The column crouched behind great chunks of sandstone for eight hours until a number of patrols had passed by. Lawrence satisfied himself that they were going at intervals of two hours. At midday, while the Turks were having their siesta, Lawrence slipped down to the railway line, and, walking a short distance on the sleepers in his bare feet in order not to leave impressions on the ground which might be seen by the Turks, he picked out what he considered a proper spot for planting a charge. Whenever he merely wanted to derail the engine of a train he would use only a pound of blasting gelatin; when he wanted to blow it up he would use from forty to fifty pounds. On this occasion, in order that no one might be disappointed, he used slightly more than fifty pounds. It took him a little more than an hour to dig a hole between the sleepers, bury the explosive, and run a fine wire underneath the rail, over the embankment, and up the hillside.
Laying a mine is rather a long and tedious task. Lawrence first took off a top layer of railway ballast, which he placed in a bag that he carried under his cloak for that purpose. He next took out enough earth and rock to fill two five-gallon petrol tins. This he carried off to a distance of some fifty yards from the track and scattered along so that it would not be noticed by the Turkish patrols. After filling the cavity with his fifty-pound tulip-seed of dynamite, he put the surface layer of ballast back in place and leveled it off with his hand. As a last precaution he took a cameľs-hair brush, swept the ground smooth, and then, in order not to leave a footprint, walked backward down the bank for twenty yards and with the brush carefully removed all trace of his tracks. He buried the wire for a distance of two hundred yards up the side of the hill and then calmly sat down under a bush, right out in the open, and waited as nonchalantly as though tending a flock of sheep. When the first trains came along the guards stationed on top of the cars and in front of the engine, with their rifles loaded, saw nothing more extraordinary than a lone Bedouin sitting on the hillside with a shepherd’s staff in his hand. Lawrence allowed the front wheels of the engine to pass over the mine, and then, as his column lay there half paralyzed behind the boulders, he sent the current into the gelatin. It exploded with a roar like the falling of a six-story building. An enormous black cloud of smoke and dust went up. With a clanking and clattering of iron the engine rose from the track. It broke squarely in two. The boiler exploded, and chunks of iron and steel showered the country for a radius of three hundred yards. Numerous bits of boiler-plate missed Lawrence by inches.
Instead of provisions, this train carried some four hundred Turkish soldiers on their way to the relief of Medina. They swarmed out of the coaches and started in a menacing manner toward Lawrence. All this time the Bedouins, lining the tops of the hills, were popping at the Turks. Evidently one Turkish officer suspected that the lone Arab was the mysterious Englishman for whom rewards up to fifty thousand pounds had been offered. He shouted something, and the men, instead of shooting, ran toward Lawrence with the evident intention of taking him prisoner; but before they had advanced six paces Lawrence whipped out his long-barreled Colt from the folds of his aba and used it so effectively that they turned and fled. He always carried a heavy American frontier-model weapon. Although very few persons ever actually saw him, it was well known among the British officers that he spent many hours at target-practice, with the result that he had made himself an expert shot.
Many of the Turks dodged behind the embankment and began shooting through the carriage-wheels; but Lawrence, in anticipation of this, had posted two Lewis machine-guns just around a curve in the track, where they covered the opposite side of the railway embankment behind which the Turks had taken refuge. The gun-crews opened fire, and before the Turks knew what had happened their line was raked from end to end and every man behind the embankment either killed or wounded. The rest of the Turks who had remained on the train fled panic-stricken in all directions.
The Arabs, who were crouching behind the rocks popping away with their rifles, charged down, tore open the carriages, and tossed out everything on board that was not nailed down. The loot consisted of sacks of Turkish silver coin and paper currency and many beautiful draperies which the Turks had taken from the private houses of wealthy Arabs in Medina. The Bedouins piled all the loot along the embankment, and with shouts of glee commenced dividing it among themselves, while Lawrence signed the duplicate way-bills and playfully returned one copy to a wounded Turkish guard whom he intended to leave behind. They were just like children around a Christmas tree. Occasionally two men would want the same silk Kermani rug and begin fighting over it. When that happened Lawrence would step between them and turn the rug over to some third man.
