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BOOK EIGHT. The Ruin of High Hope
CHAPTERS XCII TO XCVII
IN CONJUNCTION WITH ALLENBY WE LAID A TRIPLE PLAN TO JOIN HANDS ACROSS JORDAN, TO CAPTURE MOAN, AND TO CUT OFF MEDINA, IN ONE OPERATION. THIS WAS TOO PROUD AND NEITHER OF US FULFILLED HIS PART. SO THE ARABS EXCHANGED THE CARE OF THE PLACID MEDINA RAILWAY FOR THE GREATER BURDEN OF INVESTING, IN MOAN, A TURK FORCE AS BIG AS THEIR AVAILABLE REGULAR ARMY.
TO HELP IN THIS DUTY ALLENBY INCREASED OUR TRANSPORT, THAT WE MIGHT HAVE LONGER RANGE AND MORE MOBILITY. MOAN WAS IMPREGNABLE FOR US, SO WE CONCENTRATED ON CUTTING ITS NORTHERN RAILWAY AND DIVERTING THE TURKISH EFFORT TO RELIEVE ITS GARRISON FROM THE AMMAN SIDE.
CLEARLY NO DECISION LAY IN SUCH TACTICS: BUT THE GERMAN ADVANCE IN FLANDERS AT THIS MOMENT TOOK FROM ALLENBY HIS BRITISH UNITS; AND CONSEQUENTLY HIS ADVANTAGE OVER THE TURKS. HE NOTIFIED US THAT HE WAS UNABLE TO ATTACK.
A STALEMATE, AS WE WERE, THROUGHOUT 1918 WAS AN INTOLERABLE PROSPECT. WE SCHEMED TO STRENGTHEN THE ARAB ARMY FOR AUTUMN OPERATIONS NEAR DERAA AND IN THE BENI SAKHR COUNTRY. IF THIS DREW OFF ONE DIVISION FROM THE ENEMY IN PALESTINE IT WOULD MAKE POSSIBLE A BRITISH ANCILLARY ATTACK, ONE OF WHOSE ENDS WOULD BE OUR JUNCTION IN THE LOWER JORDAN VALLEY, BY JERICHO. AFTER A MONTH'S PREPARATION THIS PLAN WAS DROPPED, BECAUSE OF ITS RISK, AND BECAUSE A BETTER OFFERED.
CHAPTER XCII
In Cairo, where I spent four days, our affairs were now far from haphazard. Allenby's smile had given us Staff. We had supply officers, a shipping expert, an ordnance expert, an intelligence branch: under Alan Dawnay, brother of the maker of the Beersheba plan, who had now gone to France. Dawnay was Allenby's greatest gift to us--greater than thousands of baggage camels. As a professional officer, he had the class-touch: so that even the reddest hearer recognized an authentic redness. His was an understanding mind, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion: at the same time, his war-training enriched his treatment of this antithetic subject. He married war and rebellion in himself; as, of old in Yenbo, it had been my dream every regular officer would. Yet, in three years' practice, only Dawnay succeeded.
He could not take complete, direct command, because he did not know Arabic; and because of his Flanders-broken health. He had the gift, rare among Englishmen, of making the best of a good thing. He was exceptionally educated, for an Army officer, and imaginative. His perfect ma
The Arab Movement had lived as a wild-man show, with its means as small as its duties and prospects. Henceforward Allenby counted it as a sensible part of his scheme; and the responsibility upon us of doing better than he wished, knowing that forfeit for our failure would necessarily be part-paid in his soldiers' lives, removed it terrifyingly further from the sphere of joyous adventure.
With Joyce we laid our triple plan to support Allenby's first stroke. In our center the Arab regulars, under Jaafar, would occupy the line a march north of Maan. Joyce with our armoured cars would slip down to Mudowwara, and destroy the railway--permanently this time, for now we were ready to cut off Medina. In the north, Merzuk, with myself, would join Allenby when he fell back to Salt about March the thirtieth. Such a date gave me leisure: and I settled to go to Shobek, with Zeid and Nasir. It was springtime: very pleasant after the biting winter, whose excesses seemed dream-like, in the new freshness and strength of nature: for there was strength in this hill-top season, when a chill sharpness at sundown corrected the languid noons.
All life was alive with us: even the insects. In our first night I had laid my cashmere head-cloth on the ground under my head as pad: and at dawn, when I took it up again, twenty-eight lice were tangled in its snowy texture. Afterwards we slept on our saddle-covers, the ta
While we were in this comfortable air, with milk plentiful about us, news came from Azrak, of Ali ibn el Hussein and the Indians still on faithful watch. One Indian had died of cold, and also Daud, my Ageyli boy, the friend of Farraj. Farraj himself told us.
These two had been friends from childhood, in eternal gaiety: working together, sleeping together, sharing every scrape and profit with the ope
When looked at from this torrid East, our British conception of woman seemed to partake of the northern climate which had also contracted our faith. In the Mediterranean, woman's influence and supposed purpose were made cogent by an understanding in which she was accorded the physical world in simplicity, unchallenged, like the poor in spirit. Yet this same agreement, by denying equality of sex, made love, companionship and friendliness impossible between man and woman. Woman became a machine for muscular exercise, while man's psychic side could be slaked only amongst his peers. Whence arose these partnerships of man and man, to supply human nature with more than the contact of flesh with flesh.
We Westerners of this complex age, monks in our bodies' cells, who searched for something to fill us beyond speech and sense, were, by the mere effort of the search, shut from it for ever. Yet it came to children like these unthinking Ageyl, content to receive without return, even from one another. We racked ourselves with inherited remorse for the flesh-indulgence of our gross birth, striving to pay for it through a lifetime of misery; meeting happiness, life's overdraft, by a compensating hell, and striking a ledger-balance of good or evil against a day of judgement.
Meanwhile at Aba el Lissan things went not well with our scheme to destroy the Maan garrison by posting the Arab Army across the railway in the north, and forcing them to open battle, as Allenby attacked their base and supports at Amman. Feisal and Jaafar liked the scheme, but their officers clamoured for direct attack on Maan. Joyce pointed out their weakness in artillery and machine-guns, their untried men, the greater strategical wisdom of the railway scheme: it was of no effect. Maulud, hot for immediate assault, wrote memoranda to Feisal upon the danger of English interference with Arab liberty. At such a moment Joyce fell ill of pneumonia, and left for Suez. Dawnay came up to reason with the malcontents. He was our best card, with his proved military reputation, exquisite field-boots, and air of well-dressed science; but he came too late, for the Arab officers now felt their honour to be engaged.