Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence’s party reached their camp just before dawn, to find that Shakir was already in position with his guns. At 6.30 precisely the battery belched fire and smoke across the valley, the crack and boom ricocheting around the rock walls. The first few salvoes crumpled the upper storeys of both the fort and the station building, and three or four shells punched into the water-tank, knocking it out of shape and sending water cascading down the tower walls. The next few salvoes set the Turkish camp ablaze, destroyed the woodpile kept to refuel locomotives, and hit the wagons of the train. The locomotive uncoupled and rumbled off towards Medina, and Lawrence watched with bated breath as it approached his mine. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a cloud of dust, and the train came to a halt. The mine had detonated late, Lawrence realized, and only the front wheels had been derailed. A crew of seven men sprang out at once and began to jack up the wheels, and he waited keenly for the sound of the machine-gun. It never came. The gunners had grown tired of waiting and had packed up, and moved back to camp. Lawrence was furious, but was obliged to watch impotently as the train crew got the locomotive back on the line within half an hour, and moved off slowly to the south. Meanwhile, though, the battle for the station was becoming hotter. The ‘Utayba were skirmishing towards the buildings under the cover of billowing smoke, leaping barefoot from bush to bush and firing as they went. They assaulted two of the Turkish outposts, cutting down every man in one, and capturing the other, then closed in on the northern part of the station, taking twenty-four prisoners – all of them Syrians, whom Lawrence later interrogated. He also had a chance to examine the brake-van of the train, which had been left behind, and discovered that it was lined with cement. However, the Turks in the fort were too near to linger, and the smoke was too dense for shooting. The Arabs broke off the action and withdrew, having killed and wounded seventy-two Turks. Within two days they were back at ‘Abdallah’s camp.

  Lawrence considered his first attempt at railway-mining only a limited success: after all, the train had escaped. He also criticized the ‘Utayba, who, he wrote in his report, had not been asked to do much, and probably would not have done it if they had been. He was determined to have another try with the pressure-switch mine, and decided to hit the railway again between Hediyya and Mudahrij – second and third stations north of Abu an-Na’am respectively. He set off on 2 April, with a party which included the Juhayna law-giver Dakhilallah al-Qadi, his son Mohammad, and twenty of their Juhayna tribesmen, a couple of Sharifs, a machine-gun crew and a section of Syrian infantrymen. Once again, they marched up Wadi ‘Ais and turned into Wadi Hamdh, where they slept on a sandy flat and were disturbed in the night by a heavy shower of rain. The following day the temperature soared, and the sun burnished the soil to such a heat that Lawrence could no longer walk barefoot as the Bedu did, but had to put on his sandals. Thunder rolled across the hills all morning and the peaks around them were shrouded in ragged clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue. Suddenly, Lawrence realized that the clouds were columns of dust, over 1,000 feet high, spinning in a double vortex steadily towards them. The storm hit them like a slap only three minutes later, ripping at their cloaks, filling their eyes with stinging grains of sand, spinning round the camels and clashing them together. The whirlwind lasted only eighteen minutes, but it was followed by sleeting rain, which moulded the Arabs’ cloaks to their backs and had them shivering in the saddle. In the afternoon they climbed a steep crag to observe the railway, but found their view obscured by swirling mist: on the way down, an ‘Utaybi slipped on the wet rock and plummeted forty feet, smashing his skull on the stones beneath. This was, wrote Lawrence, the only casualty they sustained during the mission.

