Capture was easier than retention. The clans had old feuds and began quarrelling among themselves. Auda as usual was the storm-centre. The rumbles hastened the arrival of Zeid, who had been given charge of these Dead Sea operations by Feisal. Ja‘far and Lawrence accompanied him, and a small force of about a hundred Arab regulars with two mountain-guns followed as fast as the bad roads allowed. Zeid did his best to compose the troubles with the ointment of gold. Auda was treated according to the principle of the street vocalist who Is paid to go away. But harmony was hardly attained before the Turks Introduced fresh discord.
Lawrence, valuing Tafila only as a step in the ladder towards the Dead Sea, had not Imagined that the Turks would place a value on it sufficient to draw them away from opposing Allenby’s advance. Thus he was taken by surprise when a Turkish force, hastily collected at Amman, was rushed south to regain Tafila. It comprised three weak battalions, a hundred cavalry, two mountain howitzers and twenty-seven machine-guns, and was led by Hamid Fakhri Bey, the commander of the 48th Division. Marching from Kerak on January 23rd, it fell next afternoon upon the Arab pickets guarding the Wadi Hesa, a gorge ten miles north-east which separates the land of Moab from the land of Edom and formed the apparently impregnable approach to Tafila. The sudden onset, however, rolled the pickets back before they could be reinforced.
THE “BATTLE” OF TAFILA
In view of a possible attack Ja‘far had chosen a defensive position on the overhanging heights behind the great ravine of Tafila. Lawrence had disagreed with this plan both on tactical and on political grounds. The precipitous slopes offered dead ground for an attacker, who could push past the eastern flank and turn the position while himself immune from fire. And the abandonment of the town would throw its people into the Turks’ hands. Nevertheless, the sudden emergency gave no chance for reconsideration, and about midnight Zeid gave the order to fall back to the chosen position behind the town. This created a panic in the town as Lawrence had foreseen.
He stayed behind with his bodyguard after the rest of the force had left. “It was freezing hard, the ground all over ice and snow, and in the dark narrow streets the crying and confusion were terrible. I went out and walked about, listening. The men were in a passion of fear, nearly dangerous, but not to me, for I was wrapped up in a dark cloak and not distinguishable and my guards were all around in case of accident. It was important to know the real public opinion, and soon we saw that they were in horror of the Turks, ready to do all in their physical capacity to support against them a leader with any fighting intention. This was satisfactory.”
So he took the initiative of sending twenty of the Motalga forward to help those of the peasantry who were still opposing the Turks’ advance. He went himself to find Zeid, whose calmness in the crisis seemed a good omen. Lawrence profited by it to offer the germ of a battle plan. This was to culminate in a victory of which most generals would have been proud, but of which Lawrence himself, in retrospect, professed to be thoroughly ashamed. He blames it on a fit of Berserker rage. And his explanation is as enlightening as it is delightful.
“The Turks should never, by all rules of sane generalship, have returned to Tafileh at all. It was simple greed, a dog in the manger attitude unworthy of a serious enemy, just the sort of hopeless thing a Turk would do. How could they expect a proper war, when they gave us no chance to honour them? Our morale was continually being ruined by their follies, for neither could our men respect their courage, nor our officers respect their brains. Also it was an icy morning, and I had been up all night, and was Teutonic enough to decide that they should pay for my changed mind and plan.”
“They must be few in number, judging by their speed. We had the pieces and could checkmate them easily. Only in my wrath I went too far and determined to play their kind of game, to deliver them a pitched battle such as they intended, on the pigmy scale of our Arab front, and to kill them all. I would rake up the old maxims and rules of the military text books, and parody them in this action. It was a wanton step, for both the strength and the ground were on my side, and I could have won by refusing battle, beat them in manœuvre as on twenty similar occasions before and after. Somehow bad temper and conceit together made me not content just to know my power, but anxious to display it openly to the Arabs and to the enemy.”
As a military apologia it is a gem. So was the battle that followed, by any “military” test.
