In his memoir, Yale justified that intent by a nice turn of circular logic: "The information the British gave me was not given to me personally, for I was but an agent of the United States government, and if I performed the function I was employed for by the government, I must transmit to the State Department what news I acquired.... The officials of other governments must understand such to be the case, hence any condition imposed by them has no validity. In consequence, I had no hesitancy in quoting these statements in the Arab Bulletin which I judged to be necessary."
While conceding the possibility of a gap in such logic-after all, for foreign officials to "understand" his situation, it rather depended on their being informed of it-Yale had a handy excuse for this, too; if his finely calibrated American moral compa.s.s had somehow been sent askew, it was surely due to the fact that "I had been living and dealing with European and Oriental officials for four years."
But there was something else about the young American special agent that Reginald Wingate didn"t apprehend. William Yale wasn"t actually a former employee of Socony at all. Rather, he was officially "on leave" from that corporation, a status that allowed him to continue to draw half his prewar salary. And even if British officials in Cairo were to ever grow suspicious of such a link, they were unlikely to uncover it, since Yale had arranged for his Socony checks to be issued to his mother and deposited in New York. In the months ahead, as he read through the Arab Bulletin and whatever other cla.s.sified British intelligence came his way, Yale kept a careful lookout for any references to oil.
ON THE AFTERNOON of October 31, 1917, Aaron Aaronsohn and Chaim Weizmann waited in an antechamber of the British cabinet"s conference room in Whitehall. They had been invited there by Mark Sykes for the honor of being the first to learn the result of the British leadership"s latest deliberations on "the Zionist question."
At long last, the doors to the inner sanctum swung open, and a beaming Mark Sykes emerged. "Dr. Weizmann," he announced, "it"s a boy."
The two Zionist leaders were then brought into the cabinet conference room to meet Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, and the other members of the government who had just then approved the wording of a statement on the future status of Jewish settlement in Palestine six months in the making. Testament to both that tortuous process and to the deep reservations many senior British officials still harbored on the issue was the curious manner in which the statement would now be delivered: a scribbled, seemingly off-the-cuff note of a mere three sentences from Secretary Balfour to British financier Walter Rothschild.
"His Majesty"s Government view with favour," the salient clause read, "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object."
That handwritten note would soon become known as the Balfour Declaration, and from it would grow a controversy that continues to haunt the world to this day. For Aaron Aaronsohn, however, it was a first step toward his dream of a reconst.i.tuted Israel, the cause for which he and so many of his compatriots in Palestine had sacrificed so much. Aaronsohn was yet to know the full extent of those sacrifices, however. On that day of celebration at Whitehall, neither he nor anyone else outside Palestine had learned of the ugly events that had occurred at Zichron Yaakov three weeks earlier.
FOR GILBERT CLAYTON and David Hogarth and a handful of other British officers in Egypt that early November, a nagging concern began to intrude on their ebullient moods: where was Lawrence?
General Allenby"s offensive had gone off like clockwork. Catching the Turkish forces around Beersheva off guard, the British cavalry had stormed into that desert town on the morning of October 31 and then pressed on. By November 7, the Turkish garrison at Gaza, their lines of reinforcement cut and in imminent danger of being encircled, had abandoned their trenchworks and begun a hasty withdrawal twenty miles up the coast. Bad weather prevented the British from pressing their advantage, but they had now finally pierced the first and strongest defensive wall of Palestine.
Yet as the days pa.s.sed and the afterglow of that victory began to fade, those at El Arish who had been involved in the strategic planning with Lawrence grew increasingly troubled by the enduring silence from Yarmuk. As Gilbert Clayton confided to George Lloyd, now back in Aqaba, on November 12, "I am very anxious for news of Lawrence."
On that day, Lawrence and his raiding party were actually some eighty miles to the east of Yarmuk, hoping to salvage at least some small accomplishment from a mission where everything had gone wrong.
Reaching the desert fortress village of Azraq a few days after parting with Lloyd, Lawrence had found the Serahin tribesmen he hoped to enlist for Yarmuk reluctant to join; a chief reason was their deep mistrust of Abd el Kader, whom they too suspected of being a traitor. Swayed by an impa.s.sioned speech by Lawrence, the tribesmen finally joined on to the mission, but then Abd el Kader had abruptly disappeared en route to Yarmuk, last seen heading for a Turkish-held town. Still, Lawrence refused to turn back.
Despite it all, he very nearly succeeded. Reaching the railroad bridge at Tell al Shehab on the night of November 7, Lawrence and his demolition team had been hauling the gelignite down into the gorge under the very nose of a Turkish sentry when someone dropped a rifle against the rocks. Alerted by the sound, the half dozen Turkish guards rolled out of their guardhouse to begin firing wildly in all directions. Possessed of the unpleasant knowledge that gelignite explodes if hit by a bullet, Lawrence"s porters summarily tossed their loads into the ravine and scrambled for safety. With little alternative, Lawrence joined them.
Men in war are among the most superst.i.tious of people, but even one welded to pure rationality might have decided it was now time for the Yarmuk raiding party to call things off, to count its blessings at having survived for this long and make for safety. Instead, Lawrence seemed gripped by an almost demonic determination to wring at least some small shard of success from his mission. He decided to launch another train attack.
