A CAVALRY NAVAL ENGAGEMENT AND LAWRENCE’S LAST GREAT RAID
All the Turkish ammunition and food had to be brought down from
northern Syria over the Damascus-Palestine-Amman-Medina Railway.
Lawrence’s plan was to swing way out across the unmapped sea of
sand, get clear around the eastern end of the Turkish lines,
unexpectedly appear out of the desert, dash up behind the Turks,
and cut all their communication round Deraa. One of Lawrence’s most
difficult problems during this manœuver was to keep his column
supplied. Even his armored cars and aëroplanes could not carry
enough petrol to pull through. From Akaba to the oasis of Azarak
is 290 miles across burning desert. There were wells at only three
places where the camels could be watered, and the little band had
to live from hand to mouth.
On its way the column rested at Tafileh, a village of six thousand
inhabitants, near which the most unusual episode of the whole
campaign had taken place. A body of Bedouin horse under Abu Irgeig
of Beersheba, under cover of darkness, rode up to a small enemy
naval base near the southern end of the Dead Sea, not far from the
ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The so-called Turkish Dead
Sea Fleet, consisting of a few ancient arks and motor-driven craft
armed with light guns, was moored alongshore. The officers were
having breakfast in a Turkish Army mess near-by, utterly unaware
of the approach of a hostile force. Abu Irgeig saw at a glance that
the decks were deserted except for a few sentries. So he ordered
his followers to dismount. With a rush they clambered on board like
Barbary corsairs, scuppered the crews, scuttled the boats, remounted
their snorting thoroughbreds, and vanished into the desert haze
before the dazed Turks had time to realize what had happened. This
is perhaps the only occasion in history in which a naval engagement
has been won by cavalry.
Lawrence’s original plan was to gather under his standard the
enormous Rualla tribe, which fills a large part of the North
Arabian Desert, and then descend in force upon the Hauran hill
country to make a direct assault on Deraa. This came to naught
because of a little difference which unexpectedly arose between
King Hussein and General Jaffer Pasha and the senior officers of
the northern army, which ruffled the temper of an important part
of Lawrence’s forces. By the time harmony had been restored it was
too late, and, as a result, the Rualla never came together, making
it necessary for Lawrence to modify his scheme. In the end he
decided to carry out a flying attack on the railways north, west,
and south of Deraa with his regular troops, assisted only by the
wild Druses of the Hauran and a handful of the Rualla horse under
Sheiks Khalid and Trad Shaalan. Before starting this attack,
Lawrence arranged for another feint to be made on the eighteenth
against Amman and Es Salt, and for this purpose he sent word to
the members of the Beni Sakr tribe to mass in the desert near
Amman. The rumor of this, confirmed by Allenby’s mobilization of
his great camouflage army in the Jordan Valley, kept the eyes of
the Turks fixed constantly on the Jordan instead of on the
Mediterranean coastal region to the north of Jaffa.
On the oasis of Azarak is a magnificent old castle that dates from
somewhere between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, and is
turreted and loop-holed like the fortress of a Scottish baron.
Evidently it was an outpost of the far-flung Roman Empire, for
Colonel R. V. Buxton, of the Imperial Camel Corps, found a carved
stone in the ruins on which there was an inscription stating that
two legions of Antoninus Pius had been stationed here. So far as
is known no other force visited it until Lawrence and his men came.
The Arabs refuse to go near it because they say it is haunted by
the mad hunting-dogs of the Shepherd Kings that prowl round it o’
nights. Lawrence at one time thought he would like to retire here
and make Azarak Castle his home after the war.
On the thirteenth, Lawrence, accompanied by the small but mobile
force which he had organized for his big attack on Deraa, left the
oasis of Azark and marched into the Es Salt foot-hills. Two days
later they arrived at Umtaiye, thirteen miles southeast of Deraa,
where the male population of nearly all the villages of the Hauran
joined the Shereefian army in a body. Among them was Sheik Tallal
el Hareidhin of Tafas, the finest fighter in the Hauran, who had
accompanied Lawrence on some of his spying expeditions behind the
Turkish lines. He acted as guide for the expedition from this point
and sponsored Lawrence’s cause in every village. Lawrence declared
that if it had not been for this man’s courage, energy, and honesty
some of the tribes of the country through which they passed, who
were blood-enemies of King Hussein and Emir Feisal, might easily
have wrecked all their plans. Probably twenty or thirty thousand
Arab villagers and nomads joined Lawrence at different points in
this grand finale of the Near Eastern campaign.
