It all ill.u.s.trated one of the paradoxes of power, that what the Arab Revolt had gained in importance in the eyes of its British overseers had come with a corresponding loss of autonomy. The ultimate danger of that, in Lawrence"s view, was that the British were now taking their tethered Arab allies down a path that might well lead to their destruction.
From the outset, Hussein"s notion of a British-sponsored pan-Arab revolt with himself as its leader had been built on very shaky ground, viewed skeptically by both Arab conservatives and progressives. To ibn-Saud, Hussein"s chief rival in Arabia and the leader of the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement, the king"s alliance with the British made him a toady of the Christian West (never mind that Saud was also on the British payroll). At the same time, the more cosmopolitan Arabs of Syria had felt little in common with the Bedouin "primitives" riding out of the Hejaz. These were problems to deal with down the road, once the war was over, but with the Balfour Declaration the road had rushed up to meet Hussein.
Taken aback by the furious Arab reaction to that declaration, the British had put great pressure on their princ.i.p.al Arab ally to come out in its support. This Hussein had done, tepidly, but instead of calming the Arab waters, the move had served to strengthen Arab opposition to Hussein. In early January, David Hogarth, Lawrence"s old mentor and now the "acting director" of the Arab Bureau-the t.i.tle was little more than an honorific, true authority lay elsewhere-had called upon Hussein in hopes of finally clarifying the boundaries of a postwar Arab nation. Instead, he had found a king who only wished to talk of the growing threat he now faced from ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists. Simultaneously, Arab nationalists in Egypt and Syria had adopted ibn-Saud"s toady language in deriding Hussein"s accommodation with the Zionists. Just how badly this British scheme had backfired was evident in an alarming letter Reginald Wingate received from Hussein in early February. As Wingate reported, "[Hussein] refers to the contingency of suicide as [an] alternative to political bankruptcy.... The phraseology is vague, but the Sherif of Mecca appears to be affected by apprehensions caused by the Allies" pro-Zionist declarations."
It was at this juncture that Lawrence became ensnared. In late January, he had penned an essay for an even more restricted version of the Arab Bulletin, one seen by only a handful of officials, in which he"d strongly touted Faisal"s base of support in Syria, while besmirching his opponents there as dupes of French or German propaganda. While the article was a fairly transparent effort to boost Faisal"s claim to authority in Syria, it also helped alert those British officials grappling with the Arab fallout from Balfour that perhaps it was Faisal, not Hussein, whom they should be looking to for help-and, of course, wooing Faisal meant going through Lawrence. In early February, just days after Lawrence"s article appeared, Gilbert Clayton informed Mark Sykes that "I have urged Lawrence to impress on Faisal the necessity of an entente with the Jews."
The irony of being enlisted to sell Faisal on a policy with which he himself vehemently disagreed was not lost on Lawrence, and he had only halfheartedly agreed to do so. "As for the Jews," he"d answered Clayton from Tafileh, "when I see Faisal next I"ll talk to him, and the Arab att.i.tude shall be sympathetic-for the duration of the war at least." There was a limit to how far Lawrence would go, though; as he informed Clayton, if some public declaration by Faisal was hoped for, that "is rather beyond my province."
But however much he opposed the policy, Lawrence was enough a pract.i.tioner of realpolitik to realize he had little choice in the matter; the Balfour Declaration was a fait accompli, the Arab rebels were hardly in a position to renounce their alliance with the British over it, so the chief goal now must be to limit its damage or to play it for advantage elsewhere. In this latter category, the obvious candidate was greater Syria. Lawrence could see a calculus whereby, in return for the Arab rebels ceding to Balfour, a grateful Britain would then uphold the rebels" claim to the rest of Syria against the French. The problem was, Lawrence had sufficiently lost faith in his own government to realize that this was a very risky bet.
So what other cards to play? Certainly the most radical-and perilous-was to negotiate with the Turks. In early February, Faisal had received another secret peace feeler from General Mehmet Djemal, the new commander of the Turkish Fourth Army. This missive had been a good deal more specific and accommodating than Djemal Pasha"s previous letter, and Faisal had sent an equally specific, if guarded, reply. While overtly rebuffing the overture, he had also left the door open for a possible settlement if the Turks withdrew their troops from Arabia and southern Syria. This was not such a deal-breaking ultimatum as it might sound; by February 1918, the Young Turks were already looking to concentrate their military efforts on reclaiming those Turkic lands being vacated by the defeated Russians, and might be quite happy to abandon the impoverished and quarrelsome Arab regions to do so.
But before anything so drastic as cutting a deal with the Turks, there was one more potential actor who could aid the Arab cause: the Americans. This was almost certainly why Lawrence found the time to meet with William Yale in Cairo.
Since bringing his country into the war in April 1917, President Wilson had repeatedly stressed that the age of imperialism was over, that his crusade for the world to "be made safe for democracy" also meant self-determination and independence for oppressed peoples and "small nations" everywhere. It had taken his European allies some time to accept that the American president actually held to such a quaint notion, but all doubt was dispelled with Wilson"s "Fourteen Points for Peace" proclamation in January 1918.
Probably more than any other single doc.u.ment of the twentieth century, Wilson"s Fourteen Points captivated a global audience. Amid the abject and unending ruin of World War I, the American president had outlined a semi-utopian vision of how the earth was to function in the future, a radical sweeping away of the imperial structure that had held sway for millennia, in favor of all peoples enjoying the right to self-determination, a world in which patient negotiation at a "League of Nations" might make war obsolete. So profound and revolutionary was this doc.u.ment that it sent shock waves through all the imperial powers, the war-shattered citizenry of Berlin and Vienna seeing it as a potential pathway out of their misery just as much as their brethren in London and Paris and Rome. Adding to its attraction was that in simple, unambiguous language, Wilson had laid out a road map-his Fourteen Points-for how this process would begin.
The twelfth point of that proclamation was taken up with the dispensation of the Ottoman Empire. While the American president decreed that the Turkish portion of that empire should remain its own sovereign state, "the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be a.s.sured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development." To Lawrence, as to most other objective readers, that didn"t sound at all like the Sykes-Picot Agreement, nor, for that matter, like the externally imposed Balfour Declaration.
