There can be little doubt that Lawrence was attracted to Sharif’Ali: ‘No-one could see him without the desire to see him again,’ he wrote, ‘especially when he smiled, as he did rarely, with both mouth and eyes at once. His beauty was a conscious weapon.’ 1It has even been suggested that the ‘SA’ to whom Lawrence dedicated his book was not ‘Salim Ahmad’ at all, but ‘Sharif ‘Ali’. Like Dahoum, he was ‘physically splendid’, and while Lawrence’s Syrian boy had been a ‘wonderful wrestler’, ‘Ali was also as strong as an ox, capable, according to Lawrence, of kneeling down and rising to his feet with a man on each hand. Lawrence claimed that ‘Ali could not only overtake a running camel over half a mile and ‘leap into the saddle’, but would have no one on his operations who could not do the same ‘holding a rifle in one hand’. 2The Sharif, wrote Lawrence, was ‘impertinent, headstrong, conceited; as reckless in word as in deed; impressive (if he pleased) on public occasions, and fairly educated for a person whose native ambition was to excel the nomads of the desert in war and sport.’ 3He was, in short, a younger and more desirable version of the heroic Auda Abu Tayyi. Lawrence referred to the Sharif affectionately as ‘Little ‘Ali’ and represented him as having had at least one homosexual lover – a seventeen-year-old Bedui of the Bani Sakhr called Turki:’… the animal in each called to the other,’ he wrote, ‘and they wandered about inseparably, taking pleasure in touch and in silence.’ 4
Lawrence left Aqaba on 24 October with Lloyd, Wood, a yeomanry trooper called Thorne, and the Indian machine-gun company. They spent the night at Rum, where they were joined by Sharif ‘Ali and an Algerian Emir named ‘Abd al-Qadir, who was known to Feisal, and who owned several villages of Algerian exiles on the bank of the Yarmuk river. Lawrence thought that ‘Abd al-Qadir’s peasants might be of great use, and, since they were foreigners and hated by the local Arabs, might be able to strike at the Turks without causing a general rising, which he was keen to avoid. Lawrence had already received a telegram from Colonel Bremond of the French Mission, however, warning him that ‘Abd al-Qadir was a Turkish spy. Lawrence saw no reason to suspect this. He put it down to mutual distrust, for ‘Abd al-Qadir’s grandfather had led Algerian resistance against the French – a qualification which did not diminish him in Lawrence’s eyes at all. On the morning of 26 October, the raiding force climbed the Hafira pass. They crossed the railway with little incident on the 27th and arrived at Jefer the following day.
From here on, the good fortune which had so marked Lawrence’s progress to Aqaba became conspicuous by its absence. First, the Towayha Howaytat, whom he encountered at Jefer, could not be persuaded to join the raid: even the notorious raider Za’al Abu Tayyi had become complacent since Mudowwara. Lawrence was obliged to recruit fifteen Bani Sakhr at Bair and thirty Serahiyyin at Azraq, none of whom expressed genuine enthusiasm for the attack. The Serahiyyin, indeed, told him that his target, the bridge at al-Hemmi, was out of the question because the nearby Ibrid hills were swarming with woodcutters in Turkish pay. He was now forced to change his plans, and agreed reluctantly to ‘bump’ Tel ash-Shehab – the nearest bridge geographically to Azraq, yet a dangerous objective since it would take them through inhabited country and cultivated land whose dampness would be hard going for camels and might prevent a hasty retreat. Then, on 4 November, ‘Abd al-Qadir and his men suddenly disappeared from Azraq. Lawrence was astonished and troubled, but though he later wrote that he suspected the Algerian had gone to Dara’a to warn the Turks of their imminent attack, at the time he put his desertion down to simple cowardice:’ ( much talk and little doing,’ he wrote to Joyce later; ‘neither ‘Ali nor myself gave him any offence.’ 5
The starting-point of the raid was the water-pool at Abu Sawana, where the patrol arrived on 5 November, just missing a scouting party of Circassian cavalry which had been sent by the Turks to reconnoitre the area. They left on the morning of the 7th, lay up until sunset on the plain two hours east of the railway, and crossed the line after dark, riding west until they dropped into a shallow depression at Ghadir al-Abyad, where they snatched some sleep among their still laden camels until first light. They could not move before dusk in case they were spotted, and then they must infiltrate forty miles to the bridge, ‘bump’ it, and exfiltrate across the railway by dawn the following day. They had thirteen hours of darkness in which to complete the operation, and Lawrence felt that the Indian machine-gunners were generally incapable of making the eighty miles required within that time. He selected six of their best riders to accompany him, under Jemadar Hassan Shah, with one Vickers machine-gun. He believed that the bridge could be taken with only twenty good men: the Indians could have done it, but they were too few in number. He mistrusted the Serahiyyin, and placed his faith in the Bani Sakhr under their Sheikh Fahad, whom he designated as storm-troops for the assault. To make the demolition easier, Wood repacked the blasting gelatine into thirty-pound loads which would facilitate its handling on the steep hillside in the darkness.
