Winterton worried about security: almost as soon as they had arrived at Azraq a Turkish plane had appeared, though it seemed unlikely that they had been spotted. Lawrence knew that the assembly of the raiding force in Azraq could not go unreported to the Turks, but he was confident that the enemy would never venture across the desert to attack them there. Neither could the Turks be sure where they would strike or when it would be. Lawrence had cleverly sent cash to Mithqal of the Bani Sakhr with ‘top secret’ instructions to buy barley for a combined British and Arab surprise attack on as-Salt and Amman on 18 September. He knew that word would instantly be leaked to the Turks, who would spread their defensive resources thinly from Amman to Dara’a. The idea of a direct attack on Dara’a had been abandoned because of the paucity of Rwalla levies, and replaced by a strategy of encirclement in which the strike force would cut the railway to the north, south and west. Without its railway, the Dara’a garrison – only 500 strong – would choke to death. At dawn on 13 September, Peake and Scott-Higgins mounted their camels and led their combined troops of Egyptian sappers and Gurkhas silently through the maze of basalt boulders and across the glistening slicks of the Gian al-Khunna. Two armoured cars rumbled after them in support. Their task was to demolish the tracks and bridges south of Mafraq – a raid which the Turks would probably interpret as a prelude to a strike at Amman. The Gurkhas were to assault the station, while Peake’s sappers cut the railway, and the entire force was to pull out at first light, covered by the armoured cars.
Next day the main body – almost 1,000 strong – set off into the lava, the camels grumbling and stumbling their way through the stones. Nuri as-Sa id rode a horse at the head of the Arab regulars, while Joyce commanded the remaining armoured car and tenders which bounced over the harra behind. Young, riding a mule, fell into line with Pisani’s mule-mounted gunners, whose Napoleons were stripped and lashed to the broad backs of their mounts. ‘I tried to forget that we were absolutely in the air,’ he wrote, ‘with no communications and no possible way of getting back.’10 Nuri was more at ease, and recalled that Lawrence’s ‘Plan B’ was to hide out in the lava maze of Jabal Druze for the winter if the mission failed, living off the land. A cavalry screen of Nuri’ash-Sha’alan’s picked riders trotted swiftly about their flanks, and a Bristol fighter flown by Lieutenant Murphy soared out of the clear blue bell of the desert sky, heading for Umm al-Jamal where it later took on a German plane and sent it crashing into the desert in flames. That night they camped amid pickets on the Gian, and the following morning ran into Peake’s assault team, returning disconsolately from Mafraq. The railway strike had failed – indeed, it had not been put in at all. Peake’s force had run into a band of Bedu whom the Turks paid to defend the railway, and while a political officer might easily have managed to turn them, Lawrence had neglected to attach one to the group. Peake and Scott-Higgins had been chary of fighting Arabs, and had turned back. When Lawrence arrived that morning from Azraq in his Rolls-Royce tender ‘Blue Mist’, driven by S. C. Rolls, he was absolutely furious that the job had not been completed, and instead of sending Peake back for a second go, decided to take the armoured cars and do it himself.
On the 15th, Lawrence left the main body at Umm Tayeh – a deserted Roman village with a large water-cistern, which was to be the kicking-off point for the operation – and, with Joyce and Winterton, drove off towards the railway at Mafraq with two tenders and two armoured cars. They raced across the Hauran plain and in the early afternoon sighted their target – a four-arched bridge near a fort at Kilometre 149. The two tenders were left with Joyce beyond a ridge. Winterton’s car drove boldly to the fort and opened up on it with burst upon burst of tracer from its heavy Vickers. The place was defended by a handful of men in an entrenchment, and to the surprise of the British crews they suddenly jumped out of their trenches and advanced towards the car in open order: ‘Not knowing whether they were expected to run away or surrender, 5 as Rolls put it, ‘[they] got up out of their trenches to inquire.’11 Lawrence surmised later that in fact the cars had appeared so quickly that the Turks believed they belonged to friendly forces. Winterton’s gunner mowed them down mercilessly with another stuttering burst, while Lawrence, in the second car, approached the bridge, his Vickers ripping off a drum at its four guards. Two were killed, and the others surrendered. Lawrence took their rifles and sent them up to Joyce on the ridge. Almost at the same moment the fort surrendered to Winterton: the action had lasted five long minutes.
