XIX
In October, 1917, Allenby, who was fast reorganizing the British Army on the borders of Palestine, had decided on an attack of the Gaza-Beersheba line, to begin on the last day of the month. He had resolved that this time the attempt must not fail as before for want of artillery and troops, but since the Gaza end of the line (nearest the sea) was very strongly entrenched—its very strength seemed to have tempted the former disastrous British attacks—the scheme was to try south at the Beersheba end. Elaborate care was taken to deceive the Turks with false secret documents which they were allowed to capture, into thinking that the Beersheba attack was a mere feint and that the main attack was coming from Gaza.
It was for Lawrence to decide how much help the Arabs could afford to give Allenby. He was in the unfortunate position of serving two masters. And he did not ‘hate the one and love the other, cling to the one and despise the other.’ He admired and had the confidence of both, yet found himself unable to explain the whole Arab situation to Allenby, or the whole British plan to Feisal. Allenby expected much from Lawrence as one of his officers. But Feisal trusted him implicitly and this trust made him perhaps more careful on the Arab behalf than he might otherwise have been: and Feisal’s was the weaker cause, always attractive to Lawrence. Now, the country immediately behind the Turkish lines was peopled with tribes friendly to Feisal and a sudden rising there might have an enormous effect on the War. If Allenby was given a month’s fine weather to make possible the advance of his cumbrous artillery and supplies he ought to be able to take not only Jerusalem, which he was aiming at, but Haifa too. In that case it would be a chance for the Arabs to strike from behind at the all-important junction of Deraa, the nerve-centre of the Turkish army in Palestine, where the Medina-Damascus railway joined the railway that ran to Haifa and to Jerusalem. Near Deraa were great untouched reserves of Arab fighting men, secretly taught and armed by Feisal from his base at Akaba. Four main Bedouin tribes could be used there and, better still, the peasants of the Hauran plain to the north, and the Druses, a settled mountain folk from the east.
The attack on Beersheba had not yet begun, so Lawrence was in doubt whether or not to call up all these helpers at once, to rush Deraa at the same time as Allenby attacked Gaza and Beersheba, smash all the railway lines, and even go on to surprise Damascus. He could count on at least twelve thousand men, and success would put the Turks facing Allenby into a desperate condition. He was greatly tempted to stake everything on immediate action but could not quite make up his mind. As a British officer he should have taken the risk, as a leader of the Arab Revolt he should not have. The Arabs in Syria were imploring him to come. Tallal, the great fighter who led the tribes about Deraa, sent repeated messages that, given only a few of Feisal’s men in proof of support, he could take Deraa. This would have been all very well for Allenby, but Feisal could not decently accept Tallal’s offer unless he was sure that Deraa could be held once it was taken. If anything went wrong with the British advance and the Turks sent reinforcements down from Aleppo and Damascus, Deraa would be recaptured and a general massacre would follow of all the splendid peasantry of the district. The Syrians could only rise once and when they did there must be no mistake. The English troops were brave fighters, but Lawrence could not yet trust Allenby, or rather the commanders under him who were, he thought, quite capable of ruining a perfectly sound scheme, as at the Suvla landing in the Dardanelles campaign, by not profiting from their first sudden gains. And there was the weather. So he decided to postpone the rising until the following year. It is difficult to say now whether he was right. Allenby’s army fought excellently, but was later held up by the rains.
He had to do something less than raising a general revolt, in return for Allenby’s supplies and arms. So he decided that it would have to be a big raid made by a Bedouin tribe without disturbing the settled peoples, and something that would help Allenby in his pursuit of the enemy. The best plan was to blow up one of the bridges crossing the deep river-gorge of the Yarmuk just west of Deraa on the line leading to Jerusalem. This would temporarily cut off the Turkish army in Palestine from its base at Damascus, and make it less able to resist or escape from Allenby’s advance. It would be a fortnight before either of the two biggest bridges could be rebuilt. To reach the Yarmuk would mean a ride of about four hundred and twenty miles from Akaba by way of Azrak. The Turks thought the danger of an attempt on the bridges so slight that they did not guard them at all strongly. So Lawrence put the scheme before Allenby, who asked him to carry it out on November the fifth or one of the three days following. If the attempt succeeded and the weather held for the British advance, the chances were that few of the Turkish army would get back to Damascus. The Arabs would then have the opportunity of carrying on the wave of the attack from a half-way point where the British, because of transport difficulties, must stop exhausted. They should be able to sweep on to Damascus.
In that case some important Arab was needed to lead the raid from Azrak. Nasir, the usual pioneer who had led the Akaba expedition, was away. But Ali ibn el Hussein was available, the young Harith chief whom Lawrence had met disguised in his first ride to see Feisal a year before, and who had lately been active in raids on the railway down the line just above Davenport’s section. Ali knew Syria, for he had been, with Feisal, the forced guest of the Turkish general Jemal at Damascus. Besides, his courage, resource and energy were proved, and no adventure had ever been too great or disaster too deep but Ali had faced it with his high yell of a laugh. He was so strong that he would kneel down, resting his forearms palm upwards on the ground, and rise to his feet with a man standing on each hand. He could also outstrip a trotting camel running with bare feet, keep his speed for a quarter of a mile, and then leap into the saddle. He was headstrong and conceited, reckless in word and deed, and the most admired fighter in the Arab forces. Ali would win over the tribe of Beni Sakhr, who were half-peasants, half-Bedouin, on the southern border of Syria. There were good hopes also of securing the Serahin, the tribe about Azrak, and there were others farther north on whom they might count for help.
Lawrence’s plan was to rush from Azrak to the Yarmuk village which was the ancient Gadara; it commanded the most westerly of the two most important bridges, a huge steel erection guarded by a force of sixty men quartered in a railway station close by. No more than half a dozen sentries were, however, stationed actually on the girders and abutments of the bridge itself, as Lawrence had learned on his previous ride to Damascus through this country. He hoped to take some of Auda’s tough Abu Tayi Howeitat with him under Zaal. They would make certain the actual storming of the bridge. To prevent enemy reinforcements coming up, machine-guns would sweep the approaches to the bridge; the men to handle these were a party of Mohammedan Indian cavalrymen, now mounted on camels, under command of Jemadar Hassan Shah, a firm and experienced man. They had been up-country from Wejh for months, destroying rails, and might be assumed to be by now expert camel-riders. The destruction of the great steel girders with only small weights of explosive was a problem. Lawrence decided to fix the charges in place with canvas strips and buckles and fire them electrically. But this was a dangerous task under fire, so Wood, an engineer officer at Akaba, came as a substitute in case Lawrence might be hit. Wood had been condemned as unfit for active service on the Western front after a bullet through the head.
ALI IBN EL HUSSEIN
from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON