At once Lawrence mounted his camel and headed towards Mezerib with Nuri as-Sa’id and his men, leaving only 100 regulars, the Gurkhas, the Rwalla, and the armoured cars with Joyce at Tel Arar. He had been hoping that the caravan would look like a troop of Bedu, but very quickly the German planes were out again, sweeping in with exquisite slowness and loosing four bombs in the direction of the running camels. The first three missed, but the fourth struck right into their midst, with an ear-splitting crack, knocking over two of Lawrence’s bodyguard and badly mauling their mounts. The two men picked themselves up and swarmed on to their companions’ saddles, just as another plane honed in and let fly a brace of bombs, the shock of which spun Lawrence’s camel round and almost jerked him out of his saddle. He felt a terrible burning sensation in his elbow, the pain of which brought tears to his eyes. For a horrific moment he thought his arm had been blown clean off, but removing a fold of his cloak, he saw that he had been hit by a shred of shrapnel too small to do any real damage.
Nuri’s regulars, with their machine-gunners and artillery, took the first of Mezerib’s two stations within half an hour. Young and Lawrence climbed on the roof and cut the telegraph wires: ‘Slowly, with ceremony,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to draw out the indignation.’ 13Then, while Nuri’s men broached the second station, they turned their attention to the railway. Young began planting tulips along the tracks to the east while Lawrence blew the points in the station itself: ‘I had planted a dozen [tulips] when something made me look along the line to Dara’a,’ wrote Young, ‘and my heart stood still, for a train was crawling slowly out of the town towards Mezerib.’ 14Young’s first thought was to warn Lawrence, and he ran back to the station shouting that a train was coming.
‘A plane?’ Lawrence asked.
‘Not a plane, you damned fool,’ Young cried. ‘A train!’
Lawrence answered calmly that it was time to light the charges, and Young sprinted back towards the oncoming train, fumbled for a taper and found he had none. Instead, he lit a cigarette, quickly ignited the fuses, and finally leapt on to his camel to make his escape, quite forgetting that he had hobbled her. The camel stumbled: Young half fell, half jumped out of the saddle and ‘ran like hell’. The tulips puffed smoke, cracked off one by one, and the train immediately reversed gear and pulled back to Dara’a. At sunset, after the Arabs had looted the station thoroughly, Lawrence and Young set fire to the rolling stock and torched two Turkish trucks.
They rested a little while at Mezerib, where thousands of Hauran peasants turned out to join them, and during the night Lawrence and Young marched to within a few hundred yards of the bridge at Tel ash-Shehab, which he had failed to take with Sharif ‘Ali earlier in the year. The bridge seemed to be charmed, however, for now it was defended by a German artillery battery, and once again Lawrence was forced to retire. The railway had been wrecked, to the south, east and north of Dara’a, and the Turkish garrison was cut off. The mission had been a success, and all that remained was the exfiltration. In the morning, they caught up with Nuri’s party at Ramtha and began to withdraw to Umm Tayeh to rendezvous with Joyce and the armoured cars. The march back proved nerve-racking. The Germans were behind them, and ahead of them, on the railway, they might find reinforcements from Amman. The peasants at Ramtha seemed hostile, and any moment the patrol might be attacked by air. Lawrence cantered ahead with his bodyguard to mine the railway near Nasib, which lay on their line of retreat. Nuri put in a full bombardment on the station there, intending to keep Turkish heads down while the Arabs crossed the metals, and to draw the sentries from the bridge while Lawrence laid on it a whacking charge of 800 pounds of gun-cotton. After dark, the entire detachment crawled across the line unseen, covered by the roar of Pisani’s guns. When the artillery had been safely brought across, Lawrence touched off his charge: ‘There was a deafening roar,’ wrote Young, ‘and a blaze which lit up the country for miles. By its light I saw the abutment arch of the bridge sheared clean off and the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below.’ 15Within a mile of the tracks they made camp, but were woken up with a shock at first light by a shell which exploded nearby. In the night, the Turks had cunningly brought up a field-gun mounted on a railway wagon and had ranged it with their spotter plane. The Arabs mounted their camels and trotted quickly out of range. Later the same day they met up with Joyce at Umm Tayeh, and on 19 September Lawrence returned to Azraq by car. The following day he flew to GHQ, now at Ramleh in Palestine, to collect orders and discover the outcome of Allenby’s advance.
