"The landscape was of a hopelessness and sadness deeper than all the open deserts we had crossed," Lawrence wrote. "Sand or flint or a desert of bare rocks was exciting sometimes, and in certain lights had the monstrous beauty of sterile desolation; but there was something sinister, something actively evil in this snake-devoted Sirhan."
But Lawrence"s torments went beyond reptiles and too much mutton. In those quiet days of waiting, with more and more tribes coming in to negotiate their alliance with the rebel emissaries, he became acutely aware of the cloak of deception he wore.
It was a deception that operated on multiple levels. On the day they had set out from Wejh, most of Lawrence"s companions knew only the official reason for their journey: to rally the Syrian tribes and prepare for Faisal"s advance north. Knowledge of the concrete objective, the capture of Aqaba, was held by only a very small handful of men. Indeed, it"s possible the full plan was known only to Lawrence, that even Auda and Faisal hadn"t the complete picture.
His romantic reputation aside, Auda was essentially a desert raider and, as such, primarily interested in plunder. Since there would be precious little by way of loot in Aqaba, Lawrence may well have kept matters vague at the outset, operating on the premise that at some point during the expedition he could convince Auda that Aqaba"s capture would serve his long-term interests better than whatever more obvious spoils lay close to hand. As for Faisal, in the wake of Lawrence"s departure from Wejh, he once again lobbied his British advisors for an early advance on Aqaba. Perhaps this was a ruse on Faisal"s part, a way to further mask Lawrence"s true destination from his colleagues, but it seems equally likely that the Arab leader did so because he hadn"t been apprised of precisely what that destination was. Of course, these were mere tactical deceptions, made necessary by the exigencies of war, but it meant the ultimate onus of leadership-not to mention of possible failure and the catastrophe this would unleash on those around him-rested on Lawrence"s shoulders alone.
What made all this infinitely more burdensome was the greater deception that lay beyond: the planned betrayal of the Arabs at the Allies" hands. It seems Lawrence had only grasped the full scope of this double cross at his meeting with Mark Sykes just before his departure from Wejh, and it clearly weighed heavily on him on the journey north. Of this, Lawrence obviously could confide even less in his traveling companions, and his sense of guilt became overwhelming in the face of the endless stream of tribal delegations coming into Wadi Sirhan to join the fight for Arab independence.
"They saw in me a free agent of the British Government," he wrote, "and demanded from me an endors.e.m.e.nt of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy and, for what my word was worth, a.s.sured the men of their reward." It was a role that left Lawrence "continually and bitterly ashamed," for "it was evident from the beginning that if we won the war, these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest advisor of the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff."
But of course Lawrence could do no such thing. As an alternative, he chose to remove himself from the scene. "Can"t stand another day here," he jotted in his journal on June 5. "Will ride N[orth] and chuck it."
The choice of phrase, "chuck it," was an interesting one, for what Lawrence now proposed was a trek into the heart of Turkish-held Syria, a journey so hazardous as to be practically suicidal. In Seven Pillars, he would attempt to rationalize this decision by explaining that he wished to venture into the north to "sound its opinions and learn enough to lay definite plans. My general knowledge of Syria was fairly good, and some parts I knew exactly, but I felt that one more sight of it would put straight the ideas of strategic geography given me by the Crusades."
Implicit in this quest was the hope, slender though it might be, that if the Arab Revolt could be raised in the Syrian heartland, the imperialist designs of France might yet be subverted. Pressing up against this hope, though, was the far likelier outcome: that in revolt, the Syrians would fight and die for a cause already lost.
Lawrence"s anguish at the situation was evident in the scribbled message he wrote Gilbert Clayton in the margin of his notebook. "Clayton. I"ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way. For all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes any further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can"t stand it." Figuring the notebook would eventually find its way into British hands should he die on his mission, Lawrence left the notebook in Wadi Sirhan and set off for the north in the company of just two guides.
It was to be perhaps his most audacious exploit of the entire war, a circuitous four-hundred-mile tour through enemy territory that carried him to the border of Lebanon and to the very outskirts of Damascus. The feat would win him a nomination for the Victoria Cross, Britain"s highest military decoration, yet also endure as one of the most mysterious and least-doc.u.mented episodes in Lawrence"s life. This was very deliberately so. The sole report he would eventually submit to his superiors in Cairo recounting the odyssey would run to just four pages. In Seven Pillars, a 650-page book studded with exhaustive disquisitions on the flora and geological features of obscure desert basins, Lawrence"s northern expedition is dispensed with in a few paragraphs and derided "as barren of consequence as it was unworthy of motive."
What is known about that journey is that, time and again, Lawrence secretly met with prospective allies in the Arab Revolt-tribal leaders and urban nationalists-only to be greeted with profound hesitation. It was the cla.s.sic conundrum of guerrilla warfare: Faisal"s rebels needed local support to pave their way into Syria, but the locals couldn"t reasonably be asked to rise up without the aid and armed support of the rebels. In that riddle, and in how terribly wrong events could go if the right balance wasn"t achieved, Lawrence felt the weight of his and Britain"s deceit more keenly than ever.
