Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Lawrence had arrived at GHQ expecting some sort of rebuke for his failure to carry the Yarmuk bridge, to find that Allenby had already moved on. The Gaza-Beersheba line had been breached, Jerusalem had fallen, and Sir Edmund’s thoughts were already encompassing the Dead Sea. When the EEF had gathered its strength, transport and supplies – by February 1918 – he planned to unleash it on Jericho. The Hashemite base at Aqaba was now behind his own lines. If the Arabs could take Tafilah, in the wheat-growing Belqa uplands on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, then they could link up again with the British right flank. Lawrence thought they could move even farther – as far as the north end of the Dead Sea – as long as Allenby could supply them through Jericho once it had fallen. The Arab base would then shift from Aqaba to Jericho, which would be defended by the Arab Northern Army under Ja’afar Pasha – now 3,000 strong. Considered indisciplined and inefficient, Ja’afar’s regulars had astonished everyone with their tenacity when, in October 1917, the Turks had finally mounted a sledgehammer attack against the Hashemite outpost at Wadi Musa, near Petra, in brigade strength. The regulars had numbered only 350: two companies of camel-corps, and two of mule-mounted infantry under the savagely competent Maulud al-Mukhlis. Yet they had proved once and for all that trained Arab troops could hold a position against superior numbers, and had thrown back the enemy so decisively that the Turks never attacked an entrenched force of Arab regulars again.

The capture of Tafilah did not prove a difficult task. When Sharif Nasir and Auda Abu Tayyi appeared on its doorstep at dawn on 16 January 1918, having ridden all night with some Towayha and Bani Sakhr horsemen, they captured it without difficulty. Their only opposition came, not from the 180-strong Turkish garrison, but from the local Muhaysin peasantry, whose Sheikh was an anti-Hashemite partisan. When Auda rode down to the houses, and declared: ‘Dogs! Do you not know Auda Abu Tayyi?’ the peasants capitulated at once. By that evening the Arabs had been augmented by a contingent of Auda’s rivals, the ibn Jazi Howaytat, who had long since deserted the Turks for the Hashemite cause, and four days later Lawrence arrived with Sharif Zayd, Ja’afar Pasha, Zayd’s household Agayl, Bishah and ‘Utayba, and a small force of regulars with two mountain-guns. They had left their main force at Shobek, where it was stuck for lack of supplies. Auda and his clan were sent back to Jefer to prevent strife between them and the ibn Jazi, who stayed behind under their young chiefs Mata’ab and Annad. In a report written on 22 January, Lawrence wrote that the Hashemites had about 500 men in the town, but that the local peasants were bitterly divided and terrified of each other and of the Hashemite force. That the capture of Tafilah was regarded simply as a stepping-stone to the towns of Moab is indicated by his observation that ‘Tafil[ah] will not ease up till we take Kerak, and Kerak till we take Madeba.’ ¹Zayd took steps to police the town and appointed a governor, then sent cavalry scouts north along the road to Kerak to probe Turkish strength, with a quick push into Moab in mind. It was in the chasm of Sayl al-Haysa – the great wadi that divides Edom from Moab – that on 23 January his pickets fell foul of a Turkish cavalry screen outriding a force of three infantry battalions with two howitzers. Astonishingly, and against all logic, Lawrence thought, the Turks were coming back.

