Part 3 (1/2)
Through 1912 and most of 1913, Prfer struggled on, but he found it impossible to escape the cloak of ignominy that had been cast over him. With the Egyptian secret police now watching his every move, even his adventurist activities as Oriental secretary were greatly curtailed. It was for this-and perhaps also a simple desire to try something completely new with his life-that he finally tendered his resignation and went off to join Richard von Below. What he went away with was an abiding hatred for the British, the ”natural enemy” of Germany, now also the people who had destroyed his career.
On a broader level, though, the controversy that surrounded Prfer over the library directors.h.i.+p neatly ill.u.s.trated a particularly ominous feature of the early 1910s. While it already strained credulity that Lord Kitchener, the uncrowned sovereign of twelve million people in one of Britain's most important va.s.sal states, had been compelled to personally engage in that controversy, how had it ever escalated to the point where the British foreign secretary and his closest advisors were enjoined? Did these men really have nothing better to do with their time than compose and debate lengthy memoranda over the job placement of a low-level German emba.s.sy official in Cairo?
In the answer to that question lies one of the keys to how World War I happened. By the early 1910s, with all the European powers perpetually jockeying for advantage, all of them constantly manufacturing crises in hopes of winning some small claim against their rivals, a unique kind of ”fog of war” was setting in, one composed of a thousand petty slights and disputes and misunderstandings. It wasn't just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers-and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings-of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?
THE GULF OF Aqaba is a narrow, hundred-mile-long inlet of the Red Sea that separates the craggy desert mountains of Arabia to one side from a similar set of mountains on the Sinai Peninsula to the other. At the northernmost end of the Aqaba inlet is the Jordanian town of the same name.
In 1914, Aqaba was nothing more than a tiny fis.h.i.+ng village, its thousand or so inhabitants settled into a collection of crude huts sprinkled about the sh.o.r.eline. Yet it was Aqaba, more than any other spot in the roughly four thousand square miles that he and his Royal Engineers were mapping, that obsessed Captain Stewart Newcombe.
In trying to antic.i.p.ate the path an invasion force might take from Ottoman Palestine to reach the Suez Ca.n.a.l, certainly the most logical route was across the very top of the Sinai Peninsula, close to the Mediterranean. This was an established land crossing going back millennia, and its water sources, if meager, had been tapped and welled for just as long. Inland, the harsh Zin Desert seemed to afford few real possibilities, an a.s.sessment gradually being confirmed by Newcombe's men. By early February 1914, they had surveyed much of the border region's interior, and while finding a few Bedouin trails and wells, had uncovered nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size.
But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the Sinai-Palestine demarcation line, represented a wild card. With its outlet on the Red Sea, troops could be ferried into the village and then marched west. For well over a decade, persistent rumors had the Turks secretly building a railroad spur linking Aqaba to the Arabian interior, complementing the mountain trail already in existence. Rumors aside, it was known that at least two ”roads” originated somewhere in the Quweira mountains above Aqaba, trails long used by local Bedouin to launch raids into the Sinai. Taken all together, it meant the Turks might have the potential of launching an invasion force across the Sinai from the very southern end of the buffer zone, even while British attention was focused at the more obvious northern end.
Understandably, then, Stewart Newcombe viewed getting into Aqaba as the most crucial aspect of his entire mission to Zin. In mid-February 1914, he turned his attention to how he might do it and who should accompany him.
History is often the tale of small moments-chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence-that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a b.u.t.terfly's wings that triggers a hurricane. Such was the case with Captain Newcombe's choosing a companion for the journey to Aqaba.
Theoretically, he could have pulled any one of the Royal Engineers off his five surveying parties, but as much as their technical expertise might come in handy, he was expecting a cold reception in the village, and the sight of two British officers rolling in would be unlikely to improve it. He also could have chosen Leonard Woolley, whose somewhat fusty manner would lend credence to this being a foray of purely scientific interest. But instead he chose Lawrence. One reason was that he genuinely enjoyed his company, but another was Lawrence's peculiar skill at polite belligerence that Newcombe had observed in a variety of forms since the early days of the expedition, a skill likely to be called upon in Aqaba.
