Part 14 (2/2)

KING HUSSEIN TO HIS SON FAISAL, MAY 1917.

His Sherifial Majesty [King Hussein] evidently suffers from the defects of character and ignorance of system common to Oriental potentates.... The task of guiding an Oriental ruler or government in the way they should go is no light one-as I know to my cost-and you have my fullest sympathy. It must be heartbreaking work at times.

REGINALD WINGATE TO CYRIL WILSON, JULY 20, 1917.

It was a moment when the awful burden of leaders.h.i.+p fell upon Lawrence as if a great weight, reminiscent of what had occurred in Wadi Kitan two months earlier. Then, the mantle of authority had required him to execute a man. Now it required him to try to save one, but quite possibly to lose his own life in the effort.

It was midmorning on May 24, his party's fifth day in El Houl. Arabic for ”the Terror,” El Houl is a vast trackless and waterless expanse in northern Arabia empty of even the smallest signs of life, and Lawrence had dreaded that leg of their journey to Syria ever since leaving Wejh. Reality had been worse than the imagining. Within hours of entering El Houl, the forty-five-man caravan had been buffeted by a ferocious headwind, ”a half-gale,” in Lawrence's estimation, ”so dry that our shriveled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped.” The wind, and the burning, blinding sand it kicked up, continued almost without pause for the next four days.

To endure in such situations, humans tend to retreat into a kind of closed-off mental state, their entire focus honed to simply trying to reach the end. Such was the case with Lawrence and Auda's party in El Houl, so much so that on the morning of May 24, no one seemed to take note of the riderless camel padding alongside the others. Perhaps they a.s.sumed she was one of the baggage camels that traditionally lagged behind, or that her rider had switched to another camel and was to be found elsewhere along their extended line. Most likely, in their semihibernative states they simply couldn't be roused to care. When finally Lawrence investigated the mysterious camel, he discovered it was the mount of Gasim.

”A fanged and yellow-faced outlaw,” Gasim was a native of the Syrian city of Maan, and Lawrence had brought him along on the trek in hopes that he might make contact with other Arab nationalists in his hometown. Of course, this also made Gasim an outsider among the traveling Howeitat and Ageyl tribesmen and, in the harsh code of the desert, just as friendless in a crisis as the condemned Hamed had been at Wadi Kitan. As Lawrence recounted, Gasim's status now ”s.h.i.+fted the difficulty to my shoulders.”

Perhaps indicative of the stress El Houl had put on his own reasoning skills, Lawrence made a most foolhardy decision, not only to go back alone in search of Gasim, but not even to tell the others he was doing so. Within a very short distance, he discovered, all trace of their path had vanished, the camels' tracks in the sand swept away by the scouring wind, and then the caravan itself receded until it was lost in the murk. To somehow find Gasim and then return to the caravan, Lawrence could only rely on the compa.s.s readings he'd periodically noted in his diary and trust he hadn't erred.

It was fifteen days since they had set out. In Bedouin tradition, a number of tribal chiefs, including Faisal, had accompanied them the first few miles out of Wejh by way of farewell, and then the forty-five or so travelers had headed off into the northeastern darkness, the last anyone in the Hejaz would hear of them for over two months.

They traveled light. Along with a few rifles and 20,000 gold sovereigns-to be disbursed among Syrian tribal leaders they hoped to win to the rebel cause-each man carried in his saddlebags some forty-five pounds of flour. That and water would be their staples until they reached their initial staging ground, the Wadi Sirhan depression on the Syrian frontier, in an estimated three weeks' time.

Despite being struck by a new round of fever and boils, Lawrence would recall the first days of that journey in almost idyllic terms, the beginning of a great adventure. It was also during this time that there occurred one of the more intriguing side stories to his time in Arabia, the account of how he came to obtain his two camp orderlies, given the names Daud and Farraj in Seven Pillars (their actual names were Ali and Othman).

It occurred during a day of idleness when, as Lawrence rested his weary boil-covered body in the shadow of a rock escarpment, a young boy rushed up beseeching his help. Having fled from a nearby Ageyl encampment, Daud offered that his best friend, Farraj, was about to be severely beaten by the camp commander for accidentally burning down a tent; a word from Lawrence, the boy suggested, might stay the punishment. That theory was discredited when Lawrence took the matter up with the pa.s.sing Ageyl camp commander, Saad, a few moments later. Explaining that the two boys were constantly getting into trouble and that an example had to be made, Saad instead offered a Solomon-like solution in deference to Lawrence's appeal: Daud could halve his friend's punishment by submitting to the other half himself. ”Daud leaped at the chance,” Lawrence wrote, ”kissed my hand and Saad's and ran off up the valley.”

