THE DOWNFALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
On the whole, this last joint operation of the British and Arabian
forces was one of the most marvelous pieces of staff planning in
all military annals. It was a game of chess played by experts on
an international board. Never before was there a similar campaign.
It was a complete reversal of all Marshal Foch’s principles.
Allenby and Lawrence went back to the Napoleonic wars, to the
battles of the eighteenth century, when generals won by manœuver
and strategy instead of by tactics (the term “tactics” referring
to the science of handling men under fire). In this, the most
brilliant and spectacular military operation in the world’s history,
Allenby and Lawrence lost only four hundred and fifty men, although
they completely annihilated the Turkish army, captured over one
hundred thousand Turks, advanced more than three hundred miles in
less than a month, and broke the backbone of the Turkish Empire.
Part of the credit should go to Brigadier-General Bartholomew.
Allenby is colossal; he needs a needle-sharp man to complete him.
He had such an officer and strategist in General Bartholomew.
Allenby’s complete plan, which involved the destruction of all the
Turkish effectives with one sweeping blow, was known only to four
people; the commander-in-chief himself, his chief of Staff,
(Major-General Boles), General Bartholomew, and Colonel Lawrence.
Not even Emir Feisal or King Hussein knew what was going to happen.
At five o’clock on the morning of September 18, 1917, General
Bartholomew came to his office at headquarters in Ramleh and
anxiously said to the staff officer on duty: “Has there been any
change?”
“No, the Turks are still there,” replied the latter.
“Good!” said Bartholomew. “We will take at least thirty thousand
prisoners before this show is over.” He did not dream that the
Allied forces would capture three times thirty thousand Turks.
The deception of the enemy had been perfect in every detail. When
Allenby’s forces entered Nazareth, which had been the German and
Turkish Palestine headquarters, they found papers indicating that
the German High Command had been certain the attack would take
place in the Jordan Valley. Field-Marshal von Sanders had been
taken in down to the last point.
Meanwhile Lawrence, Joyce, General Nuri, and their associates had
received no news of what was going on in Palestine, but they were
busy day and night demolishing sections of the railway. One night
Lord Winterton, who played an active part in this final stage of
the desert campaign, went out on a demolition expedition and placed
some thirty parties at work along the line. The earl himself dashed
about in the dark from point to point in an armored car. While
walking along the railway he met a soldier who said, “How are
things?”
“Fine!” replied Winterton; “we have twenty-eight charges planted
and will be ready to touch them off in a few minutes.” The soldier
remarked that this was splendid, and then disappeared. A moment
later machine-guns blazed forth on all sides, and the earl had to
run for it. His questioner had either been a German or a Turk, and
had the incident occurred an hour earlier it might have spoiled
Lord Winterton’s work for that night. But the tulips were duly
touched off, and the show was a success.
The following day Lawrence dashed back to Azarak in an armored car,
then flew across the desert and northern Palestine to Allenby’s
headquarters at Ramleh. A hurried conference with the
commander-in-chief secured for him three more Bristol fighters,
the best battle-planes that the British were using in the Holy
Land. He also brought back the astounding news that more than
twenty thousand prisoners had already been taken by Allenby’s
forces, that Nazareth, Nablus, and many other important centers
had fallen, and that they were advancing toward Deraa and Damascus.
That meant that the Arabian army would be called upon by Allenby
to play a still greater part from now on, because it was the only
force between the crumbling Turkish divisions and Anatolia, toward
which they must retreat.
Lawrence had flown to Palestine for aëroplanes because the Germans
had nine of them near Deraa with which they were bombing Feisal’s
followers out of the ground. One of the pilots was a Captain
Peters, and another was a Captain Ross Smith, who later became
world famous and was knighted for flying from England to Australia.
Lord Winterton gives us a graphic picture of the events of that
morning in a scintillating article in “Blackwood’s”:
While L. and the airmen were having breakfast with us,
a Turkish ’plane was observed, making straight for us. One
of the airmen . . . hurried off to down the intruder.
This he successfully did, and the Turkish ’plane fell in
flames near the railway. He then returned and finished his
porridge, which had been kept hot for him meanwhile! But
not for him a peaceful breakfast that morning. He had
barely reached the marmalade stage when another Turkish
’plane appeared. Up hurried the Australian again; but
this Turk was too wily and scuttled back to Deraa, only
to be chased by P. on another machine, which sent him down
in flames.
That night the Germans burnt all of their remaining machines, and
from that moment the British airmen had the air above North Arabia,
Palestine, and Syria to themselves.
