Hero_ The Life And Legend Of Lawrence Of Arabia Part 2

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+ning 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, pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ps."

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 Ca.n.a.l. 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 nineteen 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. 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.

The missing rider was Gasim, a "surly ... stranger from Maan," about whom n.o.body seemed to care much. Lawrence, however, little as he liked Gasim, felt an obligation to go back for him. He mounted his own tired, thirsty camel and turned and rode back alone into the empty, desolate wilderness. It was an act of folly, but also an act of will. He had no use for Gasim, and knew that he himself, as a foreigner, would not be blamed for "s.h.i.+rking his duty," but that was precisely the excuse he refused to use. As "a Christian and a sedentary person" he would find it impossible to lead "Moslem nomads" if he made himself an exception to their rules.

His camel's reluctance to march away from the herd was matched by Lawrence's own loneliness and sense of the absurdity of risking his own life for a man he had planned to get rid of as soon as he could. Improbably, after an hour and a half he saw an object move, dismissed it as a mirage, then realized it was Gasim, "nearly blinded," and stammering incoherently. He seated Gasim behind himself, and set off on the long ride back, using his army compa.s.s to retrace his steps. Gasim continued to scream and babble, so Lawrence hit him, and threatened to throw him off and ride on by himself, eventually quieting the terrified man. The camel, sensing the presence nearby of her herd mates, picked up her pace, and Auda appeared out of the heat mirages, grumbling that had he been present, he would not have let Lawrence go. "For that thing, not worth a camel's price," he shouted in a fury, striking out at Gasim, but in fact, as Lawrence had calculated, the episode soon became part of the legend of "Aurens" (as the Arabs p.r.o.nounced his name). To his execution of Hamed the Moor, his unquestioned physical courage and powers of endurance, his daring use of explosives, and his lavish generosity with British gold coins was now added his rescue of the worthless Gasim, confirming his status as a hero. Indeed, by rescuing Gasim he had lived up to the ideals of courage the Bedouin admired most, but by no means always followed themselves, particularly when those ideals involved the rescue of a stranger, or a man of another tribe.

Even when they finally reached water at the wells of Arfaja, the desert still proved to be dangerous. That night, while they were drinking coffee around the fire, unseen a.s.sailants shot at them until Auda's cousin kicked sand over the fire, putting it out, at which point they drove their attackers away with a fusillade of rifle shots, though not before one of their own was killed. They rode on the next morning, and on their twentieth day since leaving Wejh they reached the tents of the Howeitat, Auda's own tribe, where they were feasted with one of those lavish meals that Lawrence loathed so much: hot grease and pieces of mutton on a bed of rice, decorated with the singed heads of the slaughtered sheep.

Here, they hastened to send six bags of gold coins in Auda's care, as atribute to Emir Nuri Shaalan, who led the desert tribes in Syria and the Lebanon mountains and was one of the four great men ruling the Arabian desert. The others were Feisal's father, Emir Hussein of Mecca, whose control over the Hejaz, the holy city of Mecca, and the Red Sea ports made him formidable; his greatest rival, ibn Saud, emir of the Ras.h.i.+ds, a ferocious and implacable warrior who controlled the vast desert s.p.a.ce to the east of Hejaz, with his capital at Riyadh, and whose followers were Wahhabis, fierce Muslim puritans and fundamentalists; and the idrisi, Sayid Mohammed ibn Ali, who controlled the region south of the Hejaz. The compet.i.tion between the four desert rulers was intense, and in many ways more important to them than any quarrel they might have with Turkey. As to their loyalties to outsiders, Hussein was of course now the ally of Britain and France, supported by the Foreign Office in London and the Arab Bureau in Cairo, though he remained always aware of the growing power of ibn Saud. Ibn Saud received support and backing from the government of India and the Colonial Office in London. The idrisi took money from both sides and was notoriously unreliable; and Nuri Shaalan was in the pay of the Turks, though open to higher bids from the Allied Powers. British policy, as can be seen, was confused-indeed, when open warfare finally broke out between Hussein and ibn Saud after the end of World War I, the Foreign Office and Cairo backed and supported Hussein, while the Colonial Office and New Delhi backed and supported ibn Saud, so the British taxpayer ended up paying for both sides in that war. None of the four was a Jeffersonian idealist of course-Hussein's enemies in Mecca were kept in chains in the dungeons beneath his palace, ibn Saud punished infringements of sharia with public beheadings, and both the idrisi and Nuri Shaalan were feared despots.

Lawrence had already taken the precaution of sending one of Nuri's men on ahead with a message making it clear that they came in peace and sought his hospitality, but, in typical desert fas.h.i.+on, the messenger failed to arrive, and was later found lying in the desert, a desiccated corpse-a victim of thirst or murder-with the remains of his camel beside him. The Howeitat were on the move, as they sought grazing forthe camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri's sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay.