At sunset, they mounted their camels and padded silently out of their lying-up place towards Tel ash-Shehab, following the ancient Pilgrim Road. The mood was sombre. Lawrence himself had a bad feeling about this raid, and was miserable, disconsolate about ‘Abd al-Qadir’s desertion, and despairing of the success of the Arab Revolt. The going was sticky for camels: up and down gravelly ridges, and across ploughed fields or meadows riddled with rabbit warrens. The men were on edge. They came across a merchant and his family travelling with their donkeys, whom they were obliged to put under guard till dawn. Then a peasant fired a rifle at them again and again, taking them for raiders, and screaming out in the darkness. No sooner had they escaped him than they were starded by a stray camel and a barking dog. Suddenly, it began to drizzle and the ground became dangerously slippery, so that the camels slithered: two or three crashed down. The rain stopped and they passed under the telegraph line, to a place where they could hear the sound of water falling down the hillside at Tel ash-Shehab. They barracked the camels silently and Wood helped assemble the machine-gun, while Lawrence and his party carried the gelatine down a muddy slope towards the bridge. A train suddenly clanked past them, and Lawrence, flat on his stomach, had a momentary glimpse of uniformed soldiers, before continuing his crawl towards the bridge with Fahad. They snaked through the mud until they were almost within touching distance of the metals, and observed a single sentry on the opposite side, sixty yards away, clearly illuminated by a blazing fire. Lawrence and Fahad sneaked back to guide the men carrying the explosives, but before they could get to them one of the Serahiyyin dropped his rifle and fell noisily down the bank with a clang and a scuffle which shattered the silence as completely as a shot. Lawrence froze. The Turkish sentry shouted a challenge and snapped off a round in the direction of the noise, bawling for the rest of the guard, who rushed out of their tent and fired into the darkness. The Bani Sakhr blazed back out of the shadows, but the machine-gunners, who had been caught in the act of transferring the Vickers, could not get it into action. The Serahiyyin porters, terrified that the gelatine would go off if struck by a bullet, simply dumped it into the ravine. There was now general panic among the raiding party. The Serahiyyin rushed for their camels, quickly followed by Lawrence, Wood, the Indians and the Bani Sakhr. The shooting had alarmed the nearby villages, and lights began to go up, illuminating the dark countryside. The Serahiyyin came across a group of peasants and robbed them, only adding to the alarm. The villagers for miles around took to their roofs and began shooting volleys at Lawrence’s party, while a troop of Arab horsemen charged them from the flank. The ground was still sticky, bowling the camels over as their flat feet tried to get a purchase. Lawrence and Ali took up the rear and goaded them on. They moved fast, driven by the demon of fear, and before long the shooting fell behind them. By first light they had reached the railway, hungry and exhausted. Lawrence heard the boom of Allenby’s heavy artillery drifting across the landscape from the direction of Palestine, and took the sound as a reproach for his failure. If Allenby’s attack succeeded, the Turks would now have a clear line of retreat along the railway: if it had been cut, not a man, a gun or a wagon need have escaped. The way would have been open for a general Arab revolt in Syria. Though he successfully mined Jamal Pasha the Lesser’s train near Minifir the following day, Lawrence knew that all the great opportunities he had hoped for had now been lost. Dejectedly he returned to the castle at Azraq, arriving there on 12 November.