Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  For five days they rode across the wilderness in the teeth of a smouldering sand-storm which leached their bodies dry of moisture. Yet they could not drink more than a few mouthfuls a day, for their water was limited and there would be no major water-sources till they reached the Wadi Sirhan. As the day drew on, Lawrence would see strange will-o’-the-wisp luminosities which licked suddenly out of the nothingness, and dust-devils that fumed across the hot flints like pillars of fire. Not only was there no life here, there was no sign of life. As his party rode forward reluctantly into the emptiness, weighed down by the awesome vastness of the sky, Lawrence looked in vain for the tracks of lizards, rats, insects or birds. The hugeness of this plain, so ancient, so still, so silent, reduced them to black specks on its redness, and it seemed to Lawrence that they made no progress, for the horizon remained always the same distance before them, the same distance behind: ‘we ourselves felt tiny in it,’ he wrote, ‘our progress across its stillness an immobility of futile effort.’14 The only sound was the splash of water in the goatskins, the mesmeric creak of the saddles, and the clink of the camels’ feet on the dry stones. By noon on the first day, a hot wind was boiling off the horizon, bringing with it the spice-taste of the great Nafud desert which lay beyond. The ‘Agayl drew their headcloths tightly across their mouths, but Lawrence decided to ‘face out’ the storm simply from masochistic perversity, and as a result developed badly chapped lips and a throat so hoarse with dust that he could not eat properly for the next three days. They rode from dawn till sunset, for even Auda felt too ill-at-ease in such a void to travel at night, with the risk of losing the way and thrashing about in unknown desert until they died of thirst. Soon the flint country merged into gi’an or salt-flats, which gleamed blindingly white in the sun, a sensation so painful that several times Lawrence almost fainted. At last, on 24 May, he sighted the first significant animal life he had seen since entering al-Houl – two ostrich, strutting rapidly across the horizon – and when one of the ‘Agayl ran up with ostrich eggs, he, Auda, Nasir, and Nasib al-Bakri halted to breakfast on them. Lawrence caught up with the main party hours later to find that his servant Gasim – the ill-favoured peasant from Ma’an – was missing. His camel was there, complete with his saddle-bags and rifle, but of the man himself there was no trace.

  The ‘Agayl suggested that he had fallen asleep in the saddle during the night and tumbled off, hitting his head on a rock, or even that he had been the victim of a grudge-killing. It was clear that Gasim was lost, and that the ‘Agayl – to whom he was merely a bad-tempered stranger – were not prepared to go back and look for him. Lawrence realized that the onus fell on him. He considered ordering one of his servants to go back on his camel, but realized that such a shirking of his duty would always be remembered. He begged half a skin of water from the ‘Agayl – the last water they had – and turned his camel silently, forcing her back along the line of camel-riders and into the desert beyond, cursing his need to live up to Bedu ideals. Within twenty minutes the caravan was out of sight, and the terrible loneliness of the desert descended on him. The only sign that humans had ever survived in this void was a pattern of threshing-pits across the flints of the desert floor, where in the past the Fajr Bedu had worked grain from the wild grass samh. The pits were tiny pools of sand like eyes in the stony waste, and Lawrence urged his camel across them deliberately so as to leave some trace of his outward journey. He rode on for an hour and a half through a series of mirages which cast ghostly sparklers of light and haze, and sighted at last a tiny dark blemish on the desert’s surface. This was Gasim. When Lawrence approached, he saw that the man was blundering about in confusion, half blinded by the sun, his arms held out and his mouth gaping. Lawrence couched his camel and Gasim snatched the water-skin from him, spilling the precious liquid down his shirt in his eagerness to drink. Lawrence sat him on the camel’s rump, then mounted himself and set off on a compass-bearing, hoping desperately that he could now find the caravan. He traced the tracks he had left on the threshing-floors, and Gasim clung on behind the saddle, blubbering. Within an hour, though, he spotted a black bubble in the distance, which gradually split and swelled, resolving into the forms of three camel-riders. For an anxious moment, Lawrence wondered if it was the enemy. Then, suddenly, he recognized Auda and two of Sharif Nasir’s ‘Agayl, who had come back to search for him. Lawrence yelled sneers at them for abandoning a man in the desert. Auda replied that Gasim was not worth the price of a camel: Lawrence interrupted him. ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ he said. Gasim claimed to have dismounted to urinate and lost the caravan in the darkness, but Lawrence suspected that he had actually halted and gone to sleep. Soon they caught up with Sharif Nasir and Nasib al-Bakri. While the Sharif appreciated Lawrence’s act of courage, Nasib was angry that he had endangered his own life and Auda’s – and consequently the entire mission – for the sake of a single worthless man.