When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence's relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damascus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them.

Lawrence's position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, trying to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.

Secure now that Auda would raise enough men to take Aqaba, Lawrence felt free to pursue the last and most dangerous part of his plan. He rode off alone on a 400-mile journey through enemy territory, both to test for himself the degree of support that could be expected from the Syrian tribes once Aqaba was taken, and to attract the attention of the Turks. He wanted them looking anxiously toward the approaches to Damascus, while he turned south to take Aqaba. The danger involved, and his state of mind, can be gauged by the words he scribbled for General Clayton, which he left behind in a notebook at Nebk, close to Azrak: "Clayton, I've decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can't stand it."

The farther Lawrence was from the calming presence of Feisal and of those British officers whom he respected, like Newcombe, Boyle, and Wilson, the more alone and desperate he felt. It was one thing to take on the responsibility for leading an expedition to capture Aqaba, but quite another to come close to provoking, with whatever misgivings, a full-scale Syrian uprising, which would certainly have led to thousands of deaths, all the while knowing that the French were going to get Damascus in the end. Lawrence was willing to accept blood on his hands, but not in unlimited quant.i.ty for no purpose. He was still weighed down by what Sykes had told him, and what he already knew or guessed about the Sykes-Picot agreement.

He was also fed up with the bickering and political machinations of his nearest companions-even Auda, with his unquenchable greed for loot and his prodigious vanity, had begun to get on Lawrence's nerves, as had the wily and ambitious Sharif Nasir; and the Syrians in his party ("pygmies," in Lawrence's opinion) were weaving improbable and complicated political fantasies, and were anxious to seize power for themselves. He felt tainted, corrupted, embittered. "Hideously green, unbearable, sour, putrid smelling," he wrote of Wadi Sirhan, where the Howeitat were encamped for the moment in an ugly, pitiless landscape, rich only in poisonous snakes. "Salt and snakes of evil doing. Leprosy of the world!"

These were the ravings of a man who was not only physically exhausted, but tortured by his own guilt, and by a sense that things were pa.s.sing out of his control into the hands of scheming politicians. Lawrence seems to have convinced himself that it was his duty to seek out Feisal's friends and supporters in Syria, dangerous as this was for him and for them, and for the best part of two weeks he rode from tribe to tribe, at the mercy of anybody who wanted to claim a reward by betraying him to the Turks. The journey convinced him, correctly, that Syria was not yet ripe for revolt, and that it would take news of solid victories by the British and the Arabs to win over Syrian politicians and tribal leaders. Here in the north, Mecca seemed far away, and the notion of Sharif Hussein as the self-proclaimed "king of the Arabs" was regarded with considerable skepticism. In Syria, what people wanted was the arrival of the British army, and all the riches (and political possibilities) it would bring, but so long as General Murray was unable to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza, there seemed no point in risking torture and hanging at the hands of the Turks.

Lawrence himself describes his journey as "reckless," which it certainly was, since the Turks had already put a price on his head; but it was not entirely fruitless. At one point he was warned that his host for the night had sent word to the Turks that he was there, and he swiftly slipped out through the back of the tent, mounted his camel, and rode away. At another point, he had a secret meeting with Ali Riza Pasha, the Turkish army commander in Damascus, outside the city walls. Ali Riza was an Arab, and Lawrence took the risk of meeting with him face-to-face to ask him to prevent an uprising in the city until the British army was close enough to prevent a ma.s.sacre. On the way back to Nebk, Lawrence met with Nuri Shaalan, in the old man's camp near Azrak. He described Nuri's frightening appearance five years later in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: "he was very old, livid and worn.... Over his coa.r.s.e eyelashes the eyelids wrinkled down, sagging in tired folds, through which, from the overhead sun, a red light glittered in his eyes and made them look like fiery pits in which the man was slowly burning.

"Not only was Nuri frightening to look at it and ruthless enough to earn the respect of Auda; he was also shrewd and well informed, and questioned Lawrence closely about the intentions of the British and French in Syria. Lawrence dismissed the doc.u.ments Nuri showed him, in which Britain's promises to the Arabs over the past three years contradicted each other, and advised him to believe only the latest promise and forget the rest. This cynicism seemed to satisfy Nuri, or perhaps represented his own realistic view of the matter, and he let Lawrence go on his way. Lawrence cheerfully advised Nuri to secure his own position with the Turks by telling them he had been in the area.

Lawrence accomplished what he set out to do. He spread the news of his presence throughout Syria, even going to the trouble of blowing up a railway bridge at Ras Baalbek, on the Aleppo-Damascus line-final proof, if any were needed, that he was in Syria, and that the force he was gathering in Wadi Sirhan was intended for an attack in the direction of Damascus, not Aqaba.

