Aqaba, 1917: The Making of a Hero
Lawrence left Cairo on November 25, 1916, and arrived back in Yenbo early on December 2, having spent no more than ten days in Cairo while his future was being decided. He was pleased to be nearly 200 miles away from Colonel Wilson in Jidda, and to discover that Wilson had already sent Major H. G. Garland to Yenbo to teach the Arabs how to handle explosives, and to keep track of incoming supplies. Lawrence was ambivalent regarding Garland, whose expertise about explosives was vital if the railway to Medina was to be cut, but whose attitude toward the Arabs distressed him. Garland was a former metallurgist, caustic and quick tempered, but his joy in setting off large, destructive explosions fortunately communicated itself to the Arabs. He took the time to teach Lawrence the rudiments of demolition, which Garland approached rather in the spirit of enthusiastic amateur than in the cautious, step-by-step manner of the Royal Engineers, who, Lawrence complained, treated explosives like the “sacrament.” Garland stuffed volatile detonators, fuses, and primers carelessly into his pockets; tossed explosives around as if they were tennis balls; and encouraged in Lawrence a similar fearlessness on the subject. He taught Lawrence notonly how to use high explosives but how to inflict the maximum damage to the railway, by blowing up culverts and bridges and by taking the time and trouble to destroy as many rails as possible, especially the curved rails—which, because they were in short supply, were harder for the Turks to replace than straight ones. Garland, as it turned out, was a jack-of-all-trades, who could repair machine guns, improvise an artillery plan, lay out a defense perimeter, supervise the digging of trenches, and give lessons in the use of grenades, one pattern of which he had invented himself. He was hardworking and efficient, so much so that Lawrence was able without great trouble to shift onto Garland’s shoulders the uncongenial job of being a glorified supply officer at Yenbo.
In some ways, the situation seemed better than it had when Lawrence had traveled to Rabegh less than two months earlier. The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) had finally overcome its nervousness about stationing aircraft in Rabegh; there was now a flight of four British aircraft, under the command of an officer who spoke Arabic, and guarded by 300 Egyptian soldiers who were more alarmed by their Arab allies than by the threat of a Turkish attack. The RFC flight was more important, at the moment, for carrying out aerial reconnaissance than for attacking Turkish warplanes, but its presence was heartening to the Arabs. General Wingate had scraped up from the Sudan whatever he could in the way of light artillery—most of it antiquated, some of it French—and sent it over, as a sop to Colonel Brémond. The mere sight of these guns was encouraging to the Arabs, and the sound of them was even more so. Lawrence could feel that the promises he had rashly made to Feisal were being kept, and it was therefore with some confidence that he rode with a guide up to the broadest part of Wadi Yenbo, where Feisal and his army were reported to be. As night fell they heard the noise of a sizable force in front of them. Lawrence’s guide dismounted and moved forward, cocking his rifle, fearing that they might have stumbled into a Turkish force, but he soon came back with the news that Feisal’s army was spread out from one side of the wadi to the other; the size of the force was indicated by the discontented roar and grumbling of hundreds of camels and by the number of tiny fires flickering in the dark.
Unfortunately, the numerous fires had been lit because it was cold and wet—a recent rain had turned the floor of Wadi Yenbo into slimy mud, and men and animals were uncomfortable and disgruntled. Amid all the confusion and noise—the Arabs tended to waste ammunition firing off shots into the night sky to keep their spirits up, or to greet late arrivals—Lawrence finally located Feisal seated calmly on a carpet spread on the rocks, surrounded by baggage camels, while one of his secretaries read reports aloud to him by the light of a lantern held above his head by a slave. Meanwhile, Arab tribal leaders and notables waited in the dark to complain to him. Around Feisal was incredible disorder—camels everywhere, filling the night with their noise and the smell of their dung; the mules of the Egyptian gunners braying and kicking; men spread out in the mud next to the animals, trying to sleep with their cloaks wrapped around them—the perfect picture of an army on the run. The Turks, Feisal explained, had outflanked his army and sent it flying headlong in retreat toward Yenbo, opening up the way to Rabegh and Mecca, and taking the area around Hamra, with its wells, where Lawrence had first met Feisal only a few weeks ago. Feisal’s half brother Zeid had been forced to flee, leaving much of his baggage behind and abandoning a key position, while many of Feisal’s tribal contingents had faded into the hills. Feisal had thought it best to cut his losses and retreat far enough so that he could fall back on Yenbo if the Turks continued to attack. It was exactly the kind of debacle that British doubters had always predicted would happen if the Turks attacked the Arab irregulars, and that Lawrence had convinced Wingate, Murray, Clayton, and the CIGS in London would not. It was not as if the Turks had inflicted serious losses; the Arabs had fled before any serious fighting took place.
