[Jordan Pt.6]《Remembrance Day》: From the trenches of France to the deserts of Arabia

'When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild "War to End Wars"
And another wild Armistice day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.'​

- Excerpt from 'Armistice Day' (1918) by Robert Graves

As part of school tradition we used to walk for fifty miles (80 km) in the English countryside - which would have taken a staggering 24 hours of almost non-stop walking to complete. It may be a hard walk, but it was hard to imagine if I was born eighty years earlier, I would have gone straight to war having completed that. The walk, originally created as a test of endurance for students about to enlist in WWI is today the rite of passage before we all leave school.

Officers' Training Corp at the school's parade ground. From 1914 til the end of the war, all students in my school must attend 12 hours of military training to get ready for enlistment.

During those years, almost everyone from my school ended up fighting in the Great War. One out of five former pupils who fought were killed; with 700 names of WWI war dead being carved into the stone walls of the school chapel (another 350 names were added after WW2), it is still England's biggest war memorial today. But the school didn't only give Britain soldiers during the war, it also her one of England's finest and best known war poets - Robert Graves.

Graves' vivid account of life in the trenches - detailed in his autobiography 'Goodbye to All That' (1929) - is still being regarded as some of the best accounts from a British soldier's perspective.

​He once wrote about how he had found a fallen comrade who had 'forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. He had been hit in 17 places.' Graves was himself so severely injured that at some point he was assumed dead.

The war poet, Robert Graves, in officer uniform.

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‘My subject is war, and the pity of war.
The poetry is in the pity.’

- Wilfred Owen, WWI soldier and poet (1893-1918)

An attack over the trenches in WWI. As officers were expected to lead charges, casualty rate amongst officers rank was high.

Graves at university in Oxford.

Whilst Grave's studies at the University of Oxford was cut short because of the war, he did meet the young Thomas Edward Lawrence and they would become lifelong friends. When Lawrence became some of the most famous celebrity in post-war Britain, known to us as 'Lawrence of Arabia' today. Graves would become his only authorised biographer.

When Graves was entrenched in the wet and muddy frontline in France a few years later, facing massacres done on an industrial scale with the most advanced weaponry, Lawrence was fighting a very different war altogether. He was on camels in the scorching deserts of Arabia, leading Arab tribesman against the vastly superior Ottoman army. His objective was to unite the deeply conservative Bedouin tribes and to turn them into a formidable guerrilla force.

Arab rebels during the Arab Revolt (1916-1918).

Although even Lawrence himself would later admit that the Middle Eastern war theatre was a 'sideshow of a sideshow', there was something in which Graves and Lawrence would share in common in their own respective wars: the war in the Arabian desert was going to be equally brutal - and no less violent.

On the left is an aerial photo of the Ottoman trenches in the desert of southern Jordan, and on the right are the Allied trenches in northern France. Although they were 2,000 miles away from each other there were certainly something strikingly similar.

Modern Middle East was largely created by the British and her allies: the creation of Israel, and even the upheavals in Iraq and Syria today can all trace back their roots to the post-WWI agreements written by the Entente powers. Seeking to understand more about the making of modern Arabia from a historical perspective, earlier this year I travelled for two months in Jordan to look at some of the places related to Great War. Although my researches had yielded a map earlier which marked out some of the sites where Lawrence had fought, with no place names or coordinates it was an almost impossible task to try to locate them.

At a WWI Ottoman trench in southern Jordan.

Then I had an extraordinary stroke of luck: after a couple of days of trying to scanning through the topography of the WWI map and sections of Google satellite images I had managed to match up the two. Right on my computer screen were some of the best preserved WWI battlefields: snaking around the edges of a former train station were the trenches young Ottoman conscripts had once dug in. Further south, much of the railway bed of what was once the supply line that allows the Ottomans to control the vast Arabian desert also came to life. I almost shouted in excitement.

A section of the Hejaz Railway which linked the Ottoman heartland in Turkey to her colonies in Arabia. The ruined house was once a fortified railway guardhouse.

But my walk in Jordan had come to a very bad start. In a previous attempt to camp and hike at the desert north of Wadi Rum (where Lawrence also fought) I had encountered a huge khamsin (sandstorm). Almost buried in my own tent during the night as it was a one man tent built for the elements of rainy British weather (and nothing for the fine sand which kept blowing in from the sides). In the middle of night I was forced to pack up and seek shelter from the wind.

North of Wadi Rum - the desert which I tried to cross - by walking and camping.

The only choice at the time was to get to the nearest large sandstone stumps in the wadi (valley in Arabic) which, as the gale was passing through echoes beautifully. The echo was my guide in the dark ,and around there I found my saviour for the night, a local al-Huweitat sheikh whose valley was his. He had allowed me to stay in his tent, pegged into the sand with a huge steel and concrete pole in the middle.

Typical sandstone cliffs at the north of Wadi Rum.

As I fell asleep, the whole tent also started to be shaking. We (including the sheikh and his young Palestinian helper) found ourselves braving the wind outside shifting concrete blocks to try to stabilise the side of the tent. One thing I wasn't prepared for - which I would frequently encountered later again - was how windy the desert can become when gales travel through hundreds of miles of flat desert unopposed. If you are facing the wind there is simply not much you can do: you would sand in your nose and even your ears. You can barely open your eyes or even breath. It is then that you really appreciate Lawrence’s endurance, living under these kinds of conditions for years on end.

On the second day after the sandstorm, with the air still filled with fine dust.

But we did survive the night (after having move a huge quantity of broken concrete blocks), and the next morning, whilst the air was still hazy with fine sand particles we found out that thirty roofs were blown off in the nearest village. The sheikh later told me it was the strongest sand storm the could remember. A friend of his who we visited in the afternoon was so scared in the night that he decided to spend the night in a cave inside one of the huge sandstone stumps instead.

Tea at the shed of the sheikh's friend.

That had seriously put off any further attempts to try to camp and walk in 'wild' desert Jordan (not the Petra or Wadi Rum touristy part). Or at least I thought. But in Amman I met the young but equally adventurous German who was my roommate in a small hostel. Upon hearing my plan to visit the WWI era fortifications along the Hejaz railway, Niklas, the Arabist in the making, was equally keen to come long.

Breaking down an old sofa for firewood with the young Palestinian boy. Air still hazy with sand.

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With little funding, we will first have to hitchhike to the southern border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia (there is no bus). The motorway sits on what was once a centuries old caravan route, where since time immemorial Muslim pilgrims had followed this Arabian 'Silk Road' and travel south to Mecca from greater Syria. Once there we will have to walk the old railway and look at the fortifications along until we finally reach the southern town of Ma'an again.

As there were little cars going towards the Saudi border, most of the time we would hitch on huge oil tankers like this one.

Since there was no tent for two (and since staying in a tent on my own could only seemed inappropriate), I have decided I was going to stay in the open with Niklas. The stars will be our blankets and the sand will be our beds. Our only guide will be the railway trackbed. I told him there was nothing I could offer - but I promise it was definitely going to be a little adventure.