Lawrence arrived back at Nebk on June 16, 1917, to find Auda and Nasir "quarrelling." He managed to settle the quarrel by the time they set out on June 19 with the 500 men Auda had gathered. Their first march (of two days) was to Beir, in what is now Jordan, where they discovered that the Turks had dynamited the wells. They managed to clear one, but Auda was now wary about what they would find at El Jefer, fifty miles to the southwest across difficult desert terrain, where, if the wells were destroyed, their camels would die. They camped at Beir and sent a scout ahead, while Lawrence rode to the north with more than 100 tribesmen, among them Zaal, "a noted raider," to attack the railway and ensure that the Turks would be looking in the wrong direction. They rode hard, in "six hour spells," with only one or two hours of rest between spells. They reached the railway north of Amman and, after watering the camels, moved on hoping to destroy a bridge, only to find that the Turks were busy repairing it. Since Lawrence's objective was to make the Turks believe he was going toward Azrak, his raiding party continued on andfound a curved stretch of the railway near Minifir. Although hunted by tribesmen in the pay of the Turks and by Turkish infantrymen mounted on mules, Lawrence and his party managed to blow up the railway and leave behind a buried mine to damage or destroy the locomotive when the Turks sent a repair train down from Damascus. They took two Turkish prisoners, deserters, who died of their wounds-there was nothing the raiding party could do for them, though Lawrence left behind, attached to a telegraph pole he had torn down, a letter he wrote in French and German indicating where they could be found.

The party moved on by night and the next day captured a young Circa.s.sian* cowherd. This posed a problem-it seemed to Lawrence unfair to kill him, but at the same time they could neither take him with them nor turn him loose, since he would certainly tell the Turks of their presence. They were unable to tie him up, since they had no rope to spare, and in any case if he was tied to a tree or a telegraph pole in the desert he would die hideously of thirst. Finally he was stripped of his clothes, and one of the tribesmen cut him swiftly across the soles of his feet with a dagger. The man would have to crawl naked on his hands and knees an hour or two to his home, but the wounds would heal eventually and he would survive. cowherd. This posed a problem-it seemed to Lawrence unfair to kill him, but at the same time they could neither take him with them nor turn him loose, since he would certainly tell the Turks of their presence. They were unable to tie him up, since they had no rope to spare, and in any case if he was tied to a tree or a telegraph pole in the desert he would die hideously of thirst. Finally he was stripped of his clothes, and one of the tribesmen cut him swiftly across the soles of his feet with a dagger. The man would have to crawl naked on his hands and knees an hour or two to his home, but the wounds would heal eventually and he would survive.

The incident gives one a picture of Lawrence's curious mixture of practicality and humanitarianism. Unlike the Arabs he rode with, he was constantly torn between his own system of ethics and their more savage instincts. The tribesmen had no compunction about cutting the throat of a terrified captive after robbing and stripping him. As if to prove this, Zaal led the party, maddened by the sight of a herd of fat sheep-they had been living off a diet of hard dried corn kernels for days-in a raid on a Turkish railway station at Atwi, about fifty miles east of the Dead Sea,where Zaal sniped at and killed a fat railway official on the platform. The tribesmen exchanged rifle fire with the Turks, then plundered an undefended building; drove off the herd of sheep; shot and killed four men who, unluckily for them, arrived on a hand trolley in the middle of all this; set fire to the station; and rode off. The raiding party slaughtered the stolen sheep, gorging on mutton, and even feeding it to their camels, "for the best riding camels were taught to like cooked meat," as Lawrence notes, adding, with his usual precision, that "one hundred and ten men ... ate the best parts of twenty-four sheep." Then he blew up a stretch of track and they set out on the long journey back to Beir.

Raids like this kept the Turks on edge, while satisfying the Bedouin's taste for plunder and action. They also acclimatized Lawrence to the ways of the Bedouin, which most British officers found infuriating. The Bedouin had no sense of time; they did not accept orders; they would break off fighting to loot, then ride home with what they had stolen; they thought nothing of stripping and killing enemy wounded; they wasted ammunition by firing feux de joie into the air to announce their comings and goings; when there was food they gorged on it, instead of thinking ahead; when there was water, they drank until their bellies were swollen, instead of rationing it out sensibly; they stole shamelessly, from friend and foe alike; their tribal quarrels and blood feuds made it difficult to rely on them when they were formed up in large numbers; by British standards they were cruel to animals; and they were distrustful of Europeans and Christians, even as allies. In order to lead them, Lawrence had to learn to accept their ways, to share their ribald and teasing sense of humor and their extravagant emotions and love of tall tales, to embrace the extreme hards.h.i.+ps of their life, and to understand that because they were intense individualists any attempt to give a direct order to them would be treated as an insult. This was a difficult task-even such great explorers and pro-Arabists as Richard Burton and Charles Doughty had never managed to lead the Bedouin, or be accepted by them as equals-yet Lawrence succeeded, though in doing so, he gave up some part of himself that he never recovered, eventually becoming astranger among his own countrymen. n.o.body understood this better than Lawrence himself, who wrote: "A man who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life.... He is not one of them.... In my case my effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes, and destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only."

