Part 16 (1/2)

Lawrence, as noted, minimized the importance of that trek. Indeed, the few details he ever provided on it were in an obliquely worded four-page report he wrote immediately upon his arrival in Cairo. Ever the strategist, however, he evidently realized that in the official reaction to his Syrian adventure, he had been handed a powerful instrument to further his goals. He deftly wielded that instrument when brought before the new EEF commander, General Edmund Allenby.

Given the elaborate decorum that existed within the British military of 1917, it's hard to imagine a more incongruous meeting than the one that took place at the Cairo General Headquarters on the afternoon of July 12. Nicknamed ”b.l.o.o.d.y Bull” for his explosive temper, Edmund Allenby was a towering man with the physique of a boxer gone slightly to seed, an intimidating presence even when not clad in his general's dress uniform. On the opposite side of his desk sat the wraithlike Captain T. E. Lawrence, perhaps 135 pounds when healthy but now reduced to less than a hundred by the rigors of his desert exploits, dressed in a white Arab robe and turban and, by his own account (though it seems improbable), shoeless; Lawrence's uniform had been destroyed by moths during his long absence from Cairo, so he would claim, and he had yet to find time to replace it.

Lawrence surely knew something of Allenby's war record, including that it was a somewhat checkered one. During the British withdrawal at the battle of Mons in August 1914, Allenby had ordered his cavalry regiment to stand their ground before a much larger advancing German force, thereby enabling the rest of the beleaguered army to make an orderly retreat. Coincidentally, it was during that same battle that Archibald Murray, then the chief of the Imperial General Staff and monitoring the British retreat from a central command post, had fainted away from the tension. Much more recently, however, Allenby's star had been eclipsed at the battle of Arras, where he was criticized for being slow to take advantage of breaches in the German line to drive his men forward-a relative point, perhaps, in an engagement that saw the British advance less than two miles at the cost of 150,000 casualties.

As with Murray, then, Allenby's transfer to Egypt was meant as a demotion, but where this had induced a kind of crippling caution in Murray, Lawrence sensed it might spur something very different in Allenby. In the general's office that afternoon, he proceeded to paint a wondrously ambitious portrait of what the Arab rebels now stood poised to achieve. So long as Aqaba was quickly bolstered as the chief staging point, he explained, the Arabs could at last take their fight into the Syrian heartland. And not in any small way; in Lawrence's telling, there was now the opportunity to set the whole region aflame.

To complement the threadbare report on his Syrian spying mission, Lawrence had made a little hand-drawn map to ill.u.s.trate his plan to the general. It depicted no fewer than seven prospective Arab forces attacking the Turks across the length of Syria, as far west as the Lebanon coast and as far north as the cities of Homs and Hama, one hundred miles above Damascus. While he cautioned in his cover note that ”there is little hope of things working out just as planned,” if even some aspects of Lawrence's blueprint came to fruition, the bulk of Turkish forces deployed across northern and eastern Syria would find themselves stranded, unable to advance or even to easily retreat.

There was a catch, though. For this grand Arab uprising to succeed, Lawrence told Allenby, it required a simultaneous British army breakthrough in southern Palestine. Once that had been achieved, the two forces could move north in lethal tandem, the Arab irregulars shutting down the Hejaz Railway and marooning the Turks in their garrison towns in eastern Syria, while the British army, their inland flank protected by the Arabs' actions, advanced up the western coastal shelf. In Lawrence's plotting, even the quick capture of Damascus and Jerusalem were within the realm of possibility.

But there was another small catch. The fighters who would serve as the crucial linchpin to this Arab strike force, the Bedouin of eastern Syria, traditionally trekked farther east in autumn in search of better forage for their camels, effectively leaving the war theater. To make use of these essential warriors, Lawrence explained, action would have to commence no later than mid-September, or in about two months' time.

