Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  ‘What are your orders, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Get out of range of the enemy as soon as you damned well can!’ Winterton replied.

  On the way back to the bivouac, Winterton recalled, he tried to run down some gazelles, and Lawrence stopped to tick him off angrily: ‘It was typical of him,’ he wrote, ‘to show one of his rare bursts of anger at the destruction of a gazelle.’18

  Arriving back at Umm Surab, they found Sharif Nasir about to move to Umm Tayeh, and heard for the first time that the Turkish 4th Army was pouring out of Amman. Lawrence suggested that they should leave the fleeing Turks for the local Bedu to finish off, move to Sheikh Sa’ad, north of Dara’a, and try to force an immediate evacuation of Dara’a from there. The idea was accepted, and it was decided to send the aircraft and armoured cars back to Azraq to await the final move on Damascus. The column left on the afternoon of 25 September, but they had only gone four miles when they sighted clouds of dust on the horizon: 10,000 Turks were retreating towards Dara’a protected by cavalry pickets on their flanks. One of the aircraft sheared back over the caravan and dropped a message that Turkish horsemen were approaching them. It was an inopportune moment. Pisani’s guns were in bits on their mules, the armoured cars and the rest of the aircraft had left. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to pull out the regulars, while the Rwalla horse under Nuri’ash-Sha’alan and the Hauran riders under Talal al-Haraydhin went forward to draw Turkish fire. Suddenly, the armoured car squadron, which had spotted the enemy, drove back across the plain trailing scarves of dust and prepared to engage the Turks. As it turned out, though, they were merely a group of stragglers seeking a shortcut: they rode straight into the Arab irregulars, who captured over 100 of them.

  That evening they camped at Nuwayma, and Young, whose official post was ‘military adviser’, came to Lawrence’s tent at midnight and suggested that the Arabs had done enough and should now retire to Bosra in the Druse mountains, where the Druses were gathering under Nasib al-Bakri. Here they could wait for the British to take Damascus. Lawrence would not hear of it: Damascus must at all costs be seen to be taken by Arab arms. At first light next day they crossed the railway near Ghazala, and Lawrence laid a charge on the nearest bridge while Auda raced off with his Howaytat riders to capture the station at Khirbat al-Ghazala, where he took 200 prisoners and two mountain-guns. Talal and his fierce Hauranis stormed Izra – which Lawrence claimed was being defended by the traitor ‘Abd al-Qadir – drove out its small garrison and took custody of its large grain depot. The Rwalla skittered up the main road towards Dara’a on their camels looking for Turkish stragglers and came back with 400 prisoners, mules and machine-guns. At dawn on 27 September the column had just settled among the olive groves at Sheikh Sa’ad when an RAF plane dropped a message informing them that Allenby’s spearhead – the 10th Cavalry Brigade, outriding General Barrow’s Indian Division – was already at Ramtha, only fourteen miles away, close on the tail of the fleeing Turks. Two large Turkish columns – 6,000 men from Dara’a, and 2,000 from Mezerib – were converging on the area.

