Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (55 page)

Lawrence’s reaction was very like a nervous breakdown. He was “aghast,” and realized at once that this meant “the complete ruin of myplans and hopes.” He decided on the spot to ride directly to see Allenby and offer his resignation. Admittedly, £30,000 in gold sovereigns
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was a substantial sum, but Lawrence was used to handling thousands of pounds in gold coins at a time, and while he was himself scrupulously honest, he was aware that some of it was wasted, money down the drain. British gold was the lifeblood of the Arab Revolt; it had to be handed out in huge amounts; and Lawrence himself, who at times handed out thousands of pounds a week to the tribes, remarked that it was better (and, in the long run, cheaper) to open a bag and let a man take out as much as he could in a single handful than to dole it out coin by coin. Zeid’s behavior had been weak and foolish, but that was no fault of Lawrence’s. It was an overreaction for him to write that his “will was gone,” and that he dreaded more pain, more suffering, more killing, “the daily posturing in alien dress,” in short, the whole role that had been thrust upon him, and that he had reached out for so eagerly when it was presented to him at Rabegh a year and a half ago. Now he blamed himself bitterly for “that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race.” He was clearly suffering from what was then called shell shock, and is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. He believed that he had lost his nerve, that he had “made a mess of things,” and was determined to throw himself on Allenby’s mercy.

He rode directly west, making a journey of more than eighty miles in twenty hours over terrible terrain in a countryside at war, where a party of five men on camels might easily be attacked by anyone, or shot by the British. At last he dismounted at Beersheba, thinking he had made his final camel ride, to learn that Allenby had just taken Jericho. By car and train he traveled north through the night to Bir Salem, where, to his surprise, Hogarth was waiting on the platform to greet him. Much as Lawrence may have been astonished by Hogarth’s presence, Hogarth was not Merlin, and one may therefore suppose that somebody at Aqaba or at Beersheba passed on the message that Lawrence was on his way to Allenby in a desperate state of mind. Hogarth, and the Arab Bureau,would have been at pains to make sure that this meeting did not take place until Lawrence was put in a calmer state of mind, and nobody was better suited to this task than Hogarth. To be blunt, no one had more at stake either, for Lawrence was the most visible asset of the Arab Bureau, the brightness of his fame casting the rest of the bureau into shadow, where, as an intelligence agency shaping British policy in the Middle East, it was anxious to remain.

In any case, Lawrence, barefoot in his robe, cloak, and headdress, unburdened himself then and there on the station platform to Hogarth, equally disguised in the uniform of a naval officer. Hogarth listened patiently, as he always did. Lawrence complained that he was “a very sick man, almost at breaking point,” that he was “sick of responsibility,” that he had been given “a free hand,” rather than an order, that “Cairo had put on him the moral responsibility for buoying up the Arabs with promises that might never be fulfilled,” and that he had lost faith in the Arabs’ ability to handle their own affairs even if those promises were fulfilled. His experience with the British troops manning the armored cars had reawakened his appreciation for his own countrymen, and taught him that vehicles might be as useful as camels for warfare in the desert. He wanted to be in “a subordinate position,” handling machines, not people, “a cog himself in the military machine.” In the words of Liddell Hart—and he was quoting from his conversations with Lawrence—"The harness of obedience was better than the self-applied spur of command.” When Lawrence told Liddell Hart this, of course, it was years later and he was already serving in the ranks, so he may have been retroactively applying this thought to the events of February 1918, but perhaps the decision to serve “solitary in the ranks” had already formed itself in his mind. These moments of complete despair had occurred before in Lawrence’s life—he had suffered one on his ride into Syria before Aqaba—and would recur frequently in years to come. Hogarth may also have realized, better than Lawrence himself, the cost of constantly playing the hero among people who were critical judges of heroism.

