Part 21 (2/2)

There had in fact been warning signs for some time that Lawrence might be headed for just such a collapse. Back in mid-July, only days after receiving confirmation of Allenby's offensive launch date-an event that should have put him in an ebullient mood-Lawrence had written a melancholy letter to his friend and confidant Vyvyan Richards. ”I have been so violently uprooted and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal,” he told Richards. ”I have dropped everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity, s.n.a.t.c.hing chances of the moment when and where I see them.... It's a kind of foreign stage on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one's head if the part is not well filled.”

He had gone on to describe his admiration of the Arabs, although he now recognized that he was fundamentally apart from them, an eternal stranger. He wrote of the words he carried in his mind-peace, silence, rest-”like a lighted window in the dark,” but then questioned what good a lighted window was anyway. As was often the case when Lawrence wrote from the heart, he closed by denigrating what he had written, calling it ”an idiot letter” born of his contrarian nature. ”[I] still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front and I hate being back, and I don't like responsibility and I don't obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet, like a purge, and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to.”

But if his letter to Richards spoke to physical and spiritual exhaustion, it was compounded by the guilt he felt in having ”profitably shammed” his Arab comrades for two years-and this guilt had recently grown worse. In early August, while planning for the Azraq operation, Lawrence had again met with Nuri Shalaan, the warlord of the powerful Rualla tribe he had first tried to woo to the Sherifian cause a year before by suggesting the chieftain believe the most recent promises Great Britain had made to the Arabs. At their August meeting, Shalaan had at last fully committed his tribe to the rebel side, although in the disclosures since their previous meeting-the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement-he surely knew his British suitor had been less than forthright. If exactly why remains elusive, it is clear both from Lawrence's memoir and comments he made to his early biographers that the deception he had perpetrated on Shalaan weighed more heavily on his conscience than any other.

Then, right before setting out for Azraq, there had been an incident that caused Lawrence to question the very purpose of his ”crusade” for the Arabs. In late August, just as the main Arab army was preparing to leave the Aqaba region for the north, King Hussein had elected to pick a bitter and rather public fight with Faisal, all but accusing him of disloyalty. For nearly a week, the angry cables had pa.s.sed between father and son, during which the rebel advance ground to a halt, the entire Syrian offensive cast into doubt as the clock ticked away. Lawrence had finally patched together a rapprochement-intercepting one of Hussein's cables, he had scissored off its angry second half, only pa.s.sing along to Faisal the apologetic-sounding first half-but that all his plans had been nearly sabotaged by the man he was ostensibly fighting for left a bitterness that would never fully go away.

But it seems something else was also working on Lawrence that day in Ain el Essad, a very recent and devastating personal blow. By all evidence, it was during his stay in Azraq that he first learned of the death of Dahoum, his young companion at Carchemish, the apparent victim of a typhus epidemic that had swept northern Syria some time before. To a profound degree-and to a depth Lawrence himself may not have fully realized-he had come to personify the war in his own mind in the form of Dahoum; it was for that young Syrian boy and his future that the Arabs needed to be free. Now Dahoum was dead, and with him had gone so much of what had animated Lawrence to the fight. Although he would never reveal the ident.i.ty of the mysterious ”S.A.” to whom Seven Pillars is dedicated-Dahoum's real name was Salim Ali-the first stanzas of the book's prefatory poem strongly suggest both the timing of when Lawrence learned of Dahoum's death and the effect it had upon him: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands And wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, That your eyes might be s.h.i.+ning for me when we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near And saw you waiting When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy [death] outran me And took you apart: into his quietness.

Despite his grief, Lawrence had given too much of himself, and asked too much of the Arabs, to pull away at the climax of their long campaign. He would write of his mood on September 12 that ”today it came to me with finality that my patience as regards the false position I had been led into was finished. A week [more], two weeks, three, and I would insist upon relief. My nerve had broken, and I would be lucky if the ruin of it could be hidden so long.” With that, he rose from his ”lair” at Ain el Essad and made his way back to the gathered warriors at Azraq, now just hours away from their first strikes against the enemy.

