In that land of romance and mystery, of palm-trees, camels, and veiled women, custom, founded on the teachings of the Prophet, relegates the gentler sex to an inferior position not only in this world but in the hereafter as well. But, despite this, there are many Arabs who make love just as ardently as their enslaved brethren in other lands, and nearly all Arabian poets draw their inspiration from the loveliness of woman.
My heart is firmer than the roots of mountains,
My fame pervasive as the smell of musk.
My pleasure is in hunting the wild lion,
The beast of prey I visit in his den.
Yet all the while a gentle fawn has snared me,
A heifer from the pastures of Khazam.
CHAPTER XXI
THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES IN DISGUISE
NEARLY all Arabs carry some sort of good luck charm, and the belief in jinn or genii is still common. The talisman which Auda wore round his neck was probably one of the most extraordinary to be found in all Arabia. The amulet was a diminutive copy of the Koran about one inch square, for which he paid more than two hundred pounds. One day he displayed it with great pride, and Lawrence discovered it had been printed in Glasgow and, according to the price marked inside the cover, had been issued at eighteenpence. So far as we could make out, the only things the Bedouins are afraid of are snakes, and they believe that the sole protection against them is such a charm worn round the neck.
There are thousands of reptiles in certain parts of the desert. The worst snake belt in the Year East extends from Jauf to Azrak along a chain of shallow wells in the North Arabian Desert, where one finds, usually near the water, Indian cobras, puff-adders, black whip-snakes, and hosts of others —nearly all deadly. Lawrence once started out on an expedition with eighteen men five of whom died on the way from snake-bite. Instead of relying on the usual alcoholic antidote, he, like his nomad companions, put his faith in Allah. In Arabia a snake will often snuggle up to a sleeping Bedouin at night for warmth, but it will not bite—unless the sleeper is unlucky enough to roll over and frighten it. Although their consciences are by no means clear, nearly all Bedouins, fortunately, are sound sleepers!
Whenever Lawrence and his men reconnoitered in the snake belt at night they put on boots and were careful to beat every foot of ground and every bush in front of them. When an Arab is bitten, his friends read certain chapters of the Koran over him. If they happen to choose correct passages, he lives; but if they have no Koran, the unfortunate one in all likelihood dies. ’T is the will of Allah!
Although the Arabs knew Lawrence was a Christian, once he had gained their confidence, they often invited him to pray with them. This he did only when he felt inclined to humor them, but he had completely memorized all the important Mohammedan prayers so as to be prepared for any unforeseen emergency when his declining to pray might cause embarrassment to Emir Feisal and King Hussein in the presence of members of strange tribes. Fortunately, no such emergency ever arose.
But when he did pray with his Bedouins on several occasions, just to please them, the procedure was as follows: Lawrence and his body-guard would kneel on their prayer-rugs with their faces toward Mecca. Then with one of the sheiks acting as leader they would go through a ceremony consisting of rhythmic prostrations and the repetition, in unison, of passages from the Koran. A certain number of bows are made in the morning, so many at noon, and still a different number at sunset, although the words repeated each time are much the same. At the end of all prayers Lawrence and his men would turn their heads to the right and then to the left before rising. Lawrence explained to me that two angels were supposed to be standing beside each person while praying. One angel records good deeds and the other bad deeds, and it is customary to salute them both. All good Moslems have five prayer services daily, but Lawrence and his men usually cut them down to three by telescoping two in the morning and two in the afternoon; otherwise the Arab army would have spent more time praying than fighting.