In his conversation with William Yale, Lawrence emphasized the enormous esteem in which Arabs of all stripes held the United States. Indeed, so forcefully did Lawrence hit on this note that in his summing up of their conversation for Leland Harrison, Yale noted that the main points "upon which all evidence is agreed, are the distrust of the Arabs in the good faith of England and of France; the opposition to Zionism; and the complete confidence of the Arabs in the United States."
Idle flattery had never been one of Lawrence"s strong suits, and this surely wasn"t the motive behind his message to the American agent. Rather, as Yale wrote, "he declares that later, if things should not turn out as well as is expected, and if there should be an imminent danger of the disaffection of the Arabs, a declaration by the United States concerning the future of the Arabs and their country would prove to be a "trump card" to play against the Turko-German propaganda, and he feels that such a declaration would have an enormous effect upon the Arabs."
Perhaps lulled by Lawrence"s candor on other matters, Yale appears to have accepted this argument at face value-or at least not pondered it too deeply. If he had, he might have realized that such an American declaration would be a far less effective tool against "Turko-German propaganda"-after all, the United States was at war with Germany, so her motives would naturally be suspect-than against the acquisitive aspirations of America"s allies, Britain and France. In essence, and while obviously of far less treasonable consequence than negotiating with Turkey, Lawrence was looking to a foreign government as the vehicle by which to undermine the policies of his own.
To that end, the time Lawrence carved out of his hectic Cairo schedule to meet with William Yale would seem well spent. In the months just ahead, the State Department"s special agent would increasingly urge his government to take a more active role in Middle Eastern affairs, and to stand with the Arabs against those who would subordinate them.
DURING THE SAME week that Yale and Lawrence were meeting in Cairo, on the evening of March 14, about a dozen men gathered in a stateroom of SS Canberra as it lay to its mooring in the Italian port city of Taranto. Nine were members of a group called the Zionist Commission, while two more were British government liaisons, or "minders," tasked to both facilitate and monitor that group"s work. The meeting was intended as a kind of last-minute strategy session, for in the morning the Canberra, a converted Australian steamship, would sail for Egypt, the starting point of the Zionist Commission"s historic mission to the Middle East.
Framing the task before them was William Ormsby-Gore, the British Conservative member of Parliament who had become an ardent convert to Zionism, and who now served alongside Mark Sykes on the British War Cabinet"s Near East Committee. In the four months since the Balfour Declaration"s release, Arab opposition had only grown more strident. The primary goal of the commission, Ormsby-Gore explained, was to a.s.sure the leaders of both the Christian and Muslim Arab communities that they had nothing to fear from a Jewish "national home" in Palestine.
Chaim Weizmann, the head of the delegation sailing to Egypt, then bluntly laid out his "one leading principle" for the mission, "which was that until the end of the war, the Arabs were a military a.s.set to the British government. After the war, they might become a liability." In short, now wasn"t the time to be confrontational with those who opposed them. Rather, the goal was to mollify and to calm, to bide their time and look for advantage in the future.
Needless to say, this was hardly Aaron Aaronsohn"s vision of their mission-but then he was only tangentially a member of the commission at all. Back in London, there had been such fierce opposition to his inclusion by some other committee members that his official status was now that of a mere adjunct "agricultural expert," and that only on the insistence of American Zionist leaders like Louis Brandeis.
Part of this resistance stemmed from the revelations about his NILI spy ring. That had sparked fierce debate within both the Zionist community and international Jewry as a whole, with many accusing the spy mastermind of having endangered the very existence of the Palestine yeshuv through his actions. Just as worrisome, though, was the scientist"s reputation for argumentativeness, for it was hard to imagine a more exquisitely delicate diplomatic mission than that being undertaken by the pa.s.sengers on the Canberra.
At the same time that they attempted to calm Arab fears of a Jewish takeover, the commission needed to unite the deeply fractious Jewish community in Palestine under the Zionist banner. The best, perhaps only, way to do this was to convince them of the dramatic changes soon to be coming to Palestine in the wake of the Balfour Declaration-in other words, nearly the precise opposite of what they would be telling the Arabs. In addition to these const.i.tuencies were the British military and political officials in the region. Even those favorably disposed toward the Balfour Declaration tended to view it as an extraordinary complication, a new British commitment to compete with those already made to the Arabs and the French.
In the Canberra stateroom, Weizmann laid out with a broad brush how this complex initiative was to proceed. Obviously, the favor of British officials would be won or lost depending on whether the Zionists made their lives less or more difficult, so the first task was to mollify the Arabs. To this end, it would be publicly and repeatedly stated by the commission-and by "commission" in this context, Chaim Weizmann was referring specifically to Chaim Weizmann-that the Zionists had no intention of trying to install a Jewish state in Palestine at the end of the war, nor did they intend to start buying up land. To the contrary, the Zionists fully supported the British authorities" recent moratorium on land sales in Palestine, and were only looking for the opportunity for those Jews who wished to do so to return to the land of their forebears, to engage in its political and economic development hand in hand with the region"s other religious or ethnic communities.
This was to be the overt message, at least. As Weizmann went on to explain, Zionist organizations needed to actively encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine on a large scale, and to stockpile funds for the purchase of land once the sales moratorium was lifted. Certainly there was no backing away from the ultimate goal-the creation of a Jewish state-but nothing to gain by acknowledging it publicly.
At least initially, this complicated dance was performed to great effect. After an ecstatic welcome by the Jewish community in Alexandria-hundreds of schoolchildren lined the wharf to sing the Hebrew song "Hatikvah" ("The Hope")-the Zionist Commission continued on to an even warmer reception in Cairo. To both British officials and members of the Syrian exile community in Egypt, Weizmann stressed time and again the benign intentions of the Zionist cause. As Kincaid Cornwallis, Gilbert Clayton"s deputy at the Arab Bureau, reported on April 20, the Zionist leader told a delegation of Arabs known as the Syrian Committee that "it was his ambition to see Palestine governed by some stable Government like that of Great Britain, that a Jewish Government would be fatal to his plans and that it was simply his wish to provide a home for the Jews in the Holy Land where they could live their own national life, sharing equal rights with the other inhabitants." Further, Weizmann a.s.sured his Arab listeners that the status of Muslim holy places would remain inviolate, spoke with great sympathy of the Arab Revolt against the Turks, and even suggested it was he who had pressed on the British the land-buying moratorium. "Suspicion still remains in the minds of some," Cornwallis concluded his report, "but it is tempered by the above considerations, and there is little doubt that it will gradually disappear if the Commission continues its present att.i.tude of conciliation."
