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 armbored 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 aëroplane with fifteen hundred bullets. As the armored cars started hack to Umtaiye, the Germans swooped down on them four times; hut 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.
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, Jaffar 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 Sollum, 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 Feisaľs 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. Bui there were no ifs; the enemy walked into the prepared trap like lambs to the slaughter.
CHAPTER XXIV
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;between the crumbling Turkish 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 cooperate 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 re* port. 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-sticken 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:
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 21
