XXVI
Lawrence suggested at a midnight council that the whole Arab force should move up to Sheikh Saad, north of Deraa, astride the line of retreat of the main Turkish forces. The British staff-officer appointed by Joyce as senior military adviser for the expedition objected. He said that Allenby had set the Arabs as watchmen merely of the Fourth Army; they had seen its disorderly flight and their duty was over. They might now honourably fall back twenty miles out of the way to the east and there join forces with the Druses under their leader, Lawrence’s foolish friend Nesib.
Lawrence would not hear of this. He was most anxious for the Arabs to be first in Damascus and to do their full share of the fighting. To thrust behind Deraa into Sheikh Saad would put more pressure on the Turks than any British unit was in a position to put. They could be prevented from making another stand this side of Damascus, and the capture of Damascus meant the end of the War in the East, and probably the end of the European War too. So for every reason the Arabs should go forward. The staff-officer would not be convinced. He argued and tried to drag Nun Said into the debate. Finally he insisted that he was the senior military adviser and must reluctantly point out that as a regular officer he knew his business. It was not the first time that Lawrence had been slighted for not being a regular. He merely sighed, and said that he must sleep now, because he was getting up early to cross the line with his body-guard and the Bedouin, whatever the regulars did. However, Nuri Said decided to come with Lawrence and so did Pisani, and so did the rest of the British officers. And Tallal and the Emir Nuri and old Auda were already pressing forward.
Tallal and Auda undertook attacks on Ezraa and Ghazale, towns on the Damascus railway. The Emir Nuri would sweep towards Deraa in search of escaping Turkish parties. Lawrence himself went to Sheikh Saad with his body-guard, arriving there at dawn on the twenty-seventh of September. There was nearly a serious accident here, for they were invited to guest at the tent of one of the Emir Nuri’s blood-enemies. Fortunately, the man himself was absent, so Lawrence’s party accepted: Nuri, when he arrived, would find himself temporary host of his enemy’s family and have to obey the rules. It was a great relief. Throughout the campaign they had been bothered with these same blood-feuds, barely suspended by Feisal’s authority. It was a constant strain keeping enemies apart, trying to keep the hostile clans in friendly rivalry on separate ventures, making them camp always with a neutral clan between, and avoiding any suspicion of favouritism. As Lawrence comments, the campaign in France would have been harder to control if each division, almost each brigade, of the British Army had hated every other one with a deadly hatred and had fought at every chance meeting. However, Feisal, Nasir and he had managed successfully for two years and the end was only a few days off.
Auda returned boasting, having taken Ghazale by storm and captured a train, guns and two hundred men. Tallal had taken Ezraa, held by none other than Abd el Kader, the mad Algerian. When Tallal came the townsmen joined him and Abd el Kader had to escape to Damascus. Tallal’s horsemen were too heavy with booty to catch him. The Emir Nuri captured four hundred Turks with mules and machine-guns: these prisoners were farmed out to remote villages as labourers to earn their keep. The rest of the army now arrived under Nuri Said and the peasants came shyly up to look at it. Feisal’s army had hitherto been only a legendary thing. When no Turks were about, the peasants had spoken in whispers the famous names of its leaders—Tallal, Nasir. Nuri, Auda, ‘Aurans’; whom now they saw in the flesh.
Lawrence and five or six others went up a hill for a look south to see if anything was moving. To their astonishment a company of regulars in uniform—Turks, Austrians, Germans—was coming slowly towards them with eight machine-guns mounted on pack-animals. They were marching up from Galilee towards Damascus after their defeat by Allenby, thinking themselves fifty miles from any war. Some of the Ruwalla nobles were at once sent to ambush them in a narrow lane: the officers showed fight and were instantly killed, the men threw down their arms and in five minutes had been searched and robbed and were being led off to the prisoners’ camp in a cattle-pound. Next, Zaal and the Howeitat were sent against three or four other parties seen moving in the distance, and soon returned, each man leading a mule or a pack-horse. Zaal disdained to take such broken men prisoners. ‘We gave them to the girls and boys of the village for servants,’ he sneered.