It was his vexation at this sudden reprise, Lawrence said, that made him determined to break his rule and fight a pitched battle for the first time. According to him, the engagement went off like a travesty of a classic regular battle out of Clausewitz or Foch. First, a tiny unit composed of peasants and Bedu horsemen, with two machine-guns, drove the Turkish vanguard off the plateau to the north of Tafilah and back into Sayl al-Haysa, where they ran slap into the main body of Turkish troops, who had just struck camp, and who opened up immediately with howitzers and machine-guns. The Arabs lost their own gun, and backtracked to the plateau, sheltering behind a four-foot ridge and firing desperately until their ammunition had almost run out, trying to duck the ricocheting spray of bullets from at least fifteen machine-guns directed at them from the Turkish lines. At this point, Lawrence appeared up in the eye of the battle, having strolled unarmed and barefoot across the plateau amid falling shells which the Turkish gunners had as yet failed to range correctly. On the way, he had coolly inspected the skin of an unexploded round to see what calibre of artillery the Turks were using. He saw the position was hopeless, and ordered the Arab riflemen to withdraw to a ridge three kilometres behind them, which he had already manned with twenty ‘Agayl of Sharif Zayd’s bodyguard. He begged the few horsemen of the ibn Jazi to hang on for ten or fifteen minutes to cover the retreat. He ran back, pacing out the ground, and was soon overtaken by the retreating cavalry, whose leader, Mata’ab, picked him up. Zayd’s force now crossed the ravine, and the whole Arab contingent was concentrated on his ‘Reserve Ridge’, from where they so dominated the terrain with mountain-guns and machine-guns that the Turks were obliged to halt their advance. Lawrence wrote that the battlefield was wedge-shaped with the Reserve Ridge as the flat side, and eastern and western ridges converging on the edge of the Haysa escarpment about three miles before them. The Turkish H Q and reserve lay beyond the apex of the wedge, with infantry and machine-guns deployed along the spines of the ridges to the left and right. For the Arabs, the obvious solution was to slip around the sides, under cover of the ridges, and catch the Turks in a pincer movement. Accordingly, Rasim Sardast, the artillery officer, was sent around the back of the eastern ridge with eighty riders, while Lawrence sent a contingent of new recruits – peasants from a neighbouring village called ‘Ayma – to creep round the ridge to the west. Just before four o’clock in the afternoon, the ‘Ayma men came over the ridge suddenly, taking the Turkish machine-gun nests from behind. They rushed them from only 200 yards, put them to flight, and captured the guns. On the enemy’s left flank, Rasim and his horsemen charged in almost simultaneously, while all the Arabs left behind the Reserve Ridge rushed forwards. The Turks were now streaming off the battlefield, abandoning their machine-guns and howitzers. The Ottoman commander, Hamid Fakhri, who was heard to say that in forty years he had never seen irregulars fight like this, mounted his horse to rally his troops but was struck down by an Arab bullet and mortally wounded. This was the final straw for the demoralized Turks, who withdrew in panic into Sayl al-Haysa, with the Arabs after them. Only about fifty, it was later reported, succeeded in getting back to Kerak. It was a resounding victory: of the 600 Turks who had set out from Kerak two days previously, almost 200 had been killed, including the commander, and 250 taken prisoner. The Arabs had also captured two Skoda mountain howitzers, twenty-seven machine-guns and 200 horses and mules. The official war history, whose account of the battle was – like every other European account – taken directly from Lawrence himself, called it ‘a brilliant feat of arms’. ²Yet Lawrence wrote later that his report on the battle was a deliberate parody whose intention was to mock his superiors’ rigid belief in the dicta of military thinkers such as Clausewitz and Foch. The biggest joke of all, he wrote, was that, far from recognizing this mockery, they swallowed it all gravely and awarded him the D S O: ‘We should have more bright breasts in the army,’ he chuckled, ‘if each man was able, without witnesses, to write out his own despatch.’ ³Lawrence claimed in Seven Pillarsthat he, and he alone, had deliberately and voluntarily decided to fight a pitched battle at Tafilah, yet since he also mocked his own account of the engagement, I found myself wondering what part he had really played in its phenomenal success.

I travelled to Tafilah with my ex-Special Forces friend Mohammad al-Hababeh to see the battlefield for myself, and found the town’s setting far more lovely than I could have imagined. The old part of Tafilah – the Muhaysin quarter – was a tightly packed neighbourhood of stone houses clustered around a small, square fort, which stood on a panhandle promontory, overlooking the deep rift of the Sayl az-Zarqa. To the south, across the ravine, lay the village of Busayra, and to the north, the great plateau on which the battle itself had been fought. Directly west, looking along the cleft of the Sayl, you could glimpse the gleaming green valley of the Dead Sea.

