The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy

across—guns, drugs, cooking oil, whatever you can imagine.”
    Six miles across that border stands the Syrian town of Deraa, the site where today’s Syrian civil war started and where Turkish forces briefly imprisoned Lawrence. Now, by all accounts, Deraa is a shattered shell of itself, its streets in ruins, the vast majority of its population gone. Many have ended up in the sprawling Jordanian refugee camp of Zaatari north of Amman—or here, in Ramtha.
    â€œAll the shops here are run by the Syrians now,” the Ramtha shopkeeper said, gesturing out at the commercial thoroughfare. “They have completely taken over.” His complaints about the newcomers echo those one hears about immigrants everywhere in the world: that they take away jobs from the locals, that they have caused rents to skyrocket. “I don’t know how much worse it can get,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, “but I know it won’t get better until the war there ends.”
    Fifteen miles to the west of Ramtha lie the ancient Greco-Roman ruins of Umm Qays, situated on a rocky promontory. On a clear day it is possible to see as far north as the Golan Heights and the Sea of Galilee. In the closing days of World War I, it was not these distant spots that made Umm Qays vitally strategic, but rather the sinuous Yarmouk Valley lying directly below.
    When General Allenby launched his offensive against the Turks in Palestine in late September 1918, the engagement quickly turned into a rout. Virtually the only escape left open to the Turks was up through the Yarmouk, to the railway at Deraa. But awaiting the Turks once they climbed out of the valley were T. E. Lawrence and thousands of Arab rebel soldiers. One year after Deraa, Lawrence returned to the place of his torments and now he would exact a terrible revenge.
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    At one time, the 2,000-year-old stone fortress of Azraq rose out of the eastern Jordan desert like an apparition, a 60-foot-high monolith. The upper floors and battlements collapsed in a massive earthquake in 1927, but the structure is still impressive enough to draw the occasional tourist bus from Amman, 50 miles to the west. The first place these tourists are led is to a small garret above the still-intact south tower, a space that guides refer to simply as “the Lawrence room.”
    It is a low-ceilinged chamber, cool and vaguely damp, with stone floors and narrow windows that give a view onto the surrounding desert. It has the feel of a place of refuge, and in fact Lawrence recuperated here after his ordeal in Deraa, 60 miles northwest. It is also where, at the climactic moment of World War I in the Middle East, he plotted the Arab Army’s all-out assault on Turkish forces in inland Syria.
    That attack was to be coordinated with Allenby’s sweep north through Palestine. It was Lawrence’s mission to cut off the Turks’ retreat at their most vulnerable spot: the railroad juncture of Deraa. Early on the morning of September 19, 1918, Lawrence and his followers began slipping out of Azraq castle, bound for the town where Lawrence had been tortured.
    On September 27, after coming upon the village of Tafas, where the fleeing Turks had massacred many residents, Lawrence ordered his men to give “no quarter.” Throughout that day, the rebels picked apart a retreating column of 4,000, slaughtering all they found, but as Lawrence doubled back that afternoon, he discovered one unit had missed the command and taken 250 Turks and Germans captive. “We turned our Hotchkiss [machine gun] on the prisoners,” he noted in his battlefield report, “and made an end of them.” Lawrence was even more explicit about his actions that day in
Seven Pillars
. “In a madness born of the horror of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake our agony.”
    Racing on to Damascus,