It had not been the war of ghosts which he had envisaged, but it had been an astonishingly successful action. The Arab irregulars had engaged a trained enemy of slightly superior numbers, and had killed 300 and taken 160 prisoner at a cost of only two men dead. Auda was delighted: two bullets had smashed his binoculars, one had pierced his revolver-holster, three had struck the blade of his scimitar, his horse had been shot from under him, and still he had survived. Aba 1-Lissan was the crucial battle in the capture of Aqaba, for the pass of Nagb ash-Shtar was now open to them. Standing on that crest, where Lawrence and Nasir had stood at that crucial moment in the Revolt, eighty years on, though, I saw plainly how the Arabs had won. The hollow of Aba 1-Lissan, now occupied by a village, is a natural amphitheatre, which would have been impossible to defend. Once the Turks had occupied the spring and failed to send out pickets to cover the heights around, the battle was as good as lost. They could not see the enemy hidden behind the hills, could not attack effectively uphill, and could only, perhaps, have retreated back to Ma an. The topographer in Lawrence must have known that the ground had favoured them intensely, and that not all battles would be won so easily. However, for now the bulk of the fighting was over, and that night Lawrence did a curious thing: he walked round the battlefield alone by moonlight, inspecting the corpses, moving them and arranging them in regular rows. His masochism pushed him forwards to look death, his ultimate fear, literally in the face. He later made an oddly surreal and strangely emotionless sketch of himself arranging the matchstick bodies: ‘I put them in order, one by one,’ he wrote, Very wearied myself, and longing to be one of these quiet ones.’ 30
Three more Turkish posts lay between them and Aqaba, but the garrison at Guweira – 120 strong – had already surrendered to the local Howaytat Sheikh, ibn Jad, who had waited to see which side would win at Aba 1-Lissan before declaring for the Hashemites. Leaving the next post, Kathira, for ibn Jad’s men to assault in the darkness of the lunar eclipse due that night, Lawrence’s party pushed on down the Wadi Ithm, and found post after post abandoned. The Turks had fled to Khadra at the mouth of the wadi – the last bastion standing between the Arabs and the sea. The following night hundreds of Howaytat and Haywat tribesmen joined the Hashemite force, swelling their numbers to over 1,000 men. In the morning, Khadra surrendered without a fight. A British gunboat – later identified as Slieve Foy –had lain off the Gulf at dawn and had put a couple of shells into the hills. Lawrence and Nasir rode fast out of Ithm and across the great Wadi Araba, where they glimpsed the blue of the sea through a powerful haze, but Slieve Foyhad weighed anchor and was gone. They would have to take the news of the victory to Cairo themselves, by camel. 31They found Aqaba town ruined and deserted – smashed to bits by the shellfire of British gunships weeks before. The Hashemite patrol which had marched 600 miles through smouldering deserts to get here took possession of its prize without a single shot being fired.
16. An Amateurish Buffalo-Billy Sort of Performance
Crossing Sinai: The Mudowwara Raid July – September 1917
Of all Lawrence’s camel-treks, the one I most wanted to reconstruct was his classic traverse of Sinai in forty-nine hours, to take the news of the capture of Aqaba to the British at Suez. The Howaytat I met in Wadi Rum insisted that it was impossible, so I brought one of them, Sabah ibn ‘lid, to Sinai to make the crossing with me, and prove to them that it was not. Sabah’s grandfather had ridden with Lawrence on several of his raids, but the Bedu of Jordan had grown used to four-wheel drive vehicles, I thought, and no longer knew what camels and men were capable of. Unlike them, the tribes of Sinai still rode their camels, and I bought four of the best mounts I could find from the Nuwayba’ Tarabin. Though I had Lawrence’s own map, copied from the Royal Geographical Society archives, reconstructing the route proved far more difficult than I had anticipated. For a start, Aqaba and Sinai were now separated by the narrow strip of Israel, and the border at Ras an-Naqab (called Nagb Akaba in Lawrence’s day) – between Israel and Egypt – was closed. I had to find an alternative route up the escarpment which approximated to the one Lawrence had taken, and which would take us to Ras an-Naqab. An old camel-man of the Tarabin named Furrayj showed me Wadi Tuwayba – a tortuous way running parallel with Lawrence’s pilgrim route, but starting at Taba on the Egyptian side of the border. Furrayj would accompany us as guide and rafiqfor the first part of the journey: another rafiqof the Haywat would be waiting for us at Themed. My wife, Mariantonietta – an experienced camel-rider and fluent Arabic speaker – made up the party of four.