First, we called in at the Tourist Office. The officer there was very friendly and ordered us tea, but no, he couldn’t tell us where the battle of Tafilah had been fought. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘Lawrence had nothing to do with the battle. He was just a British spy.’ We thanked him, and drove down to the oldest building in the town – the Ottoman fort. This, we decided, was the correct place to start, for it was marked on the plan of the battle I had photocopied from the official war history. From there, I located Lawrence’s Reserve Ridge by a simple compass-bearing and Mohammad drove me around the gorge to the foot of the steep chalky escarpment, where we left the car and climbed up. There were newly planted Aleppo pines and cedars on the terraces, and near the top I saw masonry blocks among the stones which Lawrence had identified as Byzantine – the local name for his ‘Reserve Ridge’ was Khirbat Nokheh: ‘the ruin of the resting-place’. Along the spine of the ridge were pits which might well have been gun-emplacements from the battle itself, and a view across undulating volcanic heath with waving yellow goatgrass and nests of black stones and boulders, but scarcely a single tree. Below me to the left I could clearly see the western ridge on which the Turkish machine-guns had been placed, and which had been taken by the ‘Ayma men from the rear. The rest of the battlefield, however, was not as I had expected. From the plan, and from Lawrence’s account, I had imagined a triangular plain bounded by ridges on two sides. Instead I saw an undulating hillside of field and stubble tilting up to the right, to the base of a great buttress hogsback along the base of which ran the Kerak-Tafilah road. The far edge of the plateau, where the Turkish H Q had stood, appeared to be in sight from the map, but in practice it was hidden by high ground which lay directly in front of me. The final charge from Reserve Ridge, therefore, had been down a slope into dead ground, and then over another ridge before falling on the Turks – quite a different impression from that given by Lawrence of a charge downhill. Mohammad examined the map carefully and squinted at the ground, then pointed out to me a note stating that the map was based on ‘an oblique aerial photograph’ – possibly the photo shown in the same report, taken in 1929, which looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the town. In fact the official report had been made in the same year, for I later traced two letters from Lawrence to its author, Major Archibold Becke, dated 1929: ‘You want me to check the affair now, on my twelve year old memories,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘against air-photos of the ground. Isn’t that overdoing what was originally meant… to be a joke? … The whole thing’s absurd.’ ⁴Although Lawrence subsequently wrote that Becke’s map ‘squared substantially with his memories’, there was plainly some discrepancy between the map and the ground. We began to walk down the hillside, pacing towards the end of the western ridge, where Lawrence had met the Muhaysin and the ibn Jazi and ordered them to withdraw. As I walked, I had a vivid vision of bullets whining past me, of the boom and crash of falling shells, the tang of cordite, the rattle of machine-guns. I was still engrossed in my reverie when a voice said, ‘Peace be on you,’ and I saw an old shepherd, a brown-skinned man with a face like cured vellum, dressed in a dirty sheepskin cloak and a tattered headcloth, scuffling over a stony fold with about ninety scrawny brown and white sheep. Mohammad asked him if he knew anything about Lawrence and the battle of Tafilah. ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘But there wasfighting up here, because we find shells and bullets sometimes.’ It took us almost an hour to reach the far tip of the western ridge where the Turkish machine-gun battery had supposedly been sited, which would bear out Lawrence’s statement that the distance was roughly two miles. We climbed to the top through soft ploughed soil, and saw from there a deep cleft in the ground, cut by water, long ago, which ran all the way down into the ravine. This, I thought, must have been the secret path by which the Ayma men had sneaked up behind the Turks, and thus changed the whole course of the battle: ‘the main Turkish effort,’ Lawrence wrote to Major Becke, ‘was along the ridge afterwards cleared by the men of [‘Ayma].’ ⁵

