Lawrence’s party reached their camp just before dawn, to find that Shakir was already in position with his guns. At 6.30 precisely the battery belched fire and smoke across the valley, the crack and boom ricocheting around the rock walls. The first few salvoes crumpled the upper storeys of both the fort and the station building, and three or four shells punched into the water-tank, knocking it out of shape and sending water cascading down the tower walls. The next few salvoes set the Turkish camp ablaze, destroyed the woodpile kept to refuel locomotives, and hit the wagons of the train. The locomotive uncoupled and rumbled off towards Medina, and Lawrence watched with bated breath as it approached his mine. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a cloud of dust, and the train came to a halt. The mine had detonated late, Lawrence realized, and only the front wheels had been derailed. A crew of seven men sprang out at once and began to jack up the wheels, and he waited keenly for the sound of the machine-gun. It never came. The gunners had grown tired of waiting and had packed up, and moved back to camp. Lawrence was furious, but was obliged to watch impotently as the train crew got the locomotive back on the line within half an hour, and moved off slowly to the south. Meanwhile, though, the battle for the station was becoming hotter. The ‘Utayba were skirmishing towards the buildings under the cover of billowing smoke, leaping barefoot from bush to bush and firing as they went. They assaulted two of the Turkish outposts, cutting down every man in one, and capturing the other, then closed in on the northern part of the station, taking twenty-four prisoners – all of them Syrians, whom Lawrence later interrogated. He also had a chance to examine the brake-van of the train, which had been left behind, and discovered that it was lined with cement. However, the Turks in the fort were too near to linger, and the smoke was too dense for shooting. The Arabs broke off the action and withdrew, having killed and wounded seventy-two Turks. Within two days they were back at ‘Abdallah’s camp.
Lawrence considered his first attempt at railway-mining only a limited success: after all, the train had escaped. He also criticized the ‘Utayba, who, he wrote in his report, had not been asked to do much, and probably would not have done it if they had been. He was determined to have another try with the pressure-switch mine, and decided to hit the railway again between Hediyya and Mudahrij – second and third stations north of Abu an-Na’am respectively. He set off on 2 April, with a party which included the Juhayna law-giver Dakhilallah al-Qadi, his son Mohammad, and twenty of their Juhayna tribesmen, a couple of Sharifs, a machine-gun crew and a section of Syrian infantrymen. Once again, they marched up Wadi ‘Ais and turned into Wadi Hamdh, where they slept on a sandy flat and were disturbed in the night by a heavy shower of rain. The following day the temperature soared, and the sun burnished the soil to such a heat that Lawrence could no longer walk barefoot as the Bedu did, but had to put on his sandals. Thunder rolled across the hills all morning and the peaks around them were shrouded in ragged clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue. Suddenly, Lawrence realized that the clouds were columns of dust, over 1,000 feet high, spinning in a double vortex steadily towards them. The storm hit them like a slap only three minutes later, ripping at their cloaks, filling their eyes with stinging grains of sand, spinning round the camels and clashing them together. The whirlwind lasted only eighteen minutes, but it was followed by sleeting rain, which moulded the Arabs’ cloaks to their backs and had them shivering in the saddle. In the afternoon they climbed a steep crag to observe the railway, but found their view obscured by swirling mist: on the way down, an ‘Utaybi slipped on the wet rock and plummeted forty feet, smashing his skull on the stones beneath. This was, wrote Lawrence, the only casualty they sustained during the mission.
After dark, Lawrence, with the al-Qadis and an ‘Utaybi Sheikh called Sultan, crossed the plain to the railway. Mudahrij – a small station without a water-tower – lay behind a steep escarpment where the line curved sharply to the east. Soon after they moved out, they heard the bugle-call from the station that signified supper, and resented it, for tonight they would be too near to the Turkish sentries to light a fire. They came upon the track at about ten o’clock and rode along it, searching for a suitable machine-gun position. Visibility was too poor to identify one, however, so Lawrence chose a place at random – Kilometre 1121 – in which to lay the mine, and the party couched their camels silently. Lawrence’s mine was this time a slightly more complicated affair, and laying the hair-trigger igniter was, he admitted, ‘shaky work’. He placed two rail-cutting charges about thirty yards apart, and connected them to the pressure-switch, which he laid half-way between. This meant that, whichever way the train was heading, at least one charge would be certain to explode beneath its body. It took two hours to complete the mine-laying, and while he worked a light rain began to fall, caking the sandy surface around the railway embankment, which became plastered with footprints. Whenever a train was due, Lawrence knew, a Turkish patrol would search the line thoroughly inch by inch, looking for suspicious signs, and the elephant-like tracks they had left would be a certain giveaway. They were too deep to be concealed, so instead Lawrence and his party brought their camels and trampled the ground for 100 yards on either side of the charge, and out into the desert beyond, to make it look as though a large force had merely crossed the railway in the night. Then they rode off to a safe distance and concealed themselves behind a ridge to wait for sunrise, shivering fitfully and gasping in the intense cold through grinding and chattering teeth. Dawn spread crimson veins across the jagged hills like a benediction, and the heat melted the clouds and spread fire through Lawrence’s body. He prayed that there would be no action until he was thoroughly warm. At first light the machine-gun crew arrived, and Dakhilallah al-Qadi crawled up to the top of the ridge to find out what was happening. At 7.30, an armed patrol of eleven Turks worked its way along the line, and halted at Kilometre 1121. They began an exhaustive search of the sand and the ballast, and although the mines had been well hidden, Lawrence watched with his heart in his mouth. To his relief, however, they continued to the south and met up with the patrol from Hediyya, the next station. An hour later, Lawrence heard the rumble of a train, and saw a locomotive and nine wagons approaching from the south. Astonishingly, it passed over the mine safely – much to Lawrence’s secret relief, for it was full of women and children – though, as a demolitions artist, he was chagrined that the pressure-switch laid so painstakingly had proved a dud. It would need replacing, he decided, but at that moment the Turkish sentries posted in guard-sangars in the hills above Mudahrij spotted the Bedu who had crowded into his position to see the train, and opened fire at a range of 5,000 yards. Though this was too far to do any damage, Lawrence and his party knew that the Turks had well over 1,000 men at Mudahrij and Hediyya, and mounted patrols would soon be out hunting for them. They beat a dignified retreat, keeping their camels at a walk so as not to exhaust the mule carrying the heavy machine-gun, which they towed behind them. They laid up in another wadi for most of the day, and in the later afternoon walked their camels coolly back, under a renewed flurry of fire, towards the railway to replace the faulty trigger. The Turks were in the habit of shooting at any troop of Bedu who came near the railway, and from a distance they had no way of knowing that Lawrence’s party was actually a guerrilla unit. Dakhilallah thought of a brilliant ploy to alleviate their suspicions by having everyone couch their camels by the railway, and perform the evening prayer, standing in line, with himself as Imam in front. The Juhayna were not assiduous in their religious practice, and Lawrence thought they had probably not prayed for a year, while he himself was a complete novice. Nevertheless, he followed their movements – bowing, kneeling, and touching the ground with the forehead – and felt that the watching Turks had been convinced: ‘This was,’ he wrote later, ‘the first and last time I ever prayed in Arabia as a Muslim.’ 16