"I hope things are going well on your side. We are anxiously awaiting news of Townshend"s relief but have heard nothing for ages."
The purpose of Lawrence"s mission was actually twofold, one overt, the other very much veiled. In view of the ongoing crisis at Kut, Kitchener and his allies in the Egyptian intelligence staff hoped the British Indian commanders in Iraq might finally see the wisdom of trying to work with the indigenous Arab tribes that should have been their natural allies all along. The plan was to start sending out a group of Iraqi Arab officers who had defected from the Turks and were now working for the British in Egypt, so that they might forge alliances with local Iraqi tribal leaders, as well as peel away disgruntled Arab units of the Ottoman army.
It was hard to imagine how any of this could be done in time to save Townshend, however, and this gave rise to the second purpose of Lawrence"s mission. Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend"s army go in return for one million English pounds" worth of gold.
If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he"d very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.
A year and a half earlier, he had been magically elevated from civilian to second lieutenant because a general visiting the General Staff map room demanded to be briefed by an officer. Now Lawrence"s superiors in Cairo had abruptly rushed through his temporary promotion to captain, effective his first day at sea, presumably to spare the very senior military commanders he would be meeting in Iraq from the indignity of conferring with a second lieutenant.
A rather more baffling episode had occurred just four days before he"d boarded the Royal George. On March 18, the small French military legation in Cairo had been temporarily recalled to France and, in long-standing military tradition among the European powers, the occasion was marked by the liberal disburs.e.m.e.nt of medals and honorifics. Quite inexplicably, considering his consistent efforts to thwart French ambitions in the region, the outgoing legation had selected Lawrence for the Legion d"Honneur, one of France"s highest awards. Compounding their error, the following year they awarded him the Croix de Guerre avec palme.
Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amus.e.m.e.nt in placing the medal around the neck of a friend"s dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford.
ON THE MORNING of April 5, the Royal George slipped into the bay of the dreary, low-slung port city of Basra, and a Royal Navy launch was sent out to collect its most important pa.s.senger, the newly minted Captain T. E. Lawrence.
As Lawrence soon discovered in Basra, the overt objective of his mission to Iraq, to coax British Indian commanders into launching a hearts-and-minds campaign among the local tribes, had already been mooted. In a series of cables to London while he had been in transit, the new commander in chief of the Indian Army Expeditionary Force in Iraq, General Percy Lake, had already dismissed the scheme as "undesirable and inconvenient."
But as Lawrence conferred with that leadership during his first days in Basra, it was clear that another, more insidious element had doomed his political mission, a toxic fusion of racism and British notions of military superiority. Despite the fresh example of the disaster at Gallipoli-maybe even because of it-many senior British commanders simply couldn"t accept that they might lose to the "rabble" of the Ottoman army yet again. This att.i.tude wasn"t isolated to the narrow-minded generals of British India, but extended all the way to the supreme commander of British forces, General William Robertson, back in London. Upon hearing of the generous surrender terms offered to Townshend by Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander at Kut, after the defeat of Aylmer"s relief column, Robertson had responded, "My general information is to the effect that the difficulties of the Turks are serious. I regard Khalil Bey"s overtures as a confirmation of this and as an indication that, given determined action on our part, success is a.s.sured."
In other words, in the upside-down worldview that this war against its military and cultural inferiors had induced in the British high command, an offer of honorable surrender was only evidence of the enemy"s weakness, and that two relief efforts had ended in abject failure meant a third was sure to succeed.
By the time Lawrence was shuttled up the Tigris River to join the frontline headquarters staff on April 15, this third relief effort was well under way. After the fiasco at Dujaila, there had been a wholesale shakeup of that staff, with Aylmer replaced by a certain Major General George Gorringe. Unfortunately, the changes hadn"t extended to the tactical playbook. Displaying the same fondness for frontal a.s.saults against an entrenched enemy as his predecessor, Gorringe neatly replicated the record of Aylmer"s first relief effort-ten thousand dead and wounded, no breakthrough-in almost precisely the same two-week span.
That final failure ended the uncomfortable existence Lawrence had endured ever since reaching the Snakefly, the British headquarters ship docked in the Tigris River below Kut. As word had spread among the officers on board of the clandestine purpose of his mission-to try to ransom out the Kut garrison-the young captain from Egypt had been pointedly shunned by most everyone. But now, having suffered some twenty-three thousand casualties across nine separate engagements without ever reaching Kut, and with that trapped garrison rapidly nearing starvation, the generals in charge belatedly accepted that Kitchener"s scheme was the only option left.
But even at this eleventh hour, there would be time for an element of farce. Since neither General Townshend nor the commanders hoping to rescue him wished to have such an ignominious endeavor attached to their reputations, through the last days of April, Townshend and General Lake waged a duel of cablegrams, each arguing that the other should carry out the negotiations. Instead, it would ultimately fall on three junior officers-Colonel Edward Beach, Captain Aubrey Herbert, and Captain T. E. Lawrence-to make one last attempt to save the dying men of Kut.
IT HAD ALL the trappings of a Victorian parlor-room melodrama: the dashing and excessively handsome young n.o.bleman, a requisite coterie of flirtatious but chaste women, the cold-blooded archvillain, even the innocent abroad, that out-of-his-depth character who, after various twists and turns, would provide the story with its moral conclusion. Where the small expatriate community of wartime Jerusalem differed from any theatrical counterparts was in the consequences to be paid for ending up on the wrong side of the narrative: imprisonment, exile, even execution. What was also different, of course, was the world that lay beyond those parlor-room windows, not the pleasant English countryside or a tony London street, but a city consumed by death, its streets and alleyways littered with those succ.u.mbed to starvation or typhus, its public squares frequently featuring men hanging from gibbet-gallows.
