The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  Learning Arabic, he took to quizzing members of the local work crew on their family histories, on the region’s complex clan and tribal affiliations, and often visited the laborers in their homes to glimpse their lives up close. To the degree that these workmen had dealt with Westerners before, it had been in the master-servant form; to meet someone who took a genuine interest in their culture, joined to Lawrence’s very un-Western tolerance for hardship and hard work, drew them to the young Briton as a kindred spirit. “The foreigners come out here always to teach,” he wrote his parents from Carchemish, “whereas they had much better learn.”

  The dig in northern Syria, originally funded for one year, stretched into four. He wrote a friend in 1913, extolling his comfortable life in Carchemish, that he intended to remain as long as the funding lasted and then go on to “another and another nice thing.” That plan abruptly ended with the onset of World War I in August 1914, and Lawrence, back in England on leave, was destined never to see Carchemish again.

  From his time in Syria, Lawrence had developed a clear, if simplistic, view of the Ottoman Empire—admiration for the free-spirited Arab, disgust at the corruption and inefficiency of their Turkish overseers—and looked forward to the day when the Ottoman “yoke” might be cast aside. That opportunity, and the chance for Lawrence to play a role, arrived when Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Because of his experience in the region, Lawrence was dispatched to Egypt, the British base of operations for the upcoming campaign against the Turks, as a second lieutenant in military intelligence.

  Despite the fact that he and other members of the intelligence branch urged that Britain forge alliances with Arab groups ready to revolt against the Turks, the generals in Cairo seemed intent on fighting the same conventional frontal assault war that had already proved so disastrous in Europe. The most immediate result was the Gallipoli fiasco of 1915, in which the British Commonwealth suffered nearly a quarter-million casualties before finally conceding failure. Making it all the more painful for the deskbound Lawrence was the death in quick succession of two of his brothers on the western front. “They were both younger than I am,” he wrote a friend, “and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo.”

  It wasn’t until October 1916, two years after his arrival in Egypt, that Lawrence would find himself catapulted to his destiny.

  To approach the Arabian Peninsula by sea is to invite one of the more unsettling of natural phenomena, that moment when the sea-cooled air abruptly collides with that coming off the desert, when the temperature can jump by 20, even 30, degrees in a matter of seconds. Probably no one described this better than T. E. Lawrence, who, when recounting his approach to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah on the morning of October 16, 1916, wrote, “The heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.”

  His presence there had come about almost by chance. Four months earlier, and after protracted secret negotiations with British authorities in Cairo, Emir Hussein, ruler of the Hejaz region of central Arabia, had launched an Arab revolt against the Turks. Initially matters had gone well. Catching the Turks by surprise, Hussein’s rebels seized the holy city of Mecca along with Jeddah, but there the rebellion had foundered. By October, the Turks remained in firm control of the Arabian interior, including the city of Medina, and appeared poised to crush the rebels. When Lawrence learned that a friend in Cairo was being dispatched to Arabia to gauge the crisis, he arranged a temporary leave from his desk job to tag along.

  Over the course of that 10-day visit, Lawrence managed to fully insinuate himself in the Arab rebel cause, and to win the confidence of Hussein’s chief battlefield commander, his third son, Faisal. In short order, Lawrence was appointed the British Army’s temporary liaison to Faisal, a posting that soon became permanent.

  Having used his time in Carchemish to study the clan and tribal structure of Arab society, Lawrence intuitively grasped the delicate negotiating process necessary to win tribal leaders over to the rebel cause. What’s more, waging war in early-twentieth-century Arabia revolved around the same primal issues—where an army on the move might find water and forage for its animals—as the wars of fourteenth-century Europe that Lawrence had so thoroughly studied at Oxford. Very quickly, Faisal came to regard the young British officer as one of his most trusted advisers, as Lawrence, donning the robes of an Arab sheik, assumed a position of honor in tribal strategy sessions. With British naval help, the Arabs captured a succession of Turkish-held towns along the Red Sea coast, while Lawrence organized guerrilla raids against the inland Hejaz Railway.

