Resuming his disguise, Lawrence went on to the tents of the Metawileh, where he pulled aside his veil and revealed his identity. The sheiks gathered around the new English “Prince of Mecca” and clamored for a Syrian revolution at once. Lawrence explained that the time was not yet ripe and tried to encourage them to future action by glowing accounts of the victories farther south in the Hedjaz. However, he found the Metawileh so keen for a raid or a lark of some kind that he was prevailed upon to join them in what he always referred to as “a cinema show.” In his contact with the peoples of the desert he made the discovery that noise is one of the best forms of propaganda. So that night, followed by every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the tribe, Lawrence went down to the main line of the Turkish railway, which runs from Constantinople and Aleppo through Baalbek to Beirut. He selected one of the largest steel and concrete bridges in the Near East as the object of the evening’s diversion. After planting his tulips under both ends of the bridge and all its bastions, he carried an electric wire, connecting all charges, to the summit of a near-by hill, which the people of the Metawileh were occupying as a grand stand. Then, at the psychological moment, he threw in the switch and sent the great bridge skyward in a mass of flame and smoke. The Metawileh to the last man were convinced of the might of the Allies and swore oaths by Allah the Most High and by the Holy Koran, that they would join King Hussein’s Faithful.
From here Lawrence and his solitary Bedouin companion trekked across Syria to Damascus. They rode through the bazaars by night to the palace of Ali Riza Pasha, who was acting as military governor for the Turks. Ali Riza, although one of the sultan’s highest officials in Syria, secretly sympathized with the Arabian Nationalist movement. That evening at dinner, over innumerable cups of sweetened coffee, Ali Riza informed Lawrence that the growing dissension between Turkish and German officials would assure the ultimate success of the Allies in Palestine and Arabia. The Germans had become so high and mighty in their own estimation that they were treating the Turks like dogs. Consequently, feeling against the Germans had become so bitter that whenever the German General Staff gave an order the Turks would do their best to prevent its execution. According to Ali Riza, Falkenhayn a few weeks previously had advised the Turks to abandon both Palestine and Arabia and retire to a line across Syria to the Mediterranean from Deraa, the important railway junction south of Damascus. The German field-marshal had given the Turks sound and valuable advice, but the latter were as reluctant to accept it as they were to accept Field-Marshal Falkenhayn himself as their commander-in-chief. As a result of their having spurned his counsel they were so overwhelmed a little later by the combined British and Arabian forces that they not only lost all the region which Falkenhayn had advised them to abandon but they also lost the city of Damascus and the entire territory of Syria, which they otherwise might have saved.