Yet during the course of a long, cold, uncomfortable night, made even more miserable by a white mist that drenched everybody to the skin, Lawrence saw signs that kindled his optimism. The Arabs had failed again, certainly, just as they had outside Medina, but Feisal’s spirits were high, he was cheerful and patient with those who brought him complaints, and he seemed unsurprised, even amused, by what had happened. Feisal’s sense of humor (“that invariable magnet of Arab good will,” as Lawrence put it)as he chaffed those who had fled first or fastest, taught Lawrence how to handle the tribesmen: they responded poorly to criticism or reproof but enjoyed a good story even when it was at their own expense.
After a breakfast of dates, Feisal decided to move the army, partly to get it out of the mud and onto higher, drier ground; partly no doubt to take the men’s minds off their position, and off the danger they would be in if the Turks pursued them. The great drums were beaten; men mounted their camels and formed up in two wings, leaving a wide central alley, down which Feisal rode, followed by flag bearers, the intimates of his household, and the 800 men of his bodyguard. Lawrence rode close to Feisal, a privileged position, and was impressed by the savage splendor of the moment, and by Feisal’s instinctive majesty. Daylight—and his presence—had transformed a fleeing mob back into the semblance of an army. Feisal rode ahead and picked out a new encampment on high ground, near the village of Nakhl Mubarak, hidden among groves of date palms, less than forty miles from Yenbo. He raised his tents on a hill overlooking the camp, surrounded by his bodyguard, with the neat rows of the Egyptian gunners’ tents below him, and the Arab army spread out in its usual chaotic disorder beyond them.
It was here that Feisal asked Lawrence to wear Arab clothes, since these would be more acceptable to the tribesmen than his khaki uniform, which reminded them of a Turkish officer, and would also enable him “to slip in and out of his tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers.” To make sure that Lawrence would be recognized as a privileged member of the inner circle, Feisal presented him with the white and gold-threaded robes of a sharifian bridegroom, sent to Feisal by an aunt—perhaps as a hint, Lawrence wondered—that would become Lawrence’s trademark, both in the field and, much to the annoyance or amusement of other British officers, off it. Feisal also gave Lawrence his own British Short Lee-Enfield rifle, the standard.303-caliber weapon of the British army. This one had a very special history; marked as having been issued to the Essex Regiment, it had been captured at Gallipoli by the Turks. Enver Pasha, leader of the ruling Turkish triumvirate, had it polished, reblued, and inlayed with a boastful but beautiful flowing Arabic inscription in gold on the receiver: “Part of our booty in the battles for the Dardanelles.” He gave it to Sharif Hussein as a present, and also as a tactful reminder of Turkey’s victory over the British. Hussein had passed it on to Feisal at the beginning of the revolt. Lawrence would carry it all through the war; he carved his own initials on the stock, a
nd initially cut a notch in the stock above the magazine for each Turk he killed, a practice he gave up in self-disgust when he reached number four.*
In the two days he spent with Feisal before returning to Yenbo to help organize its defense, Lawrence had an opportunity to judge the strength and the weaknesses of Feisal’s forces. He used the Egyptian gunners, who, unlike the Arab tribesmen, did not consider themselves above menial labor, to clear an emergency landing strip for the RFC aircraft, and sat in on all of Feisal’s meetings with the disputatious tribal leaders, noting how Feisal gently led them to do what in any other army would be normal practice, such as posting a guard at night in exposed positions, or sending out patrols. It was an army without rules and without noncommissioned officers, in which each man had to have his say (often at length), and in which an enormous amount of time and patience had to be spent—wasted, in the eyes of most British officers—to accomplish anything.