In Seven Pillars, Lawrence would strongly suggest that the Farraj-Daud relations.h.i.+p was a s.e.xual one, describing it as ”an instance of the eastern boy-and-boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable.” In the process, Lawrence was to add to speculations-still a point of heated debate in some circles nearly a century later-about his own s.e.xuality. Much of that speculation stems from his description of the ”two bent figures, with pain in their eyes, but crooked smiles upon their lips,” who showed up at his camp the next morning and begged to be taken on as his servants: ”These were Daud the hasty and his love-fellow, Farraj, a beautiful, soft-framed, girlish creature, with innocent smooth face and swimming eyes.” After first trying to turn the boys away, explaining he had no need of servants, Lawrence finally relented, ”mainly because they looked so young and clean.” From that day on, the mischievous antics of Daud and Farraj would provide lighthearted relief to Lawrence's travels.

But already in these early days of the journey, the party faced a worrisome problem. Virtually all their camels, both the baggage and mounted ones, suffered from the virulent mange endemic to Wejh, and without even the rudimentary unguents to control it-b.u.t.ter was a traditional desert remedy-many were quickly going lame or mad from it. The epidemic may have contributed to the deaths of two of the baggage camels that, during a climb through a particularly narrow defile, lost their footing and plunged to the rocks below. None of this bode well as they came to the edge of El Houl.

”In all Faisal's stud of riding-camels,” Lawrence noted, ”there was not one healthy. In our little expedition every camel was weakening daily. [Auda's chief lieutenant] Nasir was full of anxiety lest many break down in the forced march before us and leave their riders stranded in the desert.”

The torturous nature of the pa.s.sage across El Houl was reflected in the small pocket diary Lawrence carried. Instead of the voluminous notes he normally kept on his travels, the few short fragments he managed there grew steadily more disjointed, almost nonsensical. And then, on the fifth day, Gasim disappeared.

In deciding to turn back for the lost man, Lawrence surely knew that Gasim was probably already dead; for anyone caught out in El Houl without shelter or water at that time of year, life expectancy could be measured in terms of hours. He surely also knew that if he'd made the slightest miscalculation in his compa.s.s readings, he too would soon expire. Still, he persevered-and finally, he was lucky. After an hour and a half of riding, he spotted a small black object in the far distance, an object that, as he approached, took the form of a staggering and delirious Gasim. Hoisting the man onto the back of his own camel, Lawrence turned and raced to find the others.

In David Lean's epic film, the rescue of Gasim would be immortalized in a ten-minute scene, culminating in Lawrence finally rejoining his comrades to their relieved and raucous cheers, his n.o.ble act cementing his image as a true ”son of the desert.” The reality was quite different. By the code of this brutal landscape, Gasim had brought his death upon himself by having failed to secure his camel when he stopped to relieve himself, and, rather than praised, Lawrence was berated by some of his comrades for having risked his life for one clearly so worthless. Furthermore, the caravan commander now administered another beating to Daud and Farraj for letting Lawrence go back alone.

ON MAY 26, 1917, two days after Lawrence's rescue of Gasim, King George V and his War Cabinet received some gladdening news. It came in the form of a top-secret cable from Reginald Wingate in Cairo, a report on Mark Sykes's latest triumphant visit to Arabia.

Following on Sykes's earlier solo visit, he and his French diplomatic counterpart, Francois Georges-Picot, had recently met with King Hussein in Jeddah in hopes of thras.h.i.+ng out a settlement between the Arabs and the French over the future status of Syria. Since their desires were almost diametrically opposed-Hussein still insisting that postwar Syria be part of a greater independent Arab nation, the French just as insistent that it come under French control-there had been little expectation of success. The first day's session confirmed this prognosis. After a tense three-hour confrontation on May 19, Picot and Hussein had parted ways even more intransigent than before.

It came as a shock, therefore, when the following morning Hussein had his interpreter read aloud to the European envoys a bold proposal: the king was now ready to accept the same future French role in the ”Moslem-Syrian littoral”-presumably meaning the coastal, Lebanon portion of Syria-as the British were to a.s.sume in the Iraqi province of Baghdad. Since a victorious British army had recently placed Baghdad under military occupation, and the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement called for keeping the province under direct British control indefinitely, this Baghdad-Lebanon equation of Hussein's had the effect of suddenly ceding to the French most everything they were asking for in Lebanon. As Sykes reported to Wingate with what could only have been gross understatement, ”Monsieur Picot received this very well and relations became cordial.”

