Lawrence would only be wrong about the timetable; it was to be just thirty years until the British facade fell away and the state of Israel created, with Chaim Weizmann installed as its first president.
AS HIS TIME in Cairo extended, William Yale chafed under two enduring frustrations. The first was looking for any sign that his government was actually paying attention to events in the Middle East. Every Monday since late October 1917, he had been sending his long dispatches to Leland Harrison at the State Department, and hearing nothing back save for a handful of terse cables. Even his appeals for guidance-were his reports boring his readers? did the secretary want him to pursue another line of inquiry?-were met with silence.
Yale"s second frustration was more personal, his inability to gain British permission to visit the war front. In their meeting of early March, T. E. Lawrence had invited him to visit the Arab rebel base at Aqaba, but Yale"s request to that end had vanished somewhere in the British bureaucratic ether. With the Zionist Commission preparing to embark on its fact-finding mission to Palestine, Yale had pet.i.tioned to accompany it, only to be told by Gilbert Clayton that "there might be some difficulty" with the plan. He had even broached the idea of attaching himself to a delegation of the American Red Cross Commission; alas, that nongovernmental organization hadn"t warmed to the prospect of providing cover for an American intelligence agent. Really the only way to Palestine, Reginald Wingate patiently explained to the American emba.s.sy, was for Yale to be cla.s.sified as a military liaison officer and accredited to General Allenby"s staff-which, since Yale wasn"t in the military and never had been, was a diplomatic way of keeping him right where he was, sitting in Cairo.
Rather by default, then, Yale had focused his energies on what was arguably the more important task before him: getting the Wilson administration to realize what was at stake in the region. This was easier said than done, for despite Wilson"s high-minded Fourteen Points proclamation, from what Yale could determine, "our government had no policy. It was fighting, ostensibly, for nebulous ideals, little realizing that events are determined not at peace conferences, but by actions during hostilities preceding the peacemaking process.... The "deus ex machina" of international affairs is not he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realize this simple truism."
The bitter paradox in this situation-and the source of Yale"s frustration-was that by the late spring of 1918, most of the interested parties in the Middle East were clamoring for the Americans to determine events. As early as October 1917, Reginald Wingate had floated to an American diplomat the proposition that the United States take over the "mandate" of Palestinian rule in the postwar world, an idea that had continued to gain currency at the British Foreign Office. If to rather different ends, the hope of spurring American involvement had clearly been the subtext of Lawrence"s emphasis during his meeting with Yale on the Arabs" high regard for the United States. Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists made no secret that, barring a British mandate, they"d be quite happy with an American one. Even the more imperialist-minded politicians of Britain and France and Italy appeared increasingly willing to accept a broad American role in the region since, barring their gaining of new lands, the most desirable outcome was that their European "friends" not gain any either.
To Yale, however, the truly decisive factor was the burgeoning pro-American sentiment of the Arabs. While undoubtedly sparked by the promises contained in Wilson"s Fourteen Points, this att.i.tude was also a fairly logical result of contemplating the mora.s.s of claims waiting to envelop the region in the postwar era. Yale"s old friend Suleiman Bey Na.s.sif fairly typified these concerns. A moderate Arab Christian, Na.s.sif, even as he had reconciled to an expanded Jewish presence in Syria, remained deeply suspicious of British intentions, leery of King Hussein"s pan-Arab nation, and adamantly opposed to French designs. The best, perhaps only way out of this mess, Na.s.sif explained to Yale, was for the Americans-nonimperialist, idealistic, far enough away to be minimally irritating-to step into the breach.
Yale wholeheartedly agreed, but looking for the right b.u.t.ton to push with the Wilson administration was a grinding task; at one point, he even tried for base economic self-interest, pointing out to Harrison that "it is a well-known fact that certain American oil interests have recently obtained from the Ottoman Government extensive properties in Palestine," one of the rare instances, presumably, when an intelligence agent was moved to inform on his own prior activities.
Finally, in late April, after months of extolling America"s standing in the region to the State Department, Yale decided to act. It came after he met a man named Faris Nimr, a leader of the Syrian exile community in Cairo and the editor in chief of the hugely influential Egyptian newspaper al-Mokattam. As Yale explained to Leland Harrison, ever since the United States had joined the war, Nimr and a small cabal of like-minded Syrian exiles had looked to it as their homeland"s potential savior. "Quietly these few men have been spreading the idea of a sort of protectorate over Syria by the United States among the Syrians in Egypt, endeavoring to do this as secretly as possible that neither the British nor the French might become aware of it. This is an idea that appeals to both Christian and to Moslem.... It is stated by these ardent partisans of America that all the factions and all the parties among the Syrians would not only unite on the question of aid from the United States, but would rejoice if such were possible."
While waiting for Harrison"s response to this message, Yale received a bit of gladdening news from Washington on another matter. It had been decided to send a second special agent out to the Middle East, and once that man arrived in Egypt, it would be arranged for Yale to go on to Palestine. The name of his Cairo replacement, William Brewster, was very familiar to Yale; Brewster had been the Standard Oil representative in Aleppo at the same time that Yale worked for them in Jerusalem. Thus, while doubling the size of their intelligence network in the Middle East, the American government had ensured it remained within the Standard Oil recruiting pool.
With Brewster en route, Yale was hastily appointed a captain in something called "the National Army"; perhaps not wishing to appear churlish after their months of stonewalling, British authorities declined to inquire just what this curious ent.i.ty might be-the official name of the American army en route to Europe was the American Expeditionary Force-and instead congratulated the American agent on his military appointment.
"As soon as Cairo tailors could make uniforms for me," Yale recounted, "I began to prepare myself to be a soldier among soldiers. I had very little military training [actually none] and knew nothing about military matters and etiquette. For days I walked the side streets of Cairo in my new uniform, practicing saluting on pa.s.sing British Tommies. When they began to salute me automatically, with no smirks on their faces, I knew I was on the way to being a soldier."
