Having been under the impression that they had killed off the Alexandretta scheme back in the winter of 1915, the French government now felt compelled to do so in more explicit form. On November 13, the French military attache in London handed a letter to General William Robertson, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff and overall commander of the British army. After rea.s.serting France"s economic and political interests in Syria, the letter stated that "French public opinion could not be indifferent to anything that would be attempted in a country that they consider already as being intended to become a part of the future [French-controlled] Syria; and they would require of the French Government that not only could no military operation be undertaken in this particular country before it has been concerted between the Allies, but even that, should such an action be taken, the greater part of the task should be entrusted to the French troops and the Generals commanding them."
Its obtuse diplomatic language aside, the letter essentially repeated France"s earlier objections to an Alexandretta landing: since France intended to take over Syria after the war, French forces needed to be in the vanguard of any military operation in the area, and since no French troops could currently be spared for such a mission, that precluded any mission being conducted at all. What was shocking this time around, though, was that the French would actually commit such a squalid argument to paper. British historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote of the French directive that "this must surely be one of the most astounding doc.u.ments ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy"s life-line and of protecting our own." By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially "accessories to the crime," that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another a.s.sault on the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line-the narrow front of southern Palestine-an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties.
To the disbelief of Lawrence and others on the intelligence staff in Cairo, the Alexandretta plan was quashed anew, never to seriously be raised again.
Back in February 1915, when the plan had first been scuttled, Lawrence had bitterly suggested to his family that France was the true enemy in Syria. In the wake of the second scuttling in November 1915 was born an enmity that would cause him to view all future French actions in the region with utter distrust.
SOON AFTER THE death of her son Frank, Sarah Lawrence had chided her second son, "Ned," for something that clearly remained a sore point: his failure to visit Frank at his military boot camp in late 1914, prior to Ned"s departure for Egypt. T. E. Lawrence had responded to his mother"s criticism with a logic so matter-of-fact as to border on the perverse. "I didn"t go say goodbye to Frank," he explained, "because he would rather I didn"t, and I knew there was little chance of my seeing him again; in which case, we were better without a parting."
Lawrence had responded very differently in March 1915 when he learned that the ship transporting his brother Will back to England from India was pa.s.sing through the Suez Ca.n.a.l. Not having seen Will since his visit to Carchemish in 1913, Lawrence had briefly put aside his work at the Savoy Hotel, mounted his Triumph motorcycle, and raced the eighty miles out to Port Suez to meet his brother"s ship when it docked.
Just before he got there, however, a skirmish broke out somewhere along the ca.n.a.l, delaying Will"s ship. Instead of a face-to-face meeting, all the brothers were able to arrange was a brief ship-to-sh.o.r.e telephone conversation. That same evening, Lawrence remounted his motorcycle and returned to his work in Cairo.
In volunteering to serve as an aerial spotter for the Royal Flying Corps, Will had chosen a position that came with one of the shortest life expectancies for any soldier in World War I. On October 23, 1915, Will was killed when his plane was shot down over France, his body never recovered. He was twenty-six years old, and had been at the front for less than a week.
The effect of losing two brothers in just five months seemed to draw Lawrence even deeper into his emotional sh.e.l.l. For the next several months, his letters home grew steadily more infrequent and terse. Indeed, while he had quickly dropped nearly all mention of Frank in writing to his parents, there is no record of his even acknowledging Will"s death at the time, save for one oblique allusion. It was in a short note he sent home that December: I"m writing just a few words this morning, because it has surprised me by being Christmas day. I"m afraid that for you it will be no very happy day; however you have still Bob and Arnie left at home, which is far more than many people can have. Look forward all the time. Everything here is as usual, only we had a shower of rain yesterday, and it has been cool lately.
Chapter 7.
Treachery It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it. I personally cannot foresee the situation in which we may find ourselves at the end of the war, and I therefore think that any discussion at the present time of how we are going to cut up the Turkish Empire is chiefly of academic interest.
BRITISH GENERAL GEORGE MACDONOGH, DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, JANUARY 7, 1916.
On November 16, 1915, T. E. Lawrence penned a note to an old friend, Edward Leeds, one of the Ashmolean curators back in Oxford. It had been just three weeks since the death of his brother Will, and Lawrence was in a forlorn mood. After apologizing for his long silence, he told Leeds it was partly due to the demands of his job, "and partly because I"m rather low because first one and now another of my brothers has been killed. Of course, I"ve been away a lot from them, and so it doesn"t come on one like a shock at all, but I rather dread Oxford and what it may be like if one comes back. Also they were both younger than I am, and it doesn"t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo."
If war is an inherently confounding experience, Lawrence could be forgiven that November for finding his particularly so. In the eleven months since he had arrived in Cairo, he had been largely confined to a suite of offices in the Savoy Hotel, a world away from the Western Front killing fields that had taken the lives of his brothers. Even more bewildering, he had expended his greatest energies not on battling the enemy, but engaged in "paper-combat" against the parochial interests of Britain"s military bureaucracy and those of its closest ally, France.
The uselessness of those struggles was plain to see on the great map of the Ottoman Empire tacked to the wall of the Savoy offices. In November 1915, after a year of war in that theater and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the map remained virtually unchanged.