In any case, it was clear to Hogarth that his protégé was in bad straits,and very wisely he did not try to argue with Lawrence, but instead took him off to have breakfast with Brigadier-General Clayton, another of those strong, silent Englishmen who had won Lawrence’s trust. An odd little group they must have made in the officers’ mess over the toast and marmalade: the small barefoot major in his Arab costume, the neatly bearded Oxford don in his naval uniform, and the tall professional soldier. It would be interesting to know what the other officers in the mess thought of this unlikely trio, but by the time Lawrence had reached the breakfast table he had calmed down considerably. Hogarth may have advised him to forget about the £30,000 worth of gold coins; it was water under the bridge (and “a drop in the barrel as well,” considering what the Arab Revolt was costing Britain every month), but in any case the subject did not come up again. Like the skilled producer he was, Hogarth had soothed his troubled star, and Clayton, playing his role, firmly pointed out that Lawrence was indispensable, that Allenby had great things in store for him—the kind of praise that Lawrence, for all his apparent lack of vanity and ambition, could never resist. Clayton added that General Jan Smuts of South Africa, even then the supreme fixer and stage manager of imperial Britain, had paid a visit to General Allenby on behalf of the prime minister to emphasize the crucial importance of victory over the Turks, and to promise reinforcements in men and weapons. These promises, like so many of Lloyd George’s, were not to be fulfilled, since the Germans would launch their great spring offensive in a few weeks’ time; but Allenby’s mood was optimistic, and neither Clayton nor Hogarth wanted Lawrence to bring his personal loss of self-confidence to the attention of the commander in chief.

In the end Clayton bluntly told Lawrence that there was no question of “letting [him] off,” and took him straight from the breakfast table to Allenby, who had for several days been sending airplanes out to find Tafileh and drop messages to Lawrence, ordering him to report in immediately. He was in no mood to listen patiently to Lawrence’s problems, even had Lawrence cared to recite them. Smuts’s visit had conveyed Lloyd George’s burning desire to shift focus from the western front to theMiddle East and “to knock Turkey out of the war” as the first step toward victory, although the war cabinet and the CIGS were somewhat taken aback when Allenby replied that he would need an additional sixteen divisions to do it. In the end all he would get was one British division and one Indian infantry division from Mesopotamia, and one Indian cavalry division from France.

If Allenby was going to push his advance north against the Turks, he needed the Arabs to become, in effect, his right wing, taking on the Turkish Fourth Army to the east of the Jordan River. The Arabs would have to concentrate against one objective at a time, quite a different procedure from the irregular warfare they had waged so far. To accomplish that, Allenby needed Lawrence, who seemed to be the only person who could get the Arabs to fight in an organized way. Ironically, Lawrence’s success at Tafileh had had the effect of making everybody at headquarters in Jerusalem overestimate the Arab army’s ability to fight a conventional battle.

Allenby’s overbearing optimism simply rode roughshod over Lawrence’s self-doubts, and, with whatever reservations, Lawrence agreed “to take up again my mantle of fraud.” No doubt he knew better than to show a glum face. Allenby thus persuaded Lawrence to accept a significant change in tactics. For Lawrence, the Arabs’ great advantage over the Turks was space, the immense and empty desert. The Arabs could appear anywhere on its periphery in small numbers, attack the Turks, and then retire back into the desert, where the Turks could not follow them.

Now, Allenby wanted the Arabs to concentrate on the town of Maan and take it, cutting the railway south to Medina once and for all. Lawrence thought it could be done—or at least said it could be done—and even proposed a refinement of the plan. He suggested cutting the railway some miles north of Maan, so that in order to fight the Turkish garrison would have to come out into the desert, “where the Arabs would easily defeat [them].” This sounds like overconfidence on Lawrence’s part, but given his admiration for Allenby, or perhaps out of relief that the subject of the missing £30,000 worth of gold hadn’t come up, he may have laid it on a little thicker than he meant to.

In return, Lawrence had demands of his own. He would need at least 700 camels, to bring troops and supplies north from Aqaba—already, his purchases of camels in Arabia had driven up the price and reduced the supply—an immense increase in weapons, and, as usual, a lot more gold. More important, he wanted some assurance that the Turks would be prevented from bringing reinforcements down from Amman, with the obvious risk that the Arabs might be caught “between pincers,” from Medina in the south and Amman in the north. Allenby agreed, and explained that he intended to take Salt, and could then destroy as much of the railway as necessary, south of Amman. Lawrence was doubtful about the wisdom of Allenby’s plan—he knew the Arabs well enough to suspect that they would lose heart the moment the British fell back from Amman—but he seems to have kept this doubt to himself, though he hinted at his reservations to Allenby’s chief of staff. Perhaps this was because Allenby was one of the very few people Lawrence found it impossible to resist.

