Part 12 (1/2)

For his part, Lawrence struggled mightily to put the very best gloss on matters, offering in his own report a number of unconvincing explanations to account for their delay in reaching Wejh. Lawrence's reflexively contrarian response to criticisms of the Arabs by his British comrades was nothing new. Back on the night of December 11, when Turkish forces had approached the outskirts of Yenbo, a British pilot had unsparingly described the panic that gripped Faisal's forces within the town. His account stood in marked contrast to Lawrence's own version of events. ”The garrison was called out about 10 PM by means of criers sent round the streets,” he reported. ”The men all turned out without visible excitement, and proceeded to their posts round the town wall without making a noise, or firing a shot.”

The easiest explanation for this divergence of accounts was that the pilot had actually been in Yenbo at the time, whereas Lawrence had not; earlier that same day, he had left Yenbo by s.h.i.+p, a detail left obscure in his report.

This variance in viewpoints also extended to the figure of Faisal ibn Hussein. In his December report, that same British pilot had reported that Faisal ”is easily frightened and lives in constant dread of a Turkish advance, though he seems to conceal that fear from his army.” Another British officer, Major Charles Vickery, caustically commented after observing Faisal's force in Wejh that ”it is not known how far other Sherifial leaders interest themselves in the training of their troops, but certainly Sherif Faisal ignores it.” Most appalling to British officers had been Faisal's decision to take up quarters on a British wars.h.i.+p in Yenbo harbor during those dark December days when a Turkish attack seemed imminent, leaving his men onsh.o.r.e to fend for themselves.

All of this, of course, stood at great odds to Lawrence's own a.n.a.lysis; as he'd said of Faisal even during the grim interlude in Nakhl Mubarak, ”he is magnificent.” It also revealed something quite remarkable: after just three months in the field, Lawrence was not only the chief booster of Faisal and the Arabs, but their most determined apologist.

Among those who noticed this was Faisal himself. Knowing that Lawrence was now scheduled to return to Cairo-and probably having seen enough of the hard-nosed Newcombe during the march up from Um Lejj to realize theirs would be a less congenial relations.h.i.+p-Faisal sent off a secret cable to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah on the same day that he reached Wejh. As Wilson relayed to Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, Faisal ”is most anxious that Lawrence should not return to Cairo, as he has given such very great a.s.sistance.”

Confronted by this direct request from Faisal, Clayton found it quite impossible to find a way to refuse. Within days, the paperwork was readied to make Lawrence's posting to the Hejaz permanent. At last, Lawrence was to be free: free of his desk at the Savoy Hotel, free, ultimately, to remake the war in Arabia to his own image.

Chapter 11.

A Mist of Deceits A man might clearly destroy himself, but it was repugnant that the innocence and the ideals of the Arabs should enlist in my sordid service for me to destroy. We needed to win the war, and their inspiration had proved the best tool out here. The effort should have been its own reward-might yet be for the deceived-but we, the masters, had promised them results in our false contract, and that was bargaining with life.

T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.

With the taking of Wejh, the setbacks and embarra.s.sments that had plagued the Arab rebel cause in recent months were being consigned to history. Lawrence made every effort to hasten the process of forgetfulness along.

After that town's capture in late January 1917, he was briefly brought back to Cairo in preparation for his return to Arabia on a permanent basis. In the Egyptian capital, he kept up a wearying pace. Along with catching up on his long-neglected reports and making additions to The Handbook of the Hejaz, a primer the Arab Bureau was compiling to help familiarize British officers being dispatched there, Lawrence shuttled between the offices of the British military leaders.h.i.+p to provide them with firsthand accounts of what was occurring across the Red Sea. With all, he presented a very optimistic view of where matters stood-he even managed to concoct plausible-sounding excuses for Faisal's late arrival to Wejh-and insisted there was a newfound fort.i.tude and enthusiasm for battle among the western Arabian tribes. His a.s.sessment stood in marked contrast to those of other British officers present at Wejh, but success has a way of choosing winners in such disagreements.

