Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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It requires a very special kind of courage to advance and attack a larger, well-positioned force when one’s lines of communication and path of retreat have been cut. Much as Lawrence would dislike Marshal Foch when he met Foch at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919—and rejected the kind of massed frontal attack that had already led to so many million deaths on the western front—he would have agreed with Foch’s most famous military apothegm: “Mon centre cиde, ma droite recule; situation excellente. J’attaque!"*

AQABA-MAAN ZONE

Through a day of heat that produced waves of mirages, Lawrence led his party toward Abu el Lissal, pausing only to blow up ten railway bridges and a substantial length of the track. At dusk they stopped to bake bread and rest for the night, but the arrival of messengers with the news that a Turkish column had arrived spurred Lawrence on. His men remounted their camels—"Our hot bread was in our hands and we ate it as we went,” he wrote—and rode through the night, stopping at first light on the crest of the hills that surrounded Abu el Lissal to greet the tribesmen who had taken the blockhouse and lost it. Just as there was no going back, Lawrence realized, there was no going forward so long as a Turkish battalion held Abu el Lissal. Even if they could make their way around it, Lawrence’s force would still be bottled up in a valley with Turks at either end. The Arab force dismounted and spread out on the hills around the Turkish campsite, while Lawrence sent someone to cut the telegraph line to Maan. The Turks were, literally, caught napping. From higher ground the Arabs began to shoot down on the Turks, in a firefight that lasted all day. The men kept continually on the move over the rocky, thorny ground, so as not to offer the Turks a fixed target, until their rifles were too hot to touch, and the stone slabs they lay down upon to fire were so superheated by the sun that whatever patch of skin touched them peeled off in great strips, while the soles of their feet, lacerated by thorns and burned by the hot rock, left bloody footprints whenever they moved. Short of water because of the haste in which they had left, the tribesmen suffered agonies of thirst.

By late afternoon Lawrence himself was so parched that he lay down in a muddy hollow and tried to filter the moisture out of the mud by sucking at the dirt through the fabric of his sleeve. There, he was foundby an angry Auda, “his eyes bloodshot, and staring, his knotty face working with excitement,” in Lawrence’s words. “Well, how is it with the Howeitat?” Auda asked, grinning. “All talk and no work?"—throwing Lawrence’s earlier criticism of Auda’s tribe back in his face.

“By God indeed,” Lawrence replied tauntingly, “they shoot a lot and hit little.”

Auda was not one to take criticism (or sarcasm) lightly. Turning pale with rage, he tore off his headdress and threw it to the ground (since as Muslims the Bedouin never go uncovered, this was a significant indicator of Auda’s anger), and ran up the steep slope of the hill calling to his tribesmen to come to him. At first Lawrence thought that Auda might be pulling the Howeitat out of the battle, but the old man stood up despite the constant Turkish rifle fire, glaring at Lawrence, and shouted, “Get your camel, if you wish to see the old man’s work.”

Lawrence and Nasir made their way to the other side of the slope, where their camels were tethered. Here, sheltered from the gunfire, were 400 camel men, mounted and ready. Auda was not in sight. Hearing a sudden, rapid intensification of the firing, Lawrence rode forward to a point from which he could look down the valley, just in time to see Auda and his fifty Howeitat horsemen charging directly down at the Turkish troops, firing from the saddle as they rode. The Turks were forming up for an attempt to fight their way back to Maan when Auda’s bold cavalry charge hit them in the rear.

With Nasir at his side, Lawrence waved to his 400 camel men, who charged toward the Turkish flank, riding into a volley of rifle fire. The Turks were poorly prepared to deal with the surprise of a dense charge over rough ground of 400 camel riders. Lawrence, who was riding a racing camel that was faster than the rest, led the charge, firing his revolver, and smashed into the Turkish ranks, at which point his camel collapsed suddenly in a heap, sending Lawrence flying out of the saddle. He was knocked senseless by the fall, but luckily the bulk of his camel prevented him from being trampled to death by the force following him, which swept to either side of his camel like the sea sweeping around a rock.

