What ensued over that long day of September 27 was a merciless and one-sided slaughter. Quite quickly, the attacking Arabs separated the fleeing Turkish column of two thousand into three isolated sections, then set to annihilating them one by one; any Turkish or German soldier who fell out wounded or tried to surrender was swiftly cut down. Soon the pursuing Arabs were joined by villagers along the way, eager to strike against their oppressors of the past four years-and perhaps just as eager to strip their bodies of valuables. Even by the standards of ma.s.sacre, this one took on an especially macabre edge. "There lay on us a madness," Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, "born of the horror of Tafas or of its story, so that we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake the agony in our brains."
It grew worse. By chance, one of the Arab reserve columns had missed the "no quarter" order, and when a doubling-back Lawrence came upon this unit just before nightfall, he found they had taken some 250 Turkish and German soldiers captive. According to his Seven Pillars account, Lawrence was "not unwilling" to let this group live, until he was led over to a dying Arab warrior gruesomely pinioned to the ground by German bayonets, "like a collected insect." As Lawrence would state in his official report, written just days after the incident, "then we turned our Hotchkiss [machine gun] on the prisoners and made an end of them, they saying nothing."
All night and into the following days the slaughter went on, the panicked and exhausted prey becoming divided into smaller and smaller groups until they were quite defenseless against their attackers, a fortunate few taken prisoner, many more summarily put to death. By the time the last stragglers approached the outskirts of Damascus two days later, the estimated six thousand Turkish and German soldiers who had set out from the Deraa area on September 27 had been reduced to fewer than two thousand.
Lawrence didn"t partake of this further ma.s.sacre. Instead, late that night, he turned back for his command post in Sheikh Saad and then, at dawn, made for the town of his past torments: Deraa. By his account in Seven Pillars, the time he spent there was rather anticlimactic, especially when placed against the horrific events of Tafas. An Arab force had swept into Deraa the previous afternoon and, after rounding up those few Turkish soldiers who remained, spent the interim in the time-honored tradition of looting and pillaging. In quick order, Lawrence managed to stem the anarchy, placing armed guards over what remained of the railyard and its worksheds and helping with the appointment of a governor and police force. Indeed, by Lawrence"s telling, the greatest challenge he faced in Deraa that day was heading off the bellicose ambitions of General George Barrow, the commander of the British army that had just finished its climb out of the Yarmuk gorge.
In Seven Pillars, Barrow comes off as a distinctly buffoonish figure, one whose comeuppance began the moment Lawrence came out of Deraa on the western road to greet him. To the general"s plan of imposing calm in the town by posting pickets throughout, Lawrence "explained gently" that calm had already been established by the newly appointed Arab governor. When Barrow then insisted his men take possession of the Deraa railway station, Lawrence a.s.sented, but with the rather haughty request that the British not interfere with the railroad"s functioning, since the Arabs had already cleared the line and were readying a train for travel. "Barrow," Lawrence wrote, "who had come in thinking of [the Arabs] as a conquered people, though dazed at my calm a.s.sumption that he was my guest, had no option but to follow the lead of such a.s.surance." With the general thus sufficiently humbled, Lawrence recounted, "soon we got on well."
But this was not at all the way George Barrow would remember the situation in Deraa that day. As he would relate in his own memoir, "The whole place was indescribably filthy, defiled and littered with smoldering cinders and the soiled leavings of loot. Turks, some dead and some dying, lay about the railway station or sat propped against the houses. Those still living gazed at us with eyes that begged for a little of the mercy which it was hopeless for them to ask of the Arabs."
But this was trivial compared with what Barrow"s men found when they entered the Turkish hospital train that had been stranded in Deraa station, a scene he would describe, with considerable hyperbole, as "far exceeding in its savagery anything that has been known in the conflicts between nations during the past 120 years." According to Barrow, "Arab soldiers were going through the train, tearing off the clothing of the groaning and stricken Turks, regardless of gaping wounds and broken limbs, and cutting their victims" throats.... It was a sight that no average civilized human being could bear unmoved." In Barrow"s telling, when he angrily ordered Lawrence to remove the Arabs from the train, he was met with a refusal and the explanation that this was the Arabs" "idea of war."
"It is not our idea of war," Barrow countered, "and if you can"t remove them, I will." At this, Lawrence allegedly washed his hands of the matter, telling the general he would take no responsibility for what might happen next. Summoning his own men, Barrow cleared the ambulance train and brought the killing to a stop.
Taken together, the events in Tafas and Deraa encapsulate the difficulty in getting at the full truth of the "Lawrence myth"-or even to isolate which facet of that myth is the most credible. In Lawrence"s Seven Pillars description of Tafas, the skeptical reader might find some moments just a little too cinematic to be fully believed-the stirring war cry that the charging Talal delivered just before he was gunned down, the accusing gaze the bayonet-pinioned Arab warrior cast toward his German and Turkish tormentors with his dying breath-especially since those moments are absent from Lawrence"s official report. There is also his uncomfortably keen eye for the grisly detail, reminiscent of the pa.s.sage describing his torture in Deraa the year before, that edges toward prurience and war p.o.r.nography. To add a different wrinkle, after the war, several of Lawrence"s British comrades in the September 1918 offensive would stoutly maintain that he never issued a "no quarter" command, let alone ordered the execution of prisoners once taken, even though Lawrence plainly stated as much in both his memoir and official report.
The Deraa ambulance train story underscores this difficulty in reverse. As shockingly candid as Lawrence was in describing his actions at Tafas, in neither Seven Pillars nor in his official report did he even mention the train incident-yet it"s hard to imagine George Barrow, a very "proper" career military officer, simply making up such an account. If the incident did in fact occur, the simplest explanation for its omission is that Lawrence wished to avoid casting the Arab rebels in a bad light-except that there are any number of other places in Seven Pillars and his wartime reports where their conduct is shown in equally bad light. And if, for whatever reason, Lawrence did consciously choose to avoid telling the story, then why go out of his way in Seven Pillars to disparage the reputation of the one man, Barrow, best positioned to publicize it? Of course, to all this there may be a simpler, if more disturbing, explanation: that amid the wanton slaughter of those last days in September, Lawrence merely found the ambulance train incident too trifling to mention.
