The Bedu regrouped in safer ground, and were about to withdraw when, Lawrence wrote, he discovered that the slave, Salem, who had fired the charge, was missing. He asked for volunteers to go back for him, and the rest of the lost kit. Za’al, and twelve of his Towayha, agreed. They cantered back to the line on their camels to find the wreck crawling with Turks, and, realizing that Salem must be dead – for the Turks took no wounded Arab prisoners – made for their former camping ground, but were obliged to abandon the kit under heavy fire, and retired ridge by ridge covered by a Lewis gun manned by Sergeant Yells. They pulled back to the well at Mudowwara, where they watered, and then rode directly to Rum, arriving there the following evening. They had lost one Arab killed and two wounded, and had killed seventy Turks, wounded thirty, and taken ninety prisoner. 20
The Mudowwara raid was one of Lawrence’s most spectacular and most successful attacks on the railway: ‘I beg to call attention once again to the gallantry displayed by Major Lawrence,’ Clayton wrote in a message to Allenby, ‘and the successful manner in which he managed his small force. I would also bring notice to the good work and steadiness of Sgt. Yells AIF and Cpl. Brooks RWF both of whom were relatively new to the work …the success of this small operation should have effects …beyond the importance of the action. It will raise the spirit of the Arabs …and will without doubt be reported and its magnitude will not lose as the news travels.’ 21Today, the ridge on which Lawrence sited his Lewis and Stokes guns stands on the border of Saudi-Arabia and Jordan, but, if you are willing to risk the hostility of the border-guards, you may climb it, lie on the rocky shelf in a stone sangar which may itself be a relic of that battle, and gain the same view of the track which Sergeant Yells saw through his sights on 19 September 1917. You will see, too, 500 yards away, the wreck of a railway wagon on its side. Sadly, this is probably not part of the train Lawrence mined, for it is an open wagon, whereas Lawrence specified in all his reports that the train drew ten box-wagons. At the foot of the ridge you may search in vain for the remains of the bridge on which he laid his charge. It is no longer there: but if you are patient enough to pace out the distance from the ridge to the embankment, you will find, buried in the sand, the broken masonry of a two-arched culvert, which may or may not be the one which Lawrence demolished on that day in September, eighty years ago, when, within the space of ten minutes, he and his men cut down seventy Turks. Lawrence’s reaction to this killing is difficult to judge. On 25 September he wrote a letter to Major Frank Stirling, a colleague in Cairo who was about to be posted to the Arab front, describing the attack in the kind of gung-ho, boy scout language which he must have believed appropriate to the professional soldier: ‘I hope this sounds the fun it is,’ he commented. ‘It’s the most amateurish Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the [Bedu]. Only you will think it’s heaven, because there aren’t any returns, or orders, or superiors; no doctors, no accounts, no meals and no drinks.’ 22Lawrence was always adept at bluster and bravado, but beneath the surface lay a sensitive soul. A very different picture of his feelings emerges in a letter he wrote only a day earlier to Edward Leeds: ‘I hope when this nightmare ends that I will wake up and come alive again …I’m not going to last out this game much longer: nerves going and temper wearing thin …This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them …and know that you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can.’ 23Whether one or both of these letters displays the ‘real’ Lawrence, or whether both are simply reflections of the contrasting characters of their recipients, is a question which cannot satisfactorily be answered.
17. Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra
The Yarmuk operation and the Dara’a incident October 1917–January 1918
On a morning in April I rode a bull-camel called Shaylan – a famous racer of the Howaytat – under the serried pagodas of Umm Salab, the ‘guardian of Rum’, and across the sebkhacalled al-Ga’a, towards the gash of Wadi Hafira. I carried Seven Pillarsin my saddle-bag, and if Lawrence was correct, I should find, at the end of the wadi, a steep pass which would take me up 2,000 feet to the head of the Shirah plateau. I had felt the heat in the air long before the sun was up, and just after dawn long tongues of lemon and fire-orange shades had licked across the brownness of the hills, picking them out like sugared cakes, and gleaming on the mirror salt-licks of the Ga’a. Wadi Hafira itself lay in a haze which had steamed out from its thick green pastures of rimthand rattam.I reached the foot of the pass by noon, and climbed through the bed of a wadi which curved gently towards a snow-white pimple thousands of feet above. The wadi grew narrower and the walls steeper until I was hauling the camel by his headstall through a crack in the rocks which was only just wide enough to let us through. On and on I staggered, and suddenly the walls were so tight that when Shaylan passed, one of my jerrycans was scraped and punctured so that the water began to trickle out maddeningly. Since entering the wadi, doubts had nagged at me. Surely, this could not be the way Lawrence had come, I thought, with an entire army of Arabs, a squadron of Indian machine-gunners and hundreds of camels? They simply would not have got through. I was afraid that the wadi would become so narrow that I would not be able to turn the camel, yet for some reason I continued, stalking on through basting heat that bounced between the walls of the chasm, until I found that it ended abruptly beneath a towering cliff. This, certainly, had not been Lawrence’s path. Cursing myself, I turned Shaylan about and headed back, but no sooner had I done so than there was a sudden savage peal of thunder. For a moment I stood stock stilclass="underline" there was a surge of cold air, and rain came slinging down, gouging up the sand in the wadi bed. I was gripped with terror. If the rain was heavy on the plateau, a wave of water might roll down the wadi and catch me here, imprisoned between its sheer walls. I looked about me, thinking that I should have to abandon the camel and climb as high as I could. Seconds later, though, the rain stopped, and, thanking providence, I almost ran the rest of the way back to the foot of the pass, pulling the recalcitrant Shaylan after me.