Tafileh was a small town, hardly more than a large village, in a rugged, forbidding, but beautiful landscape. Prosperous in peacetime, with a population of fewer than 10,000,* it was famous for its green gardens; for its crops of olives, dates, and figs; and for its profusion of wells and hot springs. Set in a deep ravine, it was overlooked by what was almost a terraced cliff to the west, and by a gentler, triangularly rocky plain to the east rising about 3,000 yards from the town to a rock ledge about 2,000 yards in length. At its northern end, this ledge overlooked the road from Kerak, on which the Turks were approaching.

At the first news that the Turks were coming, Jaafar, with the instinctive caution of a trained professional soldier, had moved his men onto the high ground to the west of the town, the textbook solution to the problem. But Lawrence disagreed, both because there was plenty of “dead ground” in front of Jaafar, which would allow the Turks to work their way around his flank instead of attempting a direct frontal attack uphill, andbecause abandoning the town to the Turks was a political and tactical mistake. The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the population of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Armenians who had escaped the massacre, as well as “a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa,” part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local population a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence’s vivid description, “rushed to save their goods and their lives… It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible.” The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were.

Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gathered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a “pitched battle” was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as “one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned.”

BATTLE OF TAFILEH

What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardlyhave fought with more professional skill and personal daring, whatever he may have thought about it later; this is all the more true since his forces consisted of a wildly ill-assorted collection of Bedouin, armed townsmen, local peasants, and Arab regulars, none of them with much trust in the others, nor, except for the regulars, any experience of discipline. By rights, Fakhri Pasha, with three battalions of infantry, 100 cavalrymen, two mountain howitzers, twenty-seven machine guns, and a unit of armed police, should have been able to retake the town, and no doubt would have done so, had not Lawrence outmaneuvered him.

Lawrence sent Abdulla, a Mesopotamian machine gun officer, and some of his men ahead on mules with two Hotchkiss machine guns to engage the Turks, while the armed townsmen and the Motalga drove the Turkish horseman back across the triangular plain, from the first to the second ridge, where the main body of the Turks was forming up. They were slow to organize, for they had spent a night in the open and were so cold that they were “nearly frozen in their places.” Zeid wanted to wait until Abdulla reported back on the strength of the enemy, but Lawrence elected to follow Napoleon’s advice on how to win a battle: On s’engage, et puis on voit* He plunged into the town; gathered up gorgeously dressed bodyguards, who were busy looting; and told them “to recover their camels” and get to the eastern side of the ravine immediately. As for himself, he went on, barefoot and unarmed, climbing up a steep cliff, then walking across to the first ridge, where he found the remains of some Byzantine stonework, which would serve very well as “a reserve or an ultimate line of defense.” Not many officers in the British army would have cared to walk barefoot over rocks, ice, snow, and the sharp stalks of wormwood plants, but Lawrence consoled himself with the thought that bare feet were surer on icy rocks than boots, and that “the climb would warm me.”

Lawrence stationed Zeid’s personal camel men and some of his own bodyguards on the ridge and told them to stay in full sight, so as to give the impression that the ridge was strongly held—Zeid’s men were not enthusiastic about his order, and he was obliged to harangue them in Arabic and give them his gold signet ring as a symbol of his authority. Then he walked forward alone across the plain toward the second ridge, where it joined the Kerak road where the enemy was forming up. He met Abdulla, coming back to say that he had had five men killed and one gun destroyed. Lawrence sent him back to ask Zeid to move forward with the Arab regulars as soon as possible, then continued walking forward under fire in full view toward the northernmost part of the second ridge, where the Motalga horsemen and the armed townsmen were still fighting fiercely. By now, the Turkish howitzers were firing at them, but their range was too short and the shells were falling instead on the plain all around Lawrence. He stopped and burned his fingers picking up a shell fragment to examine it, deciding it was from a Skoda eleven-pounder. He did not think the townsmen and the Motalga would hold out long under shell fire, and he could see that the Turkish infantry was moving from the road to the second ridge to outflank them. When he reached the townsmen they were out of ammunition, so he sent them back to the second ridge to get more, and told the dismounted Motalga horsemen to cover their retreat, giving them the sound advice “not to quit firing from one position until ready to fire from the next.” The Motalga were amazed to see that Lawrence was unarmed and walking around among them as they tried to shelter behind a small, flinty mound while some twenty Turkish machine guns were firing at them. “The bullets slapped off it deafeningly, and the air above it so hummed and whistled with them and their ricochets and chips, that it felt like sudden death to put one’s head over the top,” Lawrence wrote.

He jokingly reminded the tribesmen of von Clausewitz’s comment that a rear guard effects its purpose more by being than by doing, though this seems unlikely to have cheered them up, even if they had understood it. He then ordered the Motalga to hold out for another ten minutes before retreating, and left them, since he had to walk back across the plain under heavy fire, carefully counting his paces. He wanted to know the exact range to set the sights of his machine guns and his mountain gun, now that it was clear to him that the Turks were going to advance into his trap.