Joined by Dahoum, Newcombe and Lawrence showed up in Aqaba in mid-February, and, just as Newcombe had expected, their welcome was a decidedly icy one. The munic.i.p.al governor, professing to have no knowledge of their project, immediately forbade them from doing any mapping or photographing or archaeological work in the region. But just as Newcombe had also expected, these strictures only spurred Lawrence to greater initiative. ”I photographed what I could,” Lawrence would recount in a letter to a friend, Edward Leeds, ”I archaeologised everywhere.”
Of special interest to Lawrence-and this interest may have mainly derived from the opportunity to flagrantly disregard the governor's orders-were the ruins of a fortress on a small island just a few hundred yards off the Aqaba sh.o.r.e. He secretly arranged for a boatman to take him to the island, only to have the man promptly arrested by the governor's police. Undeterred, Lawrence crafted a crude inflatable raft and, together with Dahoum, paddled out to the island.
It was an easy enough pa.s.sage going out, but rather a different story on the return. With both the current and wind against them, it took Lawrence and Dahoum hours to make the sh.o.r.e, at which point the local police, long since alerted, took them into custody. The furious governor placed the pair under armed escort for their journey out of Aqaba. Unfortunately for the men detailed to this mission, the unwanted entourage simply provided Lawrence with an amusing new challenge.
”I learnt that their orders were not to let me out of their sight,” he wrote his family a week later from a town fifty miles to the north, ”and I took them two days afoot over such hills and wadis as did [them in]. I have been camped here for two days, and they are still struggling in from all over the compa.s.s.”
As a bonus, during this forced march Lawrence had stumbled across the two ”great cross-roads” that the Bedouin raiding parties used for their forays into the Sinai.
All of this would prove profoundly useful to Lawrence. In just a little over three years' time, he would use the knowledge gained from his escapades in Aqaba to conquer that strategic village in a manner that no one else could conceive of, a feat of arms still considered one of the most daring military exploits of modern times.
UPON PARTING WAYS with J. C. Hill in Jerusalem in early January, William Yale and Rudolf McGovern set out for the Kornub ma.s.sif. Reaching it a few days after their humiliating encounter with Lawrence in Beersheva, they immediately had reason to recall a very basic law of chemical properties: namely, that it is not just oil mixed with water that gives off an iridescent sheen. In the right concentrations, a wide variety of minerals can, including iron, and it was precisely this-stagnant water rich in iron tailings-that Hill had observed through his binoculars from thirty miles away.
Crestfallen but determined to make the most of their arduous trip, Yale and McGovern spent several days collecting rock samples and drilling boreholes. From this, they determined there was oil in Kornub-McGovern was fairly certain of that-but whether it existed in anything near commercially viable quant.i.ties seemed unlikely. The two then returned to Jerusalem, there to relay the sobering news to Socony headquarters.
Curiously, and for reasons Yale and McGovern couldn't begin to fathom at the time, 26 Broadway didn't seem to share their sense of disappointment. The two were told to lie low in Jerusalem, which they did until mid-March, and were then dispatched for more fruitless exploration of the last of the three prospective concessionary zones, in the hill region of Thrace just to the west of Constantinople. Tucked away in the backwaters of the Ottoman Empire, Yale remained unaware that news of the Kornub ”strike” had triggered a complex diplomatic tug-of-war, one that was playing out across four continents and involving amba.s.sadors, ministers of state, and some half dozen international corporations.
When the British had pinpointed the location of Socony's interests in Palestine, courtesy of Lawrence's interrogation of Yale outside Beersheva, alarm had spread throughout the government. With access to oil now considered a matter of national security in light of the Royal Navy's ongoing oil-conversion program, taking control of any new fields was not merely an economic concern but a political one. There followed a complicated series of maneuvers in which the British authorities tried to sabotage the Kornub deal and arrange for a British oil company to obtain the concessions. In this cause they relied on information from one of the Palestinian concession holders, Suleiman Na.s.sif, who deftly played each side against the other to his own benefit. It was at this juncture that McGovern's disheartening report on Kornub finally reached New York, but by then it was too late. Caught up in the spirit of compet.i.tion, Socony not only disregarded McGovern's findings but ultimately paid a far higher price for the Kornub concessions than intended.
