After a well-earned week’s rest in Cairo, Lawrence returned to Aqaba, which was now utterly transformed. Ships were offloading weapons, bags of gold coins, Rolls-Royce armored cars, a squadron of aircraft and a battalion of Imperial Camel Corps. The fluid band of Arab fighters was now being called the Arab Northern Army, and the Arab Regular Army boasted about 6,000 men.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

In January 1918, Lawrence and an Arab force commanded by Feisal’s brother Zeid helped direct the closest thing to a set-piece battle in the entire campaign. At Tafileh, a village south of the Dead Sea, they were frontally attacked by three battalions of Turks. Marching into withering fire from the Arabs, the Turks where then outfoxed on the field by the fluid, flexible counterattacks by the Arabs. In the ensuing rout, 400 Turks were killed and more than 200 taken prisoner in what military historian Basil Liddell Hart labeled ‘a miniature masterpiece.’ Lawrence was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for that action, and in March he was promoted to lieutenant colonel.

Although mentally and physically exhausted and eager for Allenby to reassign him to a quieter job, Lawrence had to push on with the fight. Throughout the spring and summer of 1918, while the Germans pursued a massive series of offensives to win the war on the Western Front, Allenby laid plans to use the forces available to him to launch the final assault on Damascus, assigning Feisal’s Bedouins the task of cutting railway and telegraph lines. The offensive was finally launched on September 19. In a magnificent tactical move, Allenby had the Arabs execute a feint at Amman, which drew Turkish forces into that direction while the main British armies struck a hammer blow at the weakened Turks in the Levant. With four armored cars, 40 machine guns, four artillery pieces, two aircraft and 8,000 tribesmen, Lawrence and Feisal swept through Deraa and massacred a rear column of the Turkish Fourth Army. Joining up with units of the British cavalry, they swiftly marched northward toward Damascus. Lawrence pushed the Arab forces on, making sure that they would enter the city first and thus establish their authority for the peace talks afterward. Driving in a Rolls-Royce tender, Lawrence entered the city on October 1 as the populace poured out wildly into the streets, yelling ‘Feisal! Urens!’ — as the Arabs pronounced ‘Lawrence.’ ‘From this cup,’ Lawrence later wrote, ‘I drank as deeply as any man should do, when we took Damascus: and was sated with it.’ His war was over, and two days later he was heading back to England.

But his work was yet not done. As the victorious Allied governments planned to meet with their vanquished enemies at Versailles in 1919, Lawrence presented his views on the region to the British cabinet. He gained added prestige and notoriety when, in a private audience with King George V, he refused to accept the insignia of the awards he had received, citing Britain’s unfulfilled promises to the Arabs. Lawrence went to Paris with the British delegation to the peace conference in January as adviser and interpreter for Feisal. At the conference, before the press and at social gatherings, Lawrence argued the Arab cause. At that same time, he began working on his Seven Pillars. The Middle East, however, had little priority for the imperial powers.

With Britain and France intent on partitioning the Middle East, Lawrence returned to England to write, refusing all offers for a career in government. In 1919 the journalist Lowell Thomas, who had met Lawrence briefly during the war, began a series of slide shows about the battles in the Middle East. These proved extremely successful, and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ became famous. Although Thomas’ lectures were sometimes pure fantasy — labeling Lawrence ‘the uncrowned king of Arabia’ and the like — Lawrence used his newfound celebrity to revive his efforts to seek a just settlement for the Arabs. He also started a letter-writing campaign in The Times and elsewhere. By 1920, however, the French had thrown Feisal out of Syria and the Arabs were rebelling against the British mandate in Iraq. Lawrence joined Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office to find a solution, which eventually resulted in Feisal’s becoming king of Iraq and his brother Abdullah king of Transjordan. It was, Lawrence felt, an honorable settlement.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to