It's not altogether clear how much of this extravagant vision Lawrence himself actually believed. Even if flushed by his recent triumph at Aqaba, he was surely still too much the pragmatist to imagine that all the inertia and tribal squabbling that forever shadowed the Arab Revolt would somehow now melt away. He'd also undoubtedly had enough experience with the British military to know that haste was not its strong suit. Most likely, in putting forward his grandiose scheme he saw the chance to win over the new British commander in chief-unschooled in the sluggish pace with which events moved in the region, eager to redeem his soldier's reputation in the wake of Arras-to his own vision of a joint Arab-British liberation of Syria. It was a vision Allenby would have to embrace or reject quickly, of course, since Lawrence had also set a ticking clock.

But if there was an element of bluff in all this, who could possibly catch him out? T. E. Lawrence was now a celebrity in Cairo, the magical manager of Arab tribes, as well as the only British officer to have personally taken the pulse of their potential fifth columnists inside Syria. Even if he knew those prospective collaborators were nowhere near ready to rise up in two months, it's not as if anyone else knew. Instead, so long as the almost inevitable delay tripped up the British timetable, his secret knowledge of Arab unpreparedness would remain safe, and in the meantime he would have forged an alliance-and a mutual dependency-that couldn't be broken.

In Seven Pillars, Lawrence all but admitted to this game: ”Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”

And it was a performance that succeeded brilliantly. At the end of their meeting, the general raised his chin and announced, ”Well, I will do for you what I can.”

If he kept it low-key with Lawrence, Allenby let his enthusiasm be known to his superiors, including General William Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff and the overall coordinator of the British war effort. ”The advantages offered by Arab co-operation on lines proposed by Captain Lawrence,” he cabled Robertson on July 19, ”are, in my opinion, of such importance that no effort should be spared to reap full benefit therefrom.... If successfully carried out, such a movement, in conjunction with [British] offensive operations in Palestine, may cause a collapse of the Turkish campaigns in the Hejaz and in Syria and produce far-reaching results, both political as well as military.” So vital did Allenby view the scheme that he pa.s.sed on Lawrence's concern of losing the eastern Bedouin to their autumn grazing grounds should there be a delay. ”I therefore ought to be prepared to undertake such operations as may be possible with the force at my disposal by the middle of September.”

Even Robertson, a committed ”Westerner” loath to entertain ambitious plans in the East, was quickly sold on the idea; at the culmination of a flurry of cables between Cairo and London that July, he promised to immediately send Allenby as many as fifty thousand more troops for his upcoming Palestine offensive. It all marked an astounding turnaround in fortunes for the Arab Revolt. Just two months earlier, the rebels had been regarded as little more than a sideshow nuisance by Archibald Murray; now they were setting the timetable for the next British offensive in Palestine.

But the newly strengthened Arab-British alliance also signaled a change on the political front, one that General Allenby may not have appreciated or cared about, but that T. E. Lawrence most certainly did. Until recently, British planners had been pondering strategies to minimize the Arab rebels' role in Syria out of deference to their French allies. Now, by signing on to Allenby's plan-which really meant Lawrence's plan-the British military was setting on a course that completely ignored French concerns, and would eventually cast the whole framework of Sykes-Picot in doubt.

That was all a bit in the future, however, and in the interim, praise for Lawrence's exploits continued to come in from all quarters. Though he was found to be ineligible to receive the Victoria Cross (one of its stipulations is that the heroic deed must be observed by a fellow Briton), he was soon promoted to major, as well as named a Companion of the Order of the Bath, one of the highest levels in the British chivalric system available to junior military officers.

Amid his newfound celebrity, in early August Lawrence was asked to jot down his insights on working with Arabs for those British officers being sent for duty in the Hejaz, to share his secrets of success in a realm where so many others had come to crus.h.i.+ng despair. The result was a short treatise he ent.i.tled Twenty-Seven Articles. Some of his recommendations were commonsense, while others must have seemed rather exotic to his pupils. ”A slave brought up in the Hejaz is the best servant,” he advised, ”but there are rules against British subjects owning them, so they will have to be lent to you. In any case, take with you an Ageyli [tribesman] or two when you go up country. They are the most efficient couriers in Arabia, and understand camels.”

Above all, Lawrence counseled his readers to shuck their English ways, to so totally immerse themselves in the local environment as to know its ”families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads.”

