The force crept down a winding track to the village in the dark, Lawrence with his pockets filled with detonators. Suddenly they heard the sound of an engine in the ravine below. After a long wait the sheikh came to tell them that his plan had failed through the arrival of a train laden with German reserves on their way to Deraa. Nuri suggested an attempt to storm the bridge with the bayonet, but Lawrence now demurred. “I was at the pme of reckoning the value of the objective in terms of life, and as usual finding it too dear. Of course most things done in war were too dear, and we should have followed good example in going in and going through with it. But I was secretly and disclaimedly proud of the planning of our campaigns: so I told Nuri that I voted against it. We had today twice cut the Damascus-Palestine railway; and the bringing here of the Afuleh garrison was a third benefit to Allenby. Our bond had been most heavily honoured.”
Nuri, after a moment’s hesitation, agreed with this argument and the force groped its way back to Muzeirib, which it reached about two o’clock. Lawrence now began to feel the irk of his forbearance, perceiving the danger to Allenby’s plan if these enemy reinforcements went back to Afuleh, and to his own retirement across the railway, if they pushed on to Deraa too early. To detain them, by playing on their minds, he sent off two small parties to cut the line at deserted spots on the far side of the bridge. He also sent a message to Joyce asking for the balance of Nuri’s regulars to join him here, saying that on the morrow they would move back across the south face of Deraa, thus completing the circle. He suggested that Joyce should return to Umtaiye and await them. For at Umtaiye they would be well placed to menace the Turkish Fourth Army’s line of retreat and also to renew their demolitions as often as the enemy attempted repairs.
When dawn came the peasants trickled off to their various villages while the Arab troops filtered towards Nisibin, south of Deraa, the whole so dispersed that the Turkish aircraft were likely to be completely puzzled both as to their numbers and as to their direction. Thus they had an unmolested passage back to the Deraa-Amman line, and on approaching it the guns and machine-guns were pushed forward to bombard Nisib station—as a blind. For while the station garrison was kept busy in preparing to resist an assault, the important bridge to the north was blown up.
The manner of this exploit was typically Lawrentian. For it was uncertain whether the bridge-guard had slipped off to join the station garrison, and even Lawrence’s bodyguard did not care to face the risk of walking down to the bridge with their loads of blasting gelatine without knowledge of whether the guard was still there while fully aware that if one bullet hit the gelatine they would be blown to fragments. When Lawrence found that neither orders nor chaff would move them out of shelter he began to go forward alone. That sufficed and he was promptly backed up. The bridge, luckily, was deserted. It was a worthy specimen for his seventy-ninth scalp, and Lawrence viewed it with a loving eye before piling guncotton against the massive piers. While he was thus engaged the rest of the force slipped away eastward to the desert, leaving the guns to the last to keep the station garrison occupied. Finally all were clear and in the darkness Lawrence touched off his fuses and himself tumbled into the enemy’s deserted redoubt until the stone-shower was over. Those who watched from afar saw, in the lurid blaze of the explosion, the abutment arch “sheared clean off and the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below.”
Lawrence’s “preparatory” task on behalf of Allenby was complete. By his three-sided cut at the focal point of the enemy’s communications he had gone far to hamstring the Turkish armies just as Allenby was about to jump upon them. The stroke had the physical effect of shutting off the flow of their supplies temporarily—and temporarily was all that mattered here. It had the mental effect of persuading Liman von Sanders to send part of his scanty reserves towards Deraa. More significantly still he sent German troops, the precious cement that held together his jerry-built armies. The success of Lawrence’s effort may be traced to the way it was precisely proportioned; too small to impose immediate retreat upon Liman von Sanders; too near the date of Allenby’s attack for Liman von Sanders to alter his front-line dispositions, which were ideal for Allenby’s purpose.
Only a few hours remained before the hidden mass of the British Army would thrust forward like a gigantic battering ram. It was delightfully disguised. Dust columns had gone eastward by day—created by mule-drawn sleighs, while troop columns marched westward by night. Battalions had marched towards the Jordan Valley by day—and returned by night to repeat this march of a stage army. Cavalry, periodically relieved, had been kept in the valley throughout the summer heat—while Lawrence had been purchasing vast quantities of forage for their coming across the Jordan. Under cover of manifold deceptions Allenby had achieved an overwhelming superiority in the coastal sector. Fifteen thousand canvas dummies filled the vacated horse lines in the interior.