It was all in preparation for an occasion the newly minted captain rather dreaded, his formal presentation to General Allenby. In mid-July, Yale and the new American consul to Egypt, Hampson Gary, took advantage of a brief home visit by Allenby to make the journey up to his office in Alexandria. "When we entered Allenby"s study," Yale recalled, "I did not know whether or not to salute the General. I wondered whether I should stand at attention or sit down. The worry was needless, for General Allenby paid as much attention to me as though I was not there."
The climactic moment came when Allenby abruptly turned in Yale"s direction and, in his practiced stentorian voice, boomed, "Well, Captain Yale, what are you going to do at my headquarters?"
"I am going to continue my political work, General Allenby," he replied.
Wrong answer. "Captain Yale," the general bellowed, "if the United States government wishes to send a butcher to my headquarters, that"s their privilege, [but] you will remember when you are attached to my forces, you are a soldier!" Chastened, the American visitors soon beat a retreat, with Yale convinced that "Allenby had cla.s.sed me, a former Standard Oil man, as one of those lower forms of life who engage in trade."
The next day, Yale boarded a troop train for Palestine and his new billet at the British army headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, about ten miles east of Jaffa. He found reserved for him there a small tent, a cot, a writing table, and a canvas washbasin and bath. Also awaiting him was that peculiar feature of the European military officer cla.s.s of 1918, the batman, or personal valet. Among British officers, the most coveted batmen were Indian army soldiers drawn from units specifically trained for the task, but possibly in retaliation for his importune reply to Allenby, Yale"s was a grizzled old Scotsman.
Despite the rustic nature of his new surroundings, Yale was undoubtedly pleased to be out of Cairo and away from a job that had seemed increasingly futile. Shortly before leaving for the front, he had finally heard back from the State Department in regard to the message he had sent about Faris Nimr and his cell of pro-American Syrian conspirators fully two months earlier. If not for prompt reply, his message had been deemed important enough to go up to the desk of the secretary of state himself. "Referring your report No. 28," read Secretary Lansing"s cable of July 9, "continue noncommittal att.i.tude relative American att.i.tude towards Syria."
THE NEWS CAME to Lawrence as a jolt, but an exceedingly pleasant one. On June 18, he and Lieutenant Colonel Alan Dawnay, the new overall coordinator of operations in northern Arabia, went to General Headquarters to outline the plan for the Arabs" independent advance into Syria. They met there with General William Bartholomew, one of Allenby"s chief deputies. Bartholomew listened to their presentation for a few minutes before shaking his head with a smile; as he told his visitors, they had come to Ramleh three days too late.
As Dawnay and Lawrence soon learned, what had transpired in Palestine over the previous month was one of the very rare instances in World War I when an army had been readied for combat operations ahead of schedule. In recent weeks, a steady flood of British and Indian army troops had arrived from Iraq and the subcontinent, taking the place of those Allenby had been forced to send on to Europe, and tremendous effort had been made in getting these troops into the line and swiftly integrated with the rest of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. So successful had this push been that at a senior staff meeting at headquarters on June 15, it was concluded the army would be "capable of a general and sustained offensive" into the Syrian heartland as early as September.
For Lawrence, it meant there was now no reason for the Arabs to risk an unsupported advance into Syria. Instead, with Allenby"s timetable closely matching that devised by Lawrence and Dawnay for the Arabs, the rebels could simply dovetail their operations with those of the EEF. Of course, timetables had a way of getting upended in the Middle East, so Lawrence was greatly relieved when on a subsequent visit to headquarters on July 11 he learned a firm launch date for the EEF offensive had been chosen: September 19.
In the interim, a political development had made the prospect of re- attaching the Arabs to the British effort even more attractive. In early May, a group of seven Syrian exile leaders claiming to represent a broad spectrum of Syrian society had written an open letter demanding to know in clear and unequivocal language precisely what Great Britain and France envisioned for their nation"s future. London and Paris had tried to ignore the so-called Seven Syrians letter for as long as possible, but this time international attention wouldn"t allow it; the matter had finally been dropped into the laps of the two men most responsible for the enduring controversy, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot. After much back-and-forth, in mid-June Sykes and Picot had answered the Seven Syrians that in those lands "emanc.i.p.ated from Turkish control by the action of the Arabs themselves during the present war," Britain and France would "recognize the complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs inhabiting those areas and support them in their struggle for freedom."
To Lawrence, here, finally, was the reaffirming of the promise of independence that he and the Arab rebels had been seeking for so long. But the formulation also reaffirmed the caveat that Lawrence had always suspected lay beneath the surface: Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. In light of this, the rebels had every reason to join the coming British offensive. After his consultations at headquarters on July 11, Lawrence hurried back to Cairo, and then on to Aqaba, to start planning for the long-delayed Arab advance north.
One of the first tasks before him in that regard was to finally bring to an end Faisal"s long and perilous flirtation with the Turkish general Mehmet Djemal. In late July, Lawrence pa.s.sed along to David Hogarth a copy of the peace offer letter that Faisal had sent to Djemal on June 10. The cover story Lawrence concocted to explain how he had come into possession of such an explosive doc.u.ment-he claimed to have surrept.i.tiously obtained it from Faisal"s scribe-was absurd on its face, but apparently had a sufficiently Arabian Nights flavor to pa.s.s muster with his superiors.
