Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (5 page)

Neither Obeid nor his son carried any food with them—the first stage of their journey was to Bir el Sheikh, where Ali said they might pause for a meal, about sixty miles away; no Arab thought a journey of such a short distance required food, rest, or water. As for riding a camel, though itwas not Lawrence’s first attempt, he made no pretense of being a good or experienced rider. Unlike most Englishmen of his class and age, he was not an experienced horseman—his family’s budget had not extended to riding lessons; he and his brothers had excelled at bicycling, not horsemanship. Nor had he ever covered this kind of distance on a finely bred camel, which paced, in long, undulating strides, while the rider sat erect as in a sidesaddle, with the right leg cocked over a saddle post, and the left in the stirrup. Two years of desk work in Cairo had not prepared Lawrence for the fatigue, the saddle sores on legs unused to riding, the backache, the suffocating heat, or the monotony of riding by night, often over rough ground. Sometimes he dozed off—neither Obeid nor his son was a talker—and woke with a start to find himself slipping sideways, saved from a fall only by grabbing the saddle post quickly.

He had no fears about his companions—it was an extension of the Arab belief in the obligation of hospitality toward a guest as an absolute duty that those charged with conveying a stranger must protect him with their lives, whatever they thought of him. But Obeid was a Hawazim Harb, and the Harbs surrounding Rabegh were hardly more than lukewarm on the subject of the sharif of Mecca; also, their sheikh was known to be in touch with the Turks. Then too, as Lawrence knew from his experiences traveling, mostly on foot, through Palestine, the Sinai, and what is now Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria—where, as a young archaeologist he had separated armed, warring factions among the workers at the dig—the blood feud was an unavoidable part of Arab life. It involved not just tribe against tribe, but feuding within clans and families and between individuals—no matter how peaceful a situation might seem, you could never be protected from sudden, unexpected violence that might also engulf the stranger.

Empty, vast, and unprofitable as the desert looked to Europeans, every barren square foot of it, every wadi, every steep rocky hill, every sparse patch of thornbush, every well—however disgusting the water—was claimed by some tribe or person and would be defended to the death against trespassers. Nor was “the desert” a romantic, endless landscapeof windblown sand dunes: much of it was jagged, broken, black volcanic rock, as sharp as a razor, and fields of hardened lava that even camels had difficulty crossing. Steep valleys zigzagged to nowhere; towering, knife-edged hills rose from the sand; flat patches of bleached, glassy sand, the size of some European countries, reflected the harsh sunlight like vast mirrors at 125 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and stretched to the horizon, broken only by sudden sandstorms appearing out of nowhere. Except for remote areas where a green fuzz of short, rough grass in the brief “rainy season” was counted as rich pasturage for the great herds of camels that were the principal source of wealth for the Bedouin tribes, this was the landscape, or close to it, of Cain and Abel, of Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, of Job—it was not a safe or kindly place to be.

Lawrence’s mind was on the fact that the path they were following was the traditional route by which pilgrims traveled from Medina to Mecca—indeed, in the Hejaz a large part of the Arabs’ feeling against the Turks came from the building of the railway from Damascus to Medina, since the Bedouin earned money by providing guides, camels, and tented camps for the pilgrims along the desert route (and also from robbery and shameless extortion at their expense). It was the local Bedouin’s ferocious hostility to this modern encroachment that had so far prevented the Turks from building a planned 280-mile extension of the railway from Medina all the way to Mecca. Lawrence, as his camel paced in the moonlight from the flat sand of the coast into the rougher going of scrub-covered sand dunes marred by potholes and tangled roots, meditated on the fact that the Arab Revolt, in order to succeed, would have to follow the “Pilgrim Road” in reverse, as he was doing, moving north toward Syria and Damascus, bringing faith in Arab nationalism and an Arab nation as they advanced, as the pilgrims brought their faith in Islam yearly to Mecca.

Perhaps in deference to the fact that he was an Englishman, not an Arab, his guides called a halt at midnight, and allowed Lawrence a few hours of sleep in a hollow in the sand, then woke him before dawn to continue, the road now climbing the length of a great field of lava, againstwhich pilgrims for untold generations had left cairns of rocks on their way south, then across a wide area of “loose stone,” then on and upward until at last they reached the first well of their journey. They were now in territory controlled by the local tribes, who favored the Turks, or whose sheikhs received payment from the Turks, and reported on the movement of strangers.

