BY SEPTEMBER 24, the Turks had given up trying to reestablish the rail link between the Fourth Army and the communications plexus at Deraa. At the moment this was all unknown to Lawrence, who continued his efforts toward the railway, leading an attack against the station at Mafrak. Here he was met with enormous resistance by a German machine-gun company. An attempt to reach the nearby bridge and blow it was countered with such a fierce hail of bullets and grenades that even with armored car protection, the sortie was beaten back. Puzzled by the stiff defense, Lawrence withdrew to Um el Durab for regrouping.
News greeted him that the Handley Page was scheduled to make a bombing run on Mafrak that very night. Lawrence remained skeptical of a completely successful night raid but agreed to wait; he could always police up whatever the bomber missed with his mounted raiders. At precisely midnight, a deep-throated rumble could be heard coming out of the west. Under a desert moon, the huge bomber materialized into its dragonlike hulk. Finding its target all lit up and astir with rail activity, the bomber began dropping its sticks of large hundred-pound bombs, which slammed into the jammed rail sidings. The packed freight immediately caught fire, causing a serious panic among the Turks. The station burned fiercely through the whole night and well into the next day.
During the afternoon, it became apparent that the entire Turkish Fourth Army had been shattered and was falling like loose bird shot into a full-scale retreat. At last their great nemesis had been shattered. The Beni Hassan reported that the enemy was no longer a cohesive army but a band of “gypsies” in complete rout. The tribesmen tore into the fleeing Turks, trapping stragglers and disorganized remnants. The collapse of the Fourth Army caused Lawrence to call a hasty council and gather his captains: Nasir, Nuri Said, Nuri Shaalan, and Tallal. Major Young also attended to offer logistical advice. Lawrence argued that with the collapse of the Turks near Amman, their mission was accomplished. He told them: “Our new endeavor should be to force the quick evacuation of Deraa, in order to prevent the Turks there reforming the fugitives into a rearguard. I propose that we march north, past Tell Arar, and over the railway at dawn tomorrow, into Sheikh Saal village. It lies in familiar country with abundant water, perfect observation, and a secure retreat west or north, or even southwest, if we’re directly attacked.”6 Once his listeners understood that the maneuver would decisively cut off Deraa from Damascus, the group unanimously assented to his proposal, though Lawrence sensed that somehow Young harbored reservations about the plan.
In its execution, it meant that they would lose their armored car support for the time being, as well as their air cover. As the Bristol fighters flew back to Palestine to relay Lawrence’s intentions, they spotted a large column of Turkish cavalry heading toward the Arab position. At this turn of events, one of the fighters peeled off and flew over Lawrence’s camp, dropping a note that warned of the mounted element charging from the west. Lawrence read the message and ran off to find Nasir. Nasir was standing with Nuri Said on a heap of ash, discussing the forthcoming maneuver, when Lawrence pounded up beside them. Should they stay and fight the new threat or simply disengage and head north? A quick decision was required. As they pondered the new circumstances, Nuri Shaalan arrived and offered to use his horsemen as a rear guard to delay the Turks long enough for Lawrence to get the main body on the march north. They also received word that the armored cars, which had been sent back to Azrak, had spotted the huge dust cloud spewed forth by the enemy horse and sped back to reinforce Lawrence. Joyce’s reinforcements decided the issue.
When Joyce arrived with the armored cars, Nuri Shaalan charged out to meet the Turkish cavalry. His force closed rapidly upon the enemy, and much to his surprise, the entire detachment immediately surrendered. As it turned out, the “cavalry” was merely rear echelon stragglers who had mounted transport animals bareback in an attempt to escape to Damascus. The “cavalry charge” was simply the continuation of the massive rout of the Fourth Army. Meanwhile, Lawrence continued north with the main body, hoping to meet up with Nuri Shaalan later.
As Lawrence continued his advance, it became increasingly apparent to him that the chance encounter with the Turkish rabble had upset his new timetable. Besides, by now his raiders were all bedecked in captured Turkish khaki. He would have to detour in order to avoid frightening the local peasantry, who were in full revolt against their former masters. The circumstances caused Lawrence to camp just before twilight to await Nuri Shaalan and his horsemen.
