At Agayla, many black tents were pitched in the wadi, and Lawrence was rejoined by Auda with Durzi ibn Dughmi of the Rwalla and a troop of his horsemen. This suggested a favourable response from Nuri ash-Sha alan, and the prospective assistance of the powerful Rwalla changed the situation dramatically. Now, even Damascus seemed open to them, and Nasib al-Bakri, eager to raise the revolt in Syria, began to argue for an attack to the north instead of the planned move on Aqaba. Sharif Nasir and Auda were swayed by his argument, but Lawrence was outraged. If the Hashemites attempted to raise the tribes of northern Syria at this juncture, and captured Damascus, he thought, then they would be totally isolated. The British Expeditionary Force still lay behind the Gaza-Beersheba line and would be physically incapable of supporting them. The insurrection in Damascus would easily be crushed and the Hashemite cause would fizzle out. Timing was crucial, because the tribes would not rise a second time. Meanwhile, Aqaba lay on the British flank in Palestine, and Lawrence was convinced that, in order to be fully acknowledged, the revolt must move in concert with the British advance. He feared al-Bakri, as he feared all sophisticated Arab townsmen, and in Seven Pillarsbranded him spitefully as a ‘fool’, a ‘rat’and ‘petty’. Nasib, who had been one of the founders of the Revolt, was certainly neither a fool nor a traitor to the cause of Arab Nationalism, but, like the Sharif ‘Abdallah whom Lawrence despised equally, he was capable of independent thought, and had no truck with Allied aspirations in his country. He was not gulled by Lawrence’s double-talk. Nasib was exactly the kind of supposedly ‘volatile and short-sighted’ Arab Lawrence and the British disliked: they felt more empathy for the conservative elements in Arab society, and in Seven PillarsLawrence tapped this traditional orientalist view of the essential congruency between the ‘honourable’ English ‘gentleman’ and the Bedui – a category into which he pressed those members of the Hashemite family of whom he approved, despite the fact that they had been raised in Istanbul. Thus, he indicated that while Nasib frowned on his heroic rescue of Gasim, Auda and Sharif Nasir – two of ‘nature’s gentlemen’ – fully understood. When the feasting in the Wadi Sirhan grew too much to bear, Nasib and his aide, Zaki Drubi, had retired, while Lawrence and Nasir had had the grace to honour their hosts by sticking the meal out to the end. In Lawrence’s writing a man’s ‘nobility’ is frequently defined by his table-manners and eating habits. By such rhetorical devices, he sought to demonstrate how the English and the ‘real Arabs’ – that is the Bedu – had more in common than either had with the ‘ignoble’, ‘petty’ and ‘treacherous’ town Arabs, even though these townsmen were the vast majority in the Arab world, and therefore, by another definition, might be considered ‘the real Arabs’. The ‘real Arabs’ did not, of course, exist – the idea was simply an ideological concept which was of great use to the colonialists, but was in reality nebulous: referring to the Bedu as ‘the real Arabs’ was in fact no more satisfactory than calling the British royal family ‘the real British’ and trying to forget the remaining millions of the population. In any case, it was not by honourable means that Lawrence got his way with al-Bakri. First, he went to see Auda and explained that, if they were to strike north through Rwalla territory, then it would be the Rwalla and not the Howaytat who received the credit and the bulk of the British gold. He spoke privately with Nasir, too, fanning the instinctive jealousy between the Hashemites – direct descendants of the Prophet – and the al-Bakris, who claimed descent – spuriously, Lawrence hinted – from the Prophet’s first Khalif, Abu Bakr as-Sadiq. Eventually he won them both over, and it was agreed that, after the recruitment was completed, Nasib should ride off to the Druse mountains to prepare the way for an eventual march on Damascus. Lawrence tried to make sure that he had insufficient funds to raise a proper revolt by persuading Auda and Nasir to ask for the Ј7,000 Feisal had given him to spend in Syria. The strain of this double-dealing, with holding to the course he had set himself at Wejh, with lying day after day to the Bedu recruits, play-acting the Bedui, now became too much to bear. Ever since they had started from Wejh, three weeks previously, Lawrence’s overwhelming fear had nagged at him, telling him constantly to move on towards the thing he feared most. The inertia of the movement in Wadi Sirhan had been agonizing for someone of his masochistic temperament, and at last, something inside him snapped: ‘Can’t stand it another day,’ he wrote in his pocket diary on 5 June. ‘Will ride N[orth] and chuck it.’ 20
