ALLENBY SECURED JERUSALEM by the end of December, constructing roads and forward supply bases, securing his right flank, and extending the rail line forward. For the Arabs, the nature of the war began imperceptibly to turn more and more conventional. Feisal had a new military leader by the name of Maulud el Mukhlus, in command of his regular forces. He was a former Turkish officer who had been taken prisoner on the drive to Baghdad. After the new year, an operation was designed to support more directly the campaign in Palestine. A fertile area between the Hejaz railway and the Dead Sea was considered an important economic region for the Turks. Rich in maize and corn, the belt contained four market towns. From south to north there was Shobek, near the old Crusader castle of Montreale, which lay twenty miles to the northwest of Maan; next came Tafileh, which paralleled the bottom end of the Dead Sea; next stood Kerak, site of another famous Crusader castle, Krak des Chevaliers; and finally, near the top of the Dead Sea lay Madeba. A regular Arab force had assaulted Shobek back in October, tearing up a light rail system used by the Turks to feed the main line with grain produce. A struggle for the town continued until January 7, 1918, when the Turks pulled back to Maan. The capture of Shobek now opened the door into the plain of Jefer and the grain belt, uncovering Tafileh to exploitation and attack. Sherif Nasir was put in charge of the attack, with a party of Beni Sakhr directly under him. Nuri Said led a detachment of three hundred Arab regulars with a light mountain gun and a few machine guns. The initial attack was directed against the nearby station of Jurf ed Derawish.
The force struck at dawn and immediately achieved success. The Turks were quickly driven from the field and fled into the station, where they surrendered, two hundred strong. The Arabs lost only two men. The Beni Sakhr also captured twenty-five mules and seven boxcars of delicacies bound for the officers in Medina, including a carload of tobacco, whose seizure rendered Medina a “smokeless” garrison. The plunder made the Bedouin rich beyond belief. Some of the wealth was divvied up among the regulars as well, including the tobacco. Lawrence points out that later, when the inveterate smoker Feisal learned of the tobacco seizure, the prince’s empathy overwhelmed him and he sent camels full of cheap cigarettes (Camels?) under a flag of truce to the nicotine-starved Turkish garrison.
Soon news of the success quickly spread, and Auda abu Tayi suddenly became interested, sending his scouts to inquire further. Meanwhile, the Turks sent a small detachment down from Maan to investigate the commotion. Nasir became aware of the move and offered Auda the opportunity to ambush the investigators, but to no avail, as the shy detachment hightailed it back home. Perhaps the real factor for the Turkish hesitation was the weather. The Jefer plain is a high desert plateau, a miniature of the Great Basin in the western United States, standing an average of four thousand feet above sea level. Winds began to blow and created blizzardlike conditions for the next three days in the high desert. British logistics had not accounted for such conditions, leaving the Arab regulars without proper winter gear.
The seizure of the Jurf station triggered the next phase of the plan. The Arab highlanders in the region under Sherif Abd el Mayin now came into play, driving the Turks out of the hills between Petra and Shobek and cutting them to ribbons. The hill men then seized the supplies in the town, where they settled in comfort as winter storms blew through. The Motalga horsemen under Sherif Mastur, archenemy of Auda and the abu Tayi Howeitat, rode up from the warm desert plains below to join Nasir. Once the weather cleared, Nasir invested Tafileh, which he knew well from his Aqaba mission. Meanwhile, the regular contingent under Nuri Said had trekked back to Guweira in search of warmer clothes. Unfazed and full of bluff, Nasir demanded that the Turks surrender. There were only 180 among the Turkish garrison, but they were reinforced by the local village peasantry of the Muhaisin clan. While Auda deployed his band along the ridgeline, the villagers began to tease the attackers with a desultory, ineffective fire. The resistance of the peasants, typically held in the highest contempt among the desert tribesmen, was a biting affront to Auda’s heroic honor. Seething in anger and very much alone, he led his horse down to the eastern edge of the village. He dropped the reins and stood in the saddle, shaking his fist at the stunned townsmen. In a thundering voice, he said, “Dogs! Do you not know Auda?” In an instant it was over: “When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.”1
Mastur rode into Tafileh at night with his Motalga horsemen, blood enemies of Auda and his Howeitat. The Motalga had blood in their eyes as they jealously noticed how the Howeitat had taken all the best lodging in the place. And Nasir was in no position to negotiate, because he had become increasingly aligned with Auda as Mastur had become an associate of the Jazi Howeitat, equally hated by the abu Tayi Howeitat. The situation was made even more complicated by the fact that the Muhaisin villagers were struggling against two other anomalous factions: a party of Senussi strangers from North Africa and the unhappy remnants of deported Armenians, about a thousand strong. The villagers were in an ethnic melting pot stirred up by the war and feared for their lives. Typically, food was short and the peasants hid their grain in small caches as a hedge against the uncertain future. They drove away their pack animals into the hills and fate’s safekeeping. The village provided a microscopic view of the Ottoman despotic form of government: it was predicated on a culture of local intimidation, inertia, and servitude. Throughout the empire, the numerical odds were everywhere stacked against the Turkish masters, if only someone with will and initiative would rise above the ignorance-induced malaise. Even now the Muhaisin outnumbered Nasir’s little army and could have cut it to pieces with an energetic leader—but none existed.