Among those with an intimate view of this charm offensive was U.S. State Department special agent William Yale. One of the Syrian Committee leaders whom Weizmann repeatedly met with in Cairo was a man named Suleiman Bey Na.s.sif, who also happened to be one of the troika of Jerusalem businessmen who had held the oil concessions purchased by Standard Oil in 1914. Yale had stayed in close touch with Na.s.sif since coming to Cairo, and from the exiled businessman he received a detailed account of those meetings with Weizmann. "On the whole," Yale reported to the State Department, "these conferences were a success, the Syrian leaders came away from them with the impression that the Zionists did not wish to impose a Jewish government in Palestine, and that the Jews were coming to Palestine under conditions and with ideas that they could accept."
But if the Syrians were convinced, Yale harbored doubts. For one thing, he found it odd that the Zionist Commission would soon be traveling on to Palestine, their way facilitated by the British government, while Na.s.sif and his fellow Syrian Committee members remained barred from the region. Yale"s suspicions deepened further when he had a chat with Louis Meyer, the sole American "observer" delegate to the commission.
Perhaps Meyer was another of those who didn"t fully appreciate the duties of a State Department special agent, or maybe he was simply lulled by the prospect of talking to a fellow American, but he went decidedly off script in his meeting with William Yale. As Yale would recall, "Meyer told me very directly that just because Weizmann was currently disavowing any intention of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, that didn"t imply that he was bound to that disavowal for the future. Instead, the ultimate goal is a Jewish nation under either British or American protection."
As he probed further, Yale ascertained that the plans for that Jewish nation were in fact quite well advanced. Indeed, within the Zionist Commission was an ongoing debate over what should become of Palestine"s Arab population once nationhood had been achieved, with those arguing that "cheap Arab labor" was essential "to the growth and success of Zionism" pitted against those who foresaw the day when non-Jews would have to be expelled. In the end, Meyer opined, it came down to numbers, that "as in the [American] south the white population would never submit to a domination by the negroes, so a Jewish minority in Palestine would never submit to a domination by an Arab majority."
To the American intelligence agent, the commission increasingly appeared to be a kind of political Potemkin village, and he took at least a small measure of delight when the facade it was presenting to the world suffered its first small tear. As might have been predicted, that tear came at the hands of Aaron Aaronsohn.
Day after day in Cairo, Aaronsohn suffered in silence through the interminable meetings and speeches to which the commission was subjected, his frustration piqued just as much by the long-winded and quarrelsome Jewish delegations as those of the Arabs. One protracted session with a group of Jewish religious notables, in which Weizmann had been forced to patiently explain why Zionism was not antireligious, had almost proved too much; as Aaronsohn railed in his diary, "once again, pearls have been thrown down in front of the pigs of the community."
Unfortunately, the agronomist reached his breaking point at the worst possible time, during a meeting with Suleiman Na.s.sif"s Syrian Committee. When one of the Arabs suggested that Jewish settlers tended to be clannish and exclusively traded with their own, to the detriment of Arabs, a furious Aaronsohn rose to denounce the charge as a lie. Weizmann swiftly tried to defuse the situation, offering that while such a lamentable state of affairs might well have occurred in the past, steps would be taken to ensure it didn"t in the future. But Aaronsohn"s public outburst cast an understandable pall over the gathering. "It is to be hoped," Yale wryly reported to the State Department, "that Dr. Weizmann will keep Mr. Aaronsohn in the background in all the [future] dealings of the Commission with the Arabs."
Weizmann obviously thought along similar lines. At the next conference with the same Syrian Committee a few days later, Aaronsohn was nowhere to be seen.
ON THE MORNING of April 2, Lawrence and a small entourage of bodyguards set out from Guweira, bound for the Syrian interior. It was the first time Lawrence had been on a camel in over a month, and the journey quickly lifted his spirits. "The abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me," he wrote, "and rendered my mind vacant with its superfluous greatness, a greatness achieved not by the addition of thought to its emptiness, but by its subtraction. In the weakness of earth"s life was mirrored the strength of heaven, so vast, so beautiful, so strong."
Pastoral splendor aside, this trek had been made necessary by a worrisome feature on the map of Syria, one that called into question General Allenby"s proposed march on Damascus. While the British army held a strong and orderly line across the breadth of central Palestine, an approximately thirty-mile span extending from the Mediterranean sh.o.r.e above Jaffa all the way to the Jordan River, everything east of the Jordan still lay in Turkish hands. This meant that the farther the British pushed north for Damascus, the more exposed they would become to a Turkish counterattack on their ever-lengthening eastern flank. This danger would have been vastly reduced had the Moab Plateau been seized, but, following Zeid"s sabotaging of that effort, British war planners had come up with a new scheme, a preliminary operation to pave the way for the main thrust on Damascus.
In consultation with Lawrence at those headquarters meetings in late February, it had been decided that the three-thousand-man Arab army encamped in Aqaba would storm the critical railhead town of Maan, just thirty miles northeast of the Arabs" forward headquarters at Guweira. Both to mask that attack and to prevent Turkish reinforcements from being rushed to Maan, a British cavalry force would simultaneously sweep across the top of the Dead Sea, some 120 miles above Maan, to destroy critical stretches of the Hejaz Railway in the vicinity of the town of Amman. Once Maan was firmly in Arab hands, all Turkish troops to the south, including those still holding Medina, would be permanently stranded. By then turning their attention to the north, the Arab army and British auxiliary forces could quickly clear the railway of all the small Turkish outposts below Amman. If all went according to plan, the British and their Arab allies would then have a unified east-west battle line across almost the entire length of greater Syria, allowing for the push on Damascus to commence.
The role chosen for Lawrence in this rollup operation was relatively limited, but one for which he was uniquely qualified. As other British advisors oversaw the princ.i.p.al engagement, the a.s.sault on Maan, he was to take a small group of rebels one hundred miles north to a valley known as Atatir. There he would join with other tribal forces to conduct "worrying" raids against the Turks around Amman in conjunction with the British cavalry raid coming from the west. With that raid tentatively scheduled for early April, Lawrence had set out from Guweira a few days ahead of time to get into place.