Within the parochial British military culture of 1917, Twenty-Seven Articles had the force of revelation-and indeed, the tract continues to have profound influence today. Amid the American military ”surge” in Iraq in 2006, the U.S. commander in chief, General David Petraeus, ordered his senior officers to read Twenty-Seven Articles so that they might gain clues on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Presumably skipped over was Lawrence's opening admonition that his advice applied strictly to Bedouin-about 2 percent of the Iraqi population-and that interacting with Arab townspeople ”require[s] totally different treatment.”

AARON AARONSOHN AND Captain Ian Smith had never been close. From their first meeting, Smith, the EMSIB (Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau) liaison to the spy s.h.i.+ps operating out of Port Said, had made little attempt to hide his low regard for the Jewish spy ring in Palestine. From that inauspicious beginning, Smith-”always an idiot” in the agronomist's estimation-had seemed to go out of his way to slight Aaronsohn and his confederates in ways large and small, as if it were the British who were doing a great favor to the Jewish spies rather than the reverse.

No amount of past insults, however, quite prepared Aaronsohn for those of July 1. Evidently irritated that Aaronsohn had complained of his shabby treatment to an officer in the Arab Bureau, Smith acidly told the NILI ringleader that his spies in Palestine ”are no good. The work can be done much better by others.”

Making the episode especially galling was that it came at a time when the British were piling on NILI's workload at every turn-and in ways that went far beyond intelligence gathering. In the wake of the sacking-of-Jaffa story in May, an international relief effort had gone up to raise funds for its Jewish victims. To the obvious question of how such funds might reach the needy within Palestine, someone in the British hierarchy hit on the just as obvious answer: the NILI network. And so long as the NILI operatives were distributing relief funds across Palestine, why not propaganda materials as well? And how about in their spare time, they also carry out sabotage attacks? At the beginning of June, plans had been drawn up to smuggle explosives ash.o.r.e at Athlit so that a NILI team might blow up a crucial railroad bridge in the Jordan valley; toward that goal, Aaronsohn's chief lieutenant in Egypt, Liova Schneersohn, was now undergoing demolition training at a British army testing ground on the Cairo outskirts.

Aaronsohn had reluctantly agreed to each of these new demands put on his organization, seeing it as the price to be paid for British favor, but it made the insult from Ian Smith simply too much to bear. As he informed his allies in the Arab Bureau the day after that confrontation, since EMSIB apparently now had other and better operatives in Palestine, ”I no longer had the right to endanger my people in continuing the work.” Therefore, he was shutting down NILI.

Because it wasn't as if Aaronsohn lacked other reasons to feel grossly underappreciated that summer. At the core was the continuing mystery of just what his status was in Cairo, of where he and his organization fit into the larger scheme of things. In his meetings with Mark Sykes in April and May, Aaronsohn had learned that the British politician was working closely with two leaders of the English Zionist Federation, Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, in London. In fact, during his time in Cairo, Sykes had urged Weizmann to come out to Egypt to spearhead the Zionist effort there but, in lieu of that, to appoint Aaronsohn as his local ”representative.” Aaronsohn had gone along with the plan out of deference to Sykes, even though he was quite at odds with the milder brand of Zionism of Weizmann and Sokolow-but then he had received absolutely no communication from either man since. So vague had his status remained, and so futile his own efforts to receive guidance from the Zionist Federation that, just days before his run-in with Smith, he had asked Gilbert Clayton to take the matter up with Mark Sykes. Even this, though, had yielded nothing.

Thus out of the loop, Aaronsohn also remained quite unaware that his cherished Zionist cause was actually making great strides in London-and largely through the efforts of the tireless if uncommunicative Chaim Weizmann.

The campaign to prod the British government into a public declaration in support of a Jewish homeland had recently undergone a major overhaul. At one time, Weizmann had stressed the effect that such a declaration would have on American Zionists, causing them to add their influential voice to those calling for an end to American neutrality and intervention on the side of the Entente; obviously, that argument had lost much of its l.u.s.ter with the United States' entry into the war. Also headed toward oblivion that summer was the parallel contention that such a declaration would spur Russian Jews to rally to the prowar government of Alexander Kerensky; with the chaos in Russia deepening by the day, Kerensky's problems were now far beyond the point where Jewish support might make much difference. In early June, though, Weizmann had found a potent new argument courtesy of the Central Powers.