By coincidence, that same day, a top-secret report was being sent to the U.S. military intelligence office in London, outlining the collapse of morale among the Arab rebels fighting with the British. ”It is reported that the Syrians who are with Emir Faisal in the Aqaba region,” the September 12 report stated, ”are entirely disaffected and that there are many dissensions.” One reason, apparently, was the rebels' woeful incompetence on the battlefield. ”In spite of the support of the British, the Arabs of Arabia have shown their incapacity to organize or make war.... The entire Arab situation appears to be in a great muddle.”

The report's author was the military intelligence bureau's chief correspondent in the Middle East, attache William Yale. With that dispatch he was establis.h.i.+ng a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years.

IT HAD A certain boys'-lark quality to it, a not uncommon experience in war when all the advantages and few of the risks reside with one's own side. Leaving Azraq on the morning of September 14, Lawrence spent the better part of a week careening through the desert around Deraa in a Rolls-Royce armored car, blowing up bridges and tearing up railway tracks, dodging ineffective enemy air attacks, skirmis.h.i.+ng with the occasional unlucky Turkish foot patrol.

The ease with which he was able to do so could be largely credited to the success of the ruse concocted at Allenby's headquarters. With the Turks ma.s.sed around Amman in antic.i.p.ation of the presumed attack there, the Azraq strike force had nearly free rein to pursue its goals: the severing of the Hejaz Railway to the north and south of Deraa, as well as of the vital western spur leading into Palestine. The ultimate goal, of course, was to accomplish all this before Allenby's offensive got under way on September 19.

As Lawrence discovered when he caught up to the main raiding party, however, a first attempt on the southern railway link had gone awry through simple bad luck. Now quite sold on the efficacy of mechanized war in the desert, he decided to make a personal go of it, setting out for the southern railroad with just two armored cars and two ”tenders,” or large sedans. He found his target on the morning of September 16 in the form of a lightly defended bridge in the middle of nowhere, ”a pleasant little work, eighty feet long and fifteen feet high.” A particular point of pride for Lawrence was the new technique he and his colleagues used in setting their explosives, one that left the bridge ”scientifically shattered” but still standing; Turkish repair crews would now have the time-consuming task of dismantling the wreckage before they could start to rebuild.

That job complete, Lawrence rejoined the main Arab force as it fell upon the railway north of Deraa the following morning. Encountering little resistance, the thousand-odd warriors quickly took control of a nearly ten-mile stretch of track, enabling the demolition teams to begin placing their mines. The action had the effect of lifting Lawrence from the dark mood that had stalked him in Azraq; his primary orders from headquarters had been to isolate Deraa, and ”I could hardly believe our fortune, hardly believe that our word to Allenby was fulfilled so simply and so soon.”

This left only the western spur leading into Palestine, and on that same afternoon of September 17, an Arab force stormed a railway station a few miles to the west of Deraa; in short order, they had ransacked the terminal and put to the torch all that couldn't be carried off. But Lawrence had grander plans. Leading a small band farther west, he hoped to blow up the Yarmuk gorge bridges that had eluded his destruction a year before. Once again, though, he was to be thwarted, this time by the presence of a train filled with German and Turkish troops coming up from Palestine.

Still, as Lawrence turned back to rejoin the main rebel force the next day, he had every reason to feel pleased with the ”work” that had been done: the main Turkish telegraph link to Palestine was now cut, all three railway spans sufficiently damaged that repair would take days, if not weeks. There was still more mayhem to be accomplished-on that same afternoon of September 18, he would see to the blowing up of another bridge, the seventy-ninth of his career-but the Azraq vanguard had achieved most every objective asked of it in prelude to Allenby's offensive, now just hours away.

By prior arrangement, a Royal Flying Corps plane was scheduled to put into Azraq on the morning of September 21, bringing reports of how the offensive in Palestine was faring. Anxious for news, Lawrence raced back to the desert fortress the day before. Nearing a state of complete collapse-he'd barely slept since setting out from Azraq six days earlier-he found an empty cot in the encampment's field hospital and fell into an exhausted slumber.

YALE'S FIRST CLUE came when he stepped into his a.s.signed mess hall for dinner on September 18: the journalists were gone. The next clue was when he walked down to the motor pool compound: all the vehicles were gone, too. A junior British officer bravely explained that they had all been dispatched to various parts of the front in prelude to the coming offensive; apparently, none had been detailed for Yale or the one other military attache remaining, an Italian major named de Sambouy.

