T. E. Lawrence at Aqaba

Some campaigns are won at the front a general sees, and some at a flank he has not yet thought to look at. The flank is opened, almost always, not by the man whose name is on the order paper but by a junior with the wrong uniform and the right map, who has spent a season among people his army does not understand, and who arrives one afternoon with a gift his superiors had not asked for and cannot refuse.

THE ARCHAEOLOGIST IN UNIFORM

Thomas Edward Lawrence had read for a degree in medieval military architecture at Jesus College, Oxford, walked the crusader castles of Syria on foot in 1909, and dug at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates for four seasons before the war found him in the map room of the Cairo intelligence staff in 1914. He spoke the Arabic of the desert and the Arabic of the towns and could tell a Howeitat from a Beni Sakhr by the cut of a head-rope. In October 1916 the Arab Bureau sent him down the Red Sea coast to Jeddah to see whether the Hashemite revolt that Sharif Hussein had raised against the Sultan in Mecca was a movement Britain could ride. He came back convinced it was, and convinced that its centre of gravity was not Hussein in Mecca but Hussein's third son, Faisal, in the hills above Yenbo. By the spring of 1917 he was twenty-eight, a temporary captain, attached, irregular, in a white robe and a khaki shirt with the gold dagger of a sherif at his belt, riding with Faisal's column up the coast to Wejh. He had a map in his head that no one in Cairo had drawn. On it, the Hejaz was not a sideshow on the margin of the Palestine campaign. On it, the right flank of the Palestine campaign began at a Red Sea port called Aqaba, which the Turks held, and which the Royal Navy could not take from the sea because the guns there had been sited, sensibly enough, to deny the bay.

THE NEFUD

On the ninth of May 1917 Lawrence rode out of Wejh at the head of forty-five men with Sherif Nasir of Medina and Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat. They carried twenty thousand pounds in gold in saddlebags. They went east into the Nefud, the wrong way for Aqaba, because the only way to come down on Aqaba from the desert side was to swing six hundred miles inland through country the Turks did not garrison and could not patrol, raise the Howeitat in their own grazing grounds at El Jefer, and bring the tribe down on the road from Maan in numbers a Turkish battalion could not stand. They crossed the lava-fields of El Houl in temperatures that boiled the water in the skins. A man named Gasim fell off his camel asleep, and Lawrence turned back alone into the haze to find him, because the column had its own laws and Lawrence had decided he would live by them. They reached El Jefer in the middle of June. Auda called in his cousins and his cousins' cousins, and by the end of the month two thousand riders of the Howeitat were camped at the wells, and the column had become an army.

ABA EL LISSAN

On the second of July the army came down out of the hills above the wells at Aba el Lissan, where a Turkish battalion of about five hundred men had been pushed up from Maan to clear the road to Aqaba. The Turks held the high ground above the spring. The Howeitat held the slopes. The fight ran all morning in skirmish, neither side closing. At noon Lawrence, irritated by the heat and by Auda, said to him that the Howeitat shot a great deal and hit nothing. Auda turned his horse and rode up the slope to his own men, and Lawrence understood, watching him go, what he had set in motion. Auda came back at the head of fifty horse straight down the hillside at the Turkish flank. Nasir followed with four hundred camels. The Turkish line broke and was ridden into the ground. Three hundred Turks were killed. Auda had a bullet through the brim of his hat, a horse shot under him, and the case of pearls at his belt smashed by the pommel of the broken saddle, and at the well that evening he said, by Lawrence's own record in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that he had paid a high price to wear his hat at a different angle. The road from the desert side to Aqaba lay open. There was no Turkish position between the column and the sea.

THE TRACK DOWN TO THE BAY

On the morning of the sixth of July the column came down the steep dusty track through the hills above the bay in a heat that came off the cliffs at noon and baked the dust to powder under a camel's foot. Lawrence rode behind Auda. The track turned a shoulder of rock and the Red Sea opened below, flat and blue and empty of ships, and the white huddle of the town at the head of the bay, and the wire of the Turkish forts on the seaward side, and the guns of those forts pointing out into the empty water. He sat on the camel and ran the position through in his head in the way the staff college had taught him to run a position. The forts faced the wrong way. The garrison was six hundred men, on short rations for three months, with no relief column on any road that mattered now that Aba el Lissan was gone. The garrison commander, an Arabic-speaking colonel, would have had word from a runner that morning that the battalion sent up to hold the road had been ridden into the dust. If two thousand Howeitat came down the track at the walk, the colonel would surrender. If they came at the run, the colonel would surrender. The arithmetic of the position was already decided. The thing that had not been decided, and that was Lawrence's alone to decide, was what came after. Aqaba was empty of food. The Royal Navy was not in the bay and had not been told to come. The two thousand riders would, once the rifles were on the beach and the ammunition counted, drift back to their own wells within a day. The news of the capture had to be in Cairo within the week, in Allenby's hand and not in the hand of the political officers of the Arab Bureau, who would have time, given a fortnight, to argue the gift down into nothing. He looked at the bay and at the empty water and decided, before the column had reached the wire, that he would ride on from here without resting, alone with two bedouin, across the Sinai by the old pilgrim tracks to Suez, and from Suez by train to Cairo, and he would put Aqaba on Allenby's desk himself.