No well on a much-used route like this one was ever likely to be deserted—a well was the Arab equivalent of a New England village store—and with good reason Ali had warned Lawrence strictly against talking to anyone he might meet along the way. Neither then nor later did Lawrence ever try to pass himself off as a native—his Arabic was adequate, but in each area of the Ottoman Empire, and beyond, it was spoken differently, and both his speech and his appearance marked him out as a stranger—not necessarily an Englishman, because his fair coloring and straight, sharp nose were not uncommon among Circassians, but certainly not a Bedouin.

Anything but a lush oasis, the well was a desolate place, surrounded by the remains of a stone hut, some rude “shelters of branches and palm leaves,” and a few shabby, ragged tents. A small number of Bedouin watched after their camels from a distance as Obeid’s son Abdullah climbed down into the well and brought up water in a goatskin, while his father and Lawrence rested in the shade.

Lawrence seems to have attracted no attention, even when a group of Harb tribesmen driving a large herd of camels arrived, followed, perhaps more dangerously, by two richly dressed young men riding thoroughbred camels: a sharif and his cousin disguised as a master and servant to pass through the country of a hostile tribe undisturbed. This pair might at least have been expected to express some curiosity about the presence of a stranger at the well, but Lawrence seems to have possessed a natural gift for remaining silent and motionless, without betraying himself—he had always been fearless; from boyhood on he had deliberately cultivated indifference to danger and hardship, as well as emotional independence, as if rehearsing for the role he was about to play, and his lack of fearsomehow communicated itself to others in the sense that they felt he belonged where he was, whoever he might be.

In some ways, this was more effective than a vulgar disguise—the real Lawrence was actually less noticeable than if he had tried to darken his skin and pretend to be an Arab, like Sandy Arbuthnot, a character in John Buchan’s classic adventure novel Greenmantle, who many believe was based in part on Lawrence. It was something of a skill, the equivalent of camouflage or protective coloration. As a junior staff officer Lawrence had sat unnoticed among vastly more senior officers in meetings where he had no business to be, without attracting attention to his presence until he spoke (at which point, he usually dominated the conversation); he did the same among the Bedouin. His individualism—and later his curious combination of fame and shyness—gave people the impression that he never “belonged” anywhere, but he had the great actor’s gift for playing whatever role was presented to him. It was then not yet apparent that the role of a hero would come to him more easily—and stick to him much longer—than any other.

In any case, unquestioned, Lawrence and his guides continued on through an increasingly difficult and barren landscape, which gradually gave way to fine white sand that radiated the heat and the glare of the sun until he had to close his eyes against it. In the distance were fantastic rock formations and jagged mountains. They had left the roadway, such as it was, to track across country for hours, and rejoined it just as the sun began to set. Bir el Sheikh, when they reached it, proved to be nothing more than a tiny cluster of “miserable” rock huts on either side of the way, from which the smoke of cooking fires arose. Obeid dismounted and bought flour; and this was the end of the first stage of their journey.

Lawrence describes, with the eye of a good travel writer, how Obeid mixed the flour with a little water and patted and pulled it into a disk about “two inches thick, and six inches across,” which he plunged into the embers of a brushwood fire to bake, and which the three of them shared after Obeid had clapped it between his hands to knock the cinders off. Lawrence’s indifference to food was notorious, and he had nodifficulty surviving on the usual Bedouin rations of flour and dates. (It was their rare feast that made him queasy: a whole sheep—cooked with head, innards, and all—served on an enormous copper tray in a thick bed of rice moistened with hot grease.)