When he regained consciousness and stood up, he found that he had accidentally shot his own camel in the back of the head, and that the battle was over. The sheer velocity of the two charges had broken the Turks’ formation and degenerated into a brief massacre as the riders shot and hacked away with their curved sabers at small, isolated groups of soldiers. Three hundred Turks had been killed—"slaughtered,” Lawrence wrote, with a hint of self-disgust—and 160 were seriously wounded, for a loss of only two Arabs.

Auda appeared, “his eyes glazed over with the rapture of battle,” muttering incoherently, “Work, work, where are words?"—surely a rebuke to Lawrence for his disparaging comment about Howeitat marksmanship. Auda’s robes, his holster, his field-glass case, and his sword scabbard had all been pierced by bullets, and his mare had been killed under him, but he was unharmed. Having learned from a Turkish prisoner that Maan was garrisoned by only two companies, he was eager to take the town and loot it; but Lawrence’s sense of strategic priorities was undiminished by his fall, and he managed after much difficulty to persuade Auda and the tribesmen that they must move down the wadi toward Aqaba instead. Taking Maan would certainly look like a triumph, but it would be a temporary one at best, since the Turks would quickly assemble a force big enough to recapture it. Taking Aqaba would bring Feisal’s army into Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and would give the Arabs not only a place in the strategic “big picture,” but—he hoped—one at the peace conference.

In the meantime, there seemed no alternative to spending the night on the battlefield, surrounded by the bodies of the enemy, until Auda, who was superstitiously afraid of the presence of so many corpses, and tactically concerned lest the Turks attack them during the night, or lest other Howeitat clans with whom he had a blood feud use the opportunity to kill them on the pretext of mistaking them for Turks, persuaded Lawrence to move on. Wrapped in his cloak against the damp, chilly evening, Lawrence felt the inevitable reaction to victory “when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done.”

The Arabs, as was their custom, had stripped the clothes off the bodiesof their enemies, and now wore bloodstained Turkish tunics over their robes. The more seriously wounded of the Turks would have to be left behind, so Lawrence looked around for blankets or discarded pieces of uniform to cover them from the day’s brutal sun. This had been a battalion of young Turkish conscripts. “The dead men,” Lawrence noted, “looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining down, softening them into new ivory.” He found himself envying the dead, and feeling disgust at the noise of the Arabs behind him, quarreling over the spoils; the dead were spread out in low heaps or singly where they had fallen, and Lawrence began mechanically in the moonlight to rearrange them in rows, at once a lunatic attempt to impose western ideas of neatness on the chaos of death, and a kind of self-punishing atonement for having led the attack that had killed them.

Lawrence had managed to persuade the Arabs to spare some of the Turkish officers, including a former policeman whom he persuaded to write letters in Turkish to each of the commanders of the three major outposts between Abu el Lissal and Aqaba, urging them to surrender, and promising them that if they and their men did so they would reach Egypt alive as prisoners. Considering the mood of the moment, this was a farsighted tactical move. The ground was rough and water scarce between here and Aqaba, and men and animals were by now almost completely played out. It was by no means sure that the Arabs would prevail if one of the Turkish posts offered serious resistance.

The path ahead of them was as twisted as a corkscrew—a determined team of machine gunners in the right spot could have held up an army many times larger than Lawrence’s until thirst overcame them, but fortunately his letters did the trick. The first outpost, of 120 men, surrendered immediately, opening up “the gateway to the gorge of the Wadi Itm,” which in turn led directly to Aqaba. The next day, the garrison at Kethera, about eighteen miles farther on, proved more hesitant to surrender, but after prolonged negotiations, the Arabs managed to take the place in a surprise night attack, without losses. Lawrence knew from his pocket diary that it was the night of a full lunar eclipse, and had countedon the Turks’ being superstitiously distracted by it, as well as its providing the total darkness that made the attack possible.*

Wadi Itm, as they descended it, got narrower and steeper, demonstrating convincingly how impossible it would have been for the British to fight their way up it from the sea. The garrison at Aqaba had marched inland to reinforce the last Turkish post at Khedra four miles away, but this was in fact a fatal move, for all the fortifications faced the sea, from which any attack was expected to come. Nothing had been prepared for an attack down Wadi Itm. Lawrence had sent messages on ahead to tell the local tribes to harass the Turks, and when he arrived they were already firing on the Turkish lines. The last thing Lawrence wanted was an all-out assault, which would certainly be costly in lives, and he twice repeated his offer of taking the Turks prisoner. At last, as the Turkish commander took in the number of Arabs assembled against him, he ordered his men to cease firing and surrendered on the morning of July 6, less than two months after Lawrence’s departure from Wejh.