Although Nasir led the small army in this push north, the overall command of the drive devolved upon Feisal’s half-brother, Emir Zeid. Zeid was advised by Jaafar Pasha, whose force was hung up around Petra because of the weather. The two rode into Tafileh to assert Feisal’s authority and found a vipers’ nest seething with hatred. Auda began a campaign of condescension toward the villagers, projecting an image of himself as their pseudoliberator. This shameless patronizing was galling to the Motalga, who were left with the dregs of the self-image of occupiers. Two Motalga boys were especially insulted, sons of Abtan, whom Auda’s elder son had murdered. Auda declared that he would personally beat them in the village square in front of the entire population if they didn’t back down. This was another of Auda’s wild boasts, since he was outnumbered two to one by Mastur’s horsemen. By now the tension had reached a Wild West level of suspense. Weapons were locked and loaded; the townsmen were scuttling for cover; firing positions were prepared. Just then Zeid and Jaafar, along with Lawrence, intervened. They thanked Auda graciously for his help in capturing the town and gave him a pile of gold, then sent him on his way. Zeid continued to dispense largesse about the town, totally defusing the situation. His final civil act was to appoint a governor loyal to Feisal.
MEANWHILE, THE TURKS had not been idle. The threat against one of their chief economic regions had not gone unnoticed by the Turkish high command. The threat was serious enough to divert resources from the Palestine front in order to retake Tafileh. The Turkish Forty-eighth Division under Hamid Fakhri Pasha organized a task force in Amman consisting of three infantry battalion totaling nine hundred men, one hundred cavalry, two mountain guns, and twenty-seven machine guns. They rounded up some civilian officials who would take over the administration of the town once it fell. The force left Kerak on January 23 and on the following day struck a picket line at Wadi Hasa, a deep arroyo ten miles northeast of Tafileh. The Turks quickly blew through this defensive position in speed-bump fashion and advanced on the town itself.
The news of the attack “astonished” Lawrence, who expected the Turks to play their usual defeatist game. In perhaps the only time during the whole war, Lawrence was genuinely
surprised. The initial reaction was to implement Jaafar’s plan and defend on the high ground south of the town, which offered stout defensive positions at nearly forty-six hundred feet of elevation. Lawrence disagreed with the plan, however, arguing that the steep ridge to the east offered dead ground for the attacker to move in a flanking maneuver out of sight. Moreover, abandonment of the town would be a serious political defeat. In the end, it was sauve qui peut: a wild panic ensued as the villagers saw the Arabs leaving them to their fate in a cowardly escape. As the main body of Arabs streamed from the village, Lawrence stayed behind with his retainers to assess the true mood of the townsmen. He soon realized that there was a willingness among the peasantry to defend themselves against the Turkish onslaught; the few days of freedom had sparked a sudden resolve and determination among them to fight for their newly gained liberty. All they required was a determined leader, and Lawrence was ready to provide that leadership.
