Part 7 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p when it docked.
Just before he got there, however, a skirmish broke out somewhere along the ca.n.a.l, delaying Will's s.h.i.+p. Instead of a face-to-face meeting, all the brothers were able to arrange was a brief s.h.i.+p-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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 refres.h.i.+ngly 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 leaders.h.i.+p'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 Yorks.h.i.+re, 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 s.h.i.+P NEVER came.