The peace would not last, though, for Joyce and Rolls, on the ridge, had spotted a Turkish camel-mounted patrol closing on them fast. They drove to Lawrence’s position with more gun-cotton, and helped him set the charges, running back and forth from the cars to the bridge. They set six charges in the drainage-holes of the spandrils, fired them, and withdrew hastily, before the enemy patrol arrived. In seconds there was a terrific blast, which shattered each of the four arches thoroughly. The cars turned towards their base and sped off with the prisoners thrown on the back, but only 300 yards from the railway Blue Mist shuddered to a halt with a broken spring-bracket. The enemy would be on them within ten minutes. The resourceful Rolls leapt out of the driver’s seat and began jacking up the wheel, almost in tears over the potential loss of his beautiful Rolls-Royce. The team was now under fire, and Rolls worked desperately, bathed in sweat. Almost miraculously, he managed to bodge together some lengths of running-board which Lawrence shot off with a pistol and snapped off by hand, and lashed them to the broken spring with telegraph wire. Rolls packed up the jack and tried the suspension cautiously. Incredibly, it held, and as bullets began to ping off the stones around them, Lawrence and Joyce hastily cleared a track, jumped into the car and drove off, jerking and bouncing as fast as Rolls dared, back towards Umm Tayeh. There, they found that Nuri as-Said and the main force had already left for Tel Arar. They stayed at Umm Tayeh for the night to repair the tender as well as they could, and on the 17th, confident that the railway had been cut for a week, they set off to catch up with the assault force.
They overtook the main column at eight o’clock in the morning, just as Nuri was deploying the regulars to assault the redoubt at Tel ‘Arar, five miles north of Dara’a, which was manned by twenty Turks. A squadron of Rwalla horse under Trad ash-Sha’alan dashed magnificently down to the line and hesitated there, thinking it easily taken. Nuri and Young drove down in a Ford tender, and were just enjoying a snort of whisky to celebrate when a Turkish machine-gun crackled up from the redoubt, and an officer in a nightshirt came charging towards them shouting and waving a sabre, like an apparition. For a moment the two officers looked at him, shocked, then, realizing that the garrison at the fort had merely been asleep, Nuri drew his pistol and shot at their assailant, while Young, who was unarmed, rushed to fetch the French artillery. Pisani’s gunners quickly set up their Napoleons and silenced the fort’s defenders with a rapid fusillade of shells. Then the Rwalla horse, with the regulars in support, rushed in and captured it. Nuri, Lawrence and Joyce climbed to the crest of a hill to survey the town of Dara’a and the stations of Mezerib and Ghazala to the north and west of it. The next step was to lay 600 charges on the railway, which Lawrence estimated would completely wreck four miles of track and knock traffic out for a week. After breakfast, the Egyptian sappers and the Algerian gunners began to plaster the tracks with tulip mines. As they deployed along the tracks, Lawrence examined Dara’a aerodrome with his binoculars and was disturbed to see that no less than nine aircraft were being hauled out of their hangars by the German teams. Lawrence’s men had no air cover: Murphy’s Bristol had been badly holed in its clash with a German at Umm al-Jamal, and had retired to Azraq for repair. Lawrence watched Peake’s men labouring on the line below, wondering if they could lay their 600 charges before the planes arrived. Suddenly, the first tulip went up with a noise like a thunderclap and a long plume of black smoke. Almost at once, a Pfalz spotter-plane soared over the hill, sending Lawrence and Nuri scrambling for cover. Moments l
ater two big Albatross bombers and four Haberstadt scouts droned out of Dara’a, circling, diving, strafing them with machine-gun fire, and releasing payloads of bombs, which kicked up V-shaped wedges of debris across the plain. In the Arab ranks there was pandemonium: ‘we scattered in all directions,’ Rolls recalled, ‘I hastily crawled beneath my tender … bombs crashed down, sending up columns of smoke and earth.’12 Desperately, Nuri placed his Hotchkiss-gunners in cracks on the hillside and soon patterns of tracer were stitching themselves across the sky, forcing the aircraft higher, out of range. Pisani had his Napoleons swivelled up and blatted shells uselessly at the climbing planes. On the railway, the Egyptian sappers went on laying their charges as methodically as ants, and at that moment the second Bristol fighter from Azraq, flown by Lieutenant Junor, cruised defiantly into the midst of the German planes. The Albatrosses and Halberstadts left off their strafing and bombing, and roared off in pursuit. This gave the Arabs a momentary respite, and Lawrence immediately organized a detachment to ride out and cut the Palestine branch of the railway at Mezerib, to complete the isolation of Dara’a. Half an hour later, just as he and his bodyguard were swinging into the saddle, Junor’s Bristol came stuttering back towards them with the Germans buzzing around her like a swarm of bees. Lawrence and Young both realized that she was almost out of fuel. Young yelled to the men to clear a landing-strip. While the others watched impotently, the plane lost height quickly, bounced along the makeshift runway, hit a boulder and pitched heavily over on to her back. Junor leapt out of the crushed cockpit, unhitched his Lewis gun, his Vickers and some drums of tracer, and rushed for the car which Young had considerately driven up to collect him. A second later a Halberstadt came in low and scored a direct hit with a bomb on the wrecked Bristol, which erupted into flames.
