THE BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA
As they pushed northward from the head of the Gulf of Akaba, the
Hedjaz forces were joined by the Ibn Jazi Howeitat and the Beni
Sakhr, two of the best fighting tribes of the whole Arabian Desert.
About the same date the Juheinah, the Ateibah, and the Anazeh came
riding in on their camels to join Feisal and Lawrence.
After the fall of Akaba, Lawrence had made several trips to
Palestine to confer with Allenby. From that time the British in
Palestine and King Hussein’s army were in close coöperation.
The Arab army had been divided into two distinct parts, one known
as regulars and the other as irregulars. The regulars were all
infantrymen; there were not more than twenty thousand of them. They
were either deserters from the Turkish army or men of Arab blood
who had been fighting under the sultan’s flag and who had
volunteered to join the forces of King Hussein after being taken
prisoner by the British in Mesopotamia or in Palestine. At first
they were used mainly for garrisoning old Turkish posts captured
by the advancing Shereefian horde. Later on, after they had been
thoroughly trained, they were used as storm-troops in attacking
fortified positions. The Arab regulars were under an Irishman,
Colonel P. C. Joyce, who, next to Lawrence, perhaps played a more
important part in the Arabian campaign than any other non-Moslem.
The irregulars, who were by far the most numerous, were Bedouins
mounted on camels and horses. In all, Lawrence had now over two
hundred thousand fighting men available.
The battle of Seil el Hasa illustrates the manner in which he
handled King Hussein’s forces. A Turkish regiment, under the
command of Hamid Fahkri Bey, composed of infantry, cavalry, mountain
artillery, and machine-gun squads, was sent over the Hedjaz Railway
from Kerak, southeast of the Dead Sea, to recapture the town of
Tafileh, which had fallen into the hands of the Arabian army. The
Turkish regiment had been hurriedly formed in the Hauran and Amman
and was short of supplies.
When the Turks came in contact with the Bedouin patrols at Seil el
Hasa, they drove them back into the town of Tafileh. Lawrence and
his Shereefian staff had laid out a defensive position on the south
bank of the great valley in which Tafileh stands, and Shereef Zeid,
youngest of the four sons of King Hussein, occupied that position
during the night, with five hundred regulars and irregulars. At
the same time, Lawrence sent most of the baggage of his army off
in another direction, and all the natives of the town thought the
Arab army was running away.
“I think they were,” Lawrence remarked to me. Tafileh was seething
with excitement. Sheik Dhiab el Auran, the amateur Sherlock of the
Hedjaz, had brought in reports of growing dissatisfaction among
the villagers, and rumors of treachery; so Lawrence went down from
his housetop, before dawn, into the crowded streets to do a bit of
necessary eavesdropping. Dressed in his voluminous robes, he had
no difficulty in concealing his identity in the dark. There was
much criticism of King Hussein, and the populace was not
over-respectful. Every one was screaming with terror, and the town
of Tafileh was in a state of tumult. Homes were being speedily
vacated, and goods were being bundled through the lattice windows
into the crowded streets. Mounted Arabs were galloping up and down,
firing wildly into the air and through the palm branches. With each
flash of the rifles the cliffs of Tafileh gorge stood out in
momentary relief, sharp and clear against the topaz sky. Just at
dawn the enemy bullets began to fall, and Lawrence went out to
Shereef Zeid and persuaded him to send one of his officers with
two _fusils-mitrailleurs_ to support the Arab villagers, who were
still holding the southern crest of the foot-hills. The arrival of
the machine-gunners revived their spirits and stimulated the Arabs
to attack again. With a mighty shout calling upon the Prophet of
God, they drove the Turks over another ridge and across a small
plain to the Wadi el Hasa. They took the ridge but were held up
there and found the main body of Hamid Fahkri’s Turkish army posted
just behind it. The fighting became hotter now; on both sides men
were dropping thickly. Continuous bursts of machine-gun fire and
heavy shelling checked the ardor of the Arabs. Zeid hesitated to
send forward his reserves, and so Lawrence hurriedly rode to the
north of Tafileh for reinforcements. On his way he met his
machine-gunners returning; five true believers had been sent to
Paradise, one gun had exploded, and they were out of ammunition.