Nevertheless “as darkness fell after a hot airless day upon the great concentration of troops massed in the Plain of Sharon, there was at British G.H.Q. one anxiety overmastering all others.” “Was the enemy there?” Perhaps he had retired in time. Would the blow smash a weak defence, or would it hit the air and find an intact defence beyond, out of reach of its guns? That anxiety began to disperse when, at the crash of the British guns half an hour before the first streak of dawn, thousands of Turkish signal rockets soared into the air.
Why had the enemy stayed to be pulverized instead of making a timely recoil? We know now that Liman von Sanders had been anticipating a big attack and that at the beginning of September he had thought of frustrating it by a withdrawal to a rear line near the Sea of Galilee. “I gave up the idea, because we would have had to relinquish the Hejaz railway . . . and because we could no longer have stopped the progress of the Arab insurrection in rear of our army.”
No clearer or more striking testimony could be given to the decisive value of Lawrence’s “intangible ghost.” Decisive not in itself but because it alone made possible the decision.
Although Liman von Sanders was uneasy about the coast sector, he feared still more the effect of an attack east of the Jordan, and even at the eleventh hour the warning of the true plan given by an Indian deserter on September 17th was offset by the more positive news of the Arab attacks on the vital railway around Deraa. Deceived by the Lawrentlan mirage, Liman von Sanders regarded this deserter as a tool of the British Intelligence, and his story as a blind to cover Allenby’s real purpose. Thus he offered up. his forces to destruction.
At 4.30 a.m. on September 19th three hundred and eighty-five guns rained shells upon the Turkish trenches with brief intensity. Soon the infantry swept forward like an avalanche, submerging the stupefied defenders of the two shallow trench systems. Then they wheeled inland, rolling the Turks back like a door on its hinges. The wreckage of the Eighth Army poured through the defile to Messudieh, and upon this hapless mob the British aircraft dived with bombs and bullets.
Meantime, through the open doorway the cavalry had passed, riding straight up the coastal corridor for thirty miles before swinging in to cross the Carmel Range. They were over the passes by the next morning, and not only seized El Afule but temporarily occupied Nazareth, where the enemy’s General Headquarters lay, still ignorant of the disaster that had overtaken their troops—because aircraft and agents had cut all the telegraph lines. Liman von Sanders himself barely escaped. By the afternoon the cavalry were in Beisan—to reach it the 4th Cavalry Division had ridden nearly seventy miles in thirty-four hours. The barrier had been lowered across the Turks’ lines of retreat.
The one remaining bolt-hole was eastward, over the Jordan, and this the Air Force sealed. Early on September 21st the British aircraft sighted a large column winding down the steep gorge from Nablus towards the Jordan. Four hours’ continuous bombing and machine-gunning by relays of aircraft reduced this procession to stagnation, an inanimate chaos of guns and transport, From this moment may be timed the extinction of the Seventh and Eighth Tur
kish Armies. What followed was but a rounding up of fugitive “cattle” by the cavalry.
Only the Fourth Army, which yet had been the strongest of the three, remained—east of the Jordan. A broken railway and the Arabs lay along its line of retreat. Its fate was to be a rapid attrition under incessant pin-pricks.
When disaster overtook the other armies, the Fourth had still a fair chance of escape. On its western front in the Jordan valley it had Chaytor’s force, which consisted of the Anzac Mounted Division reinforced by a few infantry battalions. By active demonstrations Chaytor’s force had fomented the idea of a renewed British advance westward, and so helped to cloak Allenby’s real stroke. Its threat also helped to detain the Fourth Army from retreat, although the Turks’ delay was due more to the slowness with which news reached them and to their desire to wait for the 2nd Corps, now retiring from Ma‘an and the posts on the Hejaz railway north of it. Not until the 22nd did the Fourth Army begin its retreat. The 2nd Corps, harassed by the plague of Hornby’s Bedouin, was then still many miles short of Amman, and Chaytor’s force moved to intercept it.