From both a political and personally defining standpoint, Lawrence"s most consequential encounter came toward the end of his journey, when he stopped in Azraq, a desert oasis in southeastern Syria, to meet with Emir Nuri Shalaan. Testament to Shalaan"s preeminence in the region, it was to him that Auda Abu Tayi had sped weeks earlier seeking permission to use Wadi Sirhan as a gathering point for his Howeitat tribesmen. Since even before the Arab Revolt began, King Hussein had sent emissaries to Shalaan in an attempt to win him and his vast Rualla tribe to the cause, and for just as long the emir had nimbly danced along the knife"s edge, hinting he might soon be ready to join the rebellion, only to then nudge back toward the Ottoman side. It wasn"t just his authority that made Shalaan an imposing figure, however; in Lawrence"s hand, the chieftain appeared almost the spectral personification of death itself: "Very old, livid, and worn, with a gray sorrow and remorse upon him, and a bitter smile the only mobility of his face. Upon his coa.r.s.e eyelashes the eyelids sagged down in tired folds, through which from the overhead sun, a red light glittered into his eye sockets and made them look like fiery pits in which the man was slowly burning."
But perhaps this somewhat overwrought description stemmed from something else about Nuri Shalaan. Despite his isolation in the desert, it seemed the Rualla chieftain was well informed on the various promises the British had made to Hussein and other Arab leaders in the Hejaz over the previous two years. By way of taking Lawrence"s measure, Shalaan brought out copies of these conflicting doc.u.ments, laid them before his visitor, and asked which ones he should believe. "I saw that with my answer I would gain or lose him," Lawrence recounted, "and in him the outcome of the Arab movement."
Lawrence counseled that Shalaan should trust in the most recent of the British promises. It seemed to a.s.suage the desert chieftain, but of course simply brought a new measure of guilt to Lawrence"s burdened conscience.
After that meeting with Shalaan, Lawrence returned to his companions waiting in Wadi Sirhan with an iron resolve to compel Britain to uphold her pledges to the Arabs. He would do so by personally leading the Arabs onto an expanded Syrian battlefield, a campaign that would enable them to lay claim to the lands they conquered and thus cheat the French of their imperial designs. "In other words," Lawrence wrote, "I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber."
This was, he admitted, "an immodest presumption."
LAWRENCE WASN"T THE only Western intelligence agent afoot in Syria that June. In fact, at one point during his impetuous reconnaissance trek to the north, he came within three miles of crossing paths with his old nemesis, Curt Prfer.
Since returning from Germany in March, Prfer had rarely left the comparative comfort of his desk job at the intelligence bureau headquarters in Constantinople. The grand partnership of German government and industry envisioned by Max von Oppenheim had largely withered on the vine, with German businessmen understandably loath to invest in a region grown more dest.i.tute and fractured by the day. Prfer had instead spent much of his time trying to arrange for the publication of a new series of pro-German propaganda pamphlets, only to be beset with niggling queries from Berlin over printing costs and bureaucratic obstacles thrown up by obdurate Ottoman censors.
In mid-May, he decided to break from this tedious routine by conducting an extended inspection tour of the German propaganda centers and libraries that Oppenheim had established across Syria the year before. These field trips were also what made Prfer a good intelligence agent, providing him with a firsthand view that often conflicted with the sugarcoated communiques and cables that crossed his desk. Even so, on this outing he was in for a shock.
As often happens in war, by the spring of 1917 the outside world was gaining a rather clearer picture of what was happening inside the Ottoman Empire than the empire"s own inhabitants. Much of that insight was coming from American consular officials who had begun vacating their posts following the break in U.S.-Ottoman diplomatic relations in April. In debriefings in Switzerland and Washington and London, these officials told of a land where hundreds of thousands of civilians had succ.u.mbed to disease or starvation, where vast territories were in a state of near-open rebellion, and where army units suffered desertion rates of 25, 30, even 40 percent. The more perceptive of these recent evacuees also reported on the growing friction between Turkish and German military units, a mutual antipathy that had occasionally led to violence, and of the general population"s utter apathy, their most fervent desire simply for the war to end and life to become tolerable again.
Certainly, Prfer had received glimmers of all this while in Constantinople. Even if downplayed, reports from the field told of food shortages and epidemics, of flagging morale among both the Turkish citizenry and soldiers. But none of that truly prepared Prfer for the ravages awaiting him when he boarded an interior-bound train at Haidar Pasha station on May 21. Most telling from Prfer"s standpoint were the deprivations he personally had to endure on this journey. Gone were the special train cars put on for his comfort and the official banquets held in his honor. Instead, and despite being one of the most important German officials in the Middle East, his travel now was aboard packed and dilapidated trains that frequently broke down or were shunted to sidings for hours, even days, for no apparent reason, the only accommodation to be found in filthy and flea-infested hostels. The spare diary he kept of that two-month odyssey, brief entries made in a penciled scrawl, consisted of an almost unbroken litany of complaint.
Adding to Prfer"s misery, and rather epitomizing the ruin about him, was an intermittent toothache that steadily worsened until his entire jaw was inflamed. A dentist tentatively diagnosed scurvy, a disease now rampant in Syria and caused by a simple vitamin C deficiency. Until two years earlier Syria had been one of the great citrus-growing regions of the world, but in the face of a chronic coal shortage most of its fruit trees had been cut down to provide fuel for train engines.
Yet despite seeing all this with his own eyes, Curt Prfer seemed determined to miss its import. As he reported to senior diplomats in Berlin, the reason his and Max Oppenheim"s shared dream of pan-Islamic jihad had thus far failed to galvanize the Muslim ma.s.ses was mostly just a matter of poor communication. "Hysterical propaganda that focuses on enemy atrocities are a waste of time," he wrote. "The peoples of the Turkish empire aren"t stupid, they know what is going on around them."
