Part 8 (1/2)

”I hope things are going well on your side. We are anxiously awaiting news of Townshend's relief but have heard nothing for ages.”

The purpose of Lawrence's mission was actually twofold, one overt, the other very much veiled. In view of the ongoing crisis at Kut, Kitchener and his allies in the Egyptian intelligence staff hoped the British Indian commanders in Iraq might finally see the wisdom of trying to work with the indigenous Arab tribes that should have been their natural allies all along. The plan was to start sending out a group of Iraqi Arab officers who had defected from the Turks and were now working for the British in Egypt, so that they might forge alliances with local Iraqi tribal leaders, as well as peel away disgruntled Arab units of the Ottoman army.

It was hard to imagine how any of this could be done in time to save Townshend, however, and this gave rise to the second purpose of Lawrence's mission. Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold.

If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.

A year and a half earlier, he had been magically elevated from civilian to second lieutenant because a general visiting the General Staff map room demanded to be briefed by an officer. Now Lawrence's superiors in Cairo had abruptly rushed through his temporary promotion to captain, effective his first day at sea, presumably to spare the very senior military commanders he would be meeting in Iraq from the indignity of conferring with a second lieutenant.

A rather more baffling episode had occurred just four days before he'd boarded the Royal George. On March 18, the small French military legation in Cairo had been temporarily recalled to France and, in long-standing military tradition among the European powers, the occasion was marked by the liberal disburs.e.m.e.nt of medals and honorifics. Quite inexplicably, considering his consistent efforts to thwart French ambitions in the region, the outgoing legation had selected Lawrence for the Legion d'Honneur, one of France's highest awards. Compounding their error, the following year they awarded him the Croix de Guerre avec palme.

Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amus.e.m.e.nt in placing the medal around the neck of a friend's dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford.

ON THE MORNING of April 5, the Royal George slipped into the bay of the dreary, low-slung port city of Basra, and a Royal Navy launch was sent out to collect its most important pa.s.senger, the newly minted Captain T. E. Lawrence.

As Lawrence soon discovered in Basra, the overt objective of his mission to Iraq, to coax British Indian commanders into launching a hearts-and-minds campaign among the local tribes, had already been mooted. In a series of cables to London while he had been in transit, the new commander in chief of the Indian Army Expeditionary Force in Iraq, General Percy Lake, had already dismissed the scheme as ”undesirable and inconvenient.”

But as Lawrence conferred with that leaders.h.i.+p during his first days in Basra, it was clear that another, more insidious element had doomed his political mission, a toxic fusion of racism and British notions of military superiority. Despite the fresh example of the disaster at Gallipoli-maybe even because of it-many senior British commanders simply couldn't accept that they might lose to the ”rabble” of the Ottoman army yet again. This att.i.tude wasn't isolated to the narrow-minded generals of British India, but extended all the way to the supreme commander of British forces, General William Robertson, back in London. Upon hearing of the generous surrender terms offered to Townshend by Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander at Kut, after the defeat of Aylmer's relief column, Robertson had responded, ”My general information is to the effect that the difficulties of the Turks are serious. I regard Khalil Bey's overtures as a confirmation of this and as an indication that, given determined action on our part, success is a.s.sured.”

In other words, in the upside-down worldview that this war against its military and cultural inferiors had induced in the British high command, an offer of honorable surrender was only evidence of the enemy's weakness, and that two relief efforts had ended in abject failure meant a third was sure to succeed.

By the time Lawrence was shuttled up the Tigris River to join the frontline headquarters staff on April 15, this third relief effort was well under way. After the fiasco at Dujaila, there had been a wholesale shakeup of that staff, with Aylmer replaced by a certain Major General George Gorringe. Unfortunately, the changes hadn't extended to the tactical playbook. Displaying the same fondness for frontal a.s.saults against an entrenched enemy as his predecessor, Gorringe neatly replicated the record of Aylmer's first relief effort-ten thousand dead and wounded, no breakthrough-in almost precisely the same two-week span.

That final failure ended the uncomfortable existence Lawrence had endured ever since reaching the Snakefly, the British headquarters s.h.i.+p docked in the Tigris River below Kut. As word had spread among the officers on board of the clandestine purpose of his mission-to try to ransom out the Kut garrison-the young captain from Egypt had been pointedly shunned by most everyone. But now, having suffered some twenty-three thousand casualties across nine separate engagements without ever reaching Kut, and with that trapped garrison rapidly nearing starvation, the generals in charge belatedly accepted that Kitchener's scheme was the only option left.