It was a remarkable achievement. Against all odds, Sykes had managed to make a crucial first cut through the great Gordian knot created by Britain's conflicting pacts and promises in the Middle East.

Yet for those familiar with Sykes's modus operandi there was something about this breakthrough that should have given pause. In contrast to his usual prolixity on all manner of topics, his full report on the Jeddah meetings, the most important diplomatic discussions between the Allies and King Hussein to date, ran a mere four pages, with Hussein's startling Lebanon concession dealt with in a single sentence. Additionally, neither Sykes nor Picot had pressed Hussein to commit his offer to paper, nor had they managed to obtain a copy of the pledge the king's interpreter had read aloud. Even those senior officials in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs who had been fervently wis.h.i.+ng for just such a resolution quickly began to suspect there was something altogether too neat about the deal struck in Jeddah.

Those concerns took tangible form when Stewart Newcombe arrived in Cairo on May 27 and walked into Gilbert Clayton's office. Both he and Cyril Wilson had been present for at least some of the proceedings in Jeddah, and had written up their own accounts of what had taken place. Newcombe also brought the written account of Fuad al-Kutab, Hussein's interpreter and the man who had actually presented the proposal. While they differed in specifics, all three indicated it had actually been Mark Sykes, not Hussein, who had first come up with the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. More troubling, the king appeared to have come away with a radically different idea from the Allied envoys of what that formula meant.

The most exercised over the matter was Cyril Wilson. ”Although Sykes and Picot were very pleased at this happy result,” he wrote, ”and the Sherif had made the [Lebanon-Baghdad] proposition himself, I did not feel happy in my own my mind, and it struck me as possible that the Sherif, one of the most courteous of men, absolutely loyal to me and with complete faith in Great Britain, was verbally agreeing to a thing which he never would agree to if he knew our interpretation of what the Iraq situation is to be.”

In his distressed-and rather repet.i.tive-twelve-page letter to Clayton, Wilson detailed how he had repeatedly pressed Sykes to clarify exactly what Hussein intended by the offer, only to have his concerns brushed aside. Instead, Wilson reported, the entire affair had been marked by a breezy refusal on Sykes's part to get into particulars.

If less emotional, Newcombe's protest was in many ways more striking. His time in the Hejaz had been a difficult one, he had little faith in the Arab rebels as a viable fighting force, and yet the episode in Jeddah had left him perturbed. Central to his apprehensions was a conversation he'd had with Hussein's son Faisal, who had also been in Jeddah during the envoys' visit. In making his startling offer, Newcombe reported, ”[Hussein] stated to Faisal very vehemently that he was perfectly willing to do this because Sir Mark Sykes, representing the British government, had told him to, and that as Sir Mark Sykes had advised him to leave everything in [his] hands, he felt glad to do so, having absolute trust in the British government.”

From Newcombe's vantage point as a British officer, this a.s.surance by Sykes, conjoined to Hussein's obviously limited awareness of what he was agreeing to, meant the British government now had a moral obligation to see the Arab Revolt through to the end. ”Otherwise we are hoodwinking the Sherif and his people, and playing a very false game in which [British] officers attached to the Sherif's army are inevitably committed, and which I know causes anxiety in several officers' minds in case we let them down.”

For all their unease, however, Wilson and Newcombe were either too diplomatic to call Sykes out directly, or too credulous to piece the whole scheme together. In actual fact, what had occurred in Jeddah was not a potential misunderstanding, but an intricate and very cleverly executed deception on Mark Sykes's part.

The cornerstone for that deception had been laid three weeks earlier, during Sykes's first visit to Arabia. In his similarly spare report of that trip, Sykes a.s.serted that he had fully explained the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Hussein and Faisal, and won their grudging acceptance. While that wasn't at all Faisal's a.s.sessment of their meeting, the British envoy could be confident that British officialdom would surely take his word-a sitting member of Parliament and a baronet no less-over that of an erratic Arab tribal chieftain and his warrior son. Of course, there was at least one other person who knew that Sykes had lied about his candor during that first trip, and whom British officialdom just might listen to. This was T. E. Lawrence, but to Sykes's good fortune, Lawrence had now fallen from view, embarked on his northern trek, and he remained totally incommunicado during Sykes's crucial return visit to Jeddah with Picot.