Lawrence stayed on in Deraa in order to meet with Faisal, who came over from Azraq the following day. By then, Allenby"s stricture against the Arabs making for Damascus had been lifted in light of the Turkish army"s total collapse-in fact, he had ordered all EEF units to stay out of the Syrian capital so that their Arab allies might have the honor of entering first-and Lawrence and Faisal discussed plans for establishing a provisional government there. Then, in the very early morning hours of September 30, Lawrence and his sometime driver of recent days, Major Walter Stirling, set off north in the Rolls-Royce sedan they had dubbed the "Blue Mist." They drove through a landscape littered with the corpses of men and animals, some of those who had perished in the Turks" desperate flight. By that evening, they had reached a ridge overlooking Damascus, a promontory already crowded with Arab and EEF units poised to advance into the city at first light.
During that night of waiting, Stirling watched as Lawrence sank into a mood of deep despondency. To the junior officer, it seemed quite incomprehensible-"we were on the eve of our entry into Damascus," Stirling wrote, "and in sight of the final act which was to crown all [Lawrence"s] efforts with success"-and he finally asked his companion what was the matter. "Ever since we took Deraa," Lawrence replied, "the end has been inevitable. Now the zest has gone, and the interest."
SOMEWHERE ALONG THAT ridge outside Damascus, William Yale and the Italian military attache were also camped that night, wrapped in blankets on the ground beside their Model T as they tried to catch a few hours" sleep. Shortly after midnight, they were ripped from their slumber by a tremendous explosion; to the north, an enormous cloud of smoke and flame rose above Damascus, the countryside for miles around illuminated in its intense glow. "G.o.d Almighty," Yale said, "the Turks have blown up Damascus." That first great explosion was followed by many smaller ones throughout the night, geysers of flame and bursting sh.e.l.ls arcing across the sky.
At dawn, Yale saw that his fears were misplaced, that Damascus still stood; the Turks and Germans had only been blowing up their ammunition and fuel storage depots before they fled the city.
Quite by chance, Yale and de Sambouy had camped that night beside the same band of journalists who had disappeared on them at General Headquarters on the eve of the offensive, and for some time that morning the reunited campmates discussed among themselves whether it might be safe to venture down into Damascus. The matter was rather decided when Yale, having briefly gone in search of water for coffee, returned to discover that the journalists had ditched them once again. "Where a correspondent goes," he told de Sambouy, "an attache can go." Jumping in the Model T, they made for the city.
They were plunged into a riotous celebration. In the streets, joyous crowds of Damascenes sang and danced and beat on drums, and as Arab warriors on horses and camels fired their rifles into the air, women on overhead balconies showered them all with rose petals. The deeper the attaches ventured toward the city center, the more delirious the scenes became. "Pandemonium reigned," Yale recalled. "I, who had lived nearly three years in Palestine under the strain and in fear of the Turks, could share the madness of the Arabs with the added exhilaration of being one of the host of deliverers.... We were invited into people"s homes and had wines and sweetmeats urged upon us. It was a wild hectic day, the like of which a man is fortunate to experience but once in a lifetime."
Lawrence was also experiencing the madness of Damascus that day, if to much weightier effect. Far earlier than the journalists or the attaches, he and Stirling had set off for the city in the "Blue Mist," only to be detained for several hours by an Indian army guard suspicious of their Arab headdresses. The delay nearly proved disastrous, for when Lawrence finally reached Damascus city hall, the gathering point for the Arab rebel leaders coming into the city, he discovered something of a coup in progress.
As Faisal"s lieutenants at city hall had set to establishing a provisional government that morning, they had been joined by two men who claimed to have already done so the night before; what"s more, these interlopers maintained, they were King Hussein"s rightful representatives in Damascus. Lawrence knew the two men well: they were Abd el Kader, the Algerian traitor who had nearly gotten him killed at Yarmuk, and his brother, Mohammed Said. Within a few minutes, the brothers and their followers left city hall, but in hindsight probably wished they hadn"t. In their absence, Lawrence summarily dismissed their claim to authority and appointed another man, Shukri Pasha el-Ayubi, as the interim Damascus military governor.
Lawrence"s timing was impeccable for, just minutes later, General Henry Chauvel, the Australian commander of the EEF"s Desert Mounted Corps, showed up at city hall. As the first senior EEF commander to enter Damascus, Chauvel was under instructions from Allenby to find the wali, the Turkish-appointed governor, and ask him to temporarily continue running the city. Instead, at city hall Chauvel was met by Lawrence, who quickly led him to Shukri Pasha. "I understood that this official was the Wali," Chauvel subsequently reported to Allenby, "and I issued him instructions through Lt. Col. Lawrence to carry on the civil administration of the city, and informed him that I would find any military guards and police that he required." Quite completing this sleight of hand, Chauvel then asked Lawrence "to a.s.sist in these matters, because I had no Political Officer at the moment at my disposal."
What it meant was that in one deft move, Lawrence had established the legitimacy of his personally chosen Arab "government" in the eyes of the EEF military authorities. It also meant that for the next crucial few days, he would be the de facto ruler of Damascus, able to draw on EEF troops if needed, able to direct the Arabs through the "office" of the military governor as required.
His first order of business was to neutralize the continuing threat posed by Abd el Kader and Mohammed Said. Summoning the brothers to city hall, he informed them that their government had been abolished, and named a number of Faisal loyalists to positions of authority in its place. After a tense confrontation that almost led to knifeplay, Lawrence recounted, "Mohammed Said and Abd el Kader then went away, breathing vengeance against me as a Christian." Shortly afterward, Lawrence had EEF troops called out to quell looting that was occurring in several parts of the city.
Late that afternoon, with some degree of calm restored and Faisal loyalists now in control, Lawrence dropped by Chauvel"s office to allow that perhaps there"d been some misunderstanding at their earlier meeting, that Shukri Pasha was not in fact the Damascus wali, but rather Lawrence"s own very recent appointee. But if this was couched as a clarification, Lawrence was also presenting Chauvel with a dare; with Damascus still a very tense place, the general could either accept the current arrangement or come up with his own idea and risk the consequences. Henry Chauvel already disliked Lawrence, but apparently disliked the prospect of urban insurrection even more; that evening, Lawrence was able to send his own cable off to Allenby"s headquarters announcing that Chauvel "agrees with my carrying on with the town administration until further instructions."