By April 6, his party had reached the valley of Atatir. In Lawrence"s rendering, the place was like an Eden in the first burst of spring, its hills and streambanks a riot of young sawgra.s.s and wildflowers. "Everything was growing," he wrote, "and daily the picture was fuller and brighter till the desert became like a rank water-meadow. Playful packs of winds came crossing and tumbling over one another, their wide, brief gusts surging through the gra.s.s, to lay it momentarily in swathes of dark and light satin, like young corn after the roller."
If Lawrence"s high spirits and focus on the beauty surrounding him seemed a bit incongruous for a man preparing to go into battle, another detail made it even more so. Just before setting out for Atatir, he had learned that two of the men he"d left to guard the Azraq citadel had died from cold over the brutally harsh winter. One was Daud, one of the pair of camp imps Lawrence had taken on as his personal attendants six months earlier. The bearer of that news had been Daud"s inseparable companion, Farraj.
"These two had been friends from childhood," Lawrence noted in Seven Pillars, "in eternal gaiety, working together, sleeping together, sharing every sc.r.a.pe and profit with the openness and honesty of perfect love. So I was not astonished to see Farraj look dark and hard of face, leaden-eyed and old, when he came to tell me that his fellow was dead, and from that day till his service ended, he made no more laughter for us.... The others offered themselves to comfort him, but instead he wandered restlessly, gray and silent, very much alone." Despite his grief, or perhaps because of it, Farraj had joined Lawrence on the trek north.
In Atatir, Lawrence received word from the British army-but it was not at all what he"d expected to hear. According to the plan worked out at headquarters, the mixed cavalry and infantry force, some twelve thousand men in all, was to charge up from the Jordan valley to seize the town of Salt, in the hills some ten miles west of Amman. From there, a raiding party would continue on to destroy the most vulnerable points on the Hejaz Railway-two high-spanning bridges and a tunnel-outside Amman. But with the enemy apparently tipped to their plans, the attack force had been met in Salt by entrenched units of German and Turkish soldiers, and what was envisioned as a jaunt had turned into a b.l.o.o.d.y two-day battle. When at last Salt was secured and the raiding party made for the railway at Amman, the enemy had been waiting there, too, forcing the British to turn back without achieving any of their princ.i.p.al objectives. But then the news grew even worse: having suffered some two thousand casualties, the British had been forced out of Salt and were now scrambling back across the Jordan with the Turks in close pursuit.
"It was thought that Jerusalem would be recovered [by the Turks]," Lawrence wrote of the ever more ominous reports he received in Atatir. "I knew enough of my countrymen to reject that possibility, but clearly things were very wrong." Worse than the physical defeat, though, was the psychological effect it was likely to have on the Arabs. "Allenby"s plan had seemed modest, and that we [British] should so fall down before the Arabs was deplorable. They had never trusted us to do the great things which I had foretold." With the rout at Salt, those doubts were sure to be deepened.
With nothing left to do around Amman, Lawrence turned south with fifteen of his bodyguards to join in the ongoing a.s.sault of Maan-but the ill-starred nature of this venture wasn"t over yet. The next day, in the desert outside the hamlet of Faraifra, an eight-man Turkish foot patrol was spotted haplessly trudging along the railway ahead. After their fruitless mission north, Lawrence"s men begged for permission to attack the outnumbered and exposed patrol. "I thought it too trifling," he recalled, "but when they chafed, agreed."
As the Turks scurried to take cover in a railway culvert, Lawrence dispatched his men into flanking positions. Too late, he noticed Farraj; completely on his own, the young camp attendant had spurred his camel and was charging directly at the enemy. As Lawrence watched, Farraj abruptly drew his mount up beside the railway culvert; there was a shot, and then Farraj fell from view. "His camel stood unharmed by the bridge, alone," Lawrence wrote. "I could not believe that he had deliberately ridden up to them in the open and halted, yet it looked like it."
When finally Lawrence and the others reached the culvert, they found one Turkish soldier dead and Farraj horribly wounded, shot through the side. With efforts to stanch his bleeding to no avail, Farraj"s companions attempted to lift him onto a camel, even as the young man begged to be left to die. The matter was rather decided when an alarm went up that a Turkish patrol of some fifty soldiers was approaching along the rails.
Knowing the hideous end the Turks often perpetrated on enemy captives, Lawrence and his bodyguards had a tacit understanding to finish off any of their number too badly wounded to travel. With Farraj, this coup de grce task fell to Lawrence. "I knelt down beside him, holding my pistol near the ground by his head so that he should not see my purpose, but he must have guessed it, for he opened his eyes and clutched me with his harsh, scaly hand, the tiny hand of these unripe Nejd fellows. I waited a moment, and he said, "Daud will be angry with you," the old smile coming back so strangely to this gray shrinking face. I replied, "salute him from me." He returned the formal answer, "G.o.d will give you peace," and at last wearily closed his eyes."
After shooting Farraj, Lawrence remounted his camel, and he and his entourage fled as the first Turkish bullets came for them.
Before the day was over, there was to be one more ill.u.s.tration of the mercilessness of this war, and of Lawrence"s growing imperviousness to it. That night, as the party camped a few miles away from Faraifra, an argument developed over who should inherit Farraj"s prize camel. Lawrence settled the dispute by drawing his pistol once more and shooting the animal in the head. At dinner that night, they ate rice and the camel"s butchered carca.s.s. "Afterwards," Lawrence noted, "we slept."
BY MID-APRIL 1918, Djemal Pasha was probably feeling quite sanguine about the future. Defying the rumors of his political demise of just a few months earlier, he remained very much a force within the shadowy CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) leadership, just as respected and feared as before. There was also heartening news from the battlefield. On March 21, Germany had launched its ma.s.sive offensive in France, smashing through the Allied armies before them to make the greatest territorial gains of any Western Front army since the beginning of the war. Indeed, the first wave of that offensive, code-named Michael, had only stalled because the advancing German forces had outrun their supply lines. By April 13, a second offensive, Georgette, was closing on the French coast and the vital seaports there. Suddenly it appeared Germany just might succeed in defeating Britain and France before the incoming Americans could rescue them.
