Lawrence felt responsible for the death of ‘Farraj’ and if his description of the attack is accurate, rightly so, for his own records show that in April 1918 his bodyguard consisted of only fifteen men, and to have assaulted a Turkish position with so few would have been most unwise. There is no reference to this skirmish in official records, however, and Lawrence makes no note of the deaths of either ‘Da’ud’ or ‘Farraj’ (‘Ali and Othman) in his diary, nor, as we have seen, are there any records of an ‘Ali or an Othman serving in his small bodyguard in April 1918. It is, perhaps, significant that Lawrence uses Farraj’s grief at the death of Da’ud as a prime for an essay on the nature of woman in the ‘Mediterranean’: explaining that while women were only ‘machines for muscular exercise’ men could really be at one only with each other. It must also be significant that Lawrence felt the need to change their names at all. Since they were both dead when he came to write Seven Pillars,and since he took great pains to explain that they were both openly homosexual, and (incorrectly) that no shame was attached, there seems no rationale behind the change of names, unless – as in the case of Hubert Young – Lawrence was ‘telling lies about them’. Lawrence’s queasiness at letting Robert Graves use the story shows clearly in his note: ‘It seems unbearable that you should publish the story of the death of Farraj… I suggest that it be cut right out. The narrative was so arranged as not to depend on it … You could well say that a week after the Amman visit Farraj himself was dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish Railway Patrol and leave it at that. These are private matters.’ 13Yet, as Graves pointed out with amused indignation, Lawrence had already published the story himself in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars,which had at that time circulated to thousands of readers. If he had sincerely felt the death of ‘Farraj’ unbearable, why did he reveal such ‘private matters’ to the world? Certainly, he had had no such qualms in discussing the literary merits of his ‘death scene’ with Charlotte Shaw in 1924: ‘I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top scene for him,’ he wrote. ‘Hounds of Banba[a novel by Daniel Corkery] does it, in the story of the burning of the village … I funked it, in the death of Farraj, my man.’ 14It is interesting to note, too, that Lawrence is here comparing a scene which is supposedly factual to an incident from a novel which is presumably purely fictitious – almost as if he had forgotten that there was a distinction between the two.
The British push across the Jordan failed, and the Arab assault on Ma’an failed also, largely because the Arab officers decided, against Lawrence’s advice, on a frontal assault rather than an encircling movement. On 18 April, Lawrence, who had watched the battle and had been impressed, despite its outcome, with the valour of the Arab regulars, rode to Guweira. The same day he commandeered a Ford car and rode to Tel ash-Shahm on the railway, where Dawnay and a mixed force of British, Egyptians and Bedu were concealed in a hollow ready for an attack. The Tel ash-Shahm operation had been planned with textbook precision by Dawnay, but though Lawrence believed him the only high-ranking British officer capable of handling conventional and guerrilla tactics together, he realized that with the heterogeneous medley of troops under his command, things might not turn out quite as predicted. Lawrence volunteered himself for the mission officially as ‘interpreter’, but actually to keep an eye on relations between the three groups.
This was to be a very different operation from the one Lawrence had led against Mudowwara in the previous year. Besides a squadron of armoured cars and Rolls-Royce tenders, there was a battery of Ford-mounted ten-pounder Talbot guns of the Royal Field Artillery under Lieutenant Samuel Brodie, a flight of aircraft operating from the Ga’a of Rum, a detachment of the Egyptian Camel Corps under Bimbashi Fred Peake, as well as the Bedu irregulars under Sharif Haza a. At first light on 19 April, the armoured cars slid out of their hollow with their motors churning, crunching across the flint surface, leaving smoke-trails of dust. Lawrence sat in a Rolls-Royce tender on a ridge-top next to Dawnay, who, with a map spread on his knees and a watch in his hand, checked off each movement according to a carefully prepared schedule. Precisely on time, the armoured cars came over the ridge and approached the Turkish entrenchments around Telash-Shahm station. Each detail of the scene was accentuated and magnified by long shadows in the crystal-clear light. The Turks, taken by surprise at the sudden appearance of armoured cars, surrendered immediately. Meanwhile two Rolls-Royce tenders under the command of Lieutenant Hornby of the Royal Engineers rumbled down to one of the nearby culverts and blew it spectacularly with a hundredweight of gun-cotton. The blast almost lifted Lawrence and Dawnay out of their seats. The Turks opened fire from behind a thick stone sangar on a steep knoll, and the rat-at-tat of four machine-guns crackled out at once from the armoured-car turrets, their bullets sizzling off the stones. At that moment the Bedu irregulars under Haza a came from behind a hill, firing raggedly, and charging at the Turkish knoll, capturing it without effort. Lawrence drove down the line in his Rolls-Royce, slapping gun-cotton charges on rails and bridges, covered by the machine-guns in the armoured cars. A chain of explosions rocked the air, and clouds of debris materialized suddenly along the line like dust-devils: fragments of shrapnel and flint bumped and pattered against the steel turrets of the armoured cars. The Bedu rushed the Turkish outpost to the south of the station in a wild flight of camels, streaking up the mound and vaulting the trenches. Meanwhile the Camel Corps under Fred Peake approached the station from the north, working forward more cautiously from ridge to ridge. The Talbot battery opened fire, and shells crumped against the station buildings with ear-splitting impact, and two planes fell suddenly like swallows out of the clear sky to the west and sent a dozen bombs hurtling into the trenches. V-shaped plumes of smoke appeared momentarily around the station, and through the haze and dust the armoured cars edged forwards with their machine-guns spouting drumfire. Peake’s camel-corps now threw caution to the wind and broke into a ragged gallop across the plain, and the Bedu, not to be outdone, thundered down from the east, converging on the station, where the Turks threw up their arms in surrender and waved white flags frantically. Lawrence beat them all there in his Rolls-Royce, and while he claimed the brass bell as a memento, Dawnay took the ticket-punch and Rolls, his driver, the rubber stamp. They emerged to find that the Arabs and the Egyptians had gone mad with looting-frenzy, smashing and ransacking the buildings, and rushing about in blind lust for reward. The station store contained hundreds of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, food and clothing, and the factions began shooting at each other in their greed. One camel set off a Turkish trip-mine and was blown over, causing momentary turmoil. Lawrence, who later said that the British officers came within an inch of getting ‘scragged’, managed to separate the parties, allowing the Egyptian Camel Corps to pick what they wanted first. Afterwards, the Bedu scrabbled for the remainder on the word ‘Go!’, as Rolls put it, ‘like a solid mass of ejected inmates from Bedlam’. 15They rushed the store-house, leaned on the door until it snapped open, and were so satisfied with their loot that more than three-quarters of them simply loaded their camels and made off into the desert. The attack had been an unqualified success: it was, said Lawrence, ‘fighting de luxe’. Dawnay’s only reservation was that while he had scheduled the capture of the station for 11.30 precisely, the Turks, out of ‘ignorance and haste’, had capitulated at 11.20 – ten minutes too soon. This was, Lawrence wrote with tongue coiled in cheek, ‘the only blot on a bloodless day’. 16