was they, and not the troops, chose, with always a sure rewho would win the war. Feisal's regulars Lawrence defines as our static side, the means of securing the fruits of tribal opportunity." 66 One virtue of this system was mobility in pursuit. Their ranks were refreshed by the manhood of the new clan through whose territory they were passing. Another advantage was the wide, but economic, distribution of energy. They would be fighting in one district on Monday, in another on Tuesday, and in a third on Wednesday. This fluidity of movement was the virtue of a defect, since it was difficult to combine the tribes in a raiding party on account of their suspicions and jealousies. One could not use the men of one territory in another. Lawrence characteristically discovers advantage in these limitations. "In a real sense maximum disorder would be our equilibrium," he remarks, and explains how the absence of any formal system of units must confuse the enemy's intelligence, and make it hopeless for him to gauge the Arabs' strength at any point. He compares his operations to a naval war in their mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases, lack of communications, ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed directions and fixed points. Camel raiding parties might cruise without danger along the enemy's cultivation frontier, and tap, or raid into, his lines where they treat behind them into the desert. Here are few of Lawrence's axioms, the equation of his reading with his experience. His fighting tactics were always tip and run, not pushes but strokes, never to maintain or improve an advantage, but to move off to strike again somewhere else, to use the smallest force in the quickest time in the farthest place." If our action continued until the enemy had changed his dispositions to resist it, we should be breaking the spirit of our fundamental rule of denying him targets. If the enemy brought us to action we should be disgraced technically. "Our target was the line anywhere. The Turks defended a myriad points to cover it all, for every yard of it mattered to them. To us these points were alternatives. A few of them we wanted to take, but there was not one of them we must take. The ease, the deliberation, the freedom were ours." Lawrence had not pictured himself as a commander in the field, but he became what he had to become, strategist, diplomatist, guerilla leader, and among other things expert camel master, trained engineer, competent electrician, wise in explosives and the intricacies of demolition. His train-wrecking chapters alone contain enough thrills and hairbreadth escapes to supply a writer of books of adventure with material for a lifetime. It therefore presumption in bis bodyguard : a poet on the right and a poet on the left, among the best singers so that their ride might be musical. "It hurt them that I would not have a banner like a prince." was an amazing transforma- which was his own wear, and tion from the student, and that is where the romance comes in. There is nothing so intriguing as the bookworm who suddenly puts on chain armour to lead a crusade, unless it is the crusader who rests under the shadow of a rock to study the logos and the early metaphysicians. And Lawrence was both. His Bedouin, of course, knew nothing about this, but they regarded him as a sort of superman, and they were not far from the mark. The Turks also learnt his value. After the capture of Akaba they put a price on his head, £20,000 alive or £10,000 dead. He strengthened his bodyguard to ninety, free-lances from nearly all the tribes, many of them blood - enemies, but feuds were set aside as in a Pathan company of an Indian regiment. This gave him spies, or guides, to precede, accompany, or inquire for, him wherever his business lay at any point of the compass. They were a loyal and proud crew, outlaws, men with no family ties, ready to engage in any uninsurable occupation. Sixty of them died for him. Lawrence says they developed "a professionalism almost flamboyant." He discovered that they had a tribunal of their own, like the prefect system in our public schools, which flogged offenders and all who flinched. It must have been exhilarating to ride out with his singing Bedouin dressed like a bed of tulips in every imaginable colour except white, His physical frailty made the achievement the more wonderful. He had to live up to his bodyguard, riding a thousand miles each month on camels, tempering the body, learning to walk barefoot, hardening the feet over sharp, pebbly, burning ground, often breaking-point with fever and boils and thirst. He learnt to lie on his belly in times of enforced fasting, for “that prevented the inflation of foodlessness." His weight was less than seven stone after the fatigues and privations of the Akaba march. In the summer the heat stabbed. When they started on a raid in September the temperature was 123° in the shade in the palm gardens of "cool Akaba." But it was in his trial of strength with the winter climate of Edom that he excelled his bodyguard. Many of them, and their camels, died of cold and overstrain. Lawrence obtained his leadership by seeing with his men, by being entirely one of them, conforming even to their excesses and abstinences, drinking too much at wells and too little between them. Men of his school argue that the Bedouin will not understand a stranger or open their hearts to him. The least slip in etiquette or understanding, or even in dia lect, or in the knowledge of veil of flesh lay between them social relations between clans, may be fatal to confidence. If one cannot behave like a Sheikh one is cut off from esteem. Lawrence was always one of the family. And there is another school, who, independent of these assumed likenesses, have owed their ascendency to achievement alone. Colonel Shakespeare and Colonel Leachman, who lived among the Bedouin frankly as foreigners in European dress, are examples. A foreign costume, of course, was impossible for Lawrence in the part he was playing: it is dangerous at any time in Arabia in districts where one is not known. His sun helmet, I believe, cost Shakespeare his life. As for Lawrence, the last thing he wanted, or could afford, was a badge of distinction setting up a barrier between himself and his men. The Bedouin do not understand distinctions. In the relations between the Indian sepoys and their officers they remarked the first example of personal inequality that had come into their experience. The bodyguard were horrified. Lawrence, if he had any consciousness of class or race distinctions, was not the man to show it. He kept a little aloof from his Arabs in spirit, never in