  The rescue of Gasim was Lawrence’s most courageous single deed, and did much to enhance his reputation after the war. Though he apparently tried to play down the heroism of the act in Seven Pillars, by portraying his irritation that the duty of rescuing the man fell on him, the fact that it occupies an entire chapter is significant. There is no mention of Gasim in any official reports, but in an article in The Times written in 1918, Lawrence claimed that ‘many of his party’ were lost in crossing al-Houl – a claim less indicative of success than of failure. According to the Seven Pillars account, at least one man was lost in al-Houl, a slave of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s whom nobody went back for, since he was believed to know the country well. His mummified corpse was discovered weeks later. Although the rescue of Gasim has the characteristics of one of Lawrence’s departures into fantasy, in this case we have solid evidence, from his diary entry for 24 May 1917, that he actually did go back to look for him, for that evening Sharif Nasir apparently beat ‘Ali and Othman – Lawrence’s newly acquired servants – for allowing him to return alone. He also wrote in his diary that he ‘wasted two hours and a half looking for Gasim, which has been taken by some to suggest that the rescue attempt actually failed. Lawrence was precise in his choice of words, and a master of linguistic nuances: is it likely that he would have chosen to write ‘wasted’ if he had really returned with the lost man? If Gasim was indeed rescued, why does his name not appear again in the text of Seven Pillars when he was Lawrence’s servant, and the party a relatively small one? The absence of his name following the incident is considered the most convincing evidence that Lawrence’s heroic rescue attempt was a failure.

  Now, it is the case that ‘Gasim’ is not referred to by this single name after Lawrence had supposedly brought him out of the desert, but three weeks after the incident, he does refer to a man called ‘Gasim ash-Shimit’ in a tale he tells in an attempt to parody Auda’s epic style of rhetoric. This tale, it is true, is set at Wejh before the Aqaba expedition, but the important question is whether ‘Gasim ash-Shimt’ and the Gasim of the rescue story are the same man. First of all, the name: ‘ash-Shimt’ means ‘he who rejoices in another’s misfortune’; it is not a family name, nor is it kunya – a name defining the named person in relation to someone else, such as ‘the father of so-and-so’. It is clearly a nickname, and as such it certainly seems to evoke the character of Gasim as Lawrence described him. It so happens that in Seven Pillars there are two references to an Arab Lawrence simply calls ‘The Shimt’ following the incident in al-Houl – the first at the battle of Aba 1-Lissan, about a month later, when Lawrence, searching for Auda on the battlefield, asks ‘The Shimt’ where his horsemen have gone. The second reference is indirect: in his description of the Mudowwara raid which took place the following September, Lawrence notes that ‘The Shimt’s boy – a very dashing fellow’15 had been killed in the attack. If’ The Shimt’ and Lawrence’s Gasim are the same man, then it seems probable that Lawrence did indeed bring Gasim out of the desert and save his life. Moreover, the phrase ‘wasted two and a half hours looking for Gasim’ do
es not, in the English idiom, necessarily mean that the rescue attempt was abortive – it could indicate only that Lawrence was annoyed because Gasim had needlessly wasted time and energy by his incompetence: throughout the trek to Aqaba his diary entries frequently express his impatience to get on. Finally, Lawrence also wrote in his diary the phrase ‘not worth a camel’s price’ – which he said later was spoken by Auda, and to which he is supposed to have replied, ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ Such comments smack of deliberate admonishment to someone who has done a stupid thing – such as going to sleep in the desert when the rest of the caravan is moving on: they are scarcely the kind of remarks likely to be made about a comrade – no matter how disagreeable – who has just been lost. The balance of evidence seems to me to suggest that Lawrence did return alone into al-Houl and save the life of Gasim – a remarkable act of bravery for a man who was terrified of being hurt.