The whole of the Hauran had now risen and in two days’ time sixty thousand armed men would be waiting to cut up the Turkish retreat. A British aeroplane hovered over and dropped word that Bulgaria had surrendered. Evidently the whole war would soon be at an end as well as this Eastern campaign. The Germans were burning storehouses and aeroplanes at Deraa and another aeroplane dropped word that a Turkish column of four thousand men was retiring north from the town towards Sheikh Saad, and another column of two thousand from Mezerib. The smaller column seemed a safer size to attack, so the bigger, which later proved to be more like seven thousand strong, was let go by, with merely the Ruwalla horse and some Hauran peasants to harry it and cut off stragglers.
Tallal was anxious about the Mezerib Turks, because their path would lie through his own village of Tafas. He hurried there as fast as he could, determined to hold a ridge south of it. Lawrence galloped ahead of him, hoping to delay the Turks until the rest of the army came up. Unfortunately the camels and horses were tired out. On their way they met mounted Arabs herding a drove of Turkish prisoners stripped to the waist, beating them on with sticks. The Arabs shouted that these were the remnants of the police battalion at Deraa. Their record of monstrous cruelty towards the peasants Lawrence knew well and he made no appeal for mercy.
At Tafas he arrived too late. The Governor of Syria’s own lancer regiment had already taken it and was burning the houses after massacring the inhabitants. Lawrence and the Arabs lay in ambush on a ridge to the north as the Turks marched out in good order with the lancers in front and rear, infantry in a central column, a flank-guard of machine-guns, guns and transport in the centre. When the head of the long column showed itself beyond the houses the Arabs opened fire with machine-guns. The Turks replied with field-guns, but as usual the shrapnel was badly ranged and burst far behind the ridge. Then up came Nuri Said and Pisani with mountain-guns, and Auda, and Tallal, nearly frantic with the news of the massacre of his people. The Arabs lined the northern ridge and opened rapid fire with mountain-guns, rifles and machine-guns. Tallal, Sheikh Abd el Aziz and Lawrence with their attendants slipped round behind the Turkish column, the last parties of which were just leaving the smoking village. There seemed to be no soul left alive in the ruins. But then from a heap of corpses a child tottered out, three or four years old, her dirty smock stained red with blood from a lance thrust where neck and shoulder joined. She ran a few steps, then stood and cried in a voice that sounded very loud in the ghastly silence, ‘Don’t hit me, Baba.’ Abd el Aziz choked out something: it was his village as well as Tallal’s. He flung himself off his camel and stumbled to the child. His suddenness frightened her, for she threw up her arms and tried to scream, but instead dropped in a little heap; the blood rushed out again and she died.
They saw four more dead babies and scores of corpses, men and women obscenely mutilated. El Zaagi broke out in peals of hysterical laughter: Lawrence said, ‘The best of you are those who bring me the most Turkish dead.’ They rode after the Turks, killing stragglers and wounded without mercy. Tallal had seen all. He gave one moan, then rode to the upper ground and sat awhile on his mare, shivering and staring at the retreating Turks. Lawrence moved near to speak to him, but Auda restrained him with a hand on his reins.
Very slowly Tallal drew his headcloth about his face, then seemed to take hold of himself and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy. It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. Both armies waited for him. Firing had stopped on both sides and the noise of his hooves sounded unnaturally loud as he rushed on. Only a few lengths from the enemy he sat up in the saddle and shouted his war-cry, ‘Tallal, Tallal!’ twice in a tremendous voice. Instantly the Turkish rifles and machine-guns crashed out and he and his mare fell riddled through and through among the lance-points.
Auda looked cold and grim. ‘God give him mercy,’ he said, ‘we will take his price.’ Then he slowly moved after the enemy. He took command of the Arabs, sending out parties of peasants this way and that and at last by a skilful turn drove the Turks into bad ground and split their force into three parts. The pursuit continued. The smallest section, consisting chiefly of German and Austrian machine-gunners grouped round three motor-cars, fought magnificently. The Arabs were like devils; hatred and revenge so shook them that they could hardly hold their rifles straight to fire. At last this section was left behind while Lawrence and his men galloped after the other two which were fleeing in panic. By sunset all but a few were destroyed. For the first time in the war Lawrence gave the order: ‘No prisoners.’ The peasants flocked to join in the attack. At first only one man in six had a weapon, but gradually they armed themselves from the fallen Turks until at nightfall every man had a rifle and a captured horse.