”The circle of Arab well-wishers was now strangely increased,” Lawrence archly recalled. ”In the army, our shares rose as we showed profits. [General] Lynden-Bell stood firmly our friend and swore that method was coming out of the Arab madness. Sir Archibald Murray realized with a sudden shock that more Turkish troops were fighting the Arabs than were fighting him, and began to remember how he had always favored the Arab revolt.”

Perhaps none were so pleased as Lawrence's superior, General Gilbert Clayton. To be sure, Faisal's insistence that Lawrence stay on as his permanent liaison necessitated a bit of bureaucratic reconfiguring-Clayton needed to ensure that neither Cyril Wilson in Jeddah nor Stewart Newcombe, the recently arrived head of the British military mission, felt infringed upon-but these were trivial matters when set against the achievement: after all the distrust that had marked Arab-British relations over the previous two years, suspicions that had remained despite the ministrations of generals and senior diplomats, the chief Arab field commander now regarded a lowly British officer as his most indispensable advisor.

So hectic was Lawrence's pace in Cairo that he apparently took little notice of a visitor to the Arab Bureau offices on the morning of February 1, 1917. It had been just a few days since Aaron Aaronsohn learned of the death of his chief spying partner, Absalom Feinberg, in the Sinai desert, and he was now being treated with a kind of contrite respect within the British military intelligence apparatus; he'd come to the Savoy Hotel that morning to lend his advice to a British officer compiling a dossier on the Palestine political situation. While Lawrence made no record of their brief conversation, Aaronsohn was sufficiently struck by it to make note in his diary that night. ”At the Arab Bureau there was a young 2nd lieutenant (Laurens),” he wrote, ”an archaeologist-very well informed on Palestine questions-but rather conceited.”

Perhaps one reason Lawrence forgot about his first encounter with Aaronsohn-they would meet again, and to far greater consequence-was that just two days later a chain of events began that would fundamentally transform his mission in the Middle East. It started on the morning of February 3, with a visit to the Savoy Hotel by his nemesis, Colonel edouard Bremond.

CUNNING AND RESOURCEFULNESS are characteristics that generally well serve a military officer. If judged by those traits alone, edouard Bremond should not have been a mere colonel in the French armed forces, but a field marshal.

As he'd shown repeatedly during his time in Arabia, if Bremond found one approach to a desired goal blocked, he immediately set out in search of another. And if that first goal was made unattainable or redundant, he simply recalibrated his sights to something else. What made this agility even more impressive was that, as both political and military point man for French policy in Arabia, edouard Bremond was juggling two largely contradictory agendas at once: to ensure that France enjoyed equal standing with her ally, Great Britain, in all matters related to the war effort there, but also to try to limit that war effort from within.

His long and ultimately fruitless campaign to put an Allied force ash.o.r.e in Rabegh had been only the most overt of these efforts. During the same period, he had been urging on Hussein the establishment of a French-Ottoman bank in Jeddah, an inst.i.tution that might lend financial credits to the Hejaz government at very attractive rates. British officers examining Bremond's bank proposal had quickly judged it to be an economic trap-with no means to pay back the loans, the Hussein regime would soon become beholden to its French creditors-and scuttled the plan. Then there was the colonel's perennial lobbying to have French officers attached as advisors to the various Arab rebel formations; while he achieved some success with Abdullah and Ali-a half dozen French specialists had been dispatched to their camps in December-he'd had little with Faisal, who remained deeply wary of Gallic intentions.

With the advance on Wejh, Bremond had seen a new opportunity. Once that Red Sea port was captured from the Turks, the entire focus of the Arabian conflict would s.h.i.+ft north some two hundred miles. That would render the Turkish threat to Jeddah and Mecca essentially moot-and with it any argument for an Allied force in Rabegh-but it would offer up an even more enticing target: the Turks' last princ.i.p.al outpost on the Red Sea, the small port of Aqaba.