Around midnight, Major Young appeared for a private conversation with Lawrence.7 Young was now convinced that the Arab Revolt was successful, its main missions accomplished. They had followed Allenby’s orders and had maintained a harassing presence against the Fourth Army; but now that it no longer existed, the work was done. Furthermore, Young argued, “we can honorably fall back to Bosra, twenty miles out of the way to the east; there Nesib el Bekri is gathering more forces. We can wait with them for Allenby’s troops to march into Deraa and wait a just reward there.” Lawrence was a bit taken aback by Young’s proposal. First, it would put an added burden on Allenby’s forces. After all, Lawrence’s forces at Sheikh Saad would operationally be the best positioned of all of Allenby’s troops on the east side of the Jordan. It would prevent the Turks from establishing any sort of coherent defense south of Damascus. He told Young, “Damascus means the end of this war in the East and, I believe, the end of the general war, too; because the Central Powers being interdependent, the breaking of their weakest link—Turkey—would swing the whole cluster loose. Therefore, for every sensible reason, strategic, tactical, political, even moral—we are driving on.” There was another reason he had to continue, but this reason Lawrence kept to himself. Arab honor demanded that the Arabs seize Damascus with their own sword. Seizure of the capital by dint of their own efforts would help seal the freedom they had fought and died for these many months. Lawrence was not about to turn his back on Arab honor; to do so would destroy his own.
But Young persisted with his reasoning, bringing Pisani and Winterton into the argument as well: “Tomorrow it will be madness to cross west over the railway. The line will be guarded from end to end by tens of thousands of Turks pouring out of Deraa. If they let us cross over, we will only be in still greater danger.”8 By now Young’s audience was tired and had grown weary of his pestering. Lawrence simply turned over on his carpet and wondered aloud, “What was keeping Nuri Shaalan and Tallal?” With that, the decision was made final: Lawrence’s irregulars would continue to drive the sword into the back of the routed enemy. Tomorrow the campaign would continue as planned.
NASIR, NURI SHAALAN, and Tallal had missed the rendezvous point and didn’t link up with Lawrence until morning. After a brief breakfast they all headed north, buoyed by the heady atmosphere of impending victory. All along the march they continued to attract village peasants to their column. Outside Deraa, they encountered two Aussie pilots whose Bristol fighter had been shot through the radiator. Lawrence and his band helped repair it as the celebratory mood continued with women from a nearby village bringing water for the radiator as though to a wedding festival.
At noon the Arabs marched through a melon field, the front of their formation now extending nearly two miles wide. Advancing through the field, they once again came upon the railway extending north from Deraa to Damascus. A long train chugging up toward the old capital indicated that a spur of the track had been repaired again. As the locomotive puffed off beyond the bright horizon, the entire column advanced upon the railway and began a rabble-inspired demolition, with hundreds of Arabs trying their rookie hands at dynamite. Their actions evoked more the image of young boys with fireworks at a Fourth of July celebration than a military operation. But the ease with which these amateurs had broken a long swath of rail revealed to Lawrence how vulnerable and ineffectual the Turks had become.
After pondering the thought, Lawrence decided to convene a brief war council with Nasir and the others. He was surprised and pleased to find Auda abu Tayi
present as well. Auda had just returned from his own bit of freelancing and freebooting along the Druze Mountains. The large force would now reorganize itself into four main attack columns: Tallal would lead one in an assault against the large grain depot at Ezraa. Auda would attack Khirbet el Ghazala, a station to the south. Nuri was ordered to sweep the roads for Turkish stragglers coming out of Deraa. Lawrence would continue on with his detachment to Sheikh Saad.
