Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

Tafileh was a great anxiety to Feisal’s brother Zeid, whom Feisal now sent up, with more guns and machine-guns, to take charge of the Dead Sea operations. Auda’s Abu Tayi were in occupation alongside their former blood-enemies, another clan of Howeitat, the Motalga. The Motalga were twice as numerous as the Abu Tayi. Among them were two boys of good birth whose father had been killed by Auda’s son, Annad. Auda pretended a great magnanimity towards these boys, forgiving them for Annad’s death at the hands of their uncles. But they had not forgotten their dead father and muttered of further vengeance. Auda laughed at the boys and threatened to whip them round the market-place; so to stop further mischief Zeid thanked him for his services and paid him a large sum in gold; and Auda went back to his tents for a while. Things then quieted down in Tafileh, for Zeid had plenty of money to pay for the food he bought for the men, and the villagers, who had only sided with the Turks because some of their hated neighbours had sided with Feisal, consented to join in the Revolt.

Suddenly on the twenty-fourth of January came the news that the Turks were advancing from Kerak to retake the village. Lawrence was astonished and annoyed. Tafileh was no possible use to the Turks: their only hope of holding Palestine against Allenby was to keep every possible man for the defence of the River Jordan. Apparently the chance of surprising the Arabs for a change, instead of being surprised by them, was a temptation that made them forget commonsense strategy. And it was a real surprise. The Turkish General in command of the Amman garrison was in charge; he had with him about nine hundred infantry, a hundred cavalry, twenty-seven machine-guns and two mountain howitzers. Their cavalry drove in the Arab mounted posts guarding Tafileh on the north and by dusk were only about a mile off. Zeid decided to give the village to the Turks and defend the cliffs on the south side of the deep valley in which Tafileh lay. Lawrence objected strongly. To give up the village meant antagonizing the villagers and, in any case, the southern cliffs were dangerous to defend because a Turkish force could slip round from the railway on the east and cut off the defenders. Zeid listened to Lawrence’s advice and decided to hold the northern cliffs of the valley, but not before most of the villagers had cleared out with their movable goods in a midnight panic.

Tafileh was about four thousand feet above sea-level, and it was freezing and blowing hard; Lawrence, who was up all night seeing to things, was in a furious temper at the disturbance. He decided that the Turks should pay for their greediness and stupidity. He would give them the pitched battle that they were so eager for and obligingly kill them all. This was the one occasion in the War that Lawrence abandoned his principles of irregular mobility and fought a real battle, as a sort of bad joke, on the ordinary easy textbook lines. Zeid, who was a very cool young man and had learned much since his defeat by the Turks before Rabegh fourteen months previously, let Lawrence have his way.

There had been firing all night to the north. The local peasants were strongly resisting the Turks on the other side of the northern cliffs, and Lawrence had sent the young Motalga chiefs with whom Auda had quarrelled, to tell them to hang on, for help was coming. The boys galloped off at once on their mares, with an uncle and about twenty relations, the most that could be rallied in the confusion, and the Turkish cavalry were held up till the morning. Then Lawrence started his battle in earnest.

First he sent forward Abdulla, a Mesopotamian machine-gun officer of Feisal’s, with two automatic guns to test the strength and disposition of the enemy. He then found some of his body-guard turning over the goods lying in the street after the night’s panic and helping themselves to whatever they fancied. He told them at once to get their camels and ride to the top of the northern cliffs by the long, winding road, and to bring another automatic gun. He took a short cut himself, climbing barefoot straight up the northern cliffs to the plateau at the top. There he found a convenient ridge about forty feet high which would do well for a defence position if he could find any troops to put there. At present he had nobody. But very soon he saw twenty of Zeid’s Ageyl body-guard sitting in a hollow and by violent words managed to get them to arrange themselves on the ridge-top as if they were look-outs of a big force behind. He gave them his signet-ring to use as a token and told them to collect as many new men as they could, including the rest of his body-guard.