Lawrence overcame the two greatest prejudices of the Bedouins; namely, that he was a foreigner and a Christian. Most of the foreigners these nomads had met were Turks whom they despised as barbarians, for the Arabs are intellectual snobs. The only Christians they know are the native Christians of the Syrian coast and the Armenians, who are more accustomed to show the other cheek than to show courage; the Arabs loathe them. It suited them for the most part to ignore the fact that Lawrence was a Christian, because they consider it a disgrace that any Christian should outdo them at the very things at which they ordinarily excel. Occasionally, however, they actually invited him to recite his Christian prayers aloud, which he did most eloquently. Charles M. Doughty, the traveler and poet, so far as I know, was the only man other than Lawrence who ever wandered openly up and down Holy Arabia as a Christian. All other explorers in the forbidden country of the Prophet have disguised themselves as Moslems. Doughty had at least a score of narrow escapes from death, and that he escaped at all was due to the fact that he always went unarmed and did nothing covertly. He took no money with him and made his way about by healing the sick with simple remedies and by vaccinating Arabs. An old man and a great scholar, he now lives at a watering-place on the south coast of England. He and Lawrence are close friends, and the younger man gives his predecessor full credit for “breaking the ice” and making it possible for him and his associates to work with the Bedouins during the war. In fact Doughty’s “Arabia Deserta” was both Lawrence’s Bible and military text-book during the campaign.
The magnificent Bedouin clothes that Lawrence wore were not theatrical garb. They were a part of his carefully worked-out plan to gain complete mastery over the Arabs. Although he did not attempt to disguise either his religion or nationality, outwardly he was an Arab. Except in certain areas, he found that being known as a British officer and a Christian was less of a hindrance than full disguise. Had he desired to pass himself off as a Bedouin, he would have had to grow a beard, a feat he could not have achieved even if the fate of the British Empire had depended on it. However, on a few occasions he did disguise himself as a Bedouin woman and made his way through the Turkish lines. But to other British officers who desired to visit a tribe he recommended simply the Arab head-cloth, to be worn out of courtesy and not as a disguise.
Bedouins have a malignant prejudice against the hat and believe our persistence in wearing it is founded on some irreligious principle. If you were to wear this season’s smartest Piccadilly derby or Austrian velours in Mecca, your friends and relatives would disown you.
“Adopt the kuffieh, agal, and aba, and you will acquire the confidence and intimacy of the sons of Ishmael to a degree impossible in European garb,” was a Lawrence maxim. “But to don Arab kit has its dangers as well as its advantages. Breaches of etiquette, excused in a foreigner, are not condoned if he is in Arab clothes. You are like an English actor appearing for the first time in a German theater. Even that is not a parallel, because you are playing a part day and night, and for an anxious stake. Complete success comes when the Arab forgets your strangeness and speaks naturally before you.” So far as I know, Colonel Lawrence is the only European who was ever accepted by the Arabs as one of themselves.
His advice was that if you wear Arab dress, you should always wear the best, for the reason that clothes are significant among the tribes. “Dress like a shereef, if the people agree to it, and, if you use Arab costume at all, go the whole length. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and rely entirely on Arab habits. If you can surpass the Arabs, you have taken an immense stride toward complete success, but the effort of living and thinking a foreign language, the rude fare, strange clothes, and stranger ways, with the complete loss of privacy and quiet and the impossibility of ever relaxing your watchful imitation of others for months on end, prove such an added strain that this course should not be taken without serious thought.”
Whenever Colonel Lawrence was not engaged in conducting major military operations or planting tulips alo
ng the Hedjaz Railway, he would disguise himself as an outcast Arab woman and slip through the enemy lines. This was the best disguise for a spy, for the Turkish sentinels usually considered it beneath their dignity to say, “Stop, who goes there?” to a woman. Time and again he penetrated hundreds of miles into enemy territory, where he obtained much of the data which finally enabled Field-Marshal Allenby’s Palestine army and Emir Feisal’s Arabian forces to overwhelm the Turks in the most dazzling and brilliant cavalry operation in history.
