Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

At once Lawrence mounted his camel and headed towards Mezerib with Nuri as-Sa’id and his men, leaving only 100 regulars, the Gurkhas, the Rwalla, and the armoured cars with Joyce at Tel Arar. He had been hoping that the caravan would look like a troop of Bedu, but very quickly the German planes were out again, sweeping in with exquisite slowness and loosing four bombs in the direction of the running camels. The first three missed, but the fourth struck right into their midst, with an ear-splitting crack, knocking over two of Lawrence’s bodyguard and badly mauling their mounts. The two men picked themselves up and swarmed on to their companions’ saddles, just as another plane honed in and let fly a brace of bombs, the shock of which spun Lawrence’s camel round and almost jerked him out of his saddle. He felt a terrible burning sensation in his elbow, the pain of which brought tears to his eyes. For a horrific moment he thought his arm had been blown clean off, but removing a fold of his cloak, he saw that he had been hit by a shred of shrapnel too small to do any real damage.

Nuri’s regulars, with their machine-gunners and artillery, took the first of Mezerib’s two stations within half an hour. Young and Lawrence climbed on the roof and cut the telegraph wires: ‘Slowly, with ceremony,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to draw out the indignation.’ ¹³Then, while Nuri’s men broached the second station, they turned their attention to the railway. Young began planting tulips along the tracks to the east while Lawrence blew the points in the station itself: ‘I had planted a dozen [tulips] when something made me look along the line to Dara’a,’ wrote Young, ‘and my heart stood still, for a train was crawling slowly out of the town towards Mezerib.’ ¹⁴Young’s first thought was to warn Lawrence, and he ran back to the station shouting that a train was coming.

‘A plane?’ Lawrence asked.

‘Not a plane, you damned fool,’ Young cried. ‘A train!’

Lawrence answered calmly that it was time to light the charges, and Young sprinted back towards the oncoming train, fumbled for a taper and found he had none. Instead, he lit a cigarette, quickly ignited the fuses, and finally leapt on to his camel to make his escape, quite forgetting that he had hobbled her. The camel stumbled: Young half fell, half jumped out of the saddle and ‘ran like hell’. The tulips puffed smoke, cracked off one by one, and the train immediately reversed gear and pulled back to Dara’a. At sunset, after the Arabs had looted the station thoroughly, Lawrence and Young set fire to the rolling stock and torched two Turkish trucks.

They rested a little while at Mezerib, where thousands of Hauran peasants turned out to join them, and during the night Lawrence and Young marched to within a few hundred yards of the bridge at Tel ash-Shehab, which he had failed to take with Sharif ‘Ali earlier in the year. The bridge seemed to be charmed, however, for now it was defended by a German artillery battery, and once again Lawrence was forced to retire. The railway had been wrecked, to the south, east and north of Dara’a, and the Turkish garrison was cut off. The mission had been a success, and all that remained was the exfiltration. In the morning, they caught up with Nuri’s party at Ramtha and began to withdraw to Umm Tayeh to rendezvous with Joyce and the armoured cars. The march back proved nerve-racking. The Germans were behind them, and ahead of them, on the railway, they might find reinforcements from Amman. The peasants at Ramtha seemed hostile, and any moment the patrol might be attacked by air. Lawrence cantered ahead with his bodyguard to mine the railway near Nasib, which lay on their line of retreat. Nuri put in a full bombardment on the station there, intending to keep Turkish heads down while the Arabs crossed the metals, and to draw the sentries from the bridge while Lawrence laid on it a whacking charge of 800 pounds of gun-cotton. After dark, the entire detachment crawled across the line unseen, covered by the roar of Pisani’s guns. When the artillery had been safely brought across, Lawrence touched off his charge: ‘There was a deafening roar,’ wrote Young, ‘and a blaze which lit up the country for miles. By its light I saw the abutment arch of the bridge sheared clean off and the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below.’ ¹⁵Within a mile of the tracks they made camp, but were woken up with a shock at first light by a shell which exploded nearby. In the night, the Turks had cunningly brought up a field-gun mounted on a railway wagon and had ranged it with their spotter plane. The Arabs mounted their camels and trotted quickly out of range. Later the same day they met up with Joyce at Umm Tayeh, and on 19 September Lawrence returned to Azraq by car. The following day he flew to GHQ, now at Ramleh in Palestine, to collect orders and discover the outcome of Allenby’s advance.

