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’.¹⁵ They 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

The railway-wrecking was not finished, however. One armoured car was sent to clear Ramleh, the next station to the south, while Lawrence, in his Rolls-Royce, and other demolition teams blew bridges and miles of track in between. The culverts were demolished by charges stuffed into their drainage-holes, while Lawrence had developed a more effective method of ruining the metals, planting ‘tulip’ charges under the sleepers so that they would buckle and warp entire stretches of track. Having satisfied himself that the railway was now effectively out of service between ash-Shahm and Ramleh, Lawrence slept near ash-Shahm, preparing for the attack on Mudowwara scheduled for the following day. The Turks were expecting the assault, however, and threw the combined force back with deadly accurate artillery fire at 7,000 yards. Lawrence took the armoured cars off in an arc to the place in which he had mined his first train, and destroyed the long culvert about 500 yards from the ridge on which he had sited his Stokes and Lewis guns on that day in 1917. Then he retired back to Ramleh to destroy more line. Later, Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and his Howaytat were sent to cripple the railway north of ash-Shahm. By 20 April, the Arabs and the British together had put out of action eighty miles of track, and taken or cut off seven stations. Fakhri Pasha’s force in Medina had at long last been neutralized as a potential threat.

19. My Dreams Puffed out Like Candles in the Strong Wind of Success

Dara’a, Tafas and the fall of Damascus Winter, 1918

Our battered saloon pulled into Tafas just after noon. It seemed a typical Hauran town – a place without a centre, a sprawl of houses constructed haphazardly along a grid of roads amid acres of wheatlands, and desolate red meadows relieved only by poisonous Sodom apple and brakes of eucalypt, cedar and Aleppo pine. In places you could glimpse the village as it had been in 1918 – scattered among the jerry-built breeze-block dwellings were ancient cottages of black basalt. We trawled up and down the main road for a time, then stopped a swarthy man in a black and white headcloth and asked him if he knew where the battle of 1918 had been fought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But there is an old man in the village who was there. I can take you to him.’ I was amazed, and slightly sceptical. All these months I had been pursuing a phantom whom people knew only by hearsay. Was I, finally, to meet someone who had actually seen Lawrence with his own eyes? We urged the man into the car, and drove. He stopped us at a modern corner-house set on red earth among Sodom apple bushes. Inside, a spidery old man in a red kuffiyeh and a black cloak was sitting on a rug on the floor by a benzene heater, surrounded by half a dozen sons and grandsons. The old man wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a wisp of silver beard. One of his grandsons – a medical student in Aleppo – told me that his grandfather was over ninety years old. We sat down cross-legged on the rug, and after we had answered questions, and sipped the statutory tea, I asked him, with suppressed excitement, if he had ever met Lawrence of Arabia. ‘I saw him,’ the Sheikh told me in a shaky voice. ‘I was just a boy then, of course. I remember seeing the Arab army marching through the village. It was a terrible day. I had been with my parents at another village the night before, and when we arrived here in the morning, we found that the Turks had killed almost everyone. Their bodies were lying about on the road. God have mercy upon them!’