That was written years later, when his intense fame, and his disappointment at his own failure to get for the Arabs what he had promised them, had embittered Lawrence about the role he played in the war. But there is no reason to believe that he felt this way as he rode back into Beir "without casualty, successful, well-fed, and enriched, at dawn." He was feted by Auda and Nasir, and found the rest of the party cheered by a message from the wily Nuri Shaalan that a force of 400 Turkish cavalrymen was hunting for Lawrence's party in Wadi Sirhan, guided by his own nephew, whom Nuri had instructed to take them by the slowest and hardest of routes.

On June 28 Lawrence set out for El Jefer, despite news that the Turks had destroyed the wells. This turned out to be true, but Auda, whose family property these wells were on and who knew them well, searched out one well the enemy had failed to destroy. Lawrence organized his camel drivers to act as sappers, digging in the unbearable midday heat until they were able to expose the masonry lining of the well, and open it. The Ageyl camel drivers, less resistant to manual labor than the Bedouin tribesmen, then formed a kind of bucket brigade to bring up enough water to take the camels over the next fifty barren miles.

Lawrence sent word ahead to a friendly tribe to attack the Turkish blockhouse guarding the approach from the north to Abu el Lissal, the gateway to the wadi that led down to Aqaba, some fifty miles away. The attack was timed to stop the weekly caravan that carried food and supplies from Maan to all the outposts on the way to Aqaba, and to Aqaba itself. The taking of the blockhouse turned out to be a b.l.o.o.d.y, botchedaffair, during which the Turks slaughtered Arab women and children in their tents nearby; in retaliation the infuriated Arabs took no prisoners after the blockhouse fell to them, then sent word sent to Lawrence it was in their hands. He set out for Abu el Lissal on July 1, pausing when his party reached the railway line to blow up a long section of track, and sending a small party to Maan to stampede the Turkish garrison's camels in the night. Despite these precautions, however, a Turkish column advanced on Abu el Lissal, reoccupying the blockhouse.

As Liddell Hart points out, this was Lawrence's first exposure to the vicissitudes of war-a Turkish relief battalion had arrived in Maan just as the news came that the blockhouse at Abu el Lissal had been attacked. It was an accident, a coincidence, but the result was that the Arab tribesmen abandoned the blockhouse, which they had pillaged and destroyed, and the Turkish battalion set up camp at the well. Lawrence had foreseen this possibility and had an alternative plan in mind-already, he was thinking like generals he admired. It would take time and involve splitting his forces, and possibly serious losses, one part of his strength attacking the Turkish battalion to hold it in position, the other taking an alternative but slower route behind the Turks to Aqaba.

Either way, Lawrence had placed himself in a position from which no retreat was possible. There was no chance that he could take his forces back to Wejh, which was nearly 300 miles south as the crow flies, and more than twice that by any route he could take over the desert. The Turks were already in Wadi Sirhan, and could bring in reinforcements from Maan and Damascus. If they were successful Lawrence and his men would be cut off, surrounded, and killed, the Arabs as traitors to the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself, a British officer caught out of uniform in Arab clothing, was sure to be tortured, then hanged as a spy. He had no option but to move forward and seek battle.

It requires a very special kind of courage to advance and attack a larger, well-positioned force when one's lines of communication and path of retreat have been cut. Much as Lawrence would dislike Marshal Foch when he met Foch at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919-and rejected the kind of ma.s.sed frontal attack that had already led to so many million deaths on the western front-he would have agreed with Foch's most famous military apothegm: "Mon centre cede, ma droite recule; situation excellente. J'attaque!"*

AQABA-MAAN ZONE.

Through a day of heat that produced waves of mirages, Lawrence led his party toward Abu el Lissal, pausing only to blow up ten railway bridges and a substantial length of the track. At dusk they stopped to bake bread and rest for the night, but the arrival of messengers with the news that a Turkish column had arrived spurred Lawrence on. His men remounted their camels-"Our hot bread was in our hands and we ate it as we went," he wrote-and rode through the night, stopping at first light on the crest of the hills that surrounded Abu el Lissal to greet the tribesmen who had taken the blockhouse and lost it. Just as there was no going back, Lawrence realized, there was no going forward so long as a Turkish battalion held Abu el Lissal. Even if they could make their way around it, Lawrence's force would still be bottled up in a valley with Turks at either end. The Arab force dismounted and spread out on the hills around the Turkish campsite, while Lawrence sent someone to cut the telegraph line to Maan. The Turks were, literally, caught napping. From higher ground the Arabs began to shoot down on the Turks, in a firefight that lasted all day. The men kept continually on the move over the rocky, th.o.r.n.y ground, so as not to offer the Turks a fixed target, until their rifles were too hot to touch, and the stone slabs they lay down upon to fire were so superheated by the sun that whatever patch of skin touched them peeled off in great strips, while the soles of their feet, lacerated by thorns and burned by the hot rock, left b.l.o.o.d.y footprints whenever they moved. Short of water because of the haste in which they had left, the tribesmen suffered agonies of thirst.

