THE GREATEST HOAX SINCE THE TROJAN HORSE
WITH the capture of the ancient seaport of Akaba, which transformed the Shereefian revolt into an invasion of Syria, and with the official recognition of the Hedjaz army as the right wing of Allenby’s forces, it became imperative that all Lawrence’s movements should fit in with Allenby’s plans.
Allenby by this time was in possession of all southern Palestine up to a zigzag line extending across the country from the Jordan Valley to the shores of the Mediterranean just south of Mount Carmel, the peak which since earliest times has been known as the Mountain of God. His first drive in the autumn of 1917 had resulted in the liberation of Beer-sheba, the ancient home of Abraham and Lot, of Gaza, the capital of the Philistines where Samson was betrayed by Delilah, and of Hebron, where Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and Rebecca were buried in the cave of Machpelah. It had also resulted in the deliverance of Jaffa, the chief port of Palestine since the days of David and Solomon three thousand years ago, of the Plains of Philistia and the Plains bf Sharon, and, more important still, had resulted in the liberation of the sacred cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Ottoman yoke. But the ancient land of Samaria, the city of Nazareth and all Galilee, the coastal plain of northern Palestine and all of Syria still remained in the hands of the Turks, so that the campaign was only half completed. There were now two courses open to Allenby, either to push the Turks north by degrees, or to crush Turkish power in the East with one sweeping blow. The commander-in-chief elected to take the big risk, and he chose the latter.
He decided to launch his final attack north of Jaffa and Jerusalem in July, 1918; but in June, when Ludendorff was making his last drive toward Paris and the Channel Ports, the Allies were so hard pressed in Western Europe that they were compelled to call upon Allenby to send many of his divisions to reinforce them in France.
This completely disrupted all Allenby’s plans. It now became necessary for him to create a new army. The unexpected necessity for a complete reconstruction of the forces in the Holy Land was a staggering blow, but England’s modern Cœur de Lion was not in the least disheartened and immediately set to work to form a new army made up largely of Indian divisions from Mesopotamia hitherto untried in the war, and from his veteran Anzac cavalry under Light Horse Harry Chauvel, the Australian general whom he had placed in command of the largest body of mounted troops that ever participated in modern warfare. Instead of attacking the Turks in northern Palestine in June or July, it now seemed impossible for him to launch his final thunderbolt before October or November. Lawrence was convinced that such a long delay would make it difficult for him to give much assistance on the right flank. By then his restive Bedouins would be wanting to migrate with their flocks to their winter pastures on the Central Arabian plateaus, and, in addition, his many years’ experience in the country led him to believe that autumn rains would impede any military operation attempted during that season.
He explained this to the commander-in-chief, who immediately grasped the situation and by superhuman effort whipped his new army into shape so that his new divisions were ready to take the field within eight weeks from the date of their arrival from Mesopotamia! Toward the end of August he despatched an aëroplane to Arabia with a welcome message for Lawrence, the announcement that he would be ready for a joint attack early in September instead of October or November.
Allenby, fully aware of the inexperience of most of his new troops, realized that the Turks would have to be defeated by strategy rather than by force. So he decided to dupe the Turks with a colossal hoax, a sort of moving picture of the British Army pushing straight up along the Jordan River from the Dead Sea toward Galilee. But it was to be a bogus army! In preparing this hoax Allenby’s first move was to shift all his camel-hospitals from southern Palestine to the Jordan Valley within fifteen miles of the Turkish lines. Next, he had hundreds of condemned and worn-out tents shipped up over the Milk and Honey Railway from Egypt, and pitched them on the banks of the Jordan. Then he hauled all his captured Turkish cannons down into the Jordan Valley and started them blazing away in the direction of the Turks encamped in the hills of Moab. Ten thousand horse-blankets were thrown over bushes in the valley and tied up to look like horse-lines. Five new pontoon-bridges were flung over the river.
The sacred valley of the Jordan was filled with all the properties for a sham battle of the ages. Never since the Greeks captured Troy with their famous wooden horse has such a remarkable bit of camouflage been put over on a credulous enemy.
When the German reconnaissance aëroplanes flew over the Jordan they buzzed back to Turkish headquarters with the important news that Allenby had placed two new divisions in this sector! This camouflage army, arranged largely by General Bartholomew of Allenby’s staff, was so realistic that the Germans and Turks never dreamed that it might all be a fake; and fortunately the lines were so carefully guarded that not a single German or Turkish spy got through. Lawrence, also, lent a helping hand in duping the Turks. Shortly before the date arranged for the big push three hundred members of the Imperial Camel Corps came down from Palestine to help him. They were under the command of Colonel “Robin” Buxton, a born soldier, who before the war was a prominent Lombard Street banker. Under the guidance of his tent-mate, Major W. E. Marshall, R.A.M.C., “the fighting bacteriologist,” Lawrence sent the camel corps to attack an important Turkish garrison at Mudawara, where a spectacular twenty-minute battle was fought on August 8.