And if Germany was currently experiencing great success on the Western Front battlefield, Turkey wasn"t doing so badly on the Eastern. Having first reclaimed those northeastern provinces that had been occupied by Russia, in early February Turkish troops had taken advantage of the continuing power vacuum brought about by Russia"s defeat to smash into Armenia. By mid-April, those troops were preparing for the next phase of operations, a sweep all the way to the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian Sea and the fantastically rich oilfields of Baku. Rather like Djemal Pasha himself, the Ottoman Empire had become like a strange ever-mutating organism, shorn of influence and authority in one place only to regain it in another.
Looking to the south, it could be argued that earning the displeasure of international Zionism had produced unexpected benefits for Turkey. The Balfour Declaration had won the Zionists to the British, but it had come at the price of an enraged Arab world. That had allowed Djemal and other Ottoman leaders to make appeals to a number of disenchanted Muslim and Christian leaders in Syria, and even to the chief traitor himself, King Hussein in the Hejaz. By mid-April, there were signs that this last and most important overture was starting to bear fruit. As Djemal had learned through his intermediaries in Syria, Hussein"s son Faisal had recently responded to a Turkish peace offer by setting out demands of his own. The two sides were still quite far apart, but if there was any lesson to be learned from the musical-chairs game that World War I had become, it was that everything was fluid, that what had been lost yesterday might be recovered tomorrow. All that really mattered was who won out in the end, and by April 1918 there could be no doubt that the advantage lay with the Central Powers.
This was certainly an a.s.sessment shared by Curt Prfer, who was also in Constantinople that spring. In curious fashion, Germany"s improved situation was allowing him to return to the first great conspiracy he had been involved with, one that had long looked dead but was now suddenly given new life.
For the past six months, Abbas Hilmi II, the deposed khedive of Egypt, had occupied apartments on an upper floor of the Pera Palace hotel in the city. There, he had joined that peculiar cla.s.s of aristocracy to be found in most every European capital during World War I, the princelings and marquises and nawabs placed on ice by their imperial patrons on the off chance that they might prove useful at some point in the future. During that time, the task of keeping the former khedive entertained and feeling important had largely fallen to Curt Prfer. In contrast to his more sober-minded duties as director of the German intelligence bureau, dealing with Abbas and his eclectic entourage was often more akin to babysitting. According to Prfer biographer Donald McKale, "He kept Abbas Hilmi"s bickering advisers, who denounced each other as "English spies," under surveillance, and counseled the ex-Khedive on his difficulties with his son, his three former wives, and a French mistress."
It"s clear, though, that the German intelligence chief also saw Abbas Hilmi as a useful sounding board. Abbas derided the secret negotiations with Faisal Hussein as quite pointless; the Constantinople clique would never actually cede what Faisal was demanding, and Faisal surely knew it. A much better solution, the ex-khedive opined, was for himself to become ruler of Egypt and then fashion a quasi-independent Arab nation with Hussein and Faisal-one on very friendly terms with Turkey and Germany, Hilmi undoubtedly hastened to add.
That had been so much idle talk in the autumn of 1917, but by early 1918 what had seemed far-fetched, even delusional, took on the patina of possibility. By then, the first reliable reports of civic unrest in Egypt were reaching the outside world, with the normally quiescent population enraged by Britain"s draconian martial law rule, as well as by the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement. Then, of course, had come the final collapse of Russia, the string of battlefield successes by Germany and Turkey, the increasing signs that the Arab rebels in Arabia and Syria might be looking for a way out of their alliance with the duplicitous British. For all these reasons, by that April, the idea that Abbas Hilmi II might somehow ascend to the Egyptian throne didn"t seem so crazy after all-and if that happened, Curt Prfer"s patient ministrations at the Pera Palace might pay spectacular dividends for Germany.
Abbas clearly sensed his stock rising, too, so much so that he resurrected a long-cherished goal, one he had first put to Max von Oppenheim three years earlier but which had been consistently denied him. As he informed Curt Prfer, before anything could be decided about Egypt, he needed to meet with the kaiser. Somewhat nonplussed, Prfer said he would see what he could do.
WHEN LAWRENCE MET General Allenby for afternoon tea on May 15, both men were at a low ebb.
After his fruitless trek to Atatir, Lawrence had hurried down to join the Arab a.s.sault on the railhead town of Maan. By the time he got there on April 13, operations were already under way.
The order of battle had called for the attackers to first strike at Maan"s outlying guardhouses in hopes of luring the main Turkish garrison out of its entrenched positions around the railway station. Initially the operation had proceeded as planned, with one outer-ring Turkish post after another falling to the rebels. On April 17, however, the Iraqi commander of the Arab army, tiring of the extended waiting game, overruled the counsel of his British advisors to order a frontal a.s.sault on the train depot. The approach proved just as futile at Maan as it had on a thousand other World War I battlefields. "There was nothing to do," Lawrence wrote, "but see our men volleyed out of the railway station again. The road was littered with crumpled khaki figures."
Lawrence had stayed on in the Maan area for several more days, a.s.sisting other British officers in railway destruction operations to the south, but the battle for the crucial railway town had already been decided by that futile frontal attack. While British military communiques made much of the damage done to the Hejaz Railway below Maan-with some sixty miles of track torn up, the Turkish garrison in Medina was now stranded for good-it was a paltry achievement when measured against the offensive"s objectives.
But even more dispiriting news had awaited Lawrence when he reached Allenby"s headquarters in Ramleh on May 2. Over the previous six weeks, Allied forces on the Western Front had only barely withstood two ma.s.sive German offensives. In antic.i.p.ation of a third, Allenby had been ordered to stand to the defense and to release tens of thousands of his best frontline troops for service in France. It meant there was to be no push on Damascus, that all the losses of the previous month-the failed British cavalry raid on Salt, the disastrous frontal a.s.sault at Maan, the death of Farraj in the desert-had been for naught. To top things off, just prior to Lawrence"s arrival in Ramleh, the same British cavalry commander who"d been thrown out of Salt the first time had decided to have another go; by May 2, and after another fifteen hundred casualties, the last stragglers of this fresh British defeat were drifting back across the front lines.