As Weizmann explained in a June 12 meeting with Robert Cecil, the British a.s.sistant secretary of state for foreign affairs, for many months he had been hearing rumors that the German government was trying to enlist leaders of the German Jewish community to act as intermediaries for a prospective peace deal. Weizmann had long dismissed these rumors, but recently they had gained great credence; in fact, he told Cecil, he had heard that German Jewish leaders were now actively considering such a role, provided the kaiser's regime met their demand for a Jewish state in Palestine. This the German government was evidently contemplating, judging by the recent and unprecedented spate of articles in the German press in support of a Jewish homeland.

To the degree that any of this was substantially true, the message was plain-that if the British didn't play the Jewish-homeland card soon, the Germans surely would-and Robert Cecil was a quick pupil. The day after his meeting with Weizmann, he sent a confidential memorandum to his superior, Lord Charles Hardinge. ”There can be no doubt that a complete change of front on the part of the German Government has taken place,” Cecil wrote, ”and that orders have been given to treat Zionism as an important political factor in the policy of the Central Empires.” The purpose of that change, in his estimation, was to influence the opinion of international Jewry ”and to utilize it in the interests of German propaganda against the Entente.”

In hopes of averting this potentially calamitous outcome, Cecil explained, his recent visitor had put forward a helpful suggestion. ”Dr. Weizmann concluded by urging very strongly that it was desirable from every point of view that His Majesty's Government should give an open expression of their sympathy with, and support of, Zionist aims, and should publicly recognize the justice of Jewish claims on Palestine.”

With alarm bells over a possible German-sponsored Jewish state reverberating through the British Foreign Office that June, this was a suggestion that an increasing number of senior British officials were ready to heed.

If all this remained unknown to Aaron Aaronsohn, it was also unknown to those Arab Bureau officials who scrambled to put out the fire sparked by Captain Smith's comments of July 1. Instead, they were just trying to save Britain's most important spy network in Palestine from shutting down.

As part of a renewed effort to show Aaronsohn respect, Smith was forced to apologize for his comments, and the agronomist was soon given an audience with the new EEF commander in chief, Edmund Allenby. Their meeting took place on the morning of July 17, just five days after Allenby's discussions with T. E. Lawrence. In a leisurely conversation, Aaronsohn filled in the general on a variety of topics regarding Palestine, everything from its agricultural conditions to the fighting abilities of its Turkish garrison, and even provided character sketches of Djemal Pasha-”very much inclined to plot, and clever at it”-and the German commander in Syria. ”The [commander in chief] listened with interest,” Aaronsohn noted, ”and questioned me intelligently, 'to the point.' He made an excellent impression on me.”

In the afterglow of that meeting with Allenby, Aaronsohn may have felt he had at long last ”arrived” with the British in Cairo. Then again, he'd felt that at various other times over the preceding seven months. The problem was, with the British forever striving to keep all options open, reluctant to ever give anyone either a positive or negative straight answer, there really was no such thing as having ”arrived,” the hearty embrace avoided for the cautious pat on the back. This was compounded in Aaronsohn's case by the new machinations in London over a possible declaration of support for a Jewish homeland, a generalized anxiety within much of the British government over where that might lead. As a result, the goal was to keep Aaronsohn happy but in limbo, to maintain that fine balance between encouraging his efforts and remaining circ.u.mspect as to their ultimate reward.

Fortunately, the British could rely on a man with considerable skill at such things, Reginald Wingate. ”I gather,” Wingate wrote a senior Foreign Office diplomat on July 23 upon learning of the government's latest tentative overture to the British Zionists, ”that the matter is by no means decided, and that you wish me to keep Aaronsohn satisfied without telling him anything very definite. This has been done.”

