The Mudowwara raid was one of Lawrence’s most spectacular and most successful attacks on the railway: ‘I beg to call attention once again to the gallantry displayed by Major Lawrence,’ Clayton wrote in a message to Allenby, ‘and the successful manner in which he managed his small force. I would also bring notice to the good work and steadiness of Sgt. Yells AIF and Cpl. Brooks RWF both of whom were relatively new to the work …the success of this small operation should have effects …beyond the importance of the action. It will raise the spirit of the Arabs …and will without doubt be reported and its magnitude will not lose as the news travels.’²¹ Today, the ridge on which Lawrence sited his Lewis and Stokes guns stands on the border of Saudi-Arabia and Jordan, but, if you are willing to risk the hostility of the border-guards, you may climb it, lie on the rocky shelf in a stone sangar which may itself be a relic of that battle, and gain the same view of the track which Sergeant Yells saw through his sights on 19 September 1917. You will see, too, 500 yards away, the wreck of a railway wagon on its side. Sadly, this is probably not part of the train Lawrence mined, for it is an open wagon, whereas Lawrence specified in all his reports that the train drew ten box-wagons. At the foot of the ridge you may search in vain for the remains of the bridge on which he laid his charge. It is no longer there: but if you are patient enough to pace out the distance from the ridge to the embankment, you will find, buried in the sand, the broken masonry of a two-arched culvert, which may or may not be the one which Lawrence demolished on that day in September, eighty years ago, when, within the space of ten minutes, he and his men cut down seventy Turks. Lawrence’s reaction to this killing is difficult to judge. On 25 September he wrote a letter to Major Frank Stirling, a colleague in Cairo who was about to be posted to the Arab front, describing the attack in the kind of gung-ho, boy scout language which he must have believed appropriate to the professional soldier: ‘I hope this sounds the fun it is,’ he commented. ‘It’s the most amateurish Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the [Bedu]. Only you will think it’s heaven, because there aren’t any returns, or orders, or superiors; no doctors, no accounts, no meals and no drinks.’²² Lawrence was always adept at bluster and bravado, but beneath the surface lay a sensitive soul. A very different picture of his feelings emerges in a letter he wrote only a day earlier to Edward Leeds: ‘I hope when this nightmare ends that I will wake up and come alive again …I’m not going to last out this game much longer: nerves going and temper wearing thin …This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them …and know that you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can.’²³ Whether one or both of these letters displays the ‘real’ Lawrence, or whether both are simply reflections of the contrasting characters of their recipients, is a question which cannot satisfactorily be answered.

17. Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra

The Yarmuk operation and the Dara’a incident October 1917–January 1918

On a morning in April I rode a bull-camel called Shaylan – a famous racer of the Howaytat – under the serried pagodas of Umm Salab, the ‘guardian of Rum’, and across the sebkha called al-Ga’a, towards the gash of Wadi Hafira. I carried Seven Pillars in my saddle-bag, and if Lawrence was correct, I should find, at the end of the wadi, a steep pass which would take me up 2,000 feet to the head of the Shirah plateau. I had felt the heat in the air long before the sun was up, and just after dawn long tongues of lemon and fire-orange shades had licked across the brownness of the hills, picking them out like sugared cakes, and gleaming on the mirror salt-licks of the Ga’a. Wadi Hafira itself lay in a haze which had steamed out from its thick green pastures of rimth and rattam. I reached the foot of the pass by noon, and climbed through the bed of a wadi which curved gently towards a snow-white pimple thousands of feet above. The wadi grew narrower and the walls steeper until I was hauling the camel by his headstall through a crack in the rocks which was only just wide enough to let us through. On and on I staggered, and suddenly the walls were so tight that when Shaylan passed, one of my jerrycans was scraped and punctured so that the water began to trickle out maddeningly. Since entering the wadi, doubts had nagged at me. Surely, this could not be the way Lawrence had come, I thought, with an entire army of Arabs, a squadron of Indian machine-gunners and hundreds of camels? They simply would not have got through. I was afraid that the wadi would become so narrow that I would not be able to turn the camel, yet for some reason I continued, stalking on through basting heat that bounced between the walls of the chasm, until I found that it ended abruptly beneath a towering cliff. This, certainly, had not been Lawrence’s path. Cursing myself, I turned Shaylan about and headed back, but no sooner had I done so than there was a sudden savage peal of thunder. For a moment I stood stock still: there was a surge of cold air, and rain came slinging down, gouging up the sand in the wadi bed. I was gripped with terror. If the rain was heavy on the plateau, a wave of water might roll down the wadi and catch me here, imprisoned between its sheer walls. I looked about me, thinking that I should have to abandon the camel and climb as high as I could. Seconds later, though, the rain stopped, and, thanking providence, I almost ran the rest of the way back to the foot of the pass, pulling the recalcitrant Shaylan after me.