Zeid had realized the disadvantages of the chosen position and readily accepted Lawrence’s proposal to send forward Abdulla, the chief of his bodyguard, with a few men on mules and a couple of light automatics, to test the Turks’ strength and dispositions. The reinforcement stimulated the Motalga and the villagers, who drove back the Turkish cavalry screen on to the main body, just moving out after a cold night in bivouac. Lawrence and Zeid could hear the distant bursts of machine-gun fire. But while Zeid wished to wait for definite news from Abdulla, Lawrence was anxious to force the pace, and so went forward himself. In the streets of Tafila he found some of his bodyguard rummaging among the goods there strewn; he ordered them to recover the camels and bring up their light automatic.
MAP 8 BATTLE OF TAFILA
Crossing the Tafila ravine he climbed on to the plateau beyond, and there found a ridge—“a low straight bank with some Byzantine foundations in it, a very proper place for a reserve or ultimate line of defence.” This low ridge formed the base of a triangular plain, some two miles across, bounded by low green ridges along each side. The apex pointed north-east and through it ran the road from Kerak along which the Turks were now pressing.
Lawrence, by dint of forceful persuasion, collected some of Zeid’s personal camel-men whom he found hiding, and made them sit along the skyline of the “reserve” ridge. “They looked important, from a distance (there were some twenty of them) like the points of a considerable force. They were to add all newcomers to their display till further notice, and particularly my villains with their gun. I gave them my signet for authority.”
Then he pushed on across the plain and met Abdulla coming back to report to Zeid. His ammunition was exhausted and he had lost five men from shell-fire; but he was still full of fight and was only intent on persuading Zeid to come forward. Leaving him to do this, Lawrence walked on. Shells were now bursting on the plain and to add to his discomfort the stalks of wormwood scored his bare feet. When he reached the apex he found about sixty men holding the corner of the western ridge, while the Turks were pushing down the eastern ridge to outflank them. He came first upon a cluster of peasants. They said they had finished their ammunition and it was all over. “I assured them that it was just beginning and pointed to my populous reserve ridge.” Telling them to withdraw there and collect fresh ammunition, he mounted the ridge where the Motalga were still holding on, “quoting to them the adage not to quit firing from one position till ready to fire from the next.”
“In command was young Metaab, stripped to his skimp riding-drawers for hard work, with his black love-curls awry, his face stained and haggard.” “My presence at the last moment, when the Turks were breaking through, was bitter; and he got angrier when I said that I only wanted to study the landscape. He thought it flippancy, and screamed something about a Christian going into battle unarmed. I retorted with a quip from Clausewitz, about a rearguard effecting its purpose more by being than by doing; but he was past laughter, and perhaps with justice, for the little flinty bank behind which we sheltered was crackling with fire. The Turks, knowing we were there, had turned twenty machine-guns upon it.”
Lawrence asked Metaab to try to hold on for another ten minutes, while he, having no horse, set off on foot at a run. As he ran he did not forget to count his paces to help in ranging on the position when the Turks occupied it. “This Motalga ridge was going to be the province we would lose to win the battle, a death-trap for the enemy Ignorant of our game; and so I ran away in good spirits.” Before he reached the ridge the Motalga horsemen caught him up, but Metaab lent a stirrup to help
him along—to Lawrence, with his fondness for inversions, this Waterloo stirrup-charge in reverse may have had a pleasing piquancy.
Safely reaching the reserve ridge he found some eighty men now distributed along it, and more arriving. “We had the automatics put on the skyline . . . with orders to fire occasional shots at long range to disturb the Turks, after the expedient of Massena in delaying enemy deployment.” One feels that Lawrence’s wrath must now have evaporated under the rays of his humour, and that he had entered with zest into his parody of orthodoxy. His two hundred men deterred the Turks from advancing by showing themselves generously, until about 3 p.m. Zeid came up from the old position with some fifty of his men and two hundred villagers. He also brought nine machine-guns and light automatics and a mountain-gun to strengthen the fire-defence.