This he proceeded to do for the next two days, and with a curious marriage of munificence to severity. Even with looting persisting in certain quarters, munic.i.p.al work crews were set to restoring the city"s electrical system and waterworks. Garbage was collected, a fire brigade organized, food distributed to the dest.i.tute, at the same time that new disturbances in the city center-purportedly the result of another power bid by Abd el Kader and his brother-necessitated a firmer hand. "We called out the Arab troops," Lawrence blandly noted in his official report, "put Hotchkiss [machine guns] round the central square, and imposed peace in three hours after inflicting about twenty casualties."
Given their very different roles, it"s not surprising that the paths of T. E. Lawrence and William Yale intersected just once during those tumultuous days in Damascus. It"s also understandable, given the weight of issues he was dealing with, that Lawrence would have no memory of their meeting; Yale sought him out in order to complain about the looting of some shops owned by American citizens. Yet the two would ultimately be joined by a shared experience in Damascus. It was a place of such unspeakable horror that both would be forever scarred by it, a place known simply as "the Turkish hospital."
ON THE MORNING of October 2, an Australian officer approached William Yale in the lobby of his Damascus hotel to ask if he had seen "the Turkish hospital." Not familiar with the site, Yale was given directions to a compound near the railway station, and he and Major de Sambouy soon made for it.
It was actually a Turkish army barracks fronted by a large parade ground. Once past the two Australian sentries at the front gate, Yale recalled, "we crossed the vacant parade ground without seeing a person, climbed the steps and entered what was a charnel house."
The Turks had converted the barracks into a makeshift military hospital, but had abandoned it on September 29 amid their general exodus from the city, leaving behind some eight hundred wounded or diseased men. In the intervening three days, those men had been set upon by Arab marauders who had stripped the place bare of food and medicine, even tossing many of the invalids onto the floor in their search for concealed valuables. Other than posting sentries at the front gate, the Australian detachment that had pitched camp nearby had done nothing for the desperate and dying patients, neglecting even to bring them water.
"The floors were slimy with human offal," Yale recounted, "hundreds of men lay in small soiled hospital cots everywhere. The dead, the wounded, the sick [were] lying side by side in their own filth, save for the corpses on the floor and those who, writhing in agony, had fallen off their cots.... Most of them suffered in silence; some moaned, others cried to us pitifully, their tragic eyes filled with terror, following us as we walked the length of the room."
Somehow compounding the horror, in a small alcove above the main floor Yale and de Sambouy found three nurse-orderlies mutely sitting about a table drinking coffee. "My impression was that they were badly frightened, hopeless beings who, faced with a horrible and impossible situation, had lost all capacity to act. They sat drinking coffee in a h.e.l.l beyond the ken of one"s imagination." Seeing enough, the attaches fled the barracks building and set out in search of someone in authority-although just what const.i.tuted authority that day in Damascus was not completely clear.
T. E. Lawrence learned of the Turkish hospital that same afternoon, and also made for it. He found a scene very much as Yale described, although, in his more accomplished hand, the macabre details would be far more graphically rendered: rats had gnawed "wet red galleries" into the bodies of the dead, many of which "were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouth.... Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay."
Venturing deep into the room, Lawrence charted a path between the dead and dying, "holding my white skirts about me [so as] not to dip my bare feet in their puddled running, when suddenly I heard a sigh." Turning, he met the gaze of a still-living man, who whispered, "Aman, aman (pity)." That call was quickly joined by others, and then by a "brown waver" as some of the men tried to raise beseeching hands-"a thin fluttering like withered leaves"-before they fell back again. "No one of them had strength to speak," Lawrence recalled, "but there was something which made me laugh at their whispering in unison, as if by command."
In Lawrence"s telling, he immediately took command of the hideous situation. Finding a group of Turkish doctors idly sitting in an upstairs room, he ordered them down to the sick ward. Refused help from the adjacent Australian encampment, he instead had Arab troops bring food and water, then press-ganged a group of Turkish prisoners to dig a ma.s.s grave for the dead. Even here, though, Lawrence couldn"t resist the gruesome detail. "The trench was small for them," he noted of the men being buried, "but so fluid was the ma.s.s that each newcomer, when tipped in, fell softly, just jellying out the edges of the pile a little with his weight."
In his own effort to address the tragedy at the Turkish hospital, Yale eventually tracked down the recently arrived Gilbert Clayton. Over the course of their dealings in Cairo, Yale had developed a keen distaste for the brigadier general, finding him a cold and hard man, and nothing in Clayton"s manner at their meeting on the night of October 2 changed that view. After hearing out the attache"s impa.s.sioned plea for something to be done, Clayton calmly said, "Yale, you"re not a military man." Seeing the rage building in Yale"s eyes, he then added, "You need not be offended; I"m not a soldier either."
So deeply did the Turkish hospital incident affect Lawrence and Yale that it would dominate the one dialogue they were to have in the postwar era, an exchange of letters in 1929. While Yale"s initiating letter has been lost, he clearly pressed Lawrence for details on the subject, considering that fully a third of Lawrence"s handwritten reply-some four hundred words-was devoted to explaining his own actions at the hospital. The episode would also figure prominently in both men"s memoirs and, in the process, offer an intriguing glimpse into their very different personalities.
For William Yale, the guilt he felt over the Turkish hospital was to make for perhaps the most heartfelt and anguished pa.s.sage in his ma.n.u.script. "Nothing I did during the whole war period do I regret so deeply and with such shame as my failure to use my position wisely and calmly to alleviate the atrocious suffering of those eight hundred men. May their curses be upon my head." But self-recrimination was never one of Yale"s strong suits, and after just two more sentences, he"d settled on a new culprit to blame. "I lay this horror at the door of European imperialism, to be added to the mult.i.tude of crimes already committed in its name."
As might be expected, Lawrence"s description in Seven Pillars, in addition to being far more visceral, was also-perhaps unconsciously-far more self-revelatory. By that account, Lawrence returned to the hospital the next day to find conditions vastly improved as a result of his efforts, only to be confronted by an irate Australian major. Clad in his Arab robes, Lawrence didn"t bother to identify himself as a lieutenant colonel, even when the junior officer demanded to know who was in charge of the still-ghastly scene. When Lawrence acknowledged he was in charge, the Australian major spat "b.l.o.o.d.y brute," slapped Lawrence across the face, and stormed off.