Early in September, accompanied by two sheiks of the Ageilat Beni Atiyah from Mudowarrah, Lawrence left Akaba and trekked up to the multicolored sandstone cliff country which the tribesmen called Rum. In less than a week he had been joined by a force of 116 Toweiha, Zuwida, Darausha, Dhuman-iyah, Togatga, Zelebani, and Howeitat.
The appointed rendezvous was a small railway bridge near Kilo 587 south of Damascus. Here Lawrence buried his usual bit of tulip-seed between the rails, and stationed Stokes and Lewis guns at vantage-points three hundred yards or so distant. The following afternoon a Turk patrol spotted them. An hour later a party of forty mounted Turks put out from the fort at Haret Ammar to attack the minelaying party from the south. Another party of over a hundred set forth to outflank Lawrence from the north, but he decided to take a chance and hold his ground. A little later a train with two engines and two box-cars moved slowly up from Haret Ammar, machine-guns and rifles spitting lead from the roofs and from loopholes in the cars as the train advanced. As it passed, Lawrence touched his electric switch and exploded a mine directly under the second engine. The jar was sufficient to derail the first, demolish the boiler, as well as smash the cab and tender of the second, up-end the first box-car, and derail the second. While the Arabs swarmed around looting the wrecked train, Lawrence fired a box of guncotton under the front engine, completing its destruction. The boxcars were full of valuable baggage, and the Arabs went wild with joy. In all, seventy Turks were killed, ninety taken prisoner, and an Austrian lieutenant and thirteen Austrian and German sergeants blown up.
Every fourth or fifth man of the famous fighting Howeitat tribe is a sheik. Naturally the head sheik has but little power. Frequently these men would accompany Lawrence on a raid. On one such expedition to the railway near Biresh-Shediyah he had to adjudicate for them in twelve cases of assault with weapons, four camel-thefts, one marriage settlement, fourteen feuds, a bewitchment, and two cases of evil eye. He settled the bewitchment affair by counter-bewitching the hapless defendant. The evil eye cases he cleverly adjusted by sending the culprits away.
On still another occasion, during the first week of the following October, Lawrence was sitting out in the open near Kilo 500. His Bedouin followers were concealed behind him in the broom-brush. Along came a heavy train with twelve coaches. The explosion following the turning on of the electric current shattered the fire-box of the locomotive, burst many of the tubes, hurled the cylinders into the air, completely cleaned out the cab, including the engineer and fireman, warped the frame of the engine, bent the two rear driving-wheels, and broke their axles. When Lawrence put in his official report on this raid he humorously added a postscript to the effect that the locomotive was “beyond repair.” The tender and first coach were also demolished. Mazmi Bey, a general of the Turkish General Staff who happened to be on board, fired two shots out of the window of his private car with his Mauser pistol, which then evidently jammed. Although it appeared advisable for him to take to the camels and the distant hills, Lawrence and his band swooped down on the train, captured eight coaches, killed twenty Turks, and carried off seventy tons of food-stuffs without suffering any losses.
His only European companion on some of his wildest train-blowing parties was a daring Australian machine-gunner, Sergeant Yells by name. He was a glutton for excitement and a tiger in a fight. On one occasion,
when out with a raiding-party of Abu Tayi, Yells accounted for between thirty and forty Turks with his Lewis gun. When the loot was divided among the Bedouins, Yells, in true Australian fashion, insisted on having his share. So Lawrence handed him a Persian carpet and a fancy Turkish cavalry sword.
Shereefs Ali and Abdullah also played an important part in the raids on the Hedjaz Railway and in the capture of great convoys of Turkish camels near Medina. In 1917 Lawrence and his associates, in coöperation with Feisal, Ali, Abdullah, and Zeid, blew up twenty-five Turkish trains, tore up fifteen thousand rails, and destroyed fifty-seven bridges and culverts. During the eighteen months that he led the Arabs, they dynamited seventy-nine trains and bridges! It is a remarkable fact that he participated in only one such expedition that turned out unsatisfactorily. General Allenby, in one of his reports, said that Colonel Lawrence had made train-wrecking the national sport of Arabia!
