Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  Yet Lawrence could not help being “very conscious of the bundled powers and entities within me; it was their character which hid. There was my craving to be liked—so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying.…”6 Lawrence was a deeply lonely man who wanted to be liked. This introduced another paradox into his personal calculus: leaders must always act in ways that lead directly to being disliked, and often hated and despised.

  The thirst for affection, perhaps rooted in some deep psychological Olduvai Gorge of his familial past, had within it its own riddle: “The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat: perhaps because one such terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact: or because I so reverenced my wits and despised my body that I would not be beholden to the second for the life of the first.… To put a hand on a living thing was defilement; and it made me tremble if they touched me or took too quick an interest in me. This was an atomic repulsion, like the intact course of a snowflake. The opposite would have been my choice if my head had not been tyrannous. I had a longing for the absolutism of women and animals and lamented myself most when I saw a soldier with a girl, or man fondling a dog, because my wish was to be as superficial, as perfected; and my jailer held me back.”7 Under our modern science of psychiatry, Lawrence’s expression of anguish might be assessed as some syndrome along the autism spectrum. But such speculation, perhaps insightful, offers little help to Lawrence after the fact. The disconnection with the other left him with no social compass, and much of this was of his own doing, whether wholly conscious and deliberate or not. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Lawrence saw the social plane of his existence. Was it no wonder, then, that he should lead among men alien to that existence? Impervious to the kind of manipulation that he had evolved among his native Englishmen?

  A kind of deep intellectual boredom drove Lawrence to flit from one notion to another and to find the challenge of action a refuge for his turbulent mind: “True there lurked always that Will uneasily waiting to burst out. My brain was sudden and silent as a wild cat.… When a thing was in my reach, I no longer wanted it; my delight lay in the desire. Everything which my mind could consistently wish for was attainable, as with all the ambitions of all sane men, and when a desire gained head, I used to strive until I had just to open my hand and take it. Then I would turn away, content that it had been within my strength.… There was a special attraction in beginnings, which drove me into everlasting endeavor to free my personality from accretions and project it on fresh medium, that my curiosity to see its naked shadow might be fed.… I quickly out grew ideas. So I distrusted experts, who were often intelligences confined within high walls, knowing indeed every paving-stone of their prison courts: while I might know from what quarry the stones were hewn and what wages the mason earned. I gainsaid them out of carelessness, for I had found materials always apt to serve a purpose, and Will a sure guide to some one of the many roads leading from purpose to achievement. There was no flesh.” Reminiscent of John Cardinal Newman, Lawrence had a sharp mind that was like a razor, often mining the stony rock of irresolvable ideas, coming close to bending and breaking, dulling its fine edge—or even worse: “It was only weakness which delayed me from mind-suicide, some slow task to choke at length this furnace in my brain.”

  Then Lawrence makes a remarkable revelation in view of his dominant role as a leader: “Self-seeking ambition visited me, but did not stay, since my critical self would make me fastidiously reject their fruits. Always I grew to dominate those things into which I drifted, but in none of them did I voluntarily engage. Indeed, I saw myself a danger to ordinary men, with such capacity yawing rudderless to their disposal.” Yet still he “followed and did not institute; indeed, had no desire even to follow.… I had developed ideas of other men, and helped them, but had never created a thing of my own, since I could not approve creation. When other men created, I would serve and patch to make it as good as might be; for, if it were sinful to create, it must be sin and shame added to have created one-eyed or halt.”

  For Lawrence, the leader’s grief was real and always stalked among the shadows of his dancing mind. And the shadows were as multivaried as life itself: all uniformly dark, hiding the shadow caster himself. The desire to serve others seemed the only dominant light capable of dispelling the darkened and turmoiled regions of his soul. “Always in working I had tried to serve, for the scrutiny of leading was too prominent. [While] subjection to order[s] achieved economy of thought, the painful, and was a cold storage for character and Will, leading painlessly to the oblivion of activity. It was part of my failure never to have found a chief to use me.… Instead of this, they gave me license, which I abused in insipid indulgence. Every orchard fit to rob must have a guardian, dogs, a high wall, barbed wire.”