But even at this eleventh hour, there would be time for an element of farce. Since neither General Townshend nor the commanders hoping to rescue him wished to have such an ignominious endeavor attached to their reputations, through the last days of April, Townshend and General Lake waged a duel of cablegrams, each arguing that the other should carry out the negotiations. Instead, it would ultimately fall on three junior officers-Colonel Edward Beach, Captain Aubrey Herbert, and Captain T. E. Lawrence-to make one last attempt to save the dying men of Kut.

IT HAD ALL the trappings of a Victorian parlor-room melodrama: the das.h.i.+ng and excessively handsome young n.o.bleman, a requisite coterie of flirtatious but chaste women, the cold-blooded archvillain, even the innocent abroad, that out-of-his-depth character who, after various twists and turns, would provide the story with its moral conclusion. Where the small expatriate community of wartime Jerusalem differed from any theatrical counterparts was in the consequences to be paid for ending up on the wrong side of the narrative: imprisonment, exile, even execution. What was also different, of course, was the world that lay beyond those parlor-room windows, not the pleasant English countryside or a tony London street, but a city consumed by death, its streets and alleyways littered with those succ.u.mbed to starvation or typhus, its public squares frequently featuring men hanging from gibbet-gallows.

For William Yale, it was an exceedingly strange, fishbowl existence. With very little to do in the way of work, most every afternoon he met up to play bridge with an eclectic group of friends-a Greek doctor, an Armenian doctor, a retired Turkish colonel, and the Greek bishop of Jerusalem-that diversion giving over in the evenings to larger gatherings in the salons of various middle-aged expatriate women. At these soirees, dominated by dancing and the playing of parlor games, a peculiar s.e.xual dynamic took place. Since there were few single expatriate women remaining in Jerusalem-and any attention paid to one could be quickly interpreted as an interest to marry-the single men flirted, openly and compet.i.tively, with the married women in attendance, often in plain view and with the acquiescence of their husbands. It was all quite harmless and innocent.

But there was nothing truly harmless in wartime Jerusalem, as Yale discovered when he became the favorite of Madame Alexis Frey, an attractive middle-aged French widow who enjoyed the status of grande dame of the city's salon scene. Yale's standing with Frey so rankled one of his compet.i.tors, a middle-aged Christian Arab who headed the Turkish Tobacco Regie, or monopoly, in Syria, that the man took Yale aside one day to make a proposal. ”How about we divide the ladies of Jerusalem up between the two of us,” the businessman said. ”For myself, I will reserve Madame Frey, and you can have all the rest.”

Yale initially dismissed the proposition as a joke, but thought differently when he next went to the Regie office to purchase his monthly ration of cigarettes, only to be told by the clerks they'd been instructed to not sell to him. That posed a problem since, true to its definition, the Regie was the only place tobacco could be obtained in wartime Jerusalem. Shortly afterward, Yale was informed by the Jerusalem chief of police that his challenger from the Regie was plotting intrigues against him.

”I began to realize that I was up against a jealous, unscrupulous person who would go to great lengths to rid himself of a rival,” Yale recalled. ”As my business demanded that my position should be such that I be on friendly terms with the Turkish officials and authorities, I saw I was playing a dangerous game. I decided to let Madame Frey settle the issue, so I told her to send Monsieur X packing or our affair was over.”

When Madame Frey explained that that was quite impossible given the Regie man's prominence, the American oilman withdrew from the Frey salon in a huff. Yale's manservant, a grizzled old Kurd named Mustapha Kharpoutli, came up with an alternative solution. ”Oh Master,” he counseled Yale, ”I know where 'the pig' goes every evening, so give the order and I will finish with him.” As Kharpoutli explained, the Regie man left a particular woman's house every night at midnight. ”It's on a lonely street. I will kill him tonight if you tell me to.”

Yale declined that offer, and shortly after his friends engineered a brief rapprochement with Alexis Frey. It was a risky business, for the city's thicket of martial law edicts afforded almost endless possibilities for a rival to exact revenge; during Frey's next curfew-violating salon, her home was raided and half the attendees hauled off to jail, presumably after a tip-off from the jealous Regie man.

