Fate’s Prank with Lawrence of Arabia

Then he ordered his cavalry to charge the retreating Turks from the right flank, while he also moved forward from the center with his infantry and banners waving defiantly.

Continuing Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign,
our selection from With Lawrence in Arabia by Lowell Thomas published in 1924. The selection is presented in fifteen easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign.

Time: 1917
Place: Along the Hejaz Railway

The arrival of the machine-gunners revived their spirits and stimulated the Arabs to attack again. With a mighty shout calling upon the Prophet of God, they drove the Turks over another ridge and across a small plain to the Wadi el Hasa. They took the ridge but were held up there and found the main body of Hamid Fahkri’s Turkish army posted just behind it. The fighting became hotter now; on both sides men were dropping thickly. Continuous bursts of machine-gun fire and heavy shelling checked the ardor of the Arabs. Zeid hesitated to send forward his reserves, and so Lawrence hurriedly rode to the north of Tafileh for reinforcements. On his way he met his machine-gunners returning; five true believers had been sent to Paradise, one gun had exploded, and they were out of ammunition. Lawrence sent back urgent messages to Zeid to rush forward a mountain-gun, more ammunition, and all other available machine-guns to one of his reserve positions at the southern end of the little plain between El Hasa and Tafileh Valley. Then Lawrence galloped back to his front line on the ridge, where he found things in a precarious state. The ridge was being held by just thirty Ibn Jazi Howeitat mounted men and a handful of villagers. He could see the enemy working through the pass and along the eastern boundary to the ridge of the plain, where twenty Turkish machine-guns were concentrating their fire. An attempt was being made to flank the ridge which the Arabs were holding. The German officers directing the Turks were also correcting the fusing of the shrapnel, which had been grazing the top of the hill and bursting harmlessly over the desert plain. As Lawrence sat there, they began to spray the sides and top of the hill with steel splinters and with startling results, and he knew that the loss of the position was but a matter of minutes. A squadron of Albatross scouts flew up and helped to minimize the chances of the Shereefian forces by bombing them heavily from the air.

Lawrence gave his Motalga horsemen all the cartridges that he could collect, and the Arabs on foot ran back over the plain. He was among them. Since he had come straight up the cliffs from Tafileh, his animals had not caught up with him; the mounted men held out for fifteen minutes more and then galloped back unhurt. Lawrence collected his men in the reserve position on a ridge about sixty feet high, commanding an excellent view of the plain. It was now about noon. He had lost fifteen men and had only eighty left. But, a few minutes later, several hundred Ageyl and some of his other men, with a Hotchkiss automatic machine-gun, came up. Letfi el Assli, a Syrian, arrived with two more machine-guns, and Lawrence held his own until three o’clock, when Shereef Zeid came up with mountain artillery and more machine-guns and with fifty cavalrymen and two hundred Arabs on foot.

Meanwhile, the Turks had occupied his old front lines. Fortunately, Lawrence had their exact range. He had coolly paced it off while his followers were retreating pell-mell to their reserved position. He then rushed all his artillery to the top of the ridge and dispatched the cavalry to the right, to work up beyond the eastern boundary ridge. These mounted men were fortunate enough to get forward without being seen, until they had turned the Turkish flank at two thousand yards. There they made a dismounted attack, dancing forward with white puffs of smoke rippling from their rifles.

Meanwhile more than a hundred Arabs of the Aimi tribe, who had refused to fight the previous day because they were not satisfied with the amount of loot they were receiving, came up and joined Lawrence. There are few Bedouins who can resist the temptation to participate in a good fight when they see one coming on. He sent them to his left flank, and they crept down behind the western ridge of the plain to within two hundred yards of the Turkish Maxims. The ridge which the Turks occupied at that time was of a flint-like rock, so that entrenchment was impossible. The ricochets of the shells and shrapnel as they struck the flint boulders and glanced off were horrible, causing heavy losses among the enemy. Lawrence ordered the men on his left flank to fire an unusually heavy burst from their Hotchkiss and Vickers machine-guns at the Turks manning the Maxims. These were so accurate that they completely wiped the latter out. Then he ordered his cavalry to charge the retreating Turks from the right flank, while he also moved forward from the center with his infantry and banners waving defiantly. Horse and man, the Turks collapsed and their attack crumpled. At the sun’s decline Lawrence occupied the Turkish lines and chased the enemy back past their guns into the Hasa Valley. It was dark before his followers gave up the pursuit, exhausted from lack of sleep and food. “Allahu Akbar,” cried the weary men as they fell upon their knees with their faces toward Mecca, giving praise to Allah for their victory. Lawrence had put to flight a whole Turkish regiment. Among the slain lay Hamid Fahkri.

Fate never played a stranger prank than when she transformed this shy young Oxford graduate from a studious archaeologist into the leader of a hundred thrilling raids, creator of kings, commander of an army, and world’s champion train-wrecker.

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