CHAPTER XXIII

Photograph: COLONEL JOYCE, COMMANDER OF THE ARAB REGULARS

Photograph: ARMORED CARS IN HOLY ARABIA

A CAVALRY NAVAL ENGAGEMENT AND LAWRENCE’S LAST GREAT RAID

All the Turkish ammunition and food had to be brought down from northern Syria over the Damascus-Palestine-Amman-Medina Railway. Lawrence’s plan was to swing way out across the unmapped sea of sand, get clear around the eastern end of the Turkish lines, unexpectedly appear out of the desert, dash up behind the Turks, and cut all their communication round Deraa. One of Lawrence’s most difficult problems during this manœuver was to keep his column supplied. Even his armored cars and aëroplanes could not carry enough petrol to pull through. From Akaba to the oasis of Azarak is 290 miles across burning desert. There were wells at only three places where the camels could be watered, and the little band had to live from hand to mouth.

On its way the column rested at Tafileh, a village of six thousand inhabitants, near which the most unusual episode of the whole campaign had taken place. A body of Bedouin horse under Abu Irgeig of Beersheba, under cover of darkness, rode up to a small enemy naval base near the southern end of the Dead Sea, not far from the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The so-called Turkish Dead Sea Fleet, consisting of a few ancient arks and motor-driven craft armed with light guns, was moored alongshore. The officers were having breakfast in a Turkish Army mess near-by, utterly unaware of the approach of a hostile force. Abu Irgeig saw at a glance that the decks were deserted except for a few sentries. So he ordered his followers to dismount. With a rush they clambered on board like Barbary corsairs, scuppered the crews, scuttled the boats, remounted their snorting thoroughbreds, and vanished into the desert haze before the dazed Turks had time to realize what had happened. This is perhaps the only occasion in history in which a naval engagement has been won by cavalry.

Lawrence’s original plan was to gather under his standard the enormous Rualla tribe, which fills a large part of the North Arabian Desert, and then descend in force upon the Hauran hill country to make a direct assault on Deraa. This came to naught because of a little difference which unexpectedly arose between King Hussein and General Jaffer Pasha and the senior officers of the northern army, which ruffled the temper of an important part of Lawrence’s forces. By the time harmony had been restored it was too late, and, as a result, the Rualla never came together, making it necessary for Lawrence to modify his scheme. In the end he decided to carry out a flying attack on the railways north, west, and south of Deraa with his regular troops, assisted only by the wild Druses of the Hauran and a handful of the Rualla horse under Sheiks Khalid and Trad Shaalan. Before starting this attack, Lawrence arranged for another feint to be made on the eighteenth against Amman and Es Salt, and for this purpose he sent word to the members of the Beni Sakr tribe to mass in the desert near Amman. The rumor of this, confirmed by Allenby’s mobilization of his great camouflage army in the Jordan Valley, kept the eyes of the Turks fixed constantly on the Jordan instead of on the Mediterranean coastal region to the north of Jaffa.

On the oasis of Azarak is a magnificent old castle that dates from somewhere between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, and is turreted and loop-holed like the fortress of a Scottish baron. Evidently it was an outpost of the far-flung Roman Empire, for Colonel R. V. Buxton, of the Imperial Camel Corps, found a carved stone in the ruins on which there was an inscription stating that two legions of Antoninus Pius had been stationed here. So far as is known no other force visited it until Lawrence and his men came. The Arabs refuse to go near it because they say it is haunted by the mad hunting-dogs of the Shepherd Kings that prowl round it o’ nights. Lawrence at one time thought he would like to retire here and make Azarak Castle his home after the war.

On the thirteenth, Lawrence, accompanied by the small but mobile force which he had organized for his big attack on Deraa, left the oasis of Azark and marched into the Es Salt foot-hills. Two days later they arrived at Umtaiye, thirteen miles southeast of Deraa, where the male population of nearly all the villages of the Hauran joined the Shereefian army in a body. Among them was Sheik Tallal el Hareidhin of Tafas, the finest fighter in the Hauran, who had accompanied Lawrence on some of his spying expeditions behind the Turkish lines. He acted as guide for the expedition from this point and sponsored Lawrence’s cause in every village. Lawrence declared that if it had not been for this man’s courage, energy, and honesty some of the tribes of the country through which they passed, who were blood-enemies of King Hussein and Emir Feisal, might easily have wrecked all their plans. Probably twenty or thirty thousand Arab villagers and nomads joined Lawrence at different points in this grand finale of the Near Eastern campaign.

In addition to severing the lines of communication it was Lawrence’s intention to place himself and his troops between the vital railway junction at Deraa and the Turkish armies in Palestine so as to lure the enemy into reinforcing the thus isolated garrison at Deraa with troops from the Palestine front who otherwise would be free to help stem Allenby’s advance. At the same moment it was also necessary for Lawrence to cut the railway to the south and west of Deraa in order to add color to the belief of the enemy that the entire Allied attack was coming against the Turkish Fourth Army in the upper Jordan Valley. The only unit available for putting the railway out of business consisted of the armored cars. The cars, plus Lawrence, whizzed gloriously down the railway line and captured one post before the open-mouthed Turks were aware of their danger. This post commanded an attractive railway bridge, 149 kilos south of Damascus, on which was inscribed a flattering dedication of the bridge to old Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan. Lawrence planted tulips containing 150 pounds of guncotton at both ends and in the center, and when he touched them off the bridge faded away on the autumn breeze. This job completed, the cars started on again at top speed but became stranded in the sand, where they were delayed for several hours. On their way back to rejoin the army in the Hauran they crossed the railway five miles north of Deraa, where Lawrence suppressed another post, wiped out a Kurdish cavalry detachment, blew up another bridge, and ripped up six hundred pairs of rails.