One of the prisoners was a German army well-borer, standing out among the Turks with his red hair, blue eyes, and field-gray uniform. Lawrence paused to chat with him in German, and eased his mind by saying he would be sent to Egypt, where food and sugar were plentiful, not to Mecca. Then, while the Arabs looted the camp, Lawrence raced his camel four miles on to Aqaba, and plunged it headlong into the sea.

He had achieved the impossible—successfully carried out a dangerous, long maneuver behind enemy lines, covering hundreds of miles over what everybody else assumed was impassable terrain to capture a critical port, and killed or captured more than 1,200 Turks for a loss of only two of his own men.

Photograph by T. E. Lawrence of the Arab advance on Aqaba.

Aqaba was in ruins, “dirty and contemptible"; and now that the regular supply caravan, which meandered every two weeks from Maan down past the Turkish outposts carrying rations, had been cut off, there was no food for either victors or vanquished. Lawrence had more than 500 men, 700 prisoners, and 2,000 hungry and demanding men from the local tribes to feed. Of his Turkish prisoners forty-two were officers, and indignant at not being housed any better than their men. There were fish in the Red Sea, of course, but Lawrence had no hooks or lines, and the desert tribesmen had no knowledge of fishing—nor had they any desire to eat fish. The town was surrounded by groves of date palms, but at this season the dates were still raw, and produced violent stomach cramps and diarrhea when boiled and eaten. The Arabs could slaughter and eat their camels, of course, but eventually this would immobilize the entire force.

With his usual indifference to food, Lawrence himself did not suffer, or feel much sympathy for his prisoners—it was his general view that people ate too much anyway—but at the same time he realized that thecapture of Aqaba would be of no use to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force unless they heard of it, and that sooner or later the Turks would give some thought to retaking the port. A British armed tug had paid one of its regular visits, lobbed a few shells into the hills, and sailed on without paying any attention to the Arabs’ signals from the shore. It would be at least a week before this tug, or another ship of the Royal Navy, returned. The small force Lawrence now had assembled at Aqaba needed not just food, but modern weapons, ammunition, tents, and above all gold, since gold was the only thing that could guarantee the tribesmen’s loyalty.

Lawrence had not bothered to inform Cairo where he was going, or with what object, and he had no idea what was happening in the rest of the war. He did not therefore know that General Murray’s second attack on Gaza had failed, like the first. Gaza was no easy nut to crack—with the help of the Germans, the Turks had fortified their trenches, taking advantage of every piece of high ground and of the impenetrably thick hedges and clumps of cactus (considered worse by the troops than barbed wire), in which they had carefully sited machine gun nests. On the British side, despite huge efforts to build a small-gauge railway line to bring supplies and ammunition forward and to lay a water line, neither had been completed. Murray’s plan of attack was therefore hamstrung, since he required more than 400,000 gallons of water a day for men, animals, and vehicles. He had a large mounted force of about 11,000 sabers, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers in infantry, as well as an artillery strength of more than 170 guns (as well as a naval bombardment of Gaza from the sea, and the first use of tanks and poison gas in the Middle East); but the Turks still managed to hold their ground, and since the only way of securing water was to take Gaza, the British, having failed to do so, were obliged to break off the battle. Murray had inflicted 1,300 casualties on the Turks, at the cost of 3,000 British and Commonwealth casualties. Both Lawrence and Liddell Hart would later point out that Lawrence’s tiny force had inflicted almost the same number of casualties on the Turks for a loss of only two men!

