The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

all the aid he could and consider them equal partners. From now on, in Lawrence’s estimation, the British Army and Arab rebels would be joined at the hip, the French relegated to the margins. If the rebels reached Damascus first, they might be able to wrest Syria from the French altogether. Or so Lawrence hoped.
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    After our tea in his reception tent, Sheik al-Atoun takes me in his old four-wheel-drive Toyota up to a promontory overlooking Mudowarra. Along for the adventure are five of his young sons and nephews, standing in the Toyota’s open bed and trying—with limited success—to avoid being pitched about during the bucking ride. Ringing the hilltop are remnants of the trenchworks from which the Turks had repeatedly repelled British attacks on the town. “Even with their armored cars and airplanes, they had great problems,” the sheik says. “The Turks here were very brave fighters.”
    Al-Atoun’s words hint at the complicated emotions the legacy of World War I and the Arab Revolt stir in this part of the Arab world: pride at having cast off their Ottoman overseers after 400 years of rule, a lingering sadness at what took its place. The sheik points to a cluster of whitewashed homes perhaps 10 miles away.
    â€œThat is Saudi Arabia. I have family and many friends there, but if I wish to visit them—or they to visit me—I must have a visa and go through customs. Why? We are one people, the Arabs, and we should be one nation, but instead we have been divided into—what, twenty-two?—different countries. This is wrong. We should all be together.”
    Quite understandably, Sheik al-Atoun blames the situation on the peace imposed by the European imperial powers at the end of World War I, a peace that T. E. Lawrence tried mightily to forestall.
    Despite punching through the Turkish line in southern Palestine and taking Jerusalem in December 1917, the British Army ground to a halt as Allenby’s troops were siphoned off for the western front. Operating from the Arabs’ new headquarters in Aqaba, Lawrence continued to lead raids against the railway and into the hill country west of the Dead Sea, but this was hardly the grand, paralyzing offensive he had outlined to Allenby. The desultory nature of the war continued through the summer of 1918.
    But something had happened to Lawrence in the interim. In November 1917, while conducting a secret reconnaissance mission into the strategic railway town of Deraa, he was briefly captured by the Turks, then subjected to torture—and, by most all evidence, rape—at the hands of the local Turkish governor. Managing to escape back to rebel lines, a far more hardened, even merciless, Lawrence began to emerge.
    While Lean’s
Lawrence of Arabia
dealt obliquely with Lawrence’s Deraa ordeal, one aspect it captured exquisitely was his gradual unhinging in the field. In some battles, Lawrence ordered his followers to take no prisoners, or administered coups de grâce to men too badly wounded to be carried. In others, he took nearly suicidal risks. He attacked a Turkish troop train despite being so short of weapons that some of his men could only throw rocks at the enemy. If this was rooted in the trauma at Deraa, it seems he was at least as much driven by the desperate belief that if the Arabs could reach Damascus first, then the lies and guilty secrets he had harbored since coming to Arabia might somehow be set right.
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    On every road leading out of the ramshackle Jordanian border town of Ramtha there occurs a curious phenomenon: three- and four-story mansions set amid manicured and walled gardens. “The smugglers,” explains the owner of a tiny refreshment shop on Ramtha’s main street. He points down the road to the border crossing with Syria, a half-mile away. “The frontier has been officially closed for a year and a half now, so there’s a lot of money to be made. They move everything