Lawrence once had a spare fortnight in which to make things lively for the Turks while he was waiting for Auda Abu Tayi to assemble his Howeitat warriors. Accompanied by a lone Bedouin of the Anazah tribe named Dahmi, he passed through the Turkish lines in his customary female disguise and made his way toward Palmyra, where he hoped to find an influential Bedouin sheik who was in sympathy with the Arabian revolt. This chief was a thousand miles away on the Euphrates, and so Lawrence and Dahmi turned their camels toward Baalbek. In the desert near that ancient Syrian city, famous for its ruined temples, which rival the Acropolis at Athens, lives a tribe of semi-nomads, the Metawileh, who were friendly to King Hussein and Emir Feisal although they were compelled to cooperate with the Turks. Lawrence wanted to visit these Metawileh to assure himself of their assistance some months later when the final advance would be launched and when he expected the Hedjaz forces and Allenby’s troops to push the Turks north through Syria. His plan was to arouse all the nomad tribes in Syria, so that they would be constantly harassing the Turkish army from within their own lines.
Two miles outside Baalbek, Lawrence slid down from his camel, took off his Arab costume, and swaggered boldly into the little town in the uniform of a British officer without insignia. At this time Baalbek was still several hundred miles north of the line dividing Allenby’s forces from the Turks. The British were only a few miles north of Jerusalem. The Turkish troops on the streets of Baalbek saluted Lawrence as though he had been a German officer. But there was nothing unusual in this, for if a Prussian officer of the Death’s Head Hussars had passed Whitehall in London during the war, he, no doubt, would have received the salute of the Horse Guards. Lawrence’s theory was that it was a much simpler matter to go boldly and openly in uniform in rural Turkey than to dodge about in a suspicious manner. After hurriedly glancing over the fortifications around Baalbek, Lawrence attempted to visit the Turkish military school, where thousands of young officers were being trained. But when he reached the gates he observed that officers barred the way, and so he decided it would be safer to retreat without exacting a salute.
Resuming his disguise, Lawrence went on to the tents of the Metawileh, where he pulled aside his veil and revealed his identity. The sheiks gathered around the new English “Prince of Mecca” and clamored for a Syrian revolution at once Lawrence explained that the time was not yet ripe and tried to encourage them to future action by glowing accounts of the victories farther south in the Hedjaz. However, he found the Metawileh so keen for a raid or a lark of some kind that he was prevailed upon to join them in what he always referred to as “a cinema show.” In his contact with the peoples of the desert he made the discovery that noise is one of the best forms of propaganda. So that night, followed by every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the tribe, Lawrence went down to the main line of the Turkish railway, which runs from Constantinople and Aleppo through Baalbek to Beirut. He selected one of the largest steel and concrete bridges in the Near East as the object of the evening’s diversion. After planting his tulips under both ends of the bridge and all its bastions, he carried an electric wire, connecting all charges, to the summit of a near-by hill, which the people of the Metawileh were occupying as a grand stand. Then, at the psychological moment, he threw in the switch and sent the great bridge skyward in a mass of flame and smoke. The Metawileh to the last man were convinced of the might of the Allies and swore oaths by Allah the Most High and by the Holy Koran, that they would join King Hussein’s Faithful.
From here Lawrence and his solitary Bedouin companion trekked across Syria to Damascus. They rode through the bazaars by night to the palace of Ali Riza Pasha, who was acting as military governor for the Turks. Ali Riza, although one of the sultan’s highest officials in Syria, secretly sympathized with the Arabian Nationalist movement. That evening at dinner, over innumerable cups of sweetened coffee, Ali Riza informed Lawrence that the growing dissension between Turkish and German officials would assure the ultimate success of the Allies in Palestine and Arabia. The Germans had become so high and mighty in their own estimation that they were treating the Turks like dogs. Consequently, feeling against the Germans had become so bitter that whenever the German General Staff gave an order the Turks would do their best to prevent its execution. According to Ali Riza, Falkenhayn a few weeks previously had advised the Turks to abandon both Palestine and Arabia and retire to a line across Syria to the Mediterranean from Deraa, the important railway junction south of Damascus. The German field-marshal had given the Turks sound and valuable advice, but the latter were as reluctant to accept it as they were to accept Field-Marshal Falkenhayn himself as their commander-in-chief. As a result of their having spurned his counsel they were so overwhelmed a little later by the combined British and Arabian forces that they not only lost all the region which Falkenhayn had advised them to abandon but they also lost the city of Damascus and the entire territory of Syria, which they otherwise might have saved.