  After dark, Lawrence, with the al-Qadis and an ‘Utaybi Sheikh called Sultan, crossed the plain to the railway. Mudahrij – a small station without a water-tower – lay behind a steep escarpment where the line curved sharply to the east. Soon after they moved out, they heard the bugle-call from the station that signified supper, and resented it, for tonight they would be too near to the Turkish sentries to light a fire. They came upon the track at about ten o’clock and rode along it, searching for a suitable machine-gun position. Visibility was too poor to identify one, however, so Lawrence chose a place at random – Kilometre 1121 – in which to lay the mine, and the party couched their camels silently. Lawrence’s mine was this time a slightly more complicated affair, and laying the hair-trigger igniter was, he admitted, ‘shaky work’. He placed two rail-cutting charges about thirty yards apart, and connected them to the pressure-switch, which he laid half-way between. This meant that, whichever way the train was heading, at least one charge would be certain to explode beneath its body. It took two hours to complete the mine-laying, and while he worked a light rain began to fall, caking the sandy surface around the railway embankment, which became plastered with footprints. Whenever a train was due, Lawrence knew, a Turkish patrol would search the line thoroughly inch by inch, looking for suspicious signs, and the elephant-like tracks they had left would be a certain giveaway. They were too deep to be concealed, so instead Lawrence and his party brought their camels and trampled the ground for 100 yards on either side of the charge, and out into the desert beyond, to make it look as though a large force had merely crossed the railway in the night. Then they rode off to a safe distance and concealed themselves behind a ridge to wait for sunrise, shivering fitfully and gasping in the intense cold through grinding and chattering teeth. Dawn spread crimson veins across the jagged hills like a benediction, and the heat melted the clouds and spread fire through Lawrence’s body. He prayed that there would be no action until he was thoroughly warm. At first light the machine-gun crew arrived, and Dakhilallah al-Qadi crawled up to the top of the ridge to find out what was happening. At 7.30, an armed patrol of eleven Turks worked its way along the line, and halted at Kilometre 1121. They began an exhaustive search of the sand and the ballast, and although the mines had been well hidden, Lawrence watched with his heart in his mouth. To his relief, however, they continued to the south and met up with the patrol from Hediyya, the next station. An hour later, Lawrence heard the rumble of a train, and saw a locomotive and nine wagons approaching from the south. Astonishingly, it passed over the mine safely – much to Lawrence’s secret relief, for it was full of women and children – though, as a demolitions artist, he was chagrined that the pressure-switch laid so painstakingly had proved a dud. It would need replacing, he decided, but at that moment the Turkish sentries posted in guard-sangars in the hills above Mudahrij spotted the Bedu who had crowded into his position to see the train, and opened fire at a range of 5,000 yards. Though this was too far to do any damage, Lawrence and his party knew that the Turks had well over 1,000 men at Mudahrij and Hediyya, and mounted patrols would soon be out hunting for them. They beat a dignified retreat, keeping their camels at a walk so as not to exhaust the mule carrying the heavy machine-gun, which they towed behind them. They laid up in another wadi for most of the day, and in the later afternoon walked their camels coolly back, under a renewed flurry of fire, towards the railway to replace the faulty trigger. The Turks were in the habit of shooting at any troop of Bedu who came near the railway, and from a distance they had no way of knowing that Lawrence’s party was actually a guerrilla unit. Dakhilallah thought of a brilliant ploy to alleviate their suspicions by having everyone couch their camels by the railway, and perform the evening prayer, standing in line, with himself as Imam in front. The Juhayna were not assiduous in their religious practice, and Lawrence thought they had probably not prayed for a year, while he himself was a complete novice. Nevertheless, he followed their movements – bowing, kneeling, and touching the ground with the forehead – and felt that the watching Turks had been convinced: ‘This was,’ he wrote later, ‘the first and last time I ever prayed in Arabia as a Muslim.’16

  Sunset came, and it was time for Lawrence to face the unpleasant task of searching for the buried trigger mechanism in pitch darkness. If ignited by accident, he reckon
ed, the two charges would lacerate the line for seventy yards, and anyone within that distance would almost certainly be blown to bits. To make matters worse, the whole force of Juhayna insisted on accompanying him for moral support, and as he groped for the firing mechanism with tremulous fingers, he had dreadful visions of blowing up not only himself but the entire patrol. It took him an hour to locate it, and at once he understood why it had failed to ignite: it had subsided a fraction of an inch, due to the soft ground or his own faulty laying. He quickly reset the mechanism, and then he and his party ran for their camels and rode north towards the bluffs behind which Mudahrij was hidden, laying charges as they went. The Juhayna in Lawrence’s party were all Garland-trained dynamiters, and they scurried about like ants in the darkness, setting charges on a four-arched culvert and on the rails. Lawrence shinned up a telegraph pole and cut the wires. Within a few moments, the silence of the night was torn apart violently as the charges went off almost in unison, cutting dozens of rails and shearing the head off the bridge. As soon as it was done, the Arabs dashed for their camels and rode back to their base-camp at a canter, so wildly, in fact, that they were mistaken for the enemy by their own machine-gunners, who let fly half a belt at them in the darkness. Fortunately no one was hit, and Lawrence slept contentedly, to be woken at 7.30 by the distant thud of his mine going off. Two scouts he had left behind to watch the track reported that a train carrying 300 troops from the Repair Battalions, and stacks of replacement rails, had set off the mine, the charges going off fore and aft of its wheels. Though the damage was not as great as he would have liked, Lawrence was satisfied that the mine had worked, and that his party had done enough damage to close down the railway. He had learned that Garland mines were almost impossible to detect, and that the Turkish garrisons on the railway were nervous and trigger-happy. His keen mind, ever questing for principles, had absorbed profound lessons about the Bedu, too. They were, he concluded, ‘Odd people’: ‘Travelling with them is unsatisfactory for an Englishman,’ he wrote in his report, ‘unless he had patience as deep and wide as the sea.’17 He called them slaves of their appetites with no stamina of mind – addicted to coffee, milk and water, gluttonous consumers of mutton and smokers of tobacco. They would dream constantly about sex, he said, and titillated each other continually with bawdy tales. It was, he concluded, only the hardship of their lives which made them continent: given lush circumstances they would be pure sensualists. If they suspected one of driving them, they would resist or run away, but if one had the patience to present things from their own point of view, they would ‘do one’s pleasure’. ‘Their processes are clear,’ he wrote, ‘their minds moving as [ours] move, with nothing incomprehensible or radically different, and they will follow us, if we can endure with them, and play their game.’18 He had survived his first major action under enemy fire, had risked his life in groping for a hair-trigger igniter, and had not been found wanting. Now, the thrill of war, the intensity of balancing on the edge of the abyss almost every moment of the day, gave him a sense of connection and purpose which he had never experienced before. This, Lawrence suddenly understood, was what he had been destined for: the years of wandering had all been preparation for this.