  That night was a terrible one: the party had no water, and could neither drink nor bake bread. Instead, they lay tossing and turning sleeplessly on the desert floor with thirst and hunger pangs tearing at them: ‘Tonight worst yet in my experience,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary.16 When the day dawned, however, they found themselves in the great Wadi Sirhan, and knew that they had crossed al-Houl: the terror of thirst lay behind them, the ordeal was over. They struck camp at first light and by eight o’clock they had arrived at the well of Arfaja, an eighteen-foot shaft containing cream-coloured muddy water which both stank and tasted horrible. Nevertheless, it was all there was, and a blessing after the waterless waste behind them, and they drank until their stomachs swelled. They dumped their baggage, watered the camels, drove them out into the grazing and sat down to enjoy a well-deserved respite after the strain of crossing the ‘Devil’s Anvil’. They had not been resting more than a few minutes, though, when they were startled by the cry of ‘Raiders! Raiders!’ and Lawrence saw a wedge of Bedu cantering towards the wells on fast camels with rifles in their hands. At once he and Nasir mustered the ‘Agayl, who fell on their bellies with cocked rifles behind their baggage, ready to defend the camp. Za’al Abu Tayyi rushed for his camel and rode bravely towards the interlopers, who, seeing organized resistance, turned and retreated into the desert. They had not gone far, however. That evening, Lawrence and his men were sitting around the fire being served with coffee in turn by an ‘Agayli called Assaf. Suddenly a fusillade of shots rapped out of the darkness, hitting the coffee-server – the only man standing – who was mortally wounded and died only minutes later. Lawrence’s men doused the flames at once and rolled into the dunes, located the position of the enemy from the flashes of their rifles, and shot back with such concentrated fire that the raiders gave up and disappeared into the night: ‘Tonight we were shot into,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary; ‘an [‘Agayli] killed just after giving men coffee.’17

  No other incident marred their welcome into Sirhan, and within two days they had located the camp of ‘Ali Abu Fitna, a Howaytat chief, where they were to remain for several days, feasting royally on Howaytat sheep. Auda left them here and rode off north to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan, the paramount chief of the powerful Rwalla, whose help, tacit or explicit, they would require if the operation were to be a success. Lawrence, Nasir and their patrol made slow progress along the wadi, which to Lawrence began to appear sinister – even actively evil – with its snakes, brackish wells, salt-marsh, stunted palms and barren bush. This view was a reflection of his inner state, for the further he moved into enemy territory the more the fear gripped him. He was also troubled by the job of recruiting levies, for as groups of Bedu appeared in his camp each night to swear allegiance to Feisal, he was obliged to reassure them that the Arabs were fighting for independence, not to further Allied objectives in the Near East. This had been easy in the Hejaz, which would almost certainly receive independence if the Allies were victorious, but Lawrence was less able to convince himself of the honesty of his preaching here in Syria: he was quite aware of the Sykes–Picot agreement, and that Britain and France intended to carve the region up between them afterwards. He despised Arab Nationalists like Nasib al-Bakri who believed in development and modernization: he had fallen in love with the ‘Old Syria’ and hated the thought of change: he wanted the East to remain the mystical, romantic land he had encountered in 1909, but without the oppressive government of the Ottoman Turks. He admired the Bedu and the semi-nomadic or tribal peasants such as Dahoum and Hammoudi – these were the ‘real’ Arabs. The ‘fat, greasy’ townsmen of Syria and Palestine were, he considered, of a different race, despite the fact that they were linguistically, culturally and racially homogenous. He perceived the East through a set of highly romanticized – and therefore ethnocentric – ideas. His idea of ‘self-determination’ was in reality determination by certain traditional and reactionary elements – the Bedu, the Hashemites, the conservative Sheikhs and Islamic elders – who represented his own romantic idea of what the East should be like: not the ‘will of the people’, but the superimposition of a romantic structure of his own. That Lawrence believed in these ideas passionately, and believed that they were right for the Arabs, is beyond question: from early childhood he had seen himself always as the clever ‘elder brother’. It is similarly likely that his views changed as he moved into Syria: the wily intelligence officer who had at first accepted the realpolitik of sacrificing Arab priorities to those of the Allies became increasingly plagued by doubt. Though the guilt niggled at him more and more strongly, his chameleon-like quality never allowed him to abandon the pose of the tough, practical politician with his own side. War correspondent Lowell Thomas, who actually spoke to him only a few months later, reported his opinion that the British could never keep the ‘promises they had made to the Arabs, and that, in wartime, promises were made to be broken’.18 Lawrence made a great deal of his anguish in having to deceive the Arabs in Seven Pillars: no doubt this is part genuine, part ‘elaboration’. Beneath this role of martyrdom lies the stratum of Lawrence’s masochism – the constant need to be punished for mankind’s transgressions, and to be seen to be punished: ‘In the contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon of [masochistic] exhibitionism,’ Lyn Cowan has written, ‘the roles of masochist and martyr interchange in the same actor, their distinction almost obliterated in the spotlight’s glare.’19 The fear and the hypocrisy, the divided loyalties, the divided soul, the sheer inertia of the heavy days in Sirhan, wandering from tent to tent, stuffing himself against his will with vast quantities of mutton and rice in order to placate his hosts, receiving delegations, exchanging pleasantries, telling lies: all this began to inflate his emotions to bursting point.