Oddly, in London, the most immediate effect of this fresh revelation of Faisal"s perfidy was to reactivate the debate, begun several months earlier but gone a bit dormant, on exactly which high honorific should be bestowed upon him. The episode pointed out a truly bizarre aspect of early-twentieth-century Britain: amid the bloodiest war in human history, and coinciding with a period so dark that the very survival of the British Empire was at stake, more than a dozen of the most important officials of that empire found the time in their schedules to voice their opinions, often repeatedly, on which medal should be given to a thirty-three-year-old desert prince. In doing so, all had ignored the counsel of the one Briton who knew that prince best, T. E. Lawrence, and his suggestion that Faisal wasn"t much interested in medals.
On the morning of August 7, 1918, Lawrence gathered with his sixty-man bodyguard on the sh.o.r.e at Aqaba. His preceding weeks had been a blur of frantic preparation, and there was still a tremendous amount to be done before the Arabs would be ready to launch their September attack into the Syrian heartland. For Lawrence, though, the back-base grunt work of war-of organizing supply convoys, of plotting the movement of men and weapons across maps-was at an end; that day, he and his men were setting off for the interior, and would not return until the great battle had been joined and decided.
Embarking on that journey undoubtedly also raised a haunting "what if" in Lawrence"s mind. In October 1917, on the eve of the British army"s first advance into Palestine, General Allenby had asked Lawrence how the Arab rebels might contribute to the a.s.sault. Fearing a slaughter of the rebels, Lawrence had kept the Arab contribution to a minimum, instead proposing his ill-fated charge against the Yarmuk bridge. How differently things might have turned out save for his hesitation at that time. If the Arabs had gone all in, this last year of crushing stasis might have been averted, the war already over; also averted, of course, would have been Deraa, Tafileh, and the deaths of Daud and Farraj.
But now was the time to atone for all that. That morning in Aqaba he told his bodyguards in their colorful robes to prepare for victory, promised the Syrians among them that they would soon be home. "So for the last time we mustered on the windy beach by the sea"s edge, the sun on its brilliant waves glinting in rivalry with my flashing and changing men."
THE HEADQUARTERS OF the German army on the Western Front was a network of pleasant chteaus and stately hotels in the small Belgian resort town of Spa. It was there, on the morning of July 31, 1918, that Curt Prfer and Abbas Hilmi II were ushered into a conference room to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II. As Prfer recorded in his diary, Wilhelm gained "the best impression" of the deposed khedive of Egypt, and was visibly impressed by his grand plans for the reconquest of his homeland from the British. At the end of the interview, the kaiser turned to Prfer and said, "I request that you see me next time in a free Egypt."
But if the German emperor"s spirits had been buoyed by the visit, it produced a more muted reaction in his two guests. The kaiser had aged greatly during the war, and now seemed diminished, even slightly befuddled. To Prfer, attuned to the trappings and protocol of military life, it was clear that the German emperor no longer commanded much of anything, that for all his ostentatious medals and martial bearing he was now almost as much a figurehead as Abbas Hilmi.
It was very different from what either man had expected when they"d left Constantinople on July 23. In testament to the high hopes placed on their mission, they had been seen off at the station by an official Turkish government delegation that had included Interior Minister Talaat. But then had come the long, slow journey through the heartland of the Central Powers, images of deprivation and decline everywhere. To both men, the land and its people looked utterly spent, the situation far worse than just months earlier, and it belied the optimistic p.r.o.nouncements continuing to burble from the German high command and its talk of the approaching final victory.
If not before, they had surely grasped the fiction of those p.r.o.nouncements once they reached Spa. On July 17, the last of the five German offensives collectively known as the Kaiserschlacht, or Kaiser"s Battle, that had been launched on the Western Front since March had been halted. Their number reduced by 700,000 more casualties, the remnants of the German armies were now falling back toward the Hindenburg Line, a fantastically elaborate wall of defensive fortifications that ran the length of northern France and that the Germans had begun building in 1917. Not only was there to be no German "final victory," but also no foreseeable end to the war; from behind the Hindenburg, Germany might hold out indefinitely, the battle grinding on without victors or vanquished for a long time to come.
This was certainly the a.s.sessment of generals and war planners on the other side of the front. Even with the flood of American soldiers finally beginning to reach France, the most optimistic Allied strategists were talking of a breakthrough in the summer of 1919, while their more conservative colleagues foresaw the struggle continuing far beyond; some a.n.a.lyses had the war going well into the mid-1920s.
Yet as with nearly every other a.s.sessment among the wise men of the Entente, these estimates were to be proven wrong. After the deaths of some sixteen million around the globe, the end was coming, and with a speed few could comprehend. Improbably, that collapse would start in one of the most remote and seemingly insignificant corners of the world battlefield, the deserts of Syria.
Chapter 18.
Damascus We ordered "no prisoners," and the men obeyed.
T. E. LAWRENCE, OFFICIAL REPORT ON EVENTS IN TAFAS, OCTOBER 1918.
It was September 12, 1918. The world war had now entered its fiftieth month. In contemplating its various battlefronts on that day, Allied military and political leaders were held in a certain thrall, their growing conviction that the enemy was nearing collapse tempered by the memory of how many times they had been wrong about this in the past. On the Western Front, the Germans had now ceded the last of their gains in the Spring Offensive to regroup behind the Hindenburg Line. The first Allied test against that defensive wall, the most formidable network of fortifications ever built, was to be a joint French-American operation near the Meuse River, scheduled for the end of the month. On the Southern Front, Italian commanders, at last chastened at having suffered over 1.5 million casualties over three years of war for no gain, were working up modest plans to move against an Austro-Hungarian army that had stood on the far bank of the Piave River for nearly a year. In the Balkans, a joint army of French, Serbs, Greeks, and Britons was preparing to push against a Bulgarian army in Macedonia. With the fresh memory of millions dead, the Allies viewed these proposed thrusts as of the testing-the-waters ilk, a chance to make some incremental gains before winter shut down offensive operations until the following spring, perhaps for even longer. British prime minister Lloyd George had recently floated a proposal to delay any all-out advance against Germany until 1920, when the American army would be fully ash.o.r.e in France and Allied strength might be truly overwhelming.