That afternoon a giant Handley-Page arrived from Palestine with
General Borton, commander of Allenby’s air squadrons, as the
passenger and Ross Smith as the pilot. They brought forty-seven
tins of petrol and also a supply of tea for Lawrence, Winterton,
and companions. This was the first time that a great night-bombing
plane ever flew over the enemy lines by day. The purpose was for
propaganda, and so profoundly were the tribesmen impressed by this
vast bird, which was several times larger than any they had thus
far seen, that all of the peoples of the Hauran, who had been
reluctant to coöperate with Emir Feisal, immediately swore
allegiance to the Arab cause and galloped in on their horses, with
their rifles popping off into the air, eager to charge the Turks,
or at least make a noisy display of valor.
The next day the infantry under General Jaffer Pasha, the jovial
commander-in-chief of Colonel Joyce’s regulars, went down to have
a look at the first large bridge which Lawrence had dynamited in
the vicinity of Deraa. They found it nearly repaired, but after a
sharp fight they drove off its guards, who were persistent and game
German machine-gunners, destroyed more of the line, and then
proceeded to burn the great timber framework which had been erected
by the Turks and Germans during the intervening seven days. In this
rather sharp encounter the armored cars, the French detachment
under Captain Pisani, and the Rualla Horse under Nuri Shaalan
plunged into the heart of things. Nuri is a quiet retiring man of
few words and plenty of deeds. He turned out to be unusually
intelligent, well informed, decisive, and full of quiet humor.
Lawrence once remarked to me that he not only was the chief of the
largest tribe in all the desert but one of the finest Arab sheiks
he had ever met, and that the members of his tribe were like wax
in his hands because “he knows what should be done and does it.”
When Lawrence started his operations around Deraa, von Sanders did
exactly what his opponents wanted him to do. He sent his last
reserves up to Deraa, so that when Allenby’s troops once smashed
through the Turkish front lines they had fairly clear going ahead
of them. At the important railway junction of Afuleh, on the
evening of the nineteenth, the Turkish motor-lorries came streaming
in for supplies, not knowing that all their great depots were in
the hands of Allenby’s men. As they rumbled into the supply-station,
a British officer remarked politely to one and all, “Would you mind
going this way, please?” That lasted for four hours, until the news
spread through the Turkish back area that Allenby’s troops had
taken Afuleh, the railway junction in the center of the plain of
Esdraelon, where the Turkish railway which connects Constantinople,
Damascus, and the Holy Land branches out, one line extending down
into Samaria and the other east to Haifa on the Mediterranean.
Afuleh was the main supply-base of the whole Turkish army. After
Allenby had occupied Afuleh for fully six hours, a German plane
came down with orders to von Sanders from Hindenburg. The occupants
of the plane did not discover their predicament until they left
their machine and walked over to local headquarters to report. To
their chagrin they found themselves turning over their orders to
Allenby’s staff.
By September 24 Allenby’s forces had advanced so far that the
entire Turkish Fourth Army, concentrated around Amman and the
Jordan on the mission of attacking empty tents and horse-blankets,
had been ordered back to defend Deraa and Damascus. The Turkish
Fourth Army generals were infuriated when they discovered that the
railway line had been cut behind them, and attempted to retreat
north along their motor-roads with all their guns and transport.
Lawrence and his cavalry did not intend to pave their retreat with
roses. Stationed on the hills they poured down such an incessant
stream of bullets that the Turks were forced to abandon all their
guns and carts between Mafrak and Nasib. Hundreds were slaughtered.
The formal column of retreat broke up into a confused mass of
fugitives, who never had a minute’s peace to reform their lines.
British aëroplanes added the finishing touch by dropping bombs,
and the Turkish Fourth Army scattered panic-stricken in all
directions.
Lawrence now decided to put himself between Deraa and Damascus,
hoping to force the immediate evacuation of Deraa and thus pick up
the sorry fragments of the crack Turkish Fourth Army as it emerged
from Deraa, and also harass other remnants of the Turkish armies
in Palestine that might attempt to escape north. Accordingly, at
the head of his camel corps, he made a hurried forced march
northward on the twenty-fifth, and by the afternoon of the
twenty-sixth swept down on the Turkish railway near Ghazale and
Ezra on the road to Damascus. With him were Nasir, Nuri, Auda, and
the Druses—“names with which to hush children even in the daytime,”
to quote Lawrence himself. His rapid manœuvers took the
panic-stricken Turks completely by surprise. Just the previous day
they had worked feverishly on the railway line and had reopened it
for traffic at the points where Lawrence had damaged it a week
earlier. He planted a few hundred tulips, putting the line out of
commission permanently and penning six complete trains in Deraa.
Fantastic reports of disaster spread like wildfire throughout
Syria, and the Turks at once began the evacuation of Deraa by road.
