TURKEY’S LIFELINE

When Lawrence was well enough to stand, he went to Abdulla’s great tent and explained his plans, without eliciting any enthusiasm from Abdulla, who was no more anxious to blow up the railway than he was to attack Medina. A cultivated man who enjoyed poetry and hunting, he had come to Wadi Ais at his brother Feisal’s request, but having reached it and made himself comfortable, he was not about to be prodded into action, least of all by Lawrence, whom he disliked. However, recognizing in Lawrence a reflection of Feisal’s more spirited view of the war (as well as an altogether superior will), he allowed Lawrence to gather a group of his tribesmen, a quantity of explosives, two of the antiquated mountain guns Abdulla had received from General Wingate in Khartoum, and a German Maxim machine gun on a sledge drawn by a long-suffering donkey, and to go out to put his ideas into practice. Abdulla’s cousin Sharif Shakir, an altogether more warlike figure, promised to collect a force of 800 fighting men, to attack whatever Lawrence liked.

On March 26, Lawrence and his advance party of thirty men rode off down Wadi Ais and undertook a three-day march across the desert to a600-foot hill of sand that overlooked the railway station at Aba el Naam. It consisted of two buildings and a water tank, and like most of the Turkish stations, was as stoutly built of stone as a fortress, and garrisoned by nearly 400 troops; but also, like most of them, it had the disadvantage of being surrounded by higher ground, since any railway must be laid when possible on flat ground, and take advantage of valleys. Lawrence was therefore able to approach very close to the station without being seen. Shakir turned up as night fell, but with only 300 men instead of the 800 he had promised; as Lawrence soon discovered, any Arab promises of numbers were best taken with a grain of salt. Still, he was determined to go ahead, and rode on in the dark to the south of the station, where, for the first time in the war, he “fingered the rails … thrillingly,” and planted “twenty pounds of blasting gelatine” under the track, with one of Garland’s improvised trigger fuses, made from the lockwork of an old British army single-shot Martini rifle, with the trigger exposed so that pressure would release it. He put his two guns in position, and placed the Maxim to kill the locomotive’s crew, if they survived the explosion. At daybreak, he started shelling the station, doing considerable damage, especially to the all-important water tank. The crew of the locomotive uncoupled it from the train and began to back it southward toward safety until it ran over the mine and vanished in a cloud of sand and smoke. Although Lawrence’s Maxim gunners had apparently lost interest or patience and abandoned their post, in this first effort thirty Turkish prisoners were taken, and about seventy Turks were killed or wounded; nine more were killed when they tried to surrender and the Arabs shot them anyway. The station and the train caught fire, the locomotive was seriously damaged, and a part of the track was destroyed. For three days all traffic to and from Medina was stopped. Only one of Lawrence’s Bedouin was slightly hurt, so the attack demonstrated his theory about inflicting the maximum damage with the minimum of losses.

Lawrence’s detractors, then and now, still argue that this was merely a “pinprick,” in “a sideshow of a sideshow” compared with the western front, but it in fact was a modest first effort at a new kind of warfare—inwhich an organized, modern, occupying army was forced to deal with small but lethal attacks by an enemy who appeared suddenly out of nowhere, struck hard, and vanished again; in which the ambush, the roadside or railway “improvised explosive device,” the grenade thrown onto a busy cafй terrace, the destruction of rolling stock, even the “suicide bomber,” would take the place of battle; and in which it was almost impossible to distinguish enemy combatants from the surrounding civilian population.

Lawrence rode back to Abdulla’s camp, where a huge celebration took place, and set off the next morning with about forty tribesmen and a machine gun platoon to mine the tracks again. He seems to have regained his health and equilibrium. Mechanical devices and gadgets, whether in the form of bombs, fuses, cameras, or motorcycles, always seemed to cheer Lawrence up, even at the worst of times, and his description of the landscape is, as always, detailed and fascinating. He had the gifts of a great nature writer and presents with a kind of detached objectivity the hardships of desert travel: a fierce sandstorm, which sends pebbles and whole small trees flying at his party like projectiles, followed by heavy rain and a sudden drop in the temperature that leaves him and his party shivering. The wind is so strong that Lawrence’s robes get in his way as he climbs a rocky crag, so he strips and makes his way naked up the sharp, slippery rocks—one of the servants falls headfirst to his death—and finally arrives at kilometer 1,121 (measured from Damascus) of the railway at ten at night, close to a small station with a Turkish garrison.

Lawrence was eager to experiment with a more complicated mine; its trigger would fire two separate charges at the same time, placed about ninety feet apart. It took him four hours to lay the mine; then he crawled back to “a safe distance” to wait for dawn. “The cold was intense,” he wrote later, “and our teeth chattered, and we trembled and hissed involuntarily, while our hands drew in like claws.” Only the day before, the heat had been so oppressive that Lawrence had been unable to walk barefoot, to the amusement of the tribesmen “whose thick soles were proof even against slow fire.” It is worth noting that the desert provides everykind of torment—heat, cold, rain, flash floods, windstorms, biting insects, and sandstorms, sometimes all on the same day.

At dawn a trolley with four men and a sergeant passes over the mine, but luckily it is too light to set off the explosive—Lawrence doesn’t want to waste his explosives and firing mechanism on so small a target. Later a patrol of Turkish soldiers on foot examines the area around the mine—it has been impossible to hide the tracks because the rain has turned the sand to mud—but finds nothing; then, a heavy train, fully loaded with civilians, many of them women and children, being evacuated from Medina runs over the mine but fails to explode it, infuriating the “artist” in Lawrence—he has already begun to think of demolition as a kind of art form—but relieving “the commander” and, more important, the human being, who has no wish to kill women and children. By now the Turkish garrison is aware of the presence of Lawrence and the others, and opens fire from a distance; Lawrence and his men hide until nightfall. Then he makes his way back to kilometer 1,121 and slowly, carefully, with infinite caution feels up and down the line in the dark for the buried hair trigger, finds it, and raises it one-sixteenth of an inch higher. Afterward, to confuse the Turks, Lawrence and his men blow up a small railway bridge, cut about 200 rails, and destroy the telegraph and telephone lines, then head for home, having already sent on ahead of them the machine gunners and their donkey. The next morning, they hear a great explosion, and learn from a scout left behind that a locomotive with trucks of spare rails and a gang of laborers set off the mine in front of it and behind it, effectively blocking the track for days.

Quite apart from his boyish excitement at blowing things up—one of Lawrence’s endearing qualities is a kind of innocent delight in pyrotechnics, and throughout his life he retained some of the more attractive characteristics of an adolescent—Lawrence had every reason to be pleased. He had blocked the line to Medina for days, and rendered Turkish troops all the way up and down the line nervous and on full alert, at the cost of a little blasting gelatine and the accidental death of one servant with a fear of heights.