Later in the campaign, near Deraa, the most important railway-junction south of Damascus, Lawrence touched off one of his tulips under the driving-wheels of a particularly long and heavily armed train. It turned out that Djemal Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish armies, was on board with nearly a thousand troops. Djemal hopped out of his saloon and, followed by all his staff, jumped into a ditch.
Lawrence had less than sixty Bedouins with him, but all were members of his personal body-guard and famous fighters. In spite of the overwhelming odds, the young Englishman and his Arabs fought a pitched battle in which 125 Turks were killed and Lawrence lost a third of his own force. The remainder of the Turks finally rallied around their commander-in-chief, and Lawrence and his Arabs had to show their heels.
At every station along the Hedjaz-Pilgrim Railway were one or two bells which the Turkish officials rang as a warning to passengers when the train was ready to start. Nearly all of them now decorate the homes of Lawrence’s friends. Along with them are a dozen or more Turkish mile-posts and the number-plates from half the engines which formerly hauled trains over the line from Damascus to Medina. Lawrence and his associates collected these in order to confirm their victories. While in Arabia, I often heard the half-jocular, half-serious remark that Lawrence would capture a Turkish post merely for the sake of adding another bell to his collection; and it was no uncommon thing to see Lawrence, or one of his officers, walking stealthily along the railway embankment, between patrols, searching for the iron post marking Kilo 1000 south of Damascus. Once found, they would cut it off with a tulip-bud—a stick of dynamite. When not engaged in a major movement against the Turks or in mobilizing the Bedouins, Lawrence usually spent his time blowing up trains and demolishing track.
So famous did this young archæologist become throughout the Near East as a dynamiter of bridges and trains that after the final defeat of the Turkish armies, when word reached Cairo that Lawrence would soon be passing through Egypt en route to Paris, General Watson, G. O. C. of troops, jocularly announced that he was going to detail a special detachment to guard Kasr el Nil, the Brooklyn Bridge of Egypt, which crosses the Nile from Cairo to the residential suburb of Gazireh.
It had been rumored that Lawrence was dissatisfied at having finished up the campaign with the odd number of seventy-nine mine-laying parties to his credit. So the story spread up and down along the route of the Milk and Honey Railway between Egypt and Palestine that he proposed to make it an even eighty and wind up his career as a dynamiter in an appropriate manner by planting a few farewell tulips under the Kasr el Nil, just outside the door of the British military headquarters.
CHAPTER XII
DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR
WHILE Lawrence was traveling from sheik to sheik and from shereef to shereef, urging them, with the eloquence of all the desert dialects at his command, to join in the campaign against the Turks, squadrons of German aëroplanes were swarming down from Constantinople in a winged attempt to frighten the Arabian army with their strange devil-birds. But the Arabs refused to be intimidated. Instead, they insisted that their resourceful British leader should get them some “fighting swallows” too.
Not long after a particularly obnoxious German air raid over Akaba, a royal courier galloped up to Lawrence’s tent on his racing dromedary. Without even waiting for his mount to kneel, he slid off the camel’s hump and delivered a scroll on which was inscribed the following:
O faithful one! Thy Government hath aëroplanes as the locusts. By the Grace of Allah I implore thee to ask thy King to despatch us a dozen or so.
HUSSEIN.
The people of Arabia are exceedingly ornate and poetical in expressing themselves. They swear by the splendor of light and the silence of night and love to talk in imagery as rich as the colors in their Turkoman prayer-rugs.
An American typewriting concern startled some people by advertising that more people use the Arabic alphabet than use either Roman or Chinese characters. They are very proud of their language and call it the language of the angels; they believe it is spoken in heaven. It is one of the most difficult languages in the world to master. According to our way of thinking the Arabs begin at the end of a sentence and write backward. They have 450 words meaning “line,” 822 words meaning “camel,” and 1087 words meaning “sword.” Their language is full of color. They call a hobo “a son of the road,” and a jackal “a son of howling.” Arab despatch writers penned their accounts in picturesque vein. “The fighting was worth seeing,” wrote Emir Abdullah to Colonel Lawrence. “The armed locomotives were escaping with the coaches of the train like a serpent beaten on the head.”