In Gallipoli, the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force still clung to their blood-soaked beachheads, but even those tiny toeholds in Turkey were soon to disappear; in a cruel irony, the Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli, just then about to get under way, was to be the only well-executed phase of the entire campaign. In Anatolia, the suffering of the Armenians continued unabated, and was now being joined by that of the would-be Arab secessionists in Syria, their leadership decimated by Djemal Pasha"s secret police. A landing in Alexandretta that might have aided both groups now seemed a dead issue, even if for reasons no one in Cairo could quite discern (it would still be some weeks before the London War Office got around to informing Egypt of the French government"s formal spiking of the plan). In its stead, there was now growing talk of a conventional frontal a.s.sault against the entrenched Turkish forces at the far end of the Sinai in Palestine. Should that offensive be successful-and the example of Gallipoli offered scant reason to think it would-the British army would then be consigned to a long, slow grind north toward the Turkish heartland. Just about the only bright spot anywhere on that map was in Iraq. There, a British Indian army had steadily advanced up the Tigris River over the past seven months, and by mid-November stood at the gates of Baghdad. Even if that city at the Ottoman periphery were taken, however, it was hard to see its material effect on Constantinople, a thousand miles away.
Almost by default, then, Lawrence had increasingly looked to Arabia as the one place left that afforded a ray of hope, where the unconventional war he was convinced was needed to defeat the Turks might be waged. This hope had been given new vigor just days earlier. In the wake of Mohammed al-Faroki"s revelations, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, had rushed off a new letter to Emir Hussein acceding to nearly all his territorial demands for an independent Arab nation in payment for a British-allied Arab revolt. On November 5, an equally accommodating reply had come in to Cairo from Hussein. A few smaller points still needed to be worked out, but there was now a broad agreement in place for an Arab uprising against Turkey.
Not that Lawrence could possibly have imagined that this truly resolved matters. To the contrary, a perverse mind-set had settled in among the warring European powers by that autumn of 1915, one that suggested the situation in the Middle East was about to become far more complicated and contentious.
To understand this mind-set, one had to appreciate the paralysis that held over the larger map of the war. On the Western Front, the four-hundred-mile-long strip of no-man"s-land separating the French and British armies from those of the Germans had barely moved in a year. While much less static, a different kind of stalemate had set in on the Eastern Front. There, after being mauled by German forces on its northwestern frontier in the first days of the war, Russia had taken revenge on the hapless Austro-Hungarian armies on its southwestern, only to be mauled anew when Germany came to Austria-Hungary"s rescue. It established a deadly pattern-Russian success against Austria-Hungary negated by German success against Russia-that would continue into 1917. For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war"s end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties.
Of course, stasis is a two-way street, and if this broader map yielded no good news for the Entente, the same held true for the Central Powers.
Given this stunning lack of progress earned at such horrific cost, it might seem reasonable to imagine that the thoughts of the various warring nations would now turn toward peace, to trying to find some way out of the mess. Instead, precisely the opposite was happening.
It"s a question that has faced peoples and nations at war since the beginning of time, and usually produced a terrible answer: in contemplating all the lives already lost, the treasure squandered, how to ever admit it was for nothing? Since such an admission is unthinkable, and the status quo untenable, the only option left is to escalate. Thus among the warring states in Europe at the end of 1915 it was no longer a matter of satisfying what had brought them into the conflict in the first place-and in many cases, those reasons had been shockingly trivial-but to expand beyond them, the acceptable terms for peace not lowered, but raised. This conflict was no longer about playing for small advantage against one"s imperial rivals, but about hobbling them forever, ensuring that they might never again have the capability to wage such a devastating and pointless war.
But defeating one"s enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain. In modern European custom, that need had been sated by the payment of war reparations into the victor"s coffers, the grabbing of a disputed province here or there, but that seemed rather picayune in view of this conflict"s cost. Instead, all the slaughter was to be justified by a new golden age of empire, the victors far richer, far grander than before. Naturally, this simply propelled the cycle to its logical, murderous conclusion. When contemplating all to be conferred upon the eventual winners, and all to be taken from the losers, how to possibly quit now? No, what was required was greater commitment-more soldiers, more money, more loss-to be redeemed when victory finally came with more territory, more wealth, more power.
While the Central Powers had their own imperial wish list in the event of victory, one that also grew more grandiose as time went on, for the Entente powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia there really was only one place that offered the prospect of redemption on the scale required: the fractured and varied lands of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, by the autumn of 1915 that empire was now often referred to by cynics in the Entente capitals simply as "the Great Loot."
For all three powers, the war in the Middle East was now to become about satisfying the imperial cravings-desiderata, as it was politely known-they had long harbored. The czars of Russia had been angling to grab Constantinople for at least two hundred years. Similarly, France had enjoyed a special status as protector of the Ottoman Empire"s Catholic population in Syria since the sixteenth century; if that empire was to be dismantled, then that region should rightly go to her. For its part, Britain had long been obsessed with protecting the land approaches to India, its "jewel in the crown," from encroachment by its imperial rivals- paradoxically, Russia and France foremost among them. Then there was the religion factor. All three of the princ.i.p.al Entente powers were devoutly Christian nations in 1915, and even after six hundred years it still grated many that the Christian Holy Land lay in Muslim hands. In carving up the Ottoman Empire there was finally the chance to replay the Crusades to a happier ending.
What probably most propelled these old desires into the realm of possibility were the secret negotiations between Britain and Emir Hussein. As those negotiations became less secret among the Allies, and the prospect of an Arab revolt more real, it produced not so much a piquing of imperial appet.i.tes as a mighty collective slavering.
By late November, France, tipped to Britain"s dealings with Hussein and anxious to stake its claim, would hastily compile its own ambitious set of desiderata for the region. French demands would soon be joined by those of Russia. Confronted by the gluttonous wishes of its princ.i.p.al allies-allies today perhaps, but probably rivals again tomorrow-Britain would suddenly decide that it too was in an acquisitive mood, and never mind the promises it had so recently made to Hussein. Maneuvering for their own spot at the feeding trough would ultimately come Italy and even neutral Greece. All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their inept.i.tude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage, all was about to become shrouded in treachery and byzantine maneuver.