To do so, though, meant raising the danger stakes yet again. With his entourage running desperately short of food, he ordered some of its members away. This included the Indian machine-gun crews, which meant that even if the train attack came off, the raiders would have no heavy weaponry to protect them. What"s more, due to the amount of electric cable lost at the Yarmuk bridge, whoever triggered the detonation would be positioned a mere fifty yards from the blast site. That person would be Lawrence.
The site he chose was an isolated stretch of track outside the village of Minifir on the main trunk line of the Hejaz Railway below Amman. Crouched behind a small bush to conceal his detonator but in plain view of the track, Lawrence first tried to blow up a long troop transport train. To the great good fortune of himself and the sixty men in his retinue hiding in nearby gulleys, the electric connection failed-they surely would have been ma.s.sacred by the overwhelming Turkish force-and for agonizing minutes, Lawrence endured the puzzled stares of the Turkish soldiers on the slowly pa.s.sing train, occasionally waving to them in forced friendliness.
Not that the odds of survival were much better with the somewhat smaller troop train Lawrence succeeded in striking the next day. Positioned so close to the explosion site, he was sent flying by the blast"s concussion-a very lucky thing since a large chunk of the destroyed train engine landed directly atop the detonator mechanism that moments before had been between his knees. Dazed, Lawrence staggered to his feet to see that his shirt was torn to shreds and blood dripped from his left arm. As the dust and smoke cleared, he also saw just before him "the scalded and smoking upper half of a man," ripped in two by the blast; that portion of his body had flown fifty yards through the air.
"I duly felt that it was time to get away," Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, "but when I moved, I learnt that there was a great pain in my right foot, because of which I could only limp along, with my head swinging from the shock. Movement began to clear away this confusion, as I hobbled toward the upper valley, whence the Arabs were now shooting fast into the crowded coaches."
As Lawrence stumbled toward safety, the Turkish soldiers on the train took aim at him-albeit not very good aim; by his account, he was grazed by at least five of their bullets, "some of them uncomfortably deep." As he went, still in a state of shock, he willed himself on by chanting an odd refrain: "Oh, I wish this hadn"t happened."
In the capture of Wejh ten months earlier, Lawrence had excoriated a British officer who had led an a.s.sault party ash.o.r.e, an action that resulted in some twenty Arabs being killed, rather than simply waiting for the stranded Turkish garrison to surrender. "To me," he wrote of that engagement, "an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.... Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation, and our men were volunteers-individuals, local men, relatives-so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army."
At Minifir, Lawrence had picked a fight with a Turkish force of some four hundred soldiers with a mere sixty followers; incredibly, some of these didn"t even have weapons, and were reduced to throwing rocks at the hobbled train. About twenty were quickly shot down, including at least seven from among the group sent down to the tracks to rescue Lawrence. Of the contradiction between his response to the British officer"s actions at Wejh and his own at Minifir, Lawrence seemed to remain quite oblivious-or perhaps, in the pa.s.sage of those brutal ten months, he simply no longer cared.
"Next day," he wrote of Minifir"s aftermath, "we moved into Azrak, having a great welcome and boasting-G.o.d forgive us-that we were victors."
Chapter 16.
A Gathering Fury With reference to the recent publication of your Excellency"s declaration to Lord Rothschild regarding Jews in Palestine, we respectfully take the liberty to invite your Excellency"s attention to the fact that Palestine forms a vital part of Syria-as the heart is to the body-admitting of no separation politically or sociologically.
THE SYRIAN COMMITTEE OF EGYPT TO BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY BALFOUR, NOVEMBER 14, 1917.
The British Authorities have replied to the Syrian Committee ... that the telegram to Mr. Balfour could not be transmitted at this time, but that the British Authorities were pleased the Syrians in Egypt had made known their sentiments in regard to the Zionist Question.
WILLIAM YALE TO STATE DEPARTMENT, DECEMBER 17, 1917.
For the traveler venturing east from the Jordanian capital of Amman, there is little to relieve the eye. Within a few miles, the hilly contours of Amman are left behind and the land settles into an undulating plain of gravel and coa.r.s.e sand. As a consequence, one"s first thought upon coming to the high stone walls of the citadel of Azraq, some fifty miles across that dreary desert, is apt to be wonderment at its improbability. On this vast and empty landscape, how to account for such a ma.s.sive fortress, its thirty-foot walls crowned by even higher watchtowers at its corners, ever having been built?
The answer is water, of course, an oasis that in ancient times provided the only source of sustenance over a surrounding area of nearly five thousand square miles. It was the Romans who first appreciated Azraq"s strategic importance, erecting a small fort beside the oasis in the second century AD, but it was Saladin"s Ayyubid empire a thousand years later that created the impressive monolith that still stands. Even today, the citadel dominates the town that shares its name, but in November 1917, when Lawrence and his small band of raiders fled to Azraq after their train attack at Minifir, that settlement consisted of a few stone huts, and the fortress must have risen up from the plain before them like an apparition.
