More details were provided in a letter Alan Dawnay had sent to Lieutenant Colonel Joyce. By the previous evening, the British cavalry had already begun turning inland from their charge up the coast, leaving the enemy units in Palestine in imminent danger of being encircled. “The whole Turkish army is in the net,” Dawnay exulted, “and every bolt-hole closed except, possibly, that east of the Jordan by way of the Yarmuk valley. If the Arabs can close this, too—and close it in time—then not a man or gun or wagon ought to escape. Some victory!”
As Lawrence plainly put it in Seven Pillars, “the face of our war was changed.”
Also changed, naturally, were the prior battle plans drawn up for the Azraq force, the pace of events now rendering them obsolete. That afternoon, Lawrence boarded the RFC plane for its return to Palestine and an urgent meeting with General Allenby’s staff.
As Lawrence learned at headquarters, and as Allenby had alluded in his note to Faisal, the goal now was not to defeat the Turkish army—that had already been achieved—but to destroy it completely. To that end, even as the left flank of the British army continued its northern advance, three other columns were to cut east across the Jordan River in order to roll up the inland Syrian towns along the Hejaz Railway and, ultimately, close on Damascus. The linchpin was, as always, Deraa, the one spot where all the Turkish units fleeing east from Palestine and all those still to the south might converge and perhaps sufficiently regroup to make a stand. To forestall that, headquarters impressed on Lawrence, there was one thing the Arabs must do—permanently sever the rail line south of Deraa—and one thing they absolutely must not do: make a dash for Damascus.
This latter point had already been stressed in Alan Dawnay’s letter to Joyce in Azraq (with Joyce temporarily away, Lawrence had opened and read it). “Use all your restraining influence,” Dawnay had ordered Joyce, “and get Lawrence to do the same, to prevent Faisal from any act of rashness in the north.… The situation is completely in our hands to mold now, so Faisal need have no fear of being carted, provided he will trust us and be patient. Only let him no on account move north without first consulting General Allenby—that would be the fatal error.”
British concern was quite understandable. For nearly two years, Lawrence had been counseling Faisal that the only sure way for the Arabs to stake claim to Damascus was to get there first; this assertion had appeared to be further confirmed by Mark Sykes’s recent open letter to the “Seven Syrians.” As a result, the temptation for Faisal to drop the Deraa operations and make a dash for Damascus might prove an irresistible one. During Lawrence’s brief sojourn at headquarters, Allenby’s senior advisors repeatedly emphasized that Arab loyalty at this crucial juncture would be well compensated—apparently even implying that Faisal would be allowed to establish a government in Damascus.
Armed with these assurances, and with the Arabs’ new orders of battle in hand, Lawrence flew back to Azraq the next morning. Over the following two days, a host of Arab bands, along with British armored car units, descended on the Hejaz Railway below Deraa to render it damaged beyond repair for the foreseeable future. Already, however, the worry that the retreating Turkish armies might recover enough to make a stand in Deraa seemed far-fetched; the enemy was now in full and panicked rout, their soldiers so stunned by the speed of events that they could think of little more than personal escape. Indeed, so rapid was the Turkish disintegration that by September 25, Lawrence was able to report to headquarters that there were probably only four thousand Turkish soldiers left in all the inland garrison towns below Deraa, most of the rest having passed through Deraa and kept on going in the direction of Damascus.
But in keeping with the broadened goal of destroying the Turkish army utterly, Lawrence saw an opportunity; if Deraa wasn’t to be a Turkish rallying point, it could now be turned into a killing field. As he tersely commented in his September 25 report in describing the enemy units trying to reach Damascus, “I want to stop that.”
To do so, on the twenty-sixth he directed a number of the Arab warriors to make for a small village in the foothills just twelve miles northwest of Deraa called Sheikh Saad. From there, the rebels would enjoy a commanding view of what was transpiring both in Deraa and on the road to Damascus, and also be able to monitor any retreating Turkish units coming up out of the Yarmuk gorge from Palestine.
