Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (53 page)

Lawrence spent the early days of January composing a long and sensible report on the situation, perhaps intended to take Clayton’s mind off Feisal’s correspondence with Jemal Pasha, though its conclusions aboutSyria were such as to prevent it from being published in the Arab Bulletin; it was circulated only among senior British intelligence officials who could be trusted to keep it out of the hands of the French. Lawrence also dealt with a minor breach of discipline, albeit one that could have had serious repercussions, in a way that makes any careful reader of Seven Pillars of Wisdom realize just how tangled Lawrence’s feelings on the subject of sex and corporal punishment were.

If we bear in mind that the incident at Deraa had happened only six weeks earlier, it is surprising to read that when an Arab youth of seventeen, Ali el Alayan, an Ageyl camel man of his bodyguard, was “caught in open enjoyment of a British soldier,” by which Lawrence seems to have meant that the British soldier had been buggering the Arab or vice versa, Ali was tried in five minutes and sentenced to 100 lashes, as “appointed by the Prophet,” which Lawrence reduced to fifty. The Arab boy “was immediately trussed over a sand-heap, and beaten lustily.” Meanwhile Lawrence told the British soldier, Carson, “a very decent A.S.C.
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lad,” that he would have to turn him over to his officer, who was returning to Aqaba the next day. Carson “was miserable at his position"—understandably, since in those days, and indeed through World War II and for some years beyond it, a homosexual act committed by a member of the British armed forces was both a military and a criminal offense.

When the British NCO in charge of the cars, Corporal Driver, appeared and asked Lawrence to hush the matter up for the boy’s sake before their officer returned, Lawrence refused. He was not shocked; nor did he condemn the act morally—"neither my impulses nor my convictions,” Lawrence wrote later, “were strong enough to make me a judge of conduct"—it was simply a matter of Anglo-Arab justice. It was important that there be equity, he told the British corporal. He could not “let our man go free…. We shared good and ill fortune with the Arabs, who had already punished their offender in the case.” The corporal, who was clearly experienced and reasonable, explained that Carson “was only a boy, not vicious or decadent,” and “had been a year without opportunity of sexual indulgence.” He also, though with considerable tact, laid part of the blame on Lawrence, who, for fear of venereal disease, had posted sentries to prevent British troops from visiting the three hardy Arab prostitutes who plied their trade at Aqaba.

Corporal Driver, having made his point respectfully, returned in half an hour and asked Lawrence to come and have a look at Private Carson. Lawrence, thinking Carson was ill, or had perhaps tried to harm himself in dread of the disgrace to come, hurried to the British camp, where he found the men huddled around a fire, including Carson, who was covered with a blanket, looking “drawn and ghastly.” The corporal pulled off the blanket, and Lawrence saw that Carson’s back was scored with welts. The men had decided that Carson should receive the same punishment as Ali, “even giving him sixty instead of fifty, because he was English!” They had carried out the whipping in front of an Arab witness from Lawrence’s bodyguard, “and hoped I would see they had done their best and call it enough.”

Lawrence’s reaction was odd. “I had not expected anything so drastic, and was taken aback and rather inclined to laugh,” he wrote, and noted that Carson was eventually sent “up-country,” where “he proved to be one of our best men.” Reading between the lines, we can easily guess that a wink passed between Lawrence and Corporal Driver. The Arabs not only were satisfied by Carson’s punishment but apparently assumed that Lawrence had ordered it; and certainly it was well within the old-fashioned traditions of British military discipline to keep an incident like this “within the family,” rather than let it go to a court-martial, which would disgrace the whole unit.

What is harder to understand is why Lawrence included the story in his book at all—it feels out of place, squeezed in between a long description of how he selected his bodyguard and the plans for his campaign against Talifeh. It is preceded by a puzzling disquisition on sex in Arabia, in which Lawrence remarks that “the sacredness of women in nomad Arabia forbade prostitution” (yet there were three prostitutes in Aqaba),and argues that “voluntary and affectionate” sexual relationships among Bedouin were better than “the elaborate vices of Oriental cities” or—in an odd aside—"the bestialities of their peasantry with goats and asses.”

Aside from the fact that stories about peasants having sex with their animals are common to every country and culture, it is hard to see how “the elaborate vices” of Oriental cities would be different from or worse than those practiced in the open air at Aqaba. Granted that frankness about acts and words that were still taboo was one of the things Lawrence sought to bring to literature later on, there is still something disturbing about a man who has recently endured a savage whipping himself feeling “rather inclined to laugh” at the spectacle of two young men just having been whipped. There is also an uneasy feeling of sexual ambivalence—or perhaps simply a lack of sympathy with or understanding of the sexual impulse, which seems to affect Lawrence whenever he writes about what was, for him, an uncongenial subject.

