A body of hostile cavalry was reported to be coming north towards them. The Emir Nuri with his Ruwalla horse and Tallal with his Hauran horse went to meet it. Armoured cars joined them. But it was only a mob of fugitives looking for a short cut home, so hundreds of prisoners were taken and much transport. A panic spread down the line and troops miles away from the Arabs threw away all they had, even their rifles, making a mad rush towards supposed safety in Deraa.
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.