By coincidence, the man who was to play a singular role in generating that intrigue arrived in Cairo on November 17, 1915, just the day after Lawrence had complained to Edward Leeds of his peaceful life there. His name was Mark Sykes-or, more formally, Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet of Sledmere.
Few people in history have so heedlessly caused so much tragedy. At the age of thirty-six, the handsome if slightly doughy Sykes epitomized that remarkable subcla.s.s of British aristocrats of the late imperial age known as the "Amateurs." Despite its somewhat derogatory modern connotation, the term derives from the Latin "for the love of," and in this context denoted a select group of wealthy and usually t.i.tled young men whose breeding, education, and freedom from careerist pressures-it was considered terribly decla.s.se for such men to hold down bona fide jobs-allowed them to dabble over a broad range of interests and find all doors flung open to them. Raised on a thirty-thousand-acre ancestral estate as the only child of a Yorkshire aristocrat, Sykes, like so many of his fellow Amateurs, seemed intent on living the lives of ten "ordinary" men. Educated at Cambridge, he had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire, auth.o.r.ed four books, been a soldier in the Boer War, served as parliamentary secretary to the chief administrator of Ireland and honorary attache to the British emba.s.sy in Constantinople-and those were just the highlights up to the age of twenty-five. In the succeeding eleven years before his arrival in Cairo that autumn, he had married and had sired five children-a sixth would soon be on the way-won a reputation as an accomplished caricaturist, invented an early version of the overhead projector and, since 1912, served as the Conservative member of Parliament for Hull Central.
Sykes"s appearance in Cairo was a result of the most recent addition to his resume. The previous spring, Lord Kitchener had appointed him as an advisor to the de Bunsen Committee, an interdepartmental government board designed to guide the British cabinet on Middle Eastern affairs. Unsurprisingly, Sykes had quickly emerged as the dominant member of that committee, and in July 1915 set out on an extended fact-finding mission to the region with the intention of imparting his firsthand impressions to the cabinet upon his return.
Lawrence and Sykes first met that August, during Sykes"s stopover in Cairo on the outgoing leg of his fact-finding mission. Like most everyone else, Lawrence took a quick liking to the charming and personable MP. He and others in the Cairo intelligence staff were also gratified to finally find someone in the senior branches of the British government who appeared to appreciate their ideas for unconventional warfare. That estimate was initially fortified upon Sykes"s return to Egypt in November; he had spent the previous two months meeting with officials in British India, a group vehemently opposed to the war-by-proxy plots emanating out of British Egypt, and the returned Sykes made no secret that his sympathies lay with the Egyptian approach.
Yet for all his astounding achievements, Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling cla.s.s of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world"s messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden-no less tiresome for being G.o.d-given-to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact. Sykes"s special skill in this regard was a talent for bold and refreshingly concise writing, the ability to break down complex issues into neat bulleted-point formulas that provided the illusion of almost mathematical simplicity. He was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed.
One example-there were to be many more in the years just ahead-was an a.n.a.lysis he composed during his August stopover in Cairo that purported to chart the various intellectual elements at work in the Middle East. After first dividing those elements between the "Ancients" and the "Moderns," Sykes offered up subcategories. Thus, Cla.s.s I of the Ancients were the orthodox ("hard, unyielding, bigoted and fanatical"), while Cla.s.s I of the Moderns ("the highest type") denoted "a person of good family who has entirely absorbed a Western education," not to be confused with the Cla.s.s II Moderns, who were "the poor, incompetent, or criminal who have received an inferior European education and whose minds by circ.u.mstances or temperament or both are driven into more sinister channels than the first cla.s.s." Not content to end there, Sykes proceeded to apply his formula to various regions of the Middle East, offering his British readers an easy-to-follow guide to their nation"s standing in each. It was not a pretty picture in a place like Egypt, frankly: from the Cla.s.s I, II, and III Ancients, absolute hostility, benevolent apathy, and mild approval, respectively, joined to const.i.tutional opposition and unforgiving enmity among the Cla.s.s I and II Moderns.
It certainly wasn"t the first time such silly racialist formulas had been put to paper, but it spoke volumes to the British leadership"s own smugness-as well, no doubt, to their perpetually harried states in grappling with a conflict that spanned the globe-that such drivel, well organized and confidently stated, took on the flavor of wisdom. Upon Sykes"s return to London and a bravura performance before the de Bunsen Committee, the British government would essentially hand off to the thirty-six-year-old Amateur one of the th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t-and from a historical standpoint, most profoundly important-a.s.signments of World War I: sorting out the competing territorial claims of Great Britain and her allies in the Middle East.
Only belatedly would British leaders recognize another aspect of Sykes"s character, one that might have given them pause had they spotted it earlier. Perhaps to be expected given his frenetic pace and catholic range of interests, Mark Sykes had a very hard time keeping his facts, even his own beliefs, straight. Impressed by the last person he had spoken with, or the last idea that had popped into his fecund mind, he was forever contradicting positions or policies he had advocated earlier-often mere days earlier.
Lawrence began to get a glimmer of this in the time he spent around Sykes during that November stopover. There was something altogether disquieting about the cavalier way the young MP disregarded inconvenient evidence that didn"t fit his currently held view, often only to seize on that same evidence when his opinion changed. As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was "the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circ.u.mstances, inflate it, twist and model it."
But there was yet another side to Sykes"s personality that boded ill for the crucial role he was about to a.s.sume. It seems the man was something of a sneak. Whether due to a need to prove he was always the cleverest person in the room, or a con man"s desire to get one over simply for the sport of it, the young Amateur would make an art form out of bending the truth to suit his needs, of playing one side against another by withholding or manipulating crucial information. The result would be a most peculiar place in history for Mark Sykes: it"s hard to think of any figure who, with no true malice intended and neither a nation nor an army at his disposal, was to wreak more havoc on the twentieth century than the personable and brilliant young aristocrat from Yorkshire, havoc that a small group of his countrymen, including T. E. Lawrence, would try very hard to set right.