Lawrence sent the sons of Abtan—Metaab and Annad, the Jazi tribesmen who sought revenge against Auda in the lingering blood feud—to bring reinforcements. The Motalga stamped around the outskirts of the village, firing down at the Turks on the road from Kerak. Lawrence then crunched through the thick ice and found Zeid redeployed on the hill as planned about a mile south of town. The emir was perched upon a rock: he seemed blasé, apathetic, and almost in a state of shock. He kept peering through large binoculars that appeared incongruous against his small head and odder still given that it was in the pitch of night. While Zeid was losing his presence of mind, Lawrence had found his in a rage at dawn: “The Turks should never, by the rules of sane generalship, have ventured back 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 honor 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.”
The real source of Lawrence’s anger was the fact that the Turks had forced him into a loathsome, conventional fight. There was now little scope for him to fight in the irregular, guerrilla manner he personally favored. He would have to match them mano a mano in a regular death match: “I would rake up my memory of the half-forgotten maxims of the orthodox army textbooks, and parody them in action. This was villainous, for with arithmetic and geography for allies we might have spared the suffering factor of humanity; and to make a conscious joke of victory was wanton. We could have won by refusing battle, foxed them by maneuvering our center as on twenty such occasions before and since: yet bad temper and conceit united for this time to make me not content to know my power, but determined to give public advertisement of it to the enemy and to everyone.”2 But here Lawrence is a bit disingenuous. It was more than “bad temper and conceit” that led him to fight; the very fact that he decided to fight for Tafileh ensured that he would have to fight conventionally, for he was being nailed to a defense of his own choice. The very nature of guerrilla warfare implies the kind of freedom of maneuver that a defensive posture denies. The real reason was that he had no other choice: the Turks had outfoxed the fox.
The fact that the Turks advanced so swiftly and silently indicated to Lawrence that they were a small force. He used this assessment to motivate Zeid from his detached funk. Lawrence advised Zeid that Abdullah should take a detachment of Lawrence’s bodyguard to test the strength of the Turkish force. The Robber advanced with his party and two machine guns. The sight of Abdullah engaging the enemy was motivation enough to rally the Motalga horsemen and the townsmen who joined him in driving the Turkish cavalry back toward Kerak. The cavalry had covered the Turkish main body as it rolled out of its nighttime bivouac for a daylight attack on Tafileh itself. Now it found itself crashing in upon the roused infantry, who pitched in to salvage their horsed brethren from Abdullah’s early onslaught. Meanwhile, Lawrence urged Zeid to reinforce the initial attack with more troops, but he demurred and ignored the impulsive suggestion. With his conventional influence thus waning, Lawrence went back into the village, where he found his bodyguard, as if at a rummage sale, leisurely picking through the scattered goods left behind by the routing villagers. He quickly spurred them to action below the village.
Tafileh overlooked a small plain to its east that was shaped like an upside-down triangle. There was a series of small ridges running down from the town in stair-step fashion into the plain falling along the southwestern face of the triangle. Lawrence designated the highest step as his rally point and reserve base. The Turks were deployed upon the high ground along an angle formed by the northern base and the southeastern face of the triangle. The forces were separated by about a mile of terrain opening across the plain. As Lawrence glanced about his new position, he saw twenty of Zeid’s Ageyli bodyguard milling around in a nearby hollow. He ordered them to the reserve redoubt with a mission to hold at all costs. He gave the leader his signet ring as authority to rally any stragglers to the position and walked northeastward to reconnoiter the fighting.
Along the way, he ran into Abdullah on his way to Zeid. He provided Lawrence with a brief situation report and was sent on to the prince. Lawrence found the Turkish shelling around him ineffective because of long fuses, which caused the shells to hit the southeastern ridge and bounce harmlessly beyond into the trees. Eventually, the Turks managed to extend their line along the northern base of the upside-down triangle to the west and get Lawrence’s positions under direct observation. He also saw the Turks moving south along their side of the triangle toward its apex. Movement here threatened to outflank Lawrence’s entire position. The battle was now reaching its crisis point; near midday, the fight had gone on for almost four hours.