Lawrence soon had reason to congratulate himself on the move. That same afternoon, scouts spotted a small mixed German and Turkish force coming up the Yarmuk road, “hopeless but carefree, marching at ease, thinking themselves fifty miles from any war.” Walking heedlessly into a hastily prepared Arab ambush, the unit was soon overwhelmed. As Lawrence noted, “Sheikh Saad was paying soon, and well.”
That was just a foretaste. The next morning, and with a British army now coming up the Yarmuk, the Turks remaining in and around Deraa prepared to abandon their positions as well. Word reached Lawrence that some four thousand enemy soldiers were about to set out from Deraa on the main Damascus road, while another two thousand were pulling out of a nearby town. This latter column was taking an overland shortcut that would bring them through the village of Tafas, just six miles below Sheikh Saad. As Lawrence drily commented in Seven Pillars, “The nearer two thousand seemed more our size.”
ON THE AFTERNOON of September 23, the Mediterranean city of Haifa was captured from the Turks by an Indian army cavalry unit. Arriving that evening, William Yale arranged for lodging in a private home, then decided to take a stroll through the city’s deserted old quarter.
At the start of World War I, most all the warring powers had horse-mounted cavalry that still carried lances as part of their complement of weaponry. By 1918, nearly all such cavalries had discarded the lance as anachronistic in the age of the machine gun and warplane, but not so the Indian army. That afternoon, they had employed it to deadly effect in the narrow back streets of Haifa’s old quarter, running down and impaling terrified Turkish soldiers as they tried to flee. Everywhere Yale walked lay the dead.
“In the silent lonely streets,” he recalled, “under a brilliant moon, the bodies of these Turkish soldiers seemed strangely out of place, for the peace and calm of an Oriental night covered this part of the city.”
But it takes remarkably little time for the average person to become desensitized to the horror of war, and in this William Yale was to prove no exception. The following day, only his sixth on the battlefield, he and Major de Sambouy were driving down the Palestine coastal road when they began passing column after column of Turkish prisoners being marched off to internment camps. In their wake were scores of prisoners who had collapsed, too exhausted or ill to go on. Of these men being left behind to die in the sun, neither their comrades nor their Indian captors took any notice, and neither did Yale or his traveling companion. “It was not our affair and we had a long day’s journey ahead of us,” he would write. “It never occurred to me that we were heartlessly callous and unconcerned. We didn’t even think of stopping to take an extra passenger or two.”
THEY CAME UPON the first survivors hiding in the tall grass of a meadow just outside Tafas. Traumatized and speaking in hushed whispers, the villagers told of the atrocities the Turkish soldiers had begun perpetrating immediately upon entering Tafas just an hour before. Continuing on, Lawrence and the Arab vanguard soon found evidence of this; here and there, bodies lay amid the meadow grass, “embracing the ground in the close way of corpses.”
Suddenly, a little girl of three or four popped into view, her smock drenched in blood from a gash by her neck. “The child ran a few steps,” Lawrence recalled, “then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), ‘Don’t hit me, Baba.’ ” A moment later, the girl collapsed, presumably dead.
None of this prepared for the scene in Tafas’s streets. Everywhere were bodies, many hideously mutilated, girls and women obviously raped before their dispatch. In particular, Lawrence was to remember the sight of a naked pregnant woman, bent over a low wal
l and grotesquely impaled by a saw bayonet; around her lay some twenty others, “variously killed, but set out in accord with an obscene taste.”
By bad coincidence, one of the tribal sheikhs who had accompanied Lawrence during the previous two weeks and who now rode alongside him was Talal el Hareidhin, the headman of Tafas. As Lawrence would recount in his official report of the incident, at the sight of his ruined village, Talal “gave a horrible cry, wrapped his headcloth about his face, put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring [Turkish] column and fell, himself and his mare, riddled with machine gun bullets among their lance points.”
