Hero

by Michael Korda

  Lawrence’s detractors, then and now, still argue that this was merely a “pinprick,” in “a sideshow of a sideshow” compared with the western front, but it in fact was a modest first effort at a new kind of warfare—inwhich an organized, modern, occupying army was forced to deal with small but lethal attacks by an enemy who appeared suddenly out of nowhere, struck hard, and vanished again; in which the ambush, the roadside or railway “improvised explosive device,” the grenade thrown onto a busy café terrace, the destruction of rolling stock, even the “suicide bomber,” would take the place of battle; and in which it was almost impossible to distinguish enemy combatants from the surrounding civilian population.

  Lawrence rode back to Abdulla’s camp, where a huge celebration took place, and set off the next morning with about forty tribesmen and a machine gun platoon to mine the tracks again. He seems to have regained his health and equilibrium. Mechanical devices and gadgets, whether in the form of bombs, fuses, cameras, or motorcycles, always seemed to cheer Lawrence up, even at the worst of times, and his description of the landscape is, as always, detailed and fascinating. He had the gifts of a great nature writer and presents with a kind of detached objectivity the hardships of desert travel: a fierce sandstorm, which sends pebbles and whole small trees flying at his party like projectiles, followed by heavy rain and a sudden drop in the temperature that leaves him and his party shivering. The wind is so strong that Lawrence’s robes get in his way as he climbs a rocky crag, so he strips and makes his way naked up the sharp, slippery rocks—one of the servants falls headfirst to his death—and finally arrives at kilometer 1,121 (measured from Damascus) of the railway at ten at night, close to a small station with a Turkish garrison.

  Lawrence was eager to experiment with a more complicated mine; its trigger would fire two separate charges at the same time, placed about ninety feet apart. It took him four hours to lay the mine; then he crawled back to “a safe distance” to wait for dawn. “The cold was intense,” he wrote later, “and our teeth chattered, and we trembled and hissed involuntarily, while our hands drew in like claws.” Only the day before, the heat had been so oppressive that Lawrence had been unable to walk barefoot, to the amusement of the tribesmen “whose thick soles were proof even against slow fire.” It is worth noting that the desert provides everykind of torment—heat, cold, rain, flash floods, windstorms, biting insects, and sandstorms, sometimes all on the same day.

  At dawn a trolley with four men and a sergeant passes over the mine, but luckily it is too light to set off the explosive—Lawrence doesn’t want to waste his explosives and firing mechanism on so small a target. Later a patrol of Turkish soldiers on foot examines the area around the mine—it has been impossible to hide the tracks because the rain has turned the sand to mud—but finds nothing; then, a heavy train, fully loaded with civilians, many of them women and children, being evacuated from Medina runs over the mine but fails to explode it, infuriating the “artist” in Lawrence—he has already begun to think of demolition as a kind of art form—but relieving “the commander” and, more important, the human being, who has no wish to kill women and children. By now the Turkish garrison is aware of the presence of Lawrence and the others, and opens fire from a distance; Lawrence and his men hide until nightfall. Then he makes his way back to kilometer 1,121 and slowly, carefully, with infinite caution feels up and down the line in the dark for the buried hair trigger, finds it, and raises it one-sixteenth of an inch higher. Afterward, to confuse the Turks, Lawrence and his men blow up a small railway bridge, cut about 200 rails, and destroy the telegraph and telephone lines, then head for home, having already sent on ahead of them the machine gunners and their donkey. The next morning, they hear a great explosion, and learn from a scout left behind that a locomotive with trucks of spare rails and a gang of laborers set off the mine in front of it and behind it, effectively blocking the track for days.

  Quite apart from his boyish excitement at blowing things up—one of Lawrence’s endearing qualities is a kind of innocent delight in pyrotechnics, and throughout his life he retained some of the more attractive characteristics of an adolescent—Lawrence had every reason to be pleased. He had blocked the line to Medina for days, and rendered Turkish troops all the way up and down the line nervous and on full alert, at the cost of a little blasting gelatine and the accidental death of one servant with a fear of heights.