Azraq was where Lawrence had met Nuri Shalaan, the emir of the Rualla tribe, the previous June, and he had noted at the time that it made for a perfect hideout. Along with water and shelter, the fortress provided a commanding view of the desert in all directions. Consequently, Lawrence had sent the Indian machine-gun crews there just prior to the Minifir attack, so that by the time he and the rest of the raiding party arrived on November 12, those guns were already mounted in the citadel"s watchtowers, making the place all but invincible. So ideal was the oasis, in fact, that Lawrence quickly decided to make it the forward base for bringing the Arab Revolt to the Syrian heartland; within a day of arriving, he sent a courier on the two-hundred-mile journey to Aqaba with instructions for Faisal to begin bringing the vanguard of his army north.
Setting up shop in Azraq served a more cunning purpose, too. The settlement marked the northwestern boundary of Nuri Shalaan"s dominion. Despite the repeated entreaties of Faisal, and Lawrence himself back in June, Shalaan continued to straddle the centerline of the war, quietly lending support to the Arab rebels one day, openly trading with the Turks the next. In Azraq, the rebels would be placing themselves squarely between the Rualla heartland and the Turkish-controlled Syrian market towns. "He hesitated to declare himself only because of his wealth in Syria," Lawrence wrote of Shalaan, "and the possible hurt to his tribesmen if they were deprived of their natural market. We, by living in one of his main manors, would keep him ashamed to go in to the enemy."
In Azraq, Lawrence"s small retinue quickly became less a band of warriors than a pickup construction crew as they set to work making the citadel habitable for the much larger force soon to be on its way. They repaired its tumbled stone walls and fallen roofs, even refurbished the small mosque in its courtyard that had most recently been used as a sheep pen. As word of the rebels" presence spread through the district, their labors were interrupted by visits from tribal delegations, visits that invariably led to feasts and an atmosphere of general merriment. Lawrence found a pleasant respite from it all by taking up residence in the repaired watchroom of the southern tower.
Even for a book saturated with detail-some might say drowned by it-there is something quite remarkable about Lawrence"s account of Azraq in Seven Pillars. For five pages, and in some of the most heartfelt writing of the entire memoir, he lingered over the idyll of his time there, the happy camaraderie that existed between his group of followers and their visitors, lyrically described the mysterious wolves or jackals that howled outside the citadel"s walls at night but were never seen. Even when the winter rains started, turning the fortress into a leaking, clammy prison where the only recourse was to huddle for warmth beneath sheepskins, misery took on a distinctly heraldic quality. "It was icy cold as we hid there, motionless, from murky daylight until dark, our minds seemed suspended within these ma.s.sive walls, through whose every shot-window the piercing mist streamed like a white pennant. Past and future flowed over us like an uneddying river. We dreamed ourselves into the spirit of the place; sieges and feasting, raids, murders, love-singing in the night."
Making all this rather more remarkable is that, at most, Lawrence stayed just six days in Azraq on this November visit, and possibly as few as three.
Perhaps the place took on its idyllic trappings in his mind because of what he had just endured. For the preceding month, ever since coming up with the plan to attack the Yarmuk bridge, Lawrence had lived in the constant shadow of the knowledge that he might soon die. In Azraq, that shadow had abruptly lifted.
Or perhaps it was due to what lay immediately ahead. Just days after reaching Azraq, Lawrence set off into the desert again in the company of three men. Their destination was the crucial rail junction town of Deraa, seventy miles to the northwest. There, Lawrence would endure the most horrific-and among his various biographers of the past half century, most fiercely debated-ordeal of his entire wartime experience.
THE DOUBLE CROSS, for this was certainly how Aaron Aaronsohn viewed it, was revealed on the afternoon of November 16, on the very eve of his departure from London. It was then that he finally received Chaim Weizmann"s letter of instruction concerning his mission to the United States. The two had discussed that mission at such exhaustive length in recent days that Aaronsohn almost didn"t bother to read the letter-but he did.
Weizmann"s note instructed him, essentially, to shut up. "The carrying out of these complicated duties," he wrote, "makes it desirable for you to avoid making public speeches and journalistic interviews, and in order to prevent your being pressed to undertake such work we, in accordance with your desire, formally request you to confine yourself to the duties already specified." In case the point could be missed, Weizmann further ordered Aaronsohn to refrain from all "direct action, either by speech or letter, except through the medium of Mr. Brandeis," the leader of American Zionists.
Aaronsohn was made furious by the letter, not least by Weizmann"s contention that he himself had asked for such a muzzle. "The old man is not a fool," he angrily noted in his diary that night, "but I am not so nave either.... Verily, every day brings me another proof of Weizmann"s hypocrisy."
Since arriving in London six weeks earlier, Aaronsohn had spent a good deal of time with the British Zionist leader. Their relationship was a complicated one, rooted in both mutual respect and mutual distrust, and they had developed a habit of getting along famously one day, falling to bickering the next. Just prior to Weizmann"s demeaning letter of instruction, there had been much more of the former, and for a simple reason: in a matter of days, there had unfolded before their eyes the most dramatic and consequential events in the history of Zionism.
Chief among these was the Balfour Declaration, of course, but neatly coinciding with that had been news of the British army"s rapid advance in Palestine. After breaking through at Beersheva, Allenby"s forces had continued to push north, scattering the disorganized Turks before them. Although Aaronsohn didn"t know it yet, on that very day of November 16, a British vanguard was marching unopposed into the coastal city of Jaffa, fifty miles from their starting point, even as other units closed on the foothills below Jerusalem. With astounding speed, what had seemed a distant, even theoretical, dream for nineteen hundred years-the return of the Jewish diaspora to their ancient homeland-was hurtling toward reality.