The resulting stalemate—a miniature reproduction of the situationon the western front—was made worse by Murray’s overoptimistic dispatches home during the first battle of Gaza, which had produced first jubilation, then consternation in the war cabinet as the facts became known. The prime minister remained determined to knock Turkey out of the war, and looked for a stronger commander for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was decided to replace Murray with General Sir Edmund Allenby, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, a powerful, impatient, hard-thrusting cavalryman, know as “the bull” to men who served under him, because of both his size and his fearsome temper. Allenby had fought brilliantly in the Boer War, but quarreled badly there with Douglas Haig, who was now the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in France. Allenby, who violently disagreed with Haig’s tactics, had promptly crossed him again, and as a result it was thought wise to give Allenby a command as far away from France as possible. It was also hoped that as a cavalryman who had chafed at trench warfare he would bring a new level of energy and drive to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF).

When Allenby took his leave of Lloyd George in London, the prime minister told him “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Considering that the British army had been stuck outside Gaza for two years, this was a tall order, but Allenby, his spirits and self-confidence buoyed by being released from Haig’s command and given a show of his own, set to work immediately to breathe new life into the EEF. A consummate professional soldier, he moved his headquarters forward to Rafah,* only nineteen miles from the front line at Gaza, instead of trying to command the army from Cairo, where General Murray had preferred to remain. Allenby immediately set out to see everything he could with his own eyes, instead of relying on his staff officers for information, another failing of Murray’s. He knew he could expect no reinforcements, given the pressure on the western front, and would have to make do with what he had. He also understood at once that advancing up the coast to attack Gaza for the third time would get him nowhere. Hewould need to surprise the Turks with a new strategy, one that made use of the vast, empty desert area to the east to go around the Turkish lines and fortifications that stretched from Gaza on the Turkish right to Beersheba on their left. But what kind of army could travel great distances over a waterless desert?

Meanwhile, in Aqaba Lawrence faced two urgent problems: the first was feeding his men and his prisoners; the second was defending Aqaba against a Turkish attack, which Lawrence estimated would take about ten days. To protect Aqaba, Lawrence made use of his skill at creating maps to pick four independent strongpoints, each of which the Turks would have to attack separately if they were going to advance down Wadi Itm. He put Auda in command of one of them, and chose carefully from among the tribes to man the others. To obtain food and supplies, there was only one course open to him—to leave Aqaba and ride 150 miles across the Sinai desert to the Suez Canal. The terrain is some of the harshest in the world, with only one well between Aqaba and the Suez Canal, and the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai had the reputation of being predatory and pro-Turk.

Taking only seven men with him—one of them would have to drop out and return to Aqaba because his camel was unfit—Lawrence set off on July 7 to bring the news of the Arab victory to Cairo. Riding continuously at a walk with only short intervals of rest, in order not to exhaust their camels, the small party arrived at Shatt, on the canal, on July 9, a journey of forty-nine hours, which pushed both men and camels to their limit, crossing over Mitla Pass* and then across the shifting, rolling dunes to the east bank of the canal. Occasional heaps of rusting, empty army-ration bully beef cans in the desert marked the approach to civilization.

There, the natural lethargy of army administration took over, as if to mark Lawrence’s passage from Asia and the Arabs back to the world of uniforms, regulations, and orders. The lines at Shatt, it turned out, had been abandoned because of an outbreak of plague. Lawrence picked up a telephone in an abandoned office hut and found it still working. He rang general headquarters at Suez and asked for a boat to take him across the canal, but was told that this was no business of the army’s, and that he would have to call Inland Water Transport. Though he explained the importance of his mission, Inland Water Transport was indifferent. It might try to send a boat tomorrow, to take him to the Quarantine Department. He called again, and argued his case more vehemently, but this did no good—he was cut off. Finally, “a sympathetic northern accent from the military exchange” came on the line: “It’s no bluidy good, Sir, talking to them fooking water boogars: they’re all the same.” The kindly operator finally managed to put Lawrence through to Major Lyttleton at Port Tewfik. Lyttleton handled cargo shipments for the Arab forces at Jidda, Yenbo, and Wejh, and promised to have his launch at Shatt in half an hour. Once Lawrence reached Port Tewfik, Lyttleton took one look at him in his verminous, filthy robes, and brought him straight to the Sinai Hotel, where Lawrence had a hot bath, his first in months, iced lemonades, dinner, and a real bed, while his men were sent northward to “the animal camp on the Asiatic side” in Kubri, and provided with rations and bedding.