  Lawrence could easily imagine the effect of doing this on a grand scale, and he was eager to get away from Abdulla, whose generosity did not compensate in Lawrence’s eyes for his lack of fighting spirit.

  Each of them misjudged the other. When Abdulla fought, he fought well—he had led the force that captured Taif, the summer resort of Mecca, in the autumn of 1916 and took more than 4,000 Turkish prisoners, the only real victory of the Arab forces to date—and in some ways he was a better leader than Feisal, more flexible, and with a superficial layer of charm, worldly wisdom, and good humor that would keep him on his throne in Amman for over thirty years once Lawrence had helped him secure it. As for Lawrence, Abdulla’s distrust of him as a subversive British agent was unfounded—in fact, Lawrence wanted more for the Hashemite family than they were able to manage, and would use his status as a hero again and again in their support. No doubt Abdulla and his brothers resented the way Lawrence took the limelight—as he still does take it—in the world’s view of the Arab Revolt, but in the end Abdulla and Feisal would never have had their thrones without his help, and their victory was in part his invention.

  Lawrence rode back to Wejh, changed his travel-stained clothing, and went immediately to pay his respects to Feisal, happy, one senses, to be back in a more martial atmosphere. His arrival coincided with that of Auda Abu Tayi and Auda’s eleven-year-old son Mohammed—Auda’s entrance into Feisal’s tent is in fact one of the best set pieces of Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “I was about to take my leave when Suleiman the guest-master hurried in and whispered to Feisal, who turned to me with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said ‘Auda is here.’ I shouted, ‘Auda Abu Tayi,’ and at that moment the tent-flap was drawn back and a deep voice boomed salutations to our lord, the Commander of the Faithful: and there entered a tall strong figure with a haggard face, passionate and tragic…. Feisal had sprung to his feet. Auda caught his hand and kissed it warmly, and they drew aside a pace or two, and looked at each other: a splendid pair, as unlike as possible, but typical of much that was bestin Arabia, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each looking his part to perfection.”

  Lawrence saw in Auda the means of taking Aqaba, and moving the Arab Revolt north into Syria—for Auda was the preeminent desert warrior of his time, who could never be satisfied just with blowing up sections of railway track: his mind was set on a fast-moving war of sudden raids; he “saw life as a saga,” in which he was determined to be at the center. A visit to the English part of the camp, laid out in neat lines near the beach, was enough to warn Lawrence that the British were still determined to push the Arabs into attacking Medina, an objective that he had already concluded was probably impossible, and in any case pointless. Confident that the railway destruction could be continued in his absence, he returned to Feisal’s encampment and began to talk with Auda about the best way to move north, raise the Howeitat and some of the smaller tribes, and attack Aqaba from the direction the Turks would least expect. Auda, who had a natural sense of strategy, was enthusiastic; and Feisal, better than anyone else, understood the enormous importance of an unexpected Arab victory won without the help of the British—or even without their knowledge, for Lawrence had already made up his mind to take Aqaba as a kind “private venture,” drawing on Feisal for men, camels, and money.

  Lawrence’s time at Wejh was marked by many warning signs that his own plans and those of his superiors were beginning to diverge sharply. He was in Wejh for just over three weeks, from April 14, 1917, to May 9, a period during which it was becomingly increasingly clear to Feisal that the French intended to claim Lebanon and
Syria for themselves after the war, and that it suited them and to a lesser degree the British to direct the Arab armies toward taking Medina, rather than moving north into Syria and Palestine. During this period Sir Mark Sykes paid two short visits to Wejh. The first visit was to meet with Feisal while Lawrence was away; he had tried to present the content of the Sykes-Picot agreement to Feisal in the vaguest and most benevolent terms, without revealing that the British, French, and Russians had already agreed on a map that divided up the Ottoman Empire among them and excluded the Arabs from most ofthe cities and areas the Arabs wanted. Charming though Sykes was, the effect of his vagueness about details was to heighten rather than decrease Feisal’s shrewd and well-informed suspicions about Anglo-French policy in the Near East. Sykes returned to Wejh after a journey to Jidda for an even more trying and difficult meeting with Feisal’s father; and on May 7, accompanied by Colonel Wilson, he met with Lawrence, who, like most of the British officers in the Hejaz, now including even Wilson himself, strongly objected to urging the Arabs to fight while at the same time negotiating “behind their backs.” Lawrence was particularly outspoken on this subject, and it clearly played a role in his decision “to go [his] own way,” and ride deep into Syria with Auda, then take Aqaba from the undefended east.