Which isn"t to suggest that Sykes uniquely possessed these traits. Indeed, when it came to duplicity, the Amateur had a lot of very accomplished compet.i.tors in the Middle East just then.
AT THE SAME time that Sykes was holding court in Cairo, an enigmatic robed figure was circulating through the bazaars and teahouses of a number of towns in western Syria. He was an exceedingly soft-spoken man in his midthirties, well-off and cultured, judging by the quality of his dress and cla.s.sic Arabic diction. Because of his pale complexion and blue eyes, most who encountered him probably took the traveler for a Circa.s.sian, that ancient mountain people originally from the Black Sea region, many of whom have almost Nordic features. This was a misconception Curt Prfer likely made no effort to correct. He was conducting this clandestine mission at the behest of Djemal Pasha. Its purpose was to find out where the real sympathies of the people of Syria lay.
By that autumn, the need for an unbiased a.s.sessment of Syrian public opinion was becoming acute both for the governor and his German advisors. With the Allied misadventure in Gallipoli showing signs of winding down, there was once again the threat of an enemy landing somewhere on the Syrian coast. If the Allies put ash.o.r.e in Lebanon, how would the Lebanese Christians and the Druze religious minority respond? And what of the Jews, centered just below in Palestine? With the persecution of the Armenians in Anatolia continuing unabated, surely many in Syria"s Jewish community were worried they might be next. Above all, what of the Arabs? Djemal Pasha had already begun to move against the Arab conspirators unmasked in the French consulate doc.u.ments, and Emir Hussein in Mecca was a continuing source of concern, but what of the great ma.s.ses of Arabs elsewhere?
For five weeks, and a.s.suming a variety of personas and disguises, Prfer wandered Syria. Along the way he talked with Jewish colonists, Arab shopkeepers, and Christian landowners, with westernized aristocrats and Bedouin sheikhs and fellaheen. By early December 1915, the German spy felt he"d sufficiently taken the nation"s pulse to report his findings to Djemal and the German emba.s.sy in Constantinople.
In brief, he had found the greatest discontent among the Christians, nearly all of whom, he believed, secretly sympathized with the Entente powers. But Prfer saw little real danger here, both because of the Syrian Christians" comparatively small numbers and because their "apt.i.tude for treason" was surpa.s.sed by a "cowardice that prevents them from trying to realize their dreams."
Of somewhat greater concern, in his estimation, was the Jewish population, and specifically of that subgroup among them known as the Zionists. While "official Zionism says it only wants to create in Palestine a center for Jewish language and civilization, and is not at all interested in politics," Prfer wrote, this was clearly not true. Rather, their ultimate aim was to create an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine, a goal far more likely to be achieved by an Entente victory than a Central Powers one. Still, and for much the same reasons as with the Christians, Prfer saw little cause for alarm: "Being by nature cowardly and without initiative, the Jews will not dare to commit subversive acts unless an armed enemy force was already in the country."
Most heartening was what the German spy had discerned in the Arab Muslim community, by far the largest of the three. Partly due to the "fair and severe" measures Djemal had already conducted against those Arab leaders suspected of secessionist leanings, Prfer found the Arab independence movement in a greatly weakened state. "Among the middle cla.s.ses, reformism has barely any supporters," he wrote, "and among the small landowners, merchants and workers, who const.i.tute the bulk of the population, the government and its cause seems to be popular." Even if an Arab uprising was somehow launched, Prfer suggested in his usual trenchant way, it would receive little ma.s.s support "due to the frivolousness of the population."
This generally rosy a.s.sessment came with a major caveat, however; if the British did put ash.o.r.e in Syria, latent sympathies would come to the fore. In that eventuality, the invaders could certainly find willing local collaborators. Prfer provided Djemal with a long list of the names of "unreliables," mostly prominent Christian and Muslim Arab businessmen, as well as "all Zionist party chiefs," who should be immediately sent into internal exile in the case of an Allied landing.
This last suggestion triggered alarm within the German emba.s.sy. Just that August, Djemal had made use of the doc.u.ments seized from the French consulate in Beirut to execute eleven prominent Arab leaders in one of the city"s main squares. That event had stirred outrage in the Arab world, and Germany certainly didn"t need one of its own intelligence officers providing the Syrian governor with more names for his. .h.i.t list. In forwarding the report to the foreign ministry in Berlin, the German amba.s.sador in Constantinople noted that he"d given Prfer the following warning: "At the slightest indiscretion, the population could raise the charge that we are causing rigorous measures, like expulsions. In the future, please couch your suggestions to Djemal of this nature with cautious restraint."
That admonition may have come too late. With Prfer"s report already in hand, the Syrian governor seemed to conclude that his flexible approach to problem-solving-alternating between the rose and the dagger without readily discernible pattern-was the best way to outwit his growing list of enemies. On December 18, he had ordered a much larger roundup of those implicated in the French consulate files, a dragnet ultimately ensnaring some sixty members of the Arab intelligentsia of Beirut and Damascus.
Perhaps those arrests put Djemal in a happier mood, for he showed far greater magnanimity when another man of increasingly questionable loyalty, Aaron Aaronsohn, came calling at his Damascus office in January.
THE SPY SHIP NEVER came.
On the moonless night of November 8, 1915, Absalom Feinberg had finally been slipped back ash.o.r.e at Athlit from a British spy ship, and had immediately given an ecstatic Aaron Aaronsohn the good news: he"d made contact, the British eagerly awaited whatever intelligence they could pa.s.s on, and arrangements were now in place to make that happen.