“We remembered just in time that movement is the law of strategy and started moving.” Rasim Bey, an Arab regular, was dispatched with about eighty mounted men—horse, camel and mule—and five light automatics, “to make a circuit round the eastern ridge and envelop the enemy’s left wing, since the books advised attack not upon a line, but upon a point, and by going far enough along any finite wing it would be found eventually reduced to a point of one single man.” “Rasim liked this, my conception of his target. He promised, grinningly, to bring us that last man.”
The remaining Arabs paraded about the reserve ridge, at Lawrence’s Instigation, to cloak the departure of the “cavalry.” Meantime the Turks on their opposite ridge “were bringing up an apparently endless procession of machine-guns and dressing them by the left at internals along the ridge, as though it were a museum. It was lunatic tactics. The ridge was flint, without cover for a lizard.” Thanks to Lawrence’s pacing the Arab guns had the range (3,100 yards) and were only waiting to sweep the Turks’ ridge.
While they waited a fresh reinforcement arrived, about a hundred men from the neighbouring village of El ’Eime, or Aima. “Their arrival decided us to abandon the precepts of Marshal Foch, and to attack from at any rate three sides at once; so we sent the Aima men, with three automatic guns to envelop the enemy’s right or western flank.” As they happened to arrive on the scene from this direction it might seem that geography had as much part as strategy in deciding the form of their attack. But the facts—which Lawrence does not disclose in his book—are that Zeid had called on the Aima men to reinforce his main body according to the orthodox principle of concentration, when Lawrence intervened and sent them back to work round the flank that the Turks had so conveniently exposed to enfilade. His flair for the weak spot, here the right spot in a double sense, found an apt response in the Arab peasants, his instruments. Primitive men, who know not Marshal Foch have a sound instinct for finding the enemy’s rear, especially when, as here, it offers a covered approach.
While the four automatic weapons on the reserve ridge swept the Turks’ position and occupied their attention, Rasim’s five light automatics (which, for invisibility, were handled by only two men apiece) were pushed forward unseen until, with a sudden burst of fire, they crumpled the Turks’ left wing. The “cavalry” then charged in to exploit the disorder. The men of El ’Eime also crept to within a few hundred yards of the machine-guns on the Turks’ right flank and thence shot down their unsuspecting crews. As soon as this was seen the Arab reserve charged across the central plain, with crimson banner flying, to complete the victory.
Lawrence’s thoughts outpaced them, and ran on to the Wadi Hesa gorge. “It was going to be a massacre, and I should have been crying-sorry for the Turks, but after the angers and exertions of the battle I was too mentally tired to go down into that awful place and spend the rest of the night saving them. I knew that by my decision to fight I had killed twenty or thirty of our six hundred men, and the wounded would be perhaps three times as many. It was one-sixth of our force gone on a verbal triumph, for the destruction of a thousand Turks would have no effect on the issue of the war. Had I manœuvred, I could have worn them out and ruined them, losing perhaps only five or six men in doing so.”
One may question, however, whether there was time for manœuvre to take effect without losing Tafila, with its potential train of political ill-effects. Nor were Lawrence’s other self-reproaches fully justified. Although the Turks ied in confusion, leaving their commander dead and abandoning two howitzers and all their twenty-seven machine-guns, as well as their baggage, their cavalry combined with the Arabs’ tiredness to check the pursuit when the Wadi Hesa was reached. But over two hundred prisoners were taken, and many more killed, while the retreat was harried by the Bedouin from the Kerak district. The exact loss is uncertain. Lawrence heard that only fifty fugitives returned, whereas a Turkish report puts the figure at about four hundred; a German, although indefinite, suggests that a much smaller proportion escaped. The Turkish report probably includes the garrison of Kerak, as this retired to Amman with the fugitives.
Heavy snowfalls and a wind of razor-edge extinguished the Arabs’ flickering impulse to follow up their success, and even Lawrence was constrained to recognize that the effort placed too high a tax on human capacity. The clumsy helplessness of camels in mud would also be a tactical danger.
