of September was complete. First arrived Lawrence’s body-guard, jolly
on their well-fed camels, then two aeroplanes, then the rest of the
armoured cars and a great baggage train. Feisal brought the Arab
regular army, a thousand camel-men on Allenby’s gift-camels; with the
French Algerian gunners under Pisani. Nuri appeared with the Ruwalla
tribesmen; and Auda with Mohammed el Dheilan and the Abu Tayi; and
Fahad and Adhub with their Beni Sakhr; and the chief of the Serahin;
and many more Bedouin, Druses and town-Syrians flocking from all
directions. And the great outlaw Tallal arrived, who had taken Lawrence
spying in the Hauran the winter before.
First of all it was necessary to cut off Deraa from Amman. For this
purpose a detachment of Indian Gurkhas on camels under their British
officer were sent to raid a block-house on the railway just north of
Amman, while a party of Egyptian camel-corps blew up near-by bridges
and rails. Two armoured cars went with them, and local guides. The rest
of the army moved up to Umtaiye, a great rainwater-pit fifteen miles
below Deraa, and waited there for news.
Unfortunately this demolition did not come off; the Arabs between
the raiders and the line disliked the Indians, despised the Egyptians
and would not let them pass. So Lawrence went himself the next day
from Umtaiye with two armoured cars and a hundred and fifty pounds of
gun-cotton to the nearest point on the line, where there were two good
bridges to destroy and easy going for the cars. Joyce came with him.
While Joyce’s car kept the neighbouring block-house busy, Lawrence’s
ran to the biggest bridge, whose guard-garrison of eight men made a
first brave defence but then surrendered—as also did the block-house
garrison. Joyce and Lawrence then hurriedly set about the bridge,
destroying it scientifically so that the four arches were smashed but
the skeleton left tottering. The Turks would first have the difficult
task of destroying it completely before they could begin rebuilding.
The cars then bumped off, because a large body of Turks was seen coming
up in the distance. Lawrence’s car bumped too carelessly; at the first
watercourse there was a crash and it stuck. They hurriedly inspected
the damage and found that the front bracket of the near back-spring
had broken; a hopeless break which only a workshop could mend. The
driver, Rolls, was nearly in tears over this mishap, the first
structural damage in a team of nine cars driven for eighteen months
over the maddest country. But he realized that the fate of the whole
party rested on him and said that there was just one hope. They might
jack up the fallen end of the spring and wedge it, by balks upon the
running-board, into nearly its old position. With the help of ropes the
thin angle-irons of the running-board might carry the additional weight.
There was in each car a length of timber to help the double
car-tires over muddy places; three blocks of this would do for
the proper height. But there was no saw, so they used machine-gun
bullets instead, and soon had their three blocks. The Turks heard the
machine-gun firing and halted cautiously. Joyce’s car also heard and
came back to help; the repair was hurriedly made, only just in time.
When they got back to Umtaiye they strengthened it with telegraph-wire
and it lasted until they reached Damascus. The loss of this bridge
would keep the Turks from reinforcing Deraa from Amman and also help
Zeid and Jaafar with the Arab army at Aba el Lissan, and Hornby at
Shobek, for the Turks massing at Tafileh were delayed until the line
was mended behind them.
Meanwhile the Arab expedition moved to Tell Arar, four miles north
of Deraa, where they were to cut the northern railway to Damascus.
Lawrence and Joyce hurrying to join them in the armoured cars arrived
late because of bad going over heavy plough-land. They watched the
battle from a hill: Ruwalla horsemen dashing towards the line over
the liquorice-grown bed of a watercourse, and a Ford car, with
machine-guns, bouncing after. A Turkish guard-post opened fire, but
Pisani’s guns silenced it and the Ruwalla took it with only one man
killed. Ten miles of railway were won in only an hour’s fighting and
the Egyptians, after a halt for breakfast, began steady demolition-work
from south to north while the Arab army swarmed over the plain.
Lawrence could hardly realize the good fortune. It was September the
seventeenth, two days before Allenby could throw forward his full
power. In two days the Turks might decide to change their dispositions
to meet this new danger from the Arabs at Deraa, but they could not
do so before Allenby struck. Lawrence had cut the one railway
that connected the Turks in Amman, Maan, Medina, Nazareth, Nablus,
the Jordan valley, with their base in Damascus and with Aleppo,
Constantinople, Germany.
