Part 7 (2/2)

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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 censors.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 quas.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+on 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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-was.h.i.+ng” 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 leaders.h.i.+p might mean to Britain's long-term interests in the region. Perhaps tailoring his message to what the British leaders.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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.

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