Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (46 page)

Those who think of Lawrence merely as a dashing guerrilla leader overlook both the originality of his plan and his capacity for detail. He compared “camel raiding-parties” operating on the border between cultivated land and the desert to ships, able to attack at will and by surprise, then break off the fight and retire into the desert, where the Turks could not follow them. He hit on the essential advantage of the guerrilla: “tip and run” tactics, “using the smallest force in the quickest time, at the furthest place.” This would of course negate the Turks’ superiority in numbers and heavy weapons—a lesson that would later be put to good use by the British Long Range Desert Group in the Libyan Desert in World War II (as well as by Mao in the Chinese civil war, and by the Vietcong in Vietnam). Rather than seek a decisive battle, Lawrence was determined at all costs to
avoid
one; his object was to bleed the Turks to death by pinpricks, while forcing them to waste their troops trying to defend nearly 800 miles of railway line.

He worked out with great precision exactly what his guerrillas needed. They would ride female camels, and each man would carry half a bag (forty-five pounds) of flour “slung on his riding saddle,” enough for six weeks. A camel needed to drink every third day, and the rider would carry at most a pint of water, to see him through the second day of marching from one well to another. This would give the force the capability of riding “a thousand miles out and home,” covering anywhere between fifty and 110 miles a day. It was Lawrence’s idea to arm as many men as possible with Lewis light, drum-fed machine guns, to be used as long-range, automatic sniper rifles, rather than in their conventional role, as well as a rifle, and to keep those who had automatic weapons “ignorant of their mechanism.” If the gun jammed, they were not to waste time trying to clear it but throw it away, and use their rifle instead—speed was essential; attacks should be over in minutes. (Lawrence himself rode with a Lewis gun, from which he had removed the bulky cooling shroud, the butt secured in a leather bucket slung from his saddle, as well as the Lee-Enfield rifle that Feisal had presented to him, a bag containing 100 rounds, a pistol, and his dagger.) So far as possible, each man should be instructed in the basics of high explosives, though in practice it was usually Lawrence or one of the other British officers who did the delicate job of planting them and handling detonators.

The most difficult problem Lawrence faced he turned to his advantage. No tribe would fight in the territory of another, and it was impossible to mix men of different tribes in any raiding force. Instead, when he entered the territory of a new tribe, he would take on new men from that tribe, thus automatically giving himself a fresh force at regular intervals, and giving the men and their camels a chance to rest. A further benefit was that his force would change continually in size and composition, making it more difficult for the Turks to guess how strong it was or where it would strike. In every respect, this was the opposite of a well-trained, disciplined army of whatever size. Far from handling the weapons with respect, the men would toss them aside the moment they jammed; instead of being molded into a tightly bonded unit, the men would comeand go interchangeably; it would be an army without ranks or any visible chain of command, and without written orders, since the tribesmen were for the most part illiterate.

As the Turks, reinvigorated by new supplies and the sound advice of General Erich von Falkenhayn, moved south in an attempt to retake Aqaba, Lawrence showed his command of modern warfare while Feisal was at Aqaba by using bombing raids carried out by the RFC to slow the enemy down, while the Howeitat, under Auda, blew up railway bridges and culverts in the opposite direction to distract the Turks’ attention.

As for Lawrence, he decided to carry out a raid on the “Mudawara, the great water station in the desert eighty miles south of Maan,” sixty miles inland, directly to the east of Aqaba. If Lawrence could blow in the well, the Turks would need “to add so many more water wagons to their trains” that they would be hard pushed to supply the garrison at Medina at all. Since the insulated cable and the exploder sent from Cairo had arrived without the right kind of detonators, Lawrence borrowed three from the captain of HMS
Humber
and successfully exploded one on the deck of the monitor, proving to himself that he had mastered the technique. Tinkering with explosive devices and mastering the art of demolition by trial and error would be one of Lawrence’s more dangerous activities over the next two years.

Mudawara was guarded by a substantial Turkish garrison, so Lawrence added to his Arab forces “two forceful sergeant-instructors,” one to display the capabilities of the Lewis gun and the other to do the same for the Stokes trench mortar. “Lewis,” as the Lewis gun instructor was nicknamed, was an Australian; “Stokes,” also nicknamed after his weapon, was “a placid English yeoman.” It is a tribute to Lawrence’s skill at leadership that he was able to persuade the Arabs to accept two red-faced uniformed European unbelievers as fighting companions, and also that he was also able to steer Lewis and Stokes through the hardships of living like Bedouin.