ON JULY 16, the captain of the British troops.h.i.+p HMS Dufferin was told to stand by at Port Suez in order to transport an important official down the Red Sea coast to Jeddah. The next morning, the s.h.i.+p's crew caught first sight of their distinguished guest when twenty-eight-year-old T. E. Lawrence sauntered up the gangway. It was a long way from the day, eight months earlier, when Lawrence had walked up another naval s.h.i.+p's gangway in Yenbo harbor only to be soundly rebuked for his unkempt uniform and insolent manner.

One measure of how greatly his stock had risen in the wake of Aqaba was the mission he was undertaking to Jeddah. In his discussions with Generals Allenby and Clayton, Lawrence had emphatically-and perhaps quite exaggeratedly-told of the abiding esteem with which the Syrians held Faisal ibn Hussein; they saw him as the Arabs' overall military commander, he had explained, and it was under his banner that they would rise in revolt. As with most everything else Lawrence stated in Cairo that July, his superiors had little way of either confirming or refuting this a.s.sertion, it simply becoming part of the narrative of what lay in store once the battle for Syria was joined.

From this, Lawrence saw the opening to go one better: to fully coordinate the joint Arab-British offensive in Syria-and, not coincidentally, to permanently weld the fortunes of the Arab cause to those of the British army-why not place Faisal and his forces directly under Allenby's military command? Lawrence had gained quick approval of this idea in Cairo, but there remained a huge potential roadblock: King Hussein. With his reputation for irascibility, along with his jealous efforts to control the rebel movement, it seemed highly likely the Hejazi king would reject the suggestion out of hand. Then again, he might just listen to Faisal's most trusted British advisor and the ”hero of Aqaba.” In short order, Lawrence found himself aboard the Dufferin bound for a meeting with Hussein.

But the mission to Jeddah was only the most visible sign of the young captain's new and profound influence over British policy in the region. Behind the scenes, Lawrence had already laid the groundwork for a dramatic restructuring of the British military presence in Arabia, one tailored to his specifications. As he rather immodestly explained in Seven Pillars, he had put the argument to Gilbert Clayton thus: ”Aqaba had been taken on my plan by my effort. There was much more I felt inclined to do-and capable of doing-if he thought I had earned the right to be my own master.”

During their week together in Cairo, Clayton had agreed to most of his subordinate's suggestions. With the war in the Hejaz essentially over-though the Turks still controlled Medina, they had now lost all offensive capability-the long and futile campaign to block the Hejaz Railway at El Ula could be brought to a merciful end. For the same reason, the main rebel base at Wejh was now to be virtually shuttered, with both its Arab forces and British logistics officers brought up to Aqaba. a.s.suming the role of de facto general, Lawrence plotted out the future deployments of those Arab armies to remain in the Hejaz, and worked up a list of the British army personnel to be retained, rea.s.signed, or let go. Clayton had drawn the line, however, on Lawrence's bold proposal that he be given overall command at Aqaba, pointing out that having a junior officer order about his superiors just wasn't the British way. Instead, they jointly settled on one of Cyril Wilson's deputies, Major Pierce Joyce, for the Aqaba post, an easygoing and unambitious officer unlikely to get in Lawrence's way.

Nothing, however, more exemplified Lawrence's changed status than his reunion with Colonel Wilson in Jeddah. After Lawrence's first visit to Arabia eight months earlier, Wilson had angrily commented to Clayton that the arrogant junior officer ”wants kicking, and kicking hard,” and had tried to prevent his return to Arabia on even a temporary basis. By July 1917, however, the colonel had come to see Lawrence, now in the process of being promoted to major, as both an ally and probably the most important British field officer operating in the Hejaz.

Just prior to Lawrence's arrival in Jeddah, Wilson had received a memorandum from Clayton outlining the sweeping personnel changes being contemplated for the region, pointedly noting that he had come to these ideas in consultation with Captain Lawrence. This detail made one feature of the memorandum all the more striking: pushed aside was Stewart Newcombe, still the officially designated head of the British military mission to the Hejaz.