For William Yale, it was an exceedingly strange, fishbowl existence. With very little to do in the way of work, most every afternoon he met up to play bridge with an eclectic group of friends-a Greek doctor, an Armenian doctor, a retired Turkish colonel, and the Greek bishop of Jerusalem-that diversion giving over in the evenings to larger gatherings in the salons of various middle-aged expatriate women. At these soirees, dominated by dancing and the playing of parlor games, a peculiar s.e.xual dynamic took place. Since there were few single expatriate women remaining in Jerusalem-and any attention paid to one could be quickly interpreted as an interest to marry-the single men flirted, openly and compet.i.tively, with the married women in attendance, often in plain view and with the acquiescence of their husbands. It was all quite harmless and innocent.
But there was nothing truly harmless in wartime Jerusalem, as Yale discovered when he became the favorite of Madame Alexis Frey, an attractive middle-aged French widow who enjoyed the status of grande dame of the city"s salon scene. Yale"s standing with Frey so rankled one of his compet.i.tors, a middle-aged Christian Arab who headed the Turkish Tobacco Regie, or monopoly, in Syria, that the man took Yale aside one day to make a proposal. "How about we divide the ladies of Jerusalem up between the two of us," the businessman said. "For myself, I will reserve Madame Frey, and you can have all the rest."
Yale initially dismissed the proposition as a joke, but thought differently when he next went to the Regie office to purchase his monthly ration of cigarettes, only to be told by the clerks they"d been instructed to not sell to him. That posed a problem since, true to its definition, the Regie was the only place tobacco could be obtained in wartime Jerusalem. Shortly afterward, Yale was informed by the Jerusalem chief of police that his challenger from the Regie was plotting intrigues against him.
"I began to realize that I was up against a jealous, unscrupulous person who would go to great lengths to rid himself of a rival," Yale recalled. "As my business demanded that my position should be such that I be on friendly terms with the Turkish officials and authorities, I saw I was playing a dangerous game. I decided to let Madame Frey settle the issue, so I told her to send Monsieur X packing or our affair was over."
When Madame Frey explained that that was quite impossible given the Regie man"s prominence, the American oilman withdrew from the Frey salon in a huff. Yale"s manservant, a grizzled old Kurd named Mustapha Kharpoutli, came up with an alternative solution. "Oh Master," he counseled Yale, "I know where "the pig" goes every evening, so give the order and I will finish with him." As Kharpoutli explained, the Regie man left a particular woman"s house every night at midnight. "It"s on a lonely street. I will kill him tonight if you tell me to."
Yale declined that offer, and shortly after his friends engineered a brief rapprochement with Alexis Frey. It was a risky business, for the city"s thicket of martial law edicts afforded almost endless possibilities for a rival to exact revenge; during Frey"s next curfew-violating salon, her home was raided and half the attendees hauled off to jail, presumably after a tip-off from the jealous Regie man.
The episode served to remind Yale that his life now was like a game of musical chairs, one with extremely high stakes. The ultimate arbiter of that game, of course, was Djemal Pasha. On his word, most anyone could be cast into prison or summarily banished to some distant village in the Syrian wastelands-if often only to be just as swiftly released or restored according to Djemal"s whim.
To stay in Djemal"s good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having a.s.sumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential. William Yale"s relationship with the Conde de Ballobar was a tricky one: a good ally to have if matters went awry, but also his most formidable compet.i.tion when it came to fishing in Jerusalem"s spa.r.s.e pool of attractive and available women.
For day-to-day protection, Yale was much more likely to turn to another pillar of Jerusalem society, a charming middle-aged aristocrat named Ismail Hakki Bey al-Husseini, one of the three Jerusalem businessmen from whom Socony had obtained the original Kornub concessions back in the spring of 1914. Yale had developed a friendship with Ismail Bey during his extended stay in Palestine prior to the war"s outbreak. That had quickly resumed upon Yale"s return in 1915, and by the spring of 1916 the oilman considered Ismail Bey his closest friend in the Middle East. Of course, it probably didn"t hurt that the Husseinis were one of the most powerful and well-respected families in all of southern Syria, Ismail Bey being a particularly prominent member.
But if the expatriate community had its protectors, it also had its predators. Of these, none was more dreaded than a young German officer who flitted in and out of the city with some regularity, Curt Prfer. As Count de Ballobar noted of Prfer, despite "his harmless appearance [he] is nothing less than a secret agent of the German government," and "in possession of an extraordinary talent." What made Prfer such a figure of menace, quite beyond the creepiness factor of his whispery voice, was that he seemed to be the one German whom Djemal Pasha trusted implicitly. Run afoul of Curt Prfer, and even the determined entreaties of Count de Ballobar or Ismail Hakki Bey might prove useless. Even the entreaties of Djemal Pasha, in fact. One afternoon, Yale happened to be visiting an expatriate couple he was friendly with when their front door was kicked in by Prfer and two accompanying policemen. While the couple had claimed to be Swiss, it was an open secret within the foreign community-and to Djemal Pasha-that they were actually French, a detail Prfer had apparently just uncovered. When he demanded the couple be cast into internal exile, an unhappy Djemal had no choice but to sign the expulsion order.
Prfer"s authority became especially worrisome to William Yale in the winter of 1916 when he discovered that he and the German intelligence agent were locked in a three-way compet.i.tion-the third was the ubiquitous Ballobar-for the same woman, a beautiful Jewish-American girl living in Jerusalem. Concerned that her American suitor might soon be arrested, the girl finally confided to Yale that Prfer frequently interrogated her about him and his activities. "Clearly I was under suspicion."