By late afternoon Lawrence himself was so parched that he lay down in a muddy hollow and tried to filter the moisture out of the mud by sucking at the dirt through the fabric of his sleeve. There, he was foundby an angry Auda, "his eyes bloodshot, and staring, his knotty face working with excitement," in Lawrence's words. "Well, how is it with the Howeitat?" Auda asked, grinning. "All talk and no work?"-throwing Lawrence's earlier criticism of Auda's tribe back in his face.

"By G.o.d indeed," Lawrence replied tauntingly, "they shoot a lot and hit little."

Auda was not one to take criticism (or sarcasm) lightly. Turning pale with rage, he tore off his headdress and threw it to the ground (since as Muslims the Bedouin never go uncovered, this was a significant indicator of Auda's anger), and ran up the steep slope of the hill calling to his tribesmen to come to him. At first Lawrence thought that Auda might be pulling the Howeitat out of the battle, but the old man stood up despite the constant Turkish rifle fire, glaring at Lawrence, and shouted, "Get your camel, if you wish to see the old man's work."

Lawrence and Nasir made their way to the other side of the slope, where their camels were tethered. Here, sheltered from the gunfire, were 400 camel men, mounted and ready. Auda was not in sight. Hearing a sudden, rapid intensification of the firing, Lawrence rode forward to a point from which he could look down the valley, just in time to see Auda and his fifty Howeitat hors.e.m.e.n charging directly down at the Turkish troops, firing from the saddle as they rode. The Turks were forming up for an attempt to fight their way back to Maan when Auda's bold cavalry charge hit them in the rear.

With Nasir at his side, Lawrence waved to his 400 camel men, who charged toward the Turkish flank, riding into a volley of rifle fire. The Turks were poorly prepared to deal with the surprise of a dense charge over rough ground of 400 camel riders. Lawrence, who was riding a racing camel that was faster than the rest, led the charge, firing his revolver, and smashed into the Turkish ranks, at which point his camel collapsed suddenly in a heap, sending Lawrence flying out of the saddle. He was knocked senseless by the fall, but luckily the bulk of his camel prevented him from being trampled to death by the force following him, which swept to either side of his camel like the sea sweeping around a rock.

When he regained consciousness and stood up, he found that he had accidentally shot his own camel in the back of the head, and that the battle was over. The sheer velocity of the two charges had broken the Turks' formation and degenerated into a brief ma.s.sacre as the riders shot and hacked away with their curved sabers at small, isolated groups of soldiers. Three hundred Turks had been killed-"slaughtered," Lawrence wrote, with a hint of self-disgust-and 160 were seriously wounded, for a loss of only two Arabs.

Auda appeared, "his eyes glazed over with the rapture of battle," muttering incoherently, "Work, work, where are words?"-surely a rebuke to Lawrence for his disparaging comment about Howeitat marksmans.h.i.+p. Auda's robes, his holster, his field-gla.s.s case, and his sword scabbard had all been pierced by bullets, and his mare had been killed under him, but he was unharmed. Having learned from a Turkish prisoner that Maan was garrisoned by only two companies, he was eager to take the town and loot it; but Lawrence's sense of strategic priorities was undiminished by his fall, and he managed after much difficulty to persuade Auda and the tribesmen that they must move down the wadi toward Aqaba instead. Taking Maan would certainly look like a triumph, but it would be a temporary one at best, since the Turks would quickly a.s.semble a force big enough to recapture it. Taking Aqaba would bring Feisal's army into Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and would give the Arabs not only a place in the strategic "big picture," but-he hoped-one at the peace conference.

In the meantime, there seemed no alternative to spending the night on the battlefield, surrounded by the bodies of the enemy, until Auda, who was superst.i.tiously afraid of the presence of so many corpses, and tactically concerned lest the Turks attack them during the night, or lest other Howeitat clans with whom he had a blood feud use the opportunity to kill them on the pretext of mistaking them for Turks, persuaded Lawrence to move on. Wrapped in his cloak against the damp, chilly evening, Lawrence felt the inevitable reaction to victory "when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done."