The assault of the ‘Ayma men was clearly the decisive moment in the battle, but whether it was Lawrence himself who sent them forward, as he later told Liddell Hart, is disputable. Another participant in the battle, Subhi al-Amari, a regular Arab officer commanding a machine-gun section, recalled that the peasants of ‘Ayma had gathered on a hill called Khirbat as-Saba ah, about a kilometre to the right of the Turkish flank. According to Subhi, the Turkish position was out of range from Reserve Ridge. This is evidently so, for though Lawrence told Becke that he had to put up the sights of his Vickers to 3,000 yards to spray the retreat, the sights of a Vickers actually only extended to 2,900 yards, which was the weapon’s maximum range. As Richard Aldington correctly pointed out, a machine-gun duel at 3,000 yards was unthinkable in that era. Subhi had the sudden idea of moving his two guns around the western ridge in order to get in range. He and his men had sprinted across the dead ground and crawled to the base of the ridge, where they were joined spontaneously by the ‘Ayma peasants. His machine-gunners clambered up the slope and opened fire on the Turks from point-blank range, and were swiftly followed by a rush from the ‘Ayma men. The Turkish unit nearest the Arabs was badly hit, and the commander ordered his men to turn their line and face the peasants. It was at this point, Subhi wrote, that an unexpected thing happened. When the Turks stood up to change the line, the ‘Ayma men thought they were about to retreat and launched an impulsive attack, shouting and cheering. The Turks, taken aback, simply abandoned their guns and ran, and their panic spread to the nearby units, who did the same. Subhi later learned from a prisoner that at this precise moment, most of the Turkish officers had withdrawn from the line to attend an orders-group with the CO, and thus there was no one to rally the Turkish rank and file in their retreat. This was why, when the Turks fell into disorder, Hamid Fakhri had, as Lawrence also recorded, instructed his officers, too late, to take a rifle each and return to the line.

The Arab historian Suleiman Mousa told me that he had spoken with a number of veterans of the battle, most of whom remembered seeing Lawrence on the battlefield, but all of whom confirmed that the engagement was a highly haphazard affair, as Subhi’s report suggests. Lawrence himself hinted at this when he told Liddell Hart that as the ‘Ayma men had arrived from the west (their village lay a few miles west of the battlefield), ‘it is possible that geography had as much part as strategy in deciding the form of their attack’. ⁶What of Lawrence’s other claims? He wrote that he had decided to fight a pitched battle out of anger at the Turks’ stupidity in coming back, sent machine-guns forward to support the peasants, chose the Reserve Ridge as a last defensive line, ordered the spearhead back to the ridge, and urged Zayd to move his main body there. The evidence, though, is that it was neither Lawrence nor Sharif Zayd who decided to confront the Turks on the plateau, but the Muhaysin peasants of Tafilah, who were loath to let them back in their town: the action of a few dozen of them had obliged Lawrence to make a stand. There is no reason to suppose that he did not send the machine-guns to support them on his own initiative, nor that he did not choose the Reserve Ridge, counsel Zayd to move, or order the vanguard to withdraw. Evidently, then, he played a major part in the battle. Why the self-mockery, the peppering of aphorisms from military history in his account? What was the joke? The answer, surely, is that Lawrence realized the impossibility of reducing a series of chance events, by which most military engagements are decided, to some kind of logical pattern, which could be expressed in a brief report: ‘Throughout it I was quoting to myself absurd tags of Foch and the other blood fighters,’ he wrote to Major Becke in 1929, ‘and in every movement I was parodying the sort of thing they recommended, but exaggerating just enough to make it ridiculous. The account I wrote of it afterwards was in the same vein: a parody of a proper despatch. The Palestine staff took it seriously: I hope [you are] not going to follow their mistake.’ ⁷