  The party rode back through the Wadi Hamdh, singing, and two days later they arrived back in ‘Abdallah’s camp at Abu Markha, where Lawrence found a letter from Feisal which demonstrated once and for all the esteem in which he was held in the Sharif’s camp: ‘My Dear Affectionate Friend,’ the letter ran, ‘… I want to see you very much because I have many things to tell you. The destruction of the railway is easy. Major Garland has arrived and we can send him for this purpose. You are much needed here more than the destruction of the line because I am in a very great complication which I never expected …’19 In fact, as Lawrence later reported, the Sharif was annoyed that he had stayed away so long, and was in a nervous and exhausted state. After receiving ‘Abdallah’s assurance that he would launch attacks on the railway on a nightly basis, he set out with Mohammad al-Qadi and three ‘Agayl and arrived in Wejh on 14 April, to encounter a man with whom his fate was inextricably linked: the near-legendary warrior-chief of the Howaytat, Auda Abu Tayyi.

  15. It is Not Known What are the Present Whereabouts of Captain Lawrence

  Auda Abu Tayyi was the most feared fighting-man in Arabia. Tall, lean, predatory, with a nose like the hooked beak of an eagle, and eyes that had grown into slits from peering at the sun, his very presence carried with it the aura of danger. Auda seemed to be possessed by a demon which might today be described as psychopathy – a tendency to fall into a blind rage which could only be assuaged by violence. He had no control over his mouth, and would openly insult people by telling scandalous lies about them in public, daring them to challenge him. He claimed to have killed seventy-five men in battle, many at close quarters, and was reputed to have torn out and eaten the hearts of several of his enemies.1 In 1909 he had opened fire on a party of Turkish gendarmes who had descended on his camp to demand taxes, killing two and sending the others packing. Ever since, he had been on the run from the Ottoman government, which had declared him an outlaw and issued a warrant for his arrest.

  Auda had not been born to the sheikhdom of his tribe, which traditionally belonged to the ibn Jazi section of the Howaytat. In Bedu custom the authority of a hereditary Sheikh simply ceased when it was no longer acknowledged by the tribe – so the Howaytat Sheikh ‘Ar’ar ibn Jazi had been deserted by his people, first for Harb Abu Tayyi and later for Auda, who retained authority by dint of his reputation for courage, energy, cruelty and generosity. He was not rich, no well-respected Bedui ever could be, for the Bedu revered open-handedness rather than wealth, and stood in awe of the man who acquired much and gave most of it away. Even in a land where people prided themselves on their munificence, Auda’s hospitality was legendary. Under his leadership, and the guidance of his cousin Mohammad adh-Dhaylan, the Towayha section of the Howaytat had been transformed within one generation from a clan of nomad-farmers to the most efficient force of raiders in the entire peninsula, known to strike as far north as Aleppo and as far south as Wadi Dawaasir on the borders of the Empty Quarter. Inspired by Auda’s truculence, they had acquired an élan, a ruthlessness and a persistence which had led them into so many encounters that their numbers had been reduced in a few decades from over 1,000 fighting men to only 500. Unruly, anarchistic, uncompromising, the Howaytat had eccentricities which displayed the shortness of their history as nomadic camel-breeders and raiders: they were disorganized on the march and would argue incessantly over where to camp, they owned land, they carried parasols and bottles of mineral water on raids, and they had a reputation for treachery, for ignoring blood-ties, and for flouting the Bedu code. Lawrence later characterized the Howaytat as ‘true’ Bedu – in fact they were despised as parvenus by the great Bedu tribes of the desert such as the Rwalla and the Shammar, yet none of these could ignore their ferocity, and even Sheikhs such as the powerful Nuri ibn ash-Sha alan, Emir of the Rwalla, pretended friendship to Auda Abu Tayyi.