After blowing up enough of the railway in the vicinity of Deraa to throw the whole Turkish service of supply into complete chaos, Lawrence and his men ascended a high promontory called Mount Tell Ara, which commanded a panoramic view of Deraa four miles away. Through his field-glasses he made out nine planes on the enemy’s aërodrome. During that morning the German aviators had had it all their own way in the air. They had been playing mischief with Lawrence’s troops by dropping their eggs and raking the Arabs with their machine-guns. The Shereefian forces tried to defend themselves from the ground with their light artillery, but they were getting the worst of it until Lawrence’s one surviving machine, an antiquated old bus piloted by Captain Junor, came trundling up from Azark and sailed square into the middle of the whole German squadron, Lawrence and his followers watched this fracas with mixed feelings, for each of the four enemy two-seaters and four scout-planes was more than the equal of the one prehistoric British machine. With both skill and good luck Captain Junor cruised right through the German birdmen and led the whole circus off to the westward. Twenty minutes later the plucky Junor came tearing back through the air with his attendant swarm of enemy planes and signaled down to Lawrence that he had run out of petrol. He landed within fifty yards of the Arab column, and his B.E. flopped over on its back. A German Halberstadt dived on it at once and scored a direct hit with a bomb that blew the little British machine into bits. Fortunately, Junor had jumped out of his seat a moment before. The only part of his B.E. that was not destroyed was the Lewis machine-gun. Within half an hour the plucky pilot had transferred it to a Ford truck and was tearing around outside Deraa, raking the Turks with his tracer bullets.

Meanwhile, Lawrence dashed off to join the detachment of troops he had sent on in the direction of Mezerib. An hour after reaching it he helped them cut the main Turkish telegraph-lines between Palestine and Syria. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this, because it completely cut the Turkish armies off from all hope of relief from Northern Syria and Turkey proper.

At Mezerib several thousand more natives of the Hauran joined the Arab forces, and the following day Lawrence and his column marched on along the railway toward Palestine, right into the heart of the Turkish back area. They spent most of that day planting tulips, and near Nasib Lawrence blew up his seventy-ninth bridge, a rather large one with three fine arches, thus bringing to a close his long and successful career of demolition. Knowing it might be his last, he planted twice as many tulips under it as necessary.

The column slept soundly at Nasib on the night of the eighteenth after a good day’s work. The next morning, bright and early, Lawrence marched his camels, horses, and Arabs off to Umtaiye, where he was joined by the armored cars. During the morning another enemy aërodrome was sighted near the railway, and Lawrence, with two of the armored cars, sped across open country for a near view. They found three German two-seaters in front of the hangars. Had it not been for a deep gully intervening, the two armored cars would have rushed them. As it was, two of the Germans took off and circled around like great birds, pouring streams of lead down on the Rolls-Royce machines, while at the same time Lawrence and the crews inside the turrets finished the third aeroplane with fifteen hundred bullets. As the armored cars started back to Umtaiye, the Germans swooped down on them four times; but all their bombs were badly placed, and the cars escaped unhurt, except for a bit of shrapnel that wounded the colonel in the hand. Speaking of his impression of armored car work, Lawrence remarked that he considered it fighting de luxe.

This same day the Arab regulars, under Jaffer Pasha, and the armored cars and French detachment and the Rualla horse under Nuri Shallan, gave a fine account of themselves.

Photograph: A RACING DROMEDARY FROM INDIA

Photograph: A BABY DROMEDARY TWO HOURS OLD

Photograph: AN ARAB THOROUGHBRED

Jaffer Pasha, who also slashed his way brilliantly through this engagement, comes of a rich and noble Bagdad family. His history is full of romantic vicissitudes. At the outbreak of the war, Jaff ar el Askari, as a general on the Turkish staff, was sent across in a submarine from Constantinople to North Africa to organize an uprising in the Sahara among the Senussi Arabs. He led the Senussi in their short but spectacular campaign against the British. In the first battle he defeated the British; the second battle was a draw; and in the third he was badly wounded, defeated, and captured by the Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia, near Solium, and imprisoned in the great citadel at Cairo. In trying to escape at the end of three months he broke his ankle and was recaptured in the moat under the citadel. He was as fat as a barrel, full of the joy of life, and such a gentlemanly, likable fellow that a little later the British put him on parole and allowed him to wander about Cairo. Being an Arab himself, he sympathized with the Arab Nationalist cause and one day asked his British captors to permit him to volunteer as a private with Feisal. His request was granted, and he did such remarkable work that before many months had passed he had risen to the post of commander-in-chief of Feisal’s regular army, which was composed mainly of deserters from the Turkish ranks who had known Jaffer as a general in Turkey. Jaffer Pasha had received the kaiser’s Iron Cross at the Dardanelles and the Turkish Crescent for his work in the Senussi campaign, and after he had been with the Arabs for a while he was made a commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by the British! Allenby accorded him this last honor at his Ramleh headquarters in Palestine. The guard of honor on this occasion was the same Dorset Yeomanry that had captured the pasha just a year before. Jaffer was tremendously pleased and amused at this subtle touch of humor on Allenby’s part.

Nuri Said, Jaffer Pasha’s brother-in-law, played an equally brilliant part in the war. He was Emir Feisal’s chief of staff and remained in this position when Feisal became king in Damascus and later in Bagdad. Like Jaffer he had attended the Turkish Staff College. In the Balkan War he was an aviator. Afterward he acted as secretary of the Arab officers’ secret society which plotted to overthrow the Turks. He is reckless and loves a hot fight. In fact, the hotter the action the cooler was Nuri Said. He was one of the few Arab townsmen whom the Bedouins admired and respected.