  This was the chance they had been waiting for. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to let the bigger column pass by, to be harried by the Rwalla and Hauran horse, while the regulars would engage the smaller Mezerib column and wipe it out. It was now heading for Tafas, and Talal, a Sheikh of the village, was desperate to get there before the enemy and prevent them from entering it. According to an Arab report, Talal galloped ahead with his Hauranis and attacked the enemy furiously, but was killed by a Turkish grenade. If this is so, he was already dead when Lawrence arrived with Sharif Nasir and Auda, quickly followed by Nuri as-Sa id and the regulars with Pisani and his guns. When they reached Tafas, Lawrence wrote, the enemy was already in the village, and there was the occasional ominous shot from within, and palls of blue smoke from the houses. Soon the Turks began to march out in ordered fashion, with guards of lancers at the front and rear, infantry in columns with machine-guns on their flanks, and transport – including Jamal Pasha in his motor car – in the centre. As the column came into view from among the houses, Pisani’s guns roared and spat smoke, taking the enemy completely by surprise. According to Lawrence’s version, he and Talal then slipped into the streets with a troop of Bedu, only to be met with a nauseating sight. As soon as the Arab battery had opened fire, Lawrence wrote, the Turkish rearguard commander had ordered the massacre of the villagers: they had stabbed and shot to death twenty small children and forty women. As they rode in, a tiny girl – perhaps four years old – tried to run away. Abd al-‘Aziz, Lawrence’s ‘rabbit mouthed’ Tafas bodyguard, jumped from his camel and cradled her: she had been wounded in the neck with a lance-thrust, and blood stained her smock. She tried to escape, and screamed, ‘Don’t hit me, Baba!’ then collapsed and died. They rode grimly past the place where the Turks had mutilated the village women and caught up with wounded stragglers who begged for mercy. They shot them down at point-blank range, and Lawrence looked on silently while his bodyguard-lieutenant Ahmad az-Za’aqi pumped three bullets into the chest of a helpless man. As they came within sight of the column, Lawrence wrote, Talal gave a horrible cry: ‘[he] put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring column’.19 Lawrence moved to join him, but Auda held him back. This was Talal’s private appointment with death. According to Lawrence, he charged right into the jaws of the Turkish machine-gun, screaming his battle-cry, ‘Talal! Talal!’ until, riddled with bullets, he fell from his saddle among the Turkish spears. Lawrence and Auda watched the grim incident from afar, and at last Auda said: ‘We will take his price!’

  The artillery barrage had shocked the Turks and dispersed them in panic. One section, mostly made up of German and Austrian machine-gunners, grouped themselves tightly round three motor cars, and fought like devils. They proved too strong for the Arabs, who let them go. The other two sections, though, were separated and cut to pieces where they stood: Lawrence ordered ‘No prisoners!’ and the Arabs charged them again and again, swooping on them like avenging furies, and cutting them down almost to a man. ‘In a madness born of the horror of Tafas,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as if their death and running blood could slake our agony.’20 Thousands of Hauran villagers gathered like scavengers at the flanks of the beleaguered Turkish column, picking up the rifles of the enemy dead as they fell, and joining their fellow Arabs in the slaughter. By sunset the plain outside Tafas was littered with hundreds of bloody corpses. According to Lawrence, one group of Arabs had not heard his ‘no prisoners’ order, and had taken 250 of the enemy alive, including a number of Germans and Austrians. As he rode up, Lawrence was shown an Arab named Hassan who had been pinned to the ground with German bayonets, while already wounded. Lawrence had wanted no enemy survivors, and this was the excuse he had been looking for. He told his brother Arnie after the war that he had ordered an Arab crew to turn a Hotchkiss on the prisoners and kill them all. In doing so, he felt, he was avenging not only the children of Tafas, but the numberless generations of Arabs who had been ground down by the tyranny of the hateful Turks.

  The picture of Lawrence as a bloodthirsty sadist whose inherent cruelty was finally brought into play by the torture he suffered at Dara’a was much encouraged by David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, in which Lawrence is seen dripping with blood after the battle at Tafas. How much truth is there in such an image? A close reading of Seven Pillars reveals an obsession with cruelty which some have taken to indicate that Lawrence had a sadistic nature. On his very first railway attack near Aba an Na’am, for example, he described how his men captured a shepherd boy whom they kept tied up and threatened to kill, while butchering his goats. There are the beatings which the imaginary ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ constantly seem to have endured for their pranks, not to mention being made to sit on scorching rocks, and clapped in irons for a week; the Circassian youth, not even a combatant, who was dragged ar
ound for an hour by camel, stripped naked and whose feet were then deliberately slit open across the soles – a nauseating and pointless assault; and the even more bizarre incident Lawrence recorded, when his bodyguard picked acacia thorns from a bush and drove them into a man’s body for some unexplained crime. The more sadistic of these punishments are nowhere recorded as customary among the Arabs by the great Arabian travellers, and seem alien to Bedu culture. Wilfred Thesiger, indeed, wrote that the Bedu were so mindful of the dignity of others that they would prefer to kill a man rather than humiliate him. Some of the accounts may be imaginary – an expression of masochistic rather than sadistic fantasy: Lawrence’s