If that is a rather peculiar pa.s.sage to appear on the penultimate page of a 660-page book that has as its subt.i.tle "A Triumph," there is also something about the moment that somehow rings a bit false; as with some of the Tafas details, it feels just a little too neat, too much of a stage-play coda. Yet, fictional or not, that major"s slap served a great function, for it left Lawrence "more ashamed than angry, for in my heart I felt he was right, and that anyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so stained in estimation that, afterward, nothing in the world would make him feel clean."
For the remainder of his life, Lawrence was to feel stained by what he had seen and done during the war, and in his struggle to ever "feel clean" again, repeatedly looked to self-abnegation and violence against himself-violence far worse than a major"s slap-as recompense for his sins.
THE MEETING TOOK place in a second-floor stateroom of the finest hotel in Damascus, the Victoria, on the afternoon of October 3. Just eight men were present: on the British side, Generals Allenby and Chauvel, together with their chiefs of staff; on the Arab side, Faisal ibn Hussein, his chief of staff, Nuri Said, and Sherif Nasir of Medina. Acting as intermediary and interpreter was T. E. Lawrence. Despite its profound importance-in that stateroom much of the future history, and tragedy, of the Middle East was to be set in motion-no official record was kept.
General Allenby had arrived in the Syrian capital just hours earlier. Never the most patient of men, he was in a particularly cantankerous mood that day. With his offensive still ongoing-his vanguard was continuing a relentless pursuit of the Turks as they fled north-he"d been forced to take time away from his martial duties to sort out the increasingly nettlesome political situation in Damascus. As a result, when informed that Faisal, arriving on a three o"clock train from Deraa, would be slow in reaching the Victoria on account of his planned triumphal entry into the city on horseback, Allenby had thundered, "Triumphal entry be d.a.m.ned," and ordered Faisal to be brought to the hotel at once.
Although the general may not have been fully aware of it-or more likely was too distracted to care-the astounding initial success of his Palestinian offensive had caused the French government to frantically rea.s.sert their claims to Syria as codified in the Sykes-Picot Agreement; on September 23, the British government had largely acquiesced to their demands. The result was that two days later Allenby received a set of instructions from the Foreign Office so obtuse as to be nearly nonsensical. After stating that "the British Government adhere to their declared policy with regard to Syria, namely that should it fall into the sphere of interest of any European Power, that Power should be France," the September 25 instructions reminded Allenby that under the terms of Sykes-Picot, "you will notice that France and Britain undertake to uphold jointly the independence of any Arab State that may be set up in Area (A)"-meaning Syria. From these two seemingly opposed clauses arose an appropriately muddled proposed course of action, that "if General Allenby advances to Damascus, it would be most desirable that, in conformity with the Anglo-French Agreement of 1916 he should, if possible, work through an Arab administration by means of a French liaison."
With London apparently deciding these instructions weren"t sufficiently baffling, they were followed on October 1 by a second set that rather settled the matter. Now Allenby was told that since "the belligerent status of the Arabs fighting for the liberation of their territories from Turkish rule" had been recognized by the Allied powers, "the regions so liberated [by the Arabs] should properly be treated as Allied territory enjoying the status of an independent State (or confederation of States) of friendly Arabs." A sudden burst of clarity, perhaps, except this statement was followed by the curious rider that should "the Arab authorities [in Syria] request the a.s.sistance or advice of European functionaries, we are bound under the Anglo-French Agreement to let these be French." In essence, it appeared Sykes-Picot was being invoked to annul and uphold the accord simultaneously, the intent changing from one sentence to the next.
In first hearing of this hash at the Victoria Hotel, Lawrence undoubtedly felt a note of alarm. It was his understanding that Sykes-Picot was a dead letter, and had been for quite some time; for it to return to the conversation now for any purpose was ominous. On the positive side, Allenby"s instructions explicitly recognized the Arab claim to Syrian independence, and since Faisal had no intention of asking for European a.s.sistance or advice-that had been the whole point of establishing an interim government-it surely meant the rider about a French liaison officer was moot.
But matters were about to take a very ugly turn-or rather, a series of ugly turns. As recounted by General Chauvel, Allenby announced that Faisal actually didn"t have any choice in the matter, that France was to be the "protecting power" of Syria. Additionally, even though Faisal, as his father"s representative, "was to have the administration of Syria"-albeit "under French guidance and financial backing"-that administration didn"t extend to either Palestine or Lebanon, but "would include the hinterland of Syria only." "Hinterland" was truly the operative word since, as Faisal was further informed, the boundaries of Lebanon had now been demarcated as the entire Mediterranean coastline from Palestine to the Gulf of Alexandretta, making Syria a landlocked nation. As a final insult, Allenby told Faisal that he would be immediately a.s.signed a French liaison officer, "who would work for the present with Lawrence, who would be expected to give him every a.s.sistance."
Both Faisal and Lawrence were stunned. As Chauvel recounted, Faisal fiercely argued that it was his understanding "from the advisor whom Allenby had sent him"-meaning Lawrence-that in return for ceding Palestine, "the Arabs were to have the whole of Syria, including the Lebanon." Furthermore, he flatly refused to have a French liaison officer attached to him, "or to recognize French guidance in any way."
At this tense impa.s.se, Allenby turned to Lawrence. "But did you not tell him that the French were to have the Protectorate over Syria?"
"No, sir," Lawrence responded, according to Chauvel, "I know nothing about it."
"But you knew definitely that he, Faisal, was to have nothing to do with the Lebanon?" Allenby persisted.
"No, sir," Lawrence replied, "I did not."
Allenby tried to defuse the situation by offering that these were only temporary measures, that all would be resolved at the great postwar peace conference being planned, but Faisal would have none of it; he knew full well that temporary measures in such circ.u.mstances had a tendency to become permanent ones. It left the British commander with only military rank to fall back on. Allenby reminded Faisal that, technically, both he and the Arab Northern Army remained under his overall command; as a result, the rebel leader had no choice but to obey orders.
