A few days after the battle, Lawrence rode down the escarpment to the Dead Sea to urge a force of mounted Bedu from Beersheba, under Sharif ‘Abdallah al-Fair, to destroy the Turkish dhows in the harbour at Al-Mezra a which were lightering supplies to the Turks in Jericho. They attacked on 28 January, burned the supply-sheds and scuttled seven boats, effectively halting traffic on the Dead Sea. Lawrence was thrilled by the yarn-spinning possibilities of such an unusual action. It was, he announced proudly to Robert Graves, ‘One of [only] two occasions in military history [when mounted men have fought and sunk a fleet]. I recommended myself, vainly, for a naval D S O after this engagement.’8 Meanwhile, the Hashemite plan was still to press on north to Kerak and Madeba, and in early February Lawrence rode south to Guweira to collect an extra £30,000 in gold they would need to recruit irregulars for the advance. When he arrived back at Tafilah on 11 February, exhausted after a scramble across the icy hills, he found to his dismay that Zayd had made no preparations for the push into Moab, and that the advantage gained from the battle of Tafilah had been squandered: ‘Zayd hummed and hawed,’ he wrote in a dispatch to Clayton the next day, ‘and threw away his chance of making profit from it. He had the country from Madeba at his feet. These Arabs are the most ghastly material to build into a design.’9 Indeed, though Lawrence had always tried to remain in the background, he felt increasingly obliged to dictate strategy: ‘someday everybody will combine to down me,’ he wrote to Clayton. ‘It is impossible for a foreigner to run another people of their own free will indefinitely, and my innings has been a fairly long one.’10 He realized that the Sharif had lost the determination to advance on his own, and decided to ride north to goad various irregular groups into action. The gold would arrive in Tafilah within a few days, and Lawrence felt it would be enough to finance his and the Sharif’s immediate needs and support the offensive. He rode off to make a reconnaissance in the Sayl al-Haysa with Lieutenant Alec Kirkbride – a fluent Arabic speaker who had been sent from GHQ, Beersheba to report on intelligence possibilities – and after Kirkbride had returned to Palestine, continued with a local Sheikh as far as Kerak and Madeba. The reconnaissance was highly satisfactory, and he arrived back at Tafilah on 18 February to tell Sharif Zayd that the way north was open to them. Zayd argued that this operation would require a great deal of money, and when Lawrence pointed out that he had just had £30,000 in gold sent up, Zayd claimed, to his astonishment, that he had already disbursed the entire amount in payment to the Muhaysin, the ‘Ayma men, the ibn Jazi, the Bani Sakhr, and various other groups. Lawrence was shattered: most of these men were peasants centred on Tafilah and could not be used for an advance: the Hashemite system was to enrol men as they moved forward, but the payroll was fictitious, for they could not possibly afford to pay more than a fraction of the men on their books, and would not do so unless there was an emergency in a particular area. Lawrence knew that Zayd was aware of this and realized suddenly that the Sharif was lying to him; the last instalment of the gold had only arrived the previous day, and there were simply not enough clerks to have counted it and disbursed it all within twenty-four hours. Lawrence’s intuition that some day the Sharifs would turn against him had all too quickly proved correct. Zayd stuck to his lie, and for once Lawrence lost his cool: ‘I am in no way under your orders,’ he told the Sharif, ‘or responsible to you: rather the contrary. In all respects I expect to have my wishes considered and not acted against without due and previous explanation: and where the British provide through me the whole resources for an operation, it should follow as exactly as possible my instructions.’11 Zayd would not relent, however, and Lawrence realized the Dead Sea campaign was finished. Once more, he had failed to keep his promise to Allenby. In the morning he sent a note to Zayd asking for the return of the money, and when the Sharif merely sent back a specious account of his expenditure, Lawrence decided to ride to Beersheba, explain to Allenby that he had let him down for a second time due to faulty judgement, and give up for ever his role in the Arab Revolt.