‘Chuck it’ clearly suggests that he had in mind a suicide-mission, and such a reaction would be in keeping with the ‘flight-forward’ tendency he had displayed so markedly even as a youth. Riding alone – or with a small escort – deep into Turkish-held lands was the psychological equivalent for Lawrence of diving through the ice into the frozen Cherwelclass="underline" ‘a bodily wound would have been a grateful vent for my internal complexities,’ he wrote, ‘a mouth through which my troubles might have found relief.’ 21Before leaving, though, he scribbled a melodramatic note to Clayton in a journal he was to leave behind, suggesting that his motive was simply frustration at being expected to raise the Bedu on a fraud: ‘Clayton,’ he wrote, ‘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.’ 22No doubt Lawrence thought the note would make a suitably noble epitaph, but his true motivation for this flight-forward is much more likely to have its origin in his unusual psychological make-up – his ‘internal complexities’ were less the martyrdom of ‘lying for the cause’ than the perennial pressure of overwhelming fear which had blighted all his days.
There was certainly method in Lawrence’s recklessness too. He guessed that Nasib al-Bakri would soon be visiting the principal Arab leaders around Damascus, and was terrified that he would goad them into rising too soon. As Feisal’s emissary, he believed he might be able to persuade them to hang fire until the time was ripe. He left Nabk some time on 5 June with two tribesmen, and rode at furious pace across the Syrian Desert to Burga, Seba Biar and ‘Ain al-Barida, near Palmyra, averaging more than forty miles a day. The going was too hard for Lawrence’s camel, which had foundered by 9 June, when he arrived at the tents of the Kawakiba ‘Anaza, pitched beneath the crags of the Tadmor hills. Lawrence’s objective here had been to compose the blood-feud between the Bishr – another section of the ‘Anaza – and the Howaytat, but he realized now that time was against him. Instead, he turned to the Kawakiba Sheikh, Dhami, whom he found ‘a good man’, and an ardent pro-Hashemite. Lawrence thought that Dhami would make a suitable middle-man between the Howaytat and the powerful ‘Anaza, and could provide men to destroy the railway bridges on the Orontes river when the time was right. Dhami not only gave Lawrence a replacement for his exhausted camel, but also helped him enrol thirty-five Bedu for an immediate attack on the railway at Raas Baalbek. Though Lawrence had no intention of cutting the line at this northern latitude, he reasoned that a small demolition would have untold propaganda value, not only suggesting to the Turks that an attack was imminent, but also exciting the local Arabs of the Metawila sect, whom Lawrence had first encountered years before at Nabatiyyeh. The Bedu brought up their camels and left almost at once, heading due west towards the Anti-Lebanon range, whose white peaks seemed to float insubstantially above the desert as they padded on. They skirted the mountains, and drove straight in to the railway, coming up on a plate-girder bridge which Lawrence blew with a four-pound charge. The effect on traffic, he wrote, was slight, but the alarm was tremendous. A report obtained by British Intelligence a month later made clear that the Turks believed the Metawila responsible for the assault, and claimed that they had ‘burned the station’ at Raas Baalbek. While this was an exaggeration, the threat of a Metawila insurrection was considered serious enough to divert no less than six battalions of Ottoman troops from the front line at Gaza – an incredibly profitable return on only four pounds of explosive.