THE FALL OF AQABA, JULY 1917After a clash with a Turkish battalion at Abu al-Lissan, the Arab force took the surrender of some of the outlying garrisons and finally took Aqaba on 6 July 1917. The taking of Aqaba represented a huge turning point in the orientation of the campaign and thereafter the Arab Northern Army could use it as a base for later campaigns in support of General Allenby’s Palestine-Syrian Campaigns.
None of this could have given much comfort to Faisal. It was intelligence of limited value, which merely affirmed what Lawrence and his superiors already knew. Hedged promises of future support were common currency in wartime Syria. The month before, agent ‘Maurice’ had acquired some which added to the reassuring impression that there was a groundswell of pro-British and pro-Faisal sentiment in Syria. There was always a drawback: direct action against the Turks would only follow the victorious advance of Allied armies. As Lawrence had discovered, inter-communal jealousies were still strong and any stepping out of line by townsfolk and villagers invited chastisement of the kind which was still being meted out to the Armenians. Lawrence fully appreciated this and always emphasised that sabotage operations had to be confined to Beduin, whose desert homeland offered a degree of immunity to Turkish retaliation not available to sedentary communities.
Lawrence did not expect much open resistance from the settled regions he had visited. In his programme for future guerrilla operations, submitted to the War Office on 16 July, he concentrated on activities centred on the desert bases of el Azraq and el Jefre which would be directed against the Damascus-Maan section of railroad. He also proposed the use of these bases for long-range raids against the Dera-Haifa line which would be aimed against the bridges in the Yarmuk Valley. Further north he suggested attacks on the line below Aleppo by Beduin based in the Jebel Shomariye. Unremitting pressure on these lines would hamper Turkish troop movements and might even encourage local resistance once it was clear that the Turks could not long shift men for punitive actions. Even the Hawran Druze might be nudged towards a descent on Dera. Again everything hinged on the Druze.
There is nothing of all this in the Seven Pillars beyond a reference to Lawrence’s unquiet state of mind on the eve of his journey: ‘A rash adventure suited my mood’ which, to judge from an all but erased note in his campaign jottings, was almost suicidal.
Clayton. I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all our sakes try and clear up this show before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie.
This is all very perplexing. Soon after, in the Seven Pillars version, Lawrence admitted to the haziest knowledge of what McMahon had offered Hussain and how the boundaries of French and British concessions in the Middle East had been drawn by Sykes and Picot. In the Seven Pillars he also confessed to bewildered shame when Nuri Shalaan proffered ‘a file of British documents’ allegedly filled with official promises, and asked which one he ought to believe. Lawrence remained silent about their contents and who had drawn them up. What is more bewildering is that, in his report to Clayton, Lawrence claimed he met Nuri and his son at el Azraq towards the end of the Syrian trip. Maybe then he briefly succumbed to a mood of despair. It would have been understandable, not in terms of what others had or had not promised the Arabs, but because all his Syrian contacts, including Nuri, had responded to his calls for bold commitment with wary procrastination.
Lawrence was taking enormous risks by penetrating enemy territory where pro-Turkish sympathies were still widespread. There was, he claimed, a £5,000 reward for his capture, which, if true, suggests that Turkish intelligence was aware of his activities. In fact, the head money was a general reward first announced some months earlier by Fahreddin Pasha for British officers taken dead or alive.
Whether he travelled in search of intelligence or whether to get killed Lawrence’s exploit won him great respect in Cairo and London. What Robertson called his ‘adventurous and successful journey’, together with the Aqaba coup, established Lawrence’s reputation as an able, daring and gallant officer. Fifty years later this was challenged by al Nasib, who was adamant that Lawrence remained at an Kabk and Kaf during the fortnight of his passage through Syria. Moreover al Rikabi denied ever having met Lawrence during 1917: the entire episode was a figment of his imagination, a fantasy akin to those he had concocted during his pre-war Syrian excursions.
