Part 12 (2/2)

At the same time, Lawrence was perhaps secretly grateful to Bremond for having raised the Aqaba issue, for it had alerted him to the great struggle inevitably to come over that town's fate. In fact, that struggle was already under way, and the French colonel's gambit was but one small part of it.

Wejh was now the forward base camp of the Arab Revolt, and almost every day new tribal delegations were coming in to meet with Faisal and sign on to the revolutionary cause. Most of these tribes were from the desert and mountain expanses to the east and north, the revolutionary frontier opened by Wejh's capture, and these new recruits naturally wanted to take action in their own backyard. That meant rolling up the Red Sea coast toward Aqaba. Simultaneously, Faisal was coming under intense pressure from his Arab military advisors-primarily Syrian officers who had been captured or had deserted the Ottoman cause-to carry the fight farther north into their homeland. Both the shortest and easiest path to do so lay through Aqaba.

To these clamorings could be added those of the British officers now operating in the Hejaz, beginning with the head of the military mission, Stewart Newcombe. For the British field officers, Aqaba's seizure would mean a much shorter communication and supply line to Egypt, as well as control of the entire northern Arabian coastline. Even Gilbert Clayton back in Cairo urged in a January memo that the brigade once slated for Rabegh be put ash.o.r.e at Aqaba. In the face of this chorus, Lawrence surely realized that his protestations on the town's physical obstacles would ultimately be drowned out. Indeed, if the examples of Kut and Gallipoli and a score of battlefields on the Western Front were any guide, the very impracticality of an Aqaba landing would draw British war planners to it like moths to the flame.

Lawrence's contrarian view was unlikely to be much better received by the Arabs. As with all revolutionary movements, the animating force behind the Arab Revolt was pa.s.sion, and that was a sentiment fueled by daring and boldness, quite ant.i.thetical to pleadings for caution or restraint. Besides, if Aqaba were excluded, the Arabs' only other viable path into Syria was the inland route along the Hejaz Railway, a perilous option so long as the Turkish garrison in Medina stood at their backs. That option also meant relying on a very long and tenuous supply line to the coast, a line that would become more tenuous the farther north the Arabs pushed-although this concern possibly lay more in the theoretical realm than the practical; given the Arabs' current rate of progress in the inland theater of operations, it might not be the current generation of fighters that reached Damascus, but their grandchildren.

For all these reasons, Lawrence could strenuously counsel Faisal against going to Aqaba, could even expound on the trap he believed edouard Bremond was setting for him there, but it was unlikely to serve as anything more than a temporary brake. But due to his unique position in the British intelligence apparatus-privy to the innermost strategic and political planning being done in Cairo, but also operating in the field where those plans were to be implemented-Lawrence perceived something else as well.

In 1917, the European powers still held to the imperial mind-set that one's claim to primacy in a place was directly linked to the expenditure of blood and treasure in taking it, that legitimacy was established by quite literally planting one's flag in the soil. This ultimately was why the French, with precious few troops to spare for operations in the Middle East, had scuttled the British plans to go ash.o.r.e in the Gulf of Alexandretta in 1915, why they remained so uneasy about Murray's upcoming offensive into Palestine, and why, conversely, they wanted every available French soldier in the region to partake in any storming of Aqaba. It was only their physical presence, so they believed, that ensured their imperial claims would be honored.

This was not a peculiarly Gallic outlook, but one that very much infected the British as well. In all the talk of taking Aqaba, what most everyone envisioned, including Faisal, was basically a replay of the Wejh operation: an amphibious landing of Arab troops aboard British vessels, an advance against the Turkish garrison heavily supported by British naval guns, a new influx of British supplies and materiel once the town had fallen. Except Aqaba, in contrast to Wejh, was a town of enormous strategic importance to the British, and one that lay far outside the Islamic ”holy land” zone that had caused them to tread so gingerly in the environs of Mecca. Having expended British blood and treasure to seize it, the British military planners' temptation to claim Aqaba as their own-and simultaneously to relegate the Arabs to a subservient role-would prove all but irresistible. When that happened, the Arabs would be caught by the throat. For the first time, the two princ.i.p.al Entente allies, Britain and France, would have a sizable joint military force in the Middle East, and if forced to choose between French and Arab wishes, there could be little question which side British leaders in Cairo-or if not Cairo, London-would come down on. The most likely result would be the marooning of the Arabs in Aqaba, either explicitly or tacitly blocked from continuing north.