THE SURRENDER AND THE RIDE

The column came down to the seaward side in the late afternoon. The Turkish colonel sent out a parley flag. Six hundred Turks filed down to the beach and laid their rifles in three rows on the sand. The Howeitat took the rifles. Auda took the colonel to his tent and gave him dates and rice and the courtesies were observed, and somewhere in the courtyard of a house in the town a Hashemite flag went up a pole. By the next morning the bedouin were drifting back into the hills for want of bread, and Lawrence was on a fresh camel with two Howeitat guides, climbing the Sinai escarpment north-west out of Aqaba. He covered the two hundred and ten miles to the Suez Canal in forty-nine hours through the worst of the July heat, on four skins of water, with no medical kit and no escort. A sentry at the canal nearly arrested him for the robe. He crossed by the ferry at Shatt, took the train up to Ismailia and on to Cairo, and presented himself at the Savoy Hotel in the dust of the road on the afternoon of the tenth of July.

THE OFFICE IN CAIRO

General Sir Edmund Allenby had been in command in Egypt for ten days. He was a cavalryman of the old school, six foot two, with a temper, who had not yet met Lawrence and had been told to expect a young scholar of irregular habits attached to an irregular movement of doubtful military value. The young scholar walked into his office unshaven, sunburned to the colour of old leather, in a Hashemite robe over a torn khaki shirt, with the gold dagger of a sherif still at his belt, and Allenby looked up from his desk. Lawrence said what he had come to say in one word, by the tradition that a request to a commander in the field is made short. He said: Aqaba. Allenby took his measure for what Lawrence later wrote was the better part of a minute, weighing the robe against the rank against the news, and then said, by Lawrence's record, Well, I will do for you what I can. He picked up the desk pen. On the eighth of July, which is to say two days before Lawrence had reached him, Allenby's first telegram on the Arab question had already gone to the War Office in London; on the following day a second went, asking for the formal commissioning of Lawrence as liaison to the Arab forces, two hundred thousand pounds in gold to be paid to Faisal at the port, and the incorporation of the Hashemite army under Faisal's political command into the right flank of the autumn offensive on Beersheba. London assented to all of it.

THE FLANK AND THE RECKONING

Allenby took Beersheba on the thirty-first of October 1917, Jerusalem on the ninth of December, and Damascus, jointly with Faisal's Arab Army, on the first of October 1918. The right flank of the Palestine campaign, from Aqaba forward, was the army Lawrence had ridden the Nefud to put into the war. At the peace, the promises he had carried into the desert with the gold were set aside; the Sykes-Picot map, drawn in London and Paris while he was at El Jefer raising the Howeitat, was preferred to the word he had given Faisal at Wejh. He went up to Versailles in 1919 in Arab dress beside Faisal and was overruled. He came home and wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the great prose record of the revolt, and in it he set down the ride to Aqaba in the language of a man who had been there and not in the language of a man who had won. He enlisted under a false name in the Royal Air Force as Aircraftman Ross, and later as Shaw, and rode out the rest of his life on motorcycles in the Dorset lanes until one of them threw him on the road near Bovington in May 1935. He was forty-six.

A TYPE OF FLANKING MOVEMENT

Some campaigns are won by the army the staff has counted, and some by the column the staff has not yet learned to count, brought in across country no one has marked on the operational map by a man with the wrong uniform and the right Arabic. The decision that opened the right flank of the Palestine campaign was taken on a track above a bay at four o'clock on a July afternoon by a captain on a camel, who looked down at the empty water and the wrong-facing guns and understood, before the column had reached the wire, that the harder part of the day was the ride to come. The gold dagger of a sherif, which Faisal had given him at Wejh and which he wore at Aqaba and in Allenby's office at the Savoy and in the council chamber at Versailles, is in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.