It was the first time that they had flinched. Lawrence tried to get them forward by making jokes, but it was hopeless. At last he cast them off and standing on the crest with bullets cracking round him called by name the youngest and most timid of them all to come with him to the bridge. He shook like a man in a sick dream but obeyed quietly. They rode over the crest towards the bridge. Lawrence then sent the young Arab back to tell the men that he would hurt them worse than bullets if they did not join him. He intended to go forward to see whether the guard-post was holding out after the bombardment. While the body-guard hesitated, up came El Zaagi with Abdulla the Robber: they were men who feared nothing. Mad with fury that Lawrence had been betrayed these two dashed at the shrinkers and chased them over the ridge-top, with no more harm than six bullet-grazes. The post was indeed abandoned, so Lawrence dismounted and signalled to Nuri Said to cease fire. He and his body-guard crept up on foot to the bridge and piling eight hundred pounds of explosive against the piers, which were about five feet thick and twenty-five feet high, blew it to pieces. This was Lawrence’s last bridge, the seventy-ninth since he started and a most important one, for the Arab army was to wait close by at Umtaiye until Allenby’s troops came up to join it.
The Turkish aeroplanes were a pest, Umtaiye was only twelve miles from their aerodrome near Deraa and they kept coming over and dropping bombs on the Arab camp. The irregulars would soon lose their nerve and go off home unless something was done; so Lawrence and Junor went off in two armoured cars to raid the aerodrome. They got quite close by silencing the cars and found three aeroplanes on the ground. One they shot to pieces; the two others escaping flew to Deraa and returned to chase the cars with bombs. The first dropped its four bombs all together from a height and missed badly, but the other flew low, placing one bomb at a time with great care. Lawrence and Junor drove slowly on over rocky ground, quite defenceless. One bomb sent a shower of stones through the driving slit of Lawrence’s car but only cut his knuckles. Another tore off a front tire and nearly overturned them. But they returned safely to Umtaiye.
AN ARMOURED FORD IN THE DESERT
Copyright Imperial War Museum
Two days later a news-aeroplane was due at Azrak, so Lawrence decided to go back in it to Palestine and beg Allenby to send along some Bristol Fighters. He rode towards Azrak with his body-guard, intending on the way to smash another bridge. But he noticed that his men were red-eyed and trembling and obeyed orders with hesitation: evidently El Zaagi and The Robber had mercilessly gone through the list of those who had flinched at Nisib. He decided that they were not in form that night, so sent the Egyptians and Gurkhas (on the first stage of their journey back to help Zeid at Aba el Lissan) to do the raid instead. He followed them in an armoured car and Junor came, too, in his Ford. Lawrence, who was guiding, lost the way in the darkness; his wits were wandering after five sleepless nights in succession. But the Egyptians fired their thirty tulips all right, while Lawrence and Junor overtook a train and machine-gunned it. Junor let fly a green shower of tracer-bullets which probably did little harm but made the Turks howl with terror.
At Azrak they found the aeroplane waiting with the first amazing news of Allenby’s victory. He had burst through at every point and the Turkish army was in rout. Lawrence sent the news to Feisal, advising him to proclaim the general revolt at last, and flew off to Palestine. An hour or two later he was with Allenby who was very calm in spite of the magnitude of his victory and was allowing the Turks no rest. He was making three new thrusts: with the New Zealanders to Amman, with the Indians to Deraa, with the Australians to Kuneitra in the Hauran. The New Zealanders would stop at Amman but the other two divisions would later converge on Damascus. Allenby asked Lawrence to assist all three advances with his Arabs but not to push on to Damascus until the Indians and Australians were in line with him. Lawrence in return asked for aeroplanes, and was given them: two Bristol Fighters, with an enormous Handley-Page and a D.H.9 to carry petrol and spare parts.
Back with the Arabs the next day Lawrence told them that Nablus was taken and Afuleh and Haifa and Baisan. The news ran like fire through the camp. Tallal began boasting, the Ruwalla shouted for instant march on Damascus, even the still smarting body-guard cheered up. That day, the twenty-second of September, Lawrence was breakfasting near Umtaiye with the airmen: there were sausages frying. Suddenly a watcher called out:‘Aeroplane up.’ The pilots of the Bristol Fighters Jumped into their machines, and the pilot of the D.H.9 looked hard at Lawrence, silently asking him to come up with him to handle the machine-guns. Lawrence pretended not to understand. He had learned the theory of air-fighting all right, but it was knowledge not yet become instinctive action. No, he would not go up. The pilot looked reproachfully at him while the air-fight began without them. Five minutes later the Bristols were back, having driven down a two-seater and scattered three scout-aeroplanes. The sausages were still hot. They ate them and drank some tea and were starting on some grapes, a present from the Druse country, when again the watcher cried ‘Aeroplane’ and up the pilots jumped and soon brought it down in flames.
Later with Feisal (whom he had gone by air to fetch with his staff from Azrak) and Nuri, the Emir of the Ruwalla, Lawrence went off north in Feisal’s green Vauxhall to see the Handley-Page alight. Twenty miles from the landing-ground they met a single Arab tribesman running southward like the prophet Elijah with grey hair and grey beard flying in the wind and his clothes girded about his loins. He yelled out to the car, waving his bony arms, ‘The biggest aeroplane in the world’ and rushed on to spread his great news among the tents. They found the Handley-Page surrounded by Arabs who cried out, ‘Indeed and at last they have sent us the aeroplane, of which these others were foals.’ Before night the news had spread all over the Hauran and across the Druse mountains and every one knew by this token that the Arabs were on the winning side. The great machine unloaded a ton of petrol, oil and spare parts for the Bristol Fighters, and rations for the men; then sailed off for night-bombing at Deraa.
The task that Allenby had set the Arab army was to harass the Turkish Fourth Army until the New Zealanders forced it out of Amman, its headquarters, and afterwards to cut it up on its retreat north. Feisal’s force now consisted of four thousand men, of whom three thousand were irregulars. But these irregulars were nearly all under the sovereignty of the Emir Nuri, whose word nobody dared disobey, so Feisal could count on them. The old man led a charge of Ruwalla horsemen in a further raid on the railway and under his eye the tribe showed unusual valour; armoured cars came along too and the line was now permanently broken between Amman and Deraa. It only remained to wait for the fugitives streaming up from Amman in flight from the New Zealanders.