Surviving in wartime Syria required not only a finely honed selfishness, but a hardening of the heart. In this, Yale, the consummate survivor, was not at all immune. Every day for months on end, he had to step over the bodies of the dead and dying as he traversed Jerusalem. Every week he heard stories of those who had fallen from favor being disappeared, either figuratively in the form of banishment or quite literally in the form of the gibbet-gallows. To protect himself and his interests in such a place, he became increasingly cold-blooded, too, so much so that he would eventually turn on his closest friend. To his later embarra.s.sment, this didn"t stem from matters of personal safety; William Yale did it for oil.
Prior to his first meeting with Djemal Pasha in the spring of 1915, Yale had decided to divide Socony"s pet.i.tion for concessionary rights in Palestine into two separate requests, figuring that to ask for the entire half million acres desired at one fell swoop was to invite a backlash. The problem was that, having long since sewn up the concessionary rights to the first quarter million acres and done nothing with them, by the spring of 1916 the oilman had still not mustered the gall to ask after the second.
What he needed was some kind of opening to alter the playing field, but just what that might be was hard to imagine-especially since Djemal had clearly cottoned to Socony"s game. At the beginning of 1916, the Constantinople office had labored mightily to obtain concessionary rights to several large tracts around Damascus, going so far as to make the American consul in that city, Samuel Edelman, their point man in the effort. In late March, however, after Edelman took the matter up with "the supreme factor in these regions"-an obvious reference to Djemal-he cabled back to Socony with some bad news. "[Djemal] says that while recently in Constantinople, the Minister of Mines said to him [that] Standard Oil was not working for the benefit or interest of Turkey, but to shut off compet.i.tion. So long as this suspicion hangs over you, [it] will not be possible to obtain further concessions."
Shortly after that rebuff, however, an opening suddenly presented itself when Yale was once again summoned to Djemal"s headquarters at the German Hospice. As the governor explained, he had recently received reports from military officers in the field of a large pool of oil collected at the base of a mountain in the southern desert. Since this oil was already on the surface, Djemal pointed out, it should be an easy matter to start collecting and refining it at once. As a personal favor, he wanted Yale to go and investigate the site, a small chain of mountains below Beersheva known as Kornub.
Yale instantly realized this "find" was the very same one that J. C. Hill had spotted from a Judean hillside two years earlier, and which he and Rudolf McGovern had ascertained to be iron tailings. But this seemed a detail not worth mentioning to Djemal Pasha. Instead, Yale said he would be happy to investigate the Kornub site, so long as the governor could see his way to approving a few more concessionary tracts. When he left the German Hospice that day, the Standard representative had the pasha"s consent to another quarter million acres of Palestine.
But while preparing for this next concession-procurement expedition Yale suddenly encountered a problem with his best friend, Ismail Hakki Bey. During the first great concession-buying expedition of the previous summer, Ismail Bey had succ.u.mbed to Yale"s entreaties to accompany him on the vague a.s.surance that Socony would compensate him for his services; even though the businessman had no proprietary interest in those concessions, he had relented. To be sure, that collaboration was rooted in more than mere friendship for both men. While Ismail Bey"s cultured company was a welcome addition to the scrofulous a.s.sortment of soldiers and government functionaries who formed the rest of Yale"s retinue, the American also looked to his well-connected friend to smooth out any difficulties that might arise with stubborn landowners or extortionate local officials. From Ismail Bey"s perspective, with Socony clearly planning a ma.s.sive exploration project in Palestine at some point in the future, it only made good business sense to attach to the undertaking however he could.
But when approached by Yale in the late spring of 1916 for his help with the next round of concession-buying, Ismail Bey balked. In the Arab way of doing business, one"s word was inviolate. Ismail Bey had now seen enough of the American way to know that Yale"s a.s.surances of compensation were quite meaningless; what he needed was a written contract. Confronted by this request, Yale explained that as a mere purchasing agent for Socony, he hadn"t the authority to pen such a guarantee, but that if Ismail Bey "wished to know my personal opinion, it was that he had better have confidence in the Company."
That wasn"t good enough for Ismail Bey; he informed his friend that without such a written guarantee, he couldn"t help him.
This placed Yale in a most difficult spot. Over the course of their two-and-a-half-year friendship, he"d come to know all of Ismail Bey"s seven children, and had frequently dined in his Jerusalem home. As in any true friendship, the two had also shared confidences: on Yale"s part, of the British nurse he had met in Jerusalem before the war and hoped one day to marry; on Ismail Bey"s part, of his low opinion of the Ottoman government in general, and his resentment of Djemal Pasha in particular. Compounding Yale"s difficulty was the very prominence of the Husseini name in Syria. Since Ismail Bey had relatives scattered in high government positions throughout the region, a rift between them might not be a matter of simply parting ways; if the businessman chose to stand in his way, the same doors that had previously been flung open for Socony could now be slammed shut.
As Yale recounted in his memoir, "I looked at him and said, "Well, Ismail Bey, much as I will dislike doing it, if you do not agree to cooperate with me, I shall go at once to Djemal Pasha and tell him that you are blocking me, that you are pro-British and are tied up with British interests."
It marked a dramatic transformation in William Yale. In 1911, while working for a wealthy Bostonian industrialist, Yale had refused the pleas of his own bankrupted and desperate father for an introduction to his employer, feeling that trading on his position to arrange such a meeting would be improper. Just five years later, Yale was threatening his best friend with probable death-and not an easy death, but likely one that would only come after protracted torture and after his wives and children had been cast into a dest.i.tute exile-over a business deal.