manner. A display of even unconscious condescension would have estranged them. Most of the British who had dealings with them were officials. The veil of office as subtle and impermeable as our and the people." Lawrence knew exactly what an Arab felt when confronted with them. The first time he met an Englishman when he was disguised in his Mecca clothes he was chilled by 'that awful blankness in his eye which saw not a fellow-man but landscape or local colour." He endured the beastliness of the fœtid and promiscuous life among the Bedouin, gave up his privacy and his books, was bored and vermin-ridden, that he might banish from his eye this very blankness. As he worked his way north, keeping step with Allenbyit was essential that he should not be half a day too early or too late-the tribes flocked in to Feisal's standard. They did not want the Turks, but they were not going to show their hand before they were certain that the offensive was not a raid merely but an occupation. The Syrian peasantry are a settled people, not like the Bedouin. They have no desert into which to evaporate after a reverse. Their families and properties lie open to reprisals. That is why earlier in the year, when he might have got into Damascus independently of Allenby amidst a general rising, and the Sheikhs were urging him to move, Lawrence held back. He doubted if he could hold the city until Allenby broke through, and to capture and abandon it would have involved the population in the most ruthless massacres. After wards on that red afternoon at Tafas he was to see of what refinement in cruelty the Turks were capable. It was an unwritten law in the bodyguard that they should kill their wounded rather than leave them to torture and mutilation by the enemy. Lawrence recognised that there could only be one rising, and that decisive. At the end, when the tribes of Syria entered Damascus in the Arab triumph, people turned to one another and said, "Here is Feisal's army. They have come in at the finish when all is over." And the soldier who had fought his way to the city through mud and blood remarked caustically that they were "like a lot of spare ginerals riding about as if the place belonged to them." Of course the place did belong to them, but nobody knew that these late-comers were the last rung of the ladder of tribes by which Feisal, independently of Allenby, had been climbing for two years from Yenbo to Damascus. And some of the London newspapers, among them the groundling we spoke of, made capital of this pettiness. VII. to be a triumphant book, but it is filled with a sense of the futility of achievement. To Lawrence victory is a sort of death; before the fruits of it were in his hands he wanted to reject them. There was nothing left in the old part, and he had an itching to turn to a new one, unencumbered, having shed all his accretions. One is reminded of Waring, whose disappearances were pregnant. Arabia was a great experiment, but its unimagined success killed the enjoyment of it. His delight was in the race, not in the cup. That old copybook maxim was never better illustrated than in Lawrence's first night with his victorious Arabs in Damascus. Lawrence saw his Arabs The Seven Pillars' ought through, and then returned to his cloister, or hangar. He stayed only a few days in Damascus, just long enough to evolve order out of chaos, counter the intrigues against Feisal, and establish a de facto Arab government and the nucleus of an army. Then he asked Allenby to let him go the only personal request he ever made him. It was characteristic this last slipping away at the end. Lawrence was always slipping away, now to bring off some coup of his own, some stratagem, or rapid daring exploit, now to escape from the noise of it. And on his return All Souls was not quiet enough for him, and he chose to spend his days in a seclusion less penetrable, a numbered human unit, cleaning aeroplanes for cadets to learn to fly in. "The Muadhins began to send their call through the warm moist night over the feasting and the illuminations labouring to plough the waste of the city. From a little mosque quite near there was one who cried into my open window, a man with a ringing voice of special sweetness, and I found myself involuntarily distinguishing his words: God alone is great. I testify there is no god but God, and Mohammed the Prophet of God. Come to prayer. Come to security. God alone is great. There is no god but God.' "At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level, and very softly added, And He is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus.' The clamour beneath him hushed suddenly, as every one seemed to obey the call to prayer for this first night in their lives of perfect freedom; while my fancy showed me in the overwhelming pause my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement, since only for me of the tens of thousands in the city was that phrase meaningless.' So all is vanity and disillusion. In the next paragraph he speaks of "this false liberty drawn down to them by spells and wickedness." One is never really persuaded that he believes in his Arabs, or in their power to hold the freedom he gave them. There are outstanding figures. Feisal, Nasir, Auda have a certain undeniable greatness; as for the herd, their very virtues seemed to make their cause hopeless. "We had been trying a hopeless thing, lands, to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God, that upas certainty which forbade all hope. Among the tribes our creed and its success could be only like the desert grass-a beautiful swift seeming of spring, which after a day's heat fell to brown dust." Thus their lack of national feeling is gilded into an ideal. Lawrence, in giving his Arabs the freedom they demanded of him, has more than fulfilled his pledge. Time will show how far they are worthy of it. In the Hejaz the house he set up has been dispossessed by men of a stronger and finer breed, while in Iraq and Trans-Jordania Arab nationalism is still a fostered and protected growth, secured by British aeroplanes and armoured cars. One wonders if the Arabs are not better left to their own solitudes and their own God, making what terms with their neighbours they can. In their tribal life they have always been free enough, admitting no master but their own Sheikhs. The consciousness of nationalism is a new thing among them, destructive of their static peace, and it is turning them into politicians. Old Auda was right. "Why are the Westerners always wanting more? " he said, alluding to new conquests of science and astronomical discoveries. "Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your million." |