Instead, the Hejaz Railway fell victim to World War I. When that tunneling work was finished, it would have been theoretically possible to travel from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople all the way to the Arabian city of Medina, 1,800 miles distant, without ever touching the ground. One of the great civil-engineering projects of the early 20th century, the Hejaz Railway was an attempt by the Ottoman sultan to propel his empire into modernity and knit together his far-flung realm.īy 1914, the only remaining gap in the line was located in the mountains of southern Turkey. The southernmost town in Jordan, Mudowarra was once connected to the outside world by means of that railroad. In Lawrence’s own telling, that incident occurred in September 1917, when he and his Arab followers attacked a troop train just south of town, destroying a locomotive and killing some 70 Turkish soldiers. Lawrence’s “biggest time” there was open to debate. While the sheik was quite correct about the resiliency of the Turkish garrison in Mudowarra-the isolated outpost held out until the final days of World War I-the legendary T.E. He and other British soldiers came in armored cars and attacked the Turkish garrison here, but the Turks were too strong and they had to retreat.” He pulls on his cigarette, before adding with a tinge of civic pride: “Yes, the British had a very hard time here.” Sipping tea and chain-smoking L&M cigarettes in his reception tent in Mudowarra, Sheik Khaled Suleiman al-Atoun waves a hand to the outside, in a generally northern direction.
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