Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence’s first mission to the Hejaz had come about in an indirect way. In May, General Murray had made more changes to his intelligence organization, stripping Clayton of his carte blanche and assigning him solely to the work of the Arab Bureau, which was now under the direction of Major Kinahan Cornwallis. The Intelligence Department in Cairo, of which Lawrence remained a member, was to be reunited with its Ismaeliyya counterpart under the command of Major G. V. W. Holdich. The Bureau and the Intelligence Department were to remain quite distinct entities. Lawrence did not wish to be separated from Clayton, and had sounded out the possibility of a transfer to the Bureau. When Holdich had barred any such transfer, Lawrence had resorted to guerrilla tactics, plaguing senior officers by correcting the grammar in their reports, and mocking their poor knowledge of geography and customs in the Near East. One morning a staff officer had phoned him, demanding to know where certain divisions of the Turkish army were currently located. Lawrence had given him a thoroughly competent description of the composition and location of the divisions, to the extent of pinpointing the actual villages in which they were quartered.

  ‘Have you noted them in the Dislocation files?’ the officer asked.

  ‘No,’ Lawrence replied, ‘they are better in my head until I can check the information.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the officer. ‘But you can’t send your head along to Ismaeliyya every time.’

  ‘I wish to goodness I could,’ Lawrence concluded, ringing off.

  Such ploys amounted to insubordination, and had not endeared Lawrence to his superiors. Finally, he had taken his case to Clayton, who had agreed to request his transfer through London, in order to circumvent Holdich. Meanwhile he managed to get Lawrence out of the way by asking to ‘borrow’ him from GHQ. Clayton’s major problem with the Hejaz was that, bereft of any intelligence officers in the front line, he had little idea of what was really happening, or how many troops were involved. Parker – the Hejaz IO – was largely confined to Rabegh, and while both he and Wilson had met Feisal, they felt that the Sharif tended to exaggerate, claiming, for instance, that the Turks massed against him numbered 25,000 strong. This was clearly nonsense, but Clayton wondered what other exaggerations were being passed off in the name of truth. Frankly, he did not trust Wilson’s judgement either, and suspected him of doctoring intelligence reports to agree with his own assessments, and indeed, he sometimes wondered if Wilson was entirely compos mentis. What were the actual dimensions of the threat from Medina? Parker, in Rabegh, had been pressing Clayton for some time to send an officer inland to obtain desperately needed intelligence, and had clearly hoped to go up country himself. On 9 October, though, Clayton wrote to Wingate that Storrs was being sent back there to see ‘Abdallah and possibly Hussain. ‘I propose to send Lawrence with him, if GHQ will let him go,’ he wrote. ‘They ought to be of use, and between them bring back a good appreciation of the situation.’6 They had left Suez on the Lama on 14 October. Lawrence would later claim to have gone down to the Hejaz on his own initiative, to find ‘the master spirit’ of the revolt, and wrote that he had asked for two weeks’ leave. Storrs, on the other hand, claimed that he had requested Lawrence for the expedition, simply because he enjoyed his company, and had thus created ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as well as the Arab Revolt. The leave was a fact – a technicality designed to undermine any protests Holdich might have produced – but Storrs’s claim to have applied for him, like his own claim to have gone there of his own choosing, was spurious. He had been sent to the Hejaz by the Arab Bureau, and he had been sent with a particular – and vital – mission in mind.

  Lawrence knew that in order to make a proper appreciation he would have to visit Feisal on the Darb Sultani, and the thought did not attract him. He was well aware that the Hejaz was crawling with informers and Turkish sympathizers, and if captured he might be shot as a spy. Moreover, no Christian officers – not even Wilson or Parker – had ever been allowed to visit the front. However, he used all his charm with ‘Abdallah, pretending to support the Sharif’s view that a British landing was necessary, and suggesting obliquely that the decision not to send troops was by no means final. He argued that if he were allowed to speak to Feisal, and see the situation for himself, he might be able to give his backing more convincingly to ‘Abdallah’s case. ‘Abdallah was doubtful. He telephoned Hussain in Mecca to ask his opinion, and the Sharif greeted the proposal with mistrust. This was perhaps the most crucial moment in Lawrence’s entire life. If ‘Abdallah had put the phone down, the story might have ended there and then. Lawrence might have gone back – not unhappily – to his desk in Cairo, and Colonel Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, might never have been born. But for some reason, ‘Abdallah did not put the receiver down. He pushed his father on the point, then handed the phone to Storrs, who supported the idea with all the rhetoric at his command. Reluctantly, against all his principles, the Sharif agreed that Lawrence might ride up the Wadi Safra to visit Feisal. There was to be no turning back: the die had been cast, and the legend-in-the-making had found its path.