  But Faisal’s young liaison officer also harbored a guilty secret. From his time in Cairo, Lawrence was aware of the extravagant promises the British government had made to Hussein in order to raise the Arab Revolt: full independence for virtually the entire Arab world. What Lawrence also knew was that just months after cementing that deal with Hussein, Britain had entered into a secret compact with its chief ally in the war, France. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the future independent Arab nation was to be relegated to the wastelands of Arabia, while all the regions of value—Iraq, greater Syria—were to be allocated to the imperial spheres of Britain and France. As Lawrence recruited ever more tribes to the cause of future Arab independence, he became increasingly conscience-stricken by the “dead letter” promises he was making, and finally reached a breaking point. His first act of sedition—and by most any standards, a treasonous one—was to inform Faisal of the existence of Sykes-Picot. His second would lead to the greatest triumph of his career: the capture of Aqaba.

  By the early spring of 1917, talk of a joint British-French amphibious landing at the small fishing port of Aqaba gained great currency among the Allied leadership in Cairo. Aqaba was both the Turkish enemy’s last outpost on the Red Sea and a natural gateway—at least so it appeared on a map—to the southern reaches of Syria, the heartland of the Arab world.

  Modern Aqaba is a sprawling city of 140,000, its dense downtown giving way to new subdivisions, shopping malls, and office complexes steadily expanding over its foothills. If King Abdullah II of Jordan has his way, the expansion won’t slow any time soon. Reflecting the king’s vision for converting his nation’s only seaport into a world-class economic and tourist destination, the empty land south of town has been laced with modern roads. But those roads lead to nowhere in particular, while tattered billboards advertise the condominium complexes and industrial parks allegedly to come.

  Those in search of “old Aqaba” will be disappointed. This consists of a tiny stone fort near the oceanfront promenade and, next to it, a dusty four-room museum. Dominating the small plaza in front of the museum is perhaps Aqaba’s most peculiar landmark, a 430-foot flagpole—the second highest freestanding flagpole in the world, according to the local tourism bureau. It was at just about this spot that, on the morning of July 6, 1917, Lawrence and his exultant rebel followers would sweep through the streets to take a “victory bath” in the sea.

  By odd happenstance, Lawrence had visited Aqaba just a few months before the war began. From that firsthand experience, Lawrence knew that the “gateway” into Syria was actually through a winding, 20-mile-long mountain gorge that the Turks had laced with trenchworks and forts designed to annihilate any force advancing up from the coast.

  Lawrence also perceived a political trap. If the British and French took control of Aqaba, they could effectively bottle up their Arab allies and contain their rebellion to Arabia. That done, whenever the two European imperial powers did manage to push into Syria—promised to the French under Sykes-Picot—they could renege on the promises made to Hussein with a clearer conscience.

  Since any advance inland from Aqaba would be murderous, Lawrence’s solution was to first take the gorge and then the port. And to thwart his own nation’s imperial designs, he simply kept his plan to himself. On the day he set out from the Arabian coast, embarking on a 600-mile camel trek through the desert t
o fall on Aqaba from behind, not one of Lawrence’s fellow British officers knew where he was headed or what he intended to do when he got there. Accompanying him were a mere 45 rebels. On their journey, a two-month ordeal that would take them across one of the world’s harshest landscapes, each of the men started with only water and a 45-pound sack of flour as provisions.

  Forming the dramatic centerpiece of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the moment when Lawrence and his rebel band launch their surprise attack on Aqaba from behind. Led by a triumphant white-robed Peter O’Toole, the rebels bear down on the stunned Turks.

  In reality, the crucial battle for Aqaba occurred 40 miles to the north, in the “lost” wadi of Aba el Lissan. It was there, with the hellish two-month trek through the desert completed and Aqaba almost in his grasp, that Lawrence learned a Turkish relief force was marching in his direction. Even if his rebel army—swelled to nearly 1,000 with recruits—continued on to Aqaba, Lawrence reasoned, this enemy column would soon catch up; there was no choice but to destroy it first.