A few days after the battle, Lawrence rode down the escarpment to the Dead Sea to urge a force of mounted Bedu from Beersheba, under Sharif ‘Abdallah al-Fair, to destroy the Turkish dhows in the harbour at Al-Mezra a which were lightering supplies to the Turks in Jericho. They attacked on 28 January, burned the supply-sheds and scuttled seven boats, effectively halting traffic on the Dead Sea. Lawrence was thrilled by the yarn-spinning possibilities of such an unusual action. It was, he announced proudly to Robert Graves, ‘One of [only] two occasions in military history [when mounted men have fought and sunk a fleet]. I recommended myself, vainly, for a naval D S O after this engagement.’ ⁸Meanwhile, the Hashemite plan was still to press on north to Kerak and Madeba, and in early February Lawrence rode south to Guweira to collect an extra Ј30,000 in gold they would need to recruit irregulars for the advance. When he arrived back at Tafilah on 11 February, exhausted after a scramble across the icy hills, he found to his dismay that Zayd had made no preparations for the push into Moab, and that the advantage gained from the battle of Tafilah had been squandered: ‘Zayd hummed and hawed,’ he wrote in a dispatch to Clayton the next day, ‘and threw away his chance of making profit from it. He had the country from Madeba at his feet. These Arabs are the most ghastly material to build into a design.’ ⁹Indeed, though Lawrence had always tried to remain in the background, he felt increasingly obliged to dictate strategy: ‘someday everybody will combine to down me,’ he wrote to Clayton. ‘It is impossible for a foreigner to run another people of their own free will indefinitely, and my innings has been a fairly long one.’ ¹⁰He realized that the Sharif had lost the determination to advance on his own, and decided to ride north to goad various irregular groups into action. The gold would arrive in Tafilah within a few days, and Lawrence felt it would be enough to finance his and the Sharif’s immediate needs and support the offensive. He rode off to make a reconnaissance in the Sayl al-Haysa with Lieutenant Alec Kirkbride – a fluent Arabic speaker who had been sent from GHQ, Beersheba to report on intelligence possibilities – and after Kirkbride had returned to Palestine, continued with a local Sheikh as far as Kerak and Madeba. The reconnaissance was highly satisfactory, and he arrived back at Tafilah on 18 February to tell Sharif Zayd that the way north was open to them. Zayd argued that this operation would require a great deal of money, and when Lawrence pointed out that he had just had Ј30,000 in gold sent up, Zayd claimed, to his astonishment, that he had already disbursed the entire amount in payment to the Muhaysin, the ‘Ayma men, the ibn Jazi, the Bani Sakhr, and various other groups. Lawrence was shattered: most of these men were peasants centred on Tafilah and could not be used for an advance: the Hashemite system was to enrol men as they moved forward, but the payroll was fictitious, for they could not possibly afford to pay more than a fraction of the men on their books, and would not do so unless there was an emergency in a particular area. Lawrence knew that Zayd was aware of this and realized suddenly that the Sharif was lying to him; the last instalment of the gold had only arrived the previous day, and there were simply not enough clerks to have counted it and disbursed it all within twenty-four hours. Lawrence’s intuition that some day the Sharifs would turn against him had all too quickly proved correct. Zayd stuck to his lie, and for once Lawrence lost his cool: ‘I am in no way under your orders,’ he told the Sharif, ‘or responsible to you: rather the contrary. In all respects I expect to have my wishes considered and not acted against without due and previous explanation: and where the British provide through me the whole resources for an operation, it should follow as exactly as possible my instructions.’ ¹¹Zayd would not relent, however, and Lawrence realized the Dead Sea campaign was finished. Once more, he had failed to keep his promise to Allenby. In the morning he sent a note to Zayd asking for the return of the money, and when the Sharif merely sent back a specious account of his expenditure, Lawrence decided to ride to Beersheba, explain to Allenby that he had let him down for a second time due to faulty judgement, and give up for ever his role in the Arab Revolt.

On the very day he arrived at Allenby’s GHQ, though, the Turks evacuated Jericho and the campaign in Palestine entered a new phase. The War Office in London was pushing for a final blow to the Turks, and Allenby was already preparing to spring on Damascus and Aleppo. Lawrence’s petty squabble with Zayd over Ј30,000 was forgotten in the new euphoria. Allenby wanted his right flank secured, and the railway cut. He could not afford to have the Medina garrison brought back into play at this crucial stage. He was prepared to send his Egyptian Camel Corps and Australian Light Horse across the Jordan river to take as-Salt, west of Amman, and thus safeguard an Arab assault on Ma’an, the garrison that had proved a constant thorn in the Hashemite side. Lawrence thought that with proper transport, Ja’afar Pasha’s 4,000 Arab regulars in Aqaba could be leap-frogged to a point on the railway north of Ma an and could sit on the line until the Turks marched out to remove them. He now believed the Arab regulars more than a match for Turkish troops in open battle, but doubted they could take Ma’an by frontal assault. To move the regulars, he told Allenby, would require camels, cash and guns. Instantly, the General granted him 700 baggage camels with Egyptian handlers and Ј300,000 in gold, and promised him artillery and machine-guns. Lawrence moved to Cairo, where, with Pierce Joyce and Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay – a gifted tactician who had now been assigned as chief of Hedgehog – he planned the advance on Ma an. The final act of this drama would be an attack on the Mudowwara stretch of the railway to cut off the Medina garrison once and for all.