Understandably, the combination of these events was having an electrifying effect on the international Zionist community. From Jewish enclaves around the world, messages of grat.i.tude for the Balfour Declaration had flooded into the British Foreign Office. That outpouring seemed to instantly affirm the argument that Chaim Weizmann and his allies in the British government had been pressing for months, that by declaring support for a Jewish homeland and working to make it happen, the Allies would find the world"s Zionist community rushing to its side.
This reaction wasn"t universal, however, and the fervency of support elsewhere made the muted reaction among American Zionists all the more striking. By mid-November, few American newspapers had seen fit to even mention the declaration-the New York Times dispensed with it in three very short paragraphs-while many noted American Jewish leaders had yet to publicly comment on it. Most conspicuous was the silence emanating from the Wilson administration, a situation Weizmann and the British government found particularly galling since the declaration had been rewritten-and substantially delayed-specifically to gain the American president"s approval.
As Woodrow Wilson"s closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, had informed the British back in September when the proposal was first explicitly put to the Americans, the president was prepared to go no further than a vague statement of "sympathy" for the Anglo-Zionist plan, and only this "provided it can be made without conveying any real commitment" on his part. By subsequently watering down the declaration"s original proposed language, the British had managed to bring Wilson fully on board, but with a major caveat still attached; as House told London in mid-October, the president "asks that no mention of his approval shall be made when His Majesty"s Government makes [the] formula public, as he has arranged that American Jews shall then ask him for his approval, which he will give publicly here."
Except that Wilson"s silence had contributed to the hesitation of American Zionists on the matter, which in turn had enabled the president to maintain his silence. It was in hopes of countering this standoff that Aaron Aaronsohn, a familiar figure to many of those Zionists, was being dispatched to the United States.
The goals of his mission had been worked out at a high-level meeting at the British Foreign Office a few days earlier, one attended by both Weizmann and Mark Sykes. It was a highly ambitious agenda. As the officially designated liaison between the English Zionist Federation and its American counterpart, Aaronsohn was to "help our United States Organization to appreciate the actual significance of various political and military developments" in the Middle East, as well as to promote the "the rousing of Zionist enthusiasm, the stimulating of pro-Entente propaganda," and, in furtherance of Sykes"s fanciful notion of a Jewish-Arab-Armenian consortium in the Middle East, "the consolidation and alliance of the Zionist forces with those of the Arabs and Armenians." In addition, Aaronsohn was to act as the official channel of communication between Weizmann and the leader of the American Zionist community, U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.
As daunting as this agenda was, Aaronsohn had accepted the a.s.signment wholeheartedly, and he"d let his Zionist contacts in the United States know he was on his way. That simply added another layer of humiliation to Weizmann"s letter of instruction on November 16.
But many people had tried to silence Aaron Aaronsohn over the years, and to precious little success. Quickly coming to regard Weizmann"s strictures as something of a dare, the next morning the agronomist boarded a train at London"s Euston station for the run up to Liverpool and the ship, SS St. Paul, that would take him to New York.
In Weizmann"s defense, it wasn"t merely a controlling nature that led him to try to muzzle Aaronsohn. While appreciative of the scientist"s extensive contacts in the American Zionist community, Weizmann had spent enough time around Aaronsohn over the previous six weeks to grow apprehensive of his hotheaded personality. That was especially worrisome considering that there was actually something of a hidden agenda to his mission to the United States.
In antic.i.p.ation of full British control of Palestine in the near future, as well as to allay the fears already being expressed by the Muslim and Christian communities of Palestine over the Balfour Declaration, Sykes and Weizmann had decided that a Zionist committee should be dispatched to the region as soon as possible to take stock of the situation. Sykes in particular was anxious that this committee include an American delegation, figuring that its presence would be viewed as tacit acceptance by President Wilson of both the Balfour Declaration and future British control of Palestine. But a rather daunting obstacle stood in the way. The United States had only declared war on Germany, and Wilson had made it clear he had no intention of becoming entangled in any affairs regarding the Ottoman Empire; thus it was highly doubtful that his administration would sanction an American delegation. This gave rise to Aaronsohn"s sub rosa mission to the United States: to get American Zionist leaders to bring pressure on the Wilson government, not only to openly endorse the Balfour Declaration, but to reverse course and declare war on Turkey.
But when Aaronsohn arrived in the United States he received some crushing news. At the Zionist Federation office in New York on December 1, he was handed a cable from his youngest brother, Sam, newly arrived in Cairo. Nearly two full months after the event, Aaronsohn finally learned of the destruction of his NILI spy ring by the Turks. His brother"s cable also told of the death of their sister Sarah, their father, Ephraim, and of the execution of Naaman Belkind.
"The sacrifice is accomplished," Aaronsohn wrote in his diary that night. "I knew that we still had to face the greatest misfortune, but it is one thing to fear it, and another to know that all hope is lost. Poor father, poor Sarati.... Her loss is the most cruel."