The Arabs, as was their custom, had stripped the clothes off the bodiesof their enemies, and now wore bloodstained Turkish tunics over their robes. The more seriously wounded of the Turks would have to be left behind, so Lawrence looked around for blankets or discarded pieces of uniform to cover them from the day's brutal sun. This had been a battalion of young Turkish conscripts. "The dead men," Lawrence noted, "looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was s.h.i.+ning down, softening them into new ivory." He found himself envying the dead, and feeling disgust at the noise of the Arabs behind him, quarreling over the spoils; the dead were spread out in low heaps or singly where they had fallen, and Lawrence began mechanically in the moonlight to rearrange them in rows, at once a lunatic attempt to impose western ideas of neatness on the chaos of death, and a kind of self-punis.h.i.+ng atonement for having led the attack that had killed them.

Lawrence had managed to persuade the Arabs to spare some of the Turkish officers, including a former policeman whom he persuaded to write letters in Turkish to each of the commanders of the three major outposts between Abu el Lissal and Aqaba, urging them to surrender, and promising them that if they and their men did so they would reach Egypt alive as prisoners. Considering the mood of the moment, this was a farsighted tactical move. The ground was rough and water scarce between here and Aqaba, and men and animals were by now almost completely played out. It was by no means sure that the Arabs would prevail if one of the Turkish posts offered serious resistance.

The path ahead of them was as twisted as a corkscrew-a determined team of machine gunners in the right spot could have held up an army many times larger than Lawrence's until thirst overcame them, but fortunately his letters did the trick. The first outpost, of 120 men, surrendered immediately, opening up "the gateway to the gorge of the Wadi Itm," which in turn led directly to Aqaba. The next day, the garrison at Kethera, about eighteen miles farther on, proved more hesitant to surrender, but after prolonged negotiations, the Arabs managed to take the place in a surprise night attack, without losses. Lawrence knew from his pocket diary that it was the night of a full lunar eclipse, and had countedon the Turks' being superst.i.tiously distracted by it, as well as its providing the total darkness that made the attack possible.*

Wadi Itm, as they descended it, got narrower and steeper, demonstrating convincingly how impossible it would have been for the British to fight their way up it from the sea. The garrison at Aqaba had marched inland to reinforce the last Turkish post at Khedra four miles away, but this was in fact a fatal move, for all the fortifications faced the sea, from which any attack was expected to come. Nothing had been prepared for an attack down Wadi Itm. Lawrence had sent messages on ahead to tell the local tribes to hara.s.s the Turks, and when he arrived they were already firing on the Turkish lines. The last thing Lawrence wanted was an all-out a.s.sault, which would certainly be costly in lives, and he twice repeated his offer of taking the Turks prisoner. At last, as the Turkish commander took in the number of Arabs a.s.sembled against him, he ordered his men to cease firing and surrendered on the morning of July 6, less than two months after Lawrence's departure from Wejh.

One of the prisoners was a German army well-borer, standing out among the Turks with his red hair, blue eyes, and field-gray uniform. Lawrence paused to chat with him in German, and eased his mind by saying he would be sent to Egypt, where food and sugar were plentiful, not to Mecca. Then, while the Arabs looted the camp, Lawrence raced his camel four miles on to Aqaba, and plunged it headlong into the sea.

He had achieved the impossible-successfully carried out a dangerous, long maneuver behind enemy lines, covering hundreds of miles over what everybody else a.s.sumed was impa.s.sable terrain to capture a critical port, and killed or captured more than 1,200 Turks for a loss of only two of his own men.

Photograph by T. E. Lawrence of the Arab advance on Aqaba.

Aqaba was in ruins, "dirty and contemptible"; and now that the regular supply caravan, which meandered every two weeks from Maan down past the Turkish outposts carrying rations, had been cut off, there was no food for either victors or vanquished. Lawrence had more than 500 men, 700 prisoners, and 2,000 hungry and demanding men from the local tribes to feed. Of his Turkish prisoners forty-two were officers, and indignant at not being housed any better than their men. There were fish in the Red Sea, of course, but Lawrence had no hooks or lines, and the desert tribesmen had no knowledge of fis.h.i.+ng-nor had they any desire to eat fish. The town was surrounded by groves of date palms, but at this season the dates were still raw, and produced violent stomach cramps and diarrhea when boiled and eaten. The Arabs could slaughter and eat their camels, of course, but eventually this would immobilize the entire force.