It seems Sykes was inspired to his master deception by pondering the very issue that had made such a mess of the initial Picot-Hussein meeting on May 19: Picot's insistence that France enjoy the same role in coastal Syria as the British were to a.s.sume in Baghdad. At the time, Sykes had been deeply irritated by this linkage-he wanted to keep French and British desiderata in the Middle East quite separate-and he had left the discussions in a dispirited mood. However, once back on HMS Northbrook, the British wars.h.i.+p that had brought the envoys to Jeddah and upon which they were staying, an obvious solution to his dilemma apparently occurred to Sykes.

The reason Hussein was resisting the Lebanon-Baghdad linkage was simply because he didn't want any French presence anywhere, not because he somehow knew Baghdad was slated to fall under permanent British control. The only way Hussein could have known that was if Sykes had told him of that clause in Sykes-Picot, and Sykes most certainly had not.

Instead, the last word Hussein had on British intentions in Baghdad was the vague accord he had reached with High Commissioner Henry McMahon back in late 1915. In their back-and-forth correspondence, McMahon had argued that, in light of Britain's economic interests in Iraq, the provinces of Basra and Baghdad would require ”special administrative arrangements” within the future Arab nation, implying some measure of British control. In response, Hussein had offered to leave those provinces under British administration ”for a short time,” provided that ”a suitable sum [was] paid as compensation to the Arab kingdom for the period of occupation.” From all this, Sykes surmised, Hussein still held to the belief that any British presence in Iraq was to be along the lines of a short-term leasing arrangement, but that those provinces' ultimate inclusion in the greater independent Arab nation was secure. Indeed, on several recent occasions, Hussein had enigmatically a.s.sured his closest confidants, including both Faisal and Fuad al-Kutab, that he had an ironclad British promise about Iraq's future ”in his pocket,” even as he refused to show them the actual letters from McMahon.

To Sykes, it opened up a tantalizing prospect. Between Hussein's ignorance of Sykes-Picot, and Picot's ignorance of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, it might be possible to forge an agreement in which both sides thought they were gaining the upper hand. The ultimate beauty there was that with both sides believing they'd essentially tricked the other, neither would want to risk scuttling the deal by getting into specifics. On that same afternoon of May 19, Sykes sent an urgent message ash.o.r.e from the Northbrook asking that Fuad al-Kutab visit him.

At that meeting, Sykes impressed on Fuad the need to limit Hussein's overtures on the following day to just two points. The first, little more than a goodwill gesture, was for Hussein to announce that he would withhold support from a group of Syrian exiles who were soon to embark on an international lobbying campaign for Arab independence. The second, and obviously vastly more important, was for Hussein to cede to the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. To the nonplussed al-Kutab, Sykes was rea.s.suring, repeatedly telling the advisor to leave the matter in his hands and he would see to everything.

Even so, Hussein was wary of agreeing to the plan. He finally relented, al-Kutab related, because ”he knows that Sir Mark Sykes can fight for the Arabs better than he himself in political matters, and knows that Sir Mark Sykes speaks with the authority of the British government and will therefore be able to carry out his promises.” Besides, Hussein reminded al-Kutab once more, he had ”a letter from Sir Henry McMahon which promises all I wish. This I know is alright, as the British government will fulfill her word.”

The following morning, Fuad delivered Hussein's proclamation as directed. That afternoon, as the Northbrook sailed out of Jeddah harbor, Georges-Picot could believe France had just been handed Lebanon, while King Hussein could believe he had just maneuvered France into accepting the future independence of all of Syria.

Even if not grasping the fraud that had been perpetrated, Wilson and Newcombe were sufficiently appalled by Sykes's cavalier approach to demand a full accounting in their letters to Clayton. Wilson urged that Sykes be compelled to put in writing what he believed had been agreed to in Jeddah, and that Hussein be told precisely what British intentions truly were. ”If we are not going to see the Sherif through,” Wilson wrote, ”and we let him down badly after all his trust in us, the very 'enviable' post of Pilgrimage Officer at Jeddah will be vacant, because I certainly could not remain.”

But when it came to political gamesmans.h.i.+p, the Arabs were not necessarily rubes themselves. With his secret knowledge of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, courtesy of Lawrence, Faisal was understandably aghast at what his father had agreed to, and quickly sought to turn the tables. On May 28, he issued a public proclamation to the Syrian people calling them to arms in the cause of Arab independence, while heaping praise on Great Britain for her aid in that mission. ”Doubtless in doing so,” Faisal wrote, ”her sole object is to see in the world an independent Arab government, established and administered by the Arabs, without any modification of the boundaries of its country.” The French came in for similar treatment. After thanking France for her past contributions in Syria, Faisal noted that ”we are deeply grateful to her for having joined her Ally in recognizing our independence.”