Sadly, the plans went wrong. The British took as-Salt, but failed to take Amman, and were driven back by a massive Turkish counterattack, abandoning the town on 2 April. On the same day Lawrence, who knew nothing of the defeat, was riding back to Aba 1-Lissan with his bodyguard, when, he wrote, his men urged him to attack an eight-man Turkish patrol on a railway bridge near Faraifra. The attack was undisciplined: Lawrence’s servant Othman (‘Farraj’) rode recklessly ahead of the rest and was cut down by a bullet just as he drew his camel to a halt by the bridge. To Lawrence it seemed that he had deliberately stopped in front of the enemy to draw their fire. When he arrived, ‘Farraj’ was mortally wounded in the spine, but was ‘happy to die’, since his partner, Ali (‘Da’ud’), had perished of cold at Azraq a few weeks previously: ‘Farraj’ had never smiled again, and had lost the will to go on without his friend. For a second time in his career, Lawrence was obliged to shoot a man in cold blood: ‘Farraj’ had only hours to live, but could not be left for the Turks, who were already scooting towards them on a railway trolley. He held his pistol low so that the boy would not see it, but ‘Farraj’ understood his intention and said, ‘Da’ud will be angry with you.’

‘Salute him from me,’ Lawrence said.

‘God will give you peace,’ the ‘Agayli answered. Lawrence shot him in the head. ¹²

Lawrence felt responsible for the death of ‘Farraj’ and if his description of the attack is accurate, rightly so, for his own records show that in April 1918 his bodyguard consisted of only fifteen men, and to have assaulted a Turkish position with so few would have been most unwise. There is no reference to this skirmish in official records, however, and Lawrence makes no note of the deaths of either ‘Da’ud’ or ‘Farraj’ (‘Ali and Othman) in his diary, nor, as we have seen, are there any records of an ‘Ali or an Othman serving in his small bodyguard in April 1918. It is, perhaps, significant that Lawrence uses Farraj’s grief at the death of Da’ud as a prime for an essay on the nature of woman in the ‘Mediterranean’: explaining that while women were only ‘machines for muscular exercise’ men could really be at one only with each other. It must also be significant that Lawrence felt the need to change their names at all. Since they were both dead when he came to write Seven Pillars,and since he took great pains to explain that they were both openly homosexual, and (incorrectly) that no shame was attached, there seems no rationale behind the change of names, unless – as in the case of Hubert Young – Lawrence was ‘telling lies about them’. Lawrence’s queasiness at letting Robert Graves use the story shows clearly in his note: ‘It seems unbearable that you should publish the story of the death of Farraj… I suggest that it be cut right out. The narrative was so arranged as not to depend on it … You could well say that a week after the Amman visit Farraj himself was dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish Railway Patrol and leave it at that. These are private matters.’ ¹³Yet, as Graves pointed out with amused indignation, Lawrence had already published the story himself in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars,which had at that time circulated to thousands of readers. If he had sincerely felt the death of ‘Farraj’ unbearable, why did he reveal such ‘private matters’ to the world? Certainly, he had had no such qualms in discussing the literary merits of his ‘death scene’ with Charlotte Shaw in 1924: ‘I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top scene for him,’ he wrote. ‘Hounds of Banba[a novel by Daniel Corkery] does it, in the story of the burning of the village … I funked it, in the death of Farraj, my man.’ ¹⁴It is interesting to note, too, that Lawrence is here comparing a scene which is supposedly factual to an incident from a novel which is presumably purely fictitious – almost as if he had forgotten that there was a distinction between the two.

The British push across the Jordan failed, and the Arab assault on Ma’an failed also, largely because the Arab officers decided, against Lawrence’s advice, on a frontal assault rather than an encircling movement. On 18 April, Lawrence, who had watched the battle and had been impressed, despite its outcome, with the valour of the Arab regulars, rode to Guweira. The same day he commandeered a Ford car and rode to Tel ash-Shahm on the railway, where Dawnay and a mixed force of British, Egyptians and Bedu were concealed in a hollow ready for an attack. The Tel ash-Shahm operation had been planned with textbook precision by Dawnay, but though Lawrence believed him the only high-ranking British officer capable of handling conventional and guerrilla tactics together, he realized that with the heterogeneous medley of troops under his command, things might not turn out quite as predicted. Lawrence volunteered himself for the mission officially as ‘interpreter’, but actually to keep an eye on relations between the three groups.

This was to be a very different operation from the one Lawrence had led against Mudowwara in the previous year. Besides a squadron of armoured cars and Rolls-Royce tenders, there was a battery of Ford-mounted ten-pounder Talbot guns of the Royal Field Artillery under Lieutenant Samuel Brodie, a flight of aircraft operating from the Ga’a of Rum, a detachment of the Egyptian Camel Corps under Bimbashi Fred Peake, as well as the Bedu irregulars under Sharif Haza a. At first light on 19 April, the armoured cars slid out of their hollow with their motors churning, crunching across the flint surface, leaving smoke-trails of dust. Lawrence sat in a Rolls-Royce tender on a ridge-top next to Dawnay, who, with a map spread on his knees and a watch in his hand, checked off each movement according to a carefully prepared schedule. Precisely on time, the armoured cars came over the ridge and approached the Turkish entrenchments around Telash-Shahm station. Each detail of the scene was accentuated and magnified by long shadows in the crystal-clear light. The Turks, taken by surprise at the sudden appearance of armoured cars, surrendered immediately. Meanwhile two Rolls-Royce tenders under the command of Lieutenant Hornby of the Royal Engineers rumbled down to one of the nearby culverts and blew it spectacularly with a hundredweight of gun-cotton. The blast almost lifted Lawrence and Dawnay out of their seats. The Turks opened fire from behind a thick stone sangar on a steep knoll, and the rat-at-tat of four machine-guns crackled out at once from the armoured-car turrets, their bullets sizzling off the stones. At that moment the Bedu irregulars under Haza a came from behind a hill, firing raggedly, and charging at the Turkish knoll, capturing it without effort. Lawrence drove down the line in his Rolls-Royce, slapping gun-cotton charges on rails and bridges, covered by the machine-guns in the armoured cars. A chain of explosions rocked the air, and clouds of debris materialized suddenly along the line like dust-devils: fragments of shrapnel and flint bumped and pattered against the steel turrets of the armoured cars. The Bedu rushed the Turkish outpost to the south of the station in a wild flight of camels, streaking up the mound and vaulting the trenches. Meanwhile the Camel Corps under Fred Peake approached the station from the north, working forward more cautiously from ridge to ridge. The Talbot battery opened fire, and shells crumped against the station buildings with ear-splitting impact, and two planes fell suddenly like swallows out of the clear sky to the west and sent a dozen bombs hurtling into the trenches. V-shaped plumes of smoke appeared momentarily around the station, and through the haze and dust the armoured cars edged forwards with their machine-guns spouting drumfire. Peake’s camel-corps now threw caution to the wind and broke into a ragged gallop across the plain, and the Bedu, not to be outdone, thundered down from the east, converging on the station, where the Turks threw up their arms in surrender and waved white flags frantically. Lawrence beat them all there in his Rolls-Royce, and while he claimed the brass bell as a memento, Dawnay took the ticket-punch and Rolls, his driver, the rubber stamp. They emerged to find that the Arabs and the Egyptians had gone mad with looting-frenzy, smashing and ransacking the buildings, and rushing about in blind lust for reward. The station store contained hundreds of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, food and clothing, and the factions began shooting at each other in their greed. One camel set off a Turkish trip-mine and was blown over, causing momentary turmoil. Lawrence, who later said that the British officers came within an inch of getting ‘scragged’, managed to separate the parties, allowing the Egyptian Camel Corps to pick what they wanted first. Afterwards, the Bedu scrabbled for the remainder on the word ‘Go!’, as Rolls put it, ‘like a solid mass of ejected inmates from Bedlam’. ¹⁵They rushed the store-house, leaned on the door until it snapped open, and were so satisfied with their loot that more than three-quarters of them simply loaded their camels and made off into the desert. The attack had been an unqualified success: it was, said Lawrence, ‘fighting de luxe’. Dawnay’s only reservation was that while he had scheduled the capture of the station for 11.30 precisely, the Turks, out of ‘ignorance and haste’, had capitulated at 11.20 – ten minutes too soon. This was, Lawrence wrote with tongue coiled in cheek, ‘the only blot on a bloodless day’. ¹⁶