”I was irritated and perplexed,” Yale wrote. ”What should a military attache do? Ought I to demand transportation to the front, or should I accept the lame excuse given us? Why shouldn't Sambouy do something? He was a regular army officer who had been in the war since 1915. I went to bed annoyed with myself and the British.”

His sleep was to be interrupted. At 4:45 a.m. on the morning of September 19, Yale was wrenched awake by ”a terrific roar that seemed to shake the whole world.” As one, nearly five hundred British artillery guns had commenced sh.e.l.ling the Turkish line all along the Palestinian front.

By the time he rose and dressed, Yale had resolved what to do. Striding into a general's office, he announced that he was on his way to breakfast, and that if there wasn't a car waiting for him when he emerged, he would send a cable to Was.h.i.+ngton announcing that he was being held captive by the British. His Italian counterpart was aghast at his temerity, but when the pair emerged from the mess hall a short time later, they found a Ford Model T awaiting them with a former London cabdriver at the wheel.

They made that morning for a bluff overlooking the Plain of Sharon, from which, they were told, they could view one section of the battlefield. Finding a group of British officers already ensconced in the ruins of an old Crusader castle, the two attaches joined them, training their binoculars on the action two or three miles to the north. It was Yale's first experience observing combat, and he found it decidedly underwhelming. ”Infrequent bursts of [artillery] sh.e.l.ls [coming from] back of us on the plateau, white puffs of riflery on the hills in front of us, the intermittent rat-tat-tat of machine guns and, from time to time, lines of men who could scarcely be distinguished against the gray blankness of the limestone hills. It was nowhere near as thrilling as the sham battles I had watched as a boy at Van Cortland Park. For us, the day was long and monotonous. No one seemed to know what was happening; certainly, I had no idea of whether the British or the Turks were winning.”

New to war, the American attache couldn't appreciate that he was actually experiencing the very essence of the traditional battlefield, that amid the engulfing chaos even senior field commanders usually had only the vaguest sense of what was happening-and then often only on the ground directly before them. But the ever-resourceful Yale saw a means around this. Returning to General Headquarters that evening, he parlayed his attache status into gaining admittance to the main telegraph room. There he discovered stacks of cables coming in from every corner of the front, dispatches that when plotted on a map gave him a grasp of the overall campaign available only to Allenby and his most senior advisors. This knowledge stood him in very good stead the following day when, having ventured to a new part of the front, Yale found himself briefing a British brigadier general on what was occurring elsewhere.

”This helped me to feel less awkward amongst the military,” he recalled, ”and I even began to regain the confidence in myself which had been badly shaken when first I was thrown in among professional soldiers.”

For the first two days of the offensive, Yale had the luxury of observing war from a comfortable remove, the combatants appearing as so many scurrying ants in the distance. That ended on September 21, when he and his Model T companions journeyed up a mountain road leading to the town of Nablus in the Samaria foothills. The day before, a fleeing Turkish formation had made for Nablus up that same road, and there they had been found by the bombs and machine guns of swarming British warplanes.

”The Turks had no way of fighting back,” Yale recounted. ”There was no shelter to run to, and no way of surrendering. The results were tragic.... For a few miles, the road was lined with bloated corpses, swelling to the bursting point under the hot rays of the sun.”

One image in particular stuck in Yale's memory, a stretch of the road where an old Roman aqueduct crossed the valley. Here, scores of Turkish soldiers had hugged the stone walls of the aqueduct as protection against the strafing British warplanes-only to fall victim when the planes circled back to attack from the other direction. The dead men lay in a neat single-file line along the entire length of the aqueduct, looking ”for all the world,” Yale would recall, ”like a row of tin soldiers toppled over.”

THE NEWS WAS staggering. When the RFC plane touched down at Azraq on the morning of September 21, its pilot told of a British sweep up the Palestinian coast that had simply steamrolled whatever scant Turkish resistance stood in its path. A few weeks earlier, General Headquarters had talked of an advance that might take them as far as the city of Nablus, forty miles north of Jerusalem; now, in a matter of just two days, the British vanguard was already far above Nablus, and thousands of enemy soldiers had thrown down their weapons in surrender. The note of triumph was evident in the letter General Allenby had sent to Azraq for Faisal. ”Already the Turkish Army in Syria has suffered a defeat from which it can scarcely recover,” it read. ”It rests upon us now, by the redoubled energy of our [joint] attacks, to turn defeat into destruction.”