By dawn of the twenty-seventh, Lawrence and his cavalry were
already out scouting the surrounding country and had captured two
Austro-Turk machine-gun companies placed across a road to oppose
Allenby’s approaching columns. Then Lawrence climbed to the summit
of a high hill in the vicinity called Sheik Saad, whence he could
sweep the country-side with his glasses. Whenever he saw a small
enemy column appearing on the horizon, he jumped on his horse and,
accompanied by some nine hundred picked men only too eager for that
kind of diversion, charged into the midst of them as if they had
been tin soldiers and serenely took them all prisoners. If from
his observation station on the hill he saw a column that was too
large to tackle, he lay low and let it pass.
About noon an aëroplane dropped Lawrence a message stating that
two columns of Turks were advancing on him. One, six thousand
strong, was coming from Deraa; the other, two thousand strong, from
Mazerib. Lawrence decided that the second was about his size.
Sending for some of his regulars, who were gathering stray Turks
like daisies a few miles away, he dashed off to intercept the enemy
near Tafas. At the same time he sent the Hauran horsemen in the
other direction to get around behind them and hang on the skirts
of the column in order to annoy them. The Turks reached Tafas a
short time before Lawrence and brutally mistreated all the women
and children of the village. Shereef Bey, commander of the Turkish
Lancers, at the rear-guard of the column, ordered all the people
massacred, including the women and children. Tallal, head sheik of
this village of Tafas, who had been a great tower of strength with
Lawrence from the beginning and one of the boldest horsemen in
North Arabia, was riding at the front of the Arab column with
Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi when he came upon the wives and children
of his kinsmen lying in pools of blood in the road. Several years
after the war one of Lawrence’s poet friends in England got married,
and when Lawrence expressed regret at not having enough money to
buy an appropriate wedding present the poet suggested that he might
let him have a few pages of his diary instead. The wish was granted,
and the poet disposed of the pages to “The World’s Work” for
publication in America. The portion sold happened to include
Lawrence’s story of the death of the gallant Sheik Tallal el
Hareidhin:
We left Abd el Main there and rode on past the other
bodies, now seen clearly in the sunlight to be men, women
and four babies, toward the village whose loneliness we
knew meant that it was full of death and horror. On the
outskirts were the low mud walls of some sheep-folds, and
on one lay something red and white. I looked nearer, and
saw the body of a woman folded across it, face downward,
nailed there by a saw-bayonet whose haft stuck hideously
into the air from between her naked legs. She had been
pregnant, and about her were others, perhaps twenty in
all, variously killed, but laid out to accord with an obscene
taste. The Zaagi burst out in wild peals of laughter, in
which some of those who were not sick joined hysterically.
It was a sight near madness, the more desolate for the warm
sunshine and the clean air of this upland afternoon. I
said: “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead”;
and we turned and rode as fast as we might in the direction
of the fading enemy. On our way we shot down those of
them fallen out by the roadside who came imploring our
pity.
Tallal had seen something of what we had seen. He
gave one moan like a hurt animal, and then slowly rode
to the higher ground, and sat there a long while on his mare,
shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved
toward him to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and
stayed me. After some minutes Tallal very slowly drew
his headcloth about his face, and then seemed to take hold
of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into his horse’s flanks
and galloped headlong, bending low in the saddle and swaying
as though he would fall, straight at the main body of the
enemy. It was a long ride, down the gentle slope and
across the hollow, and we all sat there like stone while he
rushed forward, the drumming of his horse’s hoofs sounding
unnaturally loud in our ears. We had stopped shooting
and the Turks had stopped shooting; both armies
waited for him. He flew on in this hushed evening, till he
was only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in
the saddle and cried his war-cry “Tallal, Tallal” twice in a
tremendous voice. Instantly, all their rifles and machine-guns
crashed out together, and he and his mare, riddled
through and through with bullets, fell dead among their
lance points.
Auda looked very cold and grim. “God give him mercy!
We will take his price.” He shook his rein and moved
slowly forward after the enemy. We called up the
peasantry, now all drunk with fear and blood, and sent them
from this side and from that against the retreating column.
Auda led them like the old lion of battle that he is. By a
skilful turn he drove the enemy into bad ground and split
their column into three parts. The third part, the smallest,
was mostly made up of German and Austrian gunners,
grouped round three motor-cars which presumably carried
high officers. They fought magnificently and drove off our
attacks time and again, despite our desperation. The
Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blinding our eyes,
our throats parched with dust, and the agony of cruelty
and revenge which was burning in our bodies and twisting
our hands about so that we could hardly shoot. By my
orders they were to take no prisoners—for the first time
in the war.
This account of the death of Tallal el Hareidhin of Tafas, in
Lawrence’s own words, shows us what marvelous descriptive powers
this young soldier-scholar has at his command, and gives us a hint
of the masterpiece that the world should one day receive from his
pen.