In 1917 Lawrence had not lost his taste for tale-telling. Soon after he returned to Cairo, St Quentin sent a report to Paris which included stories of how, before the war, Lawrence had ridden about Syria on horseback or motorbike disguised as a Beduin (a bizarre fancy), had spied on the Hejaz railway with Woolley, had been arrested and spent three weeks locked up in Urfa before he escaped. These were all falsehoods and must have come directly from Lawrence or else from what he had told others. A wide gulf separates such petty perjuries from the submission of a bogus report which deceived close friends like Clayton as well as general officers in Cairo and London and whose conclusions were later embodied in General Staff plans. However much Lawrence disliked the army as an institution, he was a loyal soldier and not untouched by the gentlemanly codes of honour which bound officers together. These embraced many of the chivalric virtues he admired.
To turn to Lawrence’s accusers, whose evidence has been accepted by two biographers, Mousa and Stewart: although al Rikabi entered Faisal’s service after the war, he and his family may have felt uneasy about the admission of treason against his former Ottoman masters and colleagues. Moreover, in the post-Suez era in the Middle East, few Arabs would have been willing to admit conspiracy with a British officer who was now widely regarded as a cunning agent of imperialism. Nasib in particular had every reason to mistrust Lawrence and blackguard him. At an Kabk Lawrence made very clear his scepticism about Faisal’s intended Syrian coup, which, with good reason, he feared would misfire and jeopardise all future operations. In the Seven Pillars he accused Nasib of treachery because he had considered putting himself rather than Faisal at the head of the Syrian revolt. Nasib remembered their rows. ‘Lawrence,’ he recalled in the 1960s, ‘was inclined to double-dealing, slander and dissemination of discord.’ One bone of contention was al Atrash and the Druze, to whom Nasib secretly delivered £7,000 of Lawrence’s hoard, which he felt would be better spent on the proven Awda and his Huweitat.
Other British agents were busy in Syria while Lawrence was abroad, although he had no contact with them. A synopsis of their recent findings was passed from the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London to Cairo on 14 July. There was news of tribal unrest near Baalbek Yarmud, where Lawrence had blown up a bridge, of extensive troop movements through Dera towards Damascus and rumours of 20,000 reinforcements, including Austrians, who were shortly due in Syria. There were also the commonplace reports of quarrels between Turkish and German officers which always heartened the British. Strangely for such an assiduous gatherer of intelligence, Lawrence’s report includes no mention of this kind of information. Given the hazards he was facing, he made very limited use of his trek through enemy territory.
The French were given no details of Lawrence’s incursion into what was to be their post-war sphere of influence, although an account of operations near Maan and the taking of Aqaba was later passed to Brémond and St Quentin. They were able through their own agents and sources to follow his party’s activities, but got no indication of their whereabouts between 8 and 29 June when they heard reports of him in the desert east of Maan. Lawrence’s version of what he did between 4 and 18 June ultimately hangs on his word against those of two eyewitnesses, one of whom disliked him. For Lawrence to have created a completely untrue report based on a fictional mission would have been an act of supreme folly. If his deception had been uncovered, and given the presence of a network of agents already in Syria this was a possibility, he would have been discredited and removed from any position from which he could fulfil his dream of helping the Arabs to nationhood. Yet the question must also be asked whether his post-war addiction to masochistic guilt derived solely from his sense of having misled the Arabs. Here Professor Falls provides a small clue. As co-author of the official history of the Middle East campaign, he was in one of the best positions to appreciate what happened there. Falls admired Lawrence’s ‘genius’ but warned that his version of events needed to ‘be treated with caution, since he occasionally exaggerated without shame or scruple’.
No shades of ambiguity cloud Lawrence’s exploits during the final phase of his mission. Between 20 June and 7 July he was present with Arab irregular forces who undertook a brief and highly successful campaign which ended with the capture of Aqaba. Wingate was delighted. He had cherished Aqaba as a base for Faisal for six months and after reading Lawrence’s report he cabled the War Office. Captain Lawrence had passed through enemy lines, moved among a ‘highly venal population’ with a price on his head, which ‘considerably enhances the gallantry of his exploit’, and had taken an enemy port. ‘I strongly recommend him for an immediate award of the Victoria Cross, and submit that this recommendation is amply justified by his skill, pluck and endurance.’ It was, but the regulations governing the award dictated that brave deeds must be witnessed by another British officer. Furthermore, though this was and is less well known, the medal could be awarded only if the recipient had a 90 per cent chance of losing his life. Instead Lawrence received a Companionship of the Bath. What mattered most to him was that he had shown what the Arab irregulars could achieve on their own and fighting in their own way. His faith in them had been tested and proved; they were a force to be reckoned with.
