Within days of the victory, Euryalus,the flagship of the Red Sea fleet, had anchored off Aqaba as a token of British support, and by 13 July Dufferinwas disgorging arms and supplies. Feisal’s forces were to be moved from the Hejaz to Aqaba – the camelry on the hoof, the Arab Regular battalions, now under the command of Ja’afar Pasha, by sea from Wejh. Feisal was to be put under Allenby’s command, and from now on his forces would operate as the British right flank. Lawrence travelled to the Hejaz at the end of July, where he saw Feisal, and met Hussain for the first time. It was while in Jeddah that he received an intercept from Cairo apprising him that Auda Abu Tayyi was about to defect to the Turks: ‘It is reported by Agent “Y”,’ the message read, ‘that Auda [Abu Tayyi] who was Captain Lawrence’s right hand man during the recent operations in the [Ma ’an-Aqaba] area has written to the Turks giving as his reason for rebelling that presents had been given to Nuri [ash-Sha’alan – chief of the Rwalla] not to him but that he was now willing to come in under certain conditions and had twice written to the GOC 8th Army Corps asking for a present.’ 12Lawrence was alarmed, and by 4 August he was back in Aqaba, where he bought a famous camel called Ghazala and rode fast up the Wadi Ithm to Auda’s camp at Guweira. The loyalty of the Howaytat remained crucial to the defence of Aqaba, for the Turks had already recaptured Aba 1-Lissan and were bombing along the Wadi Ithm. A counter-attack on Aqaba was expected within two months, and Sharif Nasir had established four defensive outposts to protect the crucial pass of Shtar. One of these was Wadi Musa, at the gate of Petra, another at Dalagha in the Balga hills, a third at Batra, the highest point on the Shirah plateau, and the fourth at Guweira on the plain beneath, where, in the shadow of a single weathered crag of rock, there lay an ancient water-cistern. Until the Arab regulars arrived in Aqaba, these outposts were vital, and their continued viability depended on the Howaytat and Auda Abu Tayyi. Lawrence was received as a friend in Auda’s camp, and when he touched on his correspondence with the Turks, Auda told him a cock-and-bull story about having pretended to go over to them in order to obtain money. Lawrence divined, though, that Auda was angry with the British. He had received no reward for taking Aqaba, and they had not yet sent troops or guns. Lawrence guessed that Auda’s approach to the enemy had been more serious than he maintained. Though he wrote with romantic lyricism in Seven Pillarsthat Auda’s heart somehow ‘yearned for the defeated enemy’, the prosaic fact was that the Howaytat, like the Hejaz tribes, were working for money rather than ‘independence’and saw little farther than the solidarity of the tribe. Lawrence solved the problem by describing to Auda the vast amounts of arms which would soon be pouring into Aqaba, and by explaining that Feisal – who would soon be there too – would be ‘extremely grateful’ for his services. Finally, he offered Auda an advance on the large sum he could certainly count on receiving when Feisal arrived. Lawrence rode back to Aqaba the same night, hoping his gambit had secured the Howaytat at least until the regulars occupied the port. He resolved to keep the secret of Auda’s betrayal to himself: the British, with their feudal values, would not understand the nature of Arab loyalty: they wanted ‘story book heroes’, he believed. He would present Auda as the brave Bedui raider, just as he had presented Feisal as the noble Arab leader, manipulating the British image of the Arabs to the advantage of the Arabs, the British, and Lawrence himself. He maintained that it irked him to have to serve two masters. He was, he wrote, one of Allenby’s officers, and Allenby expected him to do his best for the British. But he was also Feisal’s adviser, and Feisal expected honesty and competence from him. He played one role off against the other: ‘I could not explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation,’ he wrote, ‘nor disclose the full British plan to Feisal.’ 13
Lawrence had told Clayton frankly that Aqaba had been captured on his initiative, and asked for command of ‘Operation Hedgehog’ – the British Mission to the Arabs. This Clayton could not grant, because although Lawrence was now promoted major, he was still a relatively junior officer and could not be put over men like Newcombe and Joyce. Officially, Joyce would be in command, but since Lawrence would remain liaison officer with Feisal he would in practice have as much power as he wished. On 18 August Ja’afar Pasha arrived at Aqaba with two battalions of Arab regulars, consisting mainly of Meccan townsmen or former Syrian soldiers in the Turkish army. Six days later Hardingelanded Feisal with more supplies and troops. The regulars, now about 2,000 strong, were supported by the French Mission from Wejh under Captain Pisani, with a battery of mountain-guns manned by Algerian artillerymen. Nasir had occupied his time in recruiting the local Bedu, who had flocked to Aqaba in droves to declare for the Hashemites. In late August a flight of aircraft was sent to a temporary airfield at Quntilla in Sinai, from where a continuous series of bombing raids was launched against Ma an. To initiate the campaign in Syria, the Hashemites were granted Ј200,000 in gold, 20,000 rifles, twenty Lewis machine-guns, eight Stokes mortars, 50 tons of gun-cotton for demolitions, and a squadron of armoured cars.
The arrival of Ja’afar Pasha and his regulars at Aqaba, together with the comforting guns of HMS Humber,meant that the town was now defended, and freed the Howaytat for raids against the railway. No one expected Ja’afar’s troops to be able to stop a determined onslaught from the Turks, but they were an unknown quantity to the enemy and therefore a deterrent. By the end of August a Turkish offensive against Aqaba had, anyway, begun to look increasingly unlikely, for the Turks had a transport problem: their camels were few and weak and the pasture poor. Intercepted orders from the Ottoman HQ in Damascus revealed that the Ma’an garrison, 6,000 strong, had been instructed only to cut Feisal’s units off from the fertile highlands of Balqa, whose grain supplies were needed by the Turkish army in Palestine, and whose timber was required as fuel for locomotives on the railway. A ‘sitrep’ from Clayton advised Joyce – now OC Aqaba – that the only offensive action the Turks envisaged was the occupation of Wadi Musa, near Petra, with two infantry battalions, a cavalry unit and some Mule Mounted riflemen. Clayton suggested that Feisal’s irregular forces should ‘raid the railway south of [Ma an] and demolish it as far as possible in order to keep the [Turkish garrisons at Tebuk and Medina] cut off from their base’. 14Demolitions on the line would also deter the Turks from a major offensive by diluting their forces. Many railway-cutting operations were planned for September, and for his own target Lawrence chose Mudowwara – a station south of Ma an which possessed the only water in a long arid stretch: ‘There are seven waterless stations here,’ he wrote in a dispatch to Clayton from Aqaba, on 27 August, ‘and I have hope that with the Stokes and Lewis guns we may be able to do something fairly serious to the line. If we can make a big break I will do my best to maintain it, since the need for shutting down [Wejh] altogether is becoming urgent.’ 15On 7 September, he rode out of Aqaba with two British gun-instructors, Sergeant Yells and Corporal Brook, and two Sheikhs of the Bani Atiya – a Bedu tribe inhabiting the Mudowwara area. His plan was to recruit 300 Bedu of the Howaytat at Guweira, ride to Mudowwara and take the station. At Guweira, however, he encountered opposition. The Howaytat were owed two months’ pay, and were querulous. Auda, who was now trying to assert his authority over the entire tribe, did little to ease the situation. Instead, Lawrence rode five miles south-east across the Guweira plain to Wadi Rum, where, he reported, there were good springs, some pasturage and some beautiful sandstone-cliff scenery.