Now, to kill in the red heat of battle is one thing, but to deliberately shoot a helpless man dead at close quarters must be an ordeal which few could stomach easily, especially while shaking with fever. Lawrence was not a hardened soldier: indeed, he had never fought in a battle. Even at the very end of the war, two years later and after all the killing he had seen subsequently, Alec Kirkbride wrote that he ‘appeared to be genuinely shocked by the free use which I made of my revolver …’Occasionally someone turned nasty … and I shot them at once … Lawrence got quite cross and said “For God’s sake stop being so bloody minded!” ‘ 10This does not sound like the kind of person who would find it easy to place the barrel of a gun under a man’s chin and shoot him in cold blood. The contemporary entry in his diary suggests that something or someone was ‘shot’ that night, but it is characteristically cryptic. The fact is that there is no hint of the incident in Lawrence’s reports, and neither does he ever refer to it subsequently, though one would have imagined that such an experience would have a lasting residue. In his dispatch, written afterwards, he claims to have left Wejh with ‘four ‘Agayl and four Rifa’a’: given that he may have neglected to mention his servants, the Syrian and the Moroccan, there still remains the mysterious ‘Utaybi, Sulayman, who is not mentioned in any diary or dispatch, but only appears in Seven Pillars.Lawrence’s field-diary entry for 13 March reads: ‘with us 12 camels and men, Syrian, Zilfi, Rass, Anyza, Merawi, Rifaa’. There was a seventh name, but this has been heavily crossed out. Though this obviously does not add up to twelve, Lawrence is more specific in his later, typewritten dispatch. The ‘12 men’ is missing, and the entry for 13 March – the day after the alleged shooting – now reads: ‘I have with me a Syrian, a Moroccan,a Merawi, four Rifaa, and three men from Aneizah, Rass and Zilfi [i.e. ‘Agayl] respectively.’ The only discrepancy, then, is that of the Moroccan – presumably Hamed – whose name has apparently been scrubbed off the list in the earlier, handwritten diary, but appears in the later, official typewritten document. Is it plausible that one scrubs out a name violently – presumably from remorse – in one’s diary, and then includes the name in one’s official report? The obvious implication is that the name was scrubbed out afterthe official dispatch was published – suggesting that Hamed the Moor was alive and kicking on 13 March – the day after he was supposed to have been shot by Lawrence. On close reading, too, the description in Seven Pillarsdoes not ring true. Lawrence describes the ‘Agayl as ‘running frantically about’ when he arrived to see the corpse, and says that he later sent them ‘to search for Hamed’. Yet the ‘Agayl and the Rifa’a were men who had spent their lives in the desert, tracking enemy raiders and stray camels: their first reaction to such a problem would certainly have been a methodical examination of the murderer’s tracks. In the Seven Pillarsaccount, Lawrence says that they halted in Wadi Khitan after sunset, which would indicate that the entire adventure took place in darkness. He does not explain how, if this was so, he was able to see the dead man’s wound clearly enough in the dark to distinguish the powder-burns. In his official report, though, he states specifically that the party halted at 4.15 p.m. – a good two hours before sunset, which would indicate that the murder occurred while it was still light, when any tracks would have been clearly discernible. It is true that Khitan was a rocky wadi in which tracks might not appear, yet there were also evidently sandy patches where they had made camp, for no self-respecting Bedui would ever halt his camels on rocks, simply for fear of injuring the animals’ knees, and besides, Lawrence mentions the ‘sandy gully’ in which he shot his man. Finally, there is a familiarity about the pattern of the story – it is curiously similar in context to the tale of his near-murder at Tel Bashar in Syria in 1909. In both cases, Lawrence’s dreams of Herculean achievement failed due to illness and physical weakness, and in both cases he appears to present a trauma in order to expiate that failure. Is it significant that Lawrence’s apparent first reaction to the murder was ‘the feeling that it need not have happened today of all days, when I was in pain’? Did Lawrence shoot Hamed the Moor? Did someone else shoot him? Or was Hamed still alive on the 13th? Perhaps someone was killed on the night of the 12th, but given Lawrence’s character, and given the fact that he never referred to the alleged incident subsequently, it seems unlikely that he personally ever shot a man dead in cold blood.
