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.

In the morning – 30 October – Lawrence and Stirling managed to escape some over-zealous Bengal Lancers who ‘captured’ them, and entered Damascus in Blue Mist just after sun-up, to be greeted by a galloping horseman who held out to them a bunch of yellow dates: ‘Good news: Damascus salutes you,’ he said.³² According to Lawrence, the streets along the Barada were packed with thousands of chanting people – women threw flowers and splashed scent, men hurled their hats in the air, roaring: ‘Feisal! Nasir! Shukri! Urens!’ ‘There were dervishes dancing in front of the [car],’ Stirling recalled, ‘fierce Bedu in their flowing robes, their horses mad with excitement at the noise and shouting of the townsfolk who were hysterical in their joy – as we drove through the streets with their overhanging houses the women … leaned out from their windows crying, laughing, sobbing with joy and excitement.’³³ Later, though, in a letter to Stirling, Lawrence remembered quite a different scene: ‘my memory of the entry into Damascus was of quietness and emptiness of street,’ he wrote, ‘and of myself crying like a baby with eventual thankfulness in the Blue Mist by your side. It seemed to me that the frenzy of welcome came later.’³⁴ Stirling remembered that Lawrence had not been happy: ‘His mind was too complex,’ he wrote, ‘to permit of satisfaction for an achievement successfully carried out… his moment of triumph was embittered by his knowledge that the government wouldn’t keep their promises to the Arabs.’³⁵ They arrived at the Town Hall, which was tightly packed with people, and Lawrence pushed his way through to find Auda Abu Tayyi in the centre of it all wrestling savagely with the Druse leader, Sultan al-‘Atrash. It took Lawrence, Za’al, Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and two others to drag him off and prevent him from murdering the Druse before their eyes. Nasir, the senior Hashemite, was not present, and Lawrence learned that he was with ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother. He went off looking for them in Blue Mist, only to meet up with General Chauvel entering the town at the head of the British troops. Lawrence impressed upon him that the Arabs were in possession of Damascus, and urged him, unsuccessfully, to emulate Barrow’s action at Dara’a and salute the Hashemite flag as a gesture of good will. Lawrence returned to the Town Hall and summoned ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother, who marched into his presence with their bodyguard. Lawrence had Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s Rwalla around him, and Nuri as-Sa’id’s regulars mustered in the square outside. He told the Algerians that as Feisal’s representative he was abolishing the government they had formed the previous day and named Shukri al-Ayyubi as Acting Military Governor with Nuri as-Sa’id as Commander of Troops. ‘Abd al-Qadir leapt up and drew his dagger intending to kill Lawrence, cursing him as a Christian and an Englishman, but in a flash Auda threw his weight on him and wrestled the blade from his grasp. Nuri ash-Sha’alan announced quietly that Lawrence had the support of the Rwalla. As the Algerians swept out in high dudgeon, someone suggested that they should be taken out and shot. Lawrence was inclined to agree, but desisted. By the next day they were brewing unrest again, however, and had gained some support from the Druses who had not fought at all in the Revolt, and who had been refused any reward by Lawrence. Now itching to shoot them, Lawrence sent a section of regulars to arrest the brothers: Mohammad as-Sa’id was taken: ‘Abd al-Qadir escaped. Lawrence had the Druses expelled, and established himself, until the arrival of Feisal, as the effective Governor of the city.

There was much work to be done: the police to be appointed, the water supply to be attended to, electrical power to be restored, sanitation to be established, starving people to be fed. In fact, within a few days Lawrence had set running a system which endured for the next two years. An Australian doctor asked him to attend to the Turkish barracks, which was now a makeshift hospital without a single medical orderly, and packed with dead and dying men. Lawrence realized that it had been forgotten, went to inspect it himself, and was appalled. The floor was littered with dozens of bloated, putrefying corpses, lying in stinking pools of blood and excrement. Many of them were only freshly dead, and most had been gnawed by rats. Hearing a faint sighing, Lawrence lifted his robe and walked through the bodies to find a ward full of dying men who implored him for mercy. Quickly he commandeered some Turkish prisoners, who went about burying the dead in a common grave in the nearby garden. That night he started out of sleep, sweating and trembling with the memory of the dead bodies, and the following day he returned to the hospital to find things a little better: one room had been cleaned and disinfected ready to house the most serious cases, and there were medical orderlies present. Suddenly he was confronted by a British major of the Medical Corps, who asked if he was in charge. ‘In a way, I suppose I am,’ Lawrence replied.