All had gone well with the preliminary plans for Allenby’s drive in Palestine. But until twenty-four hours before the attack was launched, on the nineteenth, the commander-in-chief himself was not certain whether he was going to succeed or not. If the Turks and Germans had discovered his real plan and had not been deceived into thinking that both the British and Arabian forces were concentrating on Amman with the intention of attempting to push north up the Jordan Valley and if the enemy had withdrawn its right wing only about half-way across Palestine from the Mediterranean coast and the River Auja to the hills of Samaria, which would merely have been a retirement of ten miles along the entire front, the Turks could have played safe, Allenby’s whole blow would have been wasted, and Lawrence’s brilliant operations around Deraa would have been all in vain. Lawrence did not even have sufficient supplies to last his column for two extra days, so that failure would have been nothing short of a catastrophe for him. Of course, neither Allenby nor Lawrence would have suffered heavy losses, but on the other hand they would not have rung the curtain down in Arabia and Palestine so soon. The entire World War might have dragged on for several months longer, and an additional hundred thousand lives or more might have been sacrificed on the Western Front. But there were no ifs; the enemy walked into the prepared trap like lambs to the slaughter.

THE DOWNFALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

On the whole, this last joint operation of the British and Arabian forces was one of the most marvelous pieces of staff planning in all military annals. It was a game of chess played by experts on an international board. Never before was there a similar campaign. It was a complete reversal of all Marshal Foch’s principles. Allenby and Lawrence went back to the Napoleonic wars, to the battles of the eighteenth century, when generals won by manœuver and strategy instead of by tactics (the term “tactics” referring to the science of handling men under fire). In this, the most brilliant and spectacular military operation in the world’s history, Allenby and Lawrence lost only four hundred and fifty men, although they completely annihilated the Turkish army, captured over one hundred thousand Turks, advanced more than three hundred miles in less than a month, and broke the backbone of the Turkish Empire. Part of the credit should go to Brigadier-General Bartholomew. Allenby is colossal; he needs a needle-sharp man to complete him. He had such an officer and strategist in General Bartholomew.

Allenby’s complete plan, which involved the destruction of all the Turkish effectives with one sweeping blow, was known only to four people; the commander-in-chief himself, his chief of Staff, (Major-General Boles), General Bartholomew, and Colonel Lawrence. Not even Emir Feisal or King Hussein knew what was going to happen.

At five o’clock on the morning of September 18, 1917, General Bartholomew came to his office at headquarters in Ramleh and anxiously said to the staff officer on duty: “Has there been any change?”

“No, the Turks are still there,” replied the latter.

“Good!” said Bartholomew. “We will take at least thirty thousand prisoners before this show is over.” He did not dream that the Allied forces would capture three times thirty thousand Turks.

The deception of the enemy had been perfect in every detail. When Allenby’s forces entered Nazareth, which had been the German and Turkish Palestine headquarters, they found papers indicating that the German High Command had been certain the attack would take place in the Jordan Valley. Field-Marshal von Sanders had been taken in down to the last point.

Meanwhile Lawrence, Joyce, General Nuri, and their associates had received no news of what was going on in Palestine, but they were busy day and night demolishing sections of the railway. One night Lord Winterton, who played an active part in this final stage of the desert campaign, went out on a demolition expedition and placed some thirty parties at work along the line. The earl himself dashed about in the dark from point to point in an armored car. While walking along the railway he met a soldier who said, “How are things?”

“Fine!” replied Winterton; “we have twenty-eight charges planted and will be ready to touch them off in a few minutes.” The soldier remarked that this was splendid, and then disappeared. A moment later machine-guns blazed forth on all sides, and the earl had to run for it. His questioner had either been a German or a Turk, and had the incident occurred an hour earlier it might have spoiled Lord Winterton’s work for that night. But the tulips were duly touched off, and the show was a success.

The following day Lawrence dashed back to Azarak in an armored car, then flew across the desert and northern Palestine to Allenby’s headquarters at Ramleh. A hurried conference with the commander-in-chief secured for him three more Bristol fighters, the best battle-planes that the British were using in the Holy Land. He also brought back the astounding news that more than twenty thousand prisoners had already been taken by Allenby’s forces, that Nazareth, Nablus, and many other important centers had fallen, and that they were advancing toward Deraa and Damascus. That meant that the Arabian army would be called upon by Allenby to play a still greater part from now on, because it was the only force between the crumbling Turkish divisions and Anatolia, toward which they must retreat.

Lawrence had flown to Palestine for aëroplanes because the Germans had nine of them near Deraa with which they were bombing Feisal’s followers out of the ground. One of the pilots was a Captain Peters, and another was a Captain Ross Smith, who later became world famous and was knighted for flying from England to Australia. Lord Winterton gives us a graphic picture of the events of that morning in a scintillating article in “Blackwood’s”:

While L. and the airmen were having breakfast with us, a Turkish ’plane was observed, making straight for us. One of the airmen . . . hurried off to down the intruder. This he successfully did, and the Turkish ’plane fell in flames near the railway. He then returned and finished his porridge, which had been kept hot for him meanwhile! But not for him a peaceful breakfast that morning. He had barely reached the marmalade stage when another Turkish ’plane appeared. Up hurried the Australian again; but this Turk was too wily and scuttled back to Deraa, only to be chased by P. on another machine, which sent him down in flames.

That night the Germans burnt all of their remaining machines, and from that moment the British airmen had the air above North Arabia, Palestine, and Syria to themselves.

That afternoon a giant Handley-Page arrived from Palestine with General Borton, commander of Allenby’s air squadrons, as the passenger and Ross Smith as the pilot. They brought forty-seven tins of petrol and also a supply of tea for Lawrence, Winterton, and companions. This was the first time that a great night-bombing plane ever flew over the enemy lines by day. The purpose was for propaganda, and so profoundly were the tribesmen impressed by this vast bird, which was several times larger than any they had thus far seen, that all of the peoples of the Hauran, who had been reluctant to coöperate with Emir Feisal, immediately swore allegiance to the Arab cause and galloped in on their horses, with their rifles popping off into the air, eager to charge the Turks, or at least make a noisy display of valor.