Even with his criticisms, however, Prfer failed to detect the fissures already cracked open all about him. He had frequently written that the Syrian Arabs were too cowardly to rise up against the Turks, and nothing he saw on this journey caused him to rea.s.sess that view. On June 3, while Prfer was in Damascus, T. E. Lawrence was in a village a mere three miles away, plotting with an Arab nationalist leader on how to bring the Arab Revolt into the Syrian capital. Prfer had been even more dismissive of the Jewish settlers in Palestine, calling them docile and obedient. June 12 saw the German intelligence chief staying at a crude little hotel in the Palestinian village of Zammarin, just one mile from the Jewish settlement of Zichron Yaakov that was the hub of the NILI spy network.
SARAH AARONSOHN"S VISIT to Cairo in mid-April had been planned as a very brief one, a chance to meet with her brother and for the two of them to coordinate NILI"s activities for the coming months. On the next sailing of the Managem, Sarah and her chief NILI deputy, Joseph Lishansky, were to be slipped back ash.o.r.e at Athlit and the spying campaign resumed. Instead, there had ensued such a string of bad luck-two abortive sailings, a bout of malaria that landed Sarah in a hospital for two weeks-that it seemed an open question whether she and Lishansky would ever get home at all. By the end of May, the pair were right back at their Egyptian starting point.
If Aaron Aaronsohn was understandably frustrated by these delays-he had never intended Joseph Lishansky to leave Athlit in the first place, and the spy network was surely foundering in both his and Sarah"s absence-he was also experiencing a bit of a change of heart. A loner at the best of times, he nevertheless enjoyed his sister"s companionship in Cairo and was coming to rely on her levelheaded advice in his battles with the British bureaucracy. He now decided it would be cruel to return her to Athlit after all. "I do not see the necessity of it," he confided in his diary on May 31, "now that the most precious time is past."
Convincing the iron-willed Sarah Aaronsohn of this, however, was an altogether different matter. When her brother broached the idea, her response was immediate and adamant: she was going back to Palestine no matter what. The agronomist tried a different tack. During her stay in Cairo, Sarah had become a familiar figure to many of the British officers her brother a.s.sociated with, an object of admiration for the very dangerous work she was conducting. At the same time, some of these officers, imbued with an old-fashioned code of chivalry, had hinted to Aaron Aaronsohn that it was a tad unseemly for a woman to continue to face such "manly" perils. This view was most persistently put forward by Aaronsohn"s erstwhile handler, William Edmonds, and Aaronsohn arranged for the EMSIB captain to raise it anew one evening while he and Sarah sat in the lounge of the Continental Hotel.
"Madam," Edmonds stiffly addressed Sarah, "the High Command has authorized me to thank you very much for all that you have done for us. They urge you not to return to Palestine. Egypt is open to you. You can stay here as long as you wish. What you have done up to now is valuable, and it is enough."
While thanking the captain for the offer, Sarah Aaronsohn instantly saw through the charade. Turning to her brother, she said, "If you know me, give me the means to return. If you don"t provide them for me, I"ll find my way back myself."
On June 15, the spy ship Managem sailed once more. This time it managed to reach Athlit, and both Sarah Aaronsohn and Joseph Lishansky went ash.o.r.e. When Aaron Aaronsohn got the word, it provoked a complicated reaction, relief and regret intermixed. As events would prove, this latter sentiment was quite justified; he would never see either his sister or Lishansky again.
ON THEIR FAST racing camels, Auda and Lawrence set off ahead of the others to inspect the water wells of Bair. Following behind was the fighting force that had been painstakingly a.s.sembled in Wadi Sirhan over the previous three weeks: some five hundred tribal fighters, mostly Howeitat, ready to strike a blow against their Turkish overlords. All had left Wadi Sirhan two days before, June 18, in the highest of spirits.
As a consequence, what Auda and Lawrence discovered at Bair was deeply dispiriting. All three of the oasis"s princ.i.p.al wells had recently been dynamited by the Turks, reduced to heaps of broken stones and still-smoldering timbers. By good luck, the charge they had placed on a fourth well a short distance away had failed to detonate, affording the rebel force just enough water to sustain themselves and their camels, but the larger message was a grim one: the Turks were onto them.
While it might seem counterintuitive, the desert is one of the more difficult places to keep one"s presence a secret. Travelers are wedded to moving between available sources of water, and on a landscape where others are also constantly on the move, crossing a desert is rather akin to traveling a highway possessed of very few side roads. Among the tribes of southeastern Syria, a great many had heard of the rebel force being mustered in Wadi Sirhan by that third week in June, and inevitably, so had the Turks. By blowing the wells at Bair, the first princ.i.p.al water source west of Wadi Sirhan, the Turks hoped to block their enemy"s advance before it even got under way.
While that mission had failed just enough to allow the rebels and their animals to stay alive in Bair, it cast grave doubt over the next proposed leg of their march. Seventy miles to the southwest of Bair stood the crossroads town of Maan, astride the Hejaz Railway and the strategic hub of the entire region. Lawrence"s plan was to skirt below the heavily garrisoned town and continue toward Aqaba, but this scheme was dependent on finding water at Jefer, another series of desert wells just twenty-five miles to the northeast of Maan. The problem was that once the Turks in Maan figured out the rebels were heading for Aqaba-and at this point even "the most civilian owl could not fail to see that"-they could send a demolition team out to destroy the Jefer wells long before the rebels got there.
The key, then, was to devise a screen, to confuse the Turks both as to where the rebels currently were and where they might be headed. From Bair, emissaries were sent to area tribes with word that the rebel force was still organizing itself back in Wadi Sirhan; surely at least one of these tribes would pa.s.s this "intelligence" on to the Turks to curry favor. Simultaneously, small units of fighters were dispatched to conduct pinp.r.i.c.k attacks throughout the region.