In consultation with Auda Abu Tayi, who had also ridden into Tafas that morning, Lawrence commanded his lieutenants that no prisoners should be taken—or, as he put it more eloquently in Seven Pillars, “ ‘the best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.’ ”
What ensued over that long day of September 27 was a merciless and one-sided slaughter. Quite quickly, the attacking Arabs separated the fleeing Turkish column of two thousand into three isolated sections, then set to annihilating them one by one; any Turkish or German soldier who fell out wounded or tried to surrender was swiftly cut down. Soon the pursuing Arabs were joined by villagers along the way, eager to strike against their oppressors of the past four years—and perhaps just as eager to strip their bodies of valuables. Even by the standards of massacre, this one took on an especially macabre edge. “There lay on us a madness,” Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, “born of the horror of Tafas or of its story, so that we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake the agony in our brains.”
It grew worse. By chance, one of the Arab reserve columns had missed the “no quarter” order, and when a doubling-back Lawrence came upon this unit just before nightfall, he found they had taken some 250 Turkish and German soldiers captive. According to his Seven Pillars account, Lawrence was “not unwilling” to let this group live, until he was led over to a dying Arab warrior gruesomely pinioned to the ground by German bayonets, “like a collected insect.” As Lawrence would state in his official report, written just days after the incident, “then we turned our Hotchkiss [machine gun] on the prisoners and made an end of them, they saying nothing.”
All night and into the following days the slaughter went on, the panicked and exhausted prey becoming divided into smaller and smaller groups until they were quite defenseless against their attackers, a fortunate few taken prisoner, many more summarily put to death. By the time the last stragglers approached the outskirts of Damascus two days later, the estimated six thousand Turkish and German soldiers who had set out from the Deraa area on September 27 had been reduced to fewer than two thousand.
Lawrence didn’t partake of this further massacre. Instead, late that night, he turned back for his command post in Sheikh Saad and then, at dawn, made for the town of his past torments: Deraa. By his account in Seven Pillars, the time he spent there was rather anticlimactic, especially when placed against the horrific events of Tafas. An Arab force had swept into Deraa the previous afternoon and, after rounding up those few Turkish soldiers who remained, spent the interim in the time-honored tradition of looting and pillaging. In quick order, Lawrence managed to stem the anarchy, placing armed guards over what remained of the railyard and its worksheds and helping with the appointment of a governor and police force. Indeed, by Lawrence’s telling, the greatest challenge he faced in Deraa that day was heading off the bellicose ambitions of General George Barrow, the commander of the British army that had just finished its climb out of the Yarmuk gorge.
In Seven Pillars, Barrow comes off as a distinctly buffoonish figure, one whose comeuppance began the moment Lawrence came out of Deraa on the western road to greet him. To the general’s plan of imposing calm in the town by posting pickets throughout, Lawrence “explained gently” that calm had already been established by the newly appointed Arab governor. When Barrow then insisted his men take possession of the Deraa railway station, Lawrence assented, but with the rather haughty request that the British not interfere with the railroad’s functioning, since the Arabs had already cleared the line and were readying a train for travel. “Barrow,” Lawrence wrote, “who had come in thinking of [the Arabs] as a conquered people, though dazed at my calm assumption that he was my guest, had no option but to follow the lead of such assurance.” With the general thus sufficiently humbled, Lawrence recounted, “soon we got on well.”
But this was not at all the way George Barrow would remember the situation in Deraa that day. As he would relate in his own memoir, “The whole place was indescribably filthy, defiled and littered with smoldering cinders and the soiled leavings of loot. Turks, some dead and some dying, lay about the railway station or sat propped against the houses. Those still living gazed at us with eyes that begged for a little of the mercy which it was hopeless for them to ask of the Arabs.”
But this was trivial compared with what Barrow’s men found when they entered the Turkish hospital train that had been stranded in Deraa station, a scene he would describe, with considerable hyperbole, as “far exceeding in its savagery anything that has been known in the conflicts between nations during the past 120 years.” According to Barrow, “Arab soldiers were going through the train, tearing off the clothing of the groaning and stricken Turks, regardless of gaping wounds and broken limbs, and cutting their victims’ throats.… It was a sight that no average civilized human being could bear unmoved.” In Barrow’s telling, when he angrily ordered Lawrence to remove the Arabs from the train, he was met with a refusal and the explanation that this was the Arabs’ “idea of war.”