The Fourth Army’s chance of making good its retreat depended on whether it could brush aside the Arabs and reach Damascus before Allenby’s cavalry made a fresh bound to the aid of the Arabs in barring the way. The broken railway, by compelling the Turks to march, would slow down their retreat, but for some days the Arabs would be in a precarious position as the strategic wedge between the Deraa socket and the recoiling mass.
That problem was Lawrence’s concern on the morning after he had closed the railway, the morning when Allenby’s distant forces were opening their attack. “Strategically, our business was to hold on to Umtaiye, which gave us command at will of Deraa’s three railways. If we held it another week we should strangle the Turkish armies, however little Allenby did. Yet tactically Umtaiye was a dangerous place. An inferior force composed exclusively of regulars, without a guerilla screen, could not safely hold it: yet to that we should shortly be reduced, if our air helplessness continued patent.”
Here was the vulnerable side of the Arab force. Because of its mobility and fluidity it ran little risk from the Turkish ground-troop, but against the vastly superior mobility of the air arm only direct protection could avail. Although the British air force in Palestine far outnumbered and outclassed the Turkish, which was “virtually driven from the skies,” that air superiority was significantly lacking in the Arab zone, despite this being the most vital zone strategically. The Arab, force had only been provided with two machines, and both were now lost, whereas the Turks had some nine machines at the Deraa aerodrome. If the Arab force had been composed mainly of armoured cars the danger would have been slight, but with its great quantity of camels and horses it offered an inviting air target, the easier to locate because it was fettered by its strategic role and the need for water. The enemy’s bombing was already beginning to wear the nerves of the Arab irregulars. If it was to continue unchecked they might disperse and go home.
Salvation could lie only in obtaining air reinforcement from Allenby. According to arrangement a liaison machine was due to fly over to Azrak from Palestine on the 20th, and Lawrence decided that he would travel back in it to see Allenby.
Meantime he and Junor carried out a raid with two armoured cars against a Turkish advanced landing ground, where three aeroplanes had been seen to alight. Silencing the engines of the cars they crept down a valley until they came in sight of the meadow where the enemy aircraft lay. Then they opened their throttles and leapt forward, only to find their way blocked by a deep, straight-sided ditch. While they searched for a possible crossing, the aircraft crews rushed to swing their propellers. Two of them took off in time, but the engine of the third failed to start and the armoured car settled its fate by putting fifteen hundred bullets into its fuselage from the other side of the ditch. As the cars drove home the other two aeroplanes pursued and bombed them, one with uncomfortable accuracy. “We crept on defencelessly, slowly, among the stones, feeling like sardines in a doomed tin, as the bombs fell closer.” One bomb sent a shower of broken stone through the driving slit of Lawrence’s car and cut his knuckles, while another tore off a front tire and nearly overturned the car. The experience moved Lawrence to the remark: “Of all danger give me the solitary sort.”
Nevertheless, after a few hours’ sleep he was out again that night with the cars, covering a fresh railway demolition by Peake’s Egyptians as an interlude on his way to Azrak. T.E. was as averse to killing time as he was adept in killing two birds with one stone. But on this occasion he contributed little to the raid, as the cars lost themselves, perhaps because his sense of direction was suffering from five successive nights without sleep. In compensation, however, he stumbled upon a Turkish train and the encounter produced a running fight in the dark between rail and road machines, a spectacle that was made the more bizarre by the green shower of luminous tracer bullets that deluged the occupants of the train.
On reaching Azrak Lawrence met Feisal and Nuri Shaalan and, after giving them the latest news, seized the chance of a good night’s sleep. He awoke to receive still better news. For, soon after dawn, the expected aeroplane from Palestine arrived and brought them the first news, astounding and exhilarating in its completeness, of Allenby’s victory over the Seventh and Eighth Turkish Armies. Lawrence now embarked for the return trip to Palestine, but before doing so he urged upon Feisal that the news should be taken as the signal for the long-delayed general revolt in Syria. Joyce, also, decided to return to Abu el Lissal to stimulate the pressure on the Turks at Ma‘an.