Inspired by a squadron of antiquated bombing and reconnaissance planes which Lawrence had brought down from Egypt, the Arabs won an important victory over the Turks in the desert just south of the Dead Sea. Thereupon the commander of the Arabian army sent this message to King George:
To His Majesty the King of England.
Our victorious troops have captured one of the enemy’s divisions near Tafileh. The truth follows by post.
FEISAL.
Another Arab chieftain in writing an account of an engagement said:
I sallied forth with my people, drinkers of the milk of war. The enemy advanced to meet us, but Allah was not with them.
During the war the British Government ran telephone and telegraph wires from Jeddah on the Red Sea to the king’s palace in the Forbidden City. The lines were strung by Mohammedans from Egypt, not by Christians. In spite of his abhorrence of all modern inventions, the king permitted the installation merely because he realized the urgent importance of being able to keep in touch with his Allies. As he insisted on living in the Forbidden City, the telephone and telegraph were a military necessity. There are about twenty branch ’phones on this official telephone system. One day a British general telephoned to his Majesty from Jeddah to discuss some urgent military and political question with him. In the middle of the conversation the king overheard other voices on the line and shouted angrily down the wire to the exchange: “I command thee to cut off every telephone in the Hedjaz for one hour! It is I, the king, who speaks.” And so it came to pass that the entire Arabian telephone system was tied up by a royal command. If you ever happen to be in Arabia and want to telephone to King Hussein, “Calif of Islam and commander of the Faithful,” all you have to do is to ask Central to give you “Mecca Number One.”
Shortly after the capture of Jeddah, Lawrence, in company with Colonel C. E. Wilson, the governor of Port Sudan, Mr. Ronald Storrs, and Emir Abdullah, for their amusement, made the Turkish band which they had captured a few days before play “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” “The Hymn of Hate,” and other German songs. The king happened to ring up in the middle of the concert. Hearing the medley of discord he requested that the receiver be left down, and for half an hour he sat in his palace in Mecca chuckling with glee while the band did its worst.
The British aviators who came down to Arabia not only had to wear Arab head-dress, but they had to fly at a considerable height to avoid being shot at by the Be
douins, who have an irresistible desire to shoot anything that is moving fast. They peppered an armored car on one occasion and then sent around profuse apologies. They admitted they knew it was a friendly machine but said it was going so fast they simply could not resist the temptation to see if they could hit it.
Colonel Lawrence and his associates introduced the first motor-cars into Holy Arabia, and Emir Feisal used a one-ton truck as his royal limousine. I went with him on one of his journeys from Akaba to the front line outposts at Waheida in the desert, north of the Turkish stronghold at Maan on the Hedjaz Railway. We camped for the day on the summit of a high hill amid the ruins of an old Turkish fortress. That noon Feisal gave a dinner in our honor. We sat around on empty boxes instead of squatting on the ground Arab fashion, and a table was improvised for our special benefit. The others present were General Nuri Pasha, Malud Bey, and old Auda Abu Tayi. Before the meal they served us with cups of sweetened tea. Then for dinner a great plate of rice crowned with chunks of lamb and goat was placed in the center of the table. Besides this there was another dish of rice mixed with pieces of meat. Beans with tomato sauce, lentils and peas, pomegranates, dried dates and figs, and a sort of candy made from sesame seed and sugar, resembling raw asbestos, heaped the groaning banquet board. For dessert we were to have had a tin of California pears; they had been sent down from Egypt as a gift for the Emir. Old Auda Abu Tayi had never seen such delicious-looking pears in his life, and the temptation to sample them so sorely tried his patience that he was unable to await the end of the meal. Disregarding the food before him, and throwing formality to the winds, he attacked them at once and devoured all of them before the rest of us were through with the first course! At the end of the meal small cups of coffee flavored with cardamom, an Indian seed with a minty taste, were served to us, and a bowl of water was solemnly passed around in order that we might remove remnants of gravy still lingering in our beards. Then the emir’s Abyssinian slaves brought cigarettes, and we strolled out with our field-glasses to watch the battle in progress a few miles distant in the hollow of the land around Maan.
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