None of this was known to Yale and McGovern until they returned to Constantinople from Thrace in late April. There they were met by their old boss, J. C. Hill, who informed them that, having just secured the Kornub concessions for a period of twenty-five years, Socony was now gearing up for a ma.s.sive exploration project in the region, one that would entail building roads, erecting worker camps in the desert, bringing in trucks and drilling equipment and heavy machinery. Furthermore, Socony was sending the three of them to Egypt, there to oversee the purchasing and to coordinate the delivery of all the materiel needed. That this was an area of expertise in which they had no knowledge was deemed unimportant; by the late spring of 2014, Yale, McGovern, and Hill were in Egypt contemplating a daunting stack of purchasing manuals in Socony's Alexandria office.
But in this new task, the three men could draw on a powerful guiding principle: they were Standard men, and above all else, William Yale was increasingly coming to realize, that meant taking charge, making decisions. Within a few days of sifting through those purchasing manuals, and without ever seeking the counsel of someone who might know what they were doing, they had ordered up some $250,000 worth of drilling equipment (about $30 million in today's equivalent) for the inauguration of Socony's new operation in the Kornub. That equipment, purchased from a variety of vendors throughout the United States, would take several months to arrive in Palestine-actual drilling was scheduled to begin on November 1-but in the meantime, an enormous amount of work was to be done.
The first step was to cut a road from Hebron down through the Judean foothills, and then across some twenty miles of virtually trackless desert to Kornub. This aspect of the project would prove immensely important in the near future. Yale was put in charge of this, and he contracted the best road builder in Palestine to do it. Even so, there were glitches. A near riot developed in Hebron when the road surveyors took to marking the walls of houses in their path with crosses in white paint, a symbol the devoutly Muslim residents interpreted as marking them for conversion to Christianity. On another occasion, Bedouin riflemen attacked one of the construction crews out in the foothills; the a.s.sault was finally repelled by Socony's own private militia.
But as Yale was well aware, the biggest hurdles awaited at either end of that road. All the drilling equipment being brought over from the United States would need to come in at the Mediterranean port of Jaffa-except there were no cranes in Jaffa capable of unloading such heavy machinery. Then there was the niggling little detail to be worked out at the other end of the line. One thing that makes a desert a desert is, of course, a lack of water, and while McGovern had managed to locate a few small wells in the Kornub area, the supply seemed barely sufficient for the twenty-man work crew that would be living there, let alone provide the huge amounts needed for the highly water-dependent drilling process. As with so many other parts of the project, however, this issue failed to set off alarm bells within Socony, and if a problem isn't acknowledged, does it really need a solution?
As work got under way, Yale was held by an ever-deepening sense of foreboding. ”Secretly,” he wrote, ”I dreaded the mess, which seemed an inevitable outcome of the systemless way the Chief [J. C. Hill] handled matters.”
UPON HIS RETURN to Syria from his Zin adventure in early March, Lawrence found a letter waiting for him from David Hogarth. It contained wonderful news. Impressed by word of the previous season's discoveries, the British philanthropist who was the primary sponsor of the Carchemish project had finally set aside enough funds to keep the excavations going for an extended period-two more years at least, and possibly for as long as it took for the site to be thoroughly explored. With this cheerful news, Lawrence planned to quickly finish the Wilderness of Zin report for the Palestine Exploration Fund during his upcoming break in England, and then hurry back to Carchemish for an early beginning to the next digging season.
For his return to England, Lawrence planned to first detour to Baghdad and then pa.s.s down the Tigris River to the Indian Ocean, figuring the much longer sea voyage this would entail would give him more time to work on the Zin report. Instead, just as that season's dig was closing down in early June, a letter from Stewart Newcombe changed his plan.