But it worked. "I studied his face anxiously as I awaited his response," Yale would recall. "Rather abruptly he replied, "I"ll a.s.sist you; I"ll trust the Company." And he did work loyally with me as long as I represented the Company in Palestine."
KHALIL PASHA"S HEADQUARTERS encampment consisted of a single round tent set some four miles back from the front lines at Kut. It was midafternoon before the three British officers, having at last completed their grueling blindfolded journey from no-man"s-land, were ushered inside.
Khalil was a trim man in his midthirties with piercing brown eyes and the handlebar mustache favored by Turkish officers-by all Turkish males, in fact-and despite the desolation of his surroundings, he still retained something of the dapper manner he had perfected in the salons of Constantinople. Aubrey Herbert, during his prewar days as an honorary consul in the Ottoman capital, had come to know Khalil quite well, and once he and his companions had settled in the tent he tried to break the ice with some opening pleasantries. "Where was it that I met Your Excellency last?" Herbert asked in French.
Khalil apparently had a good memory. "At a dance at the British emba.s.sy," he replied, also in French. From there, though, the conversation took a far more somber turn.
It was April 29, and the three British officers had set out for this meeting early that morning, climbing over the forward parapet of a British trenchline and into no-man"s-land under the cover of a white flag. Before them stretched six hundred yards of waist-high meadow gra.s.s, at the far end of which rose the earthen berm of the Turks" trenchworks. Walking to a spot roughly equidistant between the two lines, they stopped and waited for several hours for some response from the Turkish side, buffeted both by the steadily rising heat and by the swarms of blowflies feeding on the rotting corpses that lay all about them. At last, the three men were taken over to the Turkish line, where they were blindfolded and put on horses to take them to Khalil"s headquarters. Having badly hurt his knee in a fall a few days earlier, Lawrence quickly found that he couldn"t ride; taken off his horse but still in blindfold, he was led by the hand by a Turkish soldier, stumbling and limping the four miles to Khalil"s tent.
In stepping out into no-man"s-land that morning, all three men were acutely aware of the humiliating nature of the task they"d been given. So dishonorable was this bribery attempt that Edward Beach would never publicly reveal the mission"s true purpose, Lawrence would only write of it in the most euphemistic fashion, while Aubrey Herbert couldn"t even bring himself to commit the words to the anonymity of his private diary; writing in his journal the previous evening, he noted that the only items they had to bargain with were "Townshend"s guns, exchange of Turkish prisoners, and another thing." Even this ambiguity was ultimately too revealing; when Herbert"s diary was published after the war, that clause was excised altogether.
But as the three officers soon learned in Khalil Pasha"s tent, they actually had even less to bargain with than that. Unbeknownst to them when they"d set out, early that morning an increasingly unhinged Townshend had abruptly agreed to an unconditional surrender. Following military protocol, he then destroyed his remaining pieces of artillery. This act infuriated Khalil Pasha-he had desperately wanted to get his hands on those guns-and it left Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence with little to offer the Turkish commander beyond the gold ransom.
This the British officers couched in terms of a kind of humanitarian a.s.sistance package for the civilian residents of Kut. Surely, they suggested, those innocents had suffered just as badly as the trapped British soldiers through the five-month siege, and some form of financial recompense seemed in order. Khalil Pasha saw through the artifice at once and airily brushed the proposal away.
The negotiating party fared a bit better in asking for a transfer of wounded soldiers. With the Kut garrison now surrendered, the Turkish commander agreed to let British steamers come up with food supplies and take out the worst wounded. This concession encouraged Colonel Beach, the senior negotiator, to try his last card: an exchange of able-bodied prisoners, the survivors in Kut in return for the Ottoman prisoners the British had taken since first coming ash.o.r.e in Iraq.
With an arch expression, Khalil offered an alternative arrangement, a one-for-one exchange of British soldiers for Turkish ones, a separate exchange for Indian soldiers and Arabs. The British officers weren"t quite sure what to make of this offer, but when Herbert remarked that many Arab troops in the enemy army had fought valiantly and Khalil would be lucky to have them back, the Turkish commander"s manner abruptly changed. Holding up a list of the POWs held by the British, Khalil pointed out the preponderance of Arab names. "Perhaps one of our [Turkish] men in ten is weak or cowardly," he said, "but it"s only one in a hundred of the Arabs who are brave.... You can send them back to me if you like, but I have already condemned them to death. I shall like to have them to hang."
Realizing they were being toyed with, the British officers dropped the matter. A short time later, Khalil Pasha gave an affected yawn and announced that he was tired, that he still had many other matters to attend. So ended the last chance to rescue the garrison in Kut. From Khalil"s headquarters, Lawrence, Herbert, and Beach were escorted back to the front line but, as darkness had now fallen, were invited to stay the night inside a Turkish encampment. As Lawrence pointedly wrote in his diary, "they gave us a most excellent dinner in Turkish style."
The following morning, the three officers were led down to the riverbank. In the daylight, they saw one body after another floating by on the Tigris"s swift current. They were Ottoman soldiers, succ.u.mbed to cholera or typhus or battle wounds, and so indifferent were their commanders that their bodies had been tossed into the river rather than buried.
That same day, Townshend formally surrendered his forces at Kut. Both his army and the relief columns that were slaughtered trying to rescue it had been composed largely of Indian soldiers, and to whatever degree racism had contributed to their expendable treatment by their British commanders, those men were now to suffer even worse at the hands of the Turks. With most put to work essentially as slave labor on the Baghdad Railway, of the ten thousand Indian soldiers and camp-followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one-third would live to see the war"s end.