The next day the infantry under General Jaffer Pasha, the jovial commander-in-chief of Colonel Joyce’s regulars, went down to have a look at the first large bridge which Lawrence had dynamited in the vicinity of Deraa. They found it nearly repaired, but after a sharp fight they drove off its guards, who were persistent and game German machine-gunners, destroyed more of the line, and then proceeded to burn the great timber framework which had been erected by the Turks and Germans during the intervening seven days. In this rather sharp encounter the armored cars, the French detachment under Captain Pisani, and the Rualla Horse under Nuri Shaalan plunged into the heart of things. Nuri is a quiet retiring man of few words and plenty of deeds. He turned out to be unusually intelligent, well informed, decisive, and full of quiet humor. Lawrence once remarked to me that he not only was the chief of the largest tribe in all the desert but one of the finest Arab sheiks he had ever met, and that the members of his tribe were like wax in his hands because “he knows what should be done and does it.”

When Lawrence started his operations around Deraa, von Sanders did exactly what his opponents wanted him to do. He sent his last reserves up to Deraa, so that when Allenby’s troops once smashed through the Turkish front lines they had fairly clear going ahead of them. At the important railway junction of Afuleh, on the evening of the nineteenth, the Turkish motor-lorries came streaming in for supplies, not knowing that all their great depots were in the hands of Allenby’s men. As they rumbled into the supply-station, a British officer remarked politely to one and all, “Would you mind going this way, please?” That lasted for four hours, until the news spread through the Turkish back area that Allenby’s troops had taken Afuleh, the railway junction in the center of the plain of Esdraelon, where the Turkish railway which connects Constantinople, Damascus, and the Holy Land branches out, one line extending down into Samaria and the other east to Haifa on the Mediterranean. Afuleh was the main supply-base of the whole Turkish army. After Allenby had occupied Afuleh for fully six hours, a German plane came down with orders to von Sanders from Hindenburg. The occupants of the plane did not discover their predicament until they left their machine and walked over to local headquarters to report. To their chagrin they found themselves turning over their orders to Allenby’s staff.

By September 24 Allenby’s forces had advanced so far that the entire Turkish Fourth Army, concentrated around Amman and the Jordan on the mission of attacking empty tents and horse-blankets, had been ordered back to defend Deraa and Damascus. The Turkish Fourth Army generals were infuriated when they discovered that the railway line had been cut behind them, and attempted to retreat north along their motor-roads with all their guns and transport. Lawrence and his cavalry did not intend to pave their retreat with roses. Stationed on the hills they poured down such an incessant stream of bullets that the Turks were forced to abandon all their guns and carts between Mafrak and Nasib. Hundreds were slaughtered. The formal column of retreat broke up into a confused mass of fugitives, who never had a minute’s peace to reform their lines. British aëroplanes added the finishing touch by dropping bombs, and the Turkish Fourth Army scattered panic-stricken in all directions.

Lawrence now decided to put himself between Deraa and Damascus, hoping to force the immediate evacuation of Deraa and thus pick up the sorry fragments of the crack Turkish Fourth Army as it emerged from Deraa, and also harass other remnants of the Turkish armies in Palestine that might attempt to escape north. Accordingly, at the head of his camel corps, he made a hurried forced march northward on the twenty-fifth, and by the afternoon of the twenty-sixth swept down on the Turkish railway near Ghazale and Ezra on the road to Damascus. With him were Nasir, Nuri, Auda, and the Druses—“names with which to hush children even in the daytime,” to quote Lawrence himself. His rapid manœuvers took the panic-stricken Turks completely by surprise. Just the previous day they had worked feverishly on the railway line and had reopened it for traffic at the points where Lawrence had damaged it a week earlier. He planted a few hundred tulips, putting the line out of commission permanently and penning six complete trains in Deraa. Fantastic reports of disaster spread like wildfire throughout Syria, and the Turks at once began the evacuation of Deraa by road.

By dawn of the twenty-seventh, Lawrence and his cavalry were already out scouting the surrounding country and had captured two Austro-Turk machine-gun companies placed across a road to oppose Allenby’s approaching columns. Then Lawrence climbed to the summit of a high hill in the vicinity called Sheik Saad, whence he could sweep the country-side with his glasses. Whenever he saw a small enemy column appearing on the horizon, he jumped on his horse and, accompanied by some nine hundred picked men only too eager for that kind of diversion, charged into the midst of them as if they had been tin soldiers and serenely took them all prisoners. If from his observation station on the hill he saw a column that was too large to tackle, he lay low and let it pass.

About noon an aëroplane dropped Lawrence a message stating that two columns of Turks were advancing on him. One, six thousand strong, was coming from Deraa; the other, two thousand strong, from Mazerib. Lawrence decided that the second was about his size. Sending for some of his regulars, who were gathering stray Turks like daisies a few miles away, he dashed off to intercept the enemy near Tafas. At the same time he sent the Hauran horsemen in the other direction to get around behind them and hang on the skirts of the column in order to annoy them. The Turks reached Tafas a short time before Lawrence and brutally mistreated all the women and children of the village. Shereef Bey, commander of the Turkish Lancers, at the rear-guard of the column, ordered all the people massacred, including the women and children. Tallal, head sheik of this village of Tafas, who had been a great tower of strength with Lawrence from the beginning and one of the boldest horsemen in North Arabia, was riding at the front of the Arab column with Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi when he came upon the wives and children of his kinsmen lying in pools of blood in the road. Several years after the war one of Lawrence’s poet friends in England got married, and when Lawrence expressed regret at not having enough money to buy an appropriate wedding present the poet suggested that he might let him have a few pages of his diary instead. The wish was granted, and the poet disposed of the pages to “The World’s Work” for publication in America. The portion sold happened to include Lawrence’s story of the death of the gallant Sheik Tallal el Hareidhin:

We left Abd el Main there and rode on past the other bodies, now seen clearly in the sunlight to be men, women and four babies, toward the village whose loneliness we knew meant that it was full of death and horror. On the outskirts were the low mud walls of some sheep-folds, and on one lay something red and white. I looked nearer, and saw the body of a woman folded across it, face downward, nailed there by a saw-bayonet whose haft stuck hideously into the air from between her naked legs. She had been pregnant, and about her were others, perhaps twenty in all, variously killed, but laid out to accord with an obscene taste. The Zaagi burst out in wild peals of laughter, in which some of those who were not sick joined hysterically. It was a sight near madness, the more desolate for the warm sunshine and the clean air of this upland afternoon. I said: “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead”; and we turned and rode as fast as we might in the direction of the fading enemy. On our way we shot down those of them fallen out by the roadside who came imploring our pity.Tallal had seen something of what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal, and then slowly rode to the higher ground, and sat there a long while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved toward him to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. After some minutes Tallal very slowly drew his headcloth about his face, and then seemed to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into his horse’s flanks and galloped headlong, bending low in the saddle and swaying as though he would fall, straight at the main body of the enemy. It was a long ride, down the gentle slope and across the hollow, and we all sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his horse’s hoofs sounding unnaturally loud in our ears. We had stopped shooting and the Turks had stopped shooting; both armies waited for him. He flew on in this hushed evening, till he was only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry “Tallal, Tallal” twice in a tremendous voice. Instantly, all their rifles and machine-guns crashed out together, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among their lance points.Auda looked very cold and grim. “God give him mercy! We will take his price.” He shook his rein and moved slowly forward after the enemy. We called up the peasantry, now all drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and from that against the retreating column. Auda led them like the old lion of battle that he is. By a skilful turn he drove the enemy into bad ground and split their column into three parts. The third part, the smallest, was mostly made up of German and Austrian gunners, grouped round three motor-cars which presumably carried high officers. They fought magnificently and drove off our attacks time and again, despite our desperation. The Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blinding our eyes, our throats parched with dust, and the agony of cruelty and revenge which was burning in our bodies and twisting our hands about so that we could hardly shoot. By my orders they were to take no prisoners—for the first time in the war.

Tallal had seen something of what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal, and then slowly rode to the higher ground, and sat there a long while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved toward him to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. After some minutes Tallal very slowly drew his headcloth about his face, and then seemed to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into his horse’s flanks and galloped headlong, bending low in the saddle and swaying as though he would fall, straight at the main body of the enemy. It was a long ride, down the gentle slope and across the hollow, and we all sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his horse’s hoofs sounding unnaturally loud in our ears. We had stopped shooting and the Turks had stopped shooting; both armies waited for him. He flew on in this hushed evening, till he was only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry “Tallal, Tallal” twice in a tremendous voice. Instantly, all their rifles and machine-guns crashed out together, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among their lance points.

Auda looked very cold and grim. “God give him mercy! We will take his price.” He shook his rein and moved slowly forward after the enemy. We called up the peasantry, now all drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and from that against the retreating column. Auda led them like the old lion of battle that he is. By a skilful turn he drove the enemy into bad ground and split their column into three parts. The third part, the smallest, was mostly made up of German and Austrian gunners, grouped round three motor-cars which presumably carried high officers. They fought magnificently and drove off our attacks time and again, despite our desperation. The Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blinding our eyes, our throats parched with dust, and the agony of cruelty and revenge which was burning in our bodies and twisting our hands about so that we could hardly shoot. By my orders they were to take no prisoners—for the first time in the war.

This account of the death of Tallal el Hareidhin of Tafas, in Lawrence’s own words, shows us what marvelous descriptive powers this young soldier-scholar has at his command, and gives us a hint of the masterpiece that the world should one day receive from his pen.

Two German machine-gun companies had resisted magnificently and escaped, with the Turkish commander-in-chief, Djemal Pasha, in his car in their midst. The Arabs wiped out the second section completely after a bitter hand-to-hand struggle. No prisoners were taken, because the Arabs were wild with rage over the Tafas massacre. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners had been captured during the day, but when the Arabs discovered one of Lawrence’s men with a fractured thigh pinned to the ground with two German bayonets, they acted like enraged bulls. Turning their machine-guns on the remaining prisoners they wiped them out.

After the encounter, Nuri Shaalan, at the head of the Rualla horse, rode straight into the main street of Deraa. There were two or three fights on the way, but they took the town in a whirlwind gallop. The next morning Nuri returned to Lawrence at Tafas with five hundred infantry prisoners and the freedom of the town of Deraa. Some of Allenby’s troops arrived in Deraa that day also.

Lawrence and his army spent that night—and a very uneasy night it was—on Sheik Saad hill. He did not feel certain of victory since there was always a risk of his small force being washed away by a great wave of the enemy in retreat. All that night the Hauran horsemen clung tenaciously to the great Turkish column from Deraa, made up of six thousand men, which Lawrence had not dared engage in pitched battle. Instead of sleeping with the regular troops at Sheik Saad, Lawrence spent part of the night helping the Hauran cavalry, and at dawn he rode off to the westward with a handful of men until he met the outposts of the fourth cavalry division of the British army. After guiding them into Deraa and starting them off on their northward march toward Damascus, Lawrence galloped back full speed to the Hauran cavalry. Although the Turkish column when it left Deraa was six thousand strong, at the end of twenty-four hours only five thousand remained. One thousand had been picked off by the Bedouins. Eighteen hours more and there were three thousand; and after a point called Kiswe, where Lawrence headed off the remnant of the Turkish Fourth Army and flung them into one of Allenby’s cavalry brigades coming from the southwest, only two thousand remained.