The news surely added a new layer of resentment in his feelings for Weizmann and the other Zionist leaders in Europe who sought to curb his influence. For two years, Aaronsohn and those closest to him had risked their lives for the Zionist cause-and many had now paid the ultimate price-while those in London and Paris went about their meetings and pamphleteering. That contrast was exquisitely underscored on December 2. Just a day after Aaronsohn received the sad news from Athlit, members of the English Zionist Federation gathered at London"s Albert Hall for a gala celebration marking the one-month anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
IT"S UNLIKELY THAT any writer ever recounted his or her own torture in more exacting, even loving, detail.
By Lawrence"s account, it began on the morning of November 20. Several days earlier, he had left Azraq with his three escorts to survey the countryside around the vital railway town of Deraa. He now wanted a firsthand look at Deraa"s rail complex itself. The only way to do that was brazenly, so that morning Lawrence and one of his escorts had ridden to an isolated stretch of railway several miles north of town and dismounted from their camels; on foot and in Arab dress, they had then begun simply walking the rails into Deraa.
All was going well until, pa.s.sing a Turkish army encampment, the pair drew the notice of a suspicious sergeant. The officer collared Lawrence, announcing that "the Bey [chief] wants you," but for some reason allowed his companion to continue on.
For the rest of that day, Lawrence was held in a guardroom awaiting his audience with the bey and parrying suspicions that he was a Turkish army deserter. He did so by claiming to be a Circa.s.sian, a mountain people of the northern Caucasus who were exempt from conscription and known for their fair complexions and light-colored eyes. In the evening, guards came to take him to the bey"s rooms, a man Lawrence would identify as "Nahi" in Seven Pillars, but whose actual name was Hajim Muhittin, the Deraa district governor.
It became clear this meeting was intended to be of a s.e.xual nature when Hajim dismissed the guard detail and wrestled Lawrence onto his bed. When he managed to wriggle free, the governor summoned the guards, who pinioned Lawrence to the bed and began tearing away his clothes. Hajim"s pawing began anew, until Lawrence kneed him in the groin.
With his naked victim again pinned to the bed by the guards, a furious Hajim now fell on Lawrence in a frenzy of both ardor and rage, kissing and spitting on him, biting into his neck until it drew blood, finally lifting up a fold of skin on his chest to skewer him with a bayonet. As Lawrence would recount, the bey then ordered the guards "to take me out and teach me everything."
What followed was an ordeal of horrific torture. Dragged into a nearby room, Lawrence was stretched over a bench where two of the guards "knelt on my ankles, bearing down on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists till they cracked, and then crushed them and my neck against the wood." A short whip was then retrieved, and the four guards took turns lashing Lawrence on the back and b.u.t.tocks scores, if not hundreds, of times. "At last when I was completely broken they seemed satisfied," he recalled in Seven Pillars. "Somehow I found myself off the bench, lying on my back on the dirty floor, where I snuggled down, dazed, panting for breath, but vaguely comfortable."
But his torment was not quite done and, in the telling, now took on a hallucinatory quality. Viciously kicked in the ribs by the officer in charge and ordered to stand, Lawrence instead smiled idly up at the man. At this effrontery, the officer "flung up his arm and hacked the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over screaming, or rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One [of the guards] giggled with amus.e.m.e.nt. A voice cried, "Shame, you"ve killed him." Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black."
Perhaps not surprisingly, when Lawrence was finally dragged back to Hajim"s quarters, "he now rejected me in haste, as a thing too torn and b.l.o.o.d.y for his bed." His ordeal at last over, Lawrence was hauled out to the courtyard and dumped in a shed where an Armenian "dresser," or male nurse, was summoned to wash and bandage him. Then his torturers simply walked away.
That they would do so was only the first in a remarkable-some would say highly improbable-sequence of events that would ultimately deliver Lawrence from his greatest tribulation. By his account, as dawn approached, he summoned the strength to get to his feet and explore his dreary surroundings. In the empty adjacent room, he found a "suit of shoddy clothes" hanging from a door. Managing to dress himself, he then climbed out a window to drop to the empty street outside. On unsteady feet, he proceeded to walk through the just-wakening town until at last he"d left it behind. Wheedling a ride from a pa.s.sing camel-borne merchant, he finally came to the outlying village where he"d arranged to rendezvous with his Azraq companions. He found them there, their previous anxiety over his capture replaced by amazement at his escape.
"I told them a merry tale of bribery and trickery," Lawrence recounted, "which they promised to keep to themselves, laughing aloud at the simplicity of the Turks." That same afternoon, the group set out on horseback for the seventy-mile return to Azraq.
So, in brief, was Lawrence"s account of that awful day-in brief, because the story of his brutalization at Deraa would extend over five lurid and excruciating-to-read pages in Seven Pillars. Yet there is something in the sheer acc.u.mulation of such ghastly detail that serves to cloud the narrative, to make vague what really happened. In describing his wrists being twisted until they "cracked," did Lawrence mean they were broken? And was he actually raped? There are several euphemistic clues to suggest so, but just as many to suggest the opposite. Even more puzzling are those lingering descriptions of his torture that take on a vaguely lascivious, voyeuristic quality. When he was lanced with the bayonet, for example, Lawrence noted that "the blood wavered down my side, and dripped to the front of my thigh. [Hajim] looked pleased and dabbled it over my stomach with his finger-tips." Later, while being kicked in the ribs after his flogging, he would recall that "a delicious warmth, probably s.e.xual, was swelling through me."