At once Lawrence mounted his camel and headed towards Mezerib with Nuri as-Sa’id and his men, leaving only 100 regulars, the Gurkhas, the Rwalla, and the armoured cars with Joyce at Tel Arar. He had been hoping that the caravan would look like a troop of Bedu, but very quickly the German planes were out again, sweeping in with exquisite slowness and loosing four bombs in the direction of the running camels. The first three missed, but the fourth struck right into their midst, with an ear-splitting crack, knocking over two of Lawrence’s bodyguard and badly mauling their mounts. The two men picked themselves up and swarmed on to their companions’ saddles, just as another plane honed in and let fly a brace of bombs, the shock of which spun Lawrence’s camel round and almost jerked him out of his saddle. He felt a terrible burning sensation in his elbow, the pain of which brought tears to his eyes. For a horrific moment he thought his arm had been blown clean off, but removing a fold of his cloak, he saw that he had been hit by a shred of shrapnel too small to do any real damage.
Nuri’s regulars, with their machine-gunners and artillery, took the first of Mezerib’s two stations within half an hour. Young and Lawrence climbed on the roof and cut the telegraph wires: ‘Slowly, with ceremony,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to draw out the indignation.’13 Then, while Nuri’s men broached the second station, they turned their attention to the railway. Young began planting tulips along the tracks to the east while Lawrence blew the points in the station itself: ‘I had planted a dozen [tulips] when something made me look along the line to Dara’a,’ wrote Young, ‘and my heart stood still, for a train was crawling slowly out of the town towards Mezerib.’14 Young’s first thought was to warn Lawrence, and he ran back to the station shouting that a train was coming.
‘A plane?’ Lawrence asked.
‘Not a plane, you damned fool,’ Young cried. ‘A train!’
Lawrence answered calmly that it was time to light the charges, and Young sprinted back towards the oncoming train, fumbled for a taper and found he had none. Instead, he lit a cigarette, quickly ignited the fuses, and finally leapt on to his camel to make his escape, quite forgetting that he had hobbled her. The camel stumbled: Young half fell, half jumped out of the saddle and ‘ran like hell’. The tulips puffed smoke, cracked off one by one, and the train immediately reversed gear and pulled back to Dara’a. At sunset, after the Arabs had looted the station thoroughly, Lawrence and Young set fire to the rolling stock and torched two Turkish trucks.
They rested a little while at Mezerib, where thousands of Hauran peasants turned out to join them, and during the night Lawrence and Young marched to within a few hundred yards of the bridge at Tel ash-Shehab, which he had failed to take with Sharif ‘Ali earlier in the year. The bridge seemed to be charmed, however, for now it was defended by a German artillery battery, and once again Lawrence was forced to retire. The railway had been wrecked, to the south, east and north of Dara’a, and the Turkish garrison was cut off. The mission had been a success, and all that remained was the exfiltration. In the morning, they caught up with Nuri’s party at Ramtha and began to withdraw to Umm Tayeh to rendezvous with Joyce and the armoured cars. The march back proved nerve-racking. The Germans were behind them, and ahead of them, on the railway, they might find reinforcements from Amman. The peasants at Ramtha seemed hostile, and any moment the patrol might be attacked by air. Lawrence cantered ahead with his bodyguard to mine the railway near Nasib, which lay on their line of retreat. Nuri put in a full bombardment on the station there, intending to keep Turkish heads down while the Arabs crossed the metals, and to draw the sentries from the bridge while Lawrence laid on it a whacking charge of 800 pounds of gun-cotton. After dark, the entire detachment crawled across the line unseen, covered by the roar of Pisani’s guns. When the artillery had been safely brought across, Lawrence touched off his charge: ‘There was a deafening roar,’ wrote Young, ‘and a blaze which lit up the country for miles. By its light I saw the abutment arch of the bridge sheared clean off and the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below.’15 Within a mile of the tracks they made camp, but were woken up with a shock at first light by a shell which exploded nearby. In the night, the Turks had cunningly brought up a field-gun mounted on a railway wagon and had ranged it with their spotter plane. The Arabs mounted their camels and trotted quickly out of range. Later the same day they met up with Joyce at Umm Tayeh, and on 19 September Lawrence returned to Azraq by car. The following day he flew to GHQ, now at Ramleh in Palestine, to collect orders and discover the outcome of Allenby’s advance.