Far more than to anyone else, it was to Stewart Newcombe that Lawrence owed his position in the Middle East. But in Lawrence's cold-eyed view, war was war, and whatever sense of grat.i.tude he felt for his mentor couldn't stand in the way of its conduct. Newcombe had endured a contentious tenure in the Hejaz, never quite adjusting to the Arabs' mysterious approach to war-making, and in myriad reports had complained bitterly of their lack of discipline and reliability. As Lawrence explained to Cyril Wilson upon his arrival in Jeddah, it had been decided that Newcombe would now be taken off the front and relegated to a rearguard role, effectively demoted. A surprised Wilson quickly acquiesced.

That same evening, Lawrence and Wilson met with King Hussein. It was Lawrence's first audience with the king, and he found him both charming and personable. That a.s.sessment may have been helped by Hussein's quick acceptance of the proposal to place Faisal and his army under Allenby's direct command.

A very different matter arose the following morning when Hussein summoned Lawrence to his Jeddah palace for a private meeting. With uncharacteristic bluntness, the king brought the conversation to a topic that had become something of a personal obsession: his meetings back in May with Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot.

While the controversy over what had or had not been agreed to at those meetings continued to find small echo in certain branches of the British government, its import had been diminished by the pace and urgency of other events. Surely adding to its waning effect was the polite tone adopted by dissident eyewitnesses like Cyril Wilson, with his couched language alluding to ”possible misunderstandings.” It was not at all the tone Lawrence would adopt, and what had taken Wilson many discursive pages to relate, he did in less than one: ”The main points,” he cabled Clayton after his second meeting with Hussein, ”are that he had altogether refused to permit any French annexation of Beirut and the Lebanon.... He is extremely pleased to have trapped M. Picot into the admission that France will be satisfied in Syria with the [same] position Great Britain desires in Iraq.... In conclusion the Sherif remarked on the shortness and informality of conversations, the absence of written doc.u.ments and the fact that the only change in the situation caused by the meeting was the French renunciation of the ideas of annexation, permanent occupation, or suzerainty of any part of Syria.”

Whether due to its brevity or the new celebrity of its author, within days that report was finding its way onto the desks of the seniormost officials of the British government. It had the effect of instantly resurrecting the debate over Britain's web of conflicting promises in the Middle East-as well as Mark Sykes's singular role in spinning that web.

But Lawrence's mission to Arabia was not quite done. While he was still in Jeddah, word came from Cairo that according to a reliable informant, Lawrence's chief partner in the Aqaba campaign, Auda Abu Tayi, was now secretly negotiating with the Turks to switch sides. Lawrence's immediate reaction was defensive-he suggested that perhaps it was actually a ruse on Auda's part to lull the Turks into inaction-but he evidently had less confidence in that theory than he let on. Within hours, he was on board a s.h.i.+p bound for Aqaba and a face-to-face confrontation with Auda.

Trekking inland on a fast camel, Lawrence found the Howeitat chieftain along with his two chief lieutenants, both also named by the informant as prospective traitors, in a tent outside the village of Guweira. For many hours they pa.s.sed as reunited friends, until Lawrence invited Auda and one of the other conspirators to join him for a walk. Once they were alone, he challenged the two men with what he had been told. ”They were anxious to know how I had learnt of their secret dealings,” Lawrence recounted, ”and how much more I knew. We were on a slippery ledge.”

Indeed, a ledge that conceivably could have been fatal for Lawrence. Instead, drawing on his extraordinary skill in knowing how to converse with Arabs in even these minefield circ.u.mstances, he put on an elaborate performance-sympathy, flattery, and ridicule all fused into one-to first disarm and then win the men back to the rebel side. Once returned to Aqaba, Lawrence cabled Cairo that the business with Auda amounted to little more than a misunderstanding, that all was now ”absolutely satisfactory.”

As Lawrence later admitted, he frequently shaved the facts in what he pa.s.sed on to Cairo about the Arab Revolt and its leaders, but suggested it was really to everyone's benefit. ”Since [British] Egypt kept us alive by stinting herself, we must reduce impolitic truth to keep her confident and ourselves a legend. The crowd wanted book-heroes.”

And like any good performer, Lawrence gave the crowd what they wanted.

ONCE THE MATTER of his Welsh ancestry got sorted out, William Yale and the British amba.s.sador to the United States settled down to business.