Lawrence’s column soon departed, making slow progress through a moonless night, though it reached Sheikh Saad with the sun’s rising. Here they encountered the clan of ibn Smeir, a sworn blood enemy of Nuri Shaalan. But since ibn Smeir himself was not in camp, the column would be the respected guests of ibn Smeir’s family. For two years Feisal, Nasir, and Lawrence had struggled, more or less successfully, to keep the blood feuding at a minimum. Even though victory was near at hand, the tribal tensions would likely get worse as each clan clamored for its share of the spoils of war. Lawrence precisely captured the military implications of the feuding when he later wrote: “The strain of keeping them in play, and employing their hot-heads in separate spheres, balancing opportunity and service that our direction might be esteemed as above jealousy—all that was evil enough. Conduct of the war in France would have been harder if each division, almost each brigade, of our army hated every other with a deadly hatred and fought when they met suddenly.”9
The other three attack columns rejoined Lawrence that evening with the great news of their success. All were laden with booty, so much so that they were unable to pursue the fleeing enemy. Tallal was successful at Ezraa; Auda captured a decrepit train, artillery, and two hundred prisoners, some of whom were German; Nuri seized four hundred prisoners, mules, and machine guns. The bulk of the Turkish rabble was handed over to the local villagers as valuable day labor. While the plunder was being divided up, a British aircraft swooped low and dropped a message. Young readied the recognition panels and ran out to get the note: Bulgaria had surrendered! The Arabs had no knowledge of the faraway place but drew the obvious implications: the war would soon be over.
Later that evening, Feisal arrived with Nuri Said and the bulk of the Arab regular army. The villagers of Sheikh Saad were duly impressed. More mobs of enemy-routed troops continued to roll past like dark clouds of ash from a dying volcano. Zaal went out against one of these clouds with the Howeitat. An hour later he returned in riotous laughter. “We gave them to the boys and girls of the village for servants,” he told Lawrence with a scornful hoot. News also arrived that Chauvel’s Aussies were driving up from the southwest into the nearby villages, helping to precipitate a mass uprising all along the entire front. Within two days’ time, Lawrence speculated, another sixty thousand armed men would have joined the revolt.
Additional intelligence arrived from Allenby via aircraft that helped to clarify further the operational situation for Lawrence. The Germans had torched the military facilities at Deraa; the airfields and magazine stores were ablaze in towering flames; the Germans were now part of the detritus of defeat, drifting north with the Turks. The message also indicated that the entire Turkish Seventh Army had been smashed and was rolling in two waves along with the remnants of the Fourth Army toward the Arabs: one column of six thousand men, the other a fragment of two thousand. Now, it seemed, the real slaughter was about to begin.
THE ARAB ARMY along with two of Pisani’s pocket guns would go after the two thousand remnant. Tallal was becoming worried because the Turkish vestiges were moving directly toward his home village at Tafas. Lawrence rode to Tafas with his detachment, hoping to fight a delaying action until the main body came up. About halfway to the objective, Lawrence met some mounted tribesmen shepherding a herd of prisoners stripped to the waist. They had been beaten mercilessly, the welts on their backs oozing a crimson tide of blood. But the victims were members of the hated police battalion from Deraa, and Lawrence allowed the beatings to continue. It was an ominous sign: the day was beginning with a new aura and mood Lawrence had never experienced or witnessed before. This was going to be a day of wrath and vengeance. The angry Arabs also reported that one of Jemal Pasha’s lancer regiments had already entered Tafas. The lancers were an elite unit that still maintained its cohesion and could be expected to put up a stiff fight: not a good omen.
When Lawrence reached the outskirts of Tafas, he saw columns of smoke rising among the huts and shacks. Near the ascending ground he saw a clutch of villagers huddled among some thorny bushes. They told of unspeakable horrors perpetrated by the death’s-head lancers only an hour earlier. Lawrence then deployed his column in an ambush position at the north edge of the village. Soon the Turks emerged, heading for Mishin; the lancers were deployed in the front and rear, with a rabble of composite units and transport in the center. Machine guns provided flank security. The enemy column continued to advance into Lawrence’s fire sack, and when it reached an open area, the Arabs unleashed a torrent of fire and steel. Nuri Said and Pisani were there; Auda was ready to launch against the Turkish flank; Tallal was glancing back anxiously at his village. The Turkish reaction was slow and ineffectual. They turned two field guns against the ambushers, but as usual the shrapnel had its fuses set too long, so the shells screamed over Lawrence’s head without doing damage. The Turks quickly hustled out of the ambush, and Pisani began to pump high explosive rounds into the rear of the retreating column. Lawrence was unable to press home his ambush because of the urgent need to aid the village.