  He wrote an apologetic letter to General Clayton in Cairo. Then, without receiving orders or even bothering to inform his superior officers—he took advantage of the fact that Newcombe, who would certainly have tried to talk him out of it, was away attacking the railroad—Lawrence left with his Arab followers.

  Lawrence’s many critics in later years have tried to belittle the risk of what he was proposing to do, but in fact it was a daring decision. Liddell Hart describes it as a “venture … in the true Elizabethan tradition—a privateer’s expedition,” across some of the harshest and most difficult terrain in the world, led by a man who already had a price on his head. It involved a desert march of more than 600 miles, a long “turning movement” that would take Lawrence to Damascus, then down through difficult terrain and unreliable tribes “to capture a trench within gunfire of our ships.”

  Lawrence left Wejh early on May 9, with fewer than fifty tribesmen, accompanied by Auda Abu Tayi; Sharif Nasir, who would be Feisal’s spokesman to the tribes and the nominal commander; and Nesib el Bekri, a Syrian nationalist politician who hoped to make contact with Feisal’s supporters in the north. Lawrence took with him a train of baggage camels carrying ammunition; packs of blasting gelatine, fuses, and wire so hecould continue his demolition work; a “good” tent in which Nasir could receive visitors; sacks of rice, tea, and coffee for entertaining distinguished guests; and spare rifles to give away as presents. Each man carried on his own saddle forty-five pounds of flour intended to last him for six weeks, and the men shared among them the load of 22,000 gold sovereigns from Feisal’s treasury, weighing more than 800 pounds, to pay salaries and use where required as presents or bribes.

  Lawrence was not, of course, the first person to think about taking Aqaba. Kitchener had had his eye on the port even before 1914, and Feisal had brought it up often in the years since. Admiral Wemyss was interested enough in Aqaba to order regular naval reconnaissance, and even two landings by naval parties, since the Royal Navy feared the Turks might use Aqaba as a base from which to float mines down into the Red Sea, or even station a German submarine there to threaten the approach to Port Suez and the Suez Canal. Lawrence saw it, more realistically, as the way to leapfrog over the Turkish forces in the Hejaz, and bring the Arab Revolt within striking distance of Damascus and Jerusalem. He had the advantage over almost everybody else that he had been in Aqaba in 1914, working for the Survey of Palestine Exploration Committee, and indirectly for Kitchener, drawing up a map of the Sinai, and had left Aqaba, expelled by the kaimakam (police chief) and escorted by policemen, on the same route by which he proposed to attack it now. He had even made a map of it, based on aerial photographs, in Cairo—a daring innovation at the time.

  Even Lawrence’s spirit of adventure would be sorely tried by the hardships of the route, and his goals were already compromised by Mark Sykes’s visit, which had brought him face-to-face with a moral dilemma: leading the Arabs into battle for lands that the Allied powers had already decided they were not going to get. The notes in his diaries confirm his moral revulsion and his guilt, and it is perhaps no accident that he was soon troubled by the same boils and fevers that had given him so much pain on the way to Abdulla’s camp at Wadi Ais. “The weight is bearing me down now,” he wrote on May 13; “… pain and agony today.” It seemspossible that Lawrence’s physical agony was at least in part psychosomatic, and far more bearable to him than the spiritual agony of knowing that his government had no intention of respecting its promises to the Arabs, let alone his.

  The journey was an epic one—a glance at the map Lawrence made later for Seven Pillars of Wisdom shows both its length and the fact that Lawrence and Auda set their course over some of the most barren and difficult desert in Arabia, in order to avoid running into Turkish patrols, or tribes that were hostile to the sharifian cause. Even for a hardened Bedouin hero like Auda it was a daunting journey—with a high risk of dying from thirst or starvation along the way, or being killed by hostile tribesmen.