  At Agayla, many black tents were pitched in the wadi, and Lawrence was rejoined by Auda with Durzi ibn Dughmi of the Rwalla and a troop of his horsemen. This suggested a favourable response from Nuri ash-Sha alan, and the prospective assistance of the powerful Rwalla changed the situation dramatically. Now, even Damascus seemed open to them, and Nasib al-Bakri, eager to raise the revolt in Syria, began to argue for an attack to the north instead of the planned move on Aqaba. Sharif Nasir and Auda were swayed by his argument, but Lawrence was outraged. If the Hashemites attempted to raise the tribes of northern Syria at this juncture, and captured Damascus, he thought, then they would be totally isolated. The British Expeditionary Force still lay behind the Gaza-Beersheba line and would be physically incapable of supporting them. The insurrection in Damascus would easily be crushed and the Hashemite cause would fizzle out. Timing was crucial, because the tribes would not rise a second time. Meanwhile, Aqaba lay on the British flank in Palestine, and Lawrence was convinced that, in order to be fully acknowledged, the revolt must move in concert with the British advance. He feared al-Bakri, as he feared all sophisticated Arab townsmen, and in Seven Pillars branded him spitefully as a ‘fool’, a ‘rat’and ‘petty’. Nasib, who had been one of the founders of the Revolt, was certainly neither a fool nor a traitor to the cause of Arab Nationalism, but, like the Sharif ‘Abdallah whom Lawr
ence despised equally, he was capable of independent thought, and had no truck with Allied aspirations in his country. He was not gulled by Lawrence’s double-talk. Nasib was exactly the kind of supposedly ‘volatile and short-sighted’ Arab Lawrence and the British disliked: they felt more empathy for the conservative elements in Arab society, and in Seven Pillars Lawrence tapped this traditional orientalist view of the essential congruency between the ‘honourable’ English ‘gentleman’ and the Bedui – a category into which he pressed those members of the Hashemite family of whom he approved, despite the fact that they had been raised in Istanbul. Thus, he indicated that while Nasib frowned on his heroic rescue of Gasim, Auda and Sharif Nasir – two of ‘nature’s gentlemen’ – fully understood. When the feasting in the Wadi Sirhan grew too much to bear, Nasib and his aide, Zaki Drubi, had retired, while Lawrence and Nasir had had the grace to honour their hosts by sticking the meal out to the end. In Lawrence’s writing a man’s ‘nobility’ is frequently defined by his table-manners and eating habits. By such rhetorical devices, he sought to demonstrate how the English and the ‘real Arabs’ – that is the Bedu – had more in common than either had with the ‘ignoble’, ‘petty’ and ‘treacherous’ town Arabs, even though these townsmen were the vast majority in the Arab world, and therefore, by another definition, might be considered ‘the real Arabs’. The ‘real Arabs’ did not, of course, exist – the idea was simply an ideological concept which was of great use to the colonialists, but was in reality nebulous: referring to the Bedu as ‘the real Arabs’ was in fact no more satisfactory than calling the British royal family ‘the real British’ and trying to forget the remaining millions of the population. In any case, it was not by honourable means that Lawrence got his way with al-Bakri. First, he went to see Auda and explained that, if they were to strike north through Rwalla territory, then it would be the Rwalla and not the Howaytat who received the credit and the bulk of the British gold. He spoke privately with Nasir, too, fanning the instinctive jealousy between the Hashemites – direct descendants of the Prophet – and the al-Bakris, who claimed descent – spuriously, Lawrence hinted – from the Prophet’s first Khalif, Abu Bakr as-Sadiq. Eventually he won them both over, and it was agreed that, after the recruitment was completed, Nasib should ride off to the Druse mountains to prepare the way for an eventual march on Damascus. Lawrence tried to make sure that he had insufficient funds to raise a proper revolt by persuading Auda and Nasir to ask for the £7,000 Feisal had given him to spend in Syria. The strain of this double-dealing, with holding to the course he had set himself at Wejh, with lying day after day to the Bedu recruits, play-acting the Bedui, now became too much to bear. Ever since they had started from Wejh, three weeks previously, Lawrence’s overwhelming fear had nagged at him, telling him constantly to move on towards the thing he feared most. The inertia of the movement in Wadi Sirhan had been agonizing for someone of his masochistic temperament, and at last, something inside him snapped: ‘Can’t stand it another day,’ he wrote in his pocket diary on 5 June. ‘Will ride N[orth] and chuck it.’20