But although his force was chained to Tafila, his mind was projected towards his Dead Sea objective, and there succeeded in exerting a strategic influence. He bethought himself of Abdulla el Feir, camped down in the sunny, snow-free plain on the southern shore of the Dead Sea. He could operate if they could not. So Lawrence got through to him, told him of the victory and moved him to seize the chance of raiding the little lake-port near El Mezra, on the eastern shore, whence the grain of the Kerak district was shipped north to feed the Turkish armies.
Abdulla el Feir picked out some seventy Bedouin horsemen and rode thither along the narrow track between the hills of Moab and the water-edge. At dawn on January 28th, only three days after the battle of Tafila, they reached the cove and found a motor launch and six dhows anchored. Like the Athenians at Ǣgospotamoi the crews were resting on the beach. Inverting Lysander, Abdulla el Feir charged them from the land side, and thereby achieved a far rarer feat, the capture of a fleet by cavalry. Ten tons of grain and sixty prisoners were taken. After scuttling the ships and burning the huts the expedition returned, without a casualty.
This attainment of his strategic aim, the interruption of the Turks’ line of supply, pleased Lawrence far more than his own tactical victory. It helped to wipe out the regretted stain of blood, and put him in a good mood to write his report of the Tafila operation for the staff in Palestine. He made the report a fuller parody of orthodoxy than the battle, phrasing it in the Impersonal tone and professional jargon that soldiers have loved since Caesar wrote that masterpiece of official deception, De Bella Gallico. Thus, as Lawrence has said, his professional superiors might take him for a reformed character, an amateur humbly following in the footsteps of the masters Instead of a clown making fun of the professional procession that, with Foch their bandmaster at the head, went drumming down the old road of blood into the house of Clausewitz.
His jest was crowned by the award of the Distinguished Service Order. When he next saw Allenby he suggested that a naval D.S.O. would be more appropriate, a retort that showed his sense of values no less than his sense of humour. A few months later he had a fresh opportunity. When out on an expedition two British aeroplanes sighted his camel party and gave chase; and although Lawrence made his men ride round in a ring—the customary signal to show that they were friendly troops—the aeroplanes continued to pelt them with bullets, luckily without effect. Lawrence’s way of reporting the Incident to Sir Geoffrey Salmond was to recommend himself for the Distinguished Flying Cross “for presence of mind in not shooting down two Bristol fighters which were attempting to machine-gun my party from the air.”
In the weeks that followed his success at Tafila he had need of his humour. The continued hard weather frustrated his further object, of occupying all the corn belt and linking up with Allenby at the
northern end of the Dead Sea. The tribes ahead promised their support but the tribesmen with him were held fast by the snow, and the longer they stayed the more they lapsed from his Idea of activity. They were still more definitely immobilized by having to send their camels down to warmer pastures in the valley.
Sick of being cooped up in his unsavoury and verminous quarters at Tafila, Lawrence decided early in February to return to his base and collect more money ready to nourish the spring campaign. It was hard riding on the soft ground, with the camels continually slipping in the slush while their riders were nipped by a wind that, exasperatingly, froze them without freezing the path under foot. They passed Maulud’s post at Abu el Lissal without anyone hailing them—his unfortunate Arab regulars, provided only with British khaki drill of summer pattern, had lost half their strength in toll to the bitter weather which alone prevented the Turks from overwhelming the remnant. At last Guweira was reached and there Lawrence found not only Joyce but Alan Dawnay, head of the newly-formed Hejaz Operations Staff—known as “Hedgehog”—that had been formed at Cairo in November for closer liaison with, and the greater organization of, the Arab operations. Lawrence stayed three nights and then, receiving thirty thousand pounds sent up by Feisal, set off back to Tafila, which he regained alone after a still more trying ride. There he found a young Arabic-speaking- intelligence officer, Kirkbride, who had come across from the Palestine front.
Movement forward was now practicable and Lawrence made a reconnaissance to the Dead Sea with that idea. But when, on returning, he urged it on Zeid, he met difficulties, due still more to Zeid’s entourage. The chief excuse was a pretence that Zeid had spent all the money, intended to subsidize the advance, in payments to the local tribesmen who had simply been sitting still. Finding argument vain, Lawrence told Zeid that if the money was not returned he would leave him.
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