‘And what did Lawrence look like?’
‘A tall, strong man, with a long beard,’ the Arab said.
Later, the grandson took us to see the battlefield, a rolling red meadow, traversed by a stream and full of nests of boulders. It was remarkably close to the village, and seemed unexpectedly small-scale for such a dramatic event. The slaughter of a Turkish column on this very field at Tafas on 27 September 1918, and the subsequent massacre of both Turkish and German prisoners, indeed, were among the most controversial acts of Lawrence’s career – convincing some of his critics that he was a bloodthirsty sadist, or alternatively that his torture and rape at Dara’a had permanently unhinged his passions. It was a controversy that Lawrence stoked with customary glee: ‘The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead,’ he claimed to have told his bodyguard that day, commenting, ‘By my order we took no prisoners, for the first time in the war.’1 This ruthlessness was engendered by fury at the slaughter of non-combatant peasants in Tafas by the retreating Turks, one of the most sickening sights Lawrence had witnessed in the campaign. Not only had they massacred babies, they had also killed and deliberately mutilated women, leaving their corpses spread out obscenely: Lawrence had seen one pregnant woman lying dead with a bayonet thrust between her legs. Talal, a Sheikh of Tafas, with whom Lawrence claimed to have made his fateful reconnaissance of the Hauran the previous November, he wrote, had been so incensed by the slaughter of his people that he died in a suicidal lone charge towards the massed Turkish ranks.
The Tafas massacre was part of the final phase of the campaign that had begun in May 1918, when Lawrence had applied to Allenby for the 2,000 camels made redundant by the disbanding of the Imperial Camel Brigade in Sinai. ‘And what do you want them for?’ the GOC had asked: ‘To put a thousand men into Dara’a any day you please,’ Lawrence replied. His plan was to mount a force of Arab regulars on camels and march them north from Waheida, the Arabs’ new forward H Q near Ma’an, to Azraq and then to Dara a with a supply column and artillery, machine-guns, armoured cars and aeroplanes. They would carry all their own supplies, reach Dara’a in only a fortnight, and cut the railway with the aid of Bedu irregulars from the Rwalla, just as the GOC made his autumn offensive into Syria. Allenby pondered the request. Camels were scarce in the Middle East, and his Quartermaster required them urgently for another division. Finally, Lawrence’s enthusiasm convinced him. He handed over the camels to the Arab Revolt, and Lawrence rushed to meet Feisal at Aba 1-Lissan the following day, certain that they had just been given the means of final victory. Almost at once, he sent home the Egyptian Transport Corps camel-men who were busily but inefficiently shifting supplies from Aqaba to Aba 1-Lissan, and replaced them with Arab camel-drivers from Mecca, who would put the animals to better use. The organization of logistics was assigned to Captain Hubert Young, the officer Lawrence had first met at Carchemish before the war. Young had been carefully selected by Lawrence himself as an understudy in case he should be killed: he was a fluent Arabic speaker and a first-class organizer, but he was flawed by an irascibility which made it difficult for him to live peacefully with anyone for very long. Nuri as-Sa id wrote that Young’s temper was his own worst enemy, and recalled once managing to soothe some Arab officers whom Young had upset by telling them: ‘Don’t worry. He shouts at the British just the same!’ Had it not been for this Achilles heel, Young might have been another Lawrence of Arabia. Possibly the most able of all the British officers who served with the Arab forces, his powers of visualizing an operation down to the last camel-load far outweighed those of the mercurial Lawrence, who tended to ride first and consider logistics afterwards. Yet while Lawrence charmed, Young had the manner and appearance of a well-intentioned, highly intelligent, but bad-tempered schoolboy. In February 1918 he had been mysteriously ordered from a posting in India to Cairo: ‘It was not until I reported to GHQ at the Savoy …’ he wrote, ‘and the door opened to admit the familiar little figure, that I was enlightened.’ ‘They asked me to suggest someone who could take my place in case anything happened to me,’ said Lawrence, ‘… and I told them no one could. As they pressed me I said I could only think of Gertrude Bell and yourself, and they seemed to think you’d be better for this particular job than she would.’2 Alan Dawnay, Hedgehog’s CO, soon realized that the ‘understudy’ plan would never work because of Young’s abrasiveness, however, and instead assigned him to the Dara’a operation as Quartermaster.
By 22 July, Young had drawn up a detailed logistics scheme for the mission which was approved both by Joyce, commanding Feisal’s British staff, and by Feisal himself. Lawrence was then in Cairo, making his own plans for the mission with Dawnay, who suggested that they should utilize the last two companies of the Imperial Camel Corps to complete two jobs which the Bedu had as yet failed to carry off: the destruction of Mudowwara, and the demolition of the viaduct at Qissir, north of Ma an. Surprisingly perhaps, Lawrence agreed, and they sent a telegram to Joyce in Aqaba instructing him to establish supply dumps for the ICC force at Rum, Jefer and Bair. These instructions were highly unwelcome in Aqaba: Joyce had not been consulted on the question, and both he and Young saw that every load they had to transport for the Camel Corps operation would mean one load less for their ‘flying column’ to Azraq and Dara’a. Joyce and I discussed this telegram with some grinding of teeth,’ Young wrote, ‘and decided that there was nothing for it but to use some of the priceless camels to put out a dump for [the Mudowwara operation].’3 On 28 July Lawrence arrived in Aqaba, read Young’s plan and condemned it at once as unworkable. Allenby was intending to make his final push for Damascus on 19 September, and the Arabs were to lead off not more than four days previously. Timing was crucial: ‘[Allenby’s] words to me,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘were that three men and a boy with pistols in front of Dara’a on September 16th … would be better than thousands a week before or a week after.’4 Young’s plan, he pointed out, would have the Arabs in Dara’a three weeks too late. He unfolded his own scheme, worked out with Dawnay, for a more limited and more mobile operation against Dara’a. Young lost his temper. Lawrence declared sarcastically that he had executed many such mobile operations successfully in the past without the help of a Johnny-come-lately-Old Etonian-regular soldier like Young. Young riposted that Lawrence was proposing this time to move regular soldiers, not Bedu – and regulars were quite another thing. Did he expect them to ride two to a camel and live on a roll of apricot paste and a canteen of water for a fortnight? Where did he think the supplies were coming from? And what about the exfiltration? Lawrence’s plan allowed no provision for a withdrawal, and if the operation failed, they would starve: ‘[Lawrence] never knew very much about the regular army,’ Young wrote; ‘… he had no sympathy for our transport problems, for he held all military organisations in profound contempt and the letter “Q” so justly and deeply revered by regulars had no place in the Lawrentian alphabet.’5 This was essentially a conflict between the brilliant professional and the brilliant amateur. Joyce had already complained to Dawnay with some justification that Lawrence tended to bombard GHQ, with ambitious and dashing plans but would simply vanish when these ‘wildcat schemes’ had to be put into practice. The meeting ended inconclusively, and the officers scarcely spoke for three days. Young resented Lawrence’s smugness:’… the sight of that little man reading Morte d’Arthur in a corner of the mess tent with an impish smile on his face was not consoling,’ he wrote.6 Finally Joyce capitulated, and accepted Lawrence’s scheme as well as the Camel Corps operation. Young was forced to go along, and employed his genius in ferrying supplies and equipment to Ja’afar Pasha’s regulars at Waheida and Aba 1-Lissan, an operation in which he succeeded against all odds: ‘… to run a harmonious and orderly train was impossible,’ Lawrence grudgingly admitted, ‘but Young very nearly did it, in his curious, ungrateful way. Thanks to him the supply problem of the regulars on the plateau was solved.’7