As Young and Kirkbride were frying sausages for breakfast on 22 September at Umm Surab, just south of Umm Tayeh, Lawrence reappeared with three aircraft, to be followed the same afternoon by a Handley-Page bomber which landed stores, raising Arab morale with its huge dimensions. The news from the Palestine front was electrifying: Nablus, Haifa, Afuleh, Beisan and Samakh had fallen, 22,000 prisoners had been captured, and the Turkish 4th Army from Amman had been ordered to fall back on Dara’a and Damascus. The Turks were on the run, and Lawrence’s raiders were to hamper them and cut off the retreat. It would be the most dangerous mission they had undertaken so far. The Turks numbered tens of thousands, were fully equipped with artillery and machine-guns, and were desperate; the Arab force, by comparison, was a flea: ‘I noticed with pride,’ Winterton wrote, ‘but not without apprehension … that Lawrence fully intended that we should worry the retreating Turks as mastiffs of old worried a bear in the ring, oblivious of the possible consequences.’ ¹⁶Though Lawrence had estimated that the railway would be out for a week, the Turks had managed to get it back into service with astonishing speed. Lawrence was to keep up the pressure on it, to raise the peasant tribes of the northern Hauran at long last. His force would be increased by 3,000 of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s Rwalla camelry who had been waiting in the wings at Azraq. The next day, Nuri as-Sa’id and his regulars, with Young, Stirling and Winterton in the armoured cars, and Nuri ash-Sha’alan at the head of his Rwalla, hit the railway at Kilometre 149, where Lawrence and Joyce had previously destroyed the bridge. They wrecked two-thirds of a mile of line and burned the scaffolding with which the bridge had been repaired. This was the final blow to the Turks’ railway efforts, and afterwards they gave up: the Amman garrison began to move to Dara’a on foot with all its artillery and transport. Lawrence did not yet know this, however, and on the 24th he, Winterton and an Arab officer called Jamil set off in the armoured cars to demolish another bridge south of Mafraq. Winterton was reluctant to join the mission, suspecting that it was unnecessary and that Lawrence was now fighting purely for fighting’s sake. They came to a bridge and a blockhouse, and when Lawrence went forward in a car to examine the target, a machine-gun and a seven-pound field-gun blasted out at them from the fort. The armoured car commander was wary of challenging artillery, and Lawrence suggested confidently to Winterton that they should each take a Lewis gun out of the cars, creep up on the blockhouse and scourge it with enfilade fire, while the cars opened up from the front. Winterton thought Lawrence had gone crazy: ‘How on earth,’ he asked, ‘are we going to get into range without being killed? … They’ll spot us and blow us to blazes … who ever heard of taking a blockhouse with a Lewis gun?’ Lawrence inquired if His Lordship had developed ‘cold feet’. ‘Certainly not, sir,’ Winterton said. ‘But all I can say is that if this extraordinary proposal succeeds and we survive we shall both be entitled to the VC.’ ¹⁷This gave Lawrence a moment’s thought, and he decided to revert to his original plan and rush the fort with the armoured cars, with the intention of getting a car under the bridge, and setting a charge while in its protection. They rolled forward under heavy fire with bullets clattering against their armour, and shells bursting about them, when a Turkish soldier popped up behind Lawrence’s car and lobbed a grenade. Lawrence knew the car was vulnerable to grenades and that a direct shot to the gun-cotton in the back would tear them all to pieces. Suddenly Winterton’s driver informed him that Lawrence’s car was reversing out of action.

‘What are your orders, sir?’ he asked.

‘Get out of range of the enemy as soon as you damned well can!’ Winterton replied.

On the way back to the bivouac, Winterton recalled, he tried to run down some gazelles, and Lawrence stopped to tick him off angrily: ‘It was typical of him,’ he wrote, ‘to show one of his rare bursts of anger at the destruction of a gazelle.’ ¹⁸

Arriving back at Umm Surab, they found Sharif Nasir about to move to Umm Tayeh, and heard for the first time that the Turkish 4th Army was pouring out of Amman. Lawrence suggested that they should leave the fleeing Turks for the local Bedu to finish off, move to Sheikh Sa’ad, north of Dara’a, and try to force an immediate evacuation of Dara’a from there. The idea was accepted, and it was decided to send the aircraft and armoured cars back to Azraq to await the final move on Damascus. The column left on the afternoon of 25 September, but they had only gone four miles when they sighted clouds of dust on the horizon: 10,000 Turks were retreating towards Dara’a protected by cavalry pickets on their flanks. One of the aircraft sheared back over the caravan and dropped a message that Turkish horsemen were approaching them. It was an inopportune moment. Pisani’s guns were in bits on their mules, the armoured cars and the rest of the aircraft had left. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to pull out the regulars, while the Rwalla horse under Nuri’ash-Sha’alan and the Hauran riders under Talal al-Haraydhin went forward to draw Turkish fire. Suddenly, the armoured car squadron, which had spotted the enemy, drove back across the plain trailing scarves of dust and prepared to engage the Turks. As it turned out, though, they were merely a group of stragglers seeking a shortcut: they rode straight into the Arab irregulars, who captured over 100 of them.