The episode served to remind Yale that his life now was like a game of musical chairs, one with extremely high stakes. The ultimate arbiter of that game, of course, was Djemal Pasha. On his word, most anyone could be cast into prison or summarily banished to some distant village in the Syrian wastelands-if often only to be just as swiftly released or restored according to Djemal's whim.

To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the das.h.i.+ng consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having a.s.sumed the consular duties of most all the European ”belligerent” nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential. William Yale's relations.h.i.+p with the Conde de Ballobar was a tricky one: a good ally to have if matters went awry, but also his most formidable compet.i.tion when it came to fis.h.i.+ng in Jerusalem's spa.r.s.e pool of attractive and available women.

For day-to-day protection, Yale was much more likely to turn to another pillar of Jerusalem society, a charming middle-aged aristocrat named Ismail Hakki Bey al-Husseini, one of the three Jerusalem businessmen from whom Socony had obtained the original Kornub concessions back in the spring of 1914. Yale had developed a friends.h.i.+p with Ismail Bey during his extended stay in Palestine prior to the war's outbreak. That had quickly resumed upon Yale's return in 1915, and by the spring of 1916 the oilman considered Ismail Bey his closest friend in the Middle East. Of course, it probably didn't hurt that the Husseinis were one of the most powerful and well-respected families in all of southern Syria, Ismail Bey being a particularly prominent member.

But if the expatriate community had its protectors, it also had its predators. Of these, none was more dreaded than a young German officer who flitted in and out of the city with some regularity, Curt Prfer. As Count de Ballobar noted of Prfer, despite ”his harmless appearance [he] is nothing less than a secret agent of the German government,” and ”in possession of an extraordinary talent.” What made Prfer such a figure of menace, quite beyond the creepiness factor of his whispery voice, was that he seemed to be the one German whom Djemal Pasha trusted implicitly. Run afoul of Curt Prfer, and even the determined entreaties of Count de Ballobar or Ismail Hakki Bey might prove useless. Even the entreaties of Djemal Pasha, in fact. One afternoon, Yale happened to be visiting an expatriate couple he was friendly with when their front door was kicked in by Prfer and two accompanying policemen. While the couple had claimed to be Swiss, it was an open secret within the foreign community-and to Djemal Pasha-that they were actually French, a detail Prfer had apparently just uncovered. When he demanded the couple be cast into internal exile, an unhappy Djemal had no choice but to sign the expulsion order.

Prfer's authority became especially worrisome to William Yale in the winter of 1916 when he discovered that he and the German intelligence agent were locked in a three-way compet.i.tion-the third was the ubiquitous Ballobar-for the same woman, a beautiful Jewish-American girl living in Jerusalem. Concerned that her American suitor might soon be arrested, the girl finally confided to Yale that Prfer frequently interrogated her about him and his activities. ”Clearly I was under suspicion.”

Surviving in wartime Syria required not only a finely honed selfishness, but a hardening of the heart. In this, Yale, the consummate survivor, was not at all immune. Every day for months on end, he had to step over the bodies of the dead and dying as he traversed Jerusalem. Every week he heard stories of those who had fallen from favor being disappeared, either figuratively in the form of banishment or quite literally in the form of the gibbet-gallows. To protect himself and his interests in such a place, he became increasingly cold-blooded, too, so much so that he would eventually turn on his closest friend. To his later embarra.s.sment, this didn't stem from matters of personal safety; William Yale did it for oil.

Prior to his first meeting with Djemal Pasha in the spring of 1915, Yale had decided to divide Socony's pet.i.tion for concessionary rights in Palestine into two separate requests, figuring that to ask for the entire half million acres desired at one fell swoop was to invite a backlash. The problem was that, having long since sewn up the concessionary rights to the first quarter million acres and done nothing with them, by the spring of 1916 the oilman had still not mustered the gall to ask after the second.

What he needed was some kind of opening to alter the playing field, but just what that might be was hard to imagine-especially since Djemal had clearly cottoned to Socony's game. At the beginning of 1916, the Constantinople office had labored mightily to obtain concessionary rights to several large tracts around Damascus, going so far as to make the American consul in that city, Samuel Edelman, their point man in the effort. In late March, however, after Edelman took the matter up with ”the supreme factor in these regions”-an obvious reference to Djemal-he cabled back to Socony with some bad news. ”[Djemal] says that while recently in Constantinople, the Minister of Mines said to him [that] Standard Oil was not working for the benefit or interest of Turkey, but to shut off compet.i.tion. So long as this suspicion hangs over you, [it] will not be possible to obtain further concessions.”