  In AD 624, the army of the Prophet Mohammad engaged a rival Meccan force at Badr, where the Wadi Safra meets the coastal plain. The Muslims were then but a small sect, and had they lost the battle of Badr, they might well have disappeared. More than 1,000 years later, the Prophet’s direct descendants found themselves in a similar plight. In 1916, Sharif Feisal and his Bedu army were retreating slowly down the Wadi Safra with a Turkish brigade behind them. If the Turks had launched a massive counter-attack at that moment, they would probably have broken through into the coastal plain and taken Rabegh, then Mecca, and the Arab Revolt would have been at an end.

  In the Prophet’s day, Badr was an important watering-station on the route to Mecca. Today, though, it is little more than a truck-stop on the motorway, without even a place to stay. I arrived there on a bus from jeddah, late on a steamy night, and stood by the side of the road for an hour desperately trying to flag down a lift. Finally I gave up, bought two small bottles of mineral water, and walked along the soft asphalt for a mile until I found a sandy drywash, where, after carefully avoiding snake and scorpion tracks, I laid out my sleeping-bag. It was too hot to sleep, so I lay watching the stars until morning, and when dawn came, I saw that I was in a wadi forested with patches of thorn-trees and tamarisk, from which granite foothills rose steeply, their sharply carved facets turned at angles to the sun like cut jewels, flashing in the early light. The lower slopes were covered in a down of mustard-yellow goatgrass, which from this distance looked almost like a growth of lichen staining the rock. This yellowish growth solved the riddle of the valley’s name, for Wadi Safra means ‘The Yellow Wadi’ in Arabic. I hiked back to the truck-stop and after half an hour a young Bedui of the Bani Salem Harb agreed to take me to Hamra and Medina in his pick-up for 100 riyals. The Darb Sultani – the road which crawled up the Wadi Safra – opened like a long twisting corridor, climbing up steadily until a vast panorama of mountains lay before us, silver and grey, like successive waves of cloud extending into the distance until they appeared to merge into the sky itself. We passed village after village of ancient baked-mud houses, now standing roofless on the rocky sides of the valley, in forests of date-palms: Jedida, Hussainiyya, Wasta, Kharma. In Lawrence’s day these villages were the heartland of the Bani Salem, and produced almost all the tribe’s grain and dates. The Bedu remained in the villages for five months of the year, spending the rest of the time wandering with their herds and flocks and leaving the villages and palm-groves to their slaves. These slaves, who were mostly of African origin, had no legal status, and numbered about 10,000 at the time of Lawrence’s visit.

  My Bedui driver asked what I was about, and when I mentioned ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ he asked, ‘Who?’

  ‘An Englishman who helped lead the Arab armies in the Great Arab Revolt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When the Hashemites were here.’

  ‘Oh, the Hashemites! That was long ago. This is
the country of the Saudis now!’

  Was he being deliberately obtuse, I wondered, or could tribal memories really have become so short? His people, the Bani Salem, were one of the main clans of the Harb – a major Bedu tribe in the Hejaz. This youth’s grandfathers and grand-uncles had actually fought with Feisal, while many of the Masruh Harb – their rivals – had sided with the Turks, under the ‘traitor’ Sheikh ibn Mubeiriq. It was only after a while that I remembered that it had been the Bani Salem who had run from the Turks at the crucial moment. Perhaps, after all, it was a memory the tribe would rather forget.

  Hamra took me by surprise. I had imagined some tiny hamlet in a cleft in the wadi side, but the scale of the place was enormous, with thousands of palms whose heads moved slowly like sea-grass to the tune of the wind. The wadi was about half a mile wide here, lying between two steep, stony walls, and the ruined houses stood on a long ridge at the foot of the northern spur, and on high earth mounds rising steeply from the wadi bed. Lawrence had numbered the houses at about 150, but there were obviously many hundreds more, and there was also the remains of a Turkish fort, a shapeless mud stump on an island in the sea of palms. This village had for generations been a station on the Pilgrim Road from Yanbu’ al-Bahr to Medina, and when Richard Burton had halted here, disguised as a Persian doctor, in 1852, the fort had been manned by a platoon of Albanian soldiers. I climbed the ridge and scrambled among the warren of ruptured and leaning mud walls, eroded into surreal sculptures by the rain, and tried to picture what this village must have been like in late October 1916, when the wadi was full of Feisal’s defeated troops, and three camel-riders, one of them an Englishman, had suddenly appeared on the outskirts of the village.