The account of the small campaign which Lawrence compiled for GHQ Cairo was a vindication of the type of guerrilla warfare which he and Clayton believed the Arabs were best suited to perform. Just over 700 irregulars had been enrolled, of whom 200 were detailed to guard the base camp in the Wadi Sirhan, and others joined up during the campaign. Against them were five battalions of Turkish infantry at Maan and a cavalry force of 400 at Dera. Turkish intelligence at Maan was not very efficient, but evidence that wells had been destroyed suggests that the local commander was aware of the presence of hostile Arabs north-east of the town.
The campaign opened on 23 June with a series of reconnaissance sorties and small–scale demolitions along the line north of Maan. Lawrence also claimed, and this was later denied by Arab sources, that he had led an expedition to examine the bridges on the Yarmuk Valley section of the Haifa–Dera line, which he later specified as targets for sabotage in his report to the War Office. The second stage of the campaign followed a successful attack by a small force on a gendarmerie outpost at el Fuweila, seventeen miles south-west of Maan. Given that the authorities in Maan were already alerted to the possibilities of an advance against Aqaba and had reinforced units between there and Maan, the response was quick and designed to be overwhelming.
A column of the 178th Regiment, lately drafted to Maan and numbering about 550 men, moved towards el Fuweila, and accordingly the Arabs withdrew. With probably just less than that number, the Arabs pulled back to a defensive position on high ground overlooking Bir el Lasan on 2 July. Their opponents foolishly refused to contest the high ground and camped on the valley floor close to some springs. The well-chosen reverse-slope position gave the Arabs safety from artillery fire. Just after sunset Awda charged the camp with fifty camelry while the rest of the army rode down the hillside firing from the saddle. Lawrence, astride a racing camel, was in at the kill, firing his revolver. One shot hit the camel, which fell dead and he was catapulted through the air. Dazed and unable to do anything but repeat to himself some half–remembered verses, he was found later. He was told that in the mêlée the Turks’ nerve had broken and that 160 had surrendered. A further 300 were dead, many killed by Arabs enraged by the killing of some Huweitat women and children near el Fuweila a few days before.
The advance to Aqaba was now under way. At el Quweira the garrison of 120 surrendered on 4 June, while further down the Wadi el Yutm the 300 or so men of the reinforced Aqaba garrison had retreated inland. They had heard the news of the fighting to the north and clearly feared that it was the prelude to another seaborne attack. In their efforts to keep out of the range of possible naval gunfire the garrison found themselves surrounded by local tribesmen encouraged by reports of Turkish defeats. The men who had scurried off eight weeks ago when British warships had come over the horizon had little stomach for a fight. After Lawrence and Nasir had assured them that their lives would be spared, they surrendered. On the morning of 6 July Lawrence, Awda and Nasir led their small army into the abandoned port, where they discovered a German engineer NCO who had been boring wells.
Immediate measures had to be taken to forestall a counter-attack by the five battalions in Maan. The Arabs and their 600 prisoners had few rations beyond dates. Straightaway Lawrence set off across Sinai to Port Suez with an escort of eight men, and on the 9th he reached el Shatt, having covered 150 miles. Four days later HMS Dufferin anchored off Aqaba, unloaded food and picked up the Turkish prisoners. In Jiddah, Hussain ordered all public buildings to be illuminated in honour of a great Arab victory.
When he returned to Cairo in June 1917, Lawrence said he had taken Aqaba at ‘Sharif Faisal’s instructions’. In fact he had jumped the gun, since Faisal had intended to take the town nine days later as part of a combined land and sea operation. After the engagement at Bir el Lasan he had had little choice but to fall back on Aqaba, take it and get help from Egypt. A return to bases in the eastern Syrian desert would have been risky since the Turks, now fully alert to the presence of his small army, could easily have intercepted it with overwhelming forces. Even so, it seems likely that Wingate and Clayton were not taken by complete surprise when they heard that Lawrence had captured Aqaba. ‘With few close exceptions’, Lawrence’s superiors had not known the plans he intended to carry out when he had left al Wajh on 9 May. This much Lawrence was prepared to tell St Quentin when they discussed the operation a few weeks later. Arab possession of Aqaba suited their and Lawrence’s plans for the future of the Arab movement.