Lawrence had laid some of the groundwork for this screen during his earlier trip north. In early June, he had led a handful of local recruits and blown up a small bridge of the Hejaz Railway north of Damascus; that attack, occurring hundreds of miles from any previous action by the rebels, had so alarmed Turkish authorities that they"d briefly been convinced a local insurrection was about to get under way. For the expanded screening operation out of Bair, Lawrence chose to lead the most ambitious effort himself. On June 21, he and some one hundred fighters struck out from the oasis and made for the railhead town of Amman, 150 miles to the north.
It was to be a peculiar kind of exercise, and one that constantly put Lawrence"s skills of persuasion to the test. Time and again, he had to stay his Arab companions from the pitched battles they desperately craved, reminding them this was meant to be a show of force, a game of bluff in which a destroyed railway culvert sent just as powerful a message to the enemy as a blownup train. This wasn"t at all the way the Arab tribesmen thought battle should be joined, but as they were scant in number and dependent on mobility, Lawrence was determined that they avoid protracted firefights or anything else that might delay their quick return to Bair. This imperative of speed, however, also had a nasty side effect; simply put, this was a force with neither the time nor the capacity to deal with prisoners.
While preparing the ambush on the Turkish garrison at Aba el Naam three months earlier, Lawrence and his companions had been inadvertently discovered by a wandering shepherd boy. Fearing the boy would alert the Turks to their presence if released, but with the shepherd increasingly distraught at being separated from his flock, the ambush party had finally resorted to a somewhat comical solution: they tied the boy to a tree for the duration of the battle, then cut him free as they fled. In their hit-and-run operations around Amman, the raiders hadn"t the luxury of such consideration.
On one occasion, they encountered a traveling Circa.s.sian merchant. Unable to take him along as a prisoner but reluctant to let him go- most Circa.s.sians were Turkish sympathizers-many in the raiding party argued for his quick execution. By way of compromise, they instead stripped the man naked and sliced the soles of his feet open with a dagger. "Odd as was the performance," Lawrence noted mildly, "it seemed effective and more merciful than death. The cuts would make him travel to the railway on hands and knees, a journey of an hour, and his nakedness would keep him in the shadow of the rocks till the sun was low." While the Circa.s.sian"s ultimate fate is unknown, the merciful aspects of leaving a naked and crippled man out in the Syrian desert in June might reasonably be debated.
By the time the raiding party returned to Bair, Lawrence had every reason to feel confident. In response to their disinformation effort, the Turks had just dispatched a four-hundred-man cavalry unit to hunt down the phantom rebel force in Wadi Sirhan. Over the previous week, the Arabs had carried out a series of hit-and-run strikes across the length of southern Syria with no discernible pattern. By now, the Turks surely thought the next attack could come most anywhere, and were distracted from the still-distant target of Aqaba. With such confidence, the rebel force moved on the water wells of Jefer.
Sure enough, the Turks had destroyed the Jefer wells too, but with only slightly more efficiency than they"d shown at Bair. One of the wells was only partially collapsed, and a daylong repair effort restored it to use. While that project was under way, Lawrence received the most remarkable news of all.
A few days earlier, a flying column had been sent to rally the tribes residing in the foothills to the southwest of Maan and in the direction of Aqaba. Together, they had attacked the Turkish blockhouse at Fuweila, occupying a high point astride the Maan-Aqaba road. Initially that attack had accomplished little, the tribesmen easily driven off by the entrenched soldiers, but then the Turks in Fuweila had launched a reprisal raid. Falling on a nearby Howeitat settlement, they had cut the throats of everyone they found: one old man and a dozen women and children. Blind with rage, the Arab warriors had renewed their a.s.sault on the Fuweila blockhouse, overrun it, and slaughtered every soldier within. As a result, one of the chief Turkish strongpoints on the Aqaba road was suddenly gone, the path over the mountains virtually clear. Scrambling to action, the rebel force in Jefer raced for Fuweila.
Their excitement was to be short-lived. As they skirted below Maan on the afternoon of July 1, word came that a relief force of some 550 Turkish soldiers had left Maan en route to Fuweila that morning. That force was now somewhere on the road ahead of them.
It placed Lawrence in a deep quandary. With their greater mobility, the Arabs might be able to get ahead of the relief column and continue on toward Aqaba, but that would mean leaving a sizable Turkish force, already on the march, close behind them on the Wadi Itm trail-in effect, almost the precise scenario that Lawrence had persistently warned would be the result of an amphibious landing. There really was only one choice: to find the Turkish relief column and destroy it.
IT HAD BEEN nearly four years since William Yale sailed from New York harbor aboard SS Imperator, a "playboy" embarked on a tour of the Holy Land should any of his fellow pa.s.sengers ask. Now, in mid-June 1917, he was returning to a city in the grips of a patriotic frenzy. Across Manhattan, buildings were festooned with enormous American flags, windows were framed with red-white-and-blue bunting, and a fevered excitement still carried on the air two months after President Wilson had brought the country into the war.
One reason for the sustained excitement may have been that it was still a long way off before war"s more disagreeable aspects-specifically, dead and maimed soldiers-would begin to intrude on the festivities. Since 1914, Wilson had deliberately kept the American army near its paltry peacetime size as a roundabout way to defeat the interventionists; after all, with a standing army of just over 120,000 soldiers, about one-twentieth the size of any of the major European powers, what could the United States possibly contribute to the war effort? Most estimates were that it would be up to a year before an American army-now slated to grow to well over one million-might contribute to the European battlefield in any significant way.