That evening they camped at Nuwayma, and Young, whose official post was ‘military adviser’, came to Lawrence’s tent at midnight and suggested that the Arabs had done enough and should now retire to Bosra in the Druse mountains, where the Druses were gathering under Nasib al-Bakri. Here they could wait for the British to take Damascus. Lawrence would not hear of it: Damascus must at all costs be seen to be taken by Arab arms. At first light next day they crossed the railway near Ghazala, and Lawrence laid a charge on the nearest bridge while Auda raced off with his Howaytat riders to capture the station at Khirbat al-Ghazala, where he took 200 prisoners and two mountain-guns. Talal and his fierce Hauranis stormed Izra – which Lawrence claimed was being defended by the traitor ‘Abd al-Qadir – drove out its small garrison and took custody of its large grain depot. The Rwalla skittered up the main road towards Dara’a on their camels looking for Turkish stragglers and came back with 400 prisoners, mules and machine-guns. At dawn on 27 September the column had just settled among the olive groves at Sheikh Sa’ad when an RAF plane dropped a message informing them that Allenby’s spearhead – the 10th Cavalry Brigade, outriding General Barrow’s Indian Division – was already at Ramtha, only fourteen miles away, close on the tail of the fleeing Turks. Two large Turkish columns – 6,000 men from Dara’a, and 2,000 from Mezerib – were converging on the area.

This was the chance they had been waiting for. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to let the bigger column pass by, to be harried by the Rwalla and Hauran horse, while the regulars would engage the smaller Mezerib column and wipe it out. It was now heading for Tafas, and Talal, a Sheikh of the village, was desperate to get there before the enemy and prevent them from entering it. According to an Arab report, Talal galloped ahead with his Hauranis and attacked the enemy furiously, but was killed by a Turkish grenade. If this is so, he was already dead when Lawrence arrived with Sharif Nasir and Auda, quickly followed by Nuri as-Sa id and the regulars with Pisani and his guns. When they reached Tafas, Lawrence wrote, the enemy was already in the village, and there was the occasional ominous shot from within, and palls of blue smoke from the houses. Soon the Turks began to march out in ordered fashion, with guards of lancers at the front and rear, infantry in columns with machine-guns on their flanks, and transport – including Jamal Pasha in his motor car – in the centre. As the column came into view from among the houses, Pisani’s guns roared and spat smoke, taking the enemy completely by surprise. According to Lawrence’s version, he and Talal then slipped into the streets with a troop of Bedu, only to be met with a nauseating sight. As soon as the Arab battery had opened fire, Lawrence wrote, the Turkish rearguard commander had ordered the massacre of the villagers: they had stabbed and shot to death twenty small children and forty women. As they rode in, a tiny girl – perhaps four years old – tried to run away. Abd al-‘Aziz, Lawrence’s ‘rabbit mouthed’ Tafas bodyguard, jumped from his camel and cradled her: she had been wounded in the neck with a lance-thrust, and blood stained her smock. She tried to escape, and screamed, ‘Don’t hit me, Baba!’ then collapsed and died. They rode grimly past the place where the Turks had mutilated the village women and caught up with wounded stragglers who begged for mercy. They shot them down at point-blank range, and Lawrence looked on silently while his bodyguard-lieutenant Ahmad az-Za’aqi pumped three bullets into the chest of a helpless man. As they came within sight of the column, Lawrence wrote, Talal gave a horrible cry: ‘[he] put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring column’. ¹⁹Lawrence moved to join him, but Auda held him back. This was Talal’s private appointment with death. According to Lawrence, he charged right into the jaws of the Turkish machine-gun, screaming his battle-cry, ‘Talal! Talal!’ until, riddled with bullets, he fell from his saddle among the Turkish spears. Lawrence and Auda watched the grim incident from afar, and at last Auda said: ‘We will take his price!’