I realized now that Lawrence’s route must have followed the shoulder of the wadi, but here the going was no easier. There was no clearly marked path, and often I stumbled over boulders, fell sprawling, cut my feet. I shimmied, half skating, down loose screes, balanced on ledges no more than eighteen inches wide, worked my way down into a weird broken water-course of purple stones and white felspar. Once I came so near to the edge of the precipice that Shaylan, bucking and shying, almost pulled me over. Again, I wondered that Lawrence’s army could have come this way. True, he had reported that, on one of his ascents, two of the camels had been lost when they had slipped and fallen down the hillside, but on the other hand he had also described how, on another occasion, he had ridden down the pass without descending from his camel except in one or two difficult places. I shuddered at the thought of riding a camel over these sharp boulders and precipitous paths today. Yet it clearly was the same ‘zig-zag broken pass’, for gazing back down hundreds of feet, I could see the grassy street of Hafira terminating in a cone-hill which appeared to stand in the centre of the wadi, with the diaphanous mass of Rum brooding over it, exactly as Lawrence had described. Getting up that hill with a camel in tow was one of the most exhausting experiences I have ever had, and by the time I reached the top it was almost sunset. The ascent had taken me six hours. I could not believe that Lawrence had ever managed to ride up or down the steep, stony hillside virtually without getting out of the saddle – but perhaps, I thought, despite my years of experience, he had simply been a better camel-man than me.

Lawrence thought of Hafira as a passageway between Arabia and Syria, between heat and cold, between tamarisk and wormwood. Indeed, the plateau was a very different world from the sandy swaths of Rum – a stony yellow moorland undulating almost featurelessly into the distance. In a cleft beyond the first undulation, I came upon a batch of Bedu tents. Dogs barked at me as I walked by, and a Bedui in a pitch-black dishdasha came out and invited me to stay the night. He showed me where to couch my camel, and five or six Bedu in ragged shirts helped me unload. They welcomed me into the tent where a fire of rimth was flickering in the square hearth and made a place for me. After dark they slaughtered a sheep, and we squatted by the fire, drinking tea and coffee, talking for hours, until the meat was carried in on a tin tray a yard in diameter – haunches and ribs of mutton, with the sheep’s head set on top as centrepiece with its gaping maw frozen in a diabolic grin. This reminded me of the great food-tray Lawrence had described as a shallow bath, five feet across and set on a single foot, which had belonged to Auda Abu Tayyi. My Bedu hosts were Howaytat, and I asked after Auda’s great tray. They told me that when the Jordanian army had occupied Jefer in the 1930s, they had looted much of Auda’s property. Perhaps the tray had gone with them. My host, Mohammad ibn Salem, who had once served in the Desert Police camel-corps, told me that he remembered seeing an engraved tray at Jefer as a boy, ‘but it wasn’t five feet across,’ he said, ‘it was just the usual size.’ I wondered if this was another of Lawrence’s elaborations. In his original diary entry, he had written that the vessel was ‘3 feet wide’, then crossed it out and written ‘5 feet wide’. Later, I read a report by Alois Musil, who had dined with Auda in 1910, and who described the dish – presumably the same one – as being of the standard size – about three feet across. If Lawrence had exaggerated about such a trivial thing, what of the Hafira pass, I wondered? I asked the Howaytat their opinion. The older men laughed, and Mohammad told me: ‘In Lawrence’s time Hafira was different. There were no roads and no cars then, and the pass was on the main caravan route from the Hejaz to Ma’an: it was used by hundreds of camels every day. The local Howaytat used to keep it in good trim – clearing away the stones that were washed down by the rains. But now, everyone has motor cars. There are roads which take you around to Naqab ash-Shtar. Only shepherds use the path now, and nobody bothers to clear it up. That’s why you found it difficult. In the old times it was just like a motorway – you could easily ride up and down!’