In all, Lawrence, Joyce, Jaffer, and Nuri, and their scattered force of wild Bedouins and regular camel corps had killed about five thousand of the Turks in this last phase of the campaign and captured more than eight thousand of them, as well as one hundred and fifty machine-guns and thirty cannons. In addition to the column of less than one thousand men who had started north from Akaba with Lawrence, Auda Abu Tayi and two hundred of the best fighting men of the Howeitat tribe took part in Lawrence’s war-dance around Deraa, also two thousand Beni Sakhr, “the Sons of Hawks,” from east of the Dead Sea, four thousand Rualla under Nuri Shaalan from the North Arabian Desert, one thousand Druses from the Hauran, and eight thousand Arab villagers from the Hauran.

In a letter which he wrote to me more than a year after the war, Colonel Stirling, who had played a prominent rôle in this final raid, summed up the effects of what the Arabs had done to help Allenby overwhelm the Turks:

“This, after all,” wrote Colonel Stirling, “was the main justification of our existence and of the money and time we had spent on the Arab Revolt. The raid itself was really very dramatic in that we started out, a small regular force of Arabs 400 strong and marched 600 miles in 23 days through unmapped Arabia and came in out of the blue—miles behind the Turkish main armies, and as an absolute surprise. Two days before the British advance in Palestine began we had cut three lines of railways and for five days allowed no trains to get through to the Turkish armies. The result was that when their retreat commenced they found all their advance food depots and ammunition dumps were exhausted. During these days we of course led a somewhat precarious existence, generally shifting camp twice in a night to avoid being surprised. We were only a very weak force then, you see, though by the time we got on and rushed Damascus, something like 11,000 mounted Arabs had joined us.”

Some of the Arab horsemen rode right on that evening into Damascus, where the burning ammunition-dumps turned night into day. Back at Kiswe, just a few miles south of Damascus, and not far from where Saul of Tarsus was dazzled by the light that transformed him into Paul the interpreter of Christianity, the glare of the fires from Damascus and the roar and reverberation of explosions kept Lawrence awake most of the night. He was completely worn out. From September 13 to 30, he had caught only occasional snatches of sleep. Mounted on a racing-camel or dashing about the country on an Arab steed, riding inside the turret of an armored car or flying about in one of the fighting planes, he had led the relentless existence demanded of him in this great emergency of the war. Now the end of the war was in sight in the Land of the Arabian Nights. But sleep was difficult because all night long the Turks and Germans were blowing up their ammunition-dumps eight miles north in Damascus. With each explosion the earth shook, the sky went white, and splashes of red tore great gaps in the night as shells went off in the air. “They are burning Damascus,” Lawrence remarked to Stirling. Then he rolled over in the sand and fell asleep.

LAWRENCE RULES IN DAMASCUS, AND THE TREACHERY OF THE ALGERIAN EMIR

The next morning they saw Damascus in the center of its gardens as green and beautiful as any city in the world. The enchantment of the scene, “like a dream that visits the light slumbers of the morning—a dream dreamed but to vanish,” reminded Lawrence of the Arab story that when Mohammed first came here as a camel-driver, upon seeing Damascus from a distance, he refused to enter, saying that man could only hope to enter paradise once. Coming out of the desert and beholding this view, than which there is none more enchanting and alluring in the world, it is no wonder Mohammed was sorely tempted and even trembled for his soul. Seen from afar, this oasis of verdure, rimmed round by yellow desert against a background of snow-capped mountains, is indeed a pearl in an emerald setting. So it is only natural that the desert-dweller should look upon it as an earthly paradise.

Photograph: SIDI LAWRENCE AND HIS SONS

Photograph: DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR

As the sun-rays fell aslant, weaving a fairy gossamer veil over the minarets and cupolas of this dream city, Lawrence and Stirling drove into Damascus in their famous Rolls-Royce, the Blue Mist. They went straight to the town-hall and there called a meeting of all the leading sheiks. Lawrence selected Shukri Ibn Ayubi, a descendant of Saladin, to act as the first military governor under the new régime. Then he appointed a chief of police, a director of local transportation, and numerous other officials. These details arranged, Shukri, Nuri Said, Auda Abu Tayi, Nuri Shalaan, and Lawrence, at the head of their Bedouin irregulars, proceeded through the streets of Damascus.

The twenty-nine-year-old commander-in-chief of the greatest army that had been raised in Arabia for five centuries, who in less than a year had made himself the most important man in Arabia since the days of the great Calif Harun al Rashid, made his official entry into this ancient capital of the old Arabian Empire at seven o’clock on the morning of October 31. The entire population, together with tens of thousands of Bedouins from the fringes of the desert, packed the “street that is called straight” as Lawrence entered the gate, dressed in the garb of a prince of Mecca. All realized that at last their glorious city had been freed from the Turkish yoke. Howling dervishes ran in front of him, dancing and sticking knives into their flesh, while behind him came his flying column of picturesque Arabian knights. For months they had heard of the exploits of Shereef Lawrence, but now for the first time they saw the mysterious Englishman who had united the desert tribes and driven the Turks from Arabia. As they saw him come swinging along through the bazaars on the back of his camel, it seemed as though all the people of Damascus shouted his name and Feisal’s in one joyful chorus. For ten miles and more along the streets of this, the oldest city in the world that still remains standing, the crowds gave the young Englishman one of the greatest ovations ever given to any man. Dr. John Finley, of the American Red Cross, who came north with Allenby, said, in describing it, that “there were scenes of joy and ecstasy such as may never be witnessed on this earth again. The bazaars were lined with hundreds of thousands of people. The ‘street that is called straight’ was so packed that the horses and camels could hardly squirm through. The housetops were crowded. The people hung priceless Oriental carpets from their balconies and showered Lawrence and his companions with silken head-cloths, flowers and attar of roses.”