All of which meant that by the time of Lawrence"s next visit to headquarters and his tea with General Allenby on May 15, both men had been forced to acknowledge that the prospects of a breakthrough on the Syrian front were just as distant as ever-in fact, a good deal more distant, for in the interval since Lawrence"s last trip to headquarters, Allenby"s army had been poached a second time by the Western Front generals. All told, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now slated to lose some sixty thousand soldiers for service in France, about half of its frontline strength, and while London had committed to covering those losses with troops brought over from Iraq and India, it meant the Syrian front would be dormant for many months to come.
But during that tea, and amid describing the ma.s.sive reorganization his army was currently undergoing, Allenby happened to mention the Imperial Camel Corps. This was an elite unit that had been sitting idle in the Sinai for the past six months, and the general now planned to convert it into a conventional horse-mounted cavalry and discard its camels.
From the very outset of the Syrian campaign, the greatest logistical hurdle facing the Arab rebels had been a shortage of both transport and riding camels, a problem that had only grown worse as the size and scope of operations expanded. Because of that shortage, supply lines were always stretched to the breaking point, proposed actions scaled back or canceled outright for lack of mounts. What"s more, the frequent camel-purchasing forays of Lawrence and other British officers had depleted the available stock throughout the region, leading to extortionate prices for the few decent animals left. Now, with the proposed disbanding of the Imperial Camel Corps (ICC), some two thousand of the finest riding mounts in the entire Middle East would suddenly become available.
To Lawrence, it raised an obvious question: "What are you going to do with their camels?" he asked Allenby.
Allenby laughed. "Ask Q."
"Q" was the British quartermaster general, who explained that the camels had been promised to an incoming Indian army division for use as transport. The quartermaster general flatly rejected Lawrence"s appeals, but Allenby was swayed by his argument that using these prize animals for mere transport would be a colossal waste. At dinner that evening, the commander in chief asked Lawrence how, if given the ICC mounts, he proposed to use them.
Lawrence had, of course, antic.i.p.ated the question. In addition, he divined a silver lining to the British cavalry"s ill-fated second attack on Salt. As a result of that failure, the Turks would now be convinced that any future British attack would probably come at that same spot-after all, repeatedly smashing up against the enemy"s strongest points had become something of a British World War I tradition by now-and align their troops accordingly. With the Turks concentrating their forces in the Salt-Amman region, it would allow Lawrence, utilizing the new ICC camels from his desert hideout in Azraq, to strike behind the enemy"s lines and over a wide range of targets. These included the most vital target in all of lower Syria: the railhead town of Deraa, the junction of the princ.i.p.al lifeline of the Turkish forces facing the British in Palestine. At the headquarters dinner table, Lawrence gave Allenby his reply: "To put a thousand men into Deraa any day you please."
While those men might not be able to permanently hold Deraa, Lawrence explained, they would certainly have time to blow up the crucial railroad bridges in Yarmuk, leaving the Turkish forces in Palestine virtually cut off from supply or reinforcement. At this, Allenby turned to the quartermaster general and shook his head in mock sadness: "Q, you lose."
With the promise of the ICC camels, Lawrence rushed back to Faisal"s headquarters. The news had an electrifying effect on the warrior chieftains gathered there, for the "gift" of the two thousand thoroughbreds meant the Arabs could finally take their revolt to the far north in a substantive way. No longer would they be limited to sniping, hit-and-run attacks; by putting enough mounted fighters in the field, they could storm and hold population centers.
It also meant-and this had been a crucial aspect of Lawrence"s thinking-that the Arabs might loosen the British tether. It would still be some time before the ICC camels were delivered, and then they would need to be acclimated to the harder forage of Syria, but within two or three months" time, the Arab rebels wouldn"t have to rely on the actions of the British, now stalemated in Palestine. Instead, they could take their war into the Syrian heartland independently, and with that independence would come the chance to s.n.a.t.c.h Syria for themselves. It was, Lawrence wrote, "a regal gift, the gift of unlimited mobility. The Arabs could now win their war when and where they liked."
SINCE ARRIVING IN Cairo, Aaron Aaronsohn had fallen into a dark and downcast mood. Part of it may have stemmed from his marginalized role with the Zionist Commission, the unseemly manner with which he"d been relegated to the sidelines, but his return to the region after a seven-month absence also made fresh the tragedy that had befallen his NILI organization. In Cairo, he was reunited with two of his brothers, Alex and Sam, and from them he learned more details of their sister"s ghastly end. Particularly enraging to the agronomist was how Sarah and the other NILI members had been essentially handed over by their own kind, the Zichron Yaakov Committee going so far as to post a bounty on the head of the NILI fugitive Joseph Lishansky. Zichron still lay well behind Turkish lines in the spring of 1918, but in contemplating his return there, Aaronsohn noted in his diary that "if I should seek revenge on all the cowards and scoundrels, there would be hardly a half dozen people with whom I could shake hands."
More than anger, though, the memory of Sarah, or Sarati, and his fallen best friend, Absalom Feinberg, seemed to act as a kind of haunting presence on the scientist, constantly intruding on his thoughts. On one occasion, for example, he had been flabbergasted to see William Ormsby-Gore put a telephone call through to Jerusalem. "To telephone from Cairo to Jerusalem!" he marveled in his diary. "If only Sarati and Absa could have lived to see that!"
This haunting only grew worse when the Zionist Commission left Egypt for Palestine at the beginning of April. Aboard the night train taking them past Gaza, a solitary Aaronsohn stood by a window to stare out at the pa.s.sing countryside. Ever the agronomist, he took note of the poor state of the fields-"very little winter cereals, and of a poor quality"-while observing that nothing appeared to have really changed in his two-year absence. "Still," he noted, "we travel by train-and we are with the English! Absa, Absa, where are you? Sarati?"
But also to grow worse in Palestine was Aaronsohn"s pariah status. At one banquet honoring the visiting commission, a group of local Jewish elders refused to sit with the man who had "endangered the Yishuv" through his spying activities. At several other meetings with Jewish delegations, Aaronsohn was excoriated for the alleged strong-arm tactics he had displayed in disbursing international relief funds in the early days of the war. One of the few times any grat.i.tude was shown him came during a welcoming ceremony in the Jewish enclave of Tel Aviv in Jaffa, the same community whose purported plight he had publicized following Djemal Pasha"s evacuation order. As hundreds of young members of the Maccabean Society, a Jewish civic organization, serenaded the visiting commission members, Chaim Weizmann leaned to Aaronsohn"s side. "Well, Aaron," Weizmann said, "you have a great share in all this-and you paid a big price."