  The assault on the very citadel of his moral and psychological existence was relentless and sapped every potential weakness. Even “the hearing [of] other people praised made me despair jealously of myself, for I took it as face value; whereas, had they spoken ten times as well of me, I would have discounted it to nothing. I was a standing court martial on myself, inevitably, because to me the inner springs of action were bare with the knowledge of exploited chance.… It was a revenge of my trained historical faculty upon the existence of public judgment, the lowest common denominator to those who knew, but from which there was no appeal because the world was wide.” In the end, Lawrence’s public life was left to the whims and vagaries of history, the historian, and historical judgment. The historical Lawrence would always be a mere pale shadow of the living Lawrence, and it seemed as though he lived for its deliverance. In the long summer of disquiet, Lawrence had found his own true self, the reflected face of many battles. And it was a troublesome reflection: “Indeed, the truth was I did not like the ‘myself’ I could see and hear.”8

  AROUND THIS SAME time, Major Stirling arrived to meet Lawrence. His initial impressions of the leader were rather different from Lawrence’s internal ecstasy of self-scrutiny. He found him “sitting in his tent on a beautiful Persian rug looted from some unfortunate Turkish train. He was dressed, as usual, in the most immaculate white robes with the golden dagger of Mecca in his girdle. Outside lolled some of his body-guard cleaning their rifles and crooning softly to themselves and undoubtedly enjoying the quiet contemplation of some particularly devilish bit of work which they had [recently] perpetrated. They were a remarkably interesting collection, numbering just under a hundred. Most of them belonged to the Ageyl and were hired soldiers by profession. Not one of them but was famed for some daring deed, and for hard living, hard riding and hard swearing, they were the pick of Arabia. This bodyguard was a very necessary precaution, for there was a price of £20,000 on Lawrence’s head, and the Arabs are a treacherous folk—unless they are your sworn and paid men. Any one of his bodyguard, however, would have cheerfully died for Lawrence.”

  The one question that persisted in Stirling’s mind, however, was the crucial and fundamental one of leadership: “What was it that enabled Lawrence to seize and hold the imagination of the Arabs? … The Arabs are notable individualists, intractable to a degree and without any sense of discipline, and yet it was sufficient for almost any of us to say that [when] Lawrence wanted something done—it was done. How did he gain this power? The answer may partly be that he represented the heart of the Arab movement, and the Arabs realized that he had vitalized their cause; that he could do everything and endure everything just a little better than the Arabs themselves; that, by his investment with the gold dagger of Mecca, he ranked with Ashraf or the descendants of the Prophet, and the Emir Feisal treated him as a brother, as an equal; that he seemed to possess unlimited gold—for the average Arab is the most venal of all people. But chiefly, I think we must look for the answer in Lawrence’s uncanny ability to sense the feelings of any group of men in whose company he found himself; his po
wer to probe behind their minds and to uncover the well-springs of their actions.” The force of Lawrence to plumb the depths of his own soul gave him the profound sensitivity and empathy to gaze behind the Bedouin mask of cultural inscrutability: he saw them much as he saw himself.

  Stirling recounts another illustrative episode. When Buxton had arrived at Aqaba with the Imperial Camel Brigade task force after their 162-mile trek from the Suez Canal, Lawrence delivered a speech to Buxton’s men who had gathered. Lawrence was about to lead them to Jefer and Feisal’s camp. According to Stirling, “After supper Lawrence had the men collected round a large central blaze and gave them the straightest talk I have ever heard. He explained the general situation to them, told them that he was going to take them through a part of Arabia where no white man had ever set foot and where the Arab sub-tribes were none too friendly, that there was no need to worry about the Turks but every need to worry about our allies the Bedouin. They were mistrustful folk, he said, and would most certainly think that we had come to take their grazing-grounds. The essential thing was to avoid any cause of friction. If any were offended or insulted he begged of them to turn the other cheek—both because they were better educated and therefore less prejudiced and also because they were so few. The men were delighted and retired for the night, thinking that they were about to embark on the greatest rag in the history of war—as perhaps they were!”

  ON AUGUST 20, Lawrence, his men, and Buxton’s Camel Brigade task force reached the key bridge at Muaggar fifteen miles southeast of Amman. As they approached their target, the force was suddenly spotted by a low-flying Turkish biplane. Lawrence was faced with an immediate decision as to whether he should continue on with the mission and risk a severe repulse at the hands of an alerted enemy or wave off the strike altogether. To the great disappointment of Buxton, Lawrence decided to forgo the opportunity and instead raise a deception demonstration among the local villagers to the illusive effect that his detachment was the advance guard of a major Arab offensive aimed at Amman and beyond. The deception created dark rumors that flew among the enemy like ravens. Under the new moon, the Turks began to see things they had only imagined before.