They were off at three in the morning, and Lawrence was now so sick that his men had to lift him on to his camel. After two more days of slogging through the maze of washes and harrasthat surrounded the Wadi Ais, Lawrence and his escort – which may or may not have included Hamed the Moor – couched their camels at the water pool of Abu Markha, where ‘Abdallah was about to pitch camp amid a great confusion of tribesmen and roaring and whinnying pack animals.
Lawrence had preserved just enough strength to greet ‘Abdallah, hand him the instructions from Feisal, and retire. He waited for a tent to be pitched for him, then threw himself down on his bed. He did not leave the tent for eight days.
It was now 15 March. Feisal and Lawrence had hoped to have the Arab forces in position within ten days, and only five of those days remained. Lawrence was virtually paralysed by malaria, riddled with dysentery, and whether this was from nature, fear, or the added burden of conscience over a man’s death, he was hors de combat.If Fakhri Pasha’s forces got through to Tebuk, and subsequently managed to reach the Palestine front, the whole balance of the war would be upset. A major part of the Arab failure, he felt, would be down to himself. As he lay there, hour after hour, staring at the roof of the tent, a confused mass of visions began to swirl about in his mind. He thought of his childhood longing for the East, the feeling he had had at school about ‘freeing’ the Arabs, the series of synchronicities which had brought him to Syria, to the Negev, and finally here to Arabia. All the events of his life had been leading to this point. He had never been a man of action. Yet one thought dropped into his mind with the cool clarity of a water-droplet striking the surface of a pooclass="underline" he, Lawrence, was now as much in command of the campaign as he chose. 11The British looked at the revolt through his eyes, and his close liaison with Feisal meant that the Arabs saw the British largely from his perspective. He, Lawrence, was the pivot: he, Lawrence, was the uncrowned king of Arabia. He bestraddled the flow of information between the Arabs and the British and could manipulate events any way he pleased. His delirium stove through the barriers of his consciousness in a way that he had never experienced before: the fortifications broke down, and the barbarian tribes came rushing in. He experienced a powerful sense of connection, a profound sense of meaning. The liberation of the Arab nation and the winning of the war for the British: these two objectives it had been given to him to achieve. His first reaction to the revolt had been driven by the needs of the moment, but so much had been overlooked. Until now, everyone, including himself, had been obsessed with the capture of Medina, but what on earth was the good of Medina? A string of thoughts snicked into place like ratchets, and made him smile with sudden, thrilling insight. The war in the Hejaz was already won! It had been won the day Feisal’s army had marched into Wejh. From the moment the Arabs had threatened the railway the Turks had had no choice but to waste their strength in defending it. The Turkish garrison was stuck in Medina eating its own transport animals, steadily reducing its own power of movement. The Arabs did not need to take Medina, and to cut the railway entirely would merely give the enemy an excuse to march out. In Medina, they were no threat to the Arabs, nor to the British flank. Soon, his mind began instinctively to calculate. How big was Arabia? Perhaps 140,000 square miles. How could the Turks defend that vast region against its own people? To do so effectively, he reckoned, they would need a fortified post every four square miles, manned by at least twenty troops. That made 600,000 men for the whole of the Arabian theatre! Clearly, to defend Arabia was beyond the capacity of the Turks. Yes, they could defend it with an entrenched and fortified line as they had against the British in Palestine, but only if the enemy marched in formation, with banners flying. But suppose the Arabs were simply an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? 12They were not obliged to engage the Turks head-on. The prevailing military philosophy of Clausewitz, that the aim of war was to concentrate the largest force at the enemy’s strongest point, and destroy him by sledgehammer blows, need not apply to the desert. Killing Turks was a luxury. In small, mobile parties, the Arabs could strike the enemy at his weakest point, and run away back into the wilderness, their sanctuary – a place where the Turks could not follow. Their advantages were speed, range and time, not firepower. They had no need to fight a pitched battle, nor present a target to the enemy. They could not sustain large numbers of casualties like a regular army, but a war of fading ghosts, waged against objects – machines, technical equipment, rails, stations and bridges – would achieve their purpose without exposing them to great risk. The desert was an ocean in which the Arabs cruised unseen, ubiquitous, independent of bases, communications or fixed points. Using the desert they could harass the enemy, evade decisive battles, sever lines of communication, hit hard and withdraw hastily. Lawrence saw with visionary clearness that the desert was his great ally: he had discovered ‘desert power’.