The railway-wrecking was not finished, however. One armoured car was sent to clear Ramleh, the next station to the south, while Lawrence, in his Rolls-Royce, and other demolition teams blew bridges and miles of track in between. The culverts were demolished by charges stuffed into their drainage-holes, while Lawrence had developed a more effective method of ruining the metals, planting ‘tulip’ charges under the sleepers so that they would buckle and warp entire stretches of track. Having satisfied himself that the railway was now effectively out of service between ash-Shahm and Ramleh, Lawrence slept near ash-Shahm, preparing for the attack on Mudowwara scheduled for the following day. The Turks were expecting the assault, however, and threw the combined force back with deadly accurate artillery fire at 7,000 yards. Lawrence took the armoured cars off in an arc to the place in which he had mined his first train, and destroyed the long culvert about 500 yards from the ridge on which he had sited his Stokes and Lewis guns on that day in 1917. Then he retired back to Ramleh to destroy more line. Later, Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and his Howaytat were sent to cripple the railway north of ash-Shahm. By 20 April, the Arabs and the British together had put out of action eighty miles of track, and taken or cut off seven stations. Fakhri Pasha’s force in Medina had at long last been neutralized as a potential threat.
19. My Dreams Puffed out Like Candles in the Strong Wind of Success
Dara’a, Tafas and the fall of Damascus Winter, 1918
Our battered saloon pulled into Tafas just after noon. It seemed a typical Hauran town – a place without a centre, a sprawl of houses constructed haphazardly along a grid of roads amid acres of wheatlands, and desolate red meadows relieved only by poisonous Sodom apple and brakes of eucalypt, cedar and Aleppo pine. In places you could glimpse the village as it had been in 1918 – scattered among the jerry-built breeze-block dwellings were ancient cottages of black basalt. We trawled up and down the main road for a time, then stopped a swarthy man in a black and white headcloth and asked him if he knew where the battle of 1918 had been fought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But there is an old man in the village who was there. I can take you to him.’ I was amazed, and slightly sceptical. All these months I had been pursuing a phantom whom people knew only by hearsay. Was I, finally, to meet someone who had actually seenLawrence with his own eyes? We urged the man into the car, and drove. He stopped us at a modern corner-house set on red earth among Sodom apple bushes. Inside, a spidery old man in a red kuffiyehand a black cloak was sitting on a rug on the floor by a benzene heater, surrounded by half a dozen sons and grandsons. The old man wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a wisp of silver beard. One of his grandsons – a medical student in Aleppo – told me that his grandfather was over ninety years old. We sat down cross-legged on the rug, and after we had answered questions, and sipped the statutory tea, I asked him, with suppressed excitement, if he had ever met Lawrence of Arabia. ‘I saw him,’ the Sheikh told me in a shaky voice. ‘I was just a boy then, of course. I remember seeing the Arab army marching through the village. It was a terrible day. I had been with my parents at another village the night before, and when we arrived here in the morning, we found that the Turks had killed almost everyone. Their bodies were lying about on the road. God have mercy upon them!’
‘And what did Lawrence look like?’
‘A tall, strong man, with a long beard,’ the Arab said.
Later, the grandson took us to see the battlefield, a rolling red meadow, traversed by a stream and full of nests of boulders. It was remarkably close to the village, and seemed unexpectedly small-scale for such a dramatic event. The slaughter of a Turkish column on this very field at Tafas on 27 September 1918, and the subsequent massacre of both Turkish and German prisoners, indeed, were among the most controversial acts of Lawrence’s career – convincing some of his critics that he was a bloodthirsty sadist, or alternatively that his torture and rape at Dara’a had permanently unhinged his passions. It was a controversy that Lawrence stoked with customary glee: ‘The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead,’ he claimed to have told his bodyguard that day, commenting, ‘By my order we took no prisoners, for the first time in the war.’ 1This ruthlessness was engendered by fury at the slaughter of non-combatant peasants in Tafas by the retreating Turks, one of the most sickening sights Lawrence had witnessed in the campaign. Not only had they massacred babies, they had also killed and deliberately mutilated women, leaving their corpses spread out obscenely: Lawrence had seen one pregnant woman lying dead with a bayonet thrust between her legs. Talal, a Sheikh of Tafas, with whom Lawrence claimed to have made his fateful reconnaissance of the Hauran the previous November, he wrote, had been so incensed by the slaughter of his people that he died in a suicidal lone charge towards the massed Turkish ranks.
The Tafas massacre was part of the final phase of the campaign that had begun in May 1918, when Lawrence had applied to Allenby for the 2,000 camels made redundant by the disbanding of the Imperial Camel Brigade in Sinai. ‘And what do you want them for?’ the GOC had asked: ‘To put a thousand men into Dara’a any day you please,’ Lawrence replied. His plan was to mount a force of Arab regulars on camels and march them north from Waheida, the Arabs’ new forward H Q