In this climate, people went about their lives with a sense of cautious optimism or quiet trepidation, depending on which side of the battle lines they dwelt, a budding belief that the worst war in human history was finally inching toward some kind of resolution, even if the particulars and timetable for that resolution remained as indistinct as ever.
On that September 12, Aaron Aaronsohn was on a pa.s.senger ship five days out of Southampton, bound for New York. Having returned to England from the Middle East in August, he had spent a frustrating few weeks shuttling between Paris and London trying to win support for his Palestinian land-buying scheme. That effort had been complicated by his usual sparring with Chaim Weizmann and other British Zionist leaders, and Weizmann and Mark Sykes had seen a way both to be temporarily rid of the irksome agronomist and to put him to good use by proposing that he embark on another rallying-the-troops mission to the American Jewish community. Once Aaronsohn"s ship put into New York harbor, he had a full roster of meetings and talks planned that might keep him busy in the United States for months.
Curt Prfer"s summer had steadily mutated from the strange to the surreal. After arranging Abbas Hilmi"s audience with the kaiser at the end of July, he had spent weeks shuttling the pretender to the Egyptian throne around the German countryside, with official meetings and banquets in the khedive"s honor interspersed with stays at the country estates of princelings and countesses. In the mountain resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in mid-August, the pair had met up with the kaiser"s sister, Princess Viktoria von Schaumburg-Lippe, and her eclectic retinue of hangers-on, and had spent ten days in rather debauched merriment even as the news from the war front grew bleak.
"Growing intimacy with the princess and Grfin Montgelas and Seline von Schlotheim," Prfer noted in his diary on August 30, referring to the kaiser"s sister and two courtesans in her entourage. "In the evenings, boozing, dancing and flirting, hectic room parties and the like."
It wasn"t all just parlor games, though. In Abbas Hilmi, Prfer was in the company of one of the world"s most indefatigable schemers, and as the outlook for the Central Powers dimmed, the German spy chief seemed to latch onto the Egyptians" grandiose plots with a kind of anxious fervor. One involved trying to lure Abbas"s son and heir, Abdel Moneim, out of Switzerland. As the ex-khedive explained, his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with s.a.d.i.s.tic inclinations-which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British-but if Prfer could somehow lure Abdel Moneim to Germany, his father could then arrange his marriage to the daughter of the new Ottoman sultan, thereby cementing Abbas"s own claim to Egyptian rule. It was surely an indication of just how divorced from the real world Prfer was becoming that all this struck him as both a fine and important idea, one to be taken up at the highest levels of the foreign ministry.
But if the German spymaster increasingly lived in a deluded parallel universe, it was one in which he had a great deal of company. Not only did senior foreign ministry officials urge Prfer to proceed with the Abdel Moneim overture, but they beseeched him for help on another matter. Alerted to the conciliatory letter Faisal Hussein had written Turkish general Mehmet Djemal back in June, they now seized upon the idea of brokering a peace deal with the Arab rebels as a last-minute solution in the Middle East-a solution that perhaps would include their dear friends in the Young Turk leadership, but perhaps not. Prodded by the foreign ministry for possible intermediaries to carry Germany"s own secret peacemaking initiative to Faisal, Prfer pa.s.sed along the name of a contact helpfully provided by Abbas Hilmi.
If less colorful, William Yale"s late summer was also proving frustrating. By September 12, he had spent more than a month in his tent at the British General Headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, in the foothills below Jerusalem. In that time, the State Department special agent-now reconst.i.tuted as the American military attache to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force-had learned virtually nothing from the British military command of Allenby"s much-rumored coming offensive. This had not been for lack of effort; Yale had attended any number of intelligence briefings at which British officials seemed in quiet compet.i.tion with each other to impart nothing of substance, and had suffered through a host of tedious senior staff dinners even less illuminating. His repeated requests to tour the British front lines were put off with one excuse after another. He was finally given a partial explanation for this by a certain Captain Hodgson, the British officer detailed to serve as minder to the foreign attaches. "I"ll tell you, Yale," Hodgson revealed, "I was told to show you as little as possible, as you were a Standard Oil man."
Yet the British had also unwittingly handed Yale an opening. Testament to the low regard with which they held the foreign military attaches in general, and him in particular, they had isolated them in the same corner of Bir-es-Salem as another distasteful group of camp followers: the resident press corps. From this motley a.s.sortment of British and Australian newspaper correspondents, far less restricted in their movements than the attaches, Yale was able to glean at least something of what was being planned, enough so that by September 12 he knew "the big show" was soon to get under way. He didn"t know when, let alone where, but in the growing sense of urgency that permeated General Headquarters, in the shifting of troops and materiel that the journalists reported seeing on their travels, were the unmistakable signs that Allenby"s offensive was imminent.
But beyond their qualms over Yale"s Standard Oil connection, General Headquarters actually had good reason for their climate of secrecy; what they were planning in Palestine const.i.tuted a very intricate ruse. In recent weeks, an array of British army units had been brought up from Palestine"s coastal plain to take up positions around Jerusalem, their new tent encampments sprawling over the Judean hillsides. Amid this re- deployment, Allenby had moved his forward command headquarters to Jerusalem. Simultaneously, local purchasing agents had been dispatched to different tribes in the Amman region with orders to buy up enormous amounts of forage, enough to feed the horses and camels of a large army, come late September. To the watching Turks, the conclusion was inescapable: the British offensive was coming soon, and its target was to be the same Salt-Amman region where British attacks had failed twice before. In fact, however, those new tent cities were empty, Allenby"s move to Jerusalem had been a charade, and the forage-buying effort was a red herring. Rather, the British plan was to strike at the very opposite end of the line, to sweep north along the Palestinian coastal shelf and then turn inland so as to envelop the Turks from three sides.
