Lawrence · 1917
T. E. Lawrence at Aqaba
On the morning of the sixth of July 1917, after a 600-mile camel march across the Nefud desert from Wejh on the Red Sea coast through the eastern flank of the Hejaz, Captain T. E. Lawrence of the British liaison mission to the Arab Revolt entered the port of Aqaba at the head of a force of about two thousand bedouin under Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat. The Turkish garrison, whose guns were sited to defend the port from the seaward side, had been taken from the desert side at Aba el Lissan two days earlier in a charge by Auda's horse. The garrison at Aqaba surrendered without firing on the British and Arab force coming down out of the hills behind them. The capture opened the Red Sea coast to British supply and turned the Arab Revolt from a Hejaz sideshow into a strategic flank of Allenby's Palestine campaign. Lawrence was twenty-eight years old. He had been on a camel for two months. He rode another four hundred miles, in the heat of July, alone with two bedouin escort, to bring the news to Allenby in Cairo.
It is the morning of the sixth of July, 1917, on the steep dusty track down to the Red Sea port of Aqaba, in the heat that comes off the cliffs at noon and bakes the dust to a fine powder under a camel's foot. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Thomas Edward Lawrence, captain of the General Staff, on attachment to the Hejaz mission of the Arab Bureau in Cairo. He is in a white Hashemite robe over a khaki shirt, with the dagger of a sherif at his belt, on a camel called Naama, in a column of two thousand bedouin in clouds of dust, and Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat is twenty yards in front of him with his sword across his lap.
Two days ago, at the well at Aba el Lissan in the hills east of Aqaba, Auda's horse charged a Turkish battalion that had been sent up from Maan to clear the road. Three hundred Turks were killed in the charge. Auda lost his hat to a bullet through the brim, his horse to a wound through the chest, and his pearls to the pommel of a saddle that broke under him; he made the joke at the well that he had paid a high price to wear his hat at a different angle. The road to Aqaba is now open from the desert side. There is no Turkish position between the column and the sea.
He thinks: the guns of the Aqaba forts are sited to fire seaward. The garrison has been told for two years that the threat to Aqaba is the Royal Navy.
He thinks: the garrison is six hundred strong. The garrison has not been resupplied in three months.
He thinks: if I send Auda's people in at the run, the garrison will surrender. If I send Auda's people in walking, the garrison will surrender. Auda's people will surrender the garrison either way.
He thinks: the next thing after this is the news. The news has to go to Cairo. The news has to be in Allenby's hand within ten days or the political officers in Cairo will have time to argue it down.
He thinks: I will ride straight on to Cairo from here.
The column comes down the track to the seaward side at four in the afternoon. The Turkish commander, an Arabic-speaking colonel, has heard from a runner two hours before that Aba el Lissan has fallen. He sends out a parley flag. He surrenders the garrison without a shot. Six hundred Turks file down to the beach and lay their rifles in three rows. The Howeitat take the rifles. Auda has the Turkish colonel up to his tent for a meal of dates and rice and the courtesies are observed.
Aqaba is empty of food. The Royal Navy is not in the bay. The two thousand bedouin who have just taken the port are, by the next morning, hungry and beginning to leave for the desert. Lawrence, who has not eaten properly in three days himself, leaves the same morning with two bedouin guides on three camels for Suez, two hundred and ten miles by the desert tracks, no Royal Navy escort, no medical kit, no spare water beyond the standard four skins.
He covers the distance in forty-nine hours. He goes through the British lines at the Suez Canal in a Hashemite robe and is nearly arrested by a sentry; he goes to the Sirdar's office in Cairo at the end of the third day. Allenby is in his office. Lawrence walks in still in the robe with the dust still on him and Allenby asks him what he wants. Lawrence says, by the tradition: Aqaba.
Allenby, by the same tradition, takes ten seconds. He picks up the desk pen. He says: I see. Well. I will give you what you ask for.
Allenby's official telegram of the eighth of July 1917 to the War Office in London is in the National Archives. He writes that the capture of Aqaba by Lawrence and the Howeitat opens the door for the British to supply the Hejaz Revolt directly from the Red Sea, and that he requests permission to incorporate the Arab forces under Hashemite political command into his right flank for the offensive on Beersheba in the autumn. He requests the formal commissioning of Lawrence as a liaison officer with the Arab forces and an immediate grant of two hundred thousand pounds in gold to be paid to Faisal at Aqaba. London assented to all of it. 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 Arab Army Lawrence had ridden across the Nefud to get into the war. The political settlement in 1919 betrayed the promises he had carried with the gold. The story of Aqaba, written by him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, sat at the heart of his unease for the rest of his short life.