As Young and Kirkbride were frying sausages for breakfast on 22 September at Umm Surab, just south of Umm Tayeh, Lawrence reappeared with three aircraft, to be followed the same afternoon by a Handley-Page bomber which landed stores, raising Arab morale with its huge dimensions. The news from the Palestine front was electrifying: Nablus, Haifa, Afuleh, Beisan and Samakh had fallen, 22,000 prisoners had been captured, and the Turkish 4th Army from Amman had been ordered to fall back on Dara’a and Damascus. The Turks were on the run, and Lawrence’s raiders were to hamper them and cut off the retreat. It would be the most dangerous mission they had undertaken so far. The Turks numbered tens of thousands, were fully equipped with artillery and machine-guns, and were desperate; the Arab force, by comparison, was a flea: ‘I noticed with pride,’ Winterton wrote, ‘but not without apprehension … that Lawrence fully intended that we should worry the retreating Turks as mastiffs of old worried a bear in the ring, oblivious of the possible consequences.’ 16Though Lawrence had estimated that the railway would be out for a week, the Turks had managed to get it back into service with astonishing speed. Lawrence was to keep up the pressure on it, to raise the peasant tribes of the northern Hauran at long last. His force would be increased by 3,000 of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s Rwalla camelry who had been waiting in the wings at Azraq. The next day, Nuri as-Sa’id and his regulars, with Young, Stirling and Winterton in the armoured cars, and Nuri ash-Sha’alan at the head of his Rwalla, hit the railway at Kilometre 149, where Lawrence and Joyce had previously destroyed the bridge. They wrecked two-thirds of a mile of line and burned the scaffolding with which the bridge had been repaired. This was the final blow to the Turks’ railway efforts, and afterwards they gave up: the Amman garrison began to move to Dara’a on foot with all its artillery and transport. Lawrence did not yet know this, however, and on the 24th he, Winterton and an Arab officer called Jamil set off in the armoured cars to demolish another bridge south of Mafraq. Winterton was reluctant to join the mission, suspecting that it was unnecessary and that Lawrence was now fighting purely for fighting’s sake. They came to a bridge and a blockhouse, and when Lawrence went forward in a car to examine the target, a machine-gun and a seven-pound field-gun blasted out at them from the fort. The armoured car commander was wary of challenging artillery, and Lawrence suggested confidently to Winterton that they should each take a Lewis gun out of the cars, creep up on the blockhouse and scourge it with enfilade fire, while the cars opened up from the front. Winterton thought Lawrence had gone crazy: ‘How on earth,’ he asked, ‘are we going to get into range without being killed? … They’ll spot us and blow us to blazes … who ever heard of taking a blockhouse with a Lewis gun?’ Lawrence inquired if His Lordship had developed ‘cold feet’. ‘Certainly not, sir,’ Winterton said. ‘But all I can say is that if this extraordinary proposal succeeds and we survive we shall both be entitled to the VC.’ 17This gave Lawrence a moment’s thought, and he decided to revert to his original plan and rush the fort with the armoured cars, with the intention of getting a car under the bridge, and setting a charge while in its protection. They rolled forward under heavy fire with bullets clattering against their armour, and shells bursting about them, when a Turkish soldier popped up behind Lawrence’s car and lobbed a grenade. Lawrence knew the car was vulnerable to grenades and that a direct shot to the gun-cotton in the back would tear them all to pieces. Suddenly Winterton’s driver informed him that Lawrence’s car was reversing out of action.