‘What are your orders, sir?’ he asked.
‘Get out of range of the enemy as soon as you damned well can!’ Winterton replied.
On the way back to the bivouac, Winterton recalled, he tried to run down some gazelles, and Lawrence stopped to tick him off angrily: ‘It was typical of him,’ he wrote, ‘to show one of his rare bursts of anger at the destruction of a gazelle.’ 18
Arriving back at Umm Surab, they found Sharif Nasir about to move to Umm Tayeh, and heard for the first time that the Turkish 4th Army was pouring out of Amman. Lawrence suggested that they should leave the fleeing Turks for the local Bedu to finish off, move to Sheikh Sa’ad, north of Dara’a, and try to force an immediate evacuation of Dara’a from there. The idea was accepted, and it was decided to send the aircraft and armoured cars back to Azraq to await the final move on Damascus. The column left on the afternoon of 25 September, but they had only gone four miles when they sighted clouds of dust on the horizon: 10,000 Turks were retreating towards Dara’a protected by cavalry pickets on their flanks. One of the aircraft sheared back over the caravan and dropped a message that Turkish horsemen were approaching them. It was an inopportune moment. Pisani’s guns were in bits on their mules, the armoured cars and the rest of the aircraft had left. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to pull out the regulars, while the Rwalla horse under Nuri’ash-Sha’alan and the Hauran riders under Talal al-Haraydhin went forward to draw Turkish fire. Suddenly, the armoured car squadron, which had spotted the enemy, drove back across the plain trailing scarves of dust and prepared to engage the Turks. As it turned out, though, they were merely a group of stragglers seeking a shortcut: they rode straight into the Arab irregulars, who captured over 100 of them.
That evening they camped at Nuwayma, and Young, whose official post was ‘military adviser’, came to Lawrence’s tent at midnight and suggested that the Arabs had done enough and should now retire to Bosra in the Druse mountains, where the Druses were gathering under Nasib al-Bakri. Here they could wait for the British to take Damascus. Lawrence would not hear of it: Damascus must at all costs be seen to be taken by Arab arms. At first light next day they crossed the railway near Ghazala, and Lawrence laid a charge on the nearest bridge while Auda raced off with his Howaytat riders to capture the station at Khirbat al-Ghazala, where he took 200 prisoners and two mountain-guns. Talal and his fierce Hauranis stormed Izra – which Lawrence claimed was being defended by the traitor ‘Abd al-Qadir – drove out its small garrison and took custody of its large grain depot. The Rwalla skittered up the main road towards Dara’a on their camels looking for Turkish stragglers and came back with 400 prisoners, mules and machine-guns. At dawn on 27 September the column had just settled among the olive groves at Sheikh Sa’ad when an RAF plane dropped a message informing them that Allenby’s spearhead – the 10th Cavalry Brigade, outriding General Barrow’s Indian Division – was already at Ramtha, only fourteen miles away, close on the tail of the fleeing Turks. Two large Turkish columns – 6,000 men from Dara’a, and 2,000 from Mezerib – were converging on the area.
This was the chance they had been waiting for. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri decided to let the bigger column pass by, to be harried by the Rwalla and Hauran horse, while the regulars would engage the smaller Mezerib column and wipe it out. It was now heading for Tafas, and Talal, a Sheikh of the village, was desperate to get there before the enemy and prevent them from entering it. According to an Arab report, Talal galloped ahead with his Hauranis and attacked the enemy furiously, but was killed by a Turkish grenade. If this is so, he was already dead when Lawrence arrived with Sharif Nasir and Auda, quickly followed by Nuri as-Sa id and the regulars with Pisani and his guns. When they reached Tafas, Lawrence wrote, the enemy was already in the village, and there was the occasional ominous shot from within, and palls of blue smoke from the houses. Soon the Turks began to march out in ordered fashion, with guards of lancers at the front and rear, infantry in columns with machine-guns on their flanks, and transport – including Jamal Pasha in his motor car – in the centre. As the column came into view from among the houses, Pisani’s guns roared and spat smoke, taking the enemy completely by surprise. According to Lawrence’s version, he and Talal then slipped into the streets with a troop of Bedu, only to be met with a nauseating sight. As soon as the Arab battery had opened fire, Lawrence wrote, the Turkish rearguard commander had ordered the massacre of the villagers: they had stabbed and shot to death twenty small children and forty women. As they rode in, a tiny girl – perhaps four years old – tried to run away. Abd al-‘Aziz, Lawrence’s ‘rabbit mouthed’ Tafas bodyguard, jumped from his camel and cradled her: she had been wounded in the neck with a lance-thrust, and blood stained her smock. She tried to escape, and screamed, ‘Don’t hit me, Baba!’ then collapsed and died. They rode grimly past the place where the Turks had mutilated the village women and caught up with wounded stragglers who begged for mercy. They shot them down at point-blank range, and Lawrence looked on silently while his bodyguard-lieutenant Ahmad az-Za’aqi pumped three bullets into the chest of a helpless man. As they came within sight of the column, Lawrence wrote, Talal gave a horrible cry: ‘[he] put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring column’. 19Lawrence moved to join him, but Auda held him back. This was Talal’s private appointment with death. According to Lawrence, he charged right into the jaws of the Turkish machine-gun, screaming his battle-cry, ‘Talal! Talal!’ until, riddled with bullets, he fell from his saddle among the Turkish spears. Lawrence and Auda watched the grim incident from afar, and at last Auda said: ‘We will take his price!’
The artillery barrage had shocked the Turks and dispersed them in panic. One section, mostly made up of German and Austrian machine-gunners, grouped themselves tightly round three motor cars, and fought like devils. They proved too strong for the Arabs, who let them go. The other two sections, though, were separated and cut to pieces where they stood: Lawrence ordered ‘No prisoners!’ and the Arabs charged them again and again, swooping on them like avenging furies, and cutting them down almost to a man. ‘In a madness born of the horror of Tafas,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as if their death and running blood could slake our agony.’ 20Thousands of Hauran villagers gathered like scavengers at the flanks of the beleaguered Turkish column, picking up the rifles of the enemy dead as they fell, and joining their fellow Arabs in the slaughter. By sunset the plain outside Tafas was littered with hundreds of bloody corpses. According to Lawrence, one group of Arabs had not heard his ‘no prisoners’ order, and had taken 250 of the enemy alive, including a number of Germans and Austrians. As he rode up, Lawrence was shown an Arab named Hassan who had been pinned to the ground with German bayonets, while already wounded. Lawrence had wanted no enemy survivors, and this was the excuse he had been looking for. He told his brother Arnie after the war that he had ordered an Arab crew to turn a Hotchkiss on the prisoners and kill them all. In doing so, he felt, he was avenging not only the children of Tafas, but the numberless generations of Arabs who had been ground down by the tyranny of the hateful Turks.