The next day, February 28, Lawrence was invited to a corps conference, at which the plans were dealt with in more detail, and during which Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, who commanded the XX Corps and would “direct the advance,” asked Lawrence “how his men were to distinguish friendly from hostile Arabs, since their tendency was to be prejudiced against all wearing skirts.” This was an odd—though sensible—question, to which Lawrence, who was of course in his white robe, replied, not very helpfully, “that skirt-wearers disliked men in uniform.” This caused some laughter, but did not, of course, answer Chet-wode’s question. In fact, during the relatively brief time when the British and the Arab army came into contact, there were many unfortunate incidents in which British and Australian troops took Lawrence’s Bedouin for hostiles, particularly because they tended to assume that all “natives” were thieves or cutthroats. Distrust of “wogs” was fairly widespread in the British army, but Lawrence’s victory at Tafileh had made the Arab army briefly more popular, and had given it a certain credibility among the British that it lacked when it was chiefly engaged in looting trains, however important such looting was to the cause.

Confidence in the Arab army was high enough that Lawrence asked for, and got, permission to use the Imperial Camel Brigade, a handpicked unit composed of British yeomanry and Australians mounted on Sudanese camels. The yeomanry were British volunteer cavalry units, usually formed in rural areas, with the local farmers, or their sons or tenants, serving as troopers, and the local gentry, or their sons, as officers. Lawrence complained that both the camels and the men were too heavy to cover long distances in the desert, and insisted that the men and their beasts be slimmed down, and trained to subsist on the bare minimum of water. With them as “shock troops,” he hoped to be able to threaten Deraa, when the time came, and fight the Turks as they attempted to retreat.

It was an ambitious plan, but despite the efforts of Lawrence, Alan Dawnay, and Joyce to supply such a widespread advance involving so many different elements, it failed to come off as planned. In the event, these plans were overshadowed by the German spring offensive on the western front in France, which breached the British line and sent the British army “reeling backwards on Amiens.” This was Germany’s last card, intended to drive the British back to the Channel ports; it used fifty additional divisions, which the Germans could withdraw from the eastern front now that the Bolshevik government had signed a peace. The Germans’ hope was to win a victory, or at least a negotiated peace, before American divisions arrived in quantity in France. Even so convinced an “easterner” as Lloyd George was startled by the size and ferocity of the German attack—it began with the biggest artillery barrage of the war, 1.1 million shells fired in five hours—and by the horrifying prospect that after four years of trench warfare and millions of casualties the Germans might still manage to drive a wedge between the French and British armies, take Paris, and push the BEF to the sea.
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In the circumstances, Allenby’s plan to cross the Jordan River no longer seemed crucial, andvery shortly he would be stripped of two complete British divisions (as well as numerous artillery, cavalry, and machine gun units), and with them his superiority in manpower and firepower over the Turks.

It is hard to guess Lawrence’s state of mind in March 1918, while he was busy preparing for an advance which would not come off, and about which he was by no means confident. He spent some time in Cairo, where the Arab army now had its own little headquarters in the Savoy Hotel, and then returned to Aqaba, where he had to deal with a newcomer: Captain Hubert Young of the Indian army. Young, a fluent Arabic-speaker, had been designated as Lawrence’s “understudy” now that Lawrence’s indispensability had been recognized by almost everyone in Egypt. Lawrence went out of his way to be polite about Young, but the two men were a bad match, although they had gotten along well enough at Carchemish before the war. Young had deeply resented Lawrence’s presence in Mesopotamia in 1916, and he was not very much more tolerant of Lawrence now, though in the interest of civility he did his best to hide his feelings. A look at Young’s portrait in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is enough to tell the story: the touchy superiority, the suspicion in his eyes, the unmistakable look of a man who is standing on his dignity and fears he is about to be made fun of at any moment. It is by far the least appealing portrait in the book. Young at first remarked with some satisfaction that “Lawrence was only one of the many British officers who were helping the Arabs,” but then came to what was, for him, the dispiriting conclusion that although Joyce was in theory the senior British officer and Lawrence’s commanding officer, and Dawnay was officially the chief staff officer, “Lawrence really counted more than either of them with Allenby and Feisal, and used to flit backwards and forwards between G. H. Q. and Feisal’s headquarters as the spirit moved him.” The use of the word “flit” expresses perfectly Young’s disapproval of Lawrence and his flowing white robes.