Further slowing matters was evidence that, beyond the flag-waving, the American public was showing a marked hesitancy in signing on for the fighting and dying. Wilson had been under the impression that his high-blown rhetoric alone would serve to bring a flood of volunteers to the army recruitment centers, but it seems most of his countrymen got lost somewhere between his old boast that the United States was "too proud to fight" and his new exhortation that "the world must be made safe for democracy." By mid-May 1917, fewer than 100,000 young men had enlisted for this crusade, leading to the enactment of a draft law for the first time since the American Civil War. Consequently, when Yale stepped off his ship in New York harbor that June, one of his first errands was to register with the local Selective Service board.
The oilman could have harbored few illusions about what lay in store for him-as a twenty-nine-year-old single man with no dependents, draftees didn"t come any more Cla.s.s I than William Yale-and it was a prospect that filled him with dread. Part of it was that, as opposed to most of his countrymen, he had already seen the hideous face of modern war-not the slaughter in the trenches in France, but the equally grotesque spectacle of civilians dying en ma.s.se from starvation and disease in Syria. He"d observed subtler facets of it during his long slow journey across southern Europe to get home: the bread lines that had stretched for blocks in Vienna, the looks of crushing resignation among a company of French soldiers waiting on a train platform for transport to the front. He also undoubtedly saw exactly where military induction would take him. Perched as he was at the upper end of conscription age (thirty in May 1917, raised to forty-five just three months later), in combination with his college education and aristocratic pedigree, he would almost surely be shunted into an officer-training academy. Once there, given his business background and technical expertise, he would just as surely be further shunted along to the supply-and-logistics...o...b..t of the quartermaster"s office. And since the United States had only declared war on Germany, meaning practically everyone was to be sent to the Western Front, Yale would most likely spend his war "career" ticking off checklists at some supply depot well behind the lines in rural France.
This was not at all the future that the ambitious oilman saw for himself, and he was brash enough to believe that the four years he"d just spent in the Ottoman Empire might make him an attractive candidate for a more meaningful position somewhere in the governmental or military hierarchy. After spending a mere weekend at the Yale family"s upstate New York retreat, reuniting with the parents and siblings he hadn"t seen since 1913, William Yale returned to New York City and hit the hustings.
The result was demoralizing. Despite his calling on every business and college acquaintance he could think of, few had any suggestions for where an "Eastern hand" might fit into the larger scheme of things in a nation at war. He called on Socony headquarters at 26 Broadway, figuring that though their Middle Eastern operations were likely to remain suspended for the conflict"s duration, they might find something else overseas for an employee who had served them so loyally and in such difficult circ.u.mstances. That plan fell through when, meeting with one of the Socony directors, the pugnacious Yale lambasted the company"s recent decision to stop paying the salaries of their native employees in the Middle East, pointing out that this pittance for a corporation like Socony was life-sustaining for those trapped in the war zone. Alas, Yale discovered after being ordered from the office, his listener had been the author of that directive.
Despairing of finding anything in New York, he went to Washington, D.C., sustained by the thought that in the locus of power, surely someone would appreciate what he had to offer. As his calling card, Yale wrote up a detailed report on all he had seen and heard in Syria. "Three years of war," he wrote, "have reduced Palestine to a deplorable condition, the villages depleted by military drafts, devastated by cholera, typhus and recurrent fever, and typhoid has resulted in reducing the population [by] probably over 25%." The situation was even worse in Lebanon, he reported, where, according to one of his Turkish military informants, at least 30,000 civilians had already starved to death, and unconfirmed rumors put the figure at over 100,000.
Of possibly greater interest to his prospective readers was the oilman"s attention to military matters. Yale had clearly put his long rail journey from Jerusalem to Constantinople to good use, listing a number of critical bridges and embankments along the line that, if bombed, would all but cripple the Turks" ability to bring supplies or reinforcements from Anatolia to Syria or Iraq. He also pinpointed the location of an array of critical German military installations along the route, including a wireless relay station in the Ama.n.u.s Mountains made conspicuous by the Swiss chalet-style German barracks alongside it. "I saw also German aeroplanes and hospital units going south. One German aeroplane division of twenty-three aeroplanes, I was informed by the German captain in charge, was on its way to Beersheva." He was even able to report that between 150 and 200 German transport trucks were now carrying supplies to Turkish forces in southern Palestine "over a new military road which connects Jerusalem, Hebron and Beersheba," while tactfully omitting that this was the same road on which he had overseen construction for Standard Oil in 1914.
In recent weeks, Allied officials had started to glean something of conditions inside the Ottoman Empire from debriefings of the evacuated American consular officers, but these were nothing compared to William Yale"s report. Even if three months out of date, it represented one of the most detailed and reliable a.n.a.lyses of the situation in Syria to emerge since the beginning of the war. On June 27, Yale strode into the State, War and Navy Building (now the Old Executive Office Building) next to the White House and dropped his report off at the offices of the secretary of state himself, Robert Lansing. He followed up with a personal letter to Lansing three days later.
After noting that "the disposition of Palestine will probably be one of the big questions to be decided" in any postwar peace conference, Yale suggested to the secretary that "if the United States of America is to play her part in the solution of a problem so intricate and important, her statesmen must have at their disposition reports of unbiased men who had a first-hand knowledge of the country and its people. It is for such service, whether it be in diplomatic or secret service work, or relief work in Palestine, that I am prepared to resign my present position with the Standard Oil Company of New York, and offer my services to the Government of the United States."
