After the battle of Mudawara, Lawrence led a combined force of camel corps and Arabs against Amman, just east of the Jordan. This was merely a feint, but it confirmed the Turks in the belief that the valley of the historic Jordan River was swarming with the bulk of Allenby’s forces. Lawrence sent one of the most prominent chiefs of the Beni Sakr toward Damascus with £7000 in gold to buy barley. The sheik bought recklessly in every town and village on the eastern border of Syria. The Turks, knowing well that Emir Feisal’s Bedouin cavalry could not use such vast quantities of grain, immediately decided that the barley must be intended for Allenby’s forces in the Jordan Valley. Lawrence also started the rumor through the Arab army that Emir Feisal’s host intended to launch its main attack against Deraa railway junction between Amman and Damascus.
“As a matter of fact,” Lawrence remarked, “we had every intention of attacking Deraa, but we spread the news so far and wide that the Turks refused to believe it. Then in deadly secrecy we confided to a chosen few in the inner circle that we really were going to concentrate all of our forces against Amman. But we were not.”
This “secret,” of course, leaked out and was betrayed to the Turks, who immediately shifted the greater part of their forces to the vicinity of Amman, exactly as Allenby and Lawrence had planned.
When the advance of the Arab army actually started, none but Emir Feisal, Colonel Joyce, and Colonel Lawrence knew that the attack was to center on Deraa. Early in September Lawrence started north from the head of the Gulf of Akaba to help Allenby in his historic final drive. But instead of taking his Bedouin followers from the Hedjaz, with the exception of his personal body-guard Lawrence recruited a new army from the tribes of the North Arabian Desert, and Joyce kept adding to his rapidly increasing mob of deserters from the Turkish ranks. When it started up the Wadi Araba from the head of the Gulf of Akaba, Lawrence’s caravan consisted of two thousand baggage-camels, four hundred and fifty Arab regulars mounted on racing-camels, four Arab machine-gun units, two aëroplanes, three Rolls-Royce armored cars, a demolition company of picked men from the Egyptian camel corps, a battalion of Gurkhas from India mounted on tall camels from the Sind Desert, and four mountain-guns manned by French Algerians. In addition he had his resplendent private body-guard of one hundred picked Bedouins. His total force amounted to one thousand men mounted on camels. Lawrence’s motto on this expedition, as on all others, was, “No margin!” He faced a march of five hundred miles across unmapped desert under stupendous transport difficulties. During one stage they marched four days from one water-hole to another, carrying their entire water-supply with them and suffering from thirst. When they reached the new water-hole they drank copiously, only to discover that the water was filled with leeches. These leeches fastened themselves on the inside of their nasal membranes and proved most painful. But the column made the trek in a fortnight. They were hurrying north to cut three Turkish railway lines and all the telegraph-wires around Deraa, Lawrence’s primary mission being to prevent the Turks from communicating with Damascus, Aleppo, and Constantinople when Allenby started his advance.