After a bountiful dinner and this illuminating interview with the Ottoman governor of Damascus, Lawrence and Dahmi slipped into the desert and made their way south into the Hauran, the country of the Druses, a people who pitch their tents around a high mountain called Jebel Druz. The Druses owe much of their tribal solidarity to their peculiar religion, which is a secret faith built up around the worship of Hakim, a mad sultan of Egypt of the Middle Ages. The Turks have always had great difficulty in getting this quarrelsome independent tribe to recognize Ottoman authority or pay taxes to the sultan. Most of the desert Arabs have carried on perpetual blood-feuds with them, but Lawrence called their chieftains together and, with his inimitable gift for winning friends, succeeded in convincing them that they should swear allegiance to Feisal and hold themselves ready to cooperate with his army when it approached Damascus.
There would have been no quarter for Lawrence had he made a single false step. With his companion Dahmi, and Tallal, a Bedouin sheik known to the far corners of Arabia, he rode all around Damascus, Deraa, and the Hauran, making a reconnaissance of the Turkish lines of defense. He explored the Turkish railway on three sides of the junction at Deraa and took a mental note of important points on the lines north, south, and west of the junction which it would be necessary for him to cut when he made his ultimate advance against Damascus. All this was walking right into danger, and only the perfection of his disguise and his command of the dialects of the country saved him from being suspected by the Turks and shot as an ordinary spy. He had one extremely narrow escape. When strolling nonchalantly along the streets of Deraa, dressed as Sheik Tallal’s son, two soldiers of the sultan’s army stopped him at a bazaar and arrested him on the charge of being a deserter from the Turkish army. Every able-bodied Arab in the Ottoman Empire was supposed to be under arms. They took him to headquarters and flogged him until he fainted. Then they threw him out more dead than alive and fearfully bruised. Sometime later he regained consciousness, and, barely able to crawl, he made his escape under cover of night.
Masquerading as a woman also entailed many difficulties. At Amman, in the hills of Moab, east of the Jordan, Lawrence went through the Turkish lines disguised as a Bedouin Gipsy. He spent the afternoon prowling about the defenses surrounding the railway station, and, after deciding that it would be futile for his Arabs to attempt to capture it on account of the size of the garrison and the strength of the artillery, he started toward the desert. A party of Turkish soldiers, who had been looking with favorable eyes at the Bedouin “woman,” started in hot pursuit
. For more than a mile they followed Lawrence, trying to flirt with him and jeering at him when he repulsed their advances.
One of the most important Turkish strongholds on the border of the Arabian Desert was the town of Kerak, near the south end of the Dead Sea. One night Lawrence, disguised as a Bedouin, went through the Turkish lines with Sheik Trad Ibn Nueiris of the Beni Sakr tribe and found that there happened to be only three hundred Turks in the garrison at the moment. Lawrence and the sheik banqueted that evening with one of Trad’s Kerak friends. In honor of their distinguished visitors the Arab villagers dragged sheep and goats into the streets, built large fires, and feasted and circled in wild war-dance until the witching hour. The members of the Turkish garrison were so frightened by this bold demonstration that they locked themselves in their barracks! After the celebration, Lawrence and his companion left Kerak and returned to Akaba. The result of this unimportant little episode was that two thousand more Turkish troops were withdrawn from the forces opposing Allenby in Palestine and sent down to Kerak. Lawrence had attained the two objects that he had in mind in making this extended and adventurous tour of enemy territory: he had spread broadcast propaganda for the cause of Arabian nationalism among the tribes that were still under Turkish jurisdiction, and he had obtained information enough to fill a book regarding the plans of the German High Command. He went over the territory behind the Turkish lines so thoroughly that during the final drive of the campaign he knew that part of the country almost as intimately as the Turks themselves.
CHAPTER XXII
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 19