In addition to severing the lines of communication it was Lawrence’s
intention to place himself and his troops between the vital railway
junction at Deraa and the Turkish armies in Palestine so as to lure
the enemy into reinforcing the thus isolated garrison at Deraa with
troops from the Palestine front who otherwise would be free to help
stem Allenby’s advance. At the same moment it was also necessary
for Lawrence to cut the railway to the south and west of Deraa in
order to add color to the belief of the enemy that the entire
Allied attack was coming against the Turkish Fourth Army in the
upper Jordan Valley. The only unit available for putting the
railway out of business consisted of the armored cars. The cars,
plus Lawrence, whizzed gloriously down the railway line and captured
one post before the open-mouthed Turks were aware of their danger.
This post commanded an attractive railway bridge, 149 kilos south
of Damascus, on which was inscribed a flattering dedication of the
bridge to old Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan. Lawrence planted tulips
containing 150 pounds of guncotton at both ends and in the center,
and when he touched them off the bridge faded away on the autumn
breeze. This job completed, the cars started on again at top speed
but became stranded in the sand, where they were delayed for
several hours. On their way back to rejoin the army in the Hauran
they crossed the railway five miles north of Deraa, where Lawrence
suppressed another post, wiped out a Kurdish cavalry detachment,
blew up another bridge, and ripped up six hundred pairs of rails.
After blowing up enough of the railway in the vicinity of Deraa to
throw the whole Turkish service of supply into complete chaos,
Lawrence and his men ascended a high promontory called Mount Tell
Ara, which commanded a panoramic view of Deraa four miles away.
Through his field-glasses he made out nine planes on the enemy’s
aërodrome. During that morning the German aviators had had it all
their own way in the air. They had been playing mischief with
Lawrence’s troops by dropping their eggs and raking the Arabs with
their machine-guns. The Shereefian forces tried to defend themselves
from the ground with their light artillery, but they were getting
the worst of it until Lawrence’s one surviving machine, an
antiquated old bus piloted by Captain Junor, came trundling up from
Azark and sailed square into the middle of the whole German
squadron, Lawrence and his followers watched this fracas with mixed
feelings, for each of the four enemy two-seaters and four
scout-planes was more than the equal of the one prehistoric British
machine. With both skill and good luck Captain Junor cruised right
through the German birdmen and led the whole circus off to the
westward. Twenty minutes later the plucky Junor came tearing back
through the air with his attendant swarm of enemy planes and
signaled down to Lawrence that he had run out of petrol. He landed
within fifty yards of the Arab column, and his B.E. flopped over
on its back. A German Halberstadt dived on it at once and scored
a direct hit with a bomb that blew the little British machine into
bits. Fortunately, Junor had jumped out of his seat a moment
before. The only part of his B.E. that was not destroyed was the
Lewis machine-gun. Within half an hour the plucky pilot had
transferred it to a Ford truck and was tearing around outside
Deraa, raking the Turks with his tracer bullets.
Meanwhile, Lawrence dashed off to join the detachment of troops he
had sent on in the direction of Mezerib. An hour after reaching it
he helped them cut the main Turkish telegraph-lines between
Palestine and Syria. It would be difficult to overestimate the
importance of this, because it completely cut the Turkish armies
off from all hope of relief from Northern Syria and Turkey proper.
At Mezerib several thousand more natives of the Hauran joined the
Arab forces, and the following day Lawrence and his column marched
on along the railway toward Palestine, right into the heart of the
Turkish back area. They spent most of that day planting tulips,
and near Nasib Lawrence blew up his seventy-ninth bridge, a rather
large one with three fine arches, thus bringing to a close his long
and successful career of demolition. Knowing it might be his last,
he planted twice as many tulips under it as necessary.
The column slept soundly at Nasib on the night of the eighteenth
after a good day’s work. The next morning, bright and early,
Lawrence marched his camels, horses, and Arabs off to Umtaiye,
where he was joined by the armored cars. During the morning another
enemy aërodrome was sighted near the railway, and Lawrence, with
two of the armored cars, sped across open country for a near view.