The Arabs returned and entered Tafas cautiously, stepping carefully over the dead that lay all around. Lawrence would later recall the scene: “The village lay stilly under its slow wreaths of white smoke.… Some gray heaps seemed to hide in the long grass, embracing the ground in the close way of corpses. We looked away from these knowing they were dead; but from one a little figure tottered off, as if to escape us. It was a child, three or four years old, whose dirty smock was stained red over one shoulder and side, with blood from a large half-fibrous wound, perhaps a lance thrust, just where the neck and body joined.
“The child ran a few steps, then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), ‘Don’t hit me, Baba.’ Abd el Aziz, choking out something … flung himself off his camel, and stumbled, kneeling, in the grass beside the child. His suddenness frightened her, for she threw up her arms and tried to scream; but, instead, dropped in a little heap, while blood rushed out again over her clothes.” Then, she died.
The men found more dead, including four babies. Near the out-walls, they found a pregnant woman, dead with a wicked saw-toothed bayonet stuck between her outstretched bare legs. There were twenty more dead who lay with her in as many grotesque shapes and poses. Lawrence’s bodyguard stood around, silently trying to comprehend the slaughter. Then, suddenly, el Zaagi burst into a horrific spasm of mad laughter, at last breaking the surreal silence and completing the sensory mood of senselessness.
The effect on Lawrence was overwhelming. The mindless slaughter pushed him over the brink toward depravity. He hesitatingly turned to his men: “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.”10 At the order they all regrouped and raced after the receding enemy, while Lawrence remained back with the inconsolable Tallal.
Tallal slowly surveyed the wreckage of his village and soon gave out a wail like a wounded child. He urged his horse forward through the devastation to higher ground. From here he could see the routing Turks; then he began to shiver fiercely, uncontrollably. Lawrence sidled near him to speak, but Auda caught his arm and reined him back. Very deliberately and carefully, Tallal tugged his head cloth across his face and drew it tight behind his head, softly uttering some secret oath. Then he suddenly lurched forward on his mount, driving steel spurs deep into her flanks. The mare leapt into a fast gallop and, with Tallal bent low in his saddle, charged straight at the center of the retreating enemy.
The charge was down a gentle slope and quickly gathered momentum as Lawrence and the others watched in stunned and
hushed silence. The shooting had stopped, and the only sound came from the pounding of the horse’s hooves, which seemed strangely and mockingly loud. As Tallal drew near his target, he suddenly screamed forth his battle cry in a piercing shout: “Tallal! Tallal!” At that moment, the entire Turkish force unleashed upon him with every weapon a scything fire. The fusillade riddled and staggered his gallant steed; Tallal flew off the falling animal and fell dead, impaled upon the Turkish lances.
Auda turned to Lawrence, stony cold and grim, shouting: “Allah give him mercy; we will take his price!” He jiggled his horse’s reins and slowly began to advance upon the dust-shrouded enemy horde: the sword of the prophet was now unsheathed again. After Tallal’s charge of retribution, the peasants from the village rallied. Everyone now began to follow Auda’s lead. Using an adroit maneuver, Auda was able to drive the Turks into bad terrain, forcing them to split apart into three vulnerable groups. The third element was the smallest, comprising mostly German and Austrian machine gunners and a few mounted troops. They assembled around three cars and fought in brilliant desperation, beating back the mad, relentless charges of the enraged Arabs. For the first time in the war, Lawrence personally gave the order “Take no prisoners!” At that instant, its moral construction gone, the Arabs ceased being an army and Lawrence stopped being a leader, his moral compass gone. Now the full consequences of his leader’s grief took control, finally snuffing out the last flickering flame of his moral identity. Instead of leadership, he could offer only berserker incitement. All melded into one boiling, uncontrollable force of retribution. No longer men, they fought like devils with the rage of hatred inflaming their hearts and vengeance searing their souls.
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