  Reluctantly, the large column peeled off from its target after dark and headed toward Azrak under a ghostly, glowing moon that seemed to awaken the denizens of the night. It became an eerie march as the sky thickened with clouds of large black birds that flitted among the night riders like the hovering dead. The gloom birds soared with batlike agility and stillness, unnerving the men with their silent persistence. The flitting soon became a luminous black vortex that began to frighten the men, Arab and English alike. In terror, the raiders began to fire their rifles into the rushing, fluttering clouds of shadows. The men fought through the whirling vapor another two miles, when suddenly they disappeared as though drawn into the moon itself. In the shooting, Lieutenant Rowan of Buxton’s troops was hit and killed by a stray bullet. He was buried in a small Mejaber graveyard with quiet dignity. Unnerved, the men stopped to camp by the beckoning wormwood bushes and rest in a sweet bed of fragrance. Lucky or not, the hail of birds likely kept Turkish aerial reconnaissance at bay that night.

  On August 22, they reached Azrak and dug a great pit where they buried hundreds of pounds of explosives for the forthcoming raid on Deraa. With the digging completed, the Englishmen of the Camel Brigade took the showers Lawrence and Buxton had long promised them. After three days of relaxation, the column headed out for Aqaba, marching under the cadenced cries of “Are we well fed?” to be met with a thundering response of “No!” and the rhythmic “Do we see life?” met with a loud “Yes!” Bair was reached soon after. Here Lawrence decided to part with Buxton and head on to Aba el Lissan in an armored car. Buxton and his Cameleers were now in friendly territory, and their long trek had made them master riders of the desert and prime guerrilla raiders. They would serve Allenby well in his forthcoming campaign.

  Lawrence reached the railroad station in Aba el Lissan on August 26. There he found Joyce, Young, and Dawnay about to leave. Joyce was readying to leave for Cairo for an unpleasant and long-delayed visit to the army dentist. While he went to relieve a toothache, Lawrence found himself with a new headache. Joyce’s ship had just brought the mail up from Jidda, and it carried a news item in King Hussein’s official gazette of Mecca concerning Jaafar Pasha. Hussein had learned that Jaafar had been awarded a military decoration by Allenby and in a fit of jealousy sought to undermine Jaafar’s position as head of the Arab Northern Army. He did so through a proclamation that declared there was no rank among the Arabs higher than captain. The obvious inference was that Jaafar, as commanding general, was somehow illegitimately in command. The insult did not go unnoticed among Jaafar and his officers—division, regimental, and battalion commanders and staff officers—who immediately rushed to Feisal and tendered their resignations. This caused an immediate command crisis among Feisal’s army and threatened the whole operation against Deraa, whereupon Lawrence interceded to remind Jaafar and his officers that the seventy-year-old Hussein was near barking mad and completely out of touch with reality. Feisal reminded them that he alone—not Hussein—had given the officers their commissions, and only he could accept their resignations—which he refused to do. Thus, it was Feisal who was the real target of the royal proclamation. The confusion stemmed from the fact that in late 1917, Feisal appointed Jaafar to head the Northern Army in Feisal’s stead, but Hussein had never sanctioned the promotion.

  With that argument in mind, Feisal telegraphed Hussein to explain his position, whereupon the old king replied with accusations, calling his son “traitor and outlaw.” Feisal responded immediately by relieving himself of the command of the Aqaba front. Hussein countered by giving the authority over to Zeid, Feisal’s half-brother, who refused the offer. Hussein’s telegraphic dialogue became suffused with a seething anger that essentially shut down the entire Aqaba front. Dawnay delayed his return trip to Allenby, sensing that the emerging catastrophe was about to erupt. He begged Lawrence for a solution, and his only reply was “that things hung on chance.” At this dark moment, Lawrence assessed the new situation and saw three courses of action that might resolve the crisis: “First, to get pressure put on King Hussein to withdraw his statement. The second, to carry on, ignoring it. The third, to set up Feisal in formal independence of his father. There were advocates of each course, amongst the English, as amongst the Arabs.”9 The first thing that Lawrence did was to persuade Dawnay to have Allenby lean on Hussein for a resolution, but given Hussein’s cunning and obstinacy, this could take weeks and Lawrence had no more than three days before the events would move forward and unleash the Deraa operation. Time was running out.