With the spy ship scheduled to return in two weeks, the two men immediately set out on long-range reconnaissance missions to update their information, Aaronsohn heading north, Feinberg to the south. Under the guise of conducting scientific surveys for the agricultural research station, they surrept.i.tiously noted the location of new Turkish army camps and supply depots and trenchworks, tracked the movements of trains and troop formations, meticulously jotted down in tiny script in their notebooks most anything they thought might be useful to the British.
But when they returned to Athlit and waited on the appointed night, the spy ship didn"t come, nor on the next night, or the one after. As their wait dragged into early December, Aaronsohn and Feinberg grew increasingly puzzled, and then anxious; obviously, something somewhere had gone wrong, but the longer their wait extended, the more likely their nocturnal activities would come to the attention of the Turkish militia"s night patrols. On the other hand, if they relaxed their vigil and missed the boat"s appearance, the British might conclude that the conspirators had backed out or been caught and simply give up.
Despairing of the spy ship ever showing, by December 8, the impetuous Feinberg had come up with a new plan: he would reestablish contact by somehow maneuvering his way past the Turkish armies ma.s.sed in southern Palestine, then cross over the Sinai no-man"s-land to the British lines at the far end. If stopped by a Turkish patrol, he would claim to be doing fieldwork on locusts. That alibi had the benefit of credence. Just days earlier, a great new swarm of locusts had appeared over Judea, the first since the previous spring, and Aaronsohn had determined they were coming from Egypt over the Sinai land bridge. It still seemed a terribly risky venture, but, consumed by his own anxieties over reaching the British, Aaronsohn relented; Feinberg set out for the south that very night.
Soon after there came anxiety of a very different sort. In Constantinople, Aaronsohn"s younger sister Sarah had for some time been looking for a way to escape her unhappy marriage and return to her family in Palestine. In mid-November, with her husband away on an extended business trip, she found her opening upon hearing that a Jewish relief official would soon be departing Constantinople for a tour of the Jewish colonies. Pleading to be taken along, on November 26, the twenty-five-year-old Sarah boarded a train at Haidar Pasha station and set off on the long journey home.
Dark rumors had abounded for months of what was happening to the Armenians in the Anatolian countryside, but the combination of poor communications and rigorous censorship had enabled the Ottoman regime to conceal the extent of the brutality from the general population to a fairly remarkable degree. This didn"t apply, of course, to anyone whose travels took them through the killing fields. By the time Sarah Aaronsohn was reunited with her brother in Palestine on December 16, she was in a state of shock over what she had witnessed during her journey. The agronomist would later recount that "she saw the bodies of hundreds of Armenian men, women and children lying on both sides of the railway. Sometimes Turkish women were seen searching the corpses for anything that might be of value; at other times dogs were observed feeding on the bodies. There were hundreds of bleached skeletons." In the grisliest incident, Sarah claimed she had watched as her train was besieged by thousands of starving Armenians at one remote station; in the stampede, dozens fell beneath the wheels of the train, much to the delight of its conductor. Sarah fainted away at the spectacle, only to be remonstrated by two Turkish officers when she came to for her evident lack of patriotism.
Aaron Aaronsohn had long heard the Armenian horror stories on his own travels, but had tended to discount them as part of the eternal Syrian rumor mill. To have them confirmed by his sister-and to learn the slaughter was ongoing-made it all hideously real. It also led the agronomist inexorably to a grim question: who next? If the Young Turks could perpetrate this atrocity against the nation"s two million Armenians, how much easier to do the same to its eighty thousand Jews?
Then came more bad news. In the Sinai, Absalom Feinberg had been stopped by a Turkish army patrol not at all impressed by his locust fieldwork cover story. Instead, they had hauled him back to Beersheva under suspicion of being a spy. In early January, he was transferred to the prison in Jerusalem to await possible trial; if found guilty of the worst potential charge against him, that of treason, Feinberg would undoubtedly have a quick appointment with the gibbet-gallows.
It was out of concern for his coconspirator"s life that brought Aaron Aaronsohn to Djemal Pasha"s Damascus office on the afternoon of January 12. Sensing that appeals for mercy or protestations of innocence may not work in this case, the agronomist turned to the same instrument that had failed Feinberg: locusts. To combat the new infestation, he told Djemal, he would return to his post as inspector general of the locust eradication program, the position he had finally left in disgust over government interference eight months before. The one precondition, however, was that Aaronsohn have the services of his most valuable and important a.s.sistant, a young man named Absalom Feinberg recently caught up in some misunderstanding in the Sinai.
On Djemal"s order, Feinberg was swiftly released from his Jerusalem jail. Any euphoria the two would-be spies may have felt was undoubtedly tempered, however: their long and fruitless campaign to reach the British remained stalled.
NO ONE GRASPED the whole picture. Given the chaos of war and the difficulty of communications, different branches of the British government negotiated with different wartime allies-or with parties they hoped to turn into allies-with no one realizing until too late that the agreements thus forged might conflict with one another. It was not a matter of duplicity, but rather a regrettable instance of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing.
This is one commonly held view of historians looking at the tangle of secret agreements that the British entered into regarding the Middle East in 1915 and 1916. A second, minority view holds that there was really no tangle at all, and entire books, enough to fill a great groaning bookshelf, have been devoted to teasing out the carefully chosen modifiers and conditionals placed within these various agreements to absolve their crafters of any charge of bad faith.
In truth, the first view is a fiction, and the second merely squalid, akin to arguing that a promise wasn"t a promise because one"s fingers were crossed. To the degree that the British right hand didn"t know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls-deceptions, in a less charitable a.s.sessment-to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain"s wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders.