The next morning, on the train to Cairo via Ismailia, Lawrence played a game of hide-and-seek for his own amusement, in the true Oxford undergraduate tradition, with the Royal Military Police. There was nothing he enjoyed more than confronting puzzled and vexed minor authorities with the unfamiliar contrast of his blue-eyed face and upper-class accent and his present costume of Arab robes and bare feet. Although he carried a special pass issued to him by Major Lyttleton, identifying him as a British officer, Lawrence wanted to go as far as he could before showing it, and no doubt to annoy as many people on the way as possible. This kind of thing—combining a perverse schoolboy fondness for practical jokes with a flamboyant flaunting of his unmilitary ways and special privileges—was to become something of a specialty of Lawrence’s as his fame increased.

After numerous minor adventures with the authorities, Lawrence changed trains at Ismailia for Cairo, and found his friend Admiral Wemyss in conversation with a large, intimidating, and unfamiliar general, pacing up and down the platform waiting to board their private carriage on the train to Cairo. The general was Allenby, on one of his inspection tours, and his presence, together with that of the admiral, froze everyone to attention except Lawrence, who, recognizing one of Wemyss’s aides, Captain Rudolf Burmester, RN, walked forward and explained who he was and why he was there. At first Burmester was unable to recognize Lawrence, whose weight had dropped to less than ninety-eight pounds, and who was standing before him barefoot in Arab robes, but he immediately realized the significance of what Lawrence told him, and promised to load a naval ship up with “all the food in Suez” and send it to Aqaba at once. He also informed Lawrence that the unfamiliar general was Allenby, who had replaced Murray; and it was there, on the platform, that Lawrence and Allenby first set eyes on each other.

Lawrence on the railway platform after Aqaba, as Allenby strides by.

Lawrence boarded the train, arrived in Cairo at noon, and went straight to the Savoy Hotel, where the Arab Bureau was located. He walked past the sleeping sentry to General Clayton’s rooms; Clayton was hard at work, and merely glanced up at the small robed figure, and waved him away with a quick “Mush fadi,” Anglo-Egyptian slang that can mean anything from “Not now; I’m busy” to “Bugger off!”

Clayton, who supposed that Lawrence was still somewhere around Maan blowing up railway bridges, was astonished, but not vexed, to see his protйgй standing barefoot on his doorsill. Clayton confirmed with one call that HMS Dufferin was already loading food at Suez for an emergency trip to Aqaba. Then, at Lawrence’s request, he drew Ј16,000 in gold from the bank and sent it under guard to Suez to make good the promises Lawrence had written out on army telegraph forms and left with the tribal sheikhs when the gold he was carrying ran out. It was, Lawrence said, imperative for his reputation that these notes, accepted with great reluctance—since Arabs had no faith in paper money of any kind—be redeemed as soon as possible.

Lawrence found that his uniform had been eaten by moths in his absence—or at any rate so he says in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but it is also possible that he had already decided he was more of a sensation in his Arab robes than he would be in uniform. After all, were there no servants in the hotel to look after such things? For that matter, was he the only junior officer in Cairo to have no soldier as servant? Come to that, Cairo was well known for tailors who could whip up a suit or a tropical uniform to order in a few hours. If Clayton could produce Ј16,000 in gold coins at the drop of a hat, it seems unlikely that with all the resources of the Arab Bureau at his disposal he could not get Lawrence into uniform in a couple of hours if he had wanted to. It seems more probable that Clayton, like Lawrence, realized that the Arab regalia was an asset. This is, in fact, the first moment at which Lawrence can be seen consciously creating the “Lawrence legend"—a creation that, like Frankenstein’s monster, would shortly take on a life of its own.

In any case, Lawrence appeared before his commander in chief just ashe had been on the platform at Ismailia, barefoot, clothed in his white sharifian robes and his headdress with the golden agal. Since Allenby was, among other things, famous as a stickler for perfection in every detail of military uniform, regardless of rank, there is no doubt that he too saw in Lawrence and this unusual garb an opportunity, rather than merely a young staff officer in need of a stern lecture on the dangers of “going native.” As for Lawrence, though he had not been greatly impressed by generals Maxwell and Murray, and occasionally even made fun of them when he thought he could get away with it, he was instantly impressed, even overawed, by Allenby.