Perhaps his four years abroad left Yale blind to the complexity-to some minds, the hypocrisy-of the new Wilson doctrine. Yes, the American president fully intended to impose his notion of "a lasting peace" on the warring world-that had been his price for entering the conflict-but, reflective of his nation"s isolationist core, this was to be done while involving the United States in as few long-term foreign entanglements as possible. As a consequence, the very item Yale imagined to be his ace in the hole, his expertise in enabling the United States to "play her part" in the Middle East, was exactly the sort of thing the Wilson administration hoped to avoid. Little surprise, then, that his overture to Lansing was met with a resounding silence. The baffled oilman then drew on an old Yale University contact to funnel his report to the head of the U.S. Army"s Intelligence Department, only to meet the same response.
Out of desperation, Yale played what must have seemed his very last card. During his journey across Europe that spring, he had met with the British military attache to Switzerland and asked about the possibility of joining on with British military intelligence. The attache had not been at all encouraging but, impressed by Yale"s breadth of knowledge on the Middle East, suggested that if no other options presented themselves once he returned home, Yale might call on the British amba.s.sador to Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice. With the military attache"s note of introduction in hand, Yale did so on the morning of July 9.
Serendipity had an odd way of intervening at crucial moments in William Yale"s life, but never in quite so unlikely a way as on July 9. In calling at the British emba.s.sy, Yale fully expected to be told the amba.s.sador was away or in a meeting, the same brush-off he"d received from many other men far less busy or powerful over the previous month. Instead, he was immediately ushered into Spring-Rice"s office.
"Where did you get your name?" the astonished amba.s.sador asked by way of greeting. "My first wife was a Yale, one of the last members of the family in Wales!"
IT WAS LESS a battle than a ma.s.sacre. As dawn of July 2 broke, the Arab warriors circled through the hills surrounding the pa.s.s at Fuweila in cautious search of the Turkish relief battalion. They found them in a mountain close just below Fuweila known as Aba el Lissan, encamped and still asleep along the banks of a stream. Incredibly, the Turkish commander hadn"t taken the precaution of putting scouts on the surrounding ridgelines, enabling the Arabs to quietly spread out among the overhanging rocks and encircle their slumbering enemy. Once in position, they began to snipe at the men trapped below.
It became a ferociously hot day, the hottest Lawrence could ever remember in Arabia, and this greatly contributed to the desultory nature of the fight. Despite the overwhelming advantage afforded by their command of the heights, the Arab attackers found they could only lie upon the rocks to shoot down at the enemy for a few moments at a time; to linger any longer was to be burned through their thin robes, even to have skin peeled from their bodies in swatches. Into the afternoon, the erratic contest continued, the Turks below huddling in clefts along the stream for protection, the Arabs above them hopping from one overlook to the next in search of a clean shot.
By Lawrence"s account, it was a flippant comment on his part that finally changed the battle"s tenor. Overcome by the heat, he had sought refuge in the shade of a narrow gulley that also offered up a thin rivulet of water. He was found there by Auda Abu Tayi.
"Well, how is it with the Howeitat?" Auda teased, recalling Lawrence"s past gibes at his tribesmen. "All talk and no work?"
Lawrence teased back, remarking that the Howeitat "shoot a lot and hit a little."
The remark seemed to enrage the chieftain. Flinging his headgear to the ground, he charged back up the hill shouting for his men to disengage and to take to their horses waiting below. Fearing his comment had so offended Auda that the Howeitat were now leaving the fight, Lawrence clambered up the slope to make amends. He found Auda standing alone and glowering down at the enemy. "Get your camel if you want to see the old man"s work," Auda said.
Hurrying down to the protected hollow where the main camel-mounted Arab force had waited all day to make their charge into Aba el Lissan, Lawrence mounted his prized camel, Naama, and climbed to a nearby ridge. He was just in time to see Auda and his fifty Howeitat hors.e.m.e.n charge into the valley from an adjacent ridge at full gallop.
"As we watched," Lawrence recalled in Seven Pillars, "two or three [Howeitat] went down, but the rest thundered forward at marvelous speed, and the Turkish infantry, huddled together under the cliff ready to cut their desperate way out towards Maan in the first dusk, began to sway in and out, and finally broke before the rush."
The 350 camel troops were swiftly ordered forward as well. Among the Turkish infantrymen, trapped and exhausted and now being charged by a mounted enemy from two sides, any semblance of defense swiftly collapsed. Suddenly, it was every man for himself, and in Aba el Lissan that day, this simply meant death came quicker.
By his account, Lawrence missed much of it. Due both to Naama"s speed and to his position at the fore of the camel charge, he had found himself well out in front of his attacking comrades; Lawrence had managed to get off just a few rounds with his pistol before Naama was shot dead beneath him, sending him plummeting to a rough landing among the rocks. When finally he gathered his wits about him, the battle was already winding down. To his chagrin, he also discovered that Naama hadn"t actually been killed by the Turks; judging by her fatal wound, a point-blank shot to the back of the head, Lawrence had accidentally shot her himself.
The carnage in Aba el Lissan was as vicious as it was one-sided. Just two Arab fighters were killed in the attack, and a handful wounded. By contrast, of the 550 Turkish soldiers trapped in the valley, perhaps 100 managed to make their escape in the direction of Maan, leaving some 160 captive and another 300 dead or dying. As Lawrence would allude in Seven Pillars, some of these deaths were not the result of battle, but of the Arabs" thirst for vengeance for the killing of the Howeitat civilians several days before.
There now came another test of Lawrence"s leadership. From his interrogation of one of the prisoners, he learned that Maan itself was very lightly garrisoned-and considerably more so now given the fate of the Aba el Lissan relief column. As word of this spread among the Arab fighters, a clamor went up for the force to double back and fall upon the railhead town; Maan offered up a golden opportunity for plunder, while the sad little port town of Aqaba offered nothing.
