Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (14 page)

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.
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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 nobody 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 “shirking 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 compass 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 pronounced 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 assailants 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 Rashids, a ferocious and implacable warrior who controlled the vast desert space 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 competition 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 fashion, 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 quantity 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 passing 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 massacre. 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 coarse 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 documents 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.