File 756/1917 Pt 2-3 ‘ARAB BULLETIN Nos 66-114’ [‎274r] (556/834)

also lost a lot ol men, and what had been a formal column of
route became a confused mass of fugitives, who never had time
to reform again. It seemed to us, however, that we might now
venture to put ourselves between Deraa and Damascus (at some
such point as Sheikh Saad) so as to force the immediate
evacuation of the former : we might then hope to be able to do
business, not only with this mob of the Fourth Army as it
emerged from Deraa, but with such remnants of the Palestine
Army as escaped by Semakh and Irbid. Accordingly, the
camelry, guns, and machine guns, marched northward on the
25th, till, on the afternoon of the 26th, they were able to descend
on the railway and cross it between Ghazale and Ezra.
This move took the Turks (by now panic-stricken) com
pletely by surprise. The railway had been opened for traffic
(after our damage of the 17th) on the previous day, but we
now cut it again—and it remained cut till the close of operations,
and penned into Deraa six complete trains, which are now
ours—took Ghazale with its two hundred men and two guns, took
Ezra, held only by the Algerian, Abd el-Kader, a pro-Turk
religious fanatic, and a good deal of stores. We then passed on
and slept near Sheikh Miskin. The Turks received fantastic
reports of our strength, and ordered the immediate evacuation
of Deraa by road, while the Germans burnt their five remaining
aeroplanes. This gave us a total of eleven enemy machines
accounted for by our force since September 13.
At dawn on the 27th we reached Sheikh Saad, in time to
take prisoner two Austro-Turk machine-gun companies on their
way to Kuneitra to oppose the British advancing by that road.
We then stood on the hill at Sheikh Saad, and watched the
country-side. When we saw a small enemy column we went out
and took it: when we saw a large column, we lay low. Our
excuse must be physical exhaustion—also we were only nine
hundred strong.
Aeroplanes now dropped us a message that there were two
columns of Turks advancing on us. One from Deraa w r as six
thousand strong, and one from Mezerib, two thousand strong.
We determined that the second was about our size, and marched
the regulars out to meet it just north of Tafas, while sending our
Hauran horse out to hang on to the skirts of the large column, and
some unmounted peasants to secure the Tel el-Shehab bridge, which
the Turks were mining. We were too late (since on the way we
had a profitable affair with an infantry battalion) to prevent the
Mezerib column getting into Tafas. They strengthened them
selves there, and as at Turaa, the last village they had entered,
allowed themselves to rape all the women they could catch.
We attacked them with all arms as they marched out later,
and bent the head of their column back towards Tell Arar.
When Sherif Bey, the Turkish Commander of the Lancer rear
guard in the village, saw this he ordered that the inhabitants be
killed. These included some twenty small children (killed with