Just one group of Arabs who had not heard of the horror of Tafas took prisoners the last two hundred men. Lawrence went up to inquire why their lives had been spared, not unwilling to leave them alive as witnesses of Tallal’s price. But a man on the ground screamed out something to the Arabs and they turned to see who it was. It was one of their own men, his thigh shattered, left to die. But even so he had not been spared. In the manner of Tafas he had been further tormented with bayonets hammered through his shoulder and other leg, pinning him to the ground like a collector’s specimen. He was still conscious. They asked him, ‘Hassan, who did it?’ For answer he looked towards the prisoners huddled together near him. The Arabs shot them down in a heap and they were all dead before Hassan too died.
The killing and capturing of the retreating Turks went on all night. Each village, as the fight rolled towards it, took up the work. The main body of seven thousand men had tried to halt at sunset, but the Ruwalla had forced them on in a stumbling scattered mob through the cold and darkness. The Arabs, too, were scattered and nearly as uncertain and the confusion was indescribable. The only detachments that held together were the Germans. Lawrence for the first time felt proud of the enemy that had killed his two younger brothers. They went firmly ahead, proud and silent, steering like armoured ships through the wrack of Turks and Arabs. When attacked they halted, took position, fired at the word of command. It was glorious. They were two thousand miles from home, without hope and without guides, footsore, starving, sleepless: yet on they went, their numbers slowly lessening.
The Ruwalla took Deraa in a mounted charge that night; the garrison had been holding up the Indians at Remthe. Lawrence rode to Deraa to take charge of things, with his body-guard and Nuri Said. He was riding his grand racing-camel, Baha, so called from the bleat that she had from a bullet wound in her throat. He gave her liberty to stretch herself out, drawing ahead of the tired body-guard, so that he arrived alone at Deraa in the full dawn. Nasir was already there arranging for a military governor and police. Lawrence helped him by putting guards over the pumps and engine-sheds and what remained of the looted repair-shops and stores. Then he explained to Nasir what course had to be taken if the Arabs were not to lose hold of what they had won. Nasir, who now for the first time heard that there would be difficulty in persuading the English to take the Arabs seriously, was bewildered. But he soon grasped the point.
General Barrow, commanding the Indians, was advancing now to attack the town, not knowing that it was already captured. Some of his men began firing on the Arabs and Lawrence rode out with El Zaagi to stop them. A party of Indian machine-gunners was proud to capture such finely-dressed prisoners, but Lawrence explained himself to an officer and was allowed to hurry off to find General Barrow. His troops were already encircling the town and his aeroplanes bombed Nuri Said’s men as they entered from the north. Barrow seemed annoyed that the Arabs had got there first, but Lawrence was not sorry for him; particularly since he had delayed a day and a night watering at the poor wells at Remthe, though his map had showed the lake and river of Mezerib close ahead on the road by which the enemy was escaping. Barrow said that his orders were to take Deraa and he was going there anyhow, whoever was in possession. He asked Lawrence to ride beside him. But Baha’s smell disturbed the horses, so Lawrence had to take the centre of the road while the General and his staff rode their bucking horses in the ditch. Barrow said that he must put sentries in Deraa to keep the populace in order. Lawrence explained gently that the Arabs had appointed a military governor. When they reached the wells the General said that his engineers must inspect the pumps. Lawrence answered that he would welcome their assistance, but that the Arabs had already lit the furnaces and hoped to begin watering his horses in an hour’s time. Barrow snorted that Lawrence seemed to be at home; so he would only take charge of the railway station. Lawrence pointed to an engine moving out towards Mezerib and asked Barrow to instruct his sentries not to interfere with the proper working of the line by the Arabs.
LAWRENCE AND HIS BODYGUARD AT AKABA
Summer, 1918
Copyright
Barrow had no orders as to the status of the Arabs and had come in thinking of them as a conquered people; Lawrence wondered how to prevent him from doing anything foolish to antagonize them. He had read a military article, written by Barrow years before, in which the General had insisted that Fear was the people’s main incentive to action in war and peace; and knew what he was up against. Then Barrow remarked that he was short of forage and food-stuffs, and Lawrence, kindly offering to provide these, persuaded him that he was the guest of the Arabs. Barrow was sufficiently convinced to salute Nasir’s little silk flag propped on the balcony of the Government office, with a sentry beneath it. The Arabs thrilled with pleasure at the compliment and were ready to listen to Lawrence’s instructions that these Indians must be given all hospitality as guests. Later, General Allenby’s Chief Political Officer assured Barrow that Lawrence’s attitude was politically right, so all was well. There had been no disturbances, though the Indians pilfered freely from the Arabs, and the Bedouin were horrified at the manner of the British officers towards their men. They had never seen such personal inequality before.