On the very day he arrived at Allenby’s GHQ, though, the Turks evacuated Jericho and the campaign in Palestine entered a new phase. The War Office in London was pushing for a final blow to the Turks, and Allenby was already preparing to spring on Damascus and Aleppo. Lawrence’s petty squabble with Zayd over £30,000 was forgotten in the new euphoria. Allenby wanted his right flank secured, and the railway cut. He could not afford to have the Medina garrison brought back into play at this crucial stage. He was prepared to send his Egyptian Camel Corps and Australian Light Horse across the Jordan river to take as-Salt, west of Amman, and thus safeguard an Arab assault on Ma’an, the garrison that had proved a constant thorn in the Hashemite side. Lawrence thought that with proper transport, Ja’afar Pasha’s 4,000 Arab regulars in Aqaba could be leap-frogged to a point on the railway north of Ma an and could sit on the line until the Turks marched out to remove them. He now believed the Arab regulars more than a match for Turkish troops in open battle, but doubted they could take Ma’an by frontal assault. To move the regulars, he told Allenby, would require camels, cash and guns. Instantly, the General granted him 700 baggage camels with Egyptian handlers and £300,000 in gold, and promised him artillery and machine-guns. Lawrence moved to Cairo, where, with Pierce Joyce and Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay – a gifted tactician who had now been assigned as chief of Hedgehog – he planned the advance on Ma an. The final act of this drama would be an attack on the Mudowwara stretch of the railway to cut off the Medina garrison once and for all.
Sadly, the plans went wrong. The British took as-Salt, but failed to take Amman, and were driven back by a massive Turkish counterattack, abandoning the town on 2 April. On the same day Lawrence, who knew nothing of the defeat, was riding back to Aba 1-Lissan with his bodyguard, when, he wrote, his men urged him to attack an eight-man Turkish patrol on a railway bridge near Faraifra. The attack was undisciplined: Lawrence’s servant Othman (‘Farraj’) rode recklessly ahead of the rest and was cut down by a bullet just as he drew his camel to a halt by the bridge. To Lawrence it seemed that he had deliberately stopped in front of the enemy to draw their fire. When he arrived, ‘Farraj’ was mortally wounded in the spine, but was ‘happy to die’, since his partner, Ali (‘Da’ud’), had perished of cold at Azraq a few weeks previously: ‘Farraj’ had never smiled again, and had lost the will to go on without his friend. For a second time in his career, Lawrence was obliged to shoot a man in cold blood: ‘Farraj’ had only hours to live, but could not be left for the Turks, who were already scooting towards them on a railway trolley. He held his pistol low so that the boy would not see it, but ‘Farraj’ understood his intention and said, ‘Da’ud will be angry with you.’
‘Salute him from me,’ Lawrence said.
‘God will give you peace,’ the ‘Agayli answered. Lawrence shot him in the head.12
Lawrence felt responsible for the death of ‘Farraj’ and if his description of the attack is accurate, rightly so, for his own records show that in April 1918 his bodyguard consisted of only fifteen men, and to have assaulted a Turkish position with so few would have been most unwise. There is no reference to this skirmish in official records, however, and Lawrence makes no note of the deaths of either ‘Da’ud’ or ‘Farraj’ (‘Ali and Othman) in his diary, nor, as we have seen, are there any records of an ‘Ali or an Othman serving in his small bodyguard in April 1918. It is, perhaps, significant that Lawrence uses Farraj’s grief at the death of Da’ud as a prime for an essay on the nature of woman in the ‘Mediterranean’: explaining that while women were only ‘machines for muscular exercise’ men could really be at one only with each other. It must also be significant that Lawrence felt the need to change their names at all. Since they were both dead when he came to write Seven Pillars, and since he took great pains to explain that they were both openly homosexual, and (incorrectly) that no shame was attached, there seems no rationale behind the change of names, unless – as in the case of Hubert Young – Lawrence wa
s ‘telling lies about them’. Lawrence’s queasiness at letting Robert Graves use the story shows clearly in his note: ‘It seems unbearable that you should publish the story of the death of Farraj… I suggest that it be cut right out. The narrative was so arranged as not to depend on it … You could well say that a week after the Amman visit Farraj himself was dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish Railway Patrol and leave it at that. These are private matters.’13 Yet, as Graves pointed out with amused indignation, Lawrence had already published the story himself in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars, which had at that time circulated to thousands of readers. If he had sincerely felt the death of ‘Farraj’ unbearable, why did he reveal such ‘private matters’ to the world? Certainly, he had had no such qualms in discussing the literary merits of his ‘death scene’ with Charlotte Shaw in 1924: ‘I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top scene for him,’ he wrote. ‘Hounds of Banba [a novel by Daniel Corkery] does it, in the story of the burning of the village … I funked it, in the death of Farraj, my man.’14 It is interesting to note, too, that Lawrence is here comparing a scene which is supposedly factual to an incident from a novel which is presumably purely fictitious – almost as if he had forgotten that there was a distinction between the two.
