Then it hit me! On the train on the way home on the very evening that I ventured into that final box. Policy numbers changed as insurances were updated, but their due dates never did. The records should have been in date order, not policy number. In jubilation, I began the changeover the very next day. It took me another three months.
And when that period was almost ended, I had another brainstorm. Still there were occasionally records I could not find because the client had changed the date for some reason and forgotten the old one. Due dates could change, but names never did! The records should have been in alphabetical order by name. That took another three months. And I slowly began to realise that I was not quite as silly as everyone thought.
A band of trodden untidiness in a sweep of gleaming water-rounded sand showed us the way, and we arrived just as the guns opened fire. They did excellently, and crashed in all the top of one building, damaged the second, hit the pump-room, and holed the water tank. One lucky shell caught the front wagon of the train in the siding, and it took fire furiously. This alarmed the locomotive, which uncoupled and went off southward. We watched hungrily as she approached our mine, and when she was on it there came a soft cloud of dust and a report and she stood still. The damage was to the front part, as she was reversed and the charge had exploded late; but, while the drivers got out, and jacked up the front wheels and tinkered with them, we waited and waited in vain for the machine-gun to open fire. Later we learned that the gunners, afraid of their loneliness, had packed up and marched to join us when we began shooting. Half an hour later, the repaired engine went away toward Jebel Antar, going at a foot pace and clanking loudly, but going none the less.
Our Arabs worked in toward the station, under cover of the bombardment, while we gnashed our teeth at the machine-gunners. Smoke clouds from the fired trucks screened the Arab advance which wiped out one enemy outpost and captured another. The Turks withdrew their surviving detachments to the main position, and waited rigorously in their trenches for the assault, which they were in no better spirit to repel than we were to deliver. With the advantages in ground the place would have been a gift to us, if only we had had some of Feisal’s men to charge home.
Meanwhile, wood, tents and trucks in the station were burning, and the smoke was too thick for us to shoot, so we broke off the action. We had taken thirty prisoners a mare, two camels and some more sheep; and had killed and wounded seventy of the garrison, at a cost to ourselves of one man slightly hurt. Traffic was held up for three days of repair and investigation. So we did not wholly fail.
Of all the men who wrote their true war experiences (something I wouldn’t bother to do out of fear of boring the reader) no one matches T. E. Lawrence in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was published in all sorts of limited editions at first, for Lawrence was very conscious of self-aggrandisement and wished to keep a lid on it. It was not released to the general public until after his death, at his own order. A shortened version called Revolt in the Desert was published with Lawrence editing, and it was this, as a promotion for the 1962 David Lean film, that I read but no matter. I’ve read the original version since.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was a British archaeologist, adventurer, soldier and author, who was called Lawrence of Arabia after he went native when sent on a mission seeking the cooperating with Arab forces against the Turks during the World War 1. He was strongly involved in the actions that drove the Ottomans out of the Arabian peninsula and the Levant. Lawrence was a strong supporter and promoter for the establishment of an Arab state, but his efforts did not lead to the intended result. Disappointed, he withdrew from all Arab related matters in the early 1920s.
Lawrence’s fame is out of proportion with his real importance, and he was instrumental in allowing Jewish migration into the Palestine area, helping create the modern crisis there. The most major criticism of the fabulous film was that it offered few insights into Lawrence’s character, but that is because the author didn’t either. My objection is that it suggested Lawrence an oddity, whereas, as he points out in his preface, he was just one of a whole bunch of Arabic speaking Britishers who went out to organise the revolt. Anyone who suggests that either book or film are less than great has really lost the plot. A story that would be completely unbelievable if it wasn’t true.