With his usual indifference to food, Lawrence himself did not suffer, or feel much sympathy for his prisoners-it was his general view that people ate too much anyway-but at the same time he realized that thecapture of Aqaba would be of no use to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force unless they heard of it, and that sooner or later the Turks would give some thought to retaking the port. A British armed tug had paid one of its regular visits, lobbed a few sh.e.l.ls into the hills, and sailed on without paying any attention to the Arabs' signals from the sh.o.r.e. It would be at least a week before this tug, or another s.h.i.+p of the Royal Navy, returned. The small force Lawrence now had a.s.sembled at Aqaba needed not just food, but modern weapons, ammunition, tents, and above all gold, since gold was the only thing that could guarantee the tribesmen's loyalty.

Lawrence had not bothered to inform Cairo where he was going, or with what object, and he had no idea what was happening in the rest of the war. He did not therefore know that General Murray's second attack on Gaza had failed, like the first. Gaza was no easy nut to crack-with the help of the Germans, the Turks had fortified their trenches, taking advantage of every piece of high ground and of the impenetrably thick hedges and clumps of cactus (considered worse by the troops than barbed wire), in which they had carefully sited machine gun nests. On the British side, despite huge efforts to build a small-gauge railway line to bring supplies and ammunition forward and to lay a water line, neither had been completed. Murray's plan of attack was therefore hamstrung, since he required more than 400,000 gallons of water a day for men, animals, and vehicles. He had a large mounted force of about 11,000 sabers, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers in infantry, as well as an artillery strength of more than 170 guns (as well as a naval bombardment of Gaza from the sea, and the first use of tanks and poison gas in the Middle East); but the Turks still managed to hold their ground, and since the only way of securing water was to take Gaza, the British, having failed to do so, were obliged to break off the battle. Murray had inflicted 1,300 casualties on the Turks, at the cost of 3,000 British and Commonwealth casualties. Both Lawrence and Liddell Hart would later point out that Lawrence's tiny force had inflicted almost the same number of casualties on the Turks for a loss of only two men!

The resulting stalemate-a miniature reproduction of the situationon the western front-was made worse by Murray's overoptimistic dispatches home during the first battle of Gaza, which had produced first jubilation, then consternation in the war cabinet as the facts became known. The prime minister remained determined to knock Turkey out of the war, and looked for a stronger commander for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was decided to replace Murray with General Sir Edmund Allenby, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, a powerful, impatient, hard-thrusting cavalryman, know as "the bull" to men who served under him, because of both his size and his fearsome temper. Allenby had fought brilliantly in the Boer War, but quarreled badly there with Douglas Haig, who was now the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in France. Allenby, who violently disagreed with Haig's tactics, had promptly crossed him again, and as a result it was thought wise to give Allenby a command as far away from France as possible. It was also hoped that as a cavalryman who had chafed at trench warfare he would bring a new level of energy and drive to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF).

When Allenby took his leave of Lloyd George in London, the prime minister told him "that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people." Considering that the British army had been stuck outside Gaza for two years, this was a tall order, but Allenby, his spirits and self-confidence buoyed by being released from Haig's command and given a show of his own, set to work immediately to breathe new life into the EEF. A consummate professional soldier, he moved his headquarters forward to Rafah,* only nineteen miles from the front line at Gaza, instead of trying to command the army from Cairo, where General Murray had preferred to remain. Allenby immediately set out to see everything he could with his own eyes, instead of relying on his staff officers for information, another failing of Murray's. He knew he could expect no reinforcements, given the pressure on the western front, and would have to make do with what he had. He also understood at once that advancing up the coast to attack Gaza for the third time would get him nowhere. Hewould need to surprise the Turks with a new strategy, one that made use of the vast, empty desert area to the east to go around the Turkish lines and fortifications that stretched from Gaza on the Turkish right to Beersheba on their left. But what kind of army could travel great distances over a waterless desert? only nineteen miles from the front line at Gaza, instead of trying to command the army from Cairo, where General Murray had preferred to remain. Allenby immediately set out to see everything he could with his own eyes, instead of relying on his staff officers for information, another failing of Murray's. He knew he could expect no reinforcements, given the pressure on the western front, and would have to make do with what he had. He also understood at once that advancing up the coast to attack Gaza for the third time would get him nowhere. Hewould need to surprise the Turks with a new strategy, one that made use of the vast, empty desert area to the east to go around the Turkish lines and fortifications that stretched from Gaza on the Turkish right to Beersheba on their left. But what kind of army could travel great distances over a waterless desert?

Meanwhile, in Aqaba Lawrence faced two urgent problems: the first was feeding his men and his prisoners; the second was defending Aqaba against a Turkish attack, which Lawrence estimated would take about ten days. To protect Aqaba, Lawrence made use of his skill at creating maps to pick four independent strongpoints, each of which the Turks would have to attack separately if they were going to advance down Wadi Itm. He put Auda in command of one of them, and chose carefully from among the tribes to man the others. To obtain food and supplies, there was only one course open to him-to leave Aqaba and ride 150 miles across the Sinai desert to the Suez Ca.n.a.l. The terrain is some of the harshest in the world, with only one well between Aqaba and the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai had the reputation of being predatory and pro-Turk.