After perhaps an hour, a shaken Faisal Hussein left the Victoria Hotel, to be greeted, ironically, by an enormous crowd of supporters. Lawrence did not accompany him. Instead, he stayed behind in the hotel stateroom to make a request of General Allenby.
THE DAM HAD burst. Through the rest of October, the EEF and their Arab allies pursued the remnants of the Turkish armies north, swiftly overwhelming whatever rearguard resistance the enemy could offer. It wasn"t until the end of the month that Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, the future Kemal Ataturk, finally managed to establish a new defensive line at the very edge of the Turkish Anatolian heartland. By then, though, all of Syria was gone and the Constantinople regime was suing for peace. That culminated in the Armistice of Mudros on October 31; at just about the same time, the fallen Three Pashas-Djemal, Enver, and Talaat-slipped aboard a German torpedo boat and made their escape across the Black Sea.
But it wasn"t just the Turkish dam that had burst. In one of the more peculiar chain reactions in history, given that their military efforts had been largely autonomous, all the Central Powers had come to their breaking points at precisely the same moment, and all now fell together-Bulgaria at the end of September, and then Turkey and Austro-Hungary in the span of a mere six days. As might be expected, Germany held out the longest, but only by the matter of a week. With their vaunted Hindenburg Line overrun in a half dozen places and their soldiers surrendering en ma.s.se, in the early morning hours of November 11, German negotiators met with their Allied counterparts in a railroad car in a French forest to sign papers of armistice, scheduled to take effect at 11 a.m. that same day. In a fittingly obscene finale to this most senseless of wars, a number of Western Front units continued to fight right up until that eleventh hour was struck, with the result that some four thousand more soldiers died on the last morning of the war.
Curt Prfer had observed much of this staggering cascade of events from the vantage point of Switzerland, to which he had crossed in late September. Even as all fell down around him, the German spymaster had continued with his scheme to try to woo the wayward eldest son of Abbas Hilmi back into the Central Powers" fold, the keystone, in some inscrutable way, toward forging a German-Turkish-Egyptian alliance that might yet ride to triumph in the Middle East. A mentally unstable s.a.d.i.s.t Abdel Moneim may well have been, but he still had enough wits about him in October 1918 to realize that his German suitor"s scheme was ludicrous. At the end of that month, an empty-handed Prfer crossed back over to Germany, just in time to witness the final fall of his beloved Fatherland.
For a time, Aaron Aaronsohn had also been a distant observer of the events of that autumn-in his case, from the even farther remove of the United States. In mid-October, however, with the downfall of the Central Powers clearly imminent, he hurried aboard a pa.s.senger ship in New York for the return to England. Once Turkey and Germany capitulated, Aaronsohn knew, all attention would turn to the international peace conference being planned in Paris, and he was determined to make his presence there known, to press for the promises given to the Zionists in the Balfour Declaration.
By contrast, William Yale experienced the climax of the war firsthand. Through October, he followed the victorious British army north through Syria, and was in Aleppo when news of the German armistice came. Afterward, he made his way back to Cairo, not at all sure what his future held. Reluctant to go home, but with little to do in Egypt, he fixated on trying to get himself attached in some capacity to the American delegation at the upcoming Paris Peace Conference. "I feverishly wrote report after report," he recounted, "hoping that through them I could persuade someone to order me to Paris. My reports grew poorer and poorer."
That decline in quality apparently did the trick, for in late December Yale received a cable ordering him to the French capital. He was to report there to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, to serve as their "expert on Arabian affairs." As Yale would write in a moment of rare modesty, "the t.i.tle flabbergasted me."
Paradoxically, of the various spies and intelligence agents who had parried with one another across the Middle East over the previous few years, the one most completely removed from events at the war"s close was T. E. Lawrence. He had ensured that on the afternoon of October 3, in the second-floor stateroom of the Victoria Hotel in Damascus.
Once Faisal had left that room after his meeting with Allenby, Lawrence had turned to the general and requested to be given leave. Apparently, Allenby initially a.s.sumed it was a request for a few days" rest-that was easy enough to arrange and certainly well deserved-but Lawrence clarified that he wanted to leave altogether, to go home to England. At first, Allenby flatly refused; the Syrian campaign was still a very active one, it relied greatly on British officers whom the Arabs trusted, and they trusted no one more than Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence.
According to Henry Chauvel, Lawrence then raised the stakes considerably by telling Allenby "that he would not work with a French Liaison officer, and that he was due for leave and thought he had better take it now and go off to England." Whether in anger at Lawrence"s insubordination or in respect at his sense of honor-the accounts of Chauvel and Lawrence differ on this-Allenby finally relented. "Yes," he told Lawrence, "I think you had."
Since late 1916, Lawrence had waged a quiet war against his own government, and now he had lost. What would soon become clear, however, was that he intended to continue that fight off the battlefield, in the conference halls and meeting rooms of peacetime Paris. He may have asked to leave Damascus out of exhaustion, but it was also to prepare for the next round in the struggle for Arab independence.
The following afternoon, Lawrence was conducted out of Damascus. He was leaving the city he had invoked as a battle cry for two years. One hundred and fifty miles to the northeast of Damascus lay Jerablus, the place where he had spent the happiest days of his life. To Damascus or Jerablus, Lawrence would never return.
Epilogue.
Paris.
Blast the Lawrence side of things. He was a cad I"ve killed.
T. E. SHAW, ALIAS OF T. E. LAWRENCE, TO H. C. ARMSTRONG, OCTOBER 6, 1924.
Everything T. E. Lawrence had fought for, schemed for, arguably betrayed his country for, turned to ashes in a single five-minute conversation between the prime ministers of Great Britain and France. In London on the morning of December 1, 1918, David Lloyd George took aside a visiting Georges Clemenceau and bluntly outlined just what Britain wanted in the Middle East: Iraq and Palestine. In tacit exchange, although Lloyd George would always deny it, France would have free rein in Syria. It was a proposed "solution" to the spoils-of-war contest that had strained British and French relations ever since they had cast their covetous eyes toward the Middle East, and that had now taken on great urgency; with the Great War finally over and the Paris Peace Conference about to begin, it was vital that Britain and France present a unified front against the American president, Woodrow Wilson, with his high-minded talk of a "peace without victory" and the rights of oppressed peoples to self-determination. Faced with this imminent American threat, Clemenceau quickly acceded to Lloyd George"s proposal.