In short, then, edouard Bremond was the least of Faisal's problems. As the Rabegh episode had shown, Lawrence could handily outmaneuver Bremond by playing the anti-French card when Gallic interests clashed with those of the British, but it would be a very different game in a situation where British and French interests dovetailed. In essence, Faisal was well primed to spot French perfidy, but what about British perfidy?

As for why Lawrence might perceive all of this while others didn't, and why he was so ready to doubt the fidelity of his own government, the answer was simple: the Sykes-Picot Agreement. So long as that pact stood, British betrayal of the Arab cause in deference to its French ally was virtually preordained, most all the pledges contained in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence to be nullified. Indeed, because of that pact, the British government might have their own strong motive for putting the Arabs in a box at Aqaba; by denying them the opportunity to actively partic.i.p.ate in the liberation of Syria and other Arab lands, the British could then renege on their promises to the Arabs with a much clearer conscience.

But in trying to explain all this to Faisal-to impress upon him the need to turn away from the trap in Aqaba and make for Syria by the inland route; to not trust in the French, but not in the British either-Lawrence had only one potential instrument at his disposal: once again, Sykes-Picot.

In the British army of 1917-as indeed, in any wartime army at any point in history-the divulging of a secret treaty to a third party was considered a consummate act of treason, one sure to win the offender a long prison sentence if not an appointment with a firing squad. Yet at some point during those early days of February in Wejh, Lawrence took Faisal aside and did precisely that, revealing to him both the existence and the salient details of Sykes-Picot.

That Lawrence appreciated the enormity of what he had done is clear from the subsequent efforts he made to cover his tracks. In his own writings, as well as in queries put to him by various biographers, he remained resolutely vague about when he first learned of Sykes-Picot and how much he knew of its specifics, implying that he hadn't been in a position to actually tell Faisal very much. In fact, Sykes-Picot is not at all a complex doc.u.ment-it runs a mere three pages-and Lawrence almost certainly had a complete familiarity with it no later than June 1916, when it was circulated through the intelligence offices in Cairo. Similarly, in Seven Pillars he fas.h.i.+oned a false chronology whereby his hasty return to Wejh after meeting with Bremond in Cairo was born of the need to warn Faisal of the Frenchman's plan-”[Bremond] ended his talk ominously by saying that, anyhow, he was going down to put the [Aqaba] scheme to Faisal in Wejh”-an a.s.sertion that only worked by failing to mention that Bremond had already put the scheme to Faisal four days earlier. Lawrence's purpose for this omission, presumably, was to establish the idea, if it ever did come to light that he had divulged Sykes-Picot to Faisal at this juncture, that he had only done so to sabotage the conniving French. For British readers and officials alike in postwar Britain, this anti-French twist would make for a far more pleasing explanation than the alternative, his action less a treasonous offense than a perfectly understandable, even admirable, one.

It was all a construct that Lawrence's biographers-at least those in the lionizing camp-have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence's life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to a.s.sist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew?

Surely part of it was rooted in a peculiarly British sense of honor. To probably a greater degree than in any of the other warring nations in Europe, the British ruling cla.s.s in 1917 still fiercely held to the notion that their word was their bond. Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. Lawrence may have felt this more viscerally by virtue of being where the fighting and dying was taking place, but he was hardly alone in his disgust.

Another part of it may have stemmed from the rekindling of boyhood fantasies. As Lawrence would write, ”I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us.” Here in Arabia was suddenly the chance to be the knight-errant of his childhood readings, the liberator of an enslaved and broken people, and with this came a sense of purpose far stronger than any appeal to petty nationalism or to an empire that every day was further proving its unworthiness and obsolescence.

Whatever the combination of motives-and Lawrence may not have fully grasped them himself-the effect of his revelation to Faisal was both immediate and dramatic. The Arab leader now understood that despite their promises, the British were not going to simply cede Syria; if the Arabs wanted it, they would have to fight for it. Within days of Lawrence's return to Wejh, other British officers were noting with puzzlement how Faisal had suddenly cooled on the idea of an Aqaba operation; instead, his sole focus was on carrying his rebellion to points farther north, into the Syrian heartland itself.

It was the same news edouard Bremond heard on his next visit to Wejh on February 18. With Lawrence sitting in, Faisal informed the French colonel that he was now firmly opposed to an Aqaba landing, and instead intended to redouble his efforts inland. He once again turned down Bremond's offer of French advisors, explaining that he had no need for them, and even offered an arch apology for the ever-broadening scale of his military plans; he would happily concentrate his efforts on Medina, he told Bremond, if only he had the same French artillery ”to reply to the guns which the French had supplied to the Turks.” Outflanked once again, Lawrence gleefully noted, Bremond had little choice but ”to retire from the battle in good order.”