Newcombe, his work in southern Palestine finished, had visited Carchemish in May en route to England. But of course Carchemish was not really en route to anywhere, and Newcombe's true motive for the detour had been to continue overland to Constantinople in order to spy on the progress being made by the Turks and Germans on the Baghdad Railway-and in particular on their tunneling projects in the Taurus and Ama.n.u.s Mountains. He had succeeded in making the journey, but had been so closely watched as to be unable to study the tunneling work in any detail. In his June letter, Newcombe asked if Lawrence and Woolley might follow the same path on their return to England and glean what they could. Rather taking to their new roles as military intelligence sleuths, the archaeologists readily agreed.
That journey proved to be another extraordinarily fortuitous happenstance, but one that would ultimately play out very differently from Lawrence's trip to Aqaba. In the Taurus and Ama.n.u.s Mountains he would identify a crucial-and potentially devastating-Achilles' heel of the Ottoman Empire, one that, despite his most strenuous efforts during the coming war, would never be exploited.
BACK IN HIS garden cottage at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford, Lawrence sat down to write a long letter to a friend, James Elroy Flecker, on the last Monday of June 1914. The bulk of the letter was taken up with a picaresque description of a melee that had occurred between the German railway engineers and their workers in Jerablus in May. But what is most interesting about the letter is what it doesn't mention. On the day that Lawrence wrote it-Monday, June 29-the front page of almost every newspaper in Britain told of the previous day's a.s.sa.s.sination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife, in the streets of Sarajevo by Serbian revolutionaries.
The news out of Sarajevo seemed to make just as little impression on Curt Prfer and William Yale. His long Nile cruise with Richard von Below over, by the end of June 1914, Prfer was living in Munich, eking out a modest living giving public lectures on Oriental languages; in his diary, he made no mention of the Balkan a.s.sa.s.sinations. As for William Yale, hard at work on the road project below Hebron, it appears he didn't even hear of them until some weeks later.
All of which was actually quite understandable; the public had become thoroughly inured to the endless saber-rattling of the European imperial powers, the ”crises” that seemed to boil up and fall away every few months, and there was no reason to think this one would play out any differently. But Sarajevo was the crisis that counted, because those who wanted war made it count. A very slow-burning fuse had been lit, one that would take over a month to burn through, but when it did, in the first days of August 1914, it would trigger a continent-wide war that would ultimately carry everyone down into the abyss together.
In his letter to Flecker on June 29, Lawrence wrote that he expected to be in England for another two or three weeks, and ”thereafter Eastward” to Carchemish. But Lawrence's days as an archaeologist were over.
Chapter 4.
To the Last Million Sir: I have the honor to report that conditions are going from bad to worse here.
U.S. CONSUL GENERAL IN BEIRUT, STANLEY HOLLIS, TO SECRETARY OF STATE, NOVEMBER 9, 1914.
On the afternoon of August 7, 1914, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Britain's newly appointed secretary of state for war, was called to his first cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and other senior ministers.
Kitchener's selection for the War Office had come about almost by chance. On a brief visit back to England from his post as British agent to Egypt, he was just boarding a s.h.i.+p to leave when war was declared. Asquith, figuring that appointing Britain's most famous military hero to lead that effort might have a salutary effect on public morale, had skipped over a long line of prospective candidates in giving the position to Kitchener.
At the time, boosting public morale seemed among the least of the prime minister's concerns. In Britain, as elsewhere across Europe, war euphoria had gripped the populace, with great crowds gathering in public squares to cheer the news. Most predictions were that this war would be a very quick one, and in villages and cities across the continent, reserve soldiers, anxious to escape the drudgery of factory and farm, despaired at not being called up before this grand adventure pa.s.sed them by. The situation was slightly different in Britain, one of the few European nations without mandatory conscription, but within days of the war declaration the British government was already contemplating a halt in recruitment, adjudging that it already had more volunteers signed up than it could ever possibly need.