The artillery barrage had shocked the Turks and dispersed them in panic. One section, mostly made up of German and Austrian machine-gunners, grouped themselves tightly round three motor cars, and fought like devils. They proved too strong for the Arabs, who let them go. The other two sections, though, were separated and cut to pieces where they stood: Lawrence ordered ‘No prisoners!’ and the Arabs charged them again and again, swooping on them like avenging furies, and cutting them down almost to a man. ‘In a madness born of the horror of Tafas,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as if their death and running blood could slake our agony.’ ²⁰Thousands of Hauran villagers gathered like scavengers at the flanks of the beleaguered Turkish column, picking up the rifles of the enemy dead as they fell, and joining their fellow Arabs in the slaughter. By sunset the plain outside Tafas was littered with hundreds of bloody corpses. According to Lawrence, one group of Arabs had not heard his ‘no prisoners’ order, and had taken 250 of the enemy alive, including a number of Germans and Austrians. As he rode up, Lawrence was shown an Arab named Hassan who had been pinned to the ground with German bayonets, while already wounded. Lawrence had wanted no enemy survivors, and this was the excuse he had been looking for. He told his brother Arnie after the war that he had ordered an Arab crew to turn a Hotchkiss on the prisoners and kill them all. In doing so, he felt, he was avenging not only the children of Tafas, but the numberless generations of Arabs who had been ground down by the tyranny of the hateful Turks.

The picture of Lawrence as a bloodthirsty sadist whose inherent cruelty was finally brought into play by the torture he suffered at Dara’a was much encouraged by David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia,in which Lawrence is seen dripping with blood after the battle at Tafas. How much truth is there in such an image? A close reading of Seven Pillarsreveals an obsession with cruelty which some have taken to indicate that Lawrence had a sadistic nature. On his very first railway attack near Aba an Na’am, for example, he described how his men captured a shepherd boy whom they kept tied up and threatened to kill, while butchering his goats. There are the beatings which the imaginary ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ constantly seem to have endured for their pranks, not to mention being made to sit on scorching rocks, and clapped in irons for a week; the Circassian youth, not even a combatant, who was dragged around for an hour by camel, stripped naked and whose feet were then deliberately slit open across the soles – a nauseating and pointless assault; and the even more bizarre incident Lawrence recorded, when his bodyguard picked acacia thorns from a bush and drove them into a man’s body for some unexplained crime. The more sadistic of these punishments are nowhere recorded as customary among the Arabs by the great Arabian travellers, and seem alien to Bedu culture. Wilfred Thesiger, indeed, wrote that the Bedu were so mindful of the dignity of others that they would prefer to kill a man rather than humiliate him. Some of the accounts may be imaginary – an expression of masochistic rather than sadistic fantasy: Lawrence’s

constant concern with his own pain and suffering makes it clear that it was not with the perpetrators but with the victims of these imaginary punishments that he identified. While a masochistic tendency is clearly observable throughout his life, a sadistic stratum is not. Lawrence was by nature gentle, highly sensitive and compassionate: ‘… they say his mouth suggests cruelty,’ wrote his friend Vyvyan Richards; ‘… is there any trace of that in his nature? I have found none in all the thirty years I have known him… his campaign shows only strong justice where patience and mercy would have been a greater evil.’ ²¹Alec Kirkbride, who was with Lawrence at the very end of the Syrian campaign, wrote: ‘it is complete nonsense to describe him as having been either sadistic or fond of killing … He once told me that his ideal of waging war was based on the professional condottieri of medieval Italy. That is to say, to gain one’s objectives with a minimum of casualties on both sides.’ ²²