Shortly after that rebuff, however, an opening suddenly presented itself when Yale was once again summoned to Djemal's headquarters at the German Hospice. As the governor explained, he had recently received reports from military officers in the field of a large pool of oil collected at the base of a mountain in the southern desert. Since this oil was already on the surface, Djemal pointed out, it should be an easy matter to start collecting and refining it at once. As a personal favor, he wanted Yale to go and investigate the site, a small chain of mountains below Beersheva known as Kornub.

Yale instantly realized this ”find” was the very same one that J. C. Hill had spotted from a Judean hillside two years earlier, and which he and Rudolf McGovern had ascertained to be iron tailings. But this seemed a detail not worth mentioning to Djemal Pasha. Instead, Yale said he would be happy to investigate the Kornub site, so long as the governor could see his way to approving a few more concessionary tracts. When he left the German Hospice that day, the Standard representative had the pasha's consent to another quarter million acres of Palestine.

But while preparing for this next concession-procurement expedition Yale suddenly encountered a problem with his best friend, Ismail Hakki Bey. During the first great concession-buying expedition of the previous summer, Ismail Bey had succ.u.mbed to Yale's entreaties to accompany him on the vague a.s.surance that Socony would compensate him for his services; even though the businessman had no proprietary interest in those concessions, he had relented. To be sure, that collaboration was rooted in more than mere friends.h.i.+p for both men. While Ismail Bey's cultured company was a welcome addition to the scrofulous a.s.sortment of soldiers and government functionaries who formed the rest of Yale's retinue, the American also looked to his well-connected friend to smooth out any difficulties that might arise with stubborn landowners or extortionate local officials. From Ismail Bey's perspective, with Socony clearly planning a ma.s.sive exploration project in Palestine at some point in the future, it only made good business sense to attach to the undertaking however he could.

But when approached by Yale in the late spring of 1916 for his help with the next round of concession-buying, Ismail Bey balked. In the Arab way of doing business, one's word was inviolate. Ismail Bey had now seen enough of the American way to know that Yale's a.s.surances of compensation were quite meaningless; what he needed was a written contract. Confronted by this request, Yale explained that as a mere purchasing agent for Socony, he hadn't the authority to pen such a guarantee, but that if Ismail Bey ”wished to know my personal opinion, it was that he had better have confidence in the Company.”

That wasn't good enough for Ismail Bey; he informed his friend that without such a written guarantee, he couldn't help him.

This placed Yale in a most difficult spot. Over the course of their two-and-a-half-year friends.h.i.+p, he'd come to know all of Ismail Bey's seven children, and had frequently dined in his Jerusalem home. As in any true friends.h.i.+p, the two had also shared confidences: on Yale's part, of the British nurse he had met in Jerusalem before the war and hoped one day to marry; on Ismail Bey's part, of his low opinion of the Ottoman government in general, and his resentment of Djemal Pasha in particular. Compounding Yale's difficulty was the very prominence of the Husseini name in Syria. Since Ismail Bey had relatives scattered in high government positions throughout the region, a rift between them might not be a matter of simply parting ways; if the businessman chose to stand in his way, the same doors that had previously been flung open for Socony could now be slammed shut.

As Yale recounted in his memoir, ”I looked at him and said, 'Well, Ismail Bey, much as I will dislike doing it, if you do not agree to cooperate with me, I shall go at once to Djemal Pasha and tell him that you are blocking me, that you are pro-British and are tied up with British interests.”

It marked a dramatic transformation in William Yale. In 1911, while working for a wealthy Bostonian industrialist, Yale had refused the pleas of his own bankrupted and desperate father for an introduction to his employer, feeling that trading on his position to arrange such a meeting would be improper. Just five years later, Yale was threatening his best friend with probable death-and not an easy death, but likely one that would only come after protracted torture and after his wives and children had been cast into a dest.i.tute exile-over a business deal.

But it worked. ”I studied his face anxiously as I awaited his response,” Yale would recall. ”Rather abruptly he replied, 'I'll a.s.sist you; I'll trust the Company.' And he did work loyally with me as long as I represented the Company in Palestine.”

KHALIL PASHA'S HEADQUARTERS encampment consisted of a single round tent set some four miles back from the front lines at Kut. It was midafternoon before the three British officers, having at last completed their grueling blindfolded journey from no-man's-land, were ushered inside.