  They found the Turks camping in Aba el Lissan on the night of July 1, 1917, and what ensued there was less a battle than a massacre. The Turkish force of 550 soldiers was virtually wiped out at the cost of 2 Arab dead. With the path cleared, Lawrence and his men rushed on for Aqaba, the Turkish garrison there surrendering after barely firing a shot.

  Clad in worn sandals and lifting the hem of his robe to avoid the snag of thornbushes, Abu Enad Daraoush picks his way over the hillside. To the untrained eye, the wadi of Aba el Lissan is indistinguishable from a thousand other windswept valleys in southern Jordan, but Daraoush, a 48-year-old farmer and shepherd, knows its secrets. Reaching a rock outcropping, he points out a feature on the level ground below: five or six circles of cleared earth, each about 10 feet across and delineated by rings of large boulders. Resembling oversized fire pits, the circles are the traces of a Turkish Army encampment, where soldiers had cleared the earth and pitched their distinctive round tents. In 2014, that camp is nearly a century old—97 years old, to be precise.

  Daraoush and the other villagers of Aba el Lissan have collected military detritus here—bullets, uniform buttons, metal bits from horse harnesses—enough to know that the Turkish force was sizable. They also know it ended badly for the Turks. From the rock outcropping, Daraoush points to the wadi basin, perhaps 200 feet away. “Down there we found the bodies,” he says. “Not complete bodies, but bones. When I was a boy, I used to take them to school to show my friends.” Daraoush gazes up at the enclosing ridgelines. “This is a place where many, many Turks died.”

  As Daraoush and I walk across the battlefield, he laughs lightly. “Now that you are here, perhaps you can finally show us where the gold is buried.”

  It is meant as a joke, but one with a slight edge to it. While a Turkish force often carried a small quantity of gold, during Lawrence’s two years at the battlefront, his caravans frequently included several camels used to haul nothing but gold coins to pay his recruits. As a result, the urban—or rather, rural—myth was spawned, holding that sacks of stashed gold are likely to be found wherever the two warring sides collided.

  Aba el Lissan has been virtually stripped bare of any remnants of war by scavengers. In this impoverished corner of Jordan, the smallest piece of metal has value for scrap. In over an hour of scouring the land, I found only a Turkish bullet casing and the top of an old British Army rations can stenciled with the words Punch here.

  Toward the end of our walk, Daraoush leads me to one particular gold-hunter hole set away from the others. With a tinge of embarrassment, he offers that “a neighbor” had dug the hole a year or two earlier in search of booty, but instead had found the skeleton of a buried Turkish soldier. “He had been placed on his side, with his hands folded under his head,” Daraoush says. “It was like he was sleeping.” He pointed to the hole. “So we just buried him back up. What else was there to do?”

  While the Aqaba campaign is considered one of the greatest military feats of the early twentieth century—it is still studied in military colleges today—Lawrence soon followed it with a masterstroke of even greater consequence. Racing to Cairo to inform the British high command of what he had achieved, he discovered that the previous British commander in chief, never a strong supporter of the Arab Revolt, had been dismissed following two failed frontal attacks against the Turks. His replacement, a mere two weeks into the job when an emaciated and barefoot Lawrence was summoned to his office, was a cavalry general named Edmund Allenby.

  Rather lost in Lawrence’s electrifying news from Aqaba was any thought as to why the junior officer hadn’t informed his superiors of his scheme, let alone of its possible political consequences. Instead, with his newfound celebrity, Lawrence saw the opportunity to win over the green Allenby with a tantalizing prospect.