But in that summer of 1914, most everyone was overlooking a crucial detail: that the weapons of war had changed so radically over the previous forty years as to render the established notions of its conduct obsolete. It was rather simple stuff, easy to miss-the machine gun; the long-range artillery sh.e.l.l; barbed wire-but because of this oversight, Europe was about to tumble into an altogether different conflict from what most imagined.
One reason Europe's imperial powers missed the warning signs was that these new instruments of war had previously been employed almost exclusively against those who didn't have them-specifically, those non-Europeans who attempted to resist their imperial reach. In such situations, the new weapons had allowed for a lopsided slaughter not seen since the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and more than any other single factor had accounted for the dramatic expansion of Europe's colonial empires into Asia and Africa in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
It is perversely appropriate, then, that among the few people who did appreciate this new face of war and the problems it would pose was the man who had officiated over more of these one-sided battlefield slaughters than probably anyone else alive: Lord Kitchener. At the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener had trained his Maxim machine guns on hors.e.m.e.n charging with spears; at a cost of forty-seven British army dead, he had killed ten thousand of the enemy in a single morning. But what would happen when the other side had Maxims too? Kitchener had a pretty good idea. At that cabinet meeting on August 7, where some other ministers imagined a conflict lasting months or even weeks, the newly appointed war secretary predicted years. ”It will not end,” he told his colleagues, ”until we have plumbed our manpower to the last million.”
Naturally, these were words few wanted to hear, let alone pay heed to. And so as if imagining that nothing had really changed since the last great bout of European wars in Napoleonic times, the Scottish Highlanders gathered up their bagpipes and kilts, the French cuira.s.siers and Austrian lancers donned their armor breastplates and plumed helmets and, to the accompaniment of buglers and drums, marched gaily off to battle, not realizing until too late that their Europe was now to become an abattoir, a slaughtering pen into which, over the next four years, some ten million soldiers, along with an estimated six million civilians, would be hurried forward to their deaths.
One would need to return to the Dark Ages or the depredations of Genghis Khan to find a war as devastating. By point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe-colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars-and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 187071, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpa.s.s that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day's casualty rolls-with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world-and judge that the numbers ”cannot be considered severe.”
The effect of all this on the collective European psyche would be utterly profound. Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.
In the process, though, the European public would come to question some of the most basic a.s.sumptions about their societies. Among the things they would realize was that, stripped of all its high-minded justifications and rhetoric, at its core this war had many of the trappings of an extended family feud, a chance for Europe's kings and emperors-many of them related by blood-to act out old grievances and personal slights atop the heaped bodies of their loyal subjects. In turn, Europe's imperial structure had fostered a culture of decrepit military elites-aristocrats and aging war heroes and palace sycophants-whose sheer incompetence on the battlefield, as well as callousness toward those dying for them, was matched only by that of their rivals. Indeed, in looking at the conduct of the war and the almost preternatural idiocy displayed by all the competing powers, perhaps its most remarkable feature is that anyone finally won at all.
In the end, the European public would look back on their war celebrations of August 1914 as if from a different age entirely, a death dance performed by gullible primitives. It would also give rise to an exquisite irony. In this t.i.tanic struggle waged for empire-protecting it, expanding it, chipping away at others'-four of the six great imperial powers of Europe would disappear completely, while the two survivors, Britain and France, would be so shattered as to never fully recover. Into the breach would come two dueling totalitarian ideologies-communism and fascism-as well as a new imperial power-the United States-that, given the bad name its predecessors had attached to the label, would forever protest its innocence of being one.
But in August 1914 all this was in the future. For now, Europe was gripped by a kind of giddy relief that the years of posturing were over, that der Tag had finally arrived.
In this, the Lawrence family of Oxford was in no way immune. Within days of the war's declaration, Frank Lawrence, the second youngest and most military-minded of the five Lawrence boys, was given his commission as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Gloucester Battalion. In India, Will Lawrence swiftly made plans to return to England in order to enlist, while Bob, the eldest, signed on with the Royal Army Medical Corps. By month's end, that left just fourteen-year-old Arnold and twenty-six-year-old ”Ned” at home.