  *

  Lawrence and his two rafiqs had left Rabegh on 21 October, under the cover of darkness. From a distance, all three might have been mistaken for Bedu, since Lawrence wore an Arab headcloth and had thrown a cloak over his uniform. Close up, though, he would easily have been recognized as a foreigner. Not only was he cleanshaven and pink-faced, he obviously knew nothing about camel-riding. When he had travelled with camels in the Negev two years previously, he had preferred to walk. Sharif ‘Ali, the eldest of the Hashemite sons, had reluctantly provided him with his best camel and an escort of two Bani Salem – Sheikh Obeyd and his son ‘Abdallah – to take him to Feisal’s camp. Though Lawrence was to masquerade as a Syrian, ‘Ali had ordered Obeyd not to let him talk to anyone: the desert and the hills were full of Turkish spies, and the ‘traitor’ ibn Mubeiriq, whose tribal district they were passing through, would happily have killed Lawrence or sold him to the Turks. The riders cleared Rabegh’s palm-groves and stalked out into the endless coastal plain of the Tihama. There was no moon, and the night yawned infinitely before them, its silence broken only by the soft percussion of the camels’ feet on the flat sand. As the darkness closed in, Lawrence felt suddenly apprehensive. He had entered a hostile and unknown dimension, into which few Europeans had been before him, and from which even fewer had returned alive. He was unsure, even, that he could trust his companions. He knew, of course, that the role of companion or rafiq was a solemn office to the Bedu: every traveller who wanted to cross a tribal district must have a rafiq from the local tribe or one allied to it to frank him through. For a rafiq to turn on his charge once accepted was a heinous affront to the Bedu code of honour, and a Bedui found guilty by his fellow-tribesmen of the crime of bowqa – treachery – would be ostracized for life, and never allowed to marry from his own folk. To be tribeless in a tribal society amounted virtually to a death sentence, for any marauder might kill the outcast without the risk of starting a blood-feud – the one social institution in Arabia which prevented bloodshed on a large scale. Nevertheless, Lawrence reminded himself, like the English code of the ‘gentleman’, the rules the Bedu lived by were only an ideal. The German explorer Charles Huber, for instance, who had come this way in 1884, had been murdered by his Harb rafiqs near Rabegh, when the Arabs had discovered that he was a Christian.

  They slept for a few hours that night, wrapped in their cloaks, and were up in the chill of dawn, reaching the well at Masturah in the mellow flush of early light. Some Bedu of the Masruh Harb were crouching under an awning of palm-fronds, and their eyes followed Lawrence’s party suspiciously as they passed. They dismounted by a ruined wall, and Lawrence sat down in the shade. Obeyd and his son took the camels off to water them at a stone shaft, twenty feet deep, with footholds built into its side. While Obeyd held the camels, ‘Abdallah tucked up his dishdasha into his cartridge-belt and slung a goatskin over his shoulder, then descended into the well, feeling for the footholds deftly with his bare feet. He filled the goatskin, shinned up again as surely as a lizard and poured the water into a stone basin. When the animals had drunk their fill, Obeyd carried over a bowl of water for Lawrence to drink. Finally, the two Bani Salem drank themselves. Then they sat down with Lawrence in the shade, to watch the Masruh watering a herd of thin she-camels. ‘Abdallah rolled himself a cigarette.

  It was at this moment that Lawrence had a vision. As they watched, he wrote, two young riders came trotting in on richly caparisoned thoroughbred camels, and couched them by the well. One of them, dressed in a fine cashmere robe, tossed his headrope carelessly to the other and ordered him to water them. The young lord strutted arrogantly over to where Lawrence and his rafiqs were sitting, and sank down on his haunches next to them. He was a slim man, little more than a boy, with a slightly pugnacious, inquisitive face, his long hair dressed in plaits, Bedu style. He was powerful-looking and appeared supremely confident. He offered Lawrence a cigarette, freshly rolled and licked, and then inquired if he was from Syria. Lawrence left the question hanging in the air, and asked if the youth was from Mecca. His companion, meanwhile, was making little progress in watering his camels. The Masruh herd was pressing lustily around the stone basin, and the herdsmen had not given the youth a chance to water his beasts as the customary etiquette to travellers demanded. ‘What is it, Mustafa?’ the lord shouted. ‘Water them at once!’ ‘Mustafa’ approached him shamefacedly, and began to explain that the herdsmen would not let him, whereupon the other jumped up with an oath and beat him savagely three or four times about the shoulders with his camel-stick. ‘Mustafa’ looked resentful, but stayed silent. The Masruh, watching from the well, were embarrassed that their own lack of hospitality had caused the boy’s humiliation, and not only gave the young man a place at the water immediately, but offered his camels some fresh shoots to eat. After the animals had eaten and drunk, the young lord climbed upon his camel without couching her, simply pulling her head down gently and stepping on her neck. ‘God requite you!’ he told the Masruh, and rode off with his companion to the south.