In subsequent weeks, the various British officers stationed in Wejh continually tried to rein in Faisal's suddenly lofty plans, to get him to focus on the immediate matters at hand. To little avail. As one of those officers, Major Pierce Joyce, would write on April 1, ”I am still of the opinion that Sherif Faisal's whole attention is directed towards the North.... I have endeavored to confine Faisal to local ambitions and military operations, but from somewhere he has developed very wide ideas.”

As for where Faisal might have developed those ideas, senior British officers remained baffled. Certainly, they didn't suspect Captain Lawrence. In an early March report to Cairo, Cyril Wilson's deputy in Jeddah singled Lawrence out for praise, calling him of ”inestimable value.”

FOR DJEMAL PASHA, the options were narrowing. Since the beginning of the year, the signs that the British would soon launch their long-awaited offensive in southern Palestine had grown increasingly obvious. By February, Turkish units had steadily ceded ground all the way to the outskirts of the town of Gaza, and still the British were closing; German aerial spotters reported a veritable sea of tent encampments and supply depots strung along the new, British-laid railway clear back to El Arish, forty miles away. While estimates of the British attack force varied, the one certainty was that it vastly outnumbered the some twenty thousand Turkish defenders standing to meet it.

It was a disparity that Djemal despaired of closing, for everywhere across the empire, the Ottoman army was stretched to the breaking point: actively engaged on two fronts in Europe, squared off against the Russians in eastern Anatolia, and now falling back before a second British Indian invasion force in Iraq. Even if any troops could be spared from these other fronts-and the reality was, they couldn't-it seemed all but impossible that they might reach Palestine in time to meet the British attack. With no other choice, then, Djemal had reluctantly turned his gaze to the ten thousand troops still holding Medina.

Any thought of abandoning that Arabian city was an extraordinarily painful one, which is probably why the governor had put it off until the eleventh hour. Not only did Medina anchor the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway, but Turkish control was absolute, never seriously threatened by the disorganized and outgunned Arab rebels who sporadically sniped about its edges; as such, it stood as a bulwark against the schemes of Emir Hussein to spread his revolt north. To give up Medina, Islam's second holiest city, would also be to hand the rebels and their British paymasters a tremendous psychological victory, the mantle of religious primacy in the eyes of the greater Muslim world.

On the other hand, the Turkish troops in Medina were some of the finest to be found in the Ottoman Empire, and led by one of its ablest generals, Fakhri Pasha; their presence on the Palestine front could make the difference between victory and defeat. And so, under the urging of Enver Pasha and the German military high command in Constantinople, in late February Djemal sent down word that Medina was to be given up, its garrison to begin the long trek back up the Hejaz Railway to Syria and hurried into the trenchlines in Gaza.

That order drew an immediate and ferocious response from a man named Ali Haidar. In the wake of Hussein's revolt the previous summer, Constantinople had handpicked Haidar as the new ”legitimate” mufti of Mecca and bundled him south to a.s.sume his position of supreme religious authority. Haidar had ventured no farther than Medina, of course, but there he had established a kind of ”puppet papacy” in rivalry to Hussein's regime in Mecca. If rejected by most Hejazi Arabs, Haidar's claim to being the true guardian of Islam's holiest shrines had given sufficient pause to the international Muslim community to blunt Hussein's appeal. All that would be lost if Medina was abandoned. ”The news horrified me,” Haidar wrote in his memoir. ”Hastily I sent a strongly-worded telegram to Djemal in which I said the very idea of deserting the Holy Tomb was utterly shameful, and that it should be protected to the last man, if necessary.”

The mufti clearly knew his audience, for just days after issuing his Medina withdrawal order, Djemal abruptly rescinded it; the city would stay in Turkish hands, and the outnumbered troops bracing for the British attack in Palestine would have to manage as best they could on their own.

But in one of those odd little wrinkles of history, the brief and quickly resolved Turkish debate over the future of Medina was about to have far-reaching consequences. That's because British military cryptographers intercepted and decoded Djemal Pasha's cable ordering the garrison's withdrawal, but failed to intercept his subsequent cancellation order. As a result, the Arab rebels and their British advisors would devote their energies of the next several months responding to an event that wasn't going to happen. It was also in these circ.u.mstances that T. E. Lawrence would eventually have his greatest epiphany about the Arab Revolt and how it should be fought.

AS INSTRUCTED, LAWRENCE was waiting at the dock when the Nur el Bahr, an Egyptian patrol boat, put into Wejh on the morning of March 8. There he took delivery from a British army courier of two rather extraordinary doc.u.ments.