By the second week of January, Lawrence was on the move again. He rode out into the desert with his bodyguard to reconnoiter a ridge overlooking the railway station Jurf el Derawish, thirty miles north of Maan. Deciding that the position was a good one, he brought up Nuri as-Said, with 300 Arab regulars and a mountain gun. Under the cover of darkness, he cut the railway line above and below Jurf, and at dawn opened fire on the station with the mountain gun, silencing the Turkish artillery. Then the Beni Sakhr charged on camels from their position behind the ridge, where they had been hidden. The Turkish garrison, surprised and overwhelmed, surrendered when Nuri captured the Turks’ own gun and turned it on the station at point-blank range. Twenty Turks were wounded or killed, and nearly 200 were taken prisoner—but the discovery of two trains in the station loaded with delicacies for the officers in Medina set the Arabs off on a prolonged burst of looting and gorging, and as a result they missed an opportunity to destroy another train as it approached the station.

During two days of extreme cold, heavy snow, and hail, the tribesaround Shobek, near Petra, stormed and took the town. Hearing the news Nuri rode on to Tafileh through the night, and halting at the edge of the cliff above the town at dawn, he demanded that the town surrender or be shelled, even though his gun and his troops were far behind him. The Turks hesitated—they too had heard the news of the capture of Jurf and Shobek, but they were 150 men, and well armed. Then Auda Abu Tayi cantered out in full sight of them, his heavy cloak flowing behind him, and called out: “Dogs! Do you not know Auda?”

In Liddell Hart’s words, “The defences of Tafila
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collapsed before his trumpeting voice as those of Jericho had once collapsed before Joshua.” Holding on to the place was harder, however, since the Arabs immediately began quarreling among themselves, and the majority of the townspeople who were Arab were divided in their loyalty to different clans. Lawrence arrived, and began to spread around gold sovereigns to induce peace, but he had hardly even begun to restore order when news reached him that a sizable Turkish force was marching from Amman to retake Tafileh, consisting of “three … battalions of infantry, a hundred cavalry, two mountain howitzers and twenty-seven machineguns … led by Hamid Fakhri Bey, the commander of the 48th Division.” By late afternoon, the Turks had brushed aside the Arab mounted pickets guarding Wadi Hesa, “a gorge of great width and depth and difficulty” ten miles north of Tafileh, which, like almost every place in Palestine and western Syria, was part of biblical geography, cutting off the land of Moab from that of Edom. Lawrence had been elated by the capture of Jurf, Shobek, and Tafileh, but he was dismayed by the swift response of the Turks; he had assumed they would be too busy defending Amman to worry about retaking Tafileh.

In ordinary circumstances, the right thing for the Arabs to do in the face of a powerful Turkish advance would have been to withdraw, first destroying whatever they could in Tafileh, and carrying away as much booty as they could load on their camels. Instead Lawrence decided to fight a conventional battle, marking a new stage in the development of theArab army. He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle.

Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife,” and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, “I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even convinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so.” Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: “There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle.” He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs’ claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of positions. It was not that Lawrence’s philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh.

In desert skirmishes Lawrence’s command was direct and unchallenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal’s younger half brother Zeid, “a cool and gallant fighter,” who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal’s chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence’sbodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile factions, since Auda’s tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent “back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations,” thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs’ chief.

It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.

Tafileh was a small town, hardly more than a large village, in a rugged, forbidding, but beautiful landscape. Prosperous in peacetime, with a population of fewer than 10,000,
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it was famous for its green gardens; for its crops of olives, dates, and figs; and for its profusion of wells and hot springs. Set in a deep ravine, it was overlooked by what was almost a terraced cliff to the west, and by a gentler, triangularly rocky plain to the east rising about 3,000 yards from the town to a rock ledge about 2,000 yards in length. At its northern end, this ledge overlooked the road from Kerak, on which the Turks were approaching.

At the first news that the Turks were coming, Jaafar, with the instinctive caution of a trained professional soldier, had moved his men onto the high ground to the west of the town, the textbook solution to the problem. But Lawrence disagreed, both because there was plenty of “dead ground” in front of Jaafar, which would allow the Turks to work their way around his flank instead of attempting a direct frontal attack uphill, andbecause abandoning the town to the Turks was a political and tactical mistake. The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the population of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Armenians who had escaped the massacre, as well as “a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa,” part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local population a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence’s vivid description, “rushed to save their goods and their lives… It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible.” The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were.