Abdulla’s arrival had encouraged the Motalga and the peasants; together they had pushed the Turkish cavalry from the ridge across the corner of a two-mile-wide plain, triangular in shape, with the ridge as its base, and over the nearer end of another low ridge that made the left-hand side of the triangle. At this second ridge the Arabs stopped and took up a defensive position, behind a rocky bank. Lawrence, who, from climbing up the cliff, was warmer than he had been, went forward towards them, across the plain, until he came under shell-fire. The Turkish main body were shelling the ridge where the Arabs were, but the shrapnel that they were using was bursting far beyond in the plain. He met Abdulla on his way back to Zeid with news. Abdulla had lost five men and an automatic gun from shell-fire and had used up all his ammunition. He would ask Zeid to come forward with all the available troops. Lawrence was delighted and went on to the ridge.

When he reached it, the Turks had shortened the range and the shrapnel was bursting accurately overhead. Obviously some of the enemy must have come forward where they could get observation and signal back to the guns. He looked about and saw that the Turks were working round on the right of the ridge and would soon turn them out. There were about sixty Arabs at the ridge: the Motalga, dismounted, firing from the top, at the bottom sixty peasants on foot, blown and miserable, with all their ammunition gone, crying to Lawrence that the battle was lost. He answered gaily that it was only just beginning and pointed to the men on the reserve ridge, saying that the army was there in support. He told the peasants to run back, refill their cartridge belts and hold on to the reserve ridge for good.

The Motalga held the forward ridge for another ten minutes and had nobody hurt, but then had to leave in a hurry. They overtook Lawrence, who had started back before them since he had no horse, and one of the young chiefs lent him a stirrup to hold as he ran. Lawrence was counting his steps (it was a distraction from the pain of running with bare feet over sharp sticks and stones) to discover the exact range from the part of the ridge that they had just left to the reserve ridge. Here he found eighty men, and new ones were constantly arriving. The rest of his body-guard turned up with their automatic gun, and a hundred more Ageyl and two more guns. The Turks were occupying the ridge that the Motalga had just left, and to delay their attack Lawrence ordered the three automatic rifles to fire occasional shots. They were to fire short, so as to disturb the enemy, though not too much, and so make them delay their attack. It was just noon and Lawrence went to sleep for an hour or two, knowing that the Turks would do nothing for a while. In the middle of the afternoon Zeid arrived with the rest of the army—twenty men on mules, thirty Motalga horsemen, two hundred villagers, five more automatic guns, four machine-guns and an Egyptian Army mountain-gun which had been right through the campaign since the battle of the date-palms. Lawrence woke up to welcome them.

He had all day long been making jokes about military tactics, quoting tags from the textbooks. At the ridge with the Motalga he had told the young chief that the great Clausewitz had laid it down that a rear-guard effects its purpose more by being than by doing. But the joke would have been lost on the boy, even had twenty Turkish machine-guns not been in action against the top of the ridge and distracted his attention. Now he had Turk-trained Arab regular officers to try his wit upon: he sent Rasim, Feisal’s chief gunner but a cavalry leader for this occasion, to envelop the enemy’s left wing, adding mock instructions to ‘attack them upon a point, not a line. By going far enough along any finite wing, it will be found eventually reduced to a point consisting of a single man,’ Rasim liked the joke and promised to bring back that man. With Rasim were five automatic guns and all the mounted troops, the Motalga horse, the mule-men and Lawrence’s men on camels. The senior Motalga chief drew his sword and made a heroic speech to it, addressing it by name (every good sword in Arabia has a name, as in the days of European chivalry). They rode off under cover round the right-hand side of the triangular plain, where there was another ridge corresponding with the one that the Turks were occupying. They would take a few minutes to get round and meanwhile a hundred peasants arrived who were the herdsmen of this district: they had quarrelled with Zeid the day before about war-wages, but hearing of the fighting had generously sunk old differences and come up to help.

General Foch had somewhere advised attack only from one flank, but Lawrence decided to improve on him. He sent the herdsmen to work round on the left with three automatic guns. Knowing well every ridge and hollow, they managed to crawl unseen to within three hundred yards of the extreme Turkish right. The Turks had arranged their machine-guns in line right along the crest of the ridge with no post set out on either flank and no supports; it was lunacy. Lawrence, knowing the range, set four machine-guns to fire along the Turkish ridge-crest and keep the enemy busy. The crest was rocky and the flying chips of stone were as alarming as the bullets that scattered them.