategy. As the negotiations continued, Jemal offered Feisal control of the Hejaz, then Syria was thrown in to sweeten the offer, and finally—and without authority—he offered Hussein the crown of Mecca.
The Turkish staff had cards of its own to play. Soon after the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian government, they released the contents of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This perhaps more than anything forced Feisal to consider independent action if Allenby’s coming offensive should fail. Of course, Lawrence had already forewarned Feisal of the existence of the treaty. He urged him to continue to press the fight, since force of arms would have greater merit in the end than words written on a scrap of paper. At around the same time, the War Cabinet offered that all Turkish territory seized by the Arabs should be theirs to keep. All this to-ing and fro-ing caused confusion and consternation among the Arabs. Old Nuri Shaalan asked Lawrence which of these pronouncements he should believe. Lawrence replied laconically, “The last in date.” After the recent British defeat at Es Salt, Jemal sent down to Feisal Emir Mohammed Said, brother of their old nemesis Abd el Kader. Feisal said he would be happy to accept the peace offer, if only Jemal Pasha would evacuate Amman and turn over the province to Arab safekeeping. Thinking he had scored a tremendous diplomatic coup, Said rushed back and was nearly killed for his efforts.
Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal, from the other side of the Turkish army, urged Feisal not to succumb to Jemal’s blandishments. Instead he offered the Arabs an alliance that would help rid them of the Germans once and for all. All the while, Lawrence had a sneaking suspicion that the British were about to spring a separate peace of their own on the Turks, siding with the conservative-religious element like Jemal rather than the nationalist-secular faction of Mustafa Kemal. The fact that Lawrence gathered this information from private channels only reinforced his sense of betrayal and injustice: “It was only one of the twenty times in which friends helped me more than did our Government: whose action and silence were at once an example, a spur and a license to me to do the like.”5
BY THE MIDDLE of August, Lawrence set out in a Rolls-Royce with Joyce to reconnoiter a secondary base should retreat from Azrak become necessary or the place be captured by the Turks. They chose Ammari. The reconnaissance also became a shakeout drive for the tenders and the armored cars, as they encountered virtually every sort of terrain and every imaginable mechanical difficulty. After traversing several hundred square miles of desert, they returned to the wells at Bair, where they found Buxton and his Imperial Camel Corps remnant resting triumphantly. Lawrence had to return Buxton back to Aqaba and thence to Allenby’s safekeeping. Meanwhile, he would help Buxton and his men water their camels from the forty-foot wells.
The valley was crawling with the English, and the nearby Howeitat stared at them, never before seeing so many of Lawrence’s kind in one place or even imagining so many existed. The tribesmen thought they were Lawrence’s own slaves. They were dressed all alike—uncomfortably for the desert in their shorts and boots and puttees. They ate meat from cans, uncooked and every day. They were all clean-shaven, indistinguishable, silent like automatons. To know one was to know no one, they were an irreducible manifold, a real army, and Lawrence was proud of them: “I was proud of my kind, for their dapper possession and the orderly busyness of their self-appointed labor. Beside them the Arabs looked strangers in Arabia.…”
It was now August 16, 1918, and Lawrence’s thirtieth birthday. The realization sent him again into a mood of deep grief and rambling self-reflection, surely one of the most unique self-revealing passages in all of military literature. The thought of pride moved him to consider the basis of reputation, and he began to wonder “if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.” If a fraud, Lawrence’s later denials would no longer have any credibility or authenticity. “Any protestations of the truth from me was called modesty, self-deprecation; and charming—for men were always fond to believe a romantic tale. It irritated me, this silly confusion of shyness, which was conduct, with modesty, which was a point of view. I was not modest, but ashamed of my awkwardness, of my physical envelop and of my solitary unlikeness which made me no companion but an acquaintance, complete, angular, uncomfortable, as a crystal.” Although fit to command, to lead, yet he felt himself ironically a misfit, something of an outcast: “With men I had a sense always of being out of depth. This led to elaboration—the vice of amateurs tentative in their arts. As my war was overthoug
ht, because I was not a soldier, so my activity was overwrought, because I was not a man of action. They were intensely conscious efforts, with my detached self always eyeing the performance from the wings of criticism.” Here Lawrence is perhaps overly critical. Modern war is a thinking man’s game, and he is judging himself by the long-irrelevant standard of the heroic leader.
Nonetheless, he speaks to the erosion of the integrity of his character and psyche brought on in part by the brutal operating environment: “To be added to this attitude were the cross-strains of hunger, fatigue, heat or cold and the beastliness of living among the Arabs. These made for abnormality. Instead of facts and figures, my notebooks were full of states of mind, the reveries and self-questioning induced or educed by our situations, expressed in abstract words to the dotted rhythm of the camels’ marching.” To the top of his list, though not mentioned, one must always add the corrosive fear that permeated every waking and sleeping moment. The constant dust of fear settled everywhere upon the psyche, grinding it down, wearing it away, so that one’s character was always struggling to rebuild itself out of ever-diminishing stores of courage.
The social nature of combat builds strong bonds of trust and affection that replenish the soldier’s courage when his own well has run dry. A man isolated from his comrades is a man, in truth, discouraged and disheartened. On his thirtieth birthday at the wells of Bair, Lawrence was at last confronting this truth as he struggled to explore and examine the deep sources of his own character. Lawrence’s introspection was a violation of every Victorian and Edwardian tenet of personal behavior and orthodoxy. Deep self-reflection was a dangerous path that took individuals into a dark realm of second-guessing and confusion. Better to use these energies in prayer and religious contemplation, letting God worry about matters belonging to the soul.
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