An hour to cook and eat their meal, an hour of rest, and they were on their way again, in pitch darkness, on fine sand so soft that Lawrence at first found the silence oppressive. Along the way, perhaps because Lawrence blended in so well with the Bedouin way of life and made none of the complaints and demands that might be expected from a British officer, Obeid had become more talkative, and even gave Lawrence a few tactful hints about how to get the best out of his camel. Obeid had already indicated to Lawrence the existence of a small village of date farmers only a few hours from Rabegh, and of another settlement farther on along a valley that would give the Turks an opportunity of flanking Feisal’s army and attacking Rabegh, or, alternatively, marching south from well to well to isolate Rabegh and attack Mecca. Neither Emir Abdulla nor Emir Ali had thought to mention this interesting feature of the topography around Rabegh, which Lawrence instantly realized made the idea of placing a British brigade there both risky and pointless. Hitherto, whenever Sharif Hussein had been alarmed by signs of a Turkish advance, he had requested the immediate dispatch of a brigade, while the British had hesitated, unwilling to commit troops when so many were needed elsewhere; but whenever the British, alarmed by events in the Hejaz, had offered a brigade, the sharif had always turned it down at the last minute, saying that his people would object to the presence of Christian soldiers. Now it was clear to Lawrence that placing a British brigade in Rabegh would be useless, even in the unlikely event that General Wingate agreed to provide one, and at the same time, Sharif Hussein agreed to accept it.

Adding to Lawrence’s vast store of knowledge was his long-standing passion for military history, tactics, and strategy. Castles had fascinated him since his childhood, and as a boy he had visited, sketched, and measured the remains of most of the great castles in Britain and France,traveling phenomenal distances by bicycle. As an undergraduate at Oxford he visited the great crusader castles of the Near East; indeed his thesis at Oxford, which won him a “first"—so brilliant a success that his tutor at Jesus College gave a lavish “dinner to the examiners to celebrate it"—was The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the XIIth Century, with maps, architectural plans, and photographs by himself (it would eventually be published as a book).

Lawrence never did things by half. His interest in medieval fortifications and armor led him naturally to a broader study of military thinking. His friend and biographer in later life, the distinguished British military historian and philosopher of war B. H. Liddell Hart, would praise Lawrence’s “astonishingly wide” reading of military texts. That reading began when Lawrence was only fifteen, with what he himself dismissed as such “schoolboy stuff” as “Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Coxe’s Marlborough, Mahan’s Influence of Sea-Power on History, Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson” He went on to Procopius and Vegetius, and from there to the Germans: Clausewitz, Moltke, Freiherr von der Goltz; then, working backward, to Jomini and Napoleon. He “browsed” his way, as he put it, through all thirty-two volumes of Napoleon’s correspondence, then moved on to the earlier French writers on war: Bourcet (of whose book there was said to be only one copy in England, in the War Office library), and de Saxe.

Liddell Hart would compare Lawrence to Napoleon
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(favorably), though Lawrence himself never made such a claim. In part this was because his admiration for Napoleon as a general would eventually be eclipsed by his admiration for Marshal Maurice de Saxe, the great eighteenth-century French general (though he was in fact of German and Polish descent), and author of a remarkable work on the art of war, Mes Rêveries, which was to have a great effect on Lawrence (and later, in World War II, on Field Marshal Montgomery).

The generals in Cairo may be forgiven for not noticing that they had a budding military genius in their midst in the person of Temporary Second-Lieutenant and Acting Staff Captain T. E. Lawrence. But even before the war he had begun quite consciously to develop as a kind of sideline to archaeology and literature what Napoleon called le coup d’oeil de génie, the rare and elusive “quick glance of genius” that enables a great commander to see at once, on a map or from the landscape in front of him, the point at which an enemy is weakest, and where an attack will throw the enemy off balance. Years of studying castles had given Lawrence an instinctive feel for topography—it was no accident that he had entered the army through the back door as a mapmaker—and a real gift for visualizing how geographical features determine the movement of armed forces, and inexorably govern both attack and defense.

Generals Murray and Wingate, as well as the emirs Abdulla and Ali, might not appreciate how Obeid’s chance remark about date palm villages east of Rabegh brought Lawrence to the conclusion that a British brigade would be “quite useless there to save Mecca from the Turks,” but Lawrence understood it instantly. His ability to think in three dimensions, his keen eye for even the smallest details of the landscape, and his remarkable visual memory were all formidable assets for a soldier, though as yet untested in battle. Freud’s famous comment that “biology is destiny” has its equivalent in military terms—geography determines strategy; it is the inescapable foundation of the whole art of war. Lawrence was already working out, by a process of rational observation, a new way of thinking about how the Arabs might win their war against the Turks—indeed a new way of thinking about war altogether.