Taking only seven men with him-one of them would have to drop out and return to Aqaba because his camel was unfit-Lawrence set off on July 7 to bring the news of the Arab victory to Cairo. Riding continuously at a walk with only short intervals of rest, in order not to exhaust their camels, the small party arrived at Shatt, on the ca.n.a.l, on July 9, a journey of forty-nine hours, which pushed both men and camels to their limit, crossing over Mitla Pa.s.s* and then across the s.h.i.+fting, rolling dunes to the east bank of the ca.n.a.l. Occasional heaps of rusting, empty army-ration bully beef cans in the desert marked the approach to civilization. and then across the s.h.i.+fting, rolling dunes to the east bank of the ca.n.a.l. Occasional heaps of rusting, empty army-ration bully beef cans in the desert marked the approach to civilization.

There, the natural lethargy of army administration took over, as if to mark Lawrence's pa.s.sage from Asia and the Arabs back to the world of uniforms, regulations, and orders. The lines at Shatt, it turned out, had been abandoned because of an outbreak of plague. Lawrence picked up a telephone in an abandoned office hut and found it still working. He rang general headquarters at Suez and asked for a boat to take him across the ca.n.a.l, but was told that this was no business of the army's, and that he would have to call Inland Water Transport. Though he explained the importance of his mission, Inland Water Transport was indifferent. It might try to send a boat tomorrow, to take him to the Quarantine Department. He called again, and argued his case more vehemently, but this did no good-he was cut off. Finally, "a sympathetic northern accent from the military exchange" came on the line: "It's no bluidy good, Sir, talking to them f.o.o.king water boogars: they're all the same." The kindly operator finally managed to put Lawrence through to Major Lyttleton at Port Tewfik. Lyttleton handled cargo s.h.i.+pments for the Arab forces at Jidda, Yenbo, and Wejh, and promised to have his launch at Shatt in half an hour. Once Lawrence reached Port Tewfik, Lyttleton took one look at him in his verminous, filthy robes, and brought him straight to the Sinai Hotel, where Lawrence had a hot bath, his first in months, iced lemonades, dinner, and a real bed, while his men were sent northward to "the animal camp on the Asiatic side" in Kubri, and provided with rations and bedding.

The next morning, on the train to Cairo via Ismailia, Lawrence played a game of hide-and-seek for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, in the true Oxford undergraduate tradition, with the Royal Military Police. There was nothing he enjoyed more than confronting puzzled and vexed minor authorities with the unfamiliar contrast of his blue-eyed face and upper-cla.s.s accent and his present costume of Arab robes and bare feet. Although he carried a special pa.s.s issued to him by Major Lyttleton, identifying him as a British officer, Lawrence wanted to go as far as he could before showing it, and no doubt to annoy as many people on the way as possible. This kind of thing-combining a perverse schoolboy fondness for practical jokes with a flamboyant flaunting of his unmilitary ways and special privileges-was to become something of a specialty of Lawrence's as his fame increased.

After numerous minor adventures with the authorities, Lawrence changed trains at Ismailia for Cairo, and found his friend Admiral Wemyss in conversation with a large, intimidating, and unfamiliar general, pacing up and down the platform waiting to board their private carriage on the train to Cairo. The general was Allenby, on one of his inspection tours, and his presence, together with that of the admiral, froze everyone to attention except Lawrence, who, recognizing one of Wemyss's aides, Captain Rudolf Burmester, RN, walked forward and explained who he was and why he was there. At first Burmester was unable to recognize Lawrence, whose weight had dropped to less than ninety-eight pounds, and who was standing before him barefoot in Arab robes, but he immediately realized the significance of what Lawrence told him, and promised to load a naval s.h.i.+p up with "all the food in Suez" and send it to Aqaba at once. He also informed Lawrence that the unfamiliar general was Allenby, who had replaced Murray; and it was there, on the platform, that Lawrence and Allenby first set eyes on each other.

Lawrence on the railway platform after Aqaba, as Allenby strides by.

Lawrence boarded the train, arrived in Cairo at noon, and went straight to the Savoy Hotel, where the Arab Bureau was located. He walked past the sleeping sentry to General Clayton's rooms; Clayton was hard at work, and merely glanced up at the small robed figure, and waved him away with a quick "Mush fadi," Anglo-Egyptian slang that can mean anything from "Not now; I'm busy" to "b.u.g.g.e.r off!"

Clayton, who supposed that Lawrence was still somewhere around Maan blowing up railway bridges, was astonished, but not vexed, to see his protege standing barefoot on his doorsill. Clayton confirmed with one call that HMS Dufferin was already loading food at Suez for an emergency trip to Aqaba. Then, a