The British push across the Jordan failed, and the Arab assault on Ma’an failed also, largely because the Arab officers decided, against Lawrence’s advice, on a frontal assault rather than an encircling movement. On 18 April, Lawrence, who had watched the battle and had been impressed, despite its outcome, with the valour of the Arab regulars, rode to Guweira. The same day he commandeered a Ford car and rode to Tel ash-Shahm on the railway, where Dawnay and a mixed force of British, Egyptians and Bedu were concealed in a hollow ready for an attack. The Tel ash-Shahm operation had been planned with textbook precision by Dawnay, but though Lawrence believed him the only high-ranking British officer capable of handling conventional and guerrilla tactics together, he realized that with the heterogeneous medley of troops under his command, things might not turn out quite as predicted. Lawrence volunteered himself for the mission officially as ‘interpreter’, but actually to keep an eye on relations between the three groups.
This was to be a very different operation from the one Lawrence had led against Mudowwara in the previous year. Besides a squadron of armoured cars and Rolls-Royce tenders, there was a battery of Ford-mounted ten-pounder Talbot guns of the Royal Field Artillery under Lieutenant Samuel Brodie, a flight of aircraft operating from the Ga’a of Rum, a detachment of the Egyptian Camel Corps under Bimbashi Fred Peake, as well as the Bedu irregulars under Sharif Haza a. At first light on 19 April, the armoured cars slid out of their hollow with their motors churning, crunching across the flint surface, leaving smoke-trails of dust. Lawrence sat in a Rolls-Royce tender on a ridge-top next to Dawnay, who, with a map spread on his knees and a watch in his hand, checked off each movement according to a carefully prepared schedule. Precisely on time, the armoured cars came over the ridge and approached the Turkish entrenchments around Telash-Shahm station. Each detail of the scene was accentuated and magnified by long shadows in the crystal-clear light. The Turks, taken by surprise at the sudden appearance of armoured cars, surrendered immediately. Meanwhile two Rolls-Royce tenders under the command of Lieutenant Hornby of the Royal Engineers rumbled down to one of the nearby culverts and blew it spectacularly with a hundredweight of gun-cotton. The blast almost lifted Lawrence and Dawnay out of their seats. The Turks opened fire from behind a thick stone sangar on a steep knoll, and the rat-at-tat of four machine-guns crackled out at once from the armoured-car turrets, their bullets sizzling off the stones. At that moment the Bedu irregulars under Haza a came from behind a hill, firing raggedly, and charging at the Turkish knoll, capturing it without effort. Lawrence drove down the line in his Rolls-Royce, slapping gun-cotton charges on rails and bridges, covered by the machine-guns in the armoured cars. A chain of explosions rocked the air, and clouds of debris materialized suddenly along the line like dust-devils: fragments of shrapnel and flint bumped and pattered against the steel turrets of the armoured cars. The Bedu rushed the Turkish outpost to the south of the station in a wild flight of camels, streaking up the mound and vaulting the trenches. Meanwhile the Camel Corps under Fred Peake approached the station from the north, working forward more cautiously from ridge to ridge. The Talbot battery opened fire, and shells crumped against the station buildings with ear-splitting impact, and two planes fell suddenly like swallows out of the clear sky to the west and sent a dozen bombs hurtling into the trenches. V-shaped plumes of smoke appeared momentarily around the station, and through the haze and dust the armoured cars edged forwards with their machine-guns spouting drumfire. Peake’s camel-corps now threw caution to the wind and broke into a ragged gallop across the plain, and the Bedu, not to be outdone, thundered down from the east, converging on the station, where the Turks threw up their arms in surrender and waved white flags frantically. Lawrence beat them all there in his Rolls-Royce, and while he claimed the brass bell as a memento, Dawnay took the ticket-punch and Rolls, his driver, the rubber stamp. They emerged to find that the Arabs and the Egyptians had gone mad with looting-frenzy, smashing and ransacking the buildings, and rushing about in blind lust for reward. The station store contained hundreds of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, food and clothing, and the factions began shooting at each other in their greed. One camel set