That moment was an anomaly, however. Weizmann"s mission to Palestine was far too sensitive to allow for discord, whereas Aaronsohn was a man loath to ever turn the other cheek. After a commission member took Aaronsohn aside to urge that he bridge over a dispute he was having with one Jewish settlement delegation, the scientist haughtily replied that "to bridge it over would mean to establish social relations which are repugnant to me. If my att.i.tude is not prudent, fine."
With Aaronsohn"s feuds extending even to other commission members, Weizmann steadily pushed the agronomist further to the periphery. At times, quite literally; in the group photographs taken of the commission during their time in Palestine, Aaronsohn is usually seen standing off to one side-when included in the portraits at all. By the end of April, he had effectively parted ways to go off and work on a project of his own.
Ironically, that venture was to produce perhaps the most tangible result of the commission"s trip, for by late May, Aaronsohn had completed a remarkable blueprint for agricultural development in southern Palestine. In the papers and maps he pa.s.sed to Windham Deedes at the Arab Bureau was the proposal to quickly put some quarter million acres of uncultivated and "Crown" (held by the Turkish government) land under the plow to help ease the continuing wartime food shortages. Under Aaronsohn"s scheme, the project would be placed under British military control, but with the farming done by Jewish settlers and funding provided by Zionist banks; the Zionist Commission pledged at least a half million pounds. In its execution, all would benefit: food would be provided to the dest.i.tute, so the Arabs would see the material advantage of an increased Jewish presence in Palestine, and the prospect of a decent life would entice more Jews to come.
Of course, once the period of military administration ended, perhaps four or five years, t.i.tle to the quarter million acres would pa.s.s to the Zionists. But as Gilbert Clayton sunnily opined to the Foreign Office in voicing his support for Aaronsohn"s plan, "a small favor granted to one community can easily [be] counterbalanced by similar privileges afforded to the others and thus, in the normal course of administration, gradual progress can be made without causing friction and discontent."
Even with the contribution of his land scheme, however, Aaronsohn remained an outcast with the Zionist Commission-and what held for that panel quite naturally extended to its British benefactors. At the end of May, when General Allenby held a state dinner in Jerusalem for the soon-departing commission, the only a.s.sociate not invited was Aaron Aaronsohn.
TO SKIRT ORDERS with which he disagreed, Lawrence frequently relied on an old standby of Victorian literature: the message that goes missing or isn"t delivered in time. This ruse had been denied him when it came to the British effort to force an entente between the Arab rebel leaders and the Zionists; in this sphere, Lawrence could only delay or impede at the edges. Back in February 1918, when Gilbert Clayton had ordered Lawrence to press Faisal on the matter, his subordinate had replied that he hoped to arrange a Faisal visit to Jerusalem in the near future, and "all the Jews there will report him friendly. That will probably do all you need, without public commitment, which is rather beyond my province."
For an army major to tell a brigadier general what his needs were and the limits he would go in supplying them was no more acceptable in 1918 than it is today, but Clayton apparently accepted Lawrence"s response with equanimity; he surely calculated that even this partial compliance to his order was better than nothing, since there was simply no one else in the British command with Lawrence"s influence on Faisal.
Lawrence changed tactics somewhat when Clayton returned to the topic in May. In light of the continuing suspicions that Chaim Weizmann and his commission were encountering among the Arab population in Palestine, Weizmann had proposed a meeting between him and Faisal. The British leadership in Palestine had heartily embraced the idea and, on May 22, Clayton sent a telegram to Lawrence in Aqaba seeking his counsel. "What arrangements do you suggest?" the general asked. "I am of opinion you should be present at interview.... Let us have your views on above points at an early date, please."
Lawrence certainly received the message-he was in Aqaba the following day-but there is no record of his answering. On May 24, with the timetable for Weizmann"s proposed visit now firmed up-he was scheduled to sail for Aqaba in just five days-another secret cable was fired off, this time from Allenby"s headquarters to the attention of the overall Aqaba base commander. "Interview would take place at Arab headquarters to which they would motor. Wire if this is convenient to Sherif Faisal and Lawrence. It is important latter should be present at interview. Urgent reply requested."
Once again, Lawrence was most certainly informed of this cable, but he still didn"t respond. Instead, on May 27, with Weizmann"s arrival in Aqaba imminent, he found reason to depart on another reconnaissance mission to the north, conveniently falling out of easy communication until Weizmann had come and gone.
In his absence, the meeting between Faisal and the British Zionist leader took place on the afternoon of June 4. It was an amicable and pleasant enough encounter, with Weizmann ostentatiously donning an Arab headdress for the occasion, even as Faisal avoided committing himself to anything of much substance, arguing that ultimate authority lay with his father in Mecca, and that matters in Syria remained far too unsettled to start getting into specifics. Still, Weizmann was very satisfied by the talk, as were British officials. As Clayton would report to the Foreign Office after receiving a detailed report of the meeting, "In my opinion, the interview has had excellent results in promoting mutual sympathy and understanding between Weizmann and Faisal. Both are frank and open in their dealings, and a personal interview such as has now taken place can result in nothing but the good."
That a.s.sessment was unlikely to be shared by Lawrence, who returned to Aqaba from his reconnaissance mission on June 8, four days after the Faisal-Weizmann meeting. To him, this British-imposed concord could only provide more ammunition to Faisal"s-and by extension Hussein"s-rivals in the Arab world.
But again, there was little to do about it. The British weren"t going to walk back from Balfour. Any pressure the Americans might bring to bear in pursuit of Wilson"s Fourteen Points plan wouldn"t come until a peace conference, their influence on Middle Eastern affairs in the meantime resting somewhere between nil and nonexistent. As for the Arabs striking out on their own, the mounts of the Imperial Camel Corps had yet to be delivered, and even when they were, it would be some time before they had sufficiently acclimated to the Syrian landscape for large-scale operations. Of course, there was one more possibility: a rapprochement with the Turks. By coincidence, Faisal had received another secret message from General Mehmet Djemal just two days before Weizmann showed up in Aqaba.