Lawrence and his small party rode out of Aqaba on September 7, in a temperature of 123 degrees, measured in the shade of palm trees by the sea. Inland, on the yellowish sand that reflected the sun, and among the red sandstone rocks, the temperature quickly rose far higher. They rode for two days at a slow pace, to accustom the sergeants to camel riding in the desert, and arrived at Auda’s camp in Guweira just in time for the daily Turkish bombing raid—an occurrence not to be taken lightly, given the amount of high explosives Lawrence’s camels carried, all of which could be detonated by a single red-hot bomb fragment.

Guweira was a small village, the site of an abandoned Ottoman fort, a few miserable buildings in a sea of fine yellow sand and small hillocks, set next to a black volcanic rock. Auda’s encampment, however, was a mass of people and camels shaded only by a huge cloud of swarming flies, a gathering of hundreds of the Howeitat, many of them discontented with the fact that Auda kept for himself most of the money he was now receiving from the British. It was impossible even for Auda, who was in any case enjoying himself in his tent with a new young wife, to gather enough of the Howeitat for Lawrence’s purpose.

Lawrence decided to go forward on his own, with his two sergeants and the small party of Arabs with whom he had left Aqaba, riding south to Wadi Rumm, where a party of Arabs friendly to Feisal was said to be encamped. The sun was so ferocious that even the Bedouin complained, so Lawrence “played about,” pretending to enjoy himself, to keep their spirits up. But when they camped for the night one of the Arabs, a Harithi sharif named Aid, came to Lawrence, who lay sleeping on the ground wrapped in his robe, to say, “in a chilled voice, ‘Lord I am gone blind.’ “ The sun reflecting off the sand had been so intense as to burn out his retinas.

With this grim reminder of the desert’s danger, they rode on the next day through a steep valley with rose-colored cliffs 1,000 feet high, sometimes even rising to 2,000 feet, between great boulders the size of houses that had fallen from the heights. They crossed a valley so broad that in it “a squadron of airplanes could have wheeled in formation"; then, at sunset,they climbed a zigzag trail up the cliff to a ledge where they halted, near a spring around which were placed several villages of tents. Wadi Rumm was as beautiful as Petra, but the little party was not cheered by it. With the blinded Aid sunk in misery, Lawrence sought to persuade the other chiefs to join him, but such was their resentment of Auda that they refused. Lawrence decided to leave his two sergeants behind when one of the Arabs sympathetic to Lawrence guaranteed their life with his own—a necessary precaution, for feelings were running high and two infidels with not a word of Arabic between them were at grave risk without Lawrence to look after them. Having done his best for the sergeants, he rode back with one companion all the way to Aqaba, where he obtained from Feisal the promise of twenty more camels to carry the explosives, and the help of Sharif Abdulla el Feir, “his best man present,” who would ride back to Rumm with Lawrence to quell the mutiny in Feisal’s name.

Over the next few days Sharif Abdulla succeeded in patching things up, and the extra camels arrived, accompanied by four of Feisal’s enormous black Sudanese slaves, each armed with a rifle, sword, dagger, and pistol. These slaves were fanatically loyal to their master, and were intended to protect Lewis and Stokes, two to each sergeant, until they returned safely to Aqaba.

This precaution shows the degree to which clan and tribal animosities threatened to undo the capture of Aqaba, as well as the degree to which the different tribes and clans were sensitive to their own feuds and rivalry, and always subject to the ever-present temptation to test whether the Turks, who were at least fellow Muslims, might outbid the British for their support. Lawrence, who would be remembered generations later as “the Englishman who brought the gold,” distributed it lavishly, but that inevitably had the effect of making the Bedouin ever more greedy, a reality of desert warfare which he tried scrupulously to hide from his superiors.

On September 16 Lawrence led a motley and ill-assorted group of men out of Rumm, about 120 in all, including the two saddle-sore sergeants and their bodyguards, and the blind Sharif Aid, who was determined to go on. They camped for the night on a “strange flat of yellow mud,” and ate"gazelle meat and hot bread,” as Lawrence made his plans for the attack on Mudawara, which he expected to reach at the end of the next day.