  During their slog across the desert, Lawrence had, with only two escorts, conducted a remarkable reconnaissance mission across enemy-held Syria. There, he told Allenby, he had determined that huge numbers of Syrian Arabs were ready to join the rebels. Lawrence also vastly exaggerated both the strength and capability of those rebels already under arms to paint an enticing picture of a military juggernaut—the British advancing up the Palestine coast as the Arabs took the fight to the Syrian interior. As Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars: “Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”

  But Allenby bought it, promising to give the rebels all the aid he could and consider them equal partners. From now on, in Lawrence’s estimation, the British Army and Arab rebels would be joined at the hip, the French relegated to the margins. If the rebels reached Damascus first, they might be able to wrest Syria from the French altogether. Or so Lawrence hoped.

  After our tea in his reception tent, Sheik al-Atoun takes me in his old four-wheel-drive Toyota up to a promontory overlooking Mudowarra. Along for the adventure are five of his young sons and nephews, standing in the Toyota’s open bed and trying—with limited success—to avoid being pitched about during the bucking ride. Ringing the hilltop are remnants of the trenchworks from which the Turks had repeatedly repelled British attacks on the town. “Even with their armored cars and airplanes, they had great problems,” the sheik says. “The Turks here were very brave fighters.”

  Al-Atoun’s words hint at the complicated emotions the legacy of World War I and the Arab Revolt stir in this part of the Arab world: pride at having cast off their Ottoman overseers after 400 years of rule, a lingering sadness at what took its place. The sheik points to a cluster of whitewashed homes perhaps 10 miles away.

  “That is Saudi Arabia. I have family and many friends there, but if I wish to visit them—or they to visit me—I must have a visa and go through customs. Why? We are one people, the Arabs, and we should be one nation, but instead we have been divided into—what, twenty-two?—different countries. This is wrong. We should all be together.”

  Quite understandably, Sheik al-Atoun blames the situation on the peace imposed by the European imperial powers at the end of World War I, a peace that T. E. Lawrence tried mightily to forestall.

  Despite punching through the Turkish line in southern Palestine and taking Jerusalem in December 1917, the British Army ground to a halt as Allenby’s troops were siphoned off for the western front. Operating from the Arabs’ new headquarters in Aqaba, Lawrence continued to lead raids against the railway and into the hill country west of the Dead Sea, but this was hardly the grand, paralyzing offensive he had outlined to Allenby. The desultory nature of the war continued through the summer of 1918.

  But something had happened to Lawrence in the interim. In November 1917, while conducting a secret reconnaissance mission into the strategic railway town of Deraa, he was briefly captured by the Turks, then subjected to torture—and, by most all evidence, rape—at the hands of the local Turkish governor. Managing to escape back to rebel lines, a far more hardened
, even merciless, Lawrence began to emerge.

  While Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia dealt obliquely with Lawrence’s Deraa ordeal, one aspect it captured exquisitely was his gradual unhinging in the field. In some battles, Lawrence ordered his followers to take no prisoners, or administered coups de grâce to men too badly wounded to be carried. In others, he took nearly suicidal risks. He attacked a Turkish troop train despite being so short of weapons that some of his men could only throw rocks at the enemy. If this was rooted in the trauma at Deraa, it seems he was at least as much driven by the desperate belief that if the Arabs could reach Damascus first, then the lies and guilty secrets he had harbored since coming to Arabia might somehow be set right.

  On every road leading out of the ramshackle Jordanian border town of Ramtha there occurs a curious phenomenon: three- and four-story mansions set amid manicured and walled gardens. “The smugglers,” explains the owner of a tiny refreshment shop on Ramtha’s main street. He points down the road to the border crossing with Syria, a half-mile away. “The frontier has been officially closed for a year and a half now, so there’s a lot of money to be made. They move everything across—guns, drugs, cooking oil, whatever you can imagine.”

  Six miles across that border stands the Syrian town of Deraa, the site where today’s Syrian civil war started and where Turkish forces briefly imprisoned Lawrence. Now, by all accounts, Deraa is a shattered shell of itself, its streets in ruins, the vast majority of its population gone. Many have ended up in the sprawling Jordanian refugee camp of Zaatari north of Amman—or here, in Ramtha.