A happier fate was in store for General Townshend. Taken to Constantinople, he spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island in the Bosporus, where he was given use of a Turkish naval yacht and frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his three prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despite the near-starvation conditions in Kut, had weathered the ordeal quite nicely. In a testament to the element of collegiality that persisted among the imperial ruling cla.s.ses even in wartime, a number of Turkish government officials sent Townshend congratulatory notes on the occasion of his knighthood by King George V in October 1916.
ON A MORNING in early April, a courier on horseback appeared at the al-Bakri farmstead outside Damascus summoning Faisal Hussein to Djemal Pasha"s offices in the city. This was hardly out of the ordinary. Faisal had returned to the Syrian capital at Djemal"s request three months earlier and had frequent dealings with the governor. When Faisal arrived at Djemal"s office that morning, however, he found him in a strangely cool, controlled mood.
After coffee had been served and pleasantries exchanged, Djemal slid a piece of paper across his desk. It was a telegram from Enver Pasha in Constantinople, and it concerned a letter the generalissimo had just received from Faisal"s father in Mecca. It was less a letter than an ultimatum: if the Young Turks wished to retain his friendship, Hussein warned, they needed to recognize him as the hereditary ruler of the Hejaz, and to end the ongoing trial of the five dozen Arab nationalist leaders in Lebanon.
It placed Faisal in a very dangerous spot. Upon his return to Damascus in January, he had quickly discovered that the odds for a successful Arab revolt in Syria had radically diminished since his earlier visit. Many of the would-be political leaders of such a revolt had been banished or gone into hiding as a result of Djemal"s purges, while the military component had been decimated at Gallipoli. While Faisal had alerted his father to this changed situation, judging by his petulant telegram, Hussein didn"t grasp just how dire matters stood.
"Effendim," Djemal recounted Faisal as saying, "you"ve no idea what a grief this is to me. This telegram is certainly the result of some great misunderstanding. I can positively a.s.sure you that my father means nothing wrong."
Instead, Faisal attributed the "misunderstanding" to his father"s difficulty with the Turkish language; obviously, some scribe had mistranslated his father"s Arabic text and mangled it into something far different than intended. In Djemal"s office that morning, Faisal offered to cable his father and, by explaining that his words had been misconstrued, undoubtedly obtain his immediate renunciation of the offending letter.
But as tiresome as Djemal Pasha was finding the machinations of Hussein and his sons, he also rather enjoyed watching Faisal squirm. Dismissing the young sheikh from his office, he instead composed his own letter to Emir Hussein. After explaining why he couldn"t possibly release the Damascus defendants-"a government which pardoned traitors would be accused of weakness"-Djemal further suggested that with the nation in a war where its very survival was at stake, this perhaps wasn"t the best time for Hussein to pursue the business of making his t.i.tle hereditary. He then took the gloves off: "I should also draw your attention to the following aspect of the matter. Let us a.s.sume the Government complied with your demand solely because they wanted to keep you from being troublesome in the difficult times through which we are pa.s.sing. If the war came to a victorious conclusion, who could prevent the Government from dealing with you with the greatest severity once it is over?"
However imperfect his knowledge of the Turkish language, Emir Hussein surely understood the threat in those words. And just in case there was still any uncertainty, Djemal soon turned his attention to the Lebanon show-trial defendants. On May 5, and despite Faisal"s continued pleas for clemency, he signed execution orders for twenty-one of those found guilty. Early the next morning, the condemned were led into public squares in Damascus and Beirut and hanged.
In concert with another event, those executions finally brought the long, tortured dance between the Young Turks and the Hashemite ruler in Arabia to an end. Just weeks earlier, Djemal Pasha had dispatched a new force of some thirty-five hundred crack troops to Medina. He had a.s.sured Hussein that the unit was en route to Yemen, at the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, but Hussein wasn"t convinced, suspecting they were really coming for him. In the wake of the May 6 executions, Hussein decided the time for dithering was over, and sent word to Faisal to get out of Damascus.
At about the same time that Faisal was preparing to do so, Djemal Pasha received another supplicant, Aaron Aaronsohn. In the four months since he had returned to his post as head of the locust eradication program, the agronomist had been a fairly frequent visitor to the governor"s Damascus office during his travels through the region. He"d been happy to be able to report to Djemal that the second wave of locusts hadn"t sp.a.w.ned, and so posed no threat in the future; even by late March, their numbers had begun to dwindle. What he hadn"t shared with the Syrian governor, of course, was that he"d used the cover of his scientific fieldwork to establish an extensive network of prospective Jewish spies across Palestine.
Putting that network together had been exceedingly delicate work for Aaronsohn. Within the Jewish yeshuv, or community, was one faction that actively supported the Central Powers, another that secretly supported the Entente, while the vast majority simply wanted to stay out of the whole mess and hope for the best. What united almost everyone, however, was staunch opposition to any action that might bring more adverse Ottoman attention; even for those quietly praying for the British to come, they would lend their a.s.sistance once they were ash.o.r.e, but to do anything beforehand was just too dangerous for everyone. Only by very gingerly sounding out their friends and acquaintances had Aaronsohn and Feinberg managed to recruit some dozen like-minded members of the community willing to spy for Great Britain preemptively.
That remained a theoretical enterprise, however. Over the course of that winter, there had been several sightings of the British spy ships off the coast of Athlit, and the British had even sent messages ash.o.r.e, but through an improbable string of bad luck, contact had never been made. For Aaron Aaronsohn, it was a maddening predicament. Three times they"d tried to connect with the British, and three times it had gone wrong, with the last try nearly resulting in Feinberg"s death. Then, in the early spring of 1916, he came up with a new idea.