Somewhat ironically, one of the first ent.i.ties to come in for this treatment was the British Empire"s own "jewel in the crown," British India.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire had devolved into a unique kind of colonial solar system, a galaxy in which its princ.i.p.al satellites operated with increasing autonomy from the central "star" of Britain. Nowhere was this truer than in India, where the British administration in Simla (as the British government of India was commonly referred to, even though Simla was only its summer capital) pursued its own domestic agenda and, to a remarkable degree, even its own foreign policy.
But if British India maintained an aloof relationship with London, it had a downright frosty one with British Egypt, especially after it was informed of the negotiations between Cairo and Emir Hussein in 1915. Ever since the creation of the Indian Raj in 1858, the Arabian Peninsula had been recognized as falling within India"s sphere of influence, and its administrators were loath to accept either the intrusions or opinions of Egypt, that Johnny-come-lately to the scene. More to the point, the largest Muslim population in the world, some eighty million souls, was to be found in India, a number that dwarfed the Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire by a factor of four. As Simla officials pointed out to London, it seemed a very dangerous game to encourage native revolt with promises of autonomy or independence in one part of the Muslim world while ruthlessly quashing any hint of Muslim rebellion born of those same desires in another-as British India had been doing for decades.
For that reason, when Cairo"s negotiations with Emir Hussein reached a critical phase in the autumn of 1915, Simla had launched a fierce counterattack in London, denouncing the secret talks at every turn-so fierce, in fact, that by late October, when officials in London and Cairo were scrambling to fashion a suitable response to Hussein"s extravagant demands, Lord Kitchener"s solution was to simply cut India out of the conversation. It wasn"t until a reply had already been sent acceding to most all of Hussein"s demands that the viceroy of India was first told of the startling development and given the feeble excuse that, in the press of events, there just hadn"t been time to consult him.
With India thus frozen out of the equation, Emir Hussein had cut a very good deal for himself-or so he thought. In his crucial October 24 letter, the British high commissioner to Egypt, Henry McMahon, declared that, subject to certain modifications, "Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca." While the two men continued to haggle over those proposed modifications in subsequent letters-the most contentious were British demands for "special administrative arrangements" in the oil-rich Iraqi districts of Baghdad and Basra, and for the exclusion of the northwestern corner of Syria-Emir Hussein had every reason to believe that a great independent Arab nation had been promised, one encompa.s.sing nearly the entire Arabian Peninsula and stretching east to the frontier with Persia, north to the Anatolian heartland of Turkey, and west to the Mediterranean Sea and the border of Egypt.
But Hussein might have wanted to pay closer attention to a conditional clause McMahon had un.o.btrusively inserted into his letter, the caveat that these pledges only applied "wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interest of her ally, France." In other words, if the French had a problem with some aspect of the deal, their resistance might override British acceptance.
That the French were likely to have such a problem, the British knew only too well. The previous summer, the French amba.s.sador to Great Britain had spelled out to Foreign Secretary Grey precisely what territory his nation intended to grab in the Middle East. This included all of greater Syria, or the most valuable lands now promised to Hussein.
How to get around such a dilemma? By simply not telling the French of the deal struck with Hussein. Instead, in late November, French diplomats were invited to London to discuss their desiderata for the Near East. With remarkable disingenuousness, British officials expressed surprise when the French reiterated that they wanted pretty much the whole thing: Lebanon, Palestine, the Syrian interior, Iraq. Thus the stage was set for one of the strangest-and with the advantage of hindsight, most destructive-diplomatic accords ever penned: the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
In just a few days of meetings in early January 1916, two midlevel diplomats, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot-by coincidence, the same man who as French consul in Beirut had carried on a secret correspondence with Arab dissidents and had left those doc.u.ments behind to be discovered by Djemal Pasha"s secret police-cobbled together a future map of the Middle East that bore absolutely no relation to the one envisioned by Emir Hussein. Instead, French imperial avarice fueled British imperial compet.i.tion, so that the truly independent Arab nation was now to be largely limited to the desert wastelands of Arabia, with the French taking direct control of greater Syria, and the British taking outright all of Iraq. In addition, two great swatches of the interior, essentially everything north and inland of Hussein"s kingdom of the Hejaz, would be indirectly controlled, quasi-independent but with Britain and France holding "priority of right of enterprise." It was in these so-called Zone A and B enclaves where the negotiators" cynicism was most naked; since neither Sykes nor Picot believed the Arabs were truly capable of governing themselves, they could pledge independence for these enclaves secure in the knowledge that they would end up as British and French va.s.sal states. In their spare time, the two diplomats even came up with a new designation for Palestine. Rather than be part of the future Arab nation-its technical default status since McMahon had never mentioned Palestine in any of his proposed modifications with Hussein-it was now to fall under the joint administration of France, Great Britain, and Russia.
In Picot"s defense, he couldn"t have known how much his territorial demands conflicted with those of Emir Hussein. That"s because his British counterpart never chose to tell him. As incredible as it might seem, during those crucial days of early January 1916 when much of the future map of the Middle East was being drawn, there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.
But if Sykes did grasp this, he wasn"t saying. To the contrary, his accord with Picot meant new firewalls now had to be erected, to keep in the dark not only Emir Hussein but also all those British officials in Egypt who were aware of the agreement with him and still ascribed to the old-fashioned notion that a nation should abide by its promises. Just as British India had been frozen out in the autumn of 1915, so now British Egypt would be frozen out in the spring of 1916 as the Sykes-Picot Agreement was debated in Entente capitals. To Cairo"s repeated queries on the status of the Anglo-French negotiations, Sykes and other London officials only allowed that they were ongoing, and that certainly Egypt would be closely consulted before any final agreement was reached. Instead, it would be May 1916 before anyone in Cairo saw a copy of Sykes-Picot, and by then it was a fait accompli, a secret pact agreed to by the cabinets of Britain, France, and Russia. As T. E. Lawrence would recall, the reaction among the stunned Cairo military intelligence staff upon finally reading the agreement had been a collective urge to vomit.
