The Motalga held their position for almost ten minutes, as ordered, then mounted and galloped back across the plain. When they reached Lawrence, one of them lent him a stirrup so he could hold on as they raced back to the first ridge. There Lawrence lay down and rested in the sun as the Turks deployed along the ridge at the far end of the plain. Once the enemy were where he wanted them, he sent Rasim, “a Damascene, a sardonic fellow, who rose laughing to every crisis and shrunk around like a sore-headed bear … when things went well,” to lead about eighty horsemen out of sight around the southern edge of the plain to attack the Turks’ left flank. Lawrence reminded himself of the familiar military adage that an attack should be aimed at a point, not a line, and told Rasim to aim for the last man on the Turkish left. He moved men and guns up and down his ridge, clearly visible to the Turks so as to focus their attention on the ridge in front of them, instead of on their flanks. He had more than 100 men from the nearby village of Aima armed and sent them off to attack the Turkish left, then opened fire at the Turkish position on the far ridge with his mountain gun and his machine guns.*

The men from Aima, “who knew every blade of grass on their own village pastures,” crept to within 300 yards of the Turks’ right flank on the exposed ridge before they opened fire with their rifles and Lawrence’s three light machine guns. Rasim had ten of his men dismount and move forward under cover with five automatic weapons, which “crumpled the Turkish left,” then charged with his remaining horsemen. From his position on the ridge nearest Tafileh, Lawrence could see the curved swords of Rasim’s horsemen flashing in the setting sun, at which point he ordered the rest of his men to charge uphill toward the Turks, on horse, on foot,and on camel. These men included the Armenian survivors of the massacre, who drew their knives in anticipation of cutting Turkish throats in revenge. The Turks were driven back into “the broken, precipitous paths, undergrowth, the narrows and defiles,” behind them, where they and their general were massacred. It was, in the words of Liddell Hart, a victory “in the purest classical tradition…. It was Cannae, or still more, Ilipa,* adapted to modern weapons,” a “gem” which placed Lawrence among “the Great Captains.” It also bore out the truth of the duke of Wellington’s remark: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”

“In the end,” Lawrence wrote, “we had taken their two mountain howitzers, very useful to us, their twenty-seven machineguns, two hundred horses and mules, and about two hundred and fifty prisoners. Of the rest above six hundred were killed, and they said only fifty got back, exhausted fugitives, to the railway. All the Arabs on their track rose against them and shot them as they ran. Our men had to give up the pursuit quickly, for they were tired and sore and hungry, and it was pitifully cold. Fighting a battle may be thrilling for the general, but terrible afterwards when the broken flesh that has been his own men is carried past him. It began to snow as we turned back…. The Turkish wounded had to lie out, and were all dead the next day.”

Arab losses were about twenty-five killed and forty wounded. Lawrence reproached himself severely for these. Although he would never wear the ribbon or accept the decoration, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, only one step below the Victoria Cross, for which he had already been recommended.

Wavell’s praise for Lawrence’s account of the Battle of Tafileh was well earned. Better than any novelist, Lawrence succeeded in describing unflinchingly every moment and movement of the battle, and demonstrating that when called on to do so, he could direct his ragtag army in an orthodox way, while coolly exposing himself to danger.

As was so often the case with Lawrence, success was followed by a humiliating failure. One reason is that victory tended to undo the Arabs’ shaky system of alliances, which was always at the mercy of the stronger pull of tribal and clan loyalty. Another was sleet—the foul weather and heavy mud that rendered the camels clumsy and helpless. Lawrence managed to send seventy Bedouin horsemen under Abdulla el Feir to raid the lake port near El Mezraa, at the southernmost end of the Dead Sea, where they overwhelmed a small group of Turkish sailors sleeping on shore, destroyed a motor launch and six lighters, and captured sixty prisoners and ten tons of grain. This interruption of the Turkish grain supply was in some ways more important than the victory at Tafileh, but Lawrence was still anxious to fulfill his promise to Allenby and move the Arab forces north toward Jericho.

He was restless and discontented at Tafileh—forced idleness was never good for Lawrence, and for once even he complained of the vermin. He finally set off for Guweira to meet with Joyce, Feisal, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay. Dawnay had been appointed by Allenby to create a “Hejaz Operations Staff” and to establish some kind of military order. Lawrence might have been expected to object to him—Dawnay was tall and thin; was a perfectly uniformed officer of the Coldstream Guards; and was the brother of Brigadier-General Guy Dawnay, who had come up with the plan of feinting at Gaza and putting the weight of the British attack on Beersheba—but something about Alan Dawnay’s cold precision and “brilliant mind” appealed to Lawrence, who called him “Allenby’s greatest gift to us.”

Lawrence rode down to Guweira in foul weather; it was “freezing once again, and the slabby stones of the valley-slopes became sheets of ice.” The camels balked at moving forward, and the men nearly froze to death, and all would have died if Lawrence had not pushed them mercilessly on. Even when they descended into the warmer air of the plain around Guweira, there was no relief. “The pain of the blood fraying its passage once more about our frozen arms and legs and faces was as great and much faster than the slow pain its driving out: and as we warmed we grew sensible that up there in the cold we had torn and bruised ourunfeeling feet nearly to a pulp among the stones. We had not felt them tender while each step was deep in icy mud: but this warm salty mud scoured out the cuts, and in desperation we had to climb up on our sad camels, and beat them woodenly towards Guweira.”

This passage seems to express Lawrence’s state of mind, despite his earlier victory. Ostensibly, he had ridden to Guweira to pick up Ј30,000 in gold sovereigns with which to pay the tribes to the north; but one senses, reading his account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that he was briefly in need of friendly company—Joyce and Dawnay, and Feisal, whom he much preferred to his half brother Zeid—and that he was tired of dealing with Zeid and the recalcitrant tribesmen. He seems not to have been downhearted that Feisal’s attack on the railway watering station at Mudawara had failed. Lawrence understood the lack of cooperation between the Bedouin tribesmen and the Arab regulars.

He spent three days with Joyce, Dawnay, and Feisal, then set off back to Tafileh, with an escort provided by Feisal. Lawrence split the gold coins into thirty canvas bags, each bag containing 1,000 gold sovereigns; two of these bags could be carried by a single camel. Even this was a heavy burden on the poor beasts, with the ice and frozen mud, and his return journey to Tafileh was as cold and difficult as the journey down. Once there, he found waiting for him a young British intelligence officer, Kirkbride, “a taciturn, enduring fellow,” and leaving the gold in Zeid’s care, he rode to Dana with the young man, then rode north on a reconnaissance mission of his own “as far as the edge of the Jordan valley,” from where he could hear Allenby’s guns attacking Jericho. It seemed to Lawrence feasible to bring the Arab army north of the Dead Sea, as he had promised, and he rode back to give Zeid the good news, only to find that Zeid, shamefaced, had been persuaded or browbeaten by the local sheikhs to pay them the gold Lawrence had brought from Guweira. Of the Ј30,000 in gold coins, he had nothing left, so the plan of advancing north was impossible.