CHAPTER XIX
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
A BARE hour’s flight from Azrak carried Lawrence into Palestine, a transition from one world to another, from the desert where individuality prevailed to the legions where organization reigned and hierarchy ruled. If the swiftness of the passage was a portent of the way that the air was abolishing the old terrestrial independences, it was also a reminder of the Arab forces’ now inevitable subordination to Allenby’s pattern.
On landing at Ramleh, he drove straight to General Headquarters where Allenby outlined the further development of his plan. Damascus was now the next objective, coupled with Beirut. While the Infantry, one division immediately, pushed on up the coast past Haifa and Acre to Beirut, the cavalry was to set out for Damascus. The Australian Mounted Division supported by the 5th Cavalry Division would move west of the Sea of Galilee and then turn north-east for Damascus via the road through Quneitra. The 4th Cavalry Division from Beisan would strike east for Deraa, to help the Arabs in cutting off the Turkish 4th Army, and then move due north on Damascus. Meantime Chaytor’s force, farther south, would march on Amman, also with the Idea of cutting off the Turks’ retreat.
Allenby asked that the Arabs should assist these moves, taking the Turkish Fourth Army as their particular target, and he firmly warned Lawrence against attempting any independent coup against Damascus until the British forces were at hand.
The Immediate problem of preserving the Arabs from air-borne paralysis was satisfactorily settled. When Lawrence explained the precarious situation, Allenby rang for Salmond, who at once agreed to send two Bristol fighters. Then a difficulty intervened. There was no petrol at Umtaiye. But the difficulty was surmounted by ingenuity—Salmond and Borton evolved the idea of using a new big Handley-Page bomber as an air-tender. It was arranged that its pilot, Ross-Smith, who a year later made the first flight from England to Australia, should accompany the Bristols to Umtaiye next day in order to make sure that so large a machine could use the landing-ground there.
Having settled his business, Lawrence had the rare chance of enjoying a day’s rest in comparatively civilized conditions. Allenby’s headquarters might have been regarded as bare and comfortless to a sybaritic traveller, but to Lawrence the cool airiness of the whitewashed, fly-proof building, surrounded by trees, appeared like paradise. Yet he did not care for it, for he “felt immoral enjoying white table-cloths,
and coffee, and soldier servants, while our people at Umtaiye lay like lizards among the stones, eating unleavened bread, and waiting for the next plane to bomb them.” Nor was his distaste for paradise due merely to this comparison—“after a long spell of the restrained desert, flowers and grass seemed to fidget, and the everywhere-burgeoning green of tilth became vulgar, in its fecundity.” His mood yields another glimpse into his mind.
Early on the morning of the 22nd the air reinforcements set out for Umtaiye, only to find that the Arab force had moved back a few miles in the night to escape the constant bombing. The Turkish aircraft discovered this new camp at Umm es Surab soon after the British machines had landed and breakfast was twice interrupted by a sudden exchange of sausage-eating for air fighting. Two enemy machines were brought down in flames and then Ross-Smith reluctantly went back to fetch the Handley-Page while Lawrence flew on to Azrak.
Feisal and Nuri Shaalan came back with him, in the green Vaux-hall, to Umm es Surab. There they found that the Handley-Page had already arrived and was unloading a ton of petrol, with oil and spare parts, as well as provisions for the British troops. Young, ever mindful of the Q side, had been growing anxious over the problem of maintaining the force, so that these air-borne supplies had a real as well as a novelty value. Their means of transport was surrounded by astonished Arabs, who reverently spoke of it as “The aeroplane” and called the Bristol fighters its foals. These had already nullified the enemy air squadron at Deraa, which henceforth ceased to trouble the Arab force, but the appearance of the Handley-Page was none the less of moral value by its visible confirmation to the Arab population of Britain’s overwhelming might. The great machine also confirmed the military advantage by dropping a shower of hundred pound bombs on Mafraq station two nights later, with such effect that the trucks in the sidings continued to burn for many hours.
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