It was an absolutely pivotal moment, and Lawrence could feel the objective that had borne him these past two months slipping away. Even if the Arab fighters managed to take Maan, it would be a purely temporary victory; the Turks would counterattack in force, and that would see the path to Aqaba, now virtually clear, shut down forever. What"s more, it would effectively mean the end of the fighting force he and Auda and the other tribal chieftains had so patiently cobbled together. By July 2, they had "no guns, no base nearer than Wejh, no communications, no money even, for our gold was exhausted, and we were issuing our own notes, promises to pay "when Aqaba is taken" for daily expenses." Aqaba now had to be taken as a matter of survival.
With Auda"s help, Lawrence at last managed to turn the warriors away from the easy promise of Maan. Both to put more distance between their men and that temptation and out of fear of attack by Turks or marauding rival tribes, they resolved to set out for Aqaba that same night. But this decision raised another, troubling issue: what to do with the enemy wounded? It was agreed that those able to walk would join their fellow prisoners and, watched over by a rearguard detail, be herded along in the direction of Aqaba. As for the twenty or so Turks too badly wounded to travel, they were to be left behind, placed beside the stream so that at least their imminent deaths might not come from thirst.
While the Arab warriors began breaking camp for the onward night march, Lawrence set off alone down the valley to where the day"s slaughter had taken place. He hoped to gather enough coats or blankets off the Turkish corpses to make those being left by the streambank a bit more comfortable in their last hours, but he found that scavenging parties had already discovered the dead and stripped them naked. The scene, and Lawrence"s reaction to it, was to lead to one of the eeriest pa.s.sages in his autobiography: The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs, and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over their plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure G.o.d knew how many toils and pains of this sort.
At last turning away from the dead, Lawrence rejoined the warriors for the march on to Aqaba, now just forty miles away over the mountains.
IN LAWRENCE"S TWO-MONTH absence, the Anglo-Arab military campaign in the Hejaz continued in its usual fitful rhythm. Through May and June, British demolition parties, usually accompanied by bands of Arab warriors, made their periodic forays inland to do damage to the Hejaz Railway. Their reports noted the occasional success-a blown bridge here, a wrecked train there-but even more frequently complained of the unreliability and lack of discipline among their Arab confederates. Higher up the chain of command, British commanders remained exercised about galvanizing the rebels to finally carry out their blocking operation in the El Ula region northwest of Medina, but the sense of imperative for the scheme was gradually withering under the evidence that the Turks had no intention of leaving Medina. Faisal, now enjoying the t.i.tle of Commander of Arab Forces, had instead set his sights on his march into Syria. Among those British officers privy to Faisal"s fantastically ambitious blueprint for that advance-this from a man who had barely budged from Wejh in four months-enthusiasm tended to be restrained. "It is somewhat difficult to examine in any detail Sherif Faisal"s plan," one such officer reported at the end of May, "which is characterized throughout by a remarkable freedom from conventional restrictions in regard to time, s.p.a.ce, arrangements for supply, or the disposition and possible action of the enemy."
Looking over the reports from the field, Gilbert Clayton in Cairo filed a weekly status report on the Hejaz situation to the director of military intelligence in London. Throughout May and June, these memoranda were usually prefaced by the comment that very little had changed since the previous one. But if all remained static in the Hejaz-"satisfactory" was the word Clayton preferred-by late June, his spies inside Syria were reporting a rather dramatic uptick in rebel activity. By the time Clayton penned his report of July 5, these reports were coming in from all across southern Syria: "active hostility" by the Howeitat tribe near Maan; an attack on the Turkish garrison at Fuweila; a raid on a Turkish camel-grazing party near Shobek; a sabotage operation on the rail line outside Bir el Shedia.
"It is not known what are the present whereabouts of Captain Lawrence, who left for the Maan area or Jebel Druze area some time ago," Clayton noted in that same report, "but lately an Arab rumor came into Wejh to the effect that he and the small party with him had blown up a large iron bridge south of Maan. These activities in the Maan area are probably the outcome of Captain Lawrence"s arrival in that neighborhood."
Gilbert Clayton had it only partly right. What he couldn"t have known was that Lawrence and his Arab confederates were actually responsible for nearly all the actions in southern Syria he reported on that day, just as they had been for most of the other attacks across the breadth of Syria, some of them over three hundred miles behind enemy lines, that had taken place over the previous month. He also couldn"t have known that on July 5, Lawrence was not in the neighborhood of Maan, but rather sixty miles to the southwest, negotiating the surrender of the Turkish garrison in Aqaba.
After the ma.s.sacre at Aba el Lissan, Lawrence and the Arab warriors had raced toward the sea. As they crested the mountains and descended the Wadi Itm toward Aqaba, the fighters pa.s.sed one empty Turkish blockhouse and trenchline after another, final proof of the brilliance of Lawrence"s contrarian scheme. "The enemy had never imagined attack from the interior," he noted, "and of all their great works, not one trench or post faced inland."
In contrast to its dramatic rendering in David Lean"s movie, the fall of Aqaba was somewhat anticlimactic. After a tense two-day standoff, with both sides running desperately short of food, the Turkish commander finally accepted that his situation was hopeless and surrendered the port on July 6 with barely a shot fired. With the white flag raised, the rebels raced into Aqaba on their camels and splashed into the sea in celebration of their audacious victory.