  constant concern with his own pain and suffering makes it clear that it was not with the perpetrators but with the victims of these imaginary punishments that he identified. While a masochistic tendency is clearly observable throughout his life, a sadistic stratum is not. Lawrence was by nature gentle, highly sensitive and compassionate: ‘… they say his mouth suggests cruelty,’ wrote his friend Vyvyan Richards; ‘… is there any trace of that in his nature? I have found none in all the thirty years I have known him… his campaign shows only strong justice where patience and mercy would have been a greater evil.’21 Alec Kirkbride, who was with Lawrence at the very end of the Syrian campaign, wrote: ‘it is complete nonsense to describe him as having been either sadistic or fond of killing … He once told me that his ideal of waging war was based on the professional condottieri of medieval Italy. That is to say, to gain one’s objectives with a minimum of casualties on both sides.’22

  Lawrence makes two related claims in Seven Pillars regarding Tafas: first, that he gave the Arabs the order to take no prisoners, and secondly, that the Arab regulars machine-gunned a host of prisoners with his approval. He does not state specifically that he himself ordered the prisoners shot: this claim only appears after the war in conversation with his brother Arnie. Unlike most events in Lawrence’s career, though, there were other witnesses at the battle of Tafas. Fred Peake, who arrived there soon after Lawrence, and who saw the atrocities for himself, wrote to Arnie Lawrence years later that his brother had actually tried to halt the killing of wounded Turks. The Arabs had gone berserk, Peake said, and when he turned up with his Camel Corps detachment, Lawrence had asked him to restore order. Peake had dismounted 100 troopers and marched them into Tafas with fixed bayonets. The Arabs had given way, stopped killing the wounded, and had ridden after the retreating column, finishing off a few strays but withdrawing quickly when they saw that the Turks meant to fight. It is hardly surprising that Lawrence should have failed to mention this, for among the berserk Arabs were members of his own bodyguard over whom he claimed to have an almost hypnotic control.23 As for the ‘no prisoners’ command, Peake recalled that Lawrence had ordered him personally to ensure the safety of Turkish prisoners – proof, he said, that there was never any such thing. Moreover there is a discrepancy in Lawrence’s two accounts of the massacre, for while in his official dispatch he wrote ‘we’ ordered ‘no prisoners’, in Seven Pillars the ‘we’ has become T. There were several senior figures present by the time Lawrence arrived at Tafas: Sharif Nasir, who was in command of the irregulars, and Nuri as-Sa’id, in charge of the trained troops. Auda Abu Tayyi was also present, and was said by Lawrence himself to have taken command of the last phase of the attack. Is it likely, therefore, that Lawrence, who claimed to work through the Arabs’ own leaders rather than taking the foreground himself, should have been in a position to order the entire Arab force to take no prisoners? Both Peake and biographer john Mack agreed that the ‘we’ was a ‘commander’s we’ – that is, not a personal order, but an assumption of responsibility. Young, who was not present at Tafas, heard from an Arab officer named ‘Ali Jaudet that he and Lawrence had desperately tried to prevent the killing of prisoners after the battle, but to no avail. ‘I am certain,’ Peake wrote, ‘that Lawrence did all he could to stop the massacre but he would have been quite unable to do anything as any human mob that has lost its head is beyond control.’24 According to Nuri as-Sa’id, however, many Turkish prisoners who fell into Arab hands had actually survived.25 Why should Lawrence claim falsely to have committed an act which he knew was against military convention, not to mention morally reprehensible, especially when he was known as a man of great compassion – who had, indeed, only weeks before, spared an unarmed Turkish soldier he had come across on the railway, and who had written to Edward Leeds that the ‘killing and killing’ of Turks sickened him? There are resonances here of the tale of Hamad the Moor’s execution – the alleged incident which forms the overture to his arrival in the desert battle-zone. On the one hand such apparent acts depict Lawrence as a strong and ruthless man capable of righteous anger, on the other they show an apparent burden of guilt which he delighted in displaying to the world. Arnie Lawrence himself suggested to John Mack that he had doubts about the veracity of his brother’s claim, and Alec Kirkbride believed that Lawrence had a horror of bloodshed: ‘… it is because of this,’ he wrote, ‘that he tends to pile on the agony in the passages of Seven Pillars, dealing with death and wounds … however, I suspected him of liking to suffer himself.’26 Indeed, there is a sense in which Lawrence, the masochist, liked to absorb the sin and suffering of the world: the duplicity of the British he bore on his shoulders, together with the inconstancy, cruelty and barbarousness of the Arabs. There is, as we have already seen, a Christ-like leitmotif in Lawrence’s story – especially in his betrayal, torture and humiliation at Dara’a and his ‘resurrection’ afterwards. Lawrence was perfectly aware of this messianic strand: just as Christ died for the sins of the world, Lawrence’s penchant for sacrifice may have obliged him to assume responsibility for savage acts in which he personally had played no part.27