But for Lawrence in the winter of 1916, all of this lay in the future. Behind his desk at the Savoy Hotel, he continued his "bottle-washing" and mapmaking and "paper-combat."
In this last sphere, his efforts had taken on a tinge of the absurd. At least in the past, his bureaucratic battles had been waged against the perfidious French; now they were being fought against the continuing intrigues of his own countrymen in British India. Apparently operating on the premise that until Emir Hussein actually launched his revolt the pact made with him might be scuttled, Simla was engaged in a relentless effort in London to that end, warning of both Hussein"s unsuitability and of the disaster to come if a unified Arab nation was encouraged to form (a fear that obviously would have been eased had Simla known about Sykes-Picot, which they didn"t). What made this ongoing campaign somewhat curious in Lawrence"s view was that by the winter of 1916, India seemed to have rather enough problems in its own immediate sphere to worry about.
At least back in the autumn, Simla had been in a position to argue that it was they, and not British Egypt, who"d actually achieved something against the Ottoman Empire. Building on the ease with which they"d seized the petroleum fields of southern Iraq, in April 1915 the commander of the Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) had sent a force of twenty thousand men up the Tigris River. Disdaining to form alliances with any of the local Arab tribes, let alone prattle on about autonomy or independence, General Charles Townshend had led his army to success after success in time-honored British military tradition-sallying forth to thrash whoever might stand in their way-so that by October his force stood at the gates of Baghdad. In light of this, Simla"s straight-ahead approach to war-making appeared to have much to recommend it over the exotic and incendiary hearts-and-minds notions wafting out of Cairo.
But a great deal had changed in the interim. Rather than a triumphant entry into Baghdad, Townshend"s army had been fought to a b.l.o.o.d.y stalemate on the city"s outskirts in late November. Far advanced from his supply lines and with no prospect of quick reinforcement, Townshend had then made a strategic withdrawal one hundred miles down the Tigris to the riverfront town of Kut. By February 1916, the garrison in Kut was reportedly under a deepening siege-British India seemed in no hurry to provide a lot of details-even as a relief column battled its way up the Tigris to come to its aid.
Still, Simla"s whisper campaign against Cairo and its embrace of Hussein had continued. In late January, Lawrence wrote a long report, "Politics of Mecca," designed to allay concerns back in London-concerns feverishly stoked by India-of what a unified Arab nation under Hussein"s leadership might mean to Britain"s long-term interests in the region. Perhaps tailoring his message to what the British leadership wanted to hear, Lawrence opined that the notion of such a monolith was far-fetched, that "if properly handled [the Arabs] would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous princ.i.p.alities incapable of cohesion."
The following month, India appeared to try the opposite tack of belittling Hussein. They did so by inserting into the Intelligence Bulletin for the Middle East, a highly cla.s.sified digest of information restricted to top-ranking military and civilian officials, an interview with a man named Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud. A tribal chieftain from the northeastern corner of Arabia, ibn-Saud called Hussein "essentially a trivial and unstable character," and made it clear that neither he nor most other Arabian tribal chieftains would ever accede to his leadership. Even if Hussein took the risky step of declaring himself caliph, the supreme religious-political figure in the Islamic world, ibn-Saud argued, it "would not make any difference to his status among other Chiefs and there would be no question of their accepting any control from him, any more than they do now."
To Lawrence, that interview represented a new, and potentially very dangerous, escalation in the compet.i.tion between Cairo and Simla. That"s because Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud was not just another tribal malcontent bent on retaining his autonomy, but Hussein"s most formidable rival in all of Arabia. Having embraced an extremely austere form of fundamentalist Islam known as Wahhabism, over the previous fifteen years ibn-Saud had led his desert warriors into battle against one recalcitrant Arab tribe after another with a kind of evangelical zeal. The discipline of the Wahhabists was legendary; in that time, ibn-Saud"s reach had expanded from a small string of oasis villages in the Riyadh region to cover a vast expanse of northeastern Arabia. Meanwhile, Ibn-Saud was also British India"s man in Arabia, with a close relationship going back to before the war.
It was bad enough, in Lawrence"s estimation, that Simla was using the Intelligence Bulletin to promote a man with views so ant.i.thetical to British values, but the gambit also underscored a situation almost laughably absurd had it not been so perilous: in their battle for primacy over Arabian policy, two different branches of the British crown were backing two sworn rivals. Surely that was less a recipe for a successful Arab revolt than for civil war-which of course may have been Simla"s true goal all along.
In his riposte to the ibn-Saud interview, similarly disseminated to the upper reaches of the British government, Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists "with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan," ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in "The Politics of Mecca," the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, "and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd ... intensified and swollen by success."
As with many of Lawrence"s other predictions, his warning about ibn-Saud and the Wahhabists was ultimately to prove true. In 1923, ibn- Saud would conquer much of the Arabian Peninsula and, to honor his clan, give it the name Saudi Arabia. For the next ninety years, the vast and profligate Saudi royal family would survive by essentially buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power, financially subsidizing their activities so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. The most famous product of this arrangement was to be a man named Osama bin Laden.
Far more immediately, however, Lawrence was to see his war-of-words campaign against British India sidelined by more pressing matters. That March, he was selected for a mission so clandestine, and so a.s.saultive to British notions of honor, that its true nature would be largely expunged from the history books. In a nice touch of irony, it was a mission made necessary by a catastrophe of British India"s creation, a series of events that reached an ugly denouement in the early morning hours of March 8, 1916.
