First, we called in at the Tourist Office. The officer there was very friendly and ordered us tea, but no, he couldn’t tell us where the battle of Tafilah had been fought. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘Lawrence had nothing to do with the battle. He was just a British spy.’ We thanked him, and drove down to the oldest building in the town – the Ottoman fort. This, we decided, was the correct place to start, for it was marked on the plan of the battle I had photocopied from the official war history. From there, I located Lawrence’s Reserve Ridge by a simple compass-bearing and Mohammad drove me around the gorge to the foot of the steep chalky escarpment, where we left the car and climbed up. There were newly planted Aleppo pines and cedars on the terraces, and near the top I saw masonry blocks among the stones which Lawrence had identified as Byzantine – the local name for his ‘Reserve Ridge’ was Khirbat Nokheh: ‘the ruin of the resting-place’. Along the spine of the ridge were pits which might well have been gun-emplacements from the battle itself, and a view across undulating volcanic heath with waving yellow goatgrass and nests of black stones and boulders, but scarcely a single tree. Below me to the left I could clearly see the western ridge on which the Turkish machine-guns had been placed, and which had been taken by the ‘Ayma men from the rear. The rest of the battlefield, however, was not as I had expected. From the plan, and from Lawrence’s account, I had imagined a triangular plain bounded by ridges on two sides. Instead I saw an undulating hillside of field and stubble tilting up to the right, to the base of a great buttress hogsback along the base of which ran the Kerak-Tafilah road. The far edge of the plateau, where the Turkish H Q had stood, appeared to be in sight from the map, but in practice it was hidden by high ground which lay directly in front of me. The final charge from Reserve Ridge, therefore, had been down a slope into dead ground, and then over another ridge before falling on the Turks – quite a different impression from that given by Lawrence of a charge downhill. Mohammad examined the map carefully and squinted at the ground, then pointed out to me a note stating that the map was based on ‘an oblique aerial photograph’ – possibly the photo shown in the same report, taken in 1929, which looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the town. In fact the official report had been made in the same year, for I later traced two letters from Lawrence to its author, Major Archibold Becke, dated 1929: ‘You want me to check the affair now, on my twelve year old memories,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘against air-photos of the ground. Isn’t that overdoing what was originally meant… to be a joke? … The whole thing’s absurd.’ 4Although Lawrence subsequently wrote that Becke’s map ‘squared substantially with his memories’, there was plainly some discrepancy between the map and the ground. We began to walk down the hillside, pacing towards the end of the western ridge, where Lawrence had met the Muhaysin and the ibn Jazi and ordered them to withdraw. As I walked, I had a vivid vision of bullets whining past me, of the boom and crash of falling shells, the tang of cordite, the rattle of machine-guns. I was still engrossed in my reverie when a voice said, ‘Peace be on you,’ and I saw an old shepherd, a brown-skinned man with a face like cured vellum, dressed in a dirty sheepskin cloak and a tattered headcloth, scuffling over a stony fold with about ninety scrawny brown and white sheep. Mohammad asked him if he knew anything about Lawrence and the battle of Tafilah. ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘But there wasfighting up here, because we find shells and bullets sometimes.’ It took us almost an hour to reach the far tip of the western ridge where the Turkish machine-gun battery had supposedly been sited, which would bear out Lawrence’s statement that the distance was roughly two miles. We climbed to the top through soft ploughed soil, and saw from there a deep cleft in the ground, cut by water, long ago, which ran all the way down into the ravine. This, I thought, must have been the secret path by which the Ayma men had sneaked up behind the Turks, and thus changed the whole course of the battle: ‘the main Turkish effort,’ Lawrence wrote to Major Becke, ‘was along the ridge afterwards cleared by the men of [‘Ayma].’ 5
The assault of the ‘Ayma men was clearly the decisive moment in the battle, but whether it was Lawrence himself who sent them forward, as he later told Liddell Hart, is disputable. Another participant in the battle, Subhi al-Amari, a regular Arab officer commanding a machine-gun section, recalled that the peasants of ‘Ayma had gathered on a hill called Khirbat as-Saba ah, about a kilometre to the right of the Turkish flank. According to Subhi, the Turkish position was out of range from Reserve Ridge. This is evidently so, for though Lawrence told Becke that he had to put up the sights of his Vickers to 3,000 yards to spray the retreat, the sights of a Vickers actually only extended to 2,900 yards, which was the weapon’s maximum range. As Richard Aldington correctly pointed out, a machine-gun duel at 3,000 yards was unthinkable in that era. Subhi had the sudden idea of moving his two guns around the western ridge in order to get in range. He and his men had sprinted across the dead ground and crawled to the base of the ridge, where they were joined spontaneously by the ‘Ayma peasants. His machine-gunners clambered up the slope and opened fire on the Turks from point-blank range, and were swiftly followed by a rush from the ‘Ayma men. The Turkish unit nearest the Arabs was badly hit, and the commander ordered his men to turn their line and face the peasants. It was at this point, Subhi wrote, that an unexpected thing happened. When the Turks stood up to change the line, the ‘Ayma men thought they were about to retreat and launched an impulsive attack, shouting and cheering. The Turks, taken aback, simply abandoned their guns and ran, and their panic spread to the nearby units, who did the same. Subhi later learned from a prisoner that at this precise moment, most of the Turkish officers had withdrawn from the line to attend an orders-group with the CO, and thus there was no one to rally the Turkish rank and file in their retreat. This was why, when the Turks fell into disorder, Hamid Fakhri had, as Lawrence also recorded, instructed his officers, too late, to take a rifle each and return to the line.
The Arab historian Suleiman Mousa told me that he had spoken with a number of veterans of the battle, most of whom remembered seeing Lawrence on the battlefield, but all of whom confirmed that the engagement was a highly haphazard affair, as Subhi’s report suggests. Lawrence himself hinted at this when he told Liddell Hart that as the ‘Ayma men had arrived from the west (their village lay a few miles west of the battlefield), ‘it is possible that geography had as much part as strategy in deciding the form of their attack’. 6What of Lawrence’s other claims? He wrote that he had decided to fight a pitched battle out of anger at the Turks’ stupidity in coming back, sent machine-guns forward to support the peasants, chose the Reserve Ridge as a last defensive line, ordered the spearhead back to the ridge, and urged Zayd to move his main body there. The evidence, though, is that it was neither Lawrence nor Sharif Zayd who decided to confront the Turks on the plateau, but the Muhaysin peasants of Tafilah, who were loath to let them back in their town: the action of a few dozen of them had obliged Lawrence to make a stand. There is no reason to suppose that he did not send the machine-guns to support them on his own initiative, nor that he did not choose the Reserve Ridge, counsel Zayd to move, or order the vanguard to withdraw. Evidently, then, he played a major part in the battle. Why the self-mockery, the peppering of aphorisms from military history in his account? What was the joke? The answer, surely, is that Lawrence realized the impossibility of reducing a series of chance events, by which most military engagements are decided, to some kind of logical pattern, which could be expressed in a brief report: ‘Throughout it I was quoting to myself absurd tags of Foch and the other blood fighters,’ he wrote to Major Becke in 1929, ‘and in every movement I was parodying the sort of thing they recommended, but exaggerating just enough to make it ridiculous. The account I wrote of it afterwards was in the same vein: a parody of a proper despatch. The Palestine staff took it seriously: I hope [you are] not going to follow their mistake.’ 7