Far from an accord, then, the real result of Sykes's charade in Jeddah was a deepening of the gulf between Arab and Allied aspirations in the Middle East, a schism that was soon to have very ugly and lasting repercussions. In the interim, British policymakers reverted to the strategy they knew best: do nothing, see what comes next, and hope that it all works out in the end. When asked about Faisal's proclamation, so at odds with the agreement ostensibly reached days earlier, Sykes shrugged it off as a propaganda ploy meant for domestic Arab consumption. When Clayton finally got around to taking Wilson's and Newcombe's complaints to Sykes, it was with an escape clause built in. ”I do not attach very great importance to this,” he wrote of Hussein's apparent confusion, ”as I think that events will be too strong for him and that, in the end, he will have to fall in line, or fall out.”

One man who wouldn't let things drop was the dogged Cyril Wilson. In late June 1917, fully a month after he'd first sent his complaints to Cairo and received no satisfaction, he wrote to Reginald Wingate's deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Symes, urging that Sykes be made to write out a ”short statement of fact” on exactly what had been agreed to at Jeddah. As Wilson pointedly noted, ”there cannot be any harm in writing a fact [sic] which Sir Mark Sykes, I understand, states he clearly explained to the Sherif.”

But paper trails had already caused enough problems in the Middle East, and Symes saw no reason to add to them. ”The whole question is at present in a state of flux,” he answered Wilson, ”and depends entirely on various developments in the war. It is therefore quite impossible to lay down anything in the least definite, and all we can do is to keep the various factions in play so far as possible until the situation becomes more clear. It is a difficult position, I know, but there it is.”

On a pathetic note, perhaps the stoutest defender of British honor in the wake of the Jeddah meetings was the man most victimized by them, King Hussein. Upon learning of the overture made on the decks of the Northbrook, Faisal got into a heated argument with his father, until Hussein finally cut him off with a rebuke: ”These words are from a father to his son. Never doubt Great Britain's word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear.”

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a refuge, but Lawrence saw it very differently: a place of torment and pestilence, a nightmarish landscape to be escaped as soon as possible.

Running in a northwest-to-southeast diagonal through the borderlands of Arabia and Syria (modern-day Jordan), the two-hundred-mile-long Wadi Sirhan is more properly a geological depression, a hundred-million-year-old narrow drainage valley for when this desolate corner of the world had abundant water. In 1917, the wadi was where Auda Abu Tayi arranged to have his Howeitat kinsmen a.s.semble to meet the tiny force he and Lawrence were bringing up from Wejh.

As Lawrence noted in Seven Pillars, with its ample water wells and relative lushness, Wadi Sirhan should have seemed a veritable paradise after their crossing of El Houl. Instead, at least two aspects made the place barely tolerable. The first was its poisonous snakes. There were horned vipers and puff adders and cobras, and they seemed to be everywhere-tucked beneath rocks, draped on bushes, coiled at water's edge-and as a man with an almost phobic fear of snakes, Lawrence never found a moment of true peace. Not that his fears were all that irrational; within days of arriving in Wadi Sirhan, three of the men who had made the pa.s.sage from Wejh were dead from snakebites, and four others nearly so. Neither did the local ”remedy” inspire much confidence, consisting as it did of binding a victim's wound with snakeskin plaster and then reciting Koranic verses over him until he died.

Then there were the banquets. Wadi Sirhan const.i.tuted the lower reaches of the domain of Nuri Shalaan, one of the most powerful tribal chieftains of southern Syria, and Auda had immediately set off to meet with Shalaan and gain his permission for the rebels' presence there. This left Lawrence to stand as one of the chief guests of honor at the nightly feasts of rice and mutton put on by the gathered Howeitat clans. As any westerner who has been their guest might attest, Bedouin hospitality can be so overwhelming as to border on the oppressive, and so it quickly became for Lawrence. Each night, different impoverished families competed to play host to the travelers from Wejh, and in Lawrence's lavish description of these banquets, what starts out as colorfully folkloric gradually veers toward the grotesque, especially when he lingers on the image of swollen-bellied children gathered at the periphery of the feasts, anxiously awaiting their chance to swoop in and s.n.a.t.c.h up any leavings from the communal tray.

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