The first was a transcript of Djemal Pasha's cable ordering the abandonment of Medina. As soon as could be organized, Djemal had instructed, the Turkish garrison was to begin moving up the Hejaz Railway, taking all artillery and other war materiel with them, and to form a new defensive line in the Syrian city of Maan, five hundred miles to the north. From there, whatever troops could be spared were to be rushed to the redoubt of Gaza in southern Palestine.

The second was a directive from Gilbert Clayton in Cairo. With General Murray's Palestine offensive now just weeks away, it was vital that no reinforcements reach the Turkish defenders in Gaza, which meant every effort should be made to halt the Medina garrison's departure. With the technical support of their British advisors, the Arab rebels were to dramatically expand their attacks on the Hejaz Railway, rendering as much damage to it as possible, and to make a blocking stand against the withdrawing Turkish units if necessary. With his usual propensity for discretion, Clayton suggested that neither Faisal nor the other Arab commanders need be informed of the reason for this escalation.

That directive placed Lawrence in another difficult spot. On the one hand, focusing on the railway played very much into his personal effort to get Faisal to concentrate on inland operations and to turn away from the attractive trap of Aqaba. On the other, taking Medina had been a primary objective of the Arab Revolt from the outset, and an Ottoman withdrawal from that city would be nearly as great a psychological victory to the rebels as an Ottoman surrender. Now the Arabs were being asked not only to forgo the prize they had fought so long for but to commit men to battle to prevent its delivery.

This, of course, was the motive behind Clayton's call for secrecy, but it raised at least two morally troublesome issues. If the Arabs were persuaded to occupy a stretch of the railway between Medina and Maan as a blocking force without being told why, then they also wouldn't know that they stood squarely in the path of the redeploying Medina garrison-and there could be few illusions about the outcome of the lightly armed Arab tribesmen cras.h.i.+ng up against one of Turkey's best-equipped armies in the open desert. There was also the point that the Arabs were now being asked to fight-and, inevitably, to take casualties-in the Hejaz so as to lighten the burden and death toll of British troops in Gaza. Certainly, that came with the territory of members.h.i.+p in a military alliance, but just as certainly, in Lawrence's estimation, the British owed it to their Arab allies to tell them why.

Since he had technically committed treason just weeks earlier with his divulging of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, this edict was much easier for Lawrence to disobey. ”In spite of General Clayton's orders,” he wrote Cyril Wilson that evening, ”I told [Faisal] something of the situation. It would have been impossible for me to have done anything myself on the necessary scale.” As he would later recount in Seven Pillars, Faisal ”rose, as ever, to a proposition of honour, and agreed instantly to do his best.”

The immediate task was to get word of the new directive to Abdullah-with his followers ma.s.sed near the Hejaz Railway at Wadi Ais, it would be they who would carry or lose the day-but given the past la.s.situde of Hussein's second son, Lawrence was convinced that both delivering that critical message and seeing it carried out had to be done by a British officer. With Stewart Newcombe and the handful of other British officers who knew the Hejaz interior already out on scouting or demolition missions, that left him. In the same hurried note he scribbled out for Cyril Wilson that evening, Lawrence explained that his plans were quite ad hoc given how little time he had to prepare: ”I think the weak point of the Turk [evacuation] plans lies in the trains of water and food. If we can cut the line on such a scale that they cannot repair it, or smash their locomotives, the force will come to a standstill.... If only we can hold them up for ten days. I'm afraid it will be touch and go. I am taking some Garland mines with me, if I can find instantaneous fuse, and if there is time, I will set them as near Medina as possible: it is partly for this reason that I am going up myself.”

Under the cover of darkness on the night of March 10, Lawrence set out with an escort of just fourteen fighters for the grinding five-day trek to Abdullah's camp.

It was a brutal journey from the outset. Lawrence was already in the grip of a severe bout of dysentery, and by noon of the following day was also afflicted with boils that covered his back. It was all he could do to stay in his camel's saddle as the small party plodded through one of the more desolate landscapes to be found in western Arabia. By the next day, March 12, his condition had worsened still, the dysentery twice causing him to faint ”when the more difficult parts of the climb had asked too much of my strength.”

Preoccupied by his own torments, Lawrence apparently failed to notice the growing friction among his small entourage, which was drawn from a fragile a.s.sortment of previously feuding tribes. What had been good-natured ribbing between them at the journey's outset had steadily escalated to the exchange of insults and veiled threats, a simmering stew of tension. Matters came to a head that same evening.