That was only one aspect of the ruse; another was playing out on the other side of the Jordan River. For some time, a mixed force of several thousand Allied fighters-Arab tribesmen, soldiers of the Arab Northern Army, British and French advisors together with specialized artillery and armored car units-had been making their way across the Syrian desert to gather at the old citadel of Azraq. If detected by the Turks-and it was hard to see how such a large force could go unnoticed indefinitely-it would serve to further confirm that the Allied attack was coming at Amman, just fifty miles to the west of Azraq. Instead, the Azraq unit"s true target lay seventy miles to the northwest, the crucial railway junction of Deraa. Moreover, this unit was to act as the pivotal first shock troop for the entire offensive, their goal to shut down both the Hejaz Railway and its spur line into Palestine on the eve of Allenby"s attack in order to paralyze the Turkish army from behind. By September 12, the last of these shock troops had arrived in Azraq, and were met there by the two British lieutenant colonels in charge of coordinating the operation: Pierce Joyce and T. E. Lawrence.
By that date, Lawrence had already been in Azraq for nearly a week, and had taken stock of the diverse fighting force as it drifted in: warriors from a dozen Arab tribes; the British and French transport and artillery specialists; a detachment of Indian army cavalry; even a small unit of Gurkhas, the famed Nepalese soldiers with their trademark curved khukuri daggers. On that same morning of September 12, the final component fell into place with the arrival in Azraq of the senior Arab rebel leadership: Faisal Hussein foremost among them, but also Nuri Shalaan and Auda Abu Tayi and a host of other tribal chiefs whom Lawrence had helped bring to the cause of Arab independence over the past two years. With the vanguard of the attack force set to begin deploying the following morning, the plan was for these leaders to gather at a conclave that afternoon, during which Lawrence and Joyce would go over their various objectives.
Yet it was at precisely this juncture, on the eve of the campaign he had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly plunged into a paralyzing gloom. Shortly after Hussein and the other Arab leaders arrived, he slipped out of Azraq and made for a remote mountain cleft called Ain el Essad, some eight miles away. As he recounted in Seven Pillars, "[I] lay there all day in my old lair among the tamarisk, where the wind in the dusty green branches played with such sounds as it made in English trees. It told me I was tired to death of these Arabs."
There had in fact been warning signs for some time that Lawrence might be headed for just such a collapse. Back in mid-July, only days after receiving confirmation of Allenby"s offensive launch date-an event that should have put him in an ebullient mood-Lawrence had written a melancholy letter to his friend and confidant Vyvyan Richards. "I have been so violently uprooted and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal," he told Richards. "I have dropped everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity, s.n.a.t.c.hing chances of the moment when and where I see them.... It"s a kind of foreign stage on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one"s head if the part is not well filled."
He had gone on to describe his admiration of the Arabs, although he now recognized that he was fundamentally apart from them, an eternal stranger. He wrote of the words he carried in his mind-peace, silence, rest-"like a lighted window in the dark," but then questioned what good a lighted window was anyway. As was often the case when Lawrence wrote from the heart, he closed by denigrating what he had written, calling it "an idiot letter" born of his contrarian nature. "[I] still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front and I hate being back, and I don"t like responsibility and I don"t obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet, like a purge, and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to."
But if his letter to Richards spoke to physical and spiritual exhaustion, it was compounded by the guilt he felt in having "profitably shammed" his Arab comrades for two years-and this guilt had recently grown worse. In early August, while planning for the Azraq operation, Lawrence had again met with Nuri Shalaan, the warlord of the powerful Rualla tribe he had first tried to woo to the Sherifian cause a year before by suggesting the chieftain believe the most recent promises Great Britain had made to the Arabs. At their August meeting, Shalaan had at last fully committed his tribe to the rebel side, although in the disclosures since their previous meeting-the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement-he surely knew his British suitor had been less than forthright. If exactly why remains elusive, it is clear both from Lawrence"s memoir and comments he made to his early biographers that the deception he had perpetrated on Shalaan weighed more heavily on his conscience than any other.
Then, right before setting out for Azraq, there had been an incident that caused Lawrence to question the very purpose of his "crusade" for the Arabs. In late August, just as the main Arab army was preparing to leave the Aqaba region for the north, King Hussein had elected to pick a bitter and rather public fight with Faisal, all but accusing him of disloyalty. For nearly a week, the angry cables had pa.s.sed between father and son, during which the rebel advance ground to a halt, the entire Syrian offensive cast into doubt as the clock ticked away. Lawrence had finally patched together a rapprochement-intercepting one of Hussein"s cables, he had scissored off its angry second half, only pa.s.sing along to Faisal the apologetic-sounding first half-but that all his plans had been nearly sabotaged by the man he was ostensibly fighting for left a bitterness that would never fully go away.
But it seems something else was also working on Lawrence that day in Ain el Essad, a very recent and devastating personal blow. By all evidence, it was during his stay in Azraq that he first learned of the death of Dahoum, his young companion at Carchemish, the apparent victim of a typhus epidemic that had swept northern Syria some time before. To a profound degree-and to a depth Lawrence himself may not have fully realized-he had come to personify the war in his own mind in the form of Dahoum; it was for that young Syrian boy and his future that the Arabs needed to be free. Now Dahoum was dead, and with him had gone so much of what had animated Lawrence to the fight. Although he would never reveal the ident.i.ty of the mysterious "S.A." to whom Seven Pillars is dedicated-Dahoum"s real name was Salim Ali-the first stanzas of the book"s prefatory poem strongly suggest both the timing of when Lawrence learned of Dahoum"s death and the effect it had upon him: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands And wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, That your eyes might be shining for me when we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near And saw you waiting When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy [death] outran me And took you apart: into his quietness.