Under the weight of such precise and overwhelming detail, many Lawrence biographers-most, in fact-have concluded that the incident at Deraa simply could not have happened as he described, even that it didn"t occur at all. Put plainly, how could anyone subjected to the cruelties Lawrence claimed to have endured at Deraa been capable of escape? Even allowing for the fantastic string of good luck that brought him to that point, how did a man whose wrists had been "cracked" shortly before manage to climb out a window? Flogging so disrupts the central nervous system that many victims have difficulty even standing for several hours after receiving as few as thirty lashes; lashed exponentially more, how was Lawrence able to walk several miles through an enemy town unnoticed, then immediately set out on a seventy-mile horseback ride?
The implausibilities grow in light of Lawrence"s subsequent actions. Just two days after returning to Azraq, he embarked on an arduous four-day camel ride to Aqaba. Once there, he made no mention of his Deraa ordeal to his British comrades. Questioned years later, several would recall that Lawrence had seemed preoccupied upon his return, one going so far as to say he was "pale and obviously distraught," but none reported seeing any cuts or bruises on their colleague, or that he displayed any obvious signs of physical discomfort. Indeed, upon seeing his protege less than three weeks after the Deraa incident, David Hogarth would write to his wife that Lawrence looked "fitter and better than when I last saw him."
Casting further doubt on the Deraa story as rendered in Seven Pillars is the radically different first version that Lawrence provided nineteen months after the event. It was contained in a June 1919 letter to his army friend, Colonel Walter Stirling, and Lawrence backed into the account by way of listing the various betrayals of the Algerian turncoat, Abd el Kader. Not only had the Algerian sabotaged his Yarmuk bridge operation, Lawrence explained to Stirling, but he had been recognized by Hajim Muhittin, the Deraa governor, "by virtue of Abd el Kader"s description of me. (I learnt all about his treachery from Hajim"s conversation, and from my guards.) Hajim was an ardent pederast and took a fancy to me. So he kept me under guard till night, and then tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty. Hajim sent me to the hospital and I escaped before dawn, being not as hurt as he thought. He was so ashamed of the muddle he had made that he hushed the whole thing up, and never reported my capture and escape. I got back to Azrak very annoyed with Abd el Kader."
When measured against that in Seven Pillars, this account has the unique quality of being simultaneously both more and less plausible. Absent the gothic cruelties described in the book, perhaps a Lawrence "not as hurt as he thought" would have had the physical wherewithal to escape. On the other hand, if Hajim had truly recognized him-this at a time when there was a 20,000-Turkish-pound bounty on Lawrence"s head-it seems utterly absurd that he would leave such a prize unguarded in a hospital overnight. It"s also a bit hard to imagine that a chief topic of conversation among Lawrence"s captors as they set to abusing him would be of Abd el Kader"s role in unmasking him.
But despite all this, there are strong indications that something happened in Deraa. Many of those who knew Lawrence best would report a change in his personality, an even greater remoteness, dating from around that time. It was also soon afterward that he began organizing his personal bodyguard, a detail of some fifty or sixty elite warriors who from then on would be in his almost constant company.
And as it turns out, Lawrence gave yet a third account of what had occurred in Deraa, one that suggests his experience there was very different-and in some respects, a great deal worse-from that which he told Stirling or presented to the outside world. It came in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of writer George Bernard Shaw, in 1924.
Lawrence became close friends with the Shaws after the war, with Charlotte Shaw a.s.suming a kind of mother-confessor role in his life, or, as Lawrence put it, "the solitary woman who lets me feel at ease with her in spite of it all." Presumably in response to a question from Charlotte Shaw, he wrote, "About that night. I shouldn"t tell you, because decent men don"t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book and wrestled for days with my self-respect, which wouldn"t, hasn"t let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with: our bodily integrity. It"s an unforgivable matter, an irrevocable position, and it"s that which has made me forswear decent living.... You may call this morbid, but think of the offence and the intensity of brooding over it for these years."
While rendered with his trademark obliqueness, this account suggests an altogether different picture of Deraa: that Lawrence surrendered to his attacker"s advances in order to avoid being tortured-or at least to bring it to an end. If so, it not only might explain how he was able to escape-the physical torture being minimal-but why he would tell his Azraq companions "a merry tale" and swear them to secrecy, why he would make no mention of the episode to his British comrades in Aqaba, and why he would continue to dissemble about it forever after.
But if he escaped the worst of physical torture, it came at the price of a complex constellation of psychological ones. As any victim of rape or torture can attest, perhaps the most difficult aspect of the trauma to reconcile is not the pain or even the fear of the experience, but a profoundly felt, if utterly undeserved, sense of humiliation. Lawrence was apparently both raped and tortured. While potentially devastating to most anyone, in Lawrence"s case such a trial also cut to the very core of his self-image. Since childhood, he had honed in himself the credo of stoicism, the bedrock belief that he had the ability to endure most any suffering or hardship, but now that faith had deserted him at his most desperate and vulnerable moment. Possibly further added to this-especially if the theory that Lawrence was a severely repressed h.o.m.os.e.xual is given credence-was the element of s.e.xual self-loathing the ordeal likely inspired. Had he given in out of fear of pain or death, he probably asked himself ever afterward, or because he was secretly drawn to the act? Little wonder, then, that someone enduring such a trauma might wish to adorn its memory with staggering violence, the kind of violence that offers an absolution of guilt by making all questions of will or resistance moot.