They found three German two-seaters in front of the hangars. Had
it not been for a deep gully intervening, the two armored cars
would have rushed them. As it was, two of the Germans took off and
circled around like great birds, pouring streams of lead down on
the Rolls-Royce machines, while at the same time Lawrence and the
crews inside the turrets finished the third aeroplane with fifteen
hundred bullets. As the armored cars started back to Umtaiye, the
Germans swooped down on them four times; but all their bombs were
badly placed, and the cars escaped unhurt, except for a bit of
shrapnel that wounded the colonel in the hand. Speaking of his
impression of armored car work, Lawrence remarked that he considered
it fighting de luxe.
This same day the Arab regulars, under Jaffer Pasha, and the
armored cars and French detachment and the Rualla horse under Nuri
Shallan, gave a fine account of themselves.
Photograph: A RACING DROMEDARY FROM INDIA
Photograph: AN ARAB THOROUGHBRED
Photograph: A BABY DROMEDARY TWO HOURS OLD
Jaffer Pasha, who also slashed his way brilliantly through this
engagement, comes of a rich and noble Bagdad family. His history
is full of romantic vicissitudes. At the outbreak of the war, Jaff
ar el Askari, as a general on the Turkish staff, was sent across
in a submarine from Constantinople to North Africa to organize an
uprising in the Sahara among the Senussi Arabs. He led the Senussi
in their short but spectacular campaign against the British. In
the first battle he defeated the British; the second battle was a
draw; and in the third he was badly wounded, defeated, and captured
by the Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia, near Solium, and imprisoned in
the great citadel at Cairo. In trying to escape at the end of three
months he broke his ankle and was recaptured in the moat under the
citadel. He was as fat as a barrel, full of the joy of life, and
such a gentlemanly, likable fellow that a little later the British
put him on parole and allowed him to wander about Cairo. Being an
Arab himself, he sympathized with the Arab Nationalist cause and
one day asked his British captors to permit him to volunteer as a
private with Feisal. His request was granted, and he did such
remarkable work that before many months had passed he had risen to
the post of commander-in-chief of Feisal’s regular army, which was
composed mainly of deserters from the Turkish ranks who had known
Jaffer as a general in Turkey. Jaffer Pasha had received the
kaiser’s Iron Cross at the Dardanelles and the Turkish Crescent
for his work in the Senussi campaign, and after he had been with
the Arabs for a while he was made a commander of the Order of St.
Michael and St. George by the British! Allenby accorded him this
last honor at his Ramleh headquarters in Palestine. The guard of
honor on this occasion was the same Dorset Yeomanry that had
captured the pasha just a year before. Jaffer was tremendously
pleased and amused at this subtle touch of humor on Allenby’s part.
Nuri Said, Jaffer Pasha’s brother-in-law, played an equally
brilliant part in the war. He was Emir Feisal’s chief of staff and
remained in this position when Feisal became king in Damascus and
later in Bagdad. Like Jaffer he had attended the Turkish Staff
College. In the Balkan War he was an aviator. Afterward he acted
as secretary of the Arab officers’ secret society which plotted to
overthrow the Turks. He is reckless and loves a hot fight. In fact,
the hotter the action the cooler was Nuri Said. He was one of the
few Arab townsmen whom the Bedouins admired and respected.
All had gone well with the preliminary plans for Allenby’s drive
in Palestine. But until twenty-four hours before the attack was
launched, on the nineteenth, the commander-in-chief himself was
not certain whether he was going to succeed or not. If the Turks
and Germans had discovered his real plan and had not been deceived
into thinking that both the British and Arabian forces were
concentrating on Amman with the intention of attempting to push
north up the Jordan Valley and if the enemy had withdrawn its right
wing only about half-way across Palestine from the Mediterranean
coast and the River Auja to the hills of Samaria, which would
merely have been a retirement of ten miles along the entire front,
the Turks could have played safe, Allenby’s whole blow would have
been wasted, and Lawrence’s brilliant operations around Deraa would
have been all in vain. Lawrence did not even have sufficient
supplies to last his column for two extra days, so that failure
would have been nothing short of a catastrophe for him. Of course,
neither Allenby nor Lawrence would have suffered heavy losses, but
on the other hand they would not have rung the curtain down in
Arabia and Palestine so soon. The entire World War might have
dragged on for several months longer, and an additional hundred
thousand lives or more might have been sacrificed on the Western
Front. But there were no ifs; the enemy walked into the prepared
trap like lambs to the slaughter.