In the morning they rode across a wide and varied plain of sand, limestone, and flint, only to find, when they halted, that the Turks had fouled the pool by throwing dead camels into it a few months ago. The water was covered in thick, oily green slime, and disgusting to smell or taste, but there was no help for it but to fill their water skins, despite the stench. If they took Mudawara, they would have access to water, but if they did not, they could not retreat without having first watered their camels and provided a water supply for themselves.

At dusk, they arrived close to the station at Mudawara, and Lawrence, the two sergeants, and the Arab leaders dismounted and crawled forward from sand mound to sand mound and through the deserted Turkish trench lines to a point from which they could see the buildings and the tents of the Turkish garrison. To Lawrence’s disappointment, he did not see any way of rushing the station with his mixed force, in whose reliability he had been rapidly losing confidence. There was no good cover for Stokes and the mortar, or for Lewis and the machine gun, within the range of their weapons, and it seemed to Lawrence very likely that an attack would fail. There was never anything amateurish about Lawrence’s battle craft. It is a measure of his innate professionalism that he never allowed enthusiasm or his gift for improvisation to cloud his judgment. He did not trust his force in a pitched fight with superior numbers, and with Sharif Aid blinded, he did not have an Arab leader who could rally the men once they started to suffer casualties, as they surely would. He decided to withdraw, blow up a Turkish train, and let his Arabs loot it; this, if nothing else, might raise their morale a bit, and lower that of the Turks.

The next morning he found a convenient spot along the line to lay the mine. At this spot, a short two-arched bridge crossed a gulley, about 200 yards from a ledge on which Stokes and Lewis could place “their toys” with a good field of fire in whichever direction the train approached, and from which they could retreat under cover if necessary. Lawrence wasalways careful with the lives of his men, Arab or British, and disliked spending them unnecessarily. The swashbuckling, “romantic” picture of Lawrence charging on his camel, along with his Bedouin tribesmen in their flowing robes wielding their gleaming curved sabers, caught the public imagination once he became famous, but he was first and foremost a gifted, practical soldier who knew what he was doing. Although his military training was minimal (unlike his omnivorous reading of classics ancient and modern about strategy), Lawrence might as well have attended Sandhurst as an officer cadet—from the very first he displayed the instincts of a born soldier. However wild and undisciplined the Arabs might be, Lawrence was as careful as any professional in choosing the right ground, selecting a field of fire, working out his logistics down to the last bullet and pint of water, and preparing an avenue of retreat in case it proved necessary. Guerrilla warfare it might be, with all the messiness that such warfare entails, but he waged it with the care and instincts of an exceptionally capable regular officer. He left nothing to chance, right down to the smallest detail; what is more, he served in the field as his own adjutant, regimental sergeant major, and quartermaster sergeant. This is all the more impressive when one considers that he had nobody to advise him, nobody on whom he could call for reinforcements, and no assurance that the Bedouin would obey him. There was also the certainty that if he was seriously wounded, he would die, and if he was captured alive in Arab dress by the Turks, he would be tortured, then executed as a spy.

He had the camels unloaded and led away to a position where they could graze unseen (first making sure that the Arabs scraped salt from an overhanging limestone ledge for them—Lawrence had the Napoleonic eye for detail that makes a great commander), then kneaded his blocks of gelignite into a viscous lump that half-filled a sandbag, and buried it in the stone ballast under the tracks. He then had to replace the stones carefully one by one, brush the whole area clean of footprints with the hem of his cloak, and unroll the heavy insulated cables. These turned out to be an unexpected headache—burying them left a break in the sand’s thin,wind-created crust, and the stiff cables tended to rise in one place when they were buried in another. In the end, Lawrence had to weight the cables down with heavy stones to flatten them out, fill in the long trenches and smooth out the sand by brushing an empty sandbag over the surface, then use a bellows and his own cloak to create ripples in the sand that matched the rest. Finally, he had to remove every footprint for 200 yards from the mine to the ledge where the sergeants had placed their weapons. It took him two hours to lay the charge, and five hours to render everything invisible to the naked eye.