“It is not our idea of war,” Barrow countered, “and if you can’t remove them, I will.” At this, Lawrence allegedly washed his hands of the matter, telling the general he would take no responsibility for what might happen next. Summoning his own men, Barrow cleared the ambulance train and brought the killing to a stop.
Taken together, the events in Tafas and Deraa encapsulate the difficulty in getting at the full truth of the “Lawrence myth”—or even to isolate which facet of that myth is the most credible. In Lawrence’s Seven Pillars description of Tafas, the skeptical reader might find some moments just a little too cinematic to be fully believed—the stirring war cry that the charging Talal delivered just before he was gunned down, the accusing gaze the bayonet-pinioned Arab warrior cast toward his German and Turkish tormentors with his dying breath—especially since those moments are absent from Lawrence’s official report. There is also his uncomfortably keen eye for the grisly detail, reminiscent of the passage describing his torture in Deraa the year before, that edges toward prurience and war pornography. To add a different wrinkle, after the war, several of Lawrence’s British comrades in the September 1918 offensive would stoutly maintain that he never issued a “no quarter” command, let alone ordered the execution of prisoners once taken, even though Lawrence plainly stated as much in both his memoir and official report.
The Deraa ambulance train story underscores this difficulty in reverse. As shockingly candid as Lawrence was in describing his actions at Tafas, in neither Seven Pillars nor in his official report did he even mention the train incident—yet it’s hard to imagine George Barrow, a very “proper” career military officer, simply making up such an account. If the incident did in fact occur, the simplest explanation for its omission is that Lawrence wished to avoid casting the Arab rebels in a bad light—except that there are any number of other places in Seven Pillars and his wartime reports where their conduct is shown in equally bad light. And if, for whatever reason, Lawrence did consciously choose to avoid telling the story, then why go out of his way in Seven Pillars to disparage the reputation of the one man, Barrow, best positioned to publicize it? Of course, to all this there may be a simpler, if more disturbing, explanation: that amid the wanton slaughter of those last days in September, Lawren
ce merely found the ambulance train incident too trifling to mention.
Lawrence stayed on in Deraa in order to meet with Faisal, who came over from Azraq the following day. By then, Allenby’s stricture against the Arabs making for Damascus had been lifted in light of the Turkish army’s total collapse—in fact, he had ordered all EEF units to stay out of the Syrian capital so that their Arab allies might have the honor of entering first—and Lawrence and Faisal discussed plans for establishing a provisional government there. Then, in the very early morning hours of September 30, Lawrence and his sometime driver of recent days, Major Walter Stirling, set off north in the Rolls-Royce sedan they had dubbed the “Blue Mist.” They drove through a landscape littered with the corpses of men and animals, some of those who had perished in the Turks’ desperate flight. By that evening, they had reached a ridge overlooking Damascus, a promontory already crowded with Arab and EEF units poised to advance into the city at first light.
During that night of waiting, Stirling watched as Lawrence sank into a mood of deep despondency. To the junior officer, it seemed quite incomprehensible—“we were on the eve of our entry into Damascus,” Stirling wrote, “and in sight of the final act which was to crown all [Lawrence’s] efforts with success”—and he finally asked his companion what was the matter. “Ever since we took Deraa,” Lawrence replied, “the end has been inevitable. Now the zest has gone, and the interest.”
· · ·
SOMEWHERE ALONG THAT ridge outside Damascus, William Yale and the Italian military attaché were also camped that night, wrapped in blankets on the ground beside their Model T as they tried to catch a few hours’ sleep. Shortly after midnight, they were ripped from their slumber by a tremendous explosion; to the north, an enormous cloud of smoke and flame rose above Damascus, the countryside for miles around illuminated in its intense glow. “God Almighty,” Yale said, “the Turks have blown up Damascus.” That first great explosion was followed by many smaller ones throughout the night, geysers of flame and bursting shells arcing across the sky.
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