It was also an army in which religion was ever-present, from the moment the imam climbed to the top of a little hill overlooking the camp before dawn and called the faithful for prayers to the last call for prayer at dusk—even though most of the men did not seem to Lawrence particularly religious. Feisal, for example, was casually observant, but not, it appeared, from any deep belief or interest; he simply felt obliged as a leader to set a good example. He was a chain-smoker, although tobacco was forbidden to Muslims; he had a certain amused contempt for the narrow-minded puritanism of his father’s desert rival ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers, and no enthusiasm at all for his father’s efforts toreintroduce sharia law to Mecca in place of the secular Turkish legal code, which was based on France’s Code Napoléon. Religion among the tribesmen was simply a given, something they all shared; few of them, in fact, had ever met anyone who was not a Muslim. Drawing from this experience, Lawrence would write the “Twenty-Seven Articles,” as a guide for British officers working with the Arabs, a work so full of common sense and tolerance that it is still relevant today. What is extraordinary is how well Lawrence fitted into Feisal’s entourage and camp life without any attempt at disguising who he was. He shared the routine, the food, the harsh living conditions, the obligatory long-drawn-out exchange of compliments so alien to a westerner, living among them without complaint or special treatment, and always careful to ensure that he was never seen “advising” Feisal or, worse yet, contradicting him.
For all of Feisal’s superhuman calm and patience, it was clear to Lawrence that his position at Nakhl Mubarak was hazardous and exposed. It became even more critical when Feisal learned that a Turkish column had surprised his half brother Zeid and Zeid’s 800 tribesmen while they were preparing their morning coffee. Zeid had of course not bothered to post any guards or send out any patrols while he and his force slept, and they were now in full retreat, having abandoned much of their baggage and equipment, including their coffeepots. From everywhere came reports that the Turks were concentrating rapidly on Feisal’s position. Lawrence sent a messenger off to Yenbo asking the RFC to make a reconnaissance flight and determine where the Turks were and in what strength, and asked that an urgent message be telegraphed to “Ginger” Boyle for naval support. He then rode to Yenbo himself on “a magnificent bay camel” with an escort provided by Feisal. There, he found that the indefatigable and inventive Garland had already been preparing defensive positions, on the optimistic assumption that the Arabs would man them.
Lawrence himself does not seem to have made any such assumption. He had already reached the conclusion that while “man by man” the Arabs were good, “as a mass they are not formidable, since they have no corporate spirit or discipline, or mutual confidence.” His report to Clayton recommended using them in the smallest possible units, and keeping them busy by making raids on Turkish outposts and the railway, rather than letting them “sit still"; sitting still made them “get nervous, and anxious to return home,” a trait that Feisal himself shared. In short, Lawrence had already made up his mind that the Arabs needed to fight an altogether different kind of war—guerrilla warfare was, he thought, the best way to use them effectively. He was familiar with Colonel C. E. Call-well’s classic Small Wars, the British army’s bible on fighting guerrillas, in which Callwell, who had fought in the Boer War, wrote: “Guerrilla warfare is what the regular armies always have to dread, and when this is directed by a leader with a genius for war, an effective campaign becomes well-nigh impossible.”
Lawrence believed the very qualities that made the tribesmen such poor material for conventional warfare could help them defeat the Turks: swift mobility, hit-and-run tactics, a gift for long-range sniping, and a tradition of mounted raids that took an enemy by surprise, after which the raiders vanished back into the desert with their plunder. Fighting as guerrillas in small numbers they could deliver an endless series of pinpricks rather than a smashing blow, and over time the pinpricks might prove fatal for the enemy. As for the “leader with a genius for war,” there seems little doubt from Lawrence’s reports that he already saw himself in that role.
The next morning Lawrence was disagreeably surprised to learn that it was not just Zeid who had been defeated. Feisal and his army had clashed with the Turks too, in exactly the kind of conventional battle that Lawrence believed the Arabs should avoid, and had been badly beaten. Zeid’s sudden defection had exposed Feisal’s untrained and poorly organized tribesmen to a determined Turkish attack. Feisal tried to get his men to stand and fight at Nakhl Mubarak, but they were overcome by Turkish artillery, as well as by the fact that their antiquated guns (Lawrence called these guns “old rubbish” left over from the Boer War) proved not to have the range of the Turkish artillery—nor had they been supplied with sights, range tables, or even reliable ammunition. As a resultthe men of the Juheina tribe, on Feisal’s left, lost heart quickly and fled the battlefield. The Juheina would later claim that they had merely been tired and thirsty and had needed a coffee break, but in any case their flight led to the rapid collapse of the rest of Feisal’s line and a disorderly rout as the entire army raced back toward Yenbo and the protection of the British naval guns.