The Egyptians used ‘tulips,’ which were thirty-ounce charges of
gun-cotton planted beneath the centre of the central sleeper of each
ten-yard section of the track. The sleepers were hollow steel and the
explosion made them hump bud-like two feet in the air. The lift pulled
the rails three inches up, the drag pulled them six inches together,
and the chairs were inwardly warped. This threefold distortion put them
beyond repair. And it was quick work; six hundred such charges could
be laid and fired in two or three hours and would take the Turks a
week to mend. While they were busy, eight Turkish aeroplanes flew out
from Deraa and began dropping bombs. They did not seem to notice the
Egyptians on the railway but came diving down with machine-gun fire
among the Arabs. There was no overhead cover on the plain at all, so
the only thing was to scatter and present the thinnest possible target,
while Nuri Said’s automatic guns rattled back at the aeroplanes and
Pisani’s mountain-guns fired shrapnel and made them fly too high to
bomb accurately.
The question now was how to get at the Yarmuk railway-bridge which
Lawrence had failed to blow up the year before. Its destruction would
top off the cutting of the other two lines from Deraa. The enemy
aeroplanes were, however, making movement impossible. There had been
two British aeroplanes with the expedition, but the only useful one,
a Bristol Fighter, had been damaged in an air-fight the day before
and had flown back for repairs to Jerusalem; there remained only an
antiquated and almost useless B.E.12 machine. But Junor, the
pilot, had heard at Azrak from the pilot of the returning Bristol
Fighter that enemy aeroplanes were active at Deraa and most bravely
decided to take his place. When things were at their worst at Tell
Arar he suddenly sailed in and rattled away at the eight Turkish
aeroplanes with his two guns. They scattered for a careful look and he
flew westward drawing them after him: he knew that the chance of an
air-fight usually makes aeroplanes forget their ground-target. It was
deliberate self-sacrifice on Junor’s part, for his machine was utterly
useless for air-fighting. Nuri Said hurriedly collected three hundred
and fifty regulars and marched them in small parties across the rails.
He was making for Mezerib, seven miles west from Deraa, the key to the
Yarmuk bridge. The returning aeroplanes would probably not notice that
his men were gone. Armed peasants were sent on after Nuri Said, and
half an hour later Lawrence called up his body-guard, to follow himself.
As he did so, he heard a droning in the air and to his astonishment
Junor appeared, still alive, though surrounded by three enemy
aeroplanes, faster than his own, spitting bullets at him. He was
twisting and side-slipping splendidly, firing back. But the fight could
only end in one way. In a faint hope that he might get down alive
Lawrence rushed with his men and another British officer, Young, to
clear a landing-place by the railway. Junor was being driven lower; he
threw out a message to say that his petrol was finished. The body-guard
worked feverishly, rolling away boulders, and Lawrence put out a
landing-signal. Junor dived: the machine took the ground beautifully
but a flaw of wind then overturned it and he was thrown out. He was up
in a moment with only a cut chin, and rescued his Lewis-gun and
machine-gun and ammunition just before one of the Turkish aeroplanes
dived and dropped a bomb by the wreck. Five minutes later he was asking
for another job. Joyce gave him a Ford car and he ran boldly down the
hill until near Deraa and blew a gap in the rails there before the
Turks saw him. They fired at him with artillery but he bumped off in
the Ford, still unhurt.
Lawrence hurried forward to Mezerib with his body-guard, but an
aeroplane saw them and began dropping bombs: one, two, three misses,
the fourth fell right among them. Two camels fell, terribly wounded,
but the riders escaped unhurt and scrambled up behind two of their
friends. Another machine came by and dropped more bombs. A shock spun
Lawrence’s camel round and nearly knocked him out of the saddle with a
numbing pain in his right arm. He felt that he was hard hit and tears
came to his eyes with the pain and the disappointment of being put out
of action so soon before the triumphant end. Blood was running down
his arm. Perhaps, if he did not look at it, he might carry on as if he
were unhurt. The aeroplane was machine-gunning them now and his camel
swung round. He clutched at the pommel and realized that his damaged
arm was there, still in working order. He had judged it blown off. He
felt for the wound, and found a very small very hot splinter of metal
sticking into his arm. He realized how bad his nerves were. This was,
by the way, the first time that he had been hit from the air, of all
his twenty or more wounds.
Mezerib surrendered after a bombardment by Pisani’s guns and twenty
machine-guns. (Tallal had previously gone forward demanding a bloodless
surrender—he knew the stationmaster—but the Turks had fired a volley at
him and at Lawrence, who came with him, from point-blank range:
they had crawled back painfully through a field of thistles, Tallal
swearing.) The station was looted by hundreds of Hauran peasantry. Men,
women and children in a frenzy fought like dogs over every object;
even doors and windows, door-frames and window-frames, steps of the
stairs, were carried off. Others smashed and looted the wagons in the
siding. Lawrence and Young cut the telegraph, the Palestine army’s
main link with home. They cut it slowly to draw out the indignation
of the German-Turkish staff at Nazareth. The Turks’ hopeless lack of
initiative made their army a directed one, so that by destroying the
telegraph Lawrence went far towards turning them into a leaderless mob.