Despite his grief, Lawrence had given too much of himself, and asked too much of the Arabs, to pull away at the climax of their long campaign. He would write of his mood on September 12 that "today it came to me with finality that my patience as regards the false position I had been led into was finished. A week [more], two weeks, three, and I would insist upon relief. My nerve had broken, and I would be lucky if the ruin of it could be hidden so long." With that, he rose from his "lair" at Ain el Essad and made his way back to the gathered warriors at Azraq, now just hours away from their first strikes against the enemy.
By coincidence, that same day, a top-secret report was being sent to the U.S. military intelligence office in London, outlining the collapse of morale among the Arab rebels fighting with the British. "It is reported that the Syrians who are with Emir Faisal in the Aqaba region," the September 12 report stated, "are entirely disaffected and that there are many dissensions." One reason, apparently, was the rebels" woeful incompetence on the battlefield. "In spite of the support of the British, the Arabs of Arabia have shown their incapacity to organize or make war.... The entire Arab situation appears to be in a great muddle."
The report"s author was the military intelligence bureau"s chief correspondent in the Middle East, attache William Yale. With that dispatch he was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years.
IT HAD A certain boys"-lark quality to it, a not uncommon experience in war when all the advantages and few of the risks reside with one"s own side. Leaving Azraq on the morning of September 14, Lawrence spent the better part of a week careening through the desert around Deraa in a Rolls-Royce armored car, blowing up bridges and tearing up railway tracks, dodging ineffective enemy air attacks, skirmishing with the occasional unlucky Turkish foot patrol.
The ease with which he was able to do so could be largely credited to the success of the ruse concocted at Allenby"s headquarters. With the Turks ma.s.sed around Amman in antic.i.p.ation of the presumed attack there, the Azraq strike force had nearly free rein to pursue its goals: the severing of the Hejaz Railway to the north and south of Deraa, as well as of the vital western spur leading into Palestine. The ultimate goal, of course, was to accomplish all this before Allenby"s offensive got under way on September 19.
As Lawrence discovered when he caught up to the main raiding party, however, a first attempt on the southern railway link had gone awry through simple bad luck. Now quite sold on the efficacy of mechanized war in the desert, he decided to make a personal go of it, setting out for the southern railroad with just two armored cars and two "tenders," or large sedans. He found his target on the morning of September 16 in the form of a lightly defended bridge in the middle of nowhere, "a pleasant little work, eighty feet long and fifteen feet high." A particular point of pride for Lawrence was the new technique he and his colleagues used in setting their explosives, one that left the bridge "scientifically shattered" but still standing; Turkish repair crews would now have the time-consuming task of dismantling the wreckage before they could start to rebuild.
That job complete, Lawrence rejoined the main Arab force as it fell upon the railway north of Deraa the following morning. Encountering little resistance, the thousand-odd warriors quickly took control of a nearly ten-mile stretch of track, enabling the demolition teams to begin placing their mines. The action had the effect of lifting Lawrence from the dark mood that had stalked him in Azraq; his primary orders from headquarters had been to isolate Deraa, and "I could hardly believe our fortune, hardly believe that our word to Allenby was fulfilled so simply and so soon."
This left only the western spur leading into Palestine, and on that same afternoon of September 17, an Arab force stormed a railway station a few miles to the west of Deraa; in short order, they had ransacked the terminal and put to the torch all that couldn"t be carried off. But Lawrence had grander plans. Leading a small band farther west, he hoped to blow up the Yarmuk gorge bridges that had eluded his destruction a year before. Once again, though, he was to be thwarted, this time by the presence of a train filled with German and Turkish troops coming up from Palestine.
Still, as Lawrence turned back to rejoin the main rebel force the next day, he had every reason to feel pleased with the "work" that had been done: the main Turkish telegraph link to Palestine was now cut, all three railway spans sufficiently damaged that repair would take days, if not weeks. There was still more mayhem to be accomplished-on that same afternoon of September 18, he would see to the blowing up of another bridge, the seventy-ninth of his career-but the Azraq vanguard had achieved most every objective asked of it in prelude to Allenby"s offensive, now just hours away.
By prior arrangement, a Royal Flying Corps plane was scheduled to put into Azraq on the morning of September 21, bringing reports of how the offensive in Palestine was faring. Anxious for news, Lawrence raced back to the desert fortress the day before. Nearing a state of complete collapse-he"d barely slept since setting out from Azraq six days earlier-he found an empty cot in the encampment"s field hospital and fell into an exhausted slumber.
YALE"S FIRST CLUE came when he stepped into his a.s.signed mess hall for dinner on September 18: the journalists were gone. The next clue was when he walked down to the motor pool compound: all the vehicles were gone, too. A junior British officer bravely explained that they had all been dispatched to various parts of the front in prelude to the coming offensive; apparently, none had been detailed for Yale or the one other military attache remaining, an Italian major named de Sambouy.
"I was irritated and perplexed," Yale wrote. "What should a military attache do? Ought I to demand transportation to the front, or should I accept the lame excuse given us? Why shouldn"t Sambouy do something? He was a regular army officer who had been in the war since 1915. I went to bed annoyed with myself and the British."
His sleep was to be interrupted. At 4:45 a.m. on the morning of September 19, Yale was wrenched awake by "a terrific roar that seemed to shake the whole world." As one, nearly five hundred British artillery guns had commenced sh.e.l.ling the Turkish line all along the Palestinian front.
By the time he rose and dressed, Yale had resolved what to do. Striding into a general"s office, he announced that he was on his way to breakfast, and that if there wasn"t a car waiting for him when he emerged, he would send a cable to Washington announcing that he was being held captive by the British. His Italian counterpart was aghast at his temerity, but when the pair emerged from the mess hall a short time later, they found a Ford Model T awaiting them with a former London cabdriver at the wheel.