There is another compelling reason to believe something deeply scarring occurred to Lawrence at Deraa, and something more along the lines of what he described to Charlotte Shaw than what he told Walter Stirling or wrote in Seven Pillars. In ten months, he would return to that railway town in Syria, and there Lawrence would commit some of his most brutal acts of the war, acts that would carry the very strong scent of vengeance.
ON THE EVENING of December 4, 1917, the leading citizenry of Beirut gathered for a banquet in honor of Djemal Pasha. "Every time I come to Beirut," Djemal began his speech, "I observe that the inhabitants are very loyal. This has filled me with affection for them. I take this opportunity of offering them my thanks for their kindness towards me."
It was a bold tack for the Syrian governor to take, since his relationship with the city had actually always been a contentious one. With Beirut long regarded as a crucible of Arab nationalism, Djemal had exiled hundreds of its citizens on the suspicion of disloyalty, and the surrounding Lebanon region had suffered disproportionately-many believed quite deliberately-in the famines that had ravaged wartime Syria. Then there was the matter of the twenty-five alleged anti-Turk conspirators, unmasked in the doc.u.ments purloined from the shuttered French consulate, that Djemal had ordered hanged in the city"s Place des Canons in two separate ma.s.s executions. By the time of his banquet in December 1917, Place des Canons had already been dubbed Martyrs" Square by Beirut"s residents, a name it officially carries today.
Not that any of the a.s.sembled notables were likely to quibble over Djemal"s generous words, considering that they had gathered that evening by way of farewell. After three tumultuous years, the volatile military man from the island of Lesbos was leaving his posts in Syria, and even if his departure was officially described as temporary, everyone in the banquet hall, including Djemal, knew this was a fiction.
As part of a reorganization recently engineered by Enver Pasha, control of the Ottoman armies in Syria had been handed over to a new German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn. As a sop, Djemal had been named commander in chief of Syria and Western Arabia-a fine-sounding position, certainly, but more impressive if there"d been an actual army to go with it. "A sort of commander-in-chief second cla.s.s," observed Djemal"s private secretary, Falih Rifki. "The artillery, the machine guns, the rifles and the swords were put under the German"s orders, while Djemal Pasha"s share was that grand t.i.tle to put over his signature.... It was like the honorary rank of pasha which we used to give to Bedouin sheikhs in the empty desert."
If calculated to offend Djemal"s sense of honor, the move worked; resigning his various positions, he had announced his intention to return to Constantinople. To the degree that he blamed Enver for his downfall, Djemal appeared to exact some small revenge in his Beirut speech when he got around to mentioning the executions in the city"s Place des Canons, a bit of unpleasantry that still clearly rankled some of his listeners: "It is true that some time back I hanged certain Arabs," he offered. "I did not do this of my own accord, but at the insistence of Enver Pasha."
Djemal was leaving behind a record as contradictory as the man himself. While his public vow to conquer Egypt had led to fiasco in the Sinai, he could take some credit for his army"s two successful stands against the British at Gaza. He had overseen an array of ambitious modernization efforts across Syria-paved and widened city streets, electrification, new parks and mosques and munic.i.p.al buildings-even as hundreds of thousands of his subjects, perhaps as many as a million, had died from starvation and disease. He had tried to ameliorate the suffering of the Armenians, at the same time that he gained a reputation as a persecutor of the region"s Jews. And while his hard-line approach had tamped down any rebellious ardor among Arab nationalists in Syria-in none of its provinces had there been a significant uprising during his tenure-his kinder, gentler approach toward King Hussein in the Hejaz had badly backfired.
He was also getting out of Syria at a very good time. That autumn, Falkenhayn had struggled to bring a new elite Turkish force, the Yildirim Army Group, south for a preemptive a.s.sault on the British ma.s.sing in the Sinai, but he had been beaten to the punch by Allenby, with the British smashing through the Turkish line at the end of October. In the month since, and with transiting Yildirim units still scattered over the breadth of Syria, the British had seized much of southern Palestine, and now stood poised on the outskirts of Jerusalem itself. In all of this, Djemal stood perfectly blameless.
But it also wasn"t as if either Djemal or the Turkish war effort in Syria were finished just yet. Instead, and as had happened so many times over the centuries when all seemed lost for the Ottoman Empire, it was precisely at this darkest moment that a shocking turn of events had the chance to change everything.
On November 7, the very day that the Turkish army had been abandoning Gaza, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks had overthrown the Russian government of Alexander Kerensky. The following morning, the Bolsheviks released their Decree on Peace, announcing their intention to immediately withdraw from the war. All along the front, Russian forces stood down in a unilateral cease-fire. Just like that, the Ottoman Empire had seen its most implacable foe of the past two centuries simply fall away, one of the three enemy armies tearing at its frontiers suddenly go silent.
