Part 19 (1/2)

Senior British officials had been gunning for Bremond since the previous spring; in fact, antipathy for him appeared to be one of the few points on which Lawrence and Mark Sykes fully agreed. ”I am convinced that the sooner the French military mission is removed from Hejaz, the better,” Sykes had written the Foreign Office back in May. ”The French officers are without exception anti-Arab, and only serve to promote dissension and intrigue.” In Sykes's opinion, that antagonistic tone was set by the head of the French mission, in ”the deliberately perverse att.i.tude and policy followed by Colonel Bremond.”

The force of Sykes's condemnation may have actually served to keep the French colonel around that much longer. Anxious not to appear acquiescent to their ally, upon being informed of British displeasure with Bremond, Paris had replied that, coincidentally enough, they were already considering radically downscaling his Jeddah mission. Apparently to create a face-saving ”decent interval” that would allow for French authors.h.i.+p of the idea, nothing was then done for the next six months. Playing their own role in the charade, British officials busied themselves in the meantime by debating just what honorific to bestow upon their irritant. The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, it was finally resolved, and Reginald Wingate had taken the opportunity of that conferral to extend to Bremond his ”warm compliments and congratulations on the valuable work recently performed by the French Detachment under your command in the Hejaz.”

But just because edouard Bremond was now the holder of one of Britain's highest military commendations didn't alter the fact that, at the end of the day, he was still a Frenchman. As the dismissed colonel set sail for France-to maintain the decorous facade, he was officially taking a six-week leave-Wingate fired off a cable to a senior official at the Foreign Office. ”Bremond's antecedents are known to you,” he wrote, ”and I think it very probable that main object of his journey is political and to canvas opinion in Paris against entente policy of Picot and Sykes. Latter should be warned.”

What Bremond's departure didn't mean was an end to French maneuvering in the Middle East. Very much to the contrary. With Allenby's success in Palestine, what had previously been a hypothetical divvying up of Middle Eastern spoils between the Entente powers had suddenly turned quite real. And with tangible stakes in the game, the political intrigue was about to grow far more intense.

Lawrence got a glimpse of this on December 11 when after the ceremonial entry into Jerusalem, the senior British staff repaired to a banquet hall for lunch. As the French political agent officially attached to Allenby's army, Georges-Picot enjoyed a place of honor during the ceremony, and he evidently took that to mean the two-year-old plan he and Mark Sykes had worked out for Jerusalem's international administration remained in effect. In the banquet hall, Picot approached Allenby to announce, ”And tomorrow, my dear general, I will take the necessary steps to set up civil government in the town.”

In Lawrence's telling, the comment brought an awkward silence to the hall. ”Salad, chicken mayonnaise and foie gras sandwiches hung in our wet mouths unmunched, while we turned to Allenby and gaped. Even he seemed for the moment at a loss.” Only for a moment, though. Turning to the French political agent, Allenby explained that, as Jerusalem fell within the British military zone, the only true authority there was the military commander in chief-namely, himself.

But if the changed military situation was drawing new pressures from the French, that was only one small facet of the political troubles now facing the British. Lawrence saw this firsthand when, after the Jerusalem ceremony, he went on to Cairo. He found a city seething with rage.

Mark Sykes, apparently thinking better of his earlier opinion that the Arabs would have no objection to increased Jewish settlement in Palestine, had endeavored to keep knowledge of the Balfour Declaration in the Arab world to an absolute minimum. That effort had been an abject failure, and as news of the declaration spread among the Egyptian populace that November, dismay had quickly turned to anger. Even as British authorities tried to placate those protests, there had then come Djemal Pasha's speech in Beirut exposing the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. With startling speed, and with potential consequences that might reduce Allenby's victories in Palestine to virtual insignificance, the long British campaign to win and keep the Arab world to its side was dealt a serious double blow.

As he observed the situation in Cairo, Lawrence foresaw dark days ahead; if the Balfour and Sykes-Picot revelations were stirring the normally quiescent and heavily policed Egyptian population to near revolt, what effect would they have among the Arab rebels gathered in Aqaba and their prospective allies across Syria? If secretly thankful that he'd had the foresight to inform Faisal of Sykes-Picot nine months earlier-if knowledge of that had only come now, so improvidently combined with that of the Balfour Declaration, it was hard to imagine Faisal ever trusting in Lawrence or any other Briton again-the news was certain to fuel fury among those won over by the Arab leader. No matter how committed they were to Faisal or the cause of Arab independence, it had never been far from any of these men's minds that the Hashemite leaders of the revolt might be dupes, unwitting or otherwise, of their British and French paymasters. This had been the contention of Constantinople all along, of course, and that charge had now been given both amplification and credence by Djemal Pasha's disclosures in Beirut.

In Cairo, Lawrence soon received confirmation of the box in which Faisal was finding himself, and also learned of the potential escape hatch being offered by Djemal.