Lawrence then moved down to the lower “stair steps” and found the remnants of two groups cowering in defeat along the southwestern face. The first group were townsmen, who told Lawrence they were out of ammo and it was all over. He disagreed: “I assured them it was just beginning and pointed to my populous reserve ridge, saying that all arms were there in support. I told them to hurry back, refill their belts and hold on to it for good. Meanwhile we would cover their retreat by sticking here the few minutes yet possible.” Lawrence next went on to the other remnant, who were Motalga led by Metaab of the blood feud: “He was beating his hands together and crying hoarsely with baffled vexation, for he had meant to do so well in this, his first fight. 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 [Carl von] 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.”3
Nearby there was a stone barrier four feet high and fifty feet in length. It offered durable protection, but now the Turks opened up with as many as twenty machine guns on the position. The bullets twanged and ricocheted in a cacophonous, jackhammering dirge, sending flint chips everywhere, more deadly to blind than to kill. Metaab promised Lawrence he would hold the position for ten more minutes but no longer. Remarkably, as a true testament of Lawrence’s leadership, the second side of one blood feud could fight just as hard for him as the first.
Lawrence ran to the rear to take charge of the reserve, which had grown considerably, when a calm fell over the battlefield. After settling his men, Lawrence took an hour’s nap behind a large rock. Around three in the afternoon he was awakened by Zeid, Mastur, Rasim Bey—an Arab regular—and Abdullah the Robber. They had brought men from the original position south of Tafileh and had also scrounged up more villagers. The Turks noticed the reinforcement and began to shell the position. Their poor gun
nery had no effect on the reorganization of the defense, which saw Lawrence begin a swift transition from the defense to the attack. He took all the mounted men, now numbering eighty, and placed them under the command of Rasim. He ordered him to attack into the rear of the Turks arrayed along the southeastern ridge. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s reserve had now become the main line of resistance. His troops here made a demonstration to cover Rasim’s maneuver. At the same time, the Turks reinforced the fight with an apparently endless chain of machine guns, deploying them as if on a parade ground. Lawrence had the range and quickly dispersed them with shrapnel from a lone mountain gun.
Just then, in the waning sunlight of a desert winter, a hundred angry villagers from the small town of Aima to the north struck the rear of the Turks at the northern base of the upside-down triangle. Simultaneously, but purely by accident, Rasim and his riders crashed into the flank and rear of the enemy on the southeastern side. The physical and psychological shock was instantaneous. The entire Turkish line visibly recoiled; a brief and eerie silence ensued; and all the while Lawrence and the men on the ridge observed the whole looming disaster. He immediately ordered the reserve to assault across the valley into the heart of the stunned enemy. Mohammed el Ghasib, the comptroller of Zeid’s household, led the charge under the red banner of the Ageyli; banner and robes became unfurled as Zeid’s master of the household rode the wind upon the shattered Turkish line. For Lawrence, the climax of the battle had arrived: “The day had been too long for me, and I was now only shaking with desire to see the end: Zeid beside me clapped his hands with joy at the beautiful order of our plan unrolling in the frosty redness of the setting sun. On the one hand Rasim’s cavalry were sweeping the broken left wing into the pit beyond the ridge: on the other the men of Aima were bloodily cutting down fugitives. The enemy center was pouring back in disorder through the gap, with our men after them on foot, on horse, on camel. The Armenians, crouching behind us all day anxiously, now drew their knives and howled to one another in Turkish as they leaped forward.” Lawrence imagined it would be a slaughter from this point to the end. The berserker rage was beginning to consume the attackers, and as a leader he should have imposed his moral will and authority, but he was too exhausted to lead his men back from the brink of atrocity. Between twenty and thirty of his original force of six hundred had been killed. There were old scores to settle, but the frightening weather imposed its own morality and cut the pursuit mercifully short: the wicked northeast wind threw razors of jagged ice into the faces of the pursuers, blinding them. The final audit of battle accounted for the true cost of the fight for the Turks: two Skoda mountain howitzers, twenty-seven machine guns, two hundred horses and mules, and nearly three hundred POWs. The Turks lost perhaps half the original force of almost twelve hundred troops. A heroic leader would have reveled in the victory, but Lawrence felt only a sense of futility: “A battle might be thrilling at the moment for generals, but usually their imagination played too vividly beforehand, and made the reality seem sham; so quiet and unimportant that they ranged about looking for its fancied core. This evening there was no glory left, but the terror of the broken flesh, which had been our own men, carried past us to their homes.” And now a simple moral calculus emerged from the slaughter at Tafileh: “The Turkish wounded lay out, and were dead next day. It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war: but no special reproach lay on us. We risked our lives in the blizzard (the chill of victory bowing us down) to save our own fellows; and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks.”4
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