More details were provided in a letter Alan Dawnay had sent to Lieutenant Colonel Joyce. By the previous evening, the British cavalry had already begun turning inland from their charge up the coast, leaving the enemy units in Palestine in imminent danger of being encircled. ”The whole Turkish army is in the net,” Dawnay exulted, ”and every bolt-hole closed except, possibly, that east of the Jordan by way of the Yarmuk valley. If the Arabs can close this, too-and close it in time-then not a man or gun or wagon ought to escape. Some victory!”

As Lawrence plainly put it in Seven Pillars, ”the face of our war was changed.”

Also changed, naturally, were the prior battle plans drawn up for the Azraq force, the pace of events now rendering them obsolete. That afternoon, Lawrence boarded the RFC plane for its return to Palestine and an urgent meeting with General Allenby's staff.

As Lawrence learned at headquarters, and as Allenby had alluded in his note to Faisal, the goal now was not to defeat the Turkish army-that had already been achieved-but to destroy it completely. To that end, even as the left flank of the British army continued its northern advance, three other columns were to cut east across the Jordan River in order to roll up the inland Syrian towns along the Hejaz Railway and, ultimately, close on Damascus. The linchpin was, as always, Deraa, the one spot where all the Turkish units fleeing east from Palestine and all those still to the south might converge and perhaps sufficiently regroup to make a stand. To forestall that, headquarters impressed on Lawrence, there was one thing the Arabs must do-permanently sever the rail line south of Deraa-and one thing they absolutely must not do: make a dash for Damascus.

This latter point had already been stressed in Alan Dawnay's letter to Joyce in Azraq (with Joyce temporarily away, Lawrence had opened and read it). ”Use all your restraining influence,” Dawnay had ordered Joyce, ”and get Lawrence to do the same, to prevent Faisal from any act of rashness in the north.... The situation is completely in our hands to mold now, so Faisal need have no fear of being carted, provided he will trust us and be patient. Only let him no on account move north without first consulting General Allenby-that would be the fatal error.”

British concern was quite understandable. For nearly two years, Lawrence had been counseling Faisal that the only sure way for the Arabs to stake claim to Damascus was to get there first; this a.s.sertion had appeared to be further confirmed by Mark Sykes's recent open letter to the ”Seven Syrians.” As a result, the temptation for Faisal to drop the Deraa operations and make a dash for Damascus might prove an irresistible one. During Lawrence's brief sojourn at headquarters, Allenby's senior advisors repeatedly emphasized that Arab loyalty at this crucial juncture would be well compensated-apparently even implying that Faisal would be allowed to establish a government in Damascus.

Armed with these a.s.surances, and with the Arabs' new orders of battle in hand, Lawrence flew back to Azraq the next morning. Over the following two days, a host of Arab bands, along with British armored car units, descended on the Hejaz Railway below Deraa to render it damaged beyond repair for the foreseeable future. Already, however, the worry that the retreating Turkish armies might recover enough to make a stand in Deraa seemed far-fetched; the enemy was now in full and panicked rout, their soldiers so stunned by the speed of events that they could think of little more than personal escape. Indeed, so rapid was the Turkish disintegration that by September 25, Lawrence was able to report to headquarters that there were probably only four thousand Turkish soldiers left in all the inland garrison towns below Deraa, most of the rest having pa.s.sed through Deraa and kept on going in the direction of Damascus.

But in keeping with the broadened goal of destroying the Turkish army utterly, Lawrence saw an opportunity; if Deraa wasn't to be a Turkish rallying point, it could now be turned into a killing field. As he tersely commented in his September 25 report in describing the enemy units trying to reach Damascus, ”I want to stop that.”

To do so, on the twenty-sixth he directed a number of the Arab warriors to make for a small village in the foothills just twelve miles northwest of Deraa called Sheikh Saad. From there, the rebels would enjoy a commanding view of what was transpiring both in Deraa and on the road to Damascus, and also be able to monitor any retreating Turkish units coming up out of the Yarmuk gorge from Palestine.

