Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr

Author:James Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2006-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

17

Dara or Azrak?

(15–21 November 1917)

Lawrence reappeared, unexpectedly perhaps, in Aqaba on 26 November, having ridden non-stop for three days from Azraq. Almost immediately, he wrote up in his diary where he had been on his return journey. There are some crossings-out – the previous days were evidently a blur – but the writing itself is firm and breezy: quite different from the tiny scrawl of the desperate moments that summer when he was utterly exhausted.1 There is other evidence to suggest that he was in rude good health. When Hogarth saw Lawrence on 9 December, he described him as ‘looking fitter and better than when I saw him last.’2 His view is corroborated by some of the only footage of Lawrence from the campaign, taken two days later during Allenby’s formal entry into Jerusalem, which shows him grinning broadly.

From the report Lawrence had sent on ahead with Wood, by the time he arrived in Aqaba his colleagues already had a good idea of what had happened in the Yarmuk valley and how lucky he had been to escape more serious injury when he detonated the mine under the train near Minifir. None of them had any inkling of the ordeal Lawrence would say he underwent in Dara, until eighteen months later. It was only midway through 1919 while he was writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that Lawrence abruptly told Stirling how

I went into Dara in disguise to spy out the defences, was caught, and identified by Hajim Bey, the governor, by virtue of Abdul Qadir’s descriptions of me. (I learned all about his treachery from Hajim’s conversation, and from my guards.) Hajim was an ardent paederast and took a fancy to me. So he kept me under guard till night, and then tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty. Hajim sent me to the hospital, and I escaped before dawn, being not as hurt as he thought.3

The reason why Lawrence decided to describe what he had undergone in Dara at the end of 1917 lies in the context of the events which took place immediately after the war. In Damascus, Feisal came under pressure from the French to accept the crown of Syria in return for achieving a settlement with the militant Arab nationalists in the city, who included Mohammed Said al Jazairi, the brother of Abdul Qadir. Abdul Qadir himself had been shot dead in Damascus shortly after the end of the war; his brother continued to nurse ambitions to replace Feisal, which Lawrence deeply opposed: not just out of loyalty to his wartime Arab comrade but because he believed that Mohammed Said was completely untrustworthy. This revelation of what had happened to him at Dara was the most graphic, personal illustration he could offer Stirling, by then the deputy chief Political Officer in Cairo, to warn the British not to press Feisal to accept the French proposal, which would give Mohammed Said al Jazairi greater power.4

Lawrence, however, then changed the key detail of this story in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

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