Taking shelter for the night in a mountain close known as Wadi Kitan, Lawrence fell into exhausted rest among the rocks. That ended with the report of a gunshot echoing through the canyon. Roused by one of his escorts, Lawrence was led over the rocks to view the body of a member of the traveling party, an Ageyl tribesman named Salem, dead with a bullet through the temple. With the skin around the entry wound burnt, it was clear the killing had been done at close range, which meant by another member of the group. Very quickly, the finger of suspicion fell upon a Moroccan named Hamed. During an ad hoc trial, Hamed ultimately confessed, and Salem's Ageyl brethren demanded blood for blood.

Over the preceding months, Lawrence had watched in fascinated admiration as Faisal had acted as peacemaker in scores of tribal feuds, disputes running the gamut of questions over foraging rights to decades-old-even centuries-old-blood vendettas. It was a role Faisal would continue to fulfill throughout the war. ”An account of profit and loss would be struck between the parties,” Lawrence later recalled, ”with Faisal modulating and interceding between them, and often paying the balance, or contributing towards it from his own funds, to hurry on the pact. During two years Faisal so labored daily, putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tiny pieces which made up Arabian society [that] there was no blood feud left active in any of the districts through which he had pa.s.sed.”

What made the system work was a collective faith in the mediator's impartiality, but it was an arrangement that came with a harsh side: when necessary, the peacemaker also had to act as the dispenser of justice.

The horror of what lay before him in Wadi Kitan seemed to slowly dawn on Lawrence. If the Ageyl insisted on Hamed's death, then it had to be so; this was the law of the desert. But while his execution by Salem's Ageyl kinsmen might ensure short-term peace on the journey to Abdullah's camp, once word of it reached the larger rebel community it was sure to spark a blood vendetta between the Ageyl, a very important and numerous tribe, and the many Moroccans who had joined the revolt. The only real solution, then, was for an impartial third party to carry out Hamed's execution, and in Wadi Kitan that night there was only one person who was ”a stranger and kinless.” As Lawrence would recall in Seven Pillars, ”I made [Hamed] enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain.... I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments' delay, which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest.”

But the first bullet failed to kill the man. Instead, Hamed fell to the ground shrieking and thras.h.i.+ng, the blood spreading over his clothes in spurts. Lawrence fired again, but was so shaky he only struck Hamed's wrist. ”He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body s.h.i.+vered a little.”

It was the first man Lawrence had ever killed. Stumbling his way back up to his perch among the rocks, he immediately lay down and fell into exhausted sleep. By dawn, he was so ill that the others had to hoist him into his saddle to continue the journey.

AARON AARONSOHN HAD arrived-or at least he was sufficiently susceptible to kind words and respectful audiences to imagine so.

By the middle of March 1917, the man who had so long wandered the bureaucratic wilderness of Cairo was finally being recognized by the British intelligence community as one of their most important a.s.sets, the conduit for a fount of information beginning to come in from enemy-held Palestine. With tremendous satisfaction, the agronomist could note the steadily expanding number of British officers who had once given him short shrift, whether due to his temperament or his outsider status or his Jewishness-perhaps in some cases a combination of all three-but now sought his counsel, extending invitations for him to join their dinner table.

This breakthrough had begun in earnest in mid-February, when he had gone on board the spy s.h.i.+p Managem for yet another attempt to reach Athlit. This time, the weather had cooperated, and they had picked up one of Aaronsohn's confederates, a man named Liova Schneersohn. Best of all, the spy ring had been alerted to the British effort to make contact by the couriers left ash.o.r.e on previous runs, and Schneersohn brought on board with him a trove of recent intelligence reports in a waterproof satchel.

”We left at once,” the agronomist noted in his diary of February 20, ”happy.”

With that run, the link to the Athlit spy ring was finally firmly established, and in the weeks and months ahead, couriers on board the British coastal runners would collect a steady supply of reports on conditions inside Palestine. The British could only be amazed at the wealth of intelligence they received-as well as rueful at not having availed themselves of the opportunity first presented a year and a half earlier. With the Jewish spy ring gradually expanded to some two dozen operatives throughout Palestine, and many of them holding prominent positions in the local government, the Athlit ring detailed everything from the location of Turkish military supply depots, to the precise number of railway troop cars pa.s.sing through the crucial junction town of Afuleh; in this last effort, they were helped by an enterprising agent who thought to open a refreshment stand alongside the train station. For their part, the Jewish conspirators finally gave their ring a code name, NILI, the Hebrew acronym for a pa.s.sage from the Book of Samuel, Nezah Israel Lo Ieshaker, or ”the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or relent.” That was all a bit too exotic for the British, who continued to officially refer to Aaronsohn's spy ring simply as ”Organization A.”

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