Observed on a map, Aqaba's extraordinary strategic importance was plain to anyone. Situated at the end of a hundred-mile long ribbon of water that forms the southeastern boundary of the Sinai Peninsula, the port was ideally situated to serve both as a staging ground for attacks into the population centers of southern Palestine, a mere hundred miles to the north, and for launching raids on the Hejaz Railway, the lifeline of the Turkish garrison in Medina, just sixty miles to the east. In fact, Bremond had broached the idea of an a.s.sault on Aqaba with his British military counterparts shortly after his arrival in Cairo in the summer of 1916. The notion had found considerable favor among the British, but with the Arab Revolt still struggling very far to the south at that time, had been deemed premature.

By late January 1917, it was premature no more. Not only did the Arabs now control the Red Sea coast as far north as Wejh, but General Murray's ponderous advance across the Sinai Peninsula in prelude to his Palestine offensive was nearly complete. Lying in the gap between these two forces was Aqaba. Its control by the Allies would secure Murray's right flank, ensuring that no Turkish counteroffensive could be launched from that direction, and it would bring the Arab rebels much closer to their British army suppliers in Egypt.

Of course, the plan might also finally bring about the fulfillment of Bremond's not-so-secret agenda: keeping the Arab Revolt bottled up in the Hejaz. Far away from the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, King Hussein (he had declared himself such in late October) could hardly object to a sizable British and French presence in Aqaba. And with that presence, the princ.i.p.al Allies could dictate to their Arab junior partners just where they might go and what they might do; any Arab dissent on that point and the pipeline of Allied weapons and gold upon which they depended could simply be cut off. Better yet, all of this could be accomplished under the guise of helping the rebel cause by moving their forward base to a place where they could more easily carry out their railway attacks.

In mid-January, even before Wejh had been taken, Bremond began discussing this idea with his superiors in Paris, and found enthusiastic support. While Paris would pursue the matter at the departmental level in London, the French liaison in Cairo and Bremond in Jeddah were commanded to lobby for the Aqaba scheme among the regional British leaders.h.i.+p. Bremond knew just where to turn. In addition to touting the plan to British officers in the Hejaz, he put it before his most reliable ally in the Cairo power structure, Reginald Wingate, newly ensconced as British high commissioner to Egypt. Wingate liked the idea so much that he immediately took it to General Archibald Murray.

By the usual standards of British politeness and understatement, Murray's response was withering. ”In reply to your letter referring to Bremond's proposal,” he wrote Wingate on January 22, ”my opinion, from the purely military point of view, is that the [previous] objections to landing a force at Rabegh apply with equal if not greater force to a landing at Aqaba.” Therein followed Murray's usual litany of fears about mission creep, before he turned to demolis.h.i.+ng Wingate's contention that control of Aqaba would enable the Allies to strike inland at the Hejaz Railway. ”The country in the neighborhood of Aqaba is extremely rough and rocky,” the general explained, and any push inland would be over a terrain only certain rare breeds of camels could traverse. ”To sum up, therefore,” Murray wrote, ”the French proposal to land troops at Aqaba offers, from a military point of view, so few advantages and such serious disadvantages, that I can only suppose that it has been put forward without due consideration and I do not propose to entertain it.”