In essence, the two imperial victors had not only affirmed the basic structure of the Sykes-Picot Agreement but gone beyond it, giving themselves more and the Arabs even less. But in the time-honored tradition of European secret deals, it was to be a while before anyone outside the British and French prime ministers" closest circles would have any knowledge of that extraordinary accord. Certainly T. E. Lawrence had no intimation of it.
What followed in Paris was a yearlong shadow play that first raised hopes of a new era in relations between nations, Woodrow Wilson"s vaunted "new world order," only to degenerate into backroom deals, vengeful treaties, and arbitrary borders. Many books, foremost among them Margaret MacMillan"s definitive Paris 1919, have been written about the Paris Peace Conference and the immensely complicated maneuverings of great powers and nationalist supplicants. As far as the Middle East was concerned, the byzantine machinations meant, in the end, virtually nothing. "The Great Loot," the carving up of the carca.s.s of the Ottoman Empire, would now come to pa.s.s.
Not that Lawrence did not try mightily to advance the Arab cause. Acting as Faisal"s counselor during the Paris talks, he constantly floated schemes to give them control of the lands they had fought so fiercely for, while he also lobbied senior British statesmen and wrote pa.s.sionate editorials in the Arabs" defense. But Lawrence"s usefulness to the British government had ended. In an exquisite irony, at precisely the same time he was becoming a household name in Britain-an estimated one million Britons, including the king and queen, would flock to see Lowell Thomas"s lecture show "With Allenby in Palestine, and Lawrence in Arabia"-government officials were penning memos calling Lawrence "a malign influence," and "to a large extent responsible for our troubles with the French over Syria." Finally, he was simply stripped of his credentials at Paris and barred from a.s.sisting Faisal in the talks. Lawrence had lost the peace.
There was at least one extraordinary aspect of Lawrence"s diplomatic efforts, however, that bears emphasis. Having long known that control of the Palestine portion of Syria was lost to the Arabs, Lawrence and Faisal sought an ally to affirm their nationalist aspirations for the rest of it. They found such an ally in Chaim Weizmann. By the close of 1918, the Zionists had strong patrons in both the British and American governments, but what made those governments nervous was the continuing-in fact, growing-hostility of the Palestinian Arab population to the Zionists" goals. So what if Hashemite support for the Zionist program in Palestine could be traded for Zionist support of an independent Arab Syria? Over the course of that December, Lawrence, Faisal, and Weizmann worked out the details for such a mutually beneficial relationship, culminating in a joint proclamation on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference.
In that proclamation, Faisal and Weizmann announced their intention to work together in Paris, and in recognition of each other"s claims. Surely the most controversial of the nine articles of the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement was the fourth: "All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale." To this doc.u.ment, Faisal-or more likely, Lawrence-had inserted a key closing proviso. The agreement was only valid so long as Syrian independence was achieved; barring that, it was null and void.
Yet in their desperation to find a supporting partner at the peace conference, Lawrence and Faisal had chosen to ignore several crucial details. While the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement offered a fairly detailed outline for the administration of Palestine, nowhere did it specify what Palestine actually consisted of. Further, in reaching his accord with Weizmann, Faisal had quite flagrantly turned his back on the doctrine of self-determination for Palestine, placing him in a weakened-some would say hypocritical-position in invoking that same doctrine for the rest of Syria. Most troublesome, Chaim Weizmann had recently made public just what he and other Zionists envisioned as the future status of Palestine. "The establishment of a National Home for the Jewish people," he had announced in mid-November, "is understood to mean that the country of Palestine should be placed under such political, economic and moral conditions as will favor the increase of the Jewish population, so that in accordance with the principle of democracy, it may ultimately develop into a Jewish Commonwealth."
By going into partnership with the Zionists under such circ.u.mstances, Faisal had just handed his more conservative Arab and Muslim rivals a powerful weapon to use against him. One who would soon wield that weapon to devastating effect was King Hussein"s chief rival in Arabia, ibn-Saud, and his fundamentalist Wahhabist followers.
IN THE LAST sentence of his memoir, William Yale referred to the Paris Peace Conference as "the prologue of the 20th century tragedy." Yale served as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs to the American delegation in Paris and, like Lawrence, put forth great efforts to achieve a sustainable peace in the region. As with his British counterpart, with whom he sometimes aligned himself, these efforts were thwarted at every turn.
Yale placed much of the blame on his own government. To him, the grand enterprise in Paris seemed a rather perfect reflection of Woodrow Wilson"s peculiar blend of idealism and arrogance. In the American president"s almost comic fondness for tidy enumerated lists-his "Fourteen Points" had been followed by his "Four Principles," his "Four Ends," and finally his "Five Particulars"-was the hint of a simplistic mind-set, as if solving the world"s myriad messy problems was merely a matter of isolating them into their component parts and applying quasi-mathematical principles. Nowhere was this more problematic than when it came to Wilson"s cherished and oft-cited notion of "self-determination." While the phrase certainly sounded good, in the mashed-together cultures of Europe and the Middle East of the early twentieth century, where faith and ethnicity and nationalism were all exerting tremendous and often opposing pulls, just whose claim to self-determination was to win out over others? London and Paris had repeatedly warned Wilson on the dangers of opening up this Pandora"s box, but there had never been any indication that the president was listening.
To William Yale"s mind, all of this was actually symptomatic of perhaps the greatest paradox underlying the American role at the Paris Peace Conference: Woodrow Wilson"s grand vision of a new world order rested on a bedrock of profound ignorance. That was made clear on the very day Yale arrived in Paris and met with his new supervisor, William Westermann, and the other members of the American delegation"s Middle Eastern research section. Granted, the Middle East was a lesser American concern at the peace conference since the United States hadn"t gone to war with Turkey, but it still struck Yale that Westermann, a cla.s.sics professor from the University of Wisconsin, might have rounded up a panel with at least some familiarity with the region. Instead, they included a specialist in Latin American studies, an American Indian historian, a scholar on the Crusades, and two Persian linguistics professors.
The picture was completed when Yale was handed a briefing book on Syria, a 107-page compendium of historic, economic, and political data that was serving as the princ.i.p.al guide in formulating American policy in the region. The Report on the Desires of the Syrians didn"t require a lot of study on Yale"s part; almost all the citations in those sections dealing with events since 1914 were drawn from a single source, a State Department special agent in Cairo named William Yale.