Lawrence sent back urgent messages to Zeid to rush forward a
mountain-gun, more ammunition, and all other available machine-guns
to one of his reserve positions at the southern end of the little
plain between El Hasa and Tafileh Valley.
Then Lawrence galloped back to his front line on the ridge, where
he found things in a precarious state. The ridge was being held by
just thirty Ibn Jazi Howeitat mounted men and a handful of
villagers. He could see the enemy working through the pass and
along the eastern boundary to the ridge of the plain, where twenty
Turkish machine-guns were concentrating their fire. An attempt was
being made to flank the ridge which the Arabs were holding. The
German officers directing the Turks were also correcting the fusing
of the shrapnel, which had been grazing the top of the hill and
bursting harmlessly over the desert plain. As Lawrence sat there,
they began to spray the sides and top of the hill with steel
splinters and with startling results, and he knew that the loss of
the position was but a matter of minutes. A squadron of Albatross
scouts flew up and helped to minimize the chances of the Shereefian
forces by bombing them heavily from the air.
Lawrence gave his Motalga horsemen all the cartridges that he could
collect, and the Arabs on foot ran back over the plain. He was
among them. Since he had come straight up the cliffs from Tafileh,
his animals had not caught up with him; the mounted men held out
for fifteen minutes more and then galloped back unhurt. Lawrence
collected his men in the reserve position on a ridge about sixty
feet high, commanding an excellent view of the plain. It was now
about noon. He had lost fifteen men and had only eighty left. But,
a few minutes later, several hundred Ageyl and some of his other
men, with a Hotchkiss automatic machine-gun, came up. Letfi el
Assli, a Syrian, arrived with two more machine-guns, and Lawrence
held his own until three o’clock, when Shereef Zeid came up with
mountain artillery and more machine-guns and with fifty cavalrymen
and two hundred Arabs on foot.
Meanwhile, the Turks had occupied his old front lines. Fortunately,
Lawrence had their exact range. He had coolly paced it off while
his followers were retreating pell-mell to their reserved position.
He then rushed all his artillery to the top of the ridge and
despatched the cavalry to the right, to work up beyond the eastern
boundary ridge. These mounted men were fortunate enough to get
forward without being seen, until they had turned the Turkish flank
at two thousand yards. There they made a dismounted attack, dancing
forward with white puffs of smoke rippling from their rifles.
Meanwhile more than a hundred Arabs of the Aimi tribe, who had
refused to fight the previous day because they were not satisfied
with the amount of loot they were receiving, came up and joined
Lawrence. There are few Bedouins who can resist the temptation to
participate in a good fight when they see one coming on. He sent
them to his left flank, and they crept down behind the western
ridge of the plain to within two hundred yards of the Turkish
Maxims. The ridge which the Turks occupied at that time was of a
flint-like rock, so that intrenchment was impossible. The ricochets
of the shells and shrapnel as they struck the flint boulders and
glanced off were horrible, causing heavy losses among the enemy.
Lawrence ordered the men on his left flank to fire an unusually
heavy burst from their Hotchkiss and Vickers machine-guns at the
Turks manning the Maxims. These were so accurate that they
completely wiped the latter out. Then he ordered his cavalry to
charge the retreating Turks from the right flank, while he also
moved forward from the center with his infantry and banners waving
defiantly. Horse and man, the Turks collapsed and their attack
crumpled. At the sun’s decline Lawrence occupied the Turkish lines
and chased the enemy back past their guns into the Hasa Valley. It
was dark before his followers gave up the pursuit, exhausted from
lack of sleep and food. “Allahu Akbar,” cried the weary men as they
fell upon their knees with their faces toward Mecca, giving praise
to Allah for their victory. Lawrence had put to flight a whole
Turkish regiment. Among the slain lay Hamid Fahkri.