  No sooner had they gone than Obeyd started to chuckle. Later, after Lawrence and his rafiqs had mounted their camels and were riding north, he explained that the young ‘lord’ was Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain of the Harith, and ‘Mustafa’ actually his cousin, Sharif Muhsin. Sharif ‘Ali was a trusted lieutenant of Feisal’s, and despite his age had an outstanding reputation for courage. He had been one of Feisal’s picked bodyguard in Damascus, and had fought next to him on the bloody plains outside Medina at the beginning of June. Later, he had led the raids against the Turkish advance at Bir Darwish. The Harith and the Masruh were blood-enemies, and if the herdsmen at the well had suspected their identities, they might have been driven away. They had invented the charade of master and servant, Obeyd said, to deceive them. Lawrence was entranced by Sharif ‘Ali. For the rest of his time in Arabia, he would be captivated by the image of the ‘noble’ boy-warrior he had glimpsed at Masturah, on his first journey into the desert.

  Like several of the questionable incidents in Lawrence’s story, the meeting with Sharif ‘Ali makes no appearance in any official report – though Lawrence often gives details of a far more minor nature. In Seven Pillars,7 this vision sets the scene for the world of deception, conflict and cruelty in which he now found himself: a
world of handsome young men who resort frequently to the stick, a world in which the tribes are ancient blood-enemies that only an idea of great influence can unite. Since Obeyd knew the identities of the two Harith Sharifs, though, it seems unlikely that the Masruh at the well would not have recognized them. The Bedu were extremely observant, not missing a single detail – tribesmen who could remember the track of every camel they had ever seen, who could distinguish families and clans simply by the difference in the way they tied their headcloths, are unlikely to have been deceived by the rather amateurish performance, and it would have been obvious from ‘Mustafa’s’ appearance, bearing, clothing, saddlery, and a thousand other tiny details, that he was no servant or slave. Secondly, the story has a ring of familiarity common to many tales in Seven Pillars: the boyish pranks of the young Sharifs are a preview of the ‘naughtiness’ later practised by Lawrence’s servants ‘Farraj and Da’ud’, and the masochistic element – the ‘submission’, ‘humiliation’ and beating of one of the boys – is clear. Such flagellation and public humiliation also play a large role in the ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ story. Sharif ‘Ali emerges from Seven Pillars as Lawrence’s beau ideal of the desert Arab – the aristocratic Bedui, counterpart of his pre-war love, Dahoum. It seems at least possible, though, that this vision of male beauty Lawrence claimed to have experienced at Masturah was no more than an interior one, since Sharif ‘Ali makes his first appearance in Lawrence’s field diary on 8 March 1917 – five months later – and in this hand-written entry Lawrence describes the Sharif as if seeing him for the first time.

  From Masturah, they passed out of the territory of the Masruh and into that of the Bani Salem, to which Lawrence’s rafiqs belonged. Obeyd showed Lawrence the stone which marked the frontier of his own tribal district. What struck Lawrence most forcibly was the thought that, though Europeans saw the desert as a barren wilderness, to the Bedu it was home. Every tree, rock, hill, well and spring had its owner, and while it was Bedu custom to allow a traveller to cut firewood and to draw water enough for their own use, woe betide any foreign spirit who tried to exploit it. By noon, Lawrence was beginning to feel the strain of the journey. His legs and back were raw and aching from the constant jolting of the camel, his skin blistered from the sun and his eyes painful from peering all morning into the glare of the burning flint. He had been two years in the city, commuting from hotel to office, he realized, and now had suddenly been dumped in the desert without the slightest preparation. As the sun dipped and melted into the west, they arrived at a village of grass huts called Bir ash-Sheikh, belonging to the Bani Salem. The Bedu couched their camels by one of the huts, and were greeted by a woman who showed them a place to sit, and kindled a fire for them outside. Obeyd went off and begged some flour, which he mixed with a little water in a bowl, and kneaded into a flat oval patty. He buried it carefully in the sand under the embers of the fire, waiting twenty minutes, then brushed them away, delved in the sand, and brought out a piping hot, hard-baked loaf. He clapped it with his hand to remove the last grains of sand and broke it into pieces, which the three of them shared. Although Lawrence later claimed that the Arabs thought it ‘effeminate’ to take provisions for a journey of less than 100 miles, this was untrue. The fact was that no Bedui would bother to take food while travelling in his own tribal district, since he could always be certain of obtaining nourishment from his fellow tribesmen on the way. The libbeh – unleavened bread baked in the sand – was the Bedu’s standard fare, and would soon become nauseatingly familiar to Lawrence. For now, though, he ate a little with the best grace he could muster. Afterwards, Obeyd invited him to look at some nearby wells, but he was so stiff after the ride that he declined.