Several times Yale saw opportunities for championing the cause of Arab self-determination, but they always slipped away on the tide of American inaction. At a meeting with Faisal in mid-February 1919, Yale was taken aback when the Arab leader bluntly proposed an American mandate in Syria, vastly preferring the supposedly disinterested Americans to the French. By then, however, Yale had already been with the American delegation in Paris long enough to realize that, virtuous principles aside, the Wilson administration was more interested in dictating solutions to the rest of the world than in a.s.suming any responsibility of its own. And there was another problem, one that may not have been readily apparent to non-Americans. Its brief burst of international involvement notwithstanding, the United States was already showing signs of sliding back into an isolationist spirit, with Wilson and his Republican opponents who dominated in Congress increasingly at loggerheads. What it meant for all those in Paris looking to the United States for leadership was that time was not on their side, that the longer things dragged on, the less likely the Americans would have the ability or even the interest to do much at all. Very quickly, for Yale and others in the American Middle Eastern division, there came the deeply dispiriting sense that matters were slipping away. "We fought over boundary lines as if the destiny of the world depended upon it," Yale recalled of that time. "We fumed and fussed because Wilson and [his chief advisor Edward] House seemed to pay no attention to what we were doing. It all seemed strangely academic and futile to me."
As the peace conference extended, the folly of Yale"s mission would only grow increasingly absurd. In the late spring of 1919, he was appointed to an American fact-finding committee, the King-Crane Commission, which, in pursuit of Wilson"s self-determination principle, was dispatched to determine the desires of the former denizens of the Ottoman world, "to take a plebiscite," in Yale"s skeptical view, "of a vast sprawling empire of 30,000,000 inhabitants." Unsurprisingly, after a tour of two months, and scores of meetings in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, the message the commission had heard in each place was unequivocal: the vast majority of people wanted either independence or the Americans. In light of this, the commission came up with a sweeping set of recommendations that placed the United States at the forefront of administering a solution to the Middle Eastern puzzle. That solution, however, did not at all resemble what had already been secretly agreed to by the British and the French, nor what the Wilson administration was willing to take on. At least here, the administration was prepared to act with great dispatch; the King-Crane reports were swiftly locked away in a safe, not to be seen or read by the outside world for the next three years.
Returning to Europe from that mission in the fall of 1919, Yale would make one last attempt to salvage the situation in Syria, enlisting Lawrence"s support for what became known as the Yale Plan. With the plan drawing support from senior British statesmen, it briefly appeared the coming showdown between the Arabs and French in Syria might be averted. But Yale was essentially acting in a freelance capacity, and once senior American officials learned of it, his plan was quickly scuttled. On November 1, 1919, British troops who had occupied Syria until a final settlement was reached began to withdraw. On that same day, French troops began moving in. Days later, Yale resigned from the American peace delegation in disgust and sailed back to New York.
T. E. Lawrence lost hope at about the same time. As his mother would relate to a biographer, her son slipped into a state of "extreme depression and nervous exhaustion" that autumn, and during visits home he "would sometimes sit the entire morning between breakfast and lunch in the same position, without moving, and with the same expression on his face."
PART OF THE enduring fascination with T. E. Lawrence"s story is the series of painful "what if?" questions it raises, a pondering over what the world lost when he lost. What would have happened if, in 1918, the Arabs had been able to create the greater Arab nation that many so desperately sought, and which they believed had been promised them? How different would the Middle East look today if the early Zionists in postwar Palestine had been able to negotiate with a man like Faisal Hussein, who had talked of "the racial kinship and ancient bonds" that existed between Jew and Arab? And what of the Americans? Today, it scarcely seems conceivable that there was a time when the Arab and Muslim worlds were clamoring for American intervention in their lands; what might have happened if the United States had risen to the opportunity presented at the end of World War I?
In all probability, not quite the golden age some might imagine. As Lawrence himself frequently stated, the notion of a true pan-Arab nation was always something of a mirage, the differences between its radically varied cultures far greater than what united them. Perhaps such a fractious and vast nation could have endured for a time through sheer lack of strong central control, much as under the Ottomans" old system, but advances in technology and communication would almost certainly have soon brought these disparate cultures and peoples into conflict. Similarly, there were never going to be truly harmonious relations between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine, given that Arab resistance to an expanded Jewish presence long preceded the Balfour Declaration and took little notice of Faisal"s moderation; indeed, the one postwar Arab leader who would try to reach an accommodation with Israel, Faisal"s brother Abdullah, would be a.s.sa.s.sinated by a Palestinian gunman for his troubles. As for American occupying troops being hailed as liberators, that surely would have been short-lived too, ending when those troops were drawn into policing local conflicts they little understood, with the inevitable choosing of sides this entails. Even if it somehow managed to avoid those treacherous straits, the United States would certainly have shed its image as "the one disinterested party" as it steadily became an imperial power in its own right.
All that said, it"s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalog of war, religious strife, and brutal dictatorships that has haunted not just the Middle East but the entire world. That sad history began from almost the moment the negotiators in Paris packed their bags and declared their mission complete, leaving in their wake "a porcelain peace."
Denied Lawrence"s a.s.sistance in the autumn of 1919, a desperate Faisal was forced to accept the few crumbs of compromise the French were willing to throw his way in Syria. When Faisal returned to Damascus, however, he found himself denounced as a traitor for selling the nation out to the European imperialists. Harnessing this popular rage, Faisal renounced his deal with the French and in March 1920 staged something of a palace coup by declaring himself king of Syria. That act, in conjunction with the San Remo conference the following month at which Great Britain and France formalized their part.i.tion of the region-Britain taking Iraq and a "greater" Palestine that included a broad swath east of the Jordan River, or Transjordan, France the rest of Syria-set Faisal on a collision course with the French. That collision came in July; after a brief and one-sided battle on the outskirts of Damascus, the French ousted Faisal and cast him into exile. By the close of 1920, the French at last had much of their Syrie integrale (with the exception of the British mandate in Palestine and Transjordan), but they now faced a populace seething with rage. They also now confronted an external threat; in the deserts of Transjordan, Faisal"s brother Abdullah was ma.s.sing his followers with the intention of marching on Damascus.