Lawrence soon had reason to congratulate himself on the move. That same afternoon, scouts spotted a small mixed German and Turkish force coming up the Yarmuk road, ”hopeless but carefree, marching at ease, thinking themselves fifty miles from any war.” Walking heedlessly into a hastily prepared Arab ambush, the unit was soon overwhelmed. As Lawrence noted, ”Sheikh Saad was paying soon, and well.”

That was just a foretaste. The next morning, and with a British army now coming up the Yarmuk, the Turks remaining in and around Deraa prepared to abandon their positions as well. Word reached Lawrence that some four thousand enemy soldiers were about to set out from Deraa on the main Damascus road, while another two thousand were pulling out of a nearby town. This latter column was taking an overland shortcut that would bring them through the village of Tafas, just six miles below Sheikh Saad. As Lawrence drily commented in Seven Pillars, ”The nearer two thousand seemed more our size.”

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 23, the Mediterranean city of Haifa was captured from the Turks by an Indian army cavalry unit. Arriving that evening, William Yale arranged for lodging in a private home, then decided to take a stroll through the city's deserted old quarter.

At the start of World War I, most all the warring powers had horse-mounted cavalry that still carried lances as part of their complement of weaponry. By 1918, nearly all such cavalries had discarded the lance as anachronistic in the age of the machine gun and warplane, but not so the Indian army. That afternoon, they had employed it to deadly effect in the narrow back streets of Haifa's old quarter, running down and impaling terrified Turkish soldiers as they tried to flee. Everywhere Yale walked lay the dead.

”In the silent lonely streets,” he recalled, ”under a brilliant moon, the bodies of these Turkish soldiers seemed strangely out of place, for the peace and calm of an Oriental night covered this part of the city.”

But it takes remarkably little time for the average person to become desensitized to the horror of war, and in this William Yale was to prove no exception. The following day, only his sixth on the battlefield, he and Major de Sambouy were driving down the Palestine coastal road when they began pa.s.sing column after column of Turkish prisoners being marched off to internment camps. In their wake were scores of prisoners who had collapsed, too exhausted or ill to go on. Of these men being left behind to die in the sun, neither their comrades nor their Indian captors took any notice, and neither did Yale or his traveling companion. ”It was not our affair and we had a long day's journey ahead of us,” he would write. ”It never occurred to me that we were heartlessly callous and unconcerned. We didn't even think of stopping to take an extra pa.s.senger or two.”

THEY CAME UPON the first survivors hiding in the tall gra.s.s of a meadow just outside Tafas. Traumatized and speaking in hushed whispers, the villagers told of the atrocities the Turkish soldiers had begun perpetrating immediately upon entering Tafas just an hour before. Continuing on, Lawrence and the Arab vanguard soon found evidence of this; here and there, bodies lay amid the meadow gra.s.s, ”embracing the ground in the close way of corpses.”

Suddenly, a little girl of three or four popped into view, her smock drenched in blood from a gash by her neck. ”The child ran a few steps,” Lawrence recalled, ”then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonis.h.i.+ng strength (all else being very silent), 'Don't hit me, Baba.' ” A moment later, the girl collapsed, presumably dead.

None of this prepared for the scene in Tafas's streets. Everywhere were bodies, many hideously mutilated, girls and women obviously raped before their dispatch. In particular, Lawrence was to remember the sight of a naked pregnant woman, bent over a low wall and grotesquely impaled by a saw bayonet; around her lay some twenty others, ”variously killed, but set out in accord with an obscene taste.”

By bad coincidence, one of the tribal sheikhs who had accompanied Lawrence during the previous two weeks and who now rode alongside him was Talal el Hareidhin, the headman of Tafas. As Lawrence would recount in his official report of the incident, at the sight of his ruined village, Talal ”gave a horrible cry, wrapped his headcloth about his face, put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring [Turkish] column and fell, himself and his mare, riddled with machine gun bullets among their lance points.”

In consultation with Auda Abu Tayi, who had also ridden into Tafas that morning, Lawrence commanded his lieutenants that no prisoners should be taken-or, as he put it more eloquently in Seven Pillars, ”'the best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.' ”

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