Lawrence makes two related claims in Seven Pillarsregarding Tafas: first, that he gave the Arabs the order to take no prisoners, and secondly, that the Arab regulars machine-gunned a host of prisoners with his approval. He does not state specifically that he himself ordered the prisoners shot: this claim only appears after the war in conversation with his brother Arnie. Unlike most events in Lawrence’s career, though, there were other witnesses at the battle of Tafas. Fred Peake, who arrived there soon after Lawrence, and who saw the atrocities for himself, wrote to Arnie Lawrence years later that his brother had actually tried to halt the killing of wounded Turks. The Arabs had gone berserk, Peake said, and when he turned up with his Camel Corps detachment, Lawrence had asked him to restore order. Peake had dismounted 100 troopers and marched them into Tafas with fixed bayonets. The Arabs had given way, stopped killing the wounded, and had ridden after the retreating column, finishing off a few strays but withdrawing quickly when they saw that the Turks meant to fight. It is hardly surprising that Lawrence should have failed to mention this, for among the berserk Arabs were members of his own bodyguard over whom he claimed to have an almost hypnotic control. ²³As for the ‘no prisoners’ command, Peake recalled that Lawrence had ordered him personally to ensure the safety of Turkish prisoners – proof, he said, that there was never any such thing. Moreover there is a discrepancy in Lawrence’s two accounts of the massacre, for while in his official dispatch he wrote ‘we’ ordered ‘no prisoners’, in Seven Pillarsthe ‘we’ has become T. There were several senior figures present by the time Lawrence arrived at Tafas: Sharif Nasir, who was in command of the irregulars, and Nuri as-Sa’id, in charge of the trained troops. Auda Abu Tayyi was also present, and was said by Lawrence himself to have taken command of the last phase of the attack. Is it likely, therefore, that Lawrence, who claimed to work through the Arabs’ own leaders rather than taking the foreground himself, should have been in a position to order the entire Arab force to take no prisoners? Both Peake and biographer john Mack agreed that the ‘we’ was a ‘commander’s we’ – that is, not a personal order, but an assumption of responsibility. Young, who was not present at Tafas, heard from an Arab officer named ‘Ali Jaudet that he and Lawrence had desperately tried to prevent the killing of prisoners after the battle, but to no avail. ‘I am certain,’ Peake wrote, ‘that Lawrence did all he could to stop the massacre but he would have been quite unable to do anything as any human mob that has lost its head is beyond control.’ ²⁴According to Nuri as-Sa’id, however, many Turkish prisoners who fell into Arab hands had actually survived. ²⁵Why should Lawrence claim falsely to have committed an act which he knew was against military convention, not to mention morally reprehensible, especially when he was known as a man of great compassion – who had, indeed, only weeks before, spared an unarmed Turkish soldier he had come across on the railway, and who had written to Edward Leeds that the ‘killing and killing’ of Turks sickened him? There are resonances here of the tale of Hamad the Moor’s execution – the alleged incident which forms the overture to his arrival in the desert battle-zone. On the one hand such apparent acts depict Lawrence as a strong and ruthless man capable of righteous anger, on the other they show an apparent burden of guilt which he delighted in displaying to the world. Arnie Lawrence himself suggested to John Mack that he had doubts about the veracity of his brother’s claim, and Alec Kirkbride believed that Lawrence had a horror of bloodshed: ‘… it is because of this,’ he wrote, ‘that he tends to pile on the agony in the passages of Seven Pillars,dealing with death and wounds … however, I suspected him of liking to suffer himself.’ ²⁶Indeed, there is a sense in which Lawrence, the masochist, liked to absorb the sin and suffering of the world: the duplicity of the British he bore on his shoulders, together with the inconstancy, cruelty and barbarousness of the Arabs. There is, as we have already seen, a Christ-like leitmotif in Lawrence’s story – especially in his betrayal, torture and humiliation at Dara’a and his ‘resurrection’ afterwards. Lawrence was perfectly aware of this messianic strand: just as Christ died for the sins of the world, Lawrence’s penchant for sacrifice may have obliged him to assume responsibility for savage acts in which he personally had played no part. ²⁷