But whatever problems the French had at the end of 1920 were dwarfed by those of the British. In Palestine, tensions between Zionist immigrants and the resident Arab population had escalated into bloodshed. In Arabia, ibn-Saud was once again pushing to oust King Hussein. The worst crisis point was in Iraq. The previous year, Lawrence had predicted full-scale revolt against British rule there by March 1920 "if we don"t mend our ways," but he had been off by two months; by the time the May rebellion in Iraq was put down, some one thousand British and nine thousand natives were dead. As Lawrence would explain in his 1929 letter to William Yale, at Paris, Great Britain and France had taken the discredited Sykes-Picot Agreement and fashioned something even worse; how much worse was evidenced by the myriad fires that had spread across the region almost immediately.
To combat these crises, in December 1920 Lloyd George turned to a man who had become something of a pariah in British ruling circles, former first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. One of Churchill"s first acts upon a.s.suming the position of Colonial Office secretary was to enlist the help of another recent outcast, former lieutenant colonel T. E. Lawrence.
At least initially, Lawrence had little interest in rejoining the fray. Immersed in writing his memoirs, and undoubtedly still smarting over his shabby treatment by Lloyd George"s government the previous year, he told Churchill he was too busy and that he had left politics behind. He only relented when the new colonial secretary a.s.sured him that he would have a virtually free hand in helping fundamentally reshape the British portion of the Middle Eastern chessboard at the upcoming Cairo Conference. As a result, the Cairo deliberations were little more than a formality, with Lawrence and Churchill having worked out ahead of time, as Lawrence told a biographer, "not only [the] questions the Conference would consider, but decisions they would reach."
Iraq was now to be consolidated and recognized as an Arab kingdom, with Faisal placed on the throne. In Arabia, the British upheld Hussein"s claim to rule in the Hejaz, while simultaneously upholding ibn-Saud"s authority in the Arabian interior. Surely the most novel idea to come out of Cairo was the plan designed to stay Abdullah from attacking the French in Syria. At the close of the conference, Lawrence journeyed to Abdullah"s base camp in Amman and convinced the truculent Arab leader to first try to establish a government in the Transjordan region of Britain"s Palestine mandate. To Lawrence"s great surprise-and perhaps to Abdullah"s as well-this most indolent of Hussein"s four sons actually proved to be a remarkably good administrator; in the near future, Transjordan was to be officially detached from the rest of Palestine and made an independent Arab kingdom-today"s Jordan-with Abdullah as its ruler. By the time Lawrence returned to England in the autumn of 1921, his one-year service to the Colonial Office nearly over, he had quite literally become the unseen kingmaker of the Middle East.
But if all this brought a measure of stability to the center of the old Ottoman Empire map, it did little to improve matters to the north and south. There, the situation remained uncertain and b.l.o.o.d.y for some time to come.
In Anatolia, the former Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, had refused to accept the dismemberment of Turkey as outlined by the Allies. Over a four-year period, he led his army of Turkish nationalists into battle against all those who would claim a piece of the Turkish heartland, before finally establishing the modern-day borders of Turkey in 1923. France"s turn in this round robin of war came in the autumn of 1921 when Kemal, soon to become better known as Ataturk, turned his attention to the French troops occupying the Cilicia region. Quickly routed, the French armies in Cilicia beat a hasty retreat back into Syria under the leadership of their commander, the unlucky edouard Bremond.
At the same time, a bewildering arc of war extended from the Caucasus all the way to Afghanistan as various nationalist groups, Russian Reds and Whites, and remnants of the Young Turks battled for primacy, forming and reforming alliances with such dizzying regularity as to defy both logic and comprehension. Among the prominent aspirants in this crucible were both Enver and Djemal Pasha, and it was no more surprising than anything else going on in the region that Djemal Pasha should turn up in Kabul in the winter of 1921 as a military advisor to the king of Afghanistan.
And then, far to the south, it was King Hussein"s turn. With the British having long since tired of his mercurial rule and refusal to accept the political realities of the Middle East-in 1921, Lawrence had spent a maddening two months in Jeddah futilely trying to get Hussein to accept the Cairo Conference accords-he was all but defenseless when ibn-Saud and his Wahhabist warriors finally closed on Mecca in late 1924. Hustled to the coast and then onto a British destroyer, Hussein was first taken to exile in Cyprus, before finally joining his son Abdullah in his new capital of Amman, Jordan. The deposed king, who had once dreamt of a pan-Arab nation extending from Mecca to Baghdad, died there in 1931 at the age of seventy-six.
From there, matters simply turned worse for the West. By the 1930s, the British faced a quagmire in the Palestine mandate they had schemed so hard to obtain, first a full-scale Arab revolt fueled by increasing Jewish immigration into the region, joined after World War II by attacks from Jewish guerrillas who saw the British occupiers as the last roadblock toward the creation of Israel. In 1946, the war-exhausted French were forced to give up their cherished Syrie integrale, but not before carving out a new nation, Lebanon, from its territory; within three years, Syria"s pro-Western democratic government would be ousted in a military coup, and the convoluted governing structure imposed by the French in Lebanon would set the country on the path to civil war. In 1952, British control of Egypt ended when their puppet king was overthrown by Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser and his nationalist Free Officers Movement, followed six years later by a military coup in Iraq by like-minded junior officers that ended the pro-Western monarchy established by Faisal. By the 1960s, with the era of European imperialism drawing to its unceremonious close, the Middle East resembled the shambles the colonial powers were leaving behind in other parts of the globe, but with one crucial difference: because of oil, the region had now become the most strategically vital corner on earth, and the West couldn"t walk away from the mess it had helped create there even if it wanted to. What has transpired there over the past half century is, of course, familiar to all: four wars between the Arabs and Israelis; a ten-year civil war in Lebanon and a twenty-year one in Yemen; the slaughter of ethnic minorities in Syria and Iraq; four decades of state-sponsored terrorism; convulsions of religious extremism; four major American military interventions and a host of smaller ones; and for the Arab people, until very recently, a virtually unbroken string of cruel and/or kleptocratic dictatorships stretching from Tunisia to Iraq that left the great majority impoverished and disenfranchised.