After receiving Djemal's peace-feeler letter of late November, Faisal had forwarded a copy to his father. In mid-December, Hussein had in turn pa.s.sed it along to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah. Perhaps Hussein did so to show that, even now, he fully trusted in the British, or perhaps it was meant to convey a warning that in the face of British double dealing, other options were available to him. Of course, he may have simply figured the British would soon find out anyway, since Djemal had mentioned his peace overtures to the Arab rebels in his Beirut speech.

Whatever the motive, Hussein's proffer of Djemal's letter set off alarm bells in British Cairo. A few days prior, Clayton had warned Sykes that with news of Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration spreading through the Arab world, it was surely only a matter of time before the Turks approached the rebels with a counteroffer; Djemal's letter was proof that this time had already come. Fortunately, in Clayton's view, neither Faisal nor Hussein had responded to the overture-they had done the proper thing and notified the British authorities-but who knew what might happen when the next Turkish offer came?

Lawrence saw matters quite differently. In fact, in Djemal Pasha's letter, he saw a unique opening for the Arab cause.

As he'd confided to George Lloyd in October, Lawrence no longer regarded himself as fighting for Great Britain, but for Arab independence. Within the upper reaches of the British military and political staff in Cairo, it was common knowledge that British emissaries had for the past several months been meeting in Switzerland with their Turkish counterparts toward forging a peace deal, and if Great Britain felt no compunction against secretly negotiating with the enemy, then why should the Arabs? To the contrary, by playing the Turkish card, by possibly extracting specific terms of settlement from them, the Arabs might then be able to turn around and wring concrete concessions from the British and French. Ultimately, by playing their cards adroitly, the Arabs might gain independence no matter who finally won the war.

Not that Lawrence chose to spell any of this out to his superiors in Cairo. Instead, he suggested that it might be in Britain's interests to ascertain just what the Turks were willing to offer the Arabs, so that the British could respond preemptively. Implausible as it might seem, this suggestion found a receptive ear in Reginald Wingate. ”I have recommended King Hussein to send no official replies [to the Turks],” Wingate cabled the War Cabinet, ”but Major Lawrence will consult Faisal as to whether any further confirmation of new Turkish policy could be obtained by interchange of verbal [sic] messages between him and Djemal.”

The War Cabinet swiftly moved to scotch this proposal, but not swiftly enough; Lawrence, it turned out, had left Cairo on the same day, Christmas Eve, that Wingate had sent his cable, so that by the time the War Cabinet weighed in, he was already back in Aqaba with Faisal. Just as he had done at other critical junctures, Lawrence would now capitalize on the delay in receiving orders as an excuse to pursue his own course. That course was to encourage Faisal to enter into a dialogue with his Turkish enemies. Over the coming months, Faisal and Lawrence would establish and maintain just such a dialogue with the chief Turkish general operating on the south Syrian front.

In Seven Pillars, Lawrence engaged in rather labored reasoning to justify these dealings with the enemy, arguing that with the Ottoman regime increasingly riven between Islamists like Djemal Pasha and Turkish nationalists like the general, Faisal might drive a wedge between them. ”By suitably guarded phrases,” Lawrence wrote, ”we could throw the odium of the [Arab] Revolt on [Djemal's] clerical party, and then perhaps the militarists might fall out with them.” Ultimately, so this reasoning went, such a falling-out would benefit both the Arabs and the Turkish nationalists, the former to gain their independence, the latter freed up to concentrate on preserving their homeland of Anatolia.

Perhaps recognizing the thinness of this argument, Lawrence subsequently tried to put distance to his own role in the affair. Thus, the account in the 1922 so-called Oxford Text edition of Seven Pillars-”Faisal, with my full a.s.sistance, sent back tendentious answers to Djemal”-became Faisal acting quite on his own by 1926.

Three years later, Lawrence offered a much simpler-and more jaded-rationale for his and Faisal's actions. It came in reply to a question about those wartime contacts put to him by none other than William Yale. ”All is fair in love, war, and alliances,” Lawrence wrote Yale in 1929. ”Poof!”

IT APPARENTLY WASN'T enough for Aaron Aaronsohn that he flagrantly violate Chaim Weizmann's gag order while in the United States. It was also necessary that Weizmann be made fully aware of it, as Aaronsohn proceeded to do in a lengthy report to the British Zionist leader on December 13, 1917. Along with a series of meetings with officials in Was.h.i.+ngton, he recounted, there had been his address to the City Club in Boston, ”to which all the Jewish notables of the city were invited.” This was followed by his talk at the conservative and steadfastly anti-Zionist Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, precisely the sort of opposition bastion that Weizmann desired be avoided but where, according to Aaronsohn, he had been warmly received. ”I tried to be brief-I didn't speak