The points were then blown in and tulips planted all over the station
track. Among the captures were two lorries crammed with delicacies for
some German canteen. Nuri Said found an Arab prising open a tin of
bottled asparagus and cried out: ‘Pigs’ bones!’ The peasant spat in
horror and threw them down. Nuri Said picked them up and later shared
them with Lawrence, Joyce and Young. The trucks were splashed with
petrol and set on fire and the blaze that evening acted as a beacon
for hundreds and hundreds of Arab peasant rebels who came on camel, on
horse, on foot, in great enthusiasm, hoping that this was the final
release of their country.
Visitors were welcome. Lawrence’s business was to let each one tell
him all the news he wanted to tell; afterwards re-arranging it in his
mind and getting a clear picture of the whole enemy situation. Even
the magistrates of Deraa itself came offering to open the town, but
Lawrence put them off, to their disappointment. Though he knew that
the town controlled the local water-supply, the possession of
which must force the railway-station to surrender too, he would not
risk accepting the gift. If Allenby did not completely break the Turks,
Deraa might be retaken and a merciless massacre of the Hauran peasants
would follow.
The next step was to blow up Tell el Shehab bridge. There had arrived
the boy-chief of Tell el Shehab village, which crowned the cliff above
the bridge: he described the position of the large Turkish guard at
the bridge. Lawrence thought that he was probably lying, but he went
off and soon returned with his friend the commander of the Turkish
bridge-guard, an Armenian captain, who confirmed the story. The
Armenian was anxious to betray his charge; he suggested an ambush in
his own room at the village to which he would in turn call all his
lieutenants, sergeants and corporals—hated Turks—to be trussed up by
three or four waiting Arabs. The rest of the force would be ready then
to rush the leaderless guard. Lawrence agreed and at eleven o’clock he
and Nasir were close to the village with camel-men and the body-guard
bringing bags of gelatine. Lawrence knew the bridge well since his
attempt on it with Ali ibn el Hussein and Fahad from the other side of
the ravine. It was pitch-dark and the damp air came up from the river,
wetting their woollen coats. Waiting for the Armenian to come and fetch
the trussers-up they could hear the occasional cries of the sentry
challenging passers-by on the bridge far below, and the constant roar
of the waterfall, and then the noise of a train, with the squealing of
brakes as it stopped in the station close by the bridge. After awhile
the boy-chief came up holding his brown cloak open to show his white
shirt like a flag. He whispered that the plan had failed. The train in
the ravine had been sent up with German and Turk reserves from
Afuleh under a German colonel to rescue panic-stricken Deraa. They had
arrested the Armenian captain for being absent from his post. There
were dozens of machine-guns and dozens of sentries patrolling up and
down.
Nuri Said offered to take the place by main force. Surprise and numbers
were on the Arab side, but Lawrence was at his old game of reckoning
the cost and as usual found it too dear. They said good night to the
chief, thanked him, and turned back. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri Said
sat with rifles ready on the cliff edge, waiting for their men to
get back out of danger. Lawrence’s rifle was a famous one, a British
Lee-Enfield captured at the Dardanelles and given by Enver, the Turkish
commander-in-chief, as a present to Feisal, with an inscription on a
gold plate; Feisal had given it to Lawrence. It was a great temptation
sitting there to fire a rocket pistol into the station and scare the
Germans into all-night terror. Nasir, Nuri and Lawrence all had the
same childish idea at the same moment, but managed to restrain each
other from carrying it out. Instead, some of the body-guard were sent
to blow up rails in the ravine a mile or two beyond the bridge, Tallal
providing guides. The echoing explosions gave the Germans a bad night.
Then the rest of the army moved from Mezerib towards Nisib on their
way back to Umtaiye. Before leaving they lit a long time-fuse to a
mine under the water-tower. When the Germans came forward from Tell
el Shehab—they heard that Mezerib was empty—the mine exploded with a
tremendous noise and they cautiously retired again.
Nisib was ten miles south of Deraa. Pisani’s guns shelled the station
at two thousand yards’ range and the machine-guns supported him. But
the Turks would not surrender, returning a hot fire from the
trenches. This did not matter much, for the real objective was not the
station but a great bridge a few hundred yards to the north, protected
by a Turkish post which Nuri Said now began to bombard. Lawrence’s
men were tired out, like their camels, and when he asked them to come
forward with him against the bridge they refused. They knew that one
bullet in the gelatine that they were carrying would blow them sky-high.
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.
[Illustration:
description: Photo wide shot of armoured car with front
wheels buried up to the axles
caption: 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.
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