With Lawrence in Arabia

by Lowell Thomas

In addition to severing the lines of communication it was Lawrence’s intention to place himself and his troops between the vital railway junction at Deraa and the Turkish armies in Palestine so as to lure the enemy into reinforcing the thus isolated garrison at Deraa with troops from the Palestine front who otherwise would be free to help stem Allenby’s advance. At the same moment it was also necessary for Lawrence to cut the railway to the south and west of Deraa in order to add color to the belief of the enemy that the entire Allied attack was coming against the Turkish Fourth Army in the upper Jordan Valley. The only unit available for putting the railway out of business consisted of the armored cars. The cars, plus Lawrence, whizzed gloriously down the railway line and captured one post before the open-mouthed Turks were aware of their danger. This post commanded an attractive railway bridge, 149 kilos south of Damascus, on which was inscribed a flattering dedication of the bridge to old Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan. Lawrence planted tulips containing 150 pounds of guncotton at both ends and in the center, and when he touched them off the bridge faded away on the autumn breeze. This job completed, the cars started on again at top speed but became stranded in the sand, where they were delayed for several hours. On their way back to rejoin the army in the Hauran they crossed the railway five miles north of Deraa, where Lawrence suppressed another post, wiped out a Kurdish cavalry detachment, blew up another bridge, and ripped up six hundred pairs of rails.

After blowing up enough of the railway in the vicinity of Deraa to throw the whole Turkish service of supply into complete chaos, Lawrence and his men ascended a high promontory called Mount Tell Ara, which commanded a panoramic view of Deraa four miles away. Through his field-glasses he made out nine planes on the enemy’s aërodrome. During that morning the German aviators had had it all their own way in the air. They had been playing mischief with Lawrence’s troops by dropping their eggs and raking the Arabs with their machine-guns. The Shereefian forces tried to defend themselves from the ground with their light artillery, but they were getting the worst of it until Lawrence’s one surviving machine, an antiquated old bus piloted by Captain Junor, came trundling up from Azark and sailed square into the middle of the whole German squadron, Lawrence and his followers watched this fracas with mixed feelings, for each of the four enemy two-seaters and four scout-planes was more than the equal of the one prehistoric British machine. With both skill and good luck Captain Junor cruised right through the German birdmen and led the whole circus off to the westward. Twenty minutes later the plucky Junor came tearing back through the air with his attendant swarm of enemy planes and signaled down to Lawrence that he had run out of petrol. He landed within fifty yards of the Arab column, and his B.E. flopped over on its back. A German Halberstadt dived on it at once and scored a direct hit with a bomb that blew the little British machine into bits. Fortunately, Junor had jumped out of his seat a moment before. The only part of his B.E. that was not destroyed was the Lewis machine-gun. Within half an hour the plucky pilot had transferred it to a Ford truck and was tearing around outside Deraa, raking the Turks with his tracer bullets.

Meanwhile, Lawrence dashed off to join the detachment of troops he had sent on in the direction of Mezerib. An hour after reaching it he helped them cut the main Turkish telegraph-lines between Palestine and Syria. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this, because it completely cut the Turkish armies off from all hope of relief from Northern Syria and Turkey proper.

At Mezerib several thousand more natives of the Hauran joined the Arab forces, and the following day Lawrence and his column marched on along the railway toward Palestine, right into the heart of the Turkish back area. They spent most of that day planting tulips, and near Nasib Lawrence blew up his seventy-ninth bridge, a rather large one with three fine arches, thus bringing to a close his long and successful career of demolition. Knowing it might be his last, he planted twice as many tulips under it as necessary.

The column slept soundly at Nasib on the night of the eighteenth after a good day’s work. The next morning, bright and early, Lawrence marched his camels, horses, and Arabs off to Umtaiye, where he was joined by the armored cars. During the morning another enemy aërodrome was sighted near the railway, and Lawrence, with two of the armored cars, sped across open country for a near view. They found three German two-seaters in front of the hangars. Had it not been for a deep gully intervening, the two armored cars would have rushed them. As it was, two of the Germans took off and circled around like great birds, pouring streams of lead down on the Rolls-Royce machines, while at the same time Lawrence and the crews inside the turrets finished the third aeroplane with fifteen hundred bullets. As the armored cars started back to Umtaiye, the Germans swooped down on them four times; but all their bombs were badly placed, and the cars escaped unhurt, except for a bit of shrapnel that wounded the colonel in the hand. Speaking of his impression of armored car work, Lawrence remarked that he considered it fighting de luxe.

This same day the Arab regulars, under Jaffer Pasha, and the armored cars and French detachment and the Rualla horse under Nuri Shallan, gave a fine account of themselves.

Jaffer Pasha, who also slashed his way brilliantly through this engagement, comes of a rich and noble Bagdad family. His history is full of romantic vicissitudes. At the outbreak of the war, Jaff ar el Askari, as a general on the Turkish staff, was sent across in a submarine from Constantinople to North Africa to organize an uprising in the Sahara among the Senussi Arabs. He led the Senussi in their short but spectacular campaign against the British. In the first battle he defeated the British; the second battle was a draw; and in the third he was badly wounded, defeated, and captured by the Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia, near Solium, and imprisoned in the great citadel at Cairo. In trying to escape at the end of three months he broke his ankle and was recaptured in the moat under the citadel. He was as fat as a barrel, full of the joy of life, and such a gentlemanly, likable fellow that a little later the British put him on parole and allowed him to wander about Cairo. Being an Arab himself, he sympathized with the Arab Nationalist cause and one day asked his British captors to permit him to volunteer as a private with Feisal. His request was granted, and he did such remarkable work that before many months had passed he had risen to the post of commander-in-chief of Feisal’s regular army, which was composed mainly of deserters from the Turkish ranks who had known Jaffer as a general in Turkey. Jaffer Pasha had received the kaiser’s Iron Cross at the Dardanelles and the Turkish Crescent for his work in the Senussi campaign, and after he had been with the Arabs for a while he was made a commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by the British! Allenby accorded him this last honor at his Ramleh headquarters in Palestine. The guard of honor on this occasion was the same Dorset Yeomanry that had captured the pasha just a year before. Jaffer was tremendously pleased and amused at this subtle touch of humor on Allenby’s part.