For a western army this would have been a disgrace, and would have been followed by severe disciplinary measures and perhaps courts-martial for the senior officers; but when Lawrence reached Feisal’s house in Yenbo, he found the emir and his commanders in a jolly mood, trading insults, and taunting Zeid in a good-natured way for the speed with which he and his men had run away from the battle. Zeid and his men were “quiet, but in no other way mortified by their shame,” Lawrence remarked; nor did Feisal seem dismayed by the collapse of his army in the face of only three battalions of Turks—in numbers, less than half the fighting men Feisal had. This incident fully justified Colonel Callwell’s firmly expressed opinion in Small Wars: “While all goes well, irregular forces hold together and obey their chiefs, but in the hour of trial the bonds which keep the mass intact are apt to snap, and then the whole dissolves and disappears.”
Feisal’s only concern was that the Juheina tribesmen on his left, who had fled from the battlefield when the fragile bonds that tied them to him snapped, might have gone over to the enemy. But when this turned out not to be the case—they were guilty of cowardice, but not betrayal—the Juheina were given a chance to make up for their ignominious flight by going forward to harass the Turks’ line of communications with sniper fire, a logical decision, since this was their country and they knew the best places to shoot from.
Hoping that this might at least slow the Turks, Feisal and Lawrence went out to see how the town might be saved. Yenbo, fortunately, lent itself to defense—the town was built on a coral reef that rose some twenty feet above sea level, surrounded on two sides by water, and on the other two sides by wide, flat stretches of glistening sand and salt, with no drinkable water to be had on them. The Arabs’ dislike of manual labor did not need to be confronted, since the ground was coral, and far too hard to dig in—instead Lawrence and Garland reinforced the existing walls, and
placed the Egyptian gunners and naval machine gun parties at the crucial points. Boyle had managed to produce five naval ships and anchored them close inshore; they included the modern, powerful shallow-draft monitor M 31, whose six-inch guns would surely stop any Turkish attempt to rush the town across the salt flats. Navy signalers were placed in the minaret of the mosque, with Feisal’s blessing on this intrusion by infidels, to direct the fire of the ships’ guns.
At dusk, silence fell on the town as Feisal’s men waited for the attack—by that time the Turks were only three miles away—but none came. After darkness had fallen, the ships turned on their searchlights and aimed them at the wide salt flats, illuminating the flats harshly in a careful crisscross pattern through the night. The commander of the Turkish advance hesitated at the sight of the brightly lit landscape, and lost heart at the prospect of advancing across brilliantly lit open ground as flat as a billiard table, toward an enemy holding the high ground. The night passed without a Turkish attack, or a gun’s being fired.
Lawrence was sufficiently confident of the outcome—and exhausted—that he went aboard the Suva and fell asleep. He would later conclude that the Turks’ failure to rush Yenbo that night “and stamp out Feisal’s army once and for all” had cost them the war.
For the moment, however, the Turks still held Gaza on their right and Medina on their left, and threatened Mecca. The Arab army had been saved, but the Arab cause was in as precarious a situation as ever. Feisal—with the help of lavish supplies of British gold—had kept his army together, but only under the protection of British warships; what it needed was a strategy, and Lawrence was about to provide one.
Until now, Lawrence’s role had been that of an observer and a liaison officer, but those limits were about to be changed rapidly. At home, the energetic David Lloyd George had replaced the exhausted Asquith asprime minister. Lloyd George was by instinct an “easterner”: he deeply distrusted the idea that the war could be won only by breaking through the German lines on the western front whatever the cost in British and French lives, and his notoriously devious mind was attracted to the notion of knocking Germany’s weakest ally out of the war and rearranging the Middle East. In London, Cairo, and Khartoum the decision was finally made that the Arabs simply could not be allowed to fail. In Mecca Sharif Hussein still vacillated, alternately calling Colonel Wilson in Jidda to request British troops and then changing his mind and refusing permission for them to land, while Colonel Brémond schemed to get his French North African troops into the Hejaz. With the sharifian forces more or less bottled up on the coast in Rabegh and Yenbo under the protection of the Royal Navy there seemed nothing much they could do to keep the tribes from deserting, one by one.
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Page 7