They made that morning for a bluff overlooking the Plain of Sharon, from which, they were told, they could view one section of the battlefield. Finding a group of British officers already ensconced in the ruins of an old Crusader castle, the two attaches joined them, training their binoculars on the action two or three miles to the north. It was Yale"s first experience observing combat, and he found it decidedly underwhelming. "Infrequent bursts of [artillery] sh.e.l.ls [coming from] back of us on the plateau, white puffs of riflery on the hills in front of us, the intermittent rat-tat-tat of machine guns and, from time to time, lines of men who could scarcely be distinguished against the gray blankness of the limestone hills. It was nowhere near as thrilling as the sham battles I had watched as a boy at Van Cortland Park. For us, the day was long and monotonous. No one seemed to know what was happening; certainly, I had no idea of whether the British or the Turks were winning."
New to war, the American attache couldn"t appreciate that he was actually experiencing the very essence of the traditional battlefield, that amid the engulfing chaos even senior field commanders usually had only the vaguest sense of what was happening-and then often only on the ground directly before them. But the ever-resourceful Yale saw a means around this. Returning to General Headquarters that evening, he parlayed his attache status into gaining admittance to the main telegraph room. There he discovered stacks of cables coming in from every corner of the front, dispatches that when plotted on a map gave him a grasp of the overall campaign available only to Allenby and his most senior advisors. This knowledge stood him in very good stead the following day when, having ventured to a new part of the front, Yale found himself briefing a British brigadier general on what was occurring elsewhere.
"This helped me to feel less awkward amongst the military," he recalled, "and I even began to regain the confidence in myself which had been badly shaken when first I was thrown in among professional soldiers."
For the first two days of the offensive, Yale had the luxury of observing war from a comfortable remove, the combatants appearing as so many scurrying ants in the distance. That ended on September 21, when he and his Model T companions journeyed up a mountain road leading to the town of Nablus in the Samaria foothills. The day before, a fleeing Turkish formation had made for Nablus up that same road, and there they had been found by the bombs and machine guns of swarming British warplanes.
"The Turks had no way of fighting back," Yale recounted. "There was no shelter to run to, and no way of surrendering. The results were tragic.... For a few miles, the road was lined with bloated corpses, swelling to the bursting point under the hot rays of the sun."
One image in particular stuck in Yale"s memory, a stretch of the road where an old Roman aqueduct crossed the valley. Here, scores of Turkish soldiers had hugged the stone walls of the aqueduct as protection against the strafing British warplanes-only to fall victim when the planes circled back to attack from the other direction. The dead men lay in a neat single-file line along the entire length of the aqueduct, looking "for all the world," Yale would recall, "like a row of tin soldiers toppled over."
THE NEWS WAS staggering. When the RFC plane touched down at Azraq on the morning of September 21, its pilot told of a British sweep up the Palestinian coast that had simply steamrolled whatever scant Turkish resistance stood in its path. A few weeks earlier, General Headquarters had talked of an advance that might take them as far as the city of Nablus, forty miles north of Jerusalem; now, in a matter of just two days, the British vanguard was already far above Nablus, and thousands of enemy soldiers had thrown down their weapons in surrender. The note of triumph was evident in the letter General Allenby had sent to Azraq for Faisal. "Already the Turkish Army in Syria has suffered a defeat from which it can scarcely recover," it read. "It rests upon us now, by the redoubled energy of our [joint] attacks, to turn defeat into destruction."
More details were provided in a letter Alan Dawnay had sent to Lieutenant Colonel Joyce. By the previous evening, the British cavalry had already begun turning inland from their charge up the coast, leaving the enemy units in Palestine in imminent danger of being encircled. "The whole Turkish army is in the net," Dawnay exulted, "and every bolt-hole closed except, possibly, that east of the Jordan by way of the Yarmuk valley. If the Arabs can close this, too-and close it in time-then not a man or gun or wagon ought to escape. Some victory!"
As Lawrence plainly put it in Seven Pillars, "the face of our war was changed."
Also changed, naturally, were the prior battle plans drawn up for the Azraq force, the pace of events now rendering them obsolete. That afternoon, Lawrence boarded the RFC plane for its return to Palestine and an urgent meeting with General Allenby"s staff.
As Lawrence learned at headquarters, and as Allenby had alluded in his note to Faisal, the goal now was not to defeat the Turkish army-that had already been achieved-but to destroy it completely. To that end, even as the left flank of the British army continued its northern advance, three other columns were to cut east across the Jordan River in order to roll up the inland Syrian towns along the Hejaz Railway and, ultimately, close on Damascus. The linchpin was, as always, Deraa, the one spot where all the Turkish units fleeing east from Palestine and all those still to the south might converge and perhaps sufficiently regroup to make a stand. To forestall that, headquarters impressed on Lawrence, there was one thing the Arabs must do-permanently sever the rail line south of Deraa-and one thing they absolutely must not do: make a dash for Damascus.
This latter point had already been stressed in Alan Dawnay"s letter to Joyce in Azraq (with Joyce temporarily away, Lawrence had opened and read it). "Use all your restraining influence," Dawnay had ordered Joyce, "and get Lawrence to do the same, to prevent Faisal from any act of rashness in the north.... The situation is completely in our hands to mold now, so Faisal need have no fear of being carted, provided he will trust us and be patient. Only let him no on account move north without first consulting General Allenby-that would be the fatal error."
British concern was quite understandable. For nearly two years, Lawrence had been counseling Faisal that the only sure way for the Arabs to stake claim to Damascus was to get there first; this a.s.sertion had appeared to be further confirmed by Mark Sykes"s recent open letter to the "Seven Syrians." As a result, the temptation for Faisal to drop the Deraa operations and make a dash for Damascus might prove an irresistible one. During Lawrence"s brief sojourn at headquarters, Allenby"s senior advisors repeatedly emphasized that Arab loyalty at this crucial juncture would be well compensated-apparently even implying that Faisal would be allowed to establish a government in Damascus.