From his travels, Aaronsohn had learned that the Turkish army suffered from a ma.s.sive shortage of lubricating oil; indeed, he could scarcely have not learned it since the earsplitting screech of oilless axles had become a kind of perpetual background music in Syria. Reading through a scientific journal one day, the agronomist came upon an article about a team of European scientists who had devised a method of converting sesame seed oil into lubricating oil. If there was one thing the Ottoman Empire had no shortage of it was sesame seeds, and it was with this proposal-to learn the extraction method from scientists in Germany and apply it to the Turkish war effort-that Aaronsohn came to Djemal"s Damascus office one day in May.
Travel anywhere in the Ottoman Empire now required a vesika, or permit, and one of the few people who could approve the sort of journey Aaronsohn was proposing was Djemal Pasha himself. The governor was undoubtedly very suspicious. He didn"t really trust Aaronsohn-or pretty much any Jew, for that matter-and there had recently been that strange business of his a.s.sistant caught wandering in the Sinai. To let such a man out of his clutches, even for a visit to an allied nation, was to take a great chance.
Against this, though, was Djemal"s desperate need for lubricating oil for his army, a need the Standard Oil Company of New York seemed in no hurry to fulfill despite the staggering concessions he"d given them in Syria. In his usual brusque way, the governor quickly granted Aaronsohn"s vesika for pa.s.sage to Constantinople; once there, the scientist would need to clear more bureaucratic hurdles before continuing on to Berlin. But, of course, Aaronsohn had no intention of stopping at Berlin. Instead, he hoped to slip across the German frontier into a neutral country and there make contact with British intelligence; he just hadn"t figured out that part of the plan yet.
LAWRENCE SET OUT for the return to Cairo from Iraq aboard a British troopship on May 11. In the past year, he had lost two brothers to this conflict that seemed to have no end, and if by mid-1916 the bankruptcy of the British war effort was everywhere evident, nowhere was it more so than here on its eastern flank. In just thirteen months, Britain had suffered some 350,000 casualties at the hands of "the sick man of Europe," had failed-and failed totally-where a ragtag collection of Balkan militias and armed peasants had repeatedly succeeded just three years earlier. As if that weren"t enough, he was just then returning from an experience that, on both a personal and historical level, laid bare that bankruptcy like no other: a futile bid to save the lives of twelve thousand starving and defeated men, a shameful act of groveling in which he"d been forced to take part because the generals who had cast those men to their doom felt it beneath their dignity to do so.
Lawrence would come away from his Iraqi sojourn with two abiding thoughts. One was of the self-defeating arrogance with which the British Indian army had blundered into the country: "By brute force they marched into Basra. The enemy troops in Irak [sic] were nearly all Arabs in the unenviable predicament of having to fight on behalf of their [Turkish] secular oppressors against a [British] people long envisaged as liberators, but who obstinately refused to play the part." Their already keen sense of superiority swollen by Basra"s easy capture, the British Indian commanders had been contemptuous of local support, even of the need for a defendable supply line, and had instead heedlessly marched their men up the Tigris to ruin. It may have been with the Iraq debacle in mind that Lawrence would later remark, "British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance."
On a more philosophical level, what Lawrence took from Kut was a deepening antipathy for the imperialist cause. As he would write in Seven Pillars, "We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by the thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.... All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman."
Still, Lawrence was determined that it should not have all been in vain. During his fourteen-day journey back to Egypt, he composed a long report on all he had been witness to in Iraq, a scathing critique of everything from the British Indian army"s docking and warehousing systems, to the inadequacy of its seniormost generals, to the mindless stupidity of their battlefield strategies. But this, too, was to be an effort wasted. After reading Lawrence"s incendiary report and learning it was to be pa.s.sed on to General Archibald Murray, the overall commander of British forces in Egypt, senior officers in the Cairo military intelligence unit decided it was far too indelicate for the general"s sensibilities; shortly before the report was to be sent to Murray, they carefully scissored out all of Lawrence"s most inflammatory pa.s.sages, thus ensuring that even now the grim lessons of Kut would stay unlearned. So thoroughly did the censors do their job that it is believed only one copy of Lawrence"s original Iraq report survived intact.
FOR ANYONE SEEKING to justify the web of conflicting agreements that Great Britain had spun for itself in the Middle East by the spring of 1916, there were actually several strong arguments close at hand.
Perhaps the most obvious is succinctly conveyed in the old maxim that all is fair in love and war. By May 1916, the war had already killed millions of young men across Europe, and the future appeared to promise only more of the same; if double dealing and unsupportable promises might inch that conflict toward some kind of conclusion, who could reasonably argue against it?
There was also a matter of semantics, of how one defined "independence." While today the word"s meaning seems obvious and universal, that was not at all the case in 1916. For many Europeans, steeped in the condescension of the late imperial age, independence didn"t mean letting native peoples actually govern themselves, but something far more paternalistic: a new round of "the white man"s burden," the tutoring-and, of course, the exploiting-of native peoples until they might sufficiently grasp the ways of modern civilization to stand on their own at some indeterminate point in the future. For those holding such a view-and this probably included not only a majority of the senior statesmen of Great Britain but of every other nation in Europe-the distance between "independence" on the one hand, and "mandates" or "zones of control" or "suzerainty" on the other, didn"t appear to be the chasm of contradiction that others saw.