In fact, Faisal"s flirtation with the Turkish general was not unknown to senior British officials. Back in late March, a spy had given Reginald Wingate a copy of Faisal"s note to Mehmet Djemal outlining his terms for negotiations. "It is difficult to say how much importance should be attached to this correspondence," Wingate informed the Foreign Office, "and it would be inadvisable to enquire directly from Emir Faisal as to his motives.... [But] it confirms my suspicion that Sharif leaders, depressed by general military situation and doubt of Allies" policies in Palestine and Syria, are putting out feelers to ascertain Turkish official opinion about future of Arab countries."
To their credit, those Foreign Office officials apprised of this news reacted with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy. After all, several pointed out, Britain was unofficially negotiating with some half dozen Turkish emissaries in Switzerland, so it would be a bit unseemly for them to take umbrage at others doing so. Instead, and at Mark Sykes"s first suggestion, they set themselves to the task of neutralizing the threat in gentlemanly fashion: by bestowing Faisal with a medal. Over the next several months, a host of senior British officials weighed in on the debate over just what commendation might sufficiently impress the Arab rebel leader to ensure his loyalty.
Curiously, one of Faisal"s strongest defenders had been Gilbert Clayton, who hastened to inform the Foreign Office in early April that the charge of treachery against Faisal appeared based on a misunderstanding, that the thrust of his overture to Mehmet Djemal seemed actually directed at an Arab-Turk reconciliation in the postwar era. Nonetheless, Clayton had urged, London should avail herself of this opportunity "to cement the Arab Alliance with Great Britain by all possible means." Those means included recognizing Faisal"s authority in all territories east of the Jordan River, and compelling the French "to give an authoritative statement" relinquishing her claims to greater Syria. But perhaps Clayton"s generous view of Faisal"s actions wasn"t so curious given his source; as Clayton noted to the Foreign Office, he had been provided this interpretation-and perhaps his list of recommendations, too-by Major T. E. Lawrence.
The precise role Lawrence played in the secret negotiations between Faisal and the Turks has never been made clear; much like the timing of his disclosure to Faisal about Sykes-Picot, Lawrence seemed to appreciate that he was on very delicate legal ground, and gave vague and contradictory answers on the matter to his early biographers. What is clear is that he saw in those negotiations a powerful potential weapon to use against his government, a reminder that should the Arabs be betrayed, they had somewhere else to go.
"At the present day," Mehmet Djemal"s new letter of June 2 began, "the Ottoman government, the mightiest representative of Islam, has obtained supremacy over the greatest enemies of the Mohammedan religion. I am persuaded that I am honoring the Prophet"s name by inviting His most excellent and n.o.ble grandson [Faisal] to partic.i.p.ate in the protection of Islam for, by ensuring the supremacy of the Turkish army, a safe and happy life will be obtained for all true believers." The general had closed by proposing a meeting with Faisal in four days" time, during which "I feel sure that we shall be able to fulfill the wishes of all Arabs."
Faisal didn"t take up the offer of a face-to-face meeting, but did send another reply. In that unsigned letter, he again proposed that all Turkish troops below Amman be withdrawn, and further suggested that Syria"s future relationship with Turkey be modeled along the lines of the loose federation existing between Austria and Hungary. If that still left matters a bit vague, Faisal"s other preconditions didn"t: all Arab soldiers in the Turkish army were to be released for service in the Arab army, and "if the Arab and Turkish Armies fight side by side against the enemy, the Arab Army is to be under its own Commander." This was no longer talk of a mere rapprochement-and certainly not one in the postwar era-but rather of an Arab-Turkish military alliance against the Allies. By best evidence, Faisal sent his offer to Mehmet Djemal from Aqaba no later than June 10. For the two days preceding, he had been joined in Aqaba by T. E. Lawrence. It wasn"t until that same day of June 10 that Lawrence boarded SS Arethusa in Aqaba harbor, bound for Cairo and more consultations with the British military hierarchy.
The mark of a master strategist is his or her utter adaptability to circ.u.mstance, the pursuit of advantage divorced from sentiment. Whether or not Lawrence had a hand in writing Faisal"s latest note to Mehmet Djemal, just days later he went into conference with the man he"d managed to avoid meeting in Aqaba: Chaim Weizmann.
By all accounts, those talks were very cordial. Weizmann was certainly keyed to the fact that it was upon this mid-ranking British officer that the success or failure of his appeal to the Arab Revolt leaders largely rested. And as one gamesman to another, Lawrence was surely impressed by the Zionist leader"s agility in navigating the political minefield of Palestine, the considerable success he"d had in calming Arab concerns with one set of talking points while galvanizing the Jewish population to Zionism with another. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two master strategists soon found their way to common ground.
It was a common ground rooted in mutual dependence. To gain a "national home" in Palestine, the Jews obviously needed the British to win the war, which also meant they needed to support the Arab Revolt. In his meeting with Faisal, Weizmann had offered to employ the international Zionist movement in promotion of the cause of Arab independence, and with Lawrence in Ramleh, Weizmann got more specific: that promotion could also extend to funds and military training for the Arabs to fight the Turks. For his part, Lawrence saw a potentially pivotal role the Zionists might play in a postwar Syria. As he noted in a secret June 16 report on his meeting with Weizmann, "as soon as Faisal is in possession of [greater Syria], the [landowner] effendi cla.s.s, the educated cla.s.s, the Christians and the foreign elements will turn against him.... If the British and American Jews, securely established under British colors in Palestine, chose this moment to offer to the Arab State in Syria help ... Sherif Faisal would be compelled to accept." With that help, Faisal could "dispense with" his domestic opposition. Better yet, given the Zionists" deep-rooted suspicions of the French, Faisal would have a ready ally in neutralizing them as well.
That was all in the future, though. In the interim, Lawrence counseled the Foreign Office, the Arabs should neither seek nor accept Zionist aid, nor should Weizmann be given the meeting he urgently sought, an audience with King Hussein.
Lawrence"s apparent conversion on the Zionist issue had a gladdening effect on his superiors, even if there was a marked limit to that conversion. Whether due to naivete or studied wishful thinking, most British officials in the region who had dealt with Chaim Weizmann over the past three months had taken at face value his soothing vision of a Jewish community in Palestine living in political and economic harmony with the Arab majority. As one schemer sitting across the table from another, however, Lawrence saw through this almost immediately. As he noted in his June 16 report, "Dr. Weizmann hopes for a completely Jewish Palestine in fifty years, and a Jewish Palestine, under a British facade, for the moment."