Fortunately for the Arabs, Allenby had ordered Light Horse Harry Chauvel to hold his Australians back and let Feisal’s advance-guard enter the city first, and Allenby also had not given any arbitrary orders regarding the establishment of a temporary government in Damascus. So Lawrence was astute enough to see to it that representatives of the Arabian army entered just ahead of the British, thereby giving Emir Feisal first possession.

Colonel Lawrence remained in Damascus only four days. But during that time he was the virtual ruler of the city, and one of his first moves was to visit the tomb of Saladin, where the kaiser, back in 1898, had placed a satin flag and a bronze laurel wreath inscribed in Turkish and Arabic: “From one great emperor to another.” The wreath and inscription adorned with the Prussian eagle had irritated Lawrence on his pre-war visits to Damascus, and early in the campaign, when they were far south at Yenbo, Lawrence and Feisal had vowed that they would not forget Saladin’s tomb. The bronze wreath now adorns the office of the curator of the British War Museum, while the kaiser’s flag returned with me to America.

During Lawrence’s brief rule of Damascus, the kaleidoscopic bazaars of that most orthodox of all Oriental cities were seething with excitement. Only his intimate acquaintance with the personal caprices of the conspirators behind the innumerable intrigues and counter-intrigues made it possible for him to control the situation. Even then there were thrilling incidents and danger from assassins.

On November 2 a riot broke out in Damascus, a disturbance that might easily have blossomed into a counter-revolution. The moving spirit in it was an Algerian emir, one Abd el Keder, who had long been an arch-enemy of King Hussein and his sons. This blackguard was the grandson of the celebrated Emir Abd el Keder, who for many years had fought the French in Algiers and, when finally defeated, had fled to Damascus. His two grandsons, Emir Muhammed Said and Emir Abd el Keder, played an unsavory part in the war in the Near East. The former served as an agent of the Germans and Turks in Africa, where he exhorted the Senussi of the Sahara to invade Egypt, while his younger and even more truculent brother, Abd el Keder, as a super-spy for Enver Pasha, joined the Shereefian army. A mock escape from Constantinople gave Abd el Keder all the alibi needed for him to get into the good graces of the Arabs, and when he arrived across the desert at Feisal’s headquarters in Akaba he posed as an Arab Nationalist. In fact, so plausible and eloquent was he, and so seemingly genuine were the promises of coöperation which he made, that even King Hussein welcomed him to Mecca and gave him an honorary title.

Then when Allenby launched his first great drive which resulted in the capture of Beersheba, Gaza, Jerusalem, and Jericho, Lawrence was asked to coöperate by destroying an important railway bridge between the Turkish army and its Damascus base. It so happened that Abd el Keder was the feudal lord controlling much of the region round about the bridge, and when Feisal discussed the project with him he at once begged to be allowed to take part in the raid. But after accompanying Lawrence on his trek north for many days, until the party was actually within a few miles of the bridge, Abd el Keder and his cavalcade of followers galloped off in the desert night and delivered the details of Lawrence’s plan to the German and Turkish staff. Although this left him with only a few men, Lawrence nevertheless made a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to destroy the bridge, an adventure from which he barely escaped with his life.

The Turks at first suspected their Algerian spy of double-crossing them and of really having turned pro-Arab, but they finally released him and then showered him with honors. Later on, when Allenby made his last great drive toward Damascus, Abd el Keder was sent among the Syrian villagers to cajole them into remaining loyal to their Ottoman rulers. But when the cunning Algerian and his brother saw that the Turkish retreat was degenerating into adébâcle, their enthusiasm for their friends, Enver, Talaat, and Djemal, vanished, and they galloped to Damascus several hours ahead of Allenby and Lawrence, hurriedly organized an Arab civil government with themselves as the heads, and prepared a triumphal welcome for the approaching British and Hedjaz armies. But, naturally, they were a bit nonplussed to find the victors led by Colonel Lawrence, who peremptorily ordered them to resign and then appointed men of Emir Feisal’s choice in their stead. This so upset and enraged the intriguing brothers that they drew their weapons and would have attacked Lawrence had the others present at the council not disarmed them. Then these two unpleasant but immensely rich Algerian emirs collected together the members of their own personal body-guard, who were mainly exiles like themselves, and paraded through the streets making impassioned speeches denouncing Emir Feisal and King Hussein as puppets of Lawrence and the British. They called upon the Damascenes to strike a blow for the faith and launch a new rebellion. Rioting soon broke out, and it took Lawrence’s men six hours to clear the town. The rioting soon degenerated into pure looting, and it was necessary for Lawrence, General Nuri Pasha, Shukri Ayubi, and the other leaders of the Shereefian force to resort to machine-gunning in the central square of Damascus and impose peace by force, after killing and wounding a score or more. The two turbulent Algerian emirs managed to hide, and for a month they kept under cover, while they planned a new rebellion. But Abd el Keder’s restless and impulsive spirit got the better of his discretion, and in a moment of passion he seized his rifle, leaped on his charger, and galloped down to Feisal’s palace, shouting for Feisal to come out and fight him, and then started shooting. So persistent was he that one of the Arab sentries, who had taken to cover, sent a rifle-ball through his head and thus abruptly ended the adventures of the Algerian emir.