Along with testiness, another feature of Archibald Murray's leaders.h.i.+p style was a tendency to needlessly compartmentalize information. As he well knew when writing to Wingate, the chief impediment to an eastern advance from Aqaba was not simply ”rough and rocky” terrain but that terrain's near impa.s.sability. A few months earlier he had detailed a junior officer in the Arab Bureau office to a.n.a.lyze a series of aerial reconnaissance photos taken of the Aqaba region. In his report, that officer had pointed out that the port was nestled in the very shadows of a ma.s.sive range of rugged mountains that rose steadily for thirty miles inland before descending over an equally inhospitable landscape to the interior desert where the Hejaz Railway lay. The only way through that wall of rock was a narrow gorge known as the Wadi Itm, along which the Turks had built a network of fortified blockhouses and trenchworks, leaving any military force foolhardy enough to attempt a crossing exposed to constant ambush and sniper fire. The issue, then, was not taking Aqaba-that was the easy part-but in ever being able to move off its beach. A heedless move here was to invite a miniature replay of the Gallipoli debacle-or a full-scale reprise, depending on how determined military commanders became to compound their initial error.

Inexplicably, however, Murray chose not to share this salient information with Wingate, nor evidently with the growing chorus of other British officers advocating an Aqaba landing. In the absence of that information, Murray's scornful reply to the proposal appeared to be just another manifestation of his timidity and bad temper. That was certainly the view Colonel Bremond came away with upon hearing the news through the diplomatic filter of Reginald Wingate.

”You can confidentially inform Bremond,” Wingate cabled his underlings in Jeddah on January 24, ”that we have already given fullest consideration here to [the] proposal to land troops at Aqaba, but in view of our present military commitments in Sinai and elsewhere it must be discarded. We fully recognize the advantages of this scheme, but the troops and transport necessary to undertake a successful expedition against the railway [from Aqaba] are not available.”

To edouard Bremond, a man who'd previously been able to play Wingate to great effect, all this apparently sounded less like an emphatic ”no” than a coquettish ”maybe.” Days later, the French colonel boarded a naval frigate in Jeddah harbor for the run up the coast to Wejh to put his proposal directly to the one man whose desires just might override Murray's: Faisal ibn Hussein.

The two men met on the afternoon of January 30, with the more fluent Arabic-speaking Stewart Newcombe acting as interpreter. Bremond informed Faisal that he was on his way to Egypt to inspect his men at Port Suez, before continuing on to Cairo. There, he intended to lobby the British high command to send a brigade to seize Aqaba, a force to be complemented by two French-Senegalese battalions that were sitting idle in the French port of Djibouti, at the southern mouth of the Red Sea.

Although Faisal had also set his sights on Aqaba, he refused to endorse Bremond's plan; as Newcombe would report, ”Faisal afterwards told me that he would like British troops to help him, but did not want any help from the French or to have anything to do with them.” On the heels of that meeting in Wejh, Bremond immediately proceeded to Port Suez and then to Cairo, where he sought out a most unlikely listener. ”[Bremond] called to felicitate me on the capture of Wejh,” Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, ”saying that it confirmed his belief in my military talent and encouraged him to expect my help in an extension of our success.” That ”extension,” of course, was the colonel's scheme for an Allied landing at Aqaba.

Whatever possessed Bremond to tip his hand to Lawrence? The simplest explanation-that he saw the Aqaba plan as so beneficial to all concerned that even the obstreperous Lawrence might embrace it-is also the least likely. By now, Bremond was fully aware of Lawrence's abiding distrust both of him and of French intentions in the Middle East, a distrust so deep that he was likely to oppose any French proposal on the basis of its origin alone. Indeed, by Lawrence's own account, he instantly heard in Bremond's Aqaba plan an echo of his hidden motive in the Rabegh scheme, a way for the Allies to a.s.sume de facto control over the Arab Revolt and keep it out of Syria.

But what Bremond surely didn't appreciate was that the man sitting across from him that morning at the Savoy probably knew the Aqaba region as well as any European alive. Not only had Lawrence negotiated that landscape during his 1914 Wilderness of Zin expedition, but it was he who had studied the Aqaba aerial maps at the behest of General Murray, to deeply pessimistic results. Bremond may have envisioned Aqaba being a grand cul-de-sac for the Arabs, but in Lawrence's estimation, it would be for any British and French troops sent there, too.