As Young and Kirkbride were frying sausages for breakfast on 22 September at Umm Surab, just south of Umm Tayeh, Lawrence reappeared with three aircraft, to be followed the same afternoon by a Handley-Page bomber which landed stores, raising Arab morale with its huge dimensions. The news from the Palestine front was electrifying: Nablus, Haifa, Afuleh, Beisan and Samakh had fallen, 22,000 prisoners had been captured, and the Turkish 4th Army from Amman had been ordered to fall back on Dara’a and Damascus. The Turks were on the run, and Lawrence’s raiders were to hamper them and cut off the retreat. It would be the most dangerous mission they had undertaken so far. The Turks numbered tens of thousands, were fully equipped with artillery and machine-guns, and were desperate; the Arab force, by comparison, was a flea: ‘I noticed with pride,’ Winterton wrote, ‘but not without apprehension … that Lawrence fully intended that we should worry the retreating Turks as mastiffs of old worried a bear in the ring, oblivious of the possible consequences.’16 Though Lawrence had estimated that the railway would be out for a week, the Turks had managed to get it back into service with astonishing speed. Lawrence was to keep up the pressure on it, to raise the peasant tribes of the northern Hauran at long last. His force would be increased by 3,000 of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s Rwalla camelry who had been waiting in the wings at Azraq. The next day, Nuri as-Sa’id and his regulars, with Young, Stirling and Winterton in the armoured cars, and Nuri ash-Sha’alan at the head of his Rwalla, hit the railway at Kilometre 149, where Lawrence and Joyce had previously destroyed the bridge. They wrecked two-thirds of a mile of line and burned the scaffolding with which the bridge had been repaired. This was the final blow to the Turks’ railway ef
forts, and afterwards they gave up: the Amman garrison began to move to Dara’a on foot with all its artillery and transport. Lawrence did not yet know this, however, and on the 24th he, Winterton and an Arab officer called Jamil set off in the armoured cars to demolish another bridge south of Mafraq. Winterton was reluctant to join the mission, suspecting that it was unnecessary and that Lawrence was now fighting purely for fighting’s sake. They came to a bridge and a blockhouse, and when Lawrence went forward in a car to examine the target, a machine-gun and a seven-pound field-gun blasted out at them from the fort. The armoured car commander was wary of challenging artillery, and Lawrence suggested confidently to Winterton that they should each take a Lewis gun out of the cars, creep up on the blockhouse and scourge it with enfilade fire, while the cars opened up from the front. Winterton thought Lawrence had gone crazy: ‘How on earth,’ he asked, ‘are we going to get into range without being killed? … They’ll spot us and blow us to blazes … who ever heard of taking a blockhouse with a Lewis gun?’ Lawrence inquired if His Lordship had developed ‘cold feet’. ‘Certainly not, sir,’ Winterton said. ‘But all I can say is that if this extraordinary proposal succeeds and we survive we shall both be entitled to the VC.’17 This gave Lawrence a moment’s thought, and he decided to revert to his original plan and rush the fort with the armoured cars, with the intention of getting a car under the bridge, and setting a charge while in its protection. They rolled forward under heavy fire with bullets clattering against their armour, and shells bursting about them, when a Turkish soldier popped up behind Lawrence’s car and lobbed a grenade. Lawrence knew the car was vulnerable to grenades and that a direct shot to the gun-cotton in the back would tear them all to pieces. Suddenly Winterton’s driver informed him that Lawrence’s car was reversing out of action.
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