  They set out “on the old pilgrim route from Egypt,” and after two hours took a short rest (Lawrence was already feeling ill), then rode on through the night and through the next day over white, hard-packed sand that reflected the sun’s rays like a mirror. Even Lawrence, who is usually indifferent to suffering, remarks that the bare rocks on either side of their path “were too hot to touch and threw off waves of heat in which our heads ached and reeled.” They were unable to increase the pace because their baggage camels were weakened by mange, and Auda feared to press them too hard. They rested briefly, at Lawrence’s request, each man seeking relief from the sun by squatting on the burning sand in the shade from a cloak or a folded saddle blanket thrown over the branches of a thornbush. Finally they reached an oasis, where, typically of the strange coincidences of desert life, they found a rugged, independent-minded old farmer, who sold them fresh vegetables to go with their cans of army-issue beef stew. They rested for two nights, much to Auda’s distress, for he preferred the empty vistas of the desert to an oasis and vegetable gardens.

  Also typically of desert travel, they were no sooner out of sight of the oasis than it seemed like an illusion; they were forced to dismount and climb “a precipitous cliff” by a steep goat track of razor-sharp stones, leading their camels, two of which fell and broke a leg, and were instantly slaughtered and butchered by the Bedouin, who shared out the meat. They rested again when they reached the encampment of Sharif Sharraf, set deep in the steep-sided valley of Wadi Jizil, with its walls of wind-shaped stone and of fiery-red rock that ran down from here to Petra, the land once inhabited by the Nabateans, while waiting for Sharraf’s return with news of what was happening to the north. During this time Lawrence acquired, more out of pity than need, two servants—Daud and Farraj—who were about to be whipped for unruly behavior.

  The farther north Lawrence and his companions rode, the less sure it was that they would meet tribes who favored Sharif Hussein and the Arab Revolt, and the more likely that they might be attacked or betrayed to the Turks. Lawrence had in mind two objectives: the first was to pursue the roundabout way to capture Aqaba by surprise; the second was to try to win the loyalty of the tribes as far north as Damascus and the mountains of Lebanon for the sharif of Mecca and his sons, a task bound to infuriate the French.

  After two days, Sharraf finally appeared, preceded by celebratory volleys of rifle shots: an elderly, powerful man, with a shrewd and sinister face, he was a major figure in Sharif Hussein’s court in Mecca, and drew a certain respect even from so proud a figure as Auda, who put on his best clothes and elastic-sided boots to pay his respects. Over a large meal of rice and mutton in Sharraf’s tent, Lawrence managed to persuade the old man to let him have nine
teen warriors to add to their own—Sharraf was in a good mood, having blown up a piece of the railway line and captured numerous Turkish prisoners. Except for officers, Turkish prisoners were not in themselves very valuable, having nothing much on them to take except their rifles, but Sharif Feisal paid so much a head in English gold for each Turkish prisoner brought in alive.* Lawrence also heardfrom Sharraf the good news that there were pools of rainwater in the dry, barren country ahead. This mattered because there had been no water skins to buy at Wejh “for love or money,” so Lawrence’s party was left woefully short and dependent on the wells along the way.

  The next day they resumed their march, over the seemingly endless expanse of a lava field, on which the camels could walk only with great difficulty, and it was not until they were eleven days out of Wejh that they reached the railway, near Dizad, about sixty miles to the south of the railway station at Tebuk. Here, they paused to blow up some of the line and pulled down the telegraph poles and wires. Then they rode on into the furnace of El Houl (“the desolate place”), where the superheated desert wind cracked and parched their lips and skin, and across which they rode for three days and nights before they reached a well. They were now on the edge of the great Nefudh, the rolling, lifeless dunes that stretched to the horizon like a billowing ocean of sand. Lawrence, in a spirit of adventure, suggested to Auda that they cut across the Nefudh, but Auda replied gruffly that it was their business to reach Arfaja alive, not to play at being explorers, and steered them across polished mudflats from which the reflected heat almost made Lawrence faint. They were now two days out in the desert, with the nearest water a day’s march farther and their camels growing weaker with every mile. They had dismounted to lead their beasts when Lawrence suddenly noticed that one of the camels was riderless.