When Lawrence tried to explain this to Bremond, however, the Frenchman remained utterly sanguine. In fact, he let drop that once his lobbying efforts in Cairo were done, he intended to return to Wejh to prod Faisal further on the matter.

There may have rested the colonel's true motive in seeking Lawrence out that morning. The little Oxford upstart had been the most eloquent-and, as bad luck would have it, influential-of Bremond's British opponents during the Rabegh episode, and the Frenchman surely didn't want Lawrence on hand in Cairo to pour water on any pro-Aqaba fires he might light among the British high command. By further letting slip that he would soon return to Wejh for another meeting with Faisal, Bremond may have been hoping that Lawrence would immediately make haste for Arabia, thereby removing himself from the arena where decisions were actually made.

If this was Bremond's goal, it worked perfectly. ”Now I had not warned Faisal that Bremond was a crook,” Lawrence recounted. ”Newcombe was there [in Wejh], with his friendly desire to get moves on.... It seemed best for me to hurry down and put my side on their guard against the [Aqaba] notion.”

Within hours of his meeting with Bremond, Lawrence left Cairo for Port Suez, there to board the first s.h.i.+p for Wejh.

IT WAS A small but telling sign of the changes that war had brought. In June 1915, when William Yale had taken his first carriage ride to the Mount of Olives to meet Djemal Pasha, the horses had trotted up the steep cobblestoned road with ease. Now, in February 1917, that same journey was torturously slow, the emaciated horses in their harnesses so weakened from two years of food shortages that it appeared they might die in the effort. ”It seemed we would never reach the German Hospice,” Yale recalled. The oilman persevered, though, for it was absolutely vital that he reach the Syrian governor.

By that winter of 1917, Yale could feel the walls closing in on him in Jerusalem. Part of it had to do with his nationality. Over the past two and a half years of war, the grudging respect with which the United States had initially been regarded by nearly all the combatants, its annoying stance of neutrality offset by its efforts at peacemaking, had steadily eroded to something approaching disgust. In Britain and France, it took the form of a despair that the American government might ever recognize how its own welfare dictated that it side with the ”democracies” against the ”dictators.h.i.+ps.” In the Central Power nations, it took the form of a growing bitterness at an American foreign policy that, for all Woodrow Wilson's pious talk of being a neutral arbitrator, clearly favored the Entente. And for all concerned was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of ”free trade,” the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.

By early 1917, however, with Woodrow Wilson's reelection campaign safely behind him, there were growing signs that the status quo might soon end, with the United States entering the war on the side of the Entente. Should that happen, those Americans still residing in Central Power nations could expect to come in for some unpleasant treatment, and probably none more so than William Yale. With his bare-knuckled approach to commerce-bribery, threats, and blackmail had been his stock-in-trade-the oilman had made a lot of enemies during his time in Palestine, business rivals and aggrieved local government officials who might quite enjoy seeing the long-protected American ”neutral” recla.s.sified as a ”belligerent” and hauled off to an internment camp.

Yet as the menacing signs had built that winter, a personal sense of duty had prevented Yale from asking the Standard Oil office in Constantinople for permission to leave Jerusalem. Instead, he and his trusty bodyguard, Mustapha Kharpoutli, made contingency plans to try a dash for British Egypt should the Americans come into the war, even as both knew the odds of success in such an enterprise were virtually nil.

Then, on February 1, Germany had announced a resumption of its unrestricted U-boat campaign against all merchant vessels supplying its European enemies, a move that would inevitably target American s.h.i.+ps and seemed almost designed to provoke an American war declaration. That didn't immediately materialize, but just days later, after Wilson took the interim step of breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany, Yale received the cable he'd been desperately awaiting: the Standard office in Constantinople ordered him to leave Palestine and make his way to the Ottoman capital. In great relief, the American swiftly packed up his office papers and personal belongings, eleven suitcases and footlockers in all, in preparation for the long train ride north.