After the fall of Damascus, the combined British and Arabian forces occupied the Syrian seaport of Beyrouth, where the famous American university is located that has done so much to inoculate the Near East with the spirit of democracy. Here an incident occurred that warned the Arabs of the diplomatic troubles ahead of them. As in the case of Damascus, the Shereefian forces, through the local people, took over the reins of government, but a few days later a French representative (accompanied by a British officer) came along and demanded that the Arab flag be hauled down from the town-hall so that the French tricolor could be raised in its stead. Whereupon the Arab governor laid his pistol on the table and said: “There is my revolver. You may shoot me if you like, but I will not take down the flag!” However, after another three days Allenby wired that no flag at all should fly over Beyrouth, and that a French officer should rule the city in the name of all the Allies. From that date the Arabs had to fight an all-uphill battle on the field of diplomacy to keep from losing what they had fought for on the field of war. And once again their champion was young Lawrence.

From Beyrouth the united British and Arab forces pushed on north to Baalbek, the City of the Sun, where, in the days of the decline of the Roman Empire, men had erected the mightiest temple on earth, the columns of which still remain one of the wonders of the world.

Still unsatisfied, Allenby’s armored cars and Feisal’s racing camelmen under the dashing Arab general, Nuri Said, swept on north until they had driven the Turks out of Aleppo, one of the most important strategical points in the East, so far as the Great War was concerned. And then, if the Turks had not put down their arms, they would have been driven north into the Golden Horn.

When Allenby and Lawrence captured Damascus and Aleppo and then cut the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway, the dream of the kaiser and the Junkers for a Mitteleuropa reaching from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf vanished into thin air!

When Turkey threw in her lot with the kaiser, she asserted that she could mobilize an army of over a million men. But of that million some fifty per cent were of Arab stock, and from the outbreak of the Arabian revolution to the final collapse of Turkey it is estimated that approximately four hundred thousand of them deserted! The phenomenal number of desertions was due mainly to two factors: the Arab Nationalist propaganda which Lawrence and his associates had spread throughout the Near East, and the brilliant success of the Arabian revolution. In fact, the desertions alone more than repaid the Allies for backing the Shereefian cause.

In our swift journey north from Akaba to Aleppo with Lawrence, we have made no reference to the sacred city of Medina and the fate of the important Turkish garrison there. Although Holy Arabia was now no longer under Turkish rule, Ottoman forces still occupied the city famed for the tomb of the Prophet. To be sure, Feisal’s brother, Emir Abdullah, had long kept it surrounded with an army; and indeed the fact that the Turks had managed to hold on to Medina had proved to be one of the blessings of Allah for the Arabs because all of the supplies required by the garrison were shipped down across the desert from Syria, and Lawrence had seen to it that a very considerable part went to the Arabs instead of the intended destination. In fact Lawrence’s crop of tulips, planted along the Damascus-Medina railway, had brought forth a bountiful harvest of Turkish food-supplies, ammunition, and other military stores.

In explaining the reason for not driving the Turks out of Medina, writing in “The Army Quarterly,” Colonel Lawrence said: “. . . we were so weak physically that we could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. We had won a province when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom; the presence or absence of the enemy was a secondary matter.

“These reasonings showed me that the idea of assaulting Medina, or even starving it quickly into surrender, was not in accord with our best strategy. We wanted the enemy to stay in Medina and in every other harmless place in the largest numbers. The factor of food would eventually confine him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hedjaz railway, and the trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and Damascus and Aleppo railways, for the duration of the war, so long as he gave us the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world. If he showed a disposition to evacuate too soon, as a step to concentrating in the small area which his numbers would dominate effectively, then we would have to try and restore his confidence, not harshly, but by reducing our enterprises against him. Our ideal was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort to him.”

In fact, so little of what was sent down from Syria ever reached the garrison that for months prior to the Armistice this isolated Turkish force in Medina had been reduced to a diet of nothing but dates, gathered from the palms for which the oasis is celebrated. Even the roofs of all the houses in the city had been torn down and used for fuel. But still the garrison would not give in, for the commander, Fakhri-ed-din, was a courageous, determined, stubborn, and fanatical general.

Even when the news reached him that the combined British and Arab armies had captured Damascus and Aleppo, and the Turkish forces in Syria had been completely overwhelmed and compelled to sign an armistice, and even though Fakhri Pasha knew that it was futile for him to attempt to hold out any longer, since the war was all over and he and his garrison were isolated in the midst of the desert a thousand miles from Constantinople, still this Turkish tiger refused to acknowledge defeat.

Days went by, and then weeks elapsed. The Medina garrison was now reduced to worse straits than the British at Kut-el-Amara before the surrender of Townsend. Of the twenty thousand men who had made up the defending force, less than eleven thousand now remained. But still Fakhri Pasha swore on the Koran that rather than surrender to the Arabs and British he would blow up the Tomb of Mohammed and wipe out himself and all of his men. The British even guaranteed Fakhri that he and his troops would be protected from any possible rapacity of the Bedouin, but still the old tiger stood like adamant.

His troops, however, were not so fanatical and longed to get back to their homes in Anatolia. So they finally mutinied, arrested their gallant commander-in-chief, and surrendered the city to Emir Abdullah on January 10, 1919, months after the war was all over. Surely the name of General Fakhri-ed-din deserves a high place in Turkish history; for generations to come Arab mothers of Medina will use it as a means of hushing their babes.

After the dramatic surrender of Medina, Fakhri Pasha was no longer heard of in the Near East and seemed to have completely vanished from the picture. But sometime afterward, when we were traveling in little known parts of Central Asia, I encountered the defender of Medina in the city of Kabul, at the court of the emir of Afghanistan. He apparently had lost none of his fire, and in his capacity of Turkish ambassador to the Afghans was reported to be doing his utmost to keep the emir of Afghanistan from becoming friendly with the British in India.

If Turkey had a million fighting men with the fighting spirit of Fakhri-ed-din, she not only could regain all of her old provinces but could conquer the Near East and build up an empire that would surpass the ancient glory of the Great Moguls.

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