More extraordinary news had soon followed. Rifling through the overthrown government"s files, the Bolsheviks found a copy of the still-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. No doc.u.ment could have more confirmed the Bolsheviks" accusation that the slaughter visited on the earth over the past three years had been in the service of imperial aggrandizement, and in mid-November they published the compact for all to see. Of course, that doc.u.ment also played to Djemal Pasha"s long-standing accusation-that British and French talk of supporting Arab independence was simply a ruse to grab Arab lands for their colonial empires-and he used the occasion of his speech in Beirut to reiterate that point to the entire Arab and Muslim world.
"The [Sykes-Picot] Agreement was a device for bringing about an Arab revolt to suit the designs of the British who, needing tools and catspaws to serve their own ends, encouraged certain Arabs to rebel by giving them mendacious promises and hoodwinking them with false hopes," Djemal said. For a long time, he told his audience, he had puzzled over why King Hussein had turned his back on his Muslim brethren; now the answer was revealed. "Eventually, the unfortunate Sherif Hussein fell into the trap laid for him by the British, allowed himself to be ensnared by their cajoleries, and committed his offence against the unity and the majesty of Islam."
But with the Western imperialist scheme thus exposed, Djemal suggested, there was still time to defeat it. Hussein could repent for his past sins by renouncing his unholy alliance. Arabs everywhere, now shown the true face of the conniving enemy, could unite to defeat them. "I am going to Constantinople, but I shall soon be back," Djemal vowed at the end of his speech. "I beg the leading inhabitants of the town to pay no attention to false rumors, and to be patient during the few remaining days of the war, so that we may reach our goal."
The following day, his Beirut speech, with its exposure of Sykes-Picot, was carried on the front page of newspapers throughout Syria and Turkey.
Djemal hadn"t limited his efforts to oration. Just prior to his Beirut address, he had penned letters to Faisal ibn Hussein and to the rebels" chief military commander, and arranged for them to be delivered to Aqaba through a confidential emissary. In his letter to Faisal, Djemal rather magnanimously conceded that the Arab Revolt might be justified if it brought about a truly independent Arab government in which the "dignity and splendor of Islam" was secured. "But what sort of independence can you conceive ... after Palestine has become an international country, as the allied governments have openly and officially declared, [and] with Syria completely under French domination, and with Iraq and the whole of Mesopotamia forming part and parcel of British possessions? And how is such a government as this going to undertake, with independence and majesty, the shaping of the destinies of Islam? Perhaps you had not foreseen these results at the outset, but I am hoping that the spectacle of the British conquering Palestine will reveal to you this truth in all its nakedness." The letter was intended as more than a scold. "If you admit this truth," Djemal concluded, "there is nothing easier than to announce a general amnesty for the Arab revolt, and reopen negotiations with a view to solving the problem in favor of Islam."
Djemal had been quite strategic in choosing the recipient of his overture. As he knew from the time they"d spent together in Damascus, Faisal was simultaneously probably the most devout and the most modern of Hussein"s four sons. Djemal had also selected his words with great care, returning again and again to two: "Islam" and "independence." If he"d done so in hopes of stirring doubt in Faisal, he"d selected well.
FOR HIS STATE visit to Jerusalem in 1899, Kaiser Wilhelm had arranged for a special entryway to be carved from the city"s ancient walls. Astride a black stallion and clad in a uniform studded with medals, the German leader used this portal to enter the Old City, sacred ground to the world"s Jews, Christians, and Muslims, like some latter-day conquering Crusader.
The move had proven something of a public relations black eye for Germany, and for their own celebratory entry into Jerusalem in December 1917, the British strived to keep things more low-key. Adhering to the long-distance counsel of Mark Sykes, World War I Britain"s version of a political stage manager, it was decided that General Allenby would enter through one of the city"s traditional gates and on foot, and that no British flags would be flown. The Allies had been handed a tremendous propaganda victory with Jerusalem"s capture, Sykes pointed out, and anything that smacked of British or Christian triumphalism was a sure way to sabotage it.
Rather by chance, one of those partic.i.p.ating in the historic procession into the Old City on that morning of December 11 was T. E. Lawrence. After his traumatic ordeal in Deraa, he had returned to Aqaba and then been summoned to Allenby"s field headquarters in southern Palestine. He had made the journey fully expecting to be upbraided, perhaps even demoted, for his failure at Yarmuk, but instead found Allenby pleasantly distracted by his continuing string of battlefield victories. He was still at General Headquarters on December 9 when word came that the Turks and Germans were pulling out of Jerusalem. Lent an army uniform and the appropriate officer"s "pips," he changed out of his worn Arab robes and joined in the ceremonial entry masquerading as General Clayton"s staff officer. Even for a man whose Christian faith was now moribund, Lawrence found the import of that day overwhelming; for the first time in over six hundred years, a European army had returned to the cradle of Western religion, and the Middle East was never going to be the same. "For me," he later wrote, "[it] was the supreme moment of the war."
Lawrence undoubtedly felt overwhelmed for other reasons, too. It was only when he had hobbled into Aqaba in late November, racked by illness and still weakened by his ill-treatment at Deraa, that he had learned the extent of Allenby"s victories in Palestine. It was also when he first learned of the Balfour Declaration, and of the Russian revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power. A bit closer to home, he had also been apprised of the final fall from grace of his old nemesis, edouard Bremond.