  As leader and commander, Lawrence himself was under the gun to react swiftly before the whole plan completely unraveled. The first thing Lawrence did—since it was imperative that he remain at Aba el Lissan to sort out the situation—was to report immediately to Nuri Shaalan. Without providing complete details, he said that he would be unable to attend the great gathering of tribes at Kaf, preparatory to the launching of the offensive. This was a serious compromise, as it could possibly sow doubt in Nuri’s mind about the commitment of Feisal’s forces to the pending operation. The best that Lawrence could do was to promise Nuri that he would meet him in Azrak around September 16 to begin the final stroke. Lawrence also had to get the massive supply caravans launched on their way to Azrak. Major Young dealt with the issue in his usual efficient fashion, and despite the crisis, the departure was only a day late.

  Just as the last supply columns of ammunition, fuel, food, and baggage trundled off to Azrak, the crisis turned more critical. Arab gunners, who heard rumors to the effect that Feisal had abandoned the army, decided to train their guns on the unit tents in apparent mutiny. Rasim, the artillery commander, had fortunately taken the precaution of stashing the breechblocks in his tent for safekeeping. Lawrence intervened and turned the emergency into his debut as a stand-up comedian, using t
he “high heads” as the brunt of his jokes and reminding them that victory lay in Damascus, not Mecca. If they were concerned about the whereabouts of Feisal, he would deliver the prince to them immediately and personally. Using clever stage management, Lawrence arranged to have his English driver, Bols, paint the Vauxhall sedan a bright green and pass through the gunners at the appropriate moment with Feisal and Zeid in the jump seat. The drive-by convinced the men of their indiscretion, and they readied themselves for the coming battle.

  The fundamental challenge for Lawrence was to get the forces at Aba el Lissan moving to Azrak on the appointed day. Here Stirling and Nuri Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, were instrumental in convincing the troops that it was in their own best interest to maintain their military bearing and cohesion. Lawrence reminded them that if they decided to abandon the Arab cause, they would be stranded in the middle of nowhere without proper food, supplies, and money. This side of the unemployment coin made them reconsider their situation and agree to remain under arms. Following all the negotiations, the Arabs were two days late in meeting their departure deadline.

  Lawrence’s final act was to reestablish Feisal in his rightful role as leader of the Arab Revolt. Feisal had to be in the fight, and after some persuasion he offered to come under Lawrence’s direction. Meanwhile, Allenby and Wilson were doing their level best to pressure Hussein into issuing a formal apology to Feisal. If these efforts faltered, Lawrence pledged Feisal full support of the British government as sovereign leader in his drive on Damascus. This was an action of last resort. Up until now, the Arab Revolt had presented a common unified front, despite King Hussein’s increasing obstinacy. To pluck Feisal from this common effort now would create serious, perhaps insurmountable, complications after the war. As the spat with Hussein continued, Lawrence took it upon himself to decode and translate the king’s missives in less abusive terms, somewhat defusing the dialogue. “Finally, there came a long message, the first half a lame apology and withdrawal of the mischievous proclamation, the second half a repetition of the offense in a new form. I suppressed the tail, and took the head[ing] marked ‘very urgent’ to Feisal’s tent, where we sat in the full circle of his staff officers.” Lawrence proffered the cable to Feisal’s secretary, who reworked the dispatch into proper form, and when it was ready he handed it to the prince, his hand shaking noticeably. There was now great tension settling upon them. Feisal sat quite still, without his customary cigarette, looking downcast but expectant. All eyes clicked in unison as the entourage turned nervously to look at Feisal. As he read the message, he became “astonished, and gazed wonderingly at me, for the meek words were unlike his father’s querulous obstinacy. Then he pulled himself together, read the apology aloud, and at the end said thrillingly, ‘The telegraph has saved all our honor.’ ” There was an audible gasp, which turned immediately into a cry of jubilation. In the tumult, Feisal whispered coyly into Lawrence’s ear, “I mean the honor of nearly all of us.”