“Allenby was physically large and confident,” he wrote, “and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness was not easy to him. He sat in his chair looking at me—not straight, as his custom, but sideways, puzzled.” Lawrence felt that Allenby was trying to decide how much of what he was seeing was “genuine actor and how much charlatan,” and this was probably true enough, since Allenby was still turning that question over in his mind toward the end of his own life: “He [Lawrence] thinks himself a hell of a soldier and loves posturing in the limelight.” But Allenby was by then retired, a field marshal, and a viscount, whereas in 1917 he apparently came quickly to the opinion that Lawrence was, to use his own word, “an actor” (by which Lawrence meant “a man of action”) as opposed to a mere charlatan.

Allenby was not an easy man to impress, but Lawrence succeeded in impressing him, as he explained what he had done, what he intended to do in Syria now that he had captured Aqaba, and what he needed to do it, “offering to hobble the enemy by preaching, if given stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand sovereigns to convince and control the converts.” In fact, it would require close to Ј200,000 in gold sovereigns a month to fund the Arab Revolt, but even at that price the revolt was cheap. Allenby listened calmly, studied the map as Lawrence explained about the tribes, the wadis, the desert—subjects about which he was a masterful lecturer—and asked an occasional trenchant question.

Though no two people could look less alike, Allenby and Lawrencegot along famously from the beginning, partly because Lawrence knew what he was talking about, and partly because Allenby and Lawrence had many unseen similarities. They were both brilliant soldiers and at the same time intellectuals; Allenby had commanded a flying column of horsemen in the Boer War and understood the mechanics of a guerrilla war; above all Allenby was a cavalryman, who hated the brutal, wasteful head-on attacks on the western front and wanted to open up a war of movement. Like Lawrence, he sought unconventional and imaginative solutions to military problems and rejected the conventional ones, and also like Lawrence, he relished his independence. He instinctively respected Lawrence’s courage and intellect, and was willing to put up with his unorthodox behavior if it brought results, as it already had. Moving Feisal’s army north from Wejh to Aqaba would isolate the three Turkish divisions at Medina while at the same time turning Feisal’s forces loose in the Syrian desert to smash trains and railway lines, cut the Turks’ communications, and keep their attention focused in the wrong direction. Allenby saw at once that he needed a fast-moving mobile force on his right as he advanced to take Beersheba, one that could go for long periods of time without food or water in extreme heat—and here it was, ready made, with a base from which it could be supplied. He did not expect the Arab army to fight conventional battles any more than Lawrence did, but a glance at Lawrence’s map told Allenby that he could feint at Gaza while aiming his main blow at Beersheba, with its vital wells, while all the time the Turks would be looking out toward the empty desert in the northeast, wondering where the Bedouin were.

After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Allenby said to Lawrence, “Well, I will do for you what I can,” and that was that. He would prove as good as his word. Not only would the Arabs receive gold in huge amounts—which Lawrence would disburse, thus confirming his authority—they would eventually get food, small arms, ammunition, Lewis guns and instructors, Stokes mortars and instructors, armored cars, flights of British aircraft, enormous amounts of high explosives, and even camels and mules. Allenby grudged Lawrence nothing. He was even willing to put upwith the political consequences—for the taking of Aqaba, once it was properly exploited, would put the Arab army, funded and armed by the British, only 120 miles from Jerusalem and 240 miles from Damascus—which is to say, far from the Hejaz and at the very center of British and French ambitions in the Middle East. Lawrence had set in motion what would rapidly become huge changes in one of the most volatile areas of the world—ones that are still being fought over today.

Whatever Lawrence might think of them, the honors he had earned were not neglected. Colonel Wilson, who only a few months ago had referred to him as “a bumptious young ass,” recommended Lawrence for the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), a decoration for bravery for officers that is only one step below the Victoria Cross (VC), and praised his “personality, gallantry and grit.” General Sir Reginald Wingate was even more impressed by Lawrence’s secret journey through Syria than by the taking of Aqaba. Wingate praised Lawrence to the chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) in London, and going one step beyond Colonel Wilson, asked for “special recognition” of “this gallant and successful adventure"—the Victoria Cross.*