  At sunset, Trad ash-Sha’alan’s horsemen reached Dara’a and captured the Turkish rearguard of 500 soldiers. Lawrence arrived at first light. There was no time to linger, however, for British cavalry pickets were already in sight, and, ignorant of the fact that the town had fallen, were actually starting to engage Arab troops. General Barrow, commanding the British spearhead, had been ordered by Allenby to capture Dara’a and was intent on launching a full-scale assault. Only fast work would avert a disaster. Lawrence and his bodyguard rode out to meet Barrow through British lines – a hazardous undertaking, for he was dressed as an Arab and the British cavalrymen, trigger-happy and flushed with fight, could not distinguish between Hashemite Bedu and Arab irregulars in Turkish pay. George Staples, who was leading a troop of the Middlesex Yeomanry, claimed that he had almost given the order to shoot Lawrence: ‘… it was a blistering hot day,’ he told a Toronto newspaper, ‘and we were all edgy, when around a sand dune came about ten Arabs on camels … They came straight at us and our horses … started to shy. We thought they were the enemy and took aim at the leading Arab. Just as we were about to fire the Arabs stopped and out of the flowing robes came an Oxford accent. He said, “I’m Lawrence. Where’s Barrow?” He acted as if the whole world should know who he was and he was terribly self-opinioned … I had quite a shock, I don’t mind telling you when I realized I might have given the order to shoot him down – he was a thin little chap, about my size, five foot five …,’28 Lawrence, however, recalled only being ‘captured’ by an Indian machine-gun post, and that while he was being held up he had watched British aircraft bombing Nuri’s regulars on the Dara’a road, having mistaken them for Turks. His task became urgent, and he managed to speak to a British officer who directed him to General Barrow. He found the General uncompromising: Allenby had given him no instructions as to the status of the Arabs, and Clayton had not intervened, believing that the Hashemites deserved only what they could keep. For a moment the Arab efforts – and Lawrence’s miseries – of two years hung in the balance:’… my head was working full speed,’ he wrote, ‘… to prevent the fatal first steps by which the unimaginative British … created a situation which called for years of agitation… to mend.’29 Barrow a
nnounced his intention of posting sentries to control the inhabitants of the town: Lawrence countered that the Arabs were already in control: the General said that his sappers would inspect the wells: Lawrence said they were welcome, but that the Arabs had already started the pump engines. Barrow snorted that the Arabs seemed to have made themselves at home and said that he would take charge of the railway station: Lawrence pointed out that the Arabs were already working the railway, and asked politely that British sentries should not interfere. Once again, it was Lawrence’s rhetoric which saved the Hashemites: so persuasive was he, indeed, that Barrow not only accepted that the Arabs were in possession of Dara’a, but, on entering the town, actually made them the thrilling compliment of saluting the Hashemite flag fluttering from the ruined serail.

  The British remained in Dara’a one night, and on the 29th marched north for Damascus, with the Arabs under Nasir now holding their right flank. Lawrence waited for Feisal, who arrived in his Vauxhall car from Azraq, followed closely by Frank Stirling and the armoured cars. That night, however, he could not sleep, and before light he and Stirling climbed into Blue Mist and set off for Damascus, driving along the track of the disused French railway. They caught up with Barrow, watering his horses at a stream, and Lawrence borrowed a camel and rode up to him. The General, not realizing that Lawrence had come most of the way by car, was dumbfounded to hear that he had left Dara’a only that morning.