I went to sleep in the tent that night, satisfied that these Howaytat had vindicated both Lawrence and myself.

My hosts were from the Dumaniyya section of the Howaytat – the people of Sheikh Gasim Abu Dumayk, who before the Mudowwara raid had raged that he would join the Turks. He had not carried out the threat, and when Lawrence had returned to Rum he placated Gasim by recruiting only the Dumaniyya for his next railway raid at Kilometre 589 south of Ma an. It was during the march-in to this strike, on 1 October 1917, that he had climbed the Hafira pass for the first time. The raid lasted six days, and at last, after several days of waiting, Lawrence had mined and destroyed a train at Imshash al-Hesma, and claimed to have been injured in the hip when a Turkish officer had fired at him. In the following months his trained dynamiters destroyed seventeen locomotives and seriously hampered the working of the railway, precisely as he had planned. In mid-October, though, he was flown back to Ismaeliyya to meet Allenby for the second time.

Allenby was planning his major offensive against the Gaza-Beersheba line for November. In July, Lawrence had promised him a general revolt in Syria to secure the entire British flank, but now, three months later, he was loath to take such an irreversible step: the detailed report made to Clayton after the taking of Aqaba was, he said, ‘ancient history’. It had achieved its immediate object – massive British support for the Arab Revolt – but now Lawrence realized he could not deliver, for if Allenby’s offensive failed, or failed to reach Jaffa and Jerusalem, the rebel Arabs would be cut off and massacred by the Turks. The Arabs of Syria were not nomads but cultivating peasants, who lived in populous villages and would not be able to fade back into the desert like Lawrence’s cameleers – they were a one-time weapon, and if fired off prematurely would be entirely wasted. To Allenby, perhaps, the Arabs were expendable, but not to Lawrence, whose passionate desire was that the Revolt should succeed. Instead, he decided to put his efforts into a proposal which had originally been but a small part of his master-plan – an attack on the westernmost bridge in the Yarmuk valley, at Jisr al-Hemmi – a complex steel structure spanning a plunging ravine, protected by only half a dozen sentries. The destruction of this bridge would, he calculated, stop railway traffic for two weeks. If the Arabs could blow the Jisr at precisely the moment when Allenby was driving the Turks before him, then their main line of retreat from Jerusalem to Damascus would be entirely cut off. They would be forced to withdraw on foot, and this would, perhaps, be the correct moment for the Syrian peasantry to rise and harass their retreat. Allenby approved the plan and asked Lawrence to cut the railway on 5 November, or one of the three succeeding days.

Lawrence planned to approach Yarmuk by the same gradual turning movement he had used to such great success at Aqaba. As on that operation, he would march in with fifty men, hopefully from Auda’s Howaytat – the only Bedu he thought aggressive enough to capture the bridge in frontal attack. The route would hug the desert, from Rum to Azraq – the oasis in the Syrian desert where he had met Nuri ash-Sha’alan – and from there, having recruited a ladder of local Bedu tribes, the Bani Sakhr, the Bani Hassan, the Serahiyyin and the Sirhan, he would push quickly into the sown land of Syria and strike at the bridge. It was to be as close a facsimile of the Aqaba operation as conditions would allow, though this time the Bedu would be strengthened by a squadron of Indian machine-gunners, under their Jemadar Hassan Shah, who were already hardened to camel-riding, having spent some months mining the railway in the Hejaz. Lawrence would be accompanied by Lieutenant Wood of the Royal Engineers, who would lay the mine if he was hit, and part of the way by George Lloyd, the former Welsh banker to whose conversation Lawrence had become addicted. In place of the charismatic Nasir, who was away on another job, OC Mission was to be Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain al-Harithi, the brave, handsome ‘young lord’.

There can be little doubt that Lawrence was attracted to Sharif’Ali: ‘No-one could see him without the desire to see him again,’ he wrote, ‘especially when he smiled, as he did rarely, with both mouth and eyes at once. His beauty was a conscious weapon.’¹ It has even been suggested that the ‘SA’ to whom Lawrence dedicated his book was not ‘Salim Ahmad’ at all, but ‘Sharif ‘Ali’. Like Dahoum, he was ‘physically splendid’, and while Lawrence’s Syrian boy had been a ‘wonderful wrestler’, ‘Ali was also as strong as an ox, capable, according to Lawrence, of kneeling down and rising to his feet with a man on each hand. Lawrence claimed that ‘Ali could not only overtake a running camel over half a mile and ‘leap into the saddle’, but would have no one on his operations who could not do the same ‘holding a rifle in one hand’.² The Sharif, wrote Lawrence, was ‘impertinent, headstrong, conceited; as reckless in word as in deed; impressive (if he pleased) on public occasions, and fairly educated for a person whose native ambition was to excel the nomads of the desert in war and sport.’³ He was, in short, a younger and more desirable version of the heroic Auda Abu Tayyi. Lawrence referred to the Sharif affectionately as ‘Little ‘Ali’ and represented him as having had at least one homosexual lover – a seventeen-year-old Bedui of the Bani Sakhr called Turki:’… the animal in each called to the other,’ he wrote, ‘and they wandered about inseparably, taking pleasure in touch and in silence.’⁴

Lawrence left Aqaba on 24 October with Lloyd, Wood, a yeomanry trooper called Thorne, and the Indian machine-gun company. They spent the night at Rum, where they were joined by Sharif ‘Ali and an Algerian Emir named ‘Abd al-Qadir, who was known to Feisal, and who owned several villages of Algerian exiles on the bank of the Yarmuk river. Lawrence thought that ‘Abd al-Qadir’s peasants might be of great use, and, since they were foreigners and hated by the local Arabs, might be able to strike at the Turks without causing a general rising, which he was keen to avoid. Lawrence had already received a telegram from Colonel Bremond of the French Mission, however, warning him that ‘Abd al-Qadir was a Turkish spy. Lawrence saw no reason to suspect this. He put it down to mutual distrust, for ‘Abd al-Qadir’s grandfather had led Algerian resistance against the French – a qualification which did not diminish him in Lawrence’s eyes at all. On the morning of 26 October, the raiding force climbed the Hafira pass. They crossed the railway with little incident on the 27th and arrived at Jefer the following day.

From here on, the good fortune which had so marked Lawrence’s progress to Aqaba became conspicuous by its absence. First, the Towayha Howaytat, whom he encountered at Jefer, could not be persuaded to join the raid: even the notorious raider Za’al Abu Tayyi had become complacent since Mudowwara. Lawrence was obliged to recruit fifteen Bani Sakhr at Bair and thirty Serahiyyin at Azraq, none of whom expressed genuine enthusiasm for the attack. The Serahiyyin, indeed, told him that his target, the bridge at al-Hemmi, was out of the question because the nearby Ibrid hills were swarming with woodcutters in Turkish pay. He was now forced to change his plans, and agreed reluctantly to ‘bump’ Tel ash-Shehab – the nearest bridge geographically to Azraq, yet a dangerous objective since it would take them through inhabited country and cultivated land whose dampness would be hard going for camels and might prevent a hasty retreat. Then, on 4 November, ‘Abd al-Qadir and his men suddenly disappeared from Azraq. Lawrence was astonished and troubled, but though he later wrote that he suspected the Algerian had gone to Dara’a to warn the Turks of their imminent attack, at the time he put his desertion down to simple cowardice:’ ( much talk and little doing,’ he wrote to Joyce later; ‘neither ‘Ali nor myself gave him any offence.’⁵