AT ABOUT 6:30 on that morning, Lieutenant General Fenton Aylmer, the future 13th Baronet of Donadea, received some startling news. In his army"s nighttime march on the town of Dujaila in central Iraq, the 36th Indian Infantry Brigade had become disoriented in the dark. Rather than stop at their prea.s.signed forward position to wait out the dawn artillery bombardment of the enemy, segments of the brigade had continued on across the barren Dujaila plain and directly into the Turks" forward line. More specifically, they had stumbled squarely up the approaches to "the Citadel," a forty-foot-high earthen fortress that commanded the surrounding flatlands and formed the strongpoint of the Turkish defenseworks.
It sounded like a blueprint for slaughter, but it hadn"t quite played out that way. The runner who appeared at Aylmer"s headquarters that morning reported that, by all appearances, the fortress was either deserted or manned by a tiny skeleton guard; the 36th Indian Infantry Brigade was at the gates of the Citadel, and it was theirs for the taking.
It was the pivotal moment in Aylmer"s long and b.l.o.o.d.y campaign to relieve General Townshend"s army in Kut, now just eight miles farther up the Tigris River. With the astounding report out of the Citadel, here was not only the chance to win the battle of Dujaila before it had properly begun, but to begin to atone for the colossal missteps that had characterized Aylmer"s advance over the previous two months.
By March 1916, the various armies of Europe had devised a simple rote method for attacking their entrenched foes: a sustained artillery bombardment of the enemy"s forward defenses, one that might last a few hours or several days depending on the scale of the planned a.s.sault, followed by an infantry rush across no-man"s-land. The problems with these tactics were manifest at every step. Most such bombardments caused relatively few casualties, since the defenders simply retreated to back trenches-or, in the more sophisticated trenchworks of the Western Front, into heavily protected underground bunkers-to await their conclusion. Naturally, these preliminary barrages also alerted the defenders both that an a.s.sault was coming and its precise location.
Once the sh.e.l.ling ceased, the attacking infantry units climbed out of their forward staging trenches to begin their advance across no-man"s-land. Unfortunately for them, the end of the artillery barrage also cued the defenders that the ground a.s.sault was now under way, enabling them to quickly return to their own forward trenches and mow down the exposed attackers as they approached. In just this way, by early 1916, men had died by the hundreds of thousands in trenchworks across the breadth of Europe.
Despite the failure of these tactics across a wide spectrum of Europe"s varied topography, Lieutenant General Aylmer had apparently seen no means to improve upon them on the flat and featureless landscape of central Iraq. It also seemed to escape him that it was these same ruinous tactics, employed by General Townshend in his effort to take Baghdad, that were necessitating his rescue mission in the first place. In the two months since he had set off for Kut with some twenty thousand British and Indian troops, Aylmer had three times hurled his men in frontal a.s.saults over bare ground against the entrenched Turks. Each time, the British Indian army had eventually carried the field, if only through sheer numerical dominance-they outnumbered the Turks by at least two to one-and only at astounding cost; in the first two weeks, the relief force had suffered some ten thousand casualties, or half its strength.
This was no cause for undue alarm among senior commanders downstream, apparently, for they soon began shuttling some fifteen thousand more men up to Aylmer for a second push. By early March, this replenished force had advanced upriver until it came to the Turkish trenchline in Dujaila, the last obstacle standing between the rescuers and Kut just beyond. Having learned at least a little from his earlier battles, Aylmer had decided on a night march to the very edge of the Turks" artillery range in Dujaila, a quick sunrise bombardment, and then a dash for the Citadel that dominated the pancake-flat plain. It was shortly before dawn, while his guns were being silently unlimbered into place for the coming barrage, that he learned of the 36th Indian"s remarkable news.
But Fenton Aylmer was clearly not a man who liked surprises, even good ones. After hastily conferring with his senior commanders, it was decided that the preemptive capture of the Turkish stronghold posed too great a departure from the battle plans already worked out to be adequately supported. The 36th Indian was ordered away from the Citadel and back to the main British line; from there, they could recross the plain and seize the fortress once the opening artillery bombardment had been completed.
When finally the British bombardment commenced-not at dawn as planned, but at 8 a.m.-all element of surprise had been lost, the Dujaila Citadel hurriedly manned by Turkish troops ferried over from across the river. It was another hour before the British frontal a.s.sault began. Very quickly, another four thousand imperial troops had fallen in no-man"s-land, without a single one reaching the Citadel.
That engagement at Dujaila represented the last best chance the British had to save their besieged army in Kut. Over the previous two months, they had suffered fourteen thousand casualties trying to rescue an army of twelve thousand-and they weren"t quite done yet. For his efforts, Fenton Aylmer was quietly relieved of command three days after Dujaila and shuffled off to a back-base job. Perhaps in recognition of his uneven achievements in Iraq, as well as his attempted coverup of the Citadel fiasco-his official battle report would make no mention of the 36th Indian"s report-his knighthood would be delayed until 1922.
In the wake of the Dujaila debacle, and in light of the dire situation facing Townshend"s army at Kut-reports indicated the garrison would run out of food by mid-April-Lord Kitchener set to hatching a desperate scheme. In its pursuit, on the morning of March 22, 1916, the pa.s.senger ship Royal George slipped from its berth at Port Suez and turned south into the Red Sea, embarking on a fourteen-day journey around the Arabian Peninsula to southern Iraq. On board was T. E. Lawrence. He carried with him a letter of introduction from High Commissioner Henry McMahon to Sir Percy c.o.x, British India"s chief political officer in Iraq.
"My dear c.o.x," the letter read, "I send these few lines to introduce Captain Lawrence who is starting today for Mesopotamia under orders from the W.O. [War Office] to give his services in regards to Arab matters. He is one of the best of our very able intelligence staff here and has a thorough knowledge of the Arab question in all its bearings. I feel sure that you will find him of great use. We are very sorry to lose so valuable a man from our staff here.