After the battle of Mudawara, Lawrence led a combined force of camel corps and Arabs against Amman, just east of the Jordan. This was merely a feint, but it confirmed the Turks in the belief that the valley of the historic Jordan River was swarming with the bulk of Allenby’s forces. Lawrence sent one of the most prominent chiefs of the Beni Sakr toward Damascus with £7000 in gold to buy barley. The sheik bought recklessly in every town and village on the eastern border of Syria. The Turks, knowing well that Emir Feisal’s Bedouin cavalry could not use such vast quantities of grain, immediately decided that the barley must be intended for Allenby’s forces in the Jordan Valley. Lawrence also started the rumor through the Arab army that Emir Feisal’s host intended to launch its main attack against Deraa railway junction between Amman and Damascus.
“As a matter of fact,” Lawrence remarked, “we had every intention of attacking Deraa, but we spread the news so far and wide that the Turks refused to believe it. Then in deadly secrecy we confided to a chosen few in the inner circle that we really were going to concentrate all of our forces against Amman. But we were not.”
This “secret,” of course, leaked out and was betrayed to the Turks, who immediately shifted the greater part of their forces to the vicinity of Amman, exactly as Allenby and Lawrence had planned.
When the advance of the Arab army actually started, none hut Emir Feisal, Colonel Joyce, and Colonel Lawrence knew that the attack was to center on Deraa. Early in September Lawrence started north from the head of the Gulf of Akaba to help Allenby in his historic final drive. But instead of taking his Bedouin followers from the Hedjaz, with the exception of his personal body-guard Lawrence recruited a new army from the tribes of the North Arabian Desert, and Joyce kept adding to his rapidly increasing mob of deserters from the Turkish ranks. When it started up the Wadi Araba from the head of the Gulf of Akaba, Lawrence’s caravan consisted of two thousand baggage-camels, four hundred and fifty Arab regulars mounted on racing-camels, four Arab machine-gun units, two aëroplanes, three Rolls-Royce armored cars, a demolition company of picked men from the Egyptian camel corps, a battalion of Gurkhas from India mounted on tall camels from the Sind Desert, and four mountainguns manned by French Algerians. In addition he had his resplendent private body-guard of one hundred picked Bedouins. His total force amounted to one thousand men mounted on camels. Lawrence’s motto on this expedition, as on all others, was, “No margin!” He faced a march of five hundred miles across unmapped desert under stupendous transport difficulties. During one stage they marched four da
ys from one water-hole to another, carrying their entire water-supply with them and suffering from thirst. When they reached the new water-hole they drank copiously, only to discover that the water was filled with leeches. These leeches fastened themselves on the inside of their nasal membranes and proved most painful. But the column made the trek in a fortnight. They were hurrying north to cut three Turkish railway lines and all the telegraph-wires around Deraa, Lawrence’s primary mission being to prevent the Turks from communicating with Damascus, Aleppo, and Constantinople when Allenby started his advance.
The camouflage army of the Jordan was a complete success. As a matter of fact, there were only three battalions of able-bodied troops in that part of the Holy Land, two of which were made up of newly arrived Jewish troops from the British Isles and the United States.
If the Turks had known the truth they might have sent down one brigade, pushed up behind Allenby’s lines, and recaptured Jerusalem!
Allenby was taking enormous chances, but great men usually do.
The commander-in-chief supplied his troops in the Jordan Valley with but three weeks’ rations in order that they might use all of the transport for his main army. His supply people were frantic; they said the troops along the Jordan must be given eight weeks’ food; but Allenby knew he was perfectly safe so long as his plan for one smash went through without a hitch.
Allenby felt that it would not be safe to engage the Turks in a decisive pitched battle with a brand new army. He had not had time to complete his work of reorganization. So his sole object was to hoodwink the Turks by luring them to the wrong place, the Jordan Valley, thus leaving a vulnerable stretch over near the Mediterranean.
Allenby’s sham attack down near Jericho had beer scheduled for September 18. The British Intelligence Corps carefully allowed this “secret” to get out, and of course the Turks were ready to meet it. Allenby’s real attack was made not on the eighteenth but on the nineteenth, and when they woke up and discovered how they had been fooled, the war in the Near East was over, and most of them were British or Arab prisoners. Furthermore, it was not made in the Jordan Valley but away on the other side of Palestine to the north of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast! He had transferred nearly all his infantry and cavalry there by night, and they remained concealed in the orange-groves until the day of the real battle, the battle that broke the backbone of the Ottoman Empire.
CHAPTER XXIII
A CAVALRY NAVAL ENGAGEMENT AND LAWRENCES LAST GREAT RAID
A LL 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 Beer-sheba, 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 &. 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 his tory 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 loopholed 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 geting 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.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 20