But for Lawrence, the long ordeal was not quite over or the triumph secure. There were now nearly twelve hundred men crowded into Aqaba, some six hundred Arab fighters and an equal number of Turkish prisoners, but desperately little food. He also knew that it would only be a matter of time-and likely a short time-before the Turks in the Syrian interior mustered a sufficient force to march over the mountains to retake Aqaba. Such an advance might be slowed by manning the mountain guardhouses with rebel units, but as Lawrence knew from past bad experience, relying on Arab tribesmen to hold defensive positions, even formidable ones, was never a safe bet. Just as vital as Aqaba"s fall, then, was to now get word of it to the British so that supplies and reinforcements could be rushed in.
The next day, and accompanied by just eight warriors, Lawrence set out in the direction of Egypt, hoping to cross the 150 miles of desert that lay between Aqaba and the British lines at the Suez before it was too late.
Chapter 14.
Hubris Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is.
T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917.
On the morning of July 10, 1917, Gilbert Clayton was seeing to one of his drearier tasks, composing the weekly status report on the Arabian war theater for the military intelligence director in London. As he had done many times in recent months with only the slightest variation, he prefaced the memo with the comment that "nothing has occurred of great importance in the Hejaz since I last wrote," before providing a quick rundown of battle plans yet to be acted upon, small successes that should have been greater, opportunities squandered.
Shortly after the report went out the door to the telegraph office, a tiny figure in a dirty Arab robe wandered into Clayton"s office. Taking his visitor for a local favor seeker, or perhaps an enterprising beggar boy, the distracted general was in the process of shooing him out the door when he noticed the familiar lopsided grin, the piercing light blue eyes. It was T. E. Lawrence.
Sitting his emaciated subordinate down, Clayton urgently pressed for details on all that had transpired in the two months since Lawrence had set off into the Arabian interior and vanished from view. The general then dashed off an excited postscript to his weekly status report: "Since writing the above and just as I send it to the mail, Captain Lawrence has arrived after a journey through enemy country which is little short of marvelous." There followed a brief synopsis of the capture of Aqaba, as well as of Lawrence"s intelligence-gathering mission across Syria. "I have not yet been able to discuss his journey with Lawrence as he has only just arrived and is somewhat exhausted by 1,300 miles on a camel in the last 30 days.... I think, however, that you would be interested in the above brief sketch of a very remarkable performance, calling for a display of courage, resource and endurance which is conspicuous even in these days when gallant deeds are of daily occurrence."
Ironically, some of Lawrence"s greatest travails in reaching Cairo had come in trying to navigate the British lines. The previous afternoon, he and his small band of escorts had reached the eastern bank of the Suez Ca.n.a.l, having made the 150-mile trek from Aqaba in an astounding forty-nine hours, only to find the British guardposts there abandoned (due to a cholera outbreak, Lawrence would later learn). Finding an operable field telephone, he repeatedly called over to the army"s ferry transport office on the opposite sh.o.r.e to request a boat, only to be just as repeatedly hung up on. At last he reached a logistics officer who knew him from Wejh, and a launch was sent.
In that first moment of safety, two months to the day since he had set out from Wejh, Lawrence"s strength finally gave out, and it was all he could do to drag himself to the Port Suez officers" billet at the Sinai Hotel. "After conquering its first hostile impression of me and my dress," he wrote, "[the hotel] produced the hot baths and the cold drinks (six of them) and the dinner and bed of my dreams."
His ordeal continued into the next day. Barefoot and still clad in his ragged Arab robes, Lawrence was repeatedly stopped and questioned by military police during his train journey to Cairo. His luck turned on the train platform at Ismailia when he caught the notice of a senior British naval officer who recognized him from his Red Sea crossings. It was a fortunate meeting; the military high command in Cairo was quickly alerted to what had happened in Aqaba, and by that afternoon the first supplies and reinforcements were being rushed to the rebel-held port.
On the Ismailia platform, Lawrence also learned of a major development that had occurred in his absence. Following his defeat at the Second Battle of Gaza, Archibald Murray had been removed from command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. His replacement, a cavalry general named Edmund Allenby, had arrived in Cairo less than two weeks earlier. Initially, Lawrence greeted this news with dismay. It had taken months of painstaking ministrations by himself and Clayton and everyone else at the Arab Bureau to even partially win over the p.r.i.c.kly Murray to the idea of supporting the Arab Revolt. Now they would have to start over from scratch, and Lawrence envisioned many more months lost in the education of Edmund Allenby.
But upon reaching Cairo, Lawrence was to discover something else. Already, word of his exploits was spreading through the British military command, and to electrifying effect. Coming on the heels of the defeat at Gaza, the stasis in the Hejaz, and the ceaselessly grim news from Europe-another Allied offensive on the Western Front had failed, the French army was mutinying, the Russian government was collapsing-here was some genuinely cheering news, a sterling example of British daring and pluck. Even beyond the fantastic manner in which it had been achieved, Aqaba"s capture meant the Arab war effort had abruptly leapfrogged 250 miles to the north and made the task of carrying that effort into Syria dramatically simpler.
Curiously, though, it was Lawrence"s subsidiary feat, his long and perilous journey through the Syrian heartland, that seemed to most capture the imagination and accolades of his countrymen. Part of it was surely the romantic image it conjured, one with many antecedents in British military lore: the lone adventurer (never mind that Lawrence had actually been accompanied by two scouts) sneaking behind enemy lines in disguise and with a bounty on his head, his clandestine meetings with would-be conspirators, the threat of betrayal and tortured death stalking his every turn. Certainly it was this aspect that most inspired Reginald Wingate in recommending Lawrence be awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain"s highest military decoration. As Wingate pointed out, what "considerably enhanced the gallantry" of Lawrence"s exploit was that it had been conducted amid "a highly venal population" even with a 5,000 Turkish reward on his head.