Armed with these a.s.surances, and with the Arabs" new orders of battle in hand, Lawrence flew back to Azraq the next morning. Over the following two days, a host of Arab bands, along with British armored car units, descended on the Hejaz Railway below Deraa to render it damaged beyond repair for the foreseeable future. Already, however, the worry that the retreating Turkish armies might recover enough to make a stand in Deraa seemed far-fetched; the enemy was now in full and panicked rout, their soldiers so stunned by the speed of events that they could think of little more than personal escape. Indeed, so rapid was the Turkish disintegration that by September 25, Lawrence was able to report to headquarters that there were probably only four thousand Turkish soldiers left in all the inland garrison towns below Deraa, most of the rest having pa.s.sed through Deraa and kept on going in the direction of Damascus.
But in keeping with the broadened goal of destroying the Turkish army utterly, Lawrence saw an opportunity; if Deraa wasn"t to be a Turkish rallying point, it could now be turned into a killing field. As he tersely commented in his September 25 report in describing the enemy units trying to reach Damascus, "I want to stop that."
To do so, on the twenty-sixth he directed a number of the Arab warriors to make for a small village in the foothills just twelve miles northwest of Deraa called Sheikh Saad. From there, the rebels would enjoy a commanding view of what was transpiring both in Deraa and on the road to Damascus, and also be able to monitor any retreating Turkish units coming up out of the Yarmuk gorge from Palestine.
Lawrence soon had reason to congratulate himself on the move. That same afternoon, scouts spotted a small mixed German and Turkish force coming up the Yarmuk road, "hopeless but carefree, marching at ease, thinking themselves fifty miles from any war." Walking heedlessly into a hastily prepared Arab ambush, the unit was soon overwhelmed. As Lawrence noted, "Sheikh Saad was paying soon, and well."
That was just a foretaste. The next morning, and with a British army now coming up the Yarmuk, the Turks remaining in and around Deraa prepared to abandon their positions as well. Word reached Lawrence that some four thousand enemy soldiers were about to set out from Deraa on the main Damascus road, while another two thousand were pulling out of a nearby town. This latter column was taking an overland shortcut that would bring them through the village of Tafas, just six miles below Sheikh Saad. As Lawrence drily commented in Seven Pillars, "The nearer two thousand seemed more our size."
ON THE AFTERNOON of September 23, the Mediterranean city of Haifa was captured from the Turks by an Indian army cavalry unit. Arriving that evening, William Yale arranged for lodging in a private home, then decided to take a stroll through the city"s deserted old quarter.
At the start of World War I, most all the warring powers had horse-mounted cavalry that still carried lances as part of their complement of weaponry. By 1918, nearly all such cavalries had discarded the lance as anachronistic in the age of the machine gun and warplane, but not so the Indian army. That afternoon, they had employed it to deadly effect in the narrow back streets of Haifa"s old quarter, running down and impaling terrified Turkish soldiers as they tried to flee. Everywhere Yale walked lay the dead.
"In the silent lonely streets," he recalled, "under a brilliant moon, the bodies of these Turkish soldiers seemed strangely out of place, for the peace and calm of an Oriental night covered this part of the city."
But it takes remarkably little time for the average person to become desensitized to the horror of war, and in this William Yale was to prove no exception. The following day, only his sixth on the battlefield, he and Major de Sambouy were driving down the Palestine coastal road when they began pa.s.sing column after column of Turkish prisoners being marched off to internment camps. In their wake were scores of prisoners who had collapsed, too exhausted or ill to go on. Of these men being left behind to die in the sun, neither their comrades nor their Indian captors took any notice, and neither did Yale or his traveling companion. "It was not our affair and we had a long day"s journey ahead of us," he would write. "It never occurred to me that we were heartlessly callous and unconcerned. We didn"t even think of stopping to take an extra pa.s.senger or two."
THEY CAME UPON the first survivors hiding in the tall gra.s.s of a meadow just outside Tafas. Traumatized and speaking in hushed whispers, the villagers told of the atrocities the Turkish soldiers had begun perpetrating immediately upon entering Tafas just an hour before. Continuing on, Lawrence and the Arab vanguard soon found evidence of this; here and there, bodies lay amid the meadow gra.s.s, "embracing the ground in the close way of corpses."
Suddenly, a little girl of three or four popped into view, her smock drenched in blood from a gash by her neck. "The child ran a few steps," Lawrence recalled, "then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), "Don"t hit me, Baba." " A moment later, the girl collapsed, presumably dead.
None of this prepared for the scene in Tafas"s streets. Everywhere were bodies, many hideously mutilated, girls and women obviously raped before their dispatch. In particular, Lawrence was to remember the sight of a naked pregnant woman, bent over a low wall and grotesquely impaled by a saw bayonet; around her lay some twenty others, "variously killed, but set out in accord with an obscene taste."
By bad coincidence, one of the tribal sheikhs who had accompanied Lawrence during the previous two weeks and who now rode alongside him was Talal el Hareidhin, the headman of Tafas. As Lawrence would recount in his official report of the incident, at the sight of his ruined village, Talal "gave a horrible cry, wrapped his headcloth about his face, put spurs to his horse and, rocking in the saddle, galloped at full speed into the midst of the retiring [Turkish] column and fell, himself and his mare, riddled with machine gun bullets among their lance points."
In consultation with Auda Abu Tayi, who had also ridden into Tafas that morning, Lawrence commanded his lieutenants that no prisoners should be taken-or, as he put it more eloquently in Seven Pillars, ""the best of you brings me the most Turkish dead." "