Khalil was a trim man in his midthirties with piercing brown eyes and the handlebar mustache favored by Turkish officers-by all Turkish males, in fact-and despite the desolation of his surroundings, he still retained something of the dapper manner he had perfected in the salons of Constantinople. Aubrey Herbert, during his prewar days as an honorary consul in the Ottoman capital, had come to know Khalil quite well, and once he and his companions had settled in the tent he tried to break the ice with some opening pleasantries. ”Where was it that I met Your Excellency last?” Herbert asked in French.

Khalil apparently had a good memory. ”At a dance at the British emba.s.sy,” he replied, also in French. From there, though, the conversation took a far more somber turn.

It was April 29, and the three British officers had set out for this meeting early that morning, climbing over the forward parapet of a British trenchline and into no-man's-land under the cover of a white flag. Before them stretched six hundred yards of waist-high meadow gra.s.s, at the far end of which rose the earthen berm of the Turks' trenchworks. Walking to a spot roughly equidistant between the two lines, they stopped and waited for several hours for some response from the Turkish side, buffeted both by the steadily rising heat and by the swarms of blowflies feeding on the rotting corpses that lay all about them. At last, the three men were taken over to the Turkish line, where they were blindfolded and put on horses to take them to Khalil's headquarters. Having badly hurt his knee in a fall a few days earlier, Lawrence quickly found that he couldn't ride; taken off his horse but still in blindfold, he was led by the hand by a Turkish soldier, stumbling and limping the four miles to Khalil's tent.

In stepping out into no-man's-land that morning, all three men were acutely aware of the humiliating nature of the task they'd been given. So dishonorable was this bribery attempt that Edward Beach would never publicly reveal the mission's true purpose, Lawrence would only write of it in the most euphemistic fas.h.i.+on, while Aubrey Herbert couldn't even bring himself to commit the words to the anonymity of his private diary; writing in his journal the previous evening, he noted that the only items they had to bargain with were ”Townshend's guns, exchange of Turkish prisoners, and another thing.” Even this ambiguity was ultimately too revealing; when Herbert's diary was published after the war, that clause was excised altogether.

But as the three officers soon learned in Khalil Pasha's tent, they actually had even less to bargain with than that. Unbeknownst to them when they'd set out, early that morning an increasingly unhinged Townshend had abruptly agreed to an unconditional surrender. Following military protocol, he then destroyed his remaining pieces of artillery. This act infuriated Khalil Pasha-he had desperately wanted to get his hands on those guns-and it left Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence with little to offer the Turkish commander beyond the gold ransom.

This the British officers couched in terms of a kind of humanitarian a.s.sistance package for the civilian residents of Kut. Surely, they suggested, those innocents had suffered just as badly as the trapped British soldiers through the five-month siege, and some form of financial recompense seemed in order. Khalil Pasha saw through the artifice at once and airily brushed the proposal away.

The negotiating party fared a bit better in asking for a transfer of wounded soldiers. With the Kut garrison now surrendered, the Turkish commander agreed to let British steamers come up with food supplies and take out the worst wounded. This concession encouraged Colonel Beach, the senior negotiator, to try his last card: an exchange of able-bodied prisoners, the survivors in Kut in return for the Ottoman prisoners the British had taken since first coming ash.o.r.e in Iraq.

With an arch expression, Khalil offered an alternative arrangement, a one-for-one exchange of British soldiers for Turkish ones, a separate exchange for Indian soldiers and Arabs. The British officers weren't quite sure what to make of this offer, but when Herbert remarked that many Arab troops in the enemy army had fought valiantly and Khalil would be lucky to have them back, the Turkish commander's manner abruptly changed. Holding up a list of the POWs held by the British, Khalil pointed out the preponderance of Arab names. ”Perhaps one of our [Turkish] men in ten is weak or cowardly,” he said, ”but it's only one in a hundred of the Arabs who are brave.... You can send them back to me if you like, but I have already condemned them to death. I shall like to have them to hang.”

Realizing they were being toyed with, the British officers dropped the matter. A short time later, Khalil Pasha gave an affected yawn and announced that he was tired, that he still had many other matters to attend. So ended the last chance to rescue the garrison in Kut. From Khalil's headquarters, Lawrence, Herbert, and Beach were escorted back to the front line but, as darkness had now fallen, were invited to stay the night inside a Turkish encampment. As Lawrence pointedly wrote in his diary, ”they gave us a most excellent dinner in Turkish style.”