Two German machine-gun companies had resisted magnificently and
escaped, with the Turkish commander-in-chief, Djemal Pasha, in his
car in their midst. The Arabs wiped out the second section
completely after a bitter hand-to-hand struggle. No prisoners were
taken, because the Arabs were wild with rage over the Tafas
massacre. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners had been captured
during the day, but when the Arabs discovered one of Lawrence’s
men with a fractured thigh pinned to the ground with two German
bayonets, they acted like enraged bulls. Turning their machine-guns
on the remaining prisoners they wiped them out.
After the encounter, Nuri Shaalan, at the head of the Rualla horse,
rode straight into the main street of Deraa. There were two or
three fights on the way, but they took the town in a whirlwind
gallop. The next morning Nuri returned to Lawrence at Tafas with
five hundred infantry prisoners and the freedom of the town of
Deraa. Some of Allenby’s troops arrived in Deraa that day also.
Lawrence and his army spent that night—and a very uneasy night it
was—on Sheik Saad hill. He did not feel certain of victory since
there was always a risk of his small force being washed away by a
great wave of the enemy in retreat. All that night the Hauran
horsemen clung tenaciously to the great Turkish column from Deraa,
made up of six thousand men, which Lawrence had not dared engage
in pitched battle. Instead of sleeping with the regular troops at
Sheik Saad, Lawrence spent part of the night helping the Hauran
cavalry, and at dawn he rode off to the westward with a handful of
men until he met the outposts of the fourth cavalry division of
the British army. After guiding them into Deraa and starting them
off on their northward march toward Damascus, Lawrence galloped
back full speed to the Hauran cavalry. Although the Turkish column
when it left Deraa was six thousand strong, at the end of
twenty-four hours only five thousand remained. One thousand had
been picked off by the Bedouins. Eighteen hours more and there were
three thousand; and after a point called Kiswe, where Lawrence
headed off the remnant of the Turkish Fourth Army and flung them
into one of Allenby’s cavalry brigades coming from the southwest,
only two thousand remained.
In all, Lawrence, Joyce, Jaffer, and Nuri, and their scattered
force of wild Bedouins and regular camel corps had killed about
five thousand of the Turks in this last phase of the campaign and
captured more than eight thousand of them, as well as one hundred
and fifty machine-guns and thirty cannons. In addition to the
column of less than one thousand men who had started north from
Akaba with Lawrence, Auda Abu Tayi and two hundred of the best
fighting men of the Howeitat tribe took part in Lawrence’s war-dance
around Deraa, also two thousand Beni Sakhr, “the Sons of Hawks,”
from east of the Dead Sea, four thousand Rualla under Nuri Shaalan
from the North Arabian Desert, one thousand Druses from the Hauran,
and eight thousand Arab villagers from the Hauran.
In a letter which he wrote to me more than a year after the war,
Colonel Stirling, who had played a prominent rôle in this final
raid, summed up the effects of what the Arabs had done to help
Allenby overwhelm the Turks:
“This, after all,” wrote Colonel Stirling, “was the main
justification of our existence and of the money and time we had
spent on the Arab Revolt. The raid itself was really very dramatic
in that we started out, a small regular force of Arabs 400 strong
and marched 600 miles in 23 days through unmapped Arabia and came
in out of the blue—miles behind the Turkish main armies, and as an
absolute surprise. Two days before the British advance in Palestine
began we had cut three lines of railways and for five days allowed
no trains to get through to the Turkish armies. The result was that
when their retreat commenced they found all their advance food
depots and ammunition dumps were exhausted. During these days we
of course led a somewhat precarious existence, generally shifting
camp twice in a night to avoid being surprised. We were only a very
weak force then, you see, though by the time we got on and rushed
Damascus, something like 11,000 mounted Arabs had joined us.”
Some of the Arab horsemen rode right on that evening into Damascus,
where the burning ammunition-dumps turned night into day. Back at
Kiswe, just a few miles south of Damascus, and not far from where
Saul of Tarsus was dazzled by the light that transformed him into
Paul the interpreter of Christianity, the glare of the fires from
Damascus and the roar and reverberation of explosions kept Lawrence
awake most of the night. He was completely worn out. From September
13 to 30, he had caught only occasional snatches of sleep. Mounted
on a racing-camel or dashing about the country on an Arab steed,
riding inside the turret of an armored car or flying about in one
of the fighting planes, he had led the relentless existence demanded
of him in this great emergency of the war. Now the end of the war
was in sight in the Land of the Arabian Nights. But sleep was
difficult because all night long the Turks and Germans were blowing
up their ammunition-dumps eight miles north in Damascus. With each
explosion the earth shook, the sky went white, and splashes of red
tore great gaps in the night as shells went off in the air. “They
are burning Damascus,” Lawrence remarked to Stirling. Then he
rolled over in the sand and fell asleep.