There was also a simple, cynical argument to be made: that the tangle of competing promises didn"t much matter because it was probably all going to end up as an academic exercise anyway. Even the most starry-eyed imperialist had to recognize there was something faintly ludicrous about Britain and France sitting around and divvying up the postwar Middle East at a time when, if not outright losing that war, they certainly weren"t winning it. As for Emir Hussein, he had been talking about an insurrection against Constantinople since even before the war, and there was still precious little sign of it happening. In the unlikely event that both the Arab revolt did come off, and the Entente did manage to win the war, the complications would be the best sort of problem to have, one that could be dealt with down the road.
By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city"s Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein"s followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz.
By an odd twist of fate, the westerner who had done more than any other to bring that revolt to fruition would never learn of it. Shortly before 5:00 p.m. on that same day, a Royal Navy battleship cruiser, HMS Hampshire, left its port in northern Scotland to transport War Secretary Horatio Kitchener to Russia. Less than three hours later, the Hampshire struck a German mine and quickly sank in high seas. Nearly every man on board perished, including Kitchener.
Just two weeks earlier, Lawrence had returned from his failed mission to Iraq to resume his desk job at the Savoy Hotel. His future looked much like his past: paper-shuffling, mapmaking, writing up strategies and reports that would never be acted on. Instead, with the news out of Mecca, he would soon have the war of his dreams, one that would catapult him into prominence, and then into legend.
Chapter 8.
The Battle Joined The Hejaz war is one of dervishes against regular troops-and we are on the side of the dervishes.
T. E. LAWRENCE, NOVEMBER 3, 1916.
To break the tedium of the hot, slow voyage down the Red Sea, the officers of HMS Lama organized an impromptu pistol-shooting compet.i.tion on the afternoon of October 15, 1916, their second day out from Port Suez. Taking advantage of a calm sea, they lined bottles along one of the converted merchant steamer"s rails, then gathered by the far rail to take turns attempting to blast them to pieces.
The activity was not particularly pleasing to the Lama"s most important pa.s.senger, the Oriental secretary to Egypt, Ronald Storrs. He had hoped for a nap in the torpor following lunch, but found it impossible amid all the gunfire, especially once the ship officers advanced to experimenting with a captured Turkish black-powder rifle. "A detonation about equal to that of an 18-pounder cannon," Storrs noted in his diary. "Conceived the idea, for my return, of holding up any northbound vessel and boarding her."
One of the standouts in the shooting compet.i.tion was Storrs"s traveling companion, T. E. Lawrence, who had taken up target practice as a hobby during his days at Carchemish and become an expert marksman. Excepting Lawrence"s fondness for gunplay, Storrs was quite pleased to have his friend along on this trip. On his two earlier pa.s.sages down the Red Sea to Jeddah, the Oriental secretary had despaired at the lack of interesting company. Already on this one, the "supercerebral" Lawrence had given him a painstaking tutorial on the Playfair Cipher, an ingenious cryptographic system as simple to construct as it was hard to decode, and, as was their habit back in Cairo, the two had spent much of the rest of the time discussing cla.s.sical literature and art.
As with Storrs"s earlier trips to Jeddah, this October voyage was a result of the Arab Revolt, now a little more than four months old. Having served as a princ.i.p.al conduit between the British government and Emir Hussein in the laborious negotiations leading up to that event, the Oriental secretary had been a natural choice to continue in the role once the battle was joined. By October 1916, however, the Arab Revolt was fast reaching a crisis point, and it was an open question just how much longer it might remain a concern to Ronald Storrs or anyone else.
Testament to its tenuous slapdash nature was the manner in which the outside world had learned of it in the first place. That had coincided with Storrs"s first voyage to Arabia in June.
From coded messages secreted out of Mecca, the launch date for the long-delayed uprising had finally been set for June 16, and so Storrs had gone across to Jeddah from the Sudan on June 1 to meet up with Abdullah, the emir"s second son and-should it actually come off-the rebellion"s chief field commander. Except Abdullah was nowhere to be found. After dispatching an envoy to Mecca with a request that Abdullah come to the coast as soon as possible, Storrs had spent the next four days trolling the Arabian sh.o.r.eline aboard a British warship looking for some sign of either Turkish or Arab military activity. The dreary port towns had appeared even more soporific than usual.
On June 5, the envoy had finally returned from Mecca with a message from Abdullah. "To the most honoured and respected Mr. Storrs," the letter began. "I deeply regret I am unable to meet you personally, but an urgent need has called me and taken me, so my brother will come to you with all the news." That brother was twenty-year-old Zeid, the youngest of Hussein"s four sons, and Storrs was directed to go to Samima, a tiny coastal village south of Jeddah, where Zeid would make his appearance the following morning. Whatever exasperation Storrs felt over these complications was tempered by a peculiar development: according to the envoy, the date for the revolt"s launch had been moved up from June 16 to June 10. The Oriental secretary had long come to accept that timetables rarely held in the Arab world, but he could hardly recall an occasion when one had been moved forward.
Yet when finally he made contact with Zeid on the following morning, the revised launch date now a mere four days away, there was little hint of urgency. Instead, the cryptic young man had ushered Storrs into his field tent erected on the beach, where he engaged in extended pleasantries and chitchat while a retainer prepared coffee. Once the coffee was served, Zeid handed Storrs an "execrably written" letter from his father, detailing his plans for the coming revolt, as well as a request for 70,000 worth of gold to help bankroll the rebel forces. When Storrs pressed Hussein"s son on precisely how they intended to defeat the enemy, it became evident that tactical considerations remained at the rudimentary stage. "We will summon the Turks to surrender," Zeid replied, "and shoot them if they refuse."