It was then that Yale discovered he was caught in something of a riddle. As with everyone else in wartime Syria, he needed a travel permit, or vesika, in order to leave Jerusalem. Since he was a foreigner, however, his permit had to be personally authorized by Djemal Pasha, and Djemal now rarely left Damascus. For agonizing days, Yale tried to think of some way out of this conundrum, until finally he received a tip that Djemal was coming to Jerusalem on a brief fact-finding mission. It was this that spurred his anxious trip up the Mount of Olives that February morning.

But even as he waited in the main hallway of the German Hospice for the chance to b.u.t.tonhole the Syrian governor, William Yale found his trademark self-confidence deserting him. ”America was on the verge of war with Germany,” he recalled, ”and there was nothing I could do to be of use to Djemal Pasha. To make matters worse, I had [earlier] been accused of being a member of a revolutionary Arab group. Certainly I could not expect Djemal Pasha to feel kindly towards me.”

Perhaps another factor weighing on Yale was the singularly unproductive role he had performed at the behest of his employers while in Jerusalem. Despite being given concession over a vast swath of Judea by Djemal Pasha, Standard Oil had failed to produce a single drop of Palestinian oil for the Turkish military machine.

As Yale waited in the hospice foyer, Djemal at last emerged from a far doorway and, surrounded by a coterie of high-ranking German and Turkish military officers, strode briskly down the corridor toward him. But the oilman froze, didn't even try to get the governor's attention as he swept past. Appalled by his own timidity, Yale simply stared after the receding entourage until someone called to him, ”Mr. Yale, what on earth are you doing here?”

Turning, Yale saw that his questioner was a man named Zaki Bey, the former military governor of Jerusalem. A courtly and cultured figure, in the early days of the war, Zaki Bey had endeavored to s.h.i.+eld Jerusalem's foreign community from the harsher edicts of both the Constantinople regime-he had reportedly warned the Greek Orthodox patriarch to hide his church's valuables ahead of a government seizure warrant-and the resident German intelligence corps. For his conciliatory actions, Zaki Bey had ultimately been forced from office by the Germans, but had somehow remained a member in good standing of Djemal Pasha's inner circle. Just as important, given the circ.u.mstances of the moment, Zaki Bey was a member in good standing of William Yale's biweekly bridge club. After hearing of the American's predicament, the former governor tore off the last page of a government doc.u.ment, hastily scribbled out a travel authorization on the back, and sped down the corridor in pursuit of Djemal. Shortly afterward, he returned, the signed vesika in hand.

”As the horses jogged wearily down the Mount of Olives,” Yale wrote, ”I hummed with joy. After two long years of exile during which time I had seen the increasing misery of war entangle those about me, I now held in my hand a paper which would start me on my way home.”

Of course, what the future held once he reached that home was an open question. If the Americans did finally enter the war, Standard Oil's operation in the Middle East would be shut down for a long time to come. Thus idled, Yale would probably be let go or shunted back to the lowly work he'd performed in the American oilfields. In contemplating this uncertainty, the oilman apparently decided that whatever debt of grat.i.tude he might owe to Djemal Pasha for allowing his escape from Palestine, it was a debt best kept to acceptable limits. During the long train ride back to Constantinople, a grinding, stop-and-start ordeal of nearly three weeks, Yale took very careful note of all that he observed out its windows: German and Turkish troop movements, the status of railway construction projects, the location of military encampments and ammunition storehouses. Depending on what the future brought, that information might be of great use to someone-and it might also be very useful to William Yale.

LAWRENCE'S WORST FEARS had been misplaced, as he discovered when he reached Wejh on February 6 and rushed into hurried conference with Faisal. It was certainly true that the Arab leader was keen to move on Aqaba, but he was just as keen that the French play no role in it; if anything, his meeting with Colonel Bremond a week earlier had served to only deepen Faisal's distrust of the Frenchman.