off a Turkish trip-mine and was blown over, causing momentary turmoil. Lawrence, who later said that the British officers came within an inch of getting ‘scragged’, managed to separate the parties, allowing the Egyptian Camel Corps to pick what they wanted first. Afterwards, the Bedu scrabbled for the remainder on the word ‘Go!’, as Rolls put it, ‘like a solid mass of ejected inmates from Bedlam’.15 They rushed the store-house, leaned on the door until it snapped open, and were so satisfied with their loot that more than three-quarters of them simply loaded their camels and made off into the desert. The attack had been an unqualified success: it was, said Lawrence, ‘fighting de luxe’. Dawnay’s only reservation was that while he had scheduled the capture of the station for 11.30 precisely, the Turks, out of ‘ignorance and haste’, had capitulated at 11.20 – ten minutes too soon. This was, Lawrence wrote with tongue coiled in cheek, ‘the only blot on a bloodless day’.16
The railway-wrecking was not finished, however. One armoured car was sent to clear Ramleh, the next station to the south, while Lawrence, in his Rolls-Royce, and other demolition teams blew bridges and miles of track in between. The culverts were demolished by charges stuffed into their drainage-holes, while Lawrence had developed a more effective method of ruining the metals, planting ‘tulip’ charges under the sleepers so that they would buckle and warp entire stretches of track. Having satisfied himself that the railway was now effectively out of service between ash-Shahm and Ramleh, Lawrence slept near ash-Shahm, preparing for the attack on Mudowwara scheduled for the following day. The Turks were expecting the assault, however, and threw the combined force back with deadly accurate artillery fire at 7,000 yards. Lawrence took the armoured cars off in an arc to the place in which he had mined his first train, and destroyed the long culvert about 500 yards from the ridge on which he had sited his Stokes and Lewis guns on that day in 1917. Then he retired back to Ramleh to destroy more line. Later, Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and his Howaytat were sent to cripple the railway north of ash-Shahm. By 20 April, the Arabs and the British together had put out of action eighty miles of track, and taken or cut off seven stations. Fakhri Pasha’s force in Medina had at long last been neutralized as a potential threat.
19. My Dreams Puffed out Like Candles in the Strong Wind of Success
Dara’a, Tafas and the fall of Damascus Winter, 1918
Our battered saloon pulled into Tafas just after noon. It seemed a typical Hauran town – a place without a centre, a sprawl of houses constructed haphazardly along a grid of roads amid acres of wheatla
nds, and desolate red meadows relieved only by poisonous Sodom apple and brakes of eucalypt, cedar and Aleppo pine. In places you could glimpse the village as it had been in 1918 – scattered among the jerry-built breeze-block dwellings were ancient cottages of black basalt. We trawled up and down the main road for a time, then stopped a swarthy man in a black and white headcloth and asked him if he knew where the battle of 1918 had been fought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But there is an old man in the village who was there. I can take you to him.’ I was amazed, and slightly sceptical. All these months I had been pursuing a phantom whom people knew only by hearsay. Was I, finally, to meet someone who had actually seen Lawrence with his own eyes? We urged the man into the car, and drove. He stopped us at a modern corner-house set on red earth among Sodom apple bushes. Inside, a spidery old man in a red kuffiyeh and a black cloak was sitting on a rug on the floor by a benzene heater, surrounded by half a dozen sons and grandsons. The old man wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a wisp of silver beard. One of his grandsons – a medical student in Aleppo – told me that his grandfather was over ninety years old. We sat down cross-legged on the rug, and after we had answered questions, and sipped the statutory tea, I asked him, with suppressed excitement, if he had ever met Lawrence of Arabia. ‘I saw him,’ the Sheikh told me in a shaky voice. ‘I was just a boy then, of course. I remember seeing the Arab army marching through the village. It was a terrible day. I had been with my parents at another village the night before, and when we arrived here in the morning, we found that the Turks had killed almost everyone. Their bodies were lying about on the road. God have mercy upon them!’
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