The Oriental secretary had barely been able to hide his impatience. The British had been funneling gold and rifles to Hussein for many months now, and Storrs had heard these grand plans-plans unblemished by any attempt at actual execution-for nearly as long; as he and other British agents had informed Hussein many times, no more funds would be released until the revolt began. It was when Storrs reiterated this message on the Samima beach that Zeid finally got around to dropping an interesting bit of news: "I am then happy to be able to announce to you that it began yesterday at Medina."
Hustling Zeid and his chief lieutenant back to the waiting warship, Storrs settled the two men at a hastily prepared breakfast table on the afterbridge, where he and the two military intelligence officers who had accompanied him from Cairo pumped the young sheikh for details. After alerting Cairo to the news, and quickly composing notes of congratulation to Hussein and Abdullah, Storrs gathered up whatever items were close at hand that might provide immediate encouragement to the rebel leaders: 10,000 worth of gold from the ship"s safe; five cartons of cigarettes for Faisal and Abdullah, the two smokers in the family; the promise of a Maxim machine gun, to be delivered in one week"s time. Lending all this momentous activity a homey touch was the wanderings of a small desert gazelle, bought in some Red Sea bazaar as a ship"s mascot, that alternated between p.r.o.nging the visitors with his horns in a bid for attention and feeding on whatever cigarettes were left lying about.
It had taken some time for clear battle lines to be drawn in the Hejaz. Capitalizing on the element of surprise of the first few days, Hussein"s rebels quickly overpowered the tiny Turkish force in Mecca and, with the help of a British naval bombardment, the all-important port of Jeddah. In Taif, Hussein"s "summer capital" in the mountains below Mecca, Abdullah"s fighters took possession of the town while isolating the Turkish garrison of some three hundred troops in their well-defended fort. Matters didn"t go nearly so well in Medina, the Hejaz"s largest city. There, the rebels, emboldened by reports of the quick success in Mecca, had charged into the teeth of a vastly larger and entrenched Turkish garrison, some ten thousand soldiers, and been slaughtered by machine-gun and artillery fire. A month into the revolt, an uneasy stasis had set in, Hussein"s forces firmly in control of Mecca and Jeddah and several of the smaller southern coastal towns, the Turks just as firmly in control of the railhead city of Medina, 150 miles to the north of Mecca, as well as the coastal towns on the Red Sea"s upper reaches.
From a political standpoint, news of the Arab Revolt had been joyously received in Cairo and London. Coming on the heels of the fiascoes at Gallipoli and Kut, here at long last was some good news out of the Middle East. Most crucially, by virtue of his violent break with Constantinople, Hussein-both custodian of Islam"s holiest shrines and one of the Arab world"s most respected leaders-had fairly laid to rest any lingering fear that the Turks and Germans might finally galvanize their pan-Islamic jihad.
From a military standpoint, however, the British response was a good deal more equivocal. Obviously, if the Arab rebels succeeded in tying down large numbers of Turkish troops in the Arabian Peninsula, that would help protect the British army"s right flank in an offensive into Palestine, an operation now in the planning stages in Cairo. On the other hand, by failing to spark a broader Arab uprising-in Syria and elsewhere, the Hejaz revolt had been met with a resounding silence-Hussein"s forces were left extremely vulnerable to a Turkish counterattack and, given their spotty conduct thus far, unlikely to prosper in such a contest. In that case, troops and materiel from the British expeditionary army in Egypt might have to be siphoned off to aid the rebels at the very moment that the commander of that army, General Archibald Murray, was jealous to hold every available resource for his prospective push into Palestine.
And that scenario was to invite a much greater risk, one that might swiftly turn the Arab Revolt applauded by Britain"s more politically minded war planners into the stuff of their worst nightmares. That"s because it was not just the holy cities of Mecca and Medina that, by Koranic dictate, were off-limits to non-Islamic "infidels"; to only a slightly lesser degree this held true for the entire Hejaz. A hint of this had attended Ronald Storrs"s first voyage to Arabia in June, when Zeid had refused to allow Storrs"s two military intelligence colleagues to accompany him ash.o.r.e; instead, the Oriental secretary had been compelled to come alone. In the following months, Hussein had concocted a bit of scriptural wiggle room to permit a very small group of British logistics officers to man a supply operation in the coastal town of Rabegh, but strictly restricted their presence to the sh.o.r.eline. To allow them to venture farther inland, let alone to bring in whole units of rescuing British Christian soldiers in the event of a major rebel setback, would be to play directly into the hands of Turkish propagandists and risk the immolation of all concerned: Hussein no longer regarded as merely a traitor to the Ottoman Empire but to Islam as well; Britain"s imperialist, Crusader intentions laid bare before an enraged Muslim world.
In the face of this dilemma, Britain had tried to work at the margins, bringing weaponry and gold to the Hejaz rebels through Rabegh, while ferrying over whatever Muslim troops could readily be spared-primarily Egyptians, along with a few Syrian and Iraqi defectors-to provide training and a small on-the-ground presence. That clearly wasn"t enough, though, and as the summer of 1916 wore on, with the rebels" disorganization becoming more apparent and the signs of a Turkish counteroffensive more imminent, the debate in Cairo and London between those seeking a broader involvement and those urging continued caution took on a deepening urgency. Matters were not at all helped by Emir Hussein. Indeed, well into the autumn he had carried on a version of this debate all by himself depending on the latest news from the battlefront, alternately rejecting plans to bring in non-Muslim troops and pleading that any available troops be sent immediately, periodically shifting to the middle ground of asking Cairo to keep such troops on standby for possible intervention down the road.