Thousands of prisoners had meanwhile been taken by the Arabs. Most were boarded out in the villages, some were handed over to the British, who counted them again as their own captures. Feisal drove up in his green car from Azrak the next day, September the twenty-ninth, with the armoured cars behind him. General Barrow, now watered and fed, was due to meet Chauvel, the general commanding the Australians, for a joint entry into Damascus. He told Lawrence to ask Feisal to take the right flank. That suited Lawrence, for there along the railway was Nasir still hanging on to the main Turkish retreat (the column seven thousand strong which the Ruwalla had harried on the night of the Tafas massacre), reducing its numbers by continuous attack night and day. He stayed another day at Deraa, having much to attend to, but his memories of the place were too horrible, and he camped outside the town with his body-guard.
He could not sleep that night, so before dawn he went off in the Rolls-Royce towards Damascus. The roads were blocked with the Indians’ transport; he took a cut across country and along the railway. He overtook Barrow, who asked him where he was going to stop that night. ‘At Damascus,’ Lawrence answered, and Barrow’s face fell. Barrow was advancing very cautiously, sending out scouts and cavalry-screens through friendly country already cleared of Turks by the Arabs. Lawrence’s Rolls-Royce continued along the railway till he came on Nasir, the Emir Nuri, and Auda with the tribes, still fighting. The seven thousand Turks had melted to two in three days’ ceaseless battle. Lawrence could see the survivors in ragged groups halting now and then to fire their mountain-guns. Nasir rode up to greet Lawrence on his liver-coloured Arab stallion (the splendid creature was still spirited after a hundred miles of running flight). With him were old Emir Nuri and about thirty of his servants. They asked whether help was coming at last. Lawrence told them that the Indians were just behind. If they could only check the enemy for just an hour.... Nasir saw a walled farm-house ahead guarding the track and he and Nuri galloped forward to hold it against the Turks.
Lawrence drove back to the Indian cavalry and told a surly old colonel what a gift the Arabs had waiting for him. The colonel hardly seemed grateful, but at last sent a squadron out across the plain. The Turks turned their little guns at it. One or two shells fell near and to Lawrence’s disgust the colonel ordered a retirement. Lawrence and the staff-officer in the car with him dashed back and begged the colonel not to be afraid of the wretched little ten-pound shells, hardly more dangerous than rocket-pistols. But the old man would not budge, so the Rolls-Royce had to rush back farther until Lawrence found a general of Barrow’s staff and got him to send some Middlesex Yeomanry and Royal Horse Artillery forward. That night the remaining Turks broke, abandoning their guns and transport, and went streaming off across the eastern hills into what they thought was empty land beyond. But Auda was waiting there in ambush, and all that night, in his last battle, the old man killed and killed, plundered and captured until, when dawn came, he found that all was over. So passed the Turkish Fourth Army.
It may be interesting to note the record of these operations in the official handbook, A Brief Record of the Advance of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force:
‘The Fourth Mounted Division (General Barrow’s) coming up from the south with the Arab forces on its right entered Deraa unopposed on September 28th, and next day got in touch with the retreating Turks in the Dilli area. For two days the enemy was pressed and harassed, his columns were fired upon and broken up, and on September 30th the division got into touch with the other divisions of the Desert Mounted Corps and reached Zerakiye late that night.’
Other references to the Arabs’ services are similarly reticent. (There are, however, plentiful references to the way that the Beni Sakhr tribe failed the Amman raiders some months previously.) This withholding of credit where due was, I think, principally Lawrence’s fault; he did not send detailed reports to General Headquarters. He was, of course, far too busy. What really mattered to him was not that the Arabs should be given homage in Allenby’s despatches—they would not for the most part have been particularly gratified—but that they should set up a government in Damascus before somebody else did.