At sunset, Trad ash-Sha’alan’s horsemen reached Dara’a and captured the Turkish rearguard of 500 soldiers. Lawrence arrived at first light. There was no time to linger, however, for British cavalry pickets were already in sight, and, ignorant of the fact that the town had fallen, were actually starting to engage Arab troops. General Barrow, commanding the British spearhead, had been ordered by Allenby to capture Dara’a and was intent on launching a full-scale assault. Only fast work would avert a disaster. Lawrence and his bodyguard rode out to meet Barrow through British lines – a hazardous undertaking, for he was dressed as an Arab and the British cavalrymen, trigger-happy and flushed with fight, could not distinguish between Hashemite Bedu and Arab irregulars in Turkish pay. George Staples, who was leading a troop of the Middlesex Yeomanry, claimed that he had almost given the order to shoot Lawrence: ‘… it was a blistering hot day,’ he told a Toronto newspaper, ‘and we were all edgy, when around a sand dune came about ten Arabs on camels … They came straight at us and our horses … started to shy. We thought they were the enemy and took aim at the leading Arab. Just as we were about to fire the Arabs stopped and out of the flowing robes came an Oxford accent. He said, “I’m Lawrence. Where’s Barrow?” He acted as if the whole world should know who he was and he was terribly self-opinioned … I had quite a shock, I don’t mind telling you when I realized I might have given the order to shoot him down – he was a thin little chap, about my size, five foot five …,’ ²⁸Lawrence, however, recalled only being ‘captured’ by an Indian machine-gun post, and that while he was being held up he had watched British aircraft bombing Nuri’s regulars on the Dara’a road, having mistaken them for Turks. His task became urgent, and he managed to speak to a British officer who directed him to General Barrow. He found the General uncompromising: Allenby had given him no instructions as to the status of the Arabs, and Clayton had not intervened, believing that the Hashemites deserved only what they could keep. For a moment the Arab efforts – and Lawrence’s miseries – of two years hung in the balance:’… my head was working full speed,’ he wrote, ‘… to prevent the fatal first steps by which the unimaginative British … created a situation which called for years of agitation… to mend.’ ²⁹Barrow announced his intention of posting sentries to control the inhabitants of the town: Lawrence countered that the Arabs were already in control: the General said that his sappers would inspect the wells: Lawrence said they were welcome, but that the Arabs had already started the pump engines. Barrow snorted that the Arabs seemed to have made themselves at home and said that he would take charge of the railway station: Lawrence pointed out that the Arabs were already working the railway, and asked politely that British sentries should not interfere. Once again, it was Lawrence’s rhetoric which saved the Hashemites: so persuasive was he, indeed, that Barrow not only accepted that the Arabs were in possession of Dara’a, but, on entering the town, actually made them the thrilling compliment of saluting the Hashemite flag fluttering from the ruined serail.

The British remained in Dara’a one night, and on the 29th marched north for Damascus, with the Arabs under Nasir now holding their right flank. Lawrence waited for Feisal, who arrived in his Vauxhall car from Azraq, followed closely by Frank Stirling and the armoured cars. That night, however, he could not sleep, and before light he and Stirling climbed into Blue Mist and set off for Damascus, driving along the track of the disused French railway. They caught up with Barrow, watering his horses at a stream, and Lawrence borrowed a camel and rode up to him. The General, not realizing that Lawrence had come most of the way by car, was dumbfounded to hear that he had left Dara’a only that morning.

‘And where will you spend the night?’ Barrow inquired.

‘In Damascus!’ Lawrence answered, and rode away. ³⁰

Soon, he and Stirling in Blue Mist had caught up with the Hashemite cavalry under Nasir and the Rwalla under Nuri ash-Sha’alan. The Rwalla had never ceased their harassment of the larger Turkish column, which their attrition had now reduced to half its original strength. Auda was in the country beyond, gathering the local Bedu for an ambush. Lawrence asked them to hold the Turks for an hour. Nasir selected a lonely farmstead on a distant ridge, and posted Nuri and his Rwalla there to slow down the enemy, while Lawrence and Stirling drove back to the British lines to get the Middlesex Yeomanry and horse artillery to attack the Turkish rear. With the Arabs in front and the British behind them, the Turkish column began to break up and, abandoning their guns and transport, fled in straggling groups into the hills to the east, where Auda’s hyenas were waiting: ‘In the night of his last battle,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘the old man killed and killed, plundered and captured, till dawn showed him the end. There passed the Fourth Army, our stumbling block for two years.’ ³¹

Lawrence and Stirling slept by the Rolls-Royce on a ridge above Damascus. It was a cold, windless night, and Stirling recalled seeing flashes of light from the direction of the hills, where Auda’s men were cutting up the remnants of the Turks. Damascus, the final prize, was hidden in darkness below them, but in the early hours of the morning they were woken up by a series of explosions from inside. ‘Good God!’ Lawrence said. ‘They are burning the town!’ They discovered later that the German troops had destroyed their ammunition dumps before pulling out. Lawrence told Stirling that he had already sent thousands of Rwalla horse into Damascus ahead of the British forces, in search of ‘Ali Ridha ar-Rikabi, the Governor of the town, whom Lawrence had met on his perilous journey north, more than a year previously. The Rwalla carried instructions from Sharif Nasir that ‘Ali Ridha or his assistant Shukri al-Ayyubi should form a government at once in the name of the Hashemites. Actually, the work had already been done: although ‘Ali Ridha was no longer in Damascus, Shukri had been supported by Lawrence’s old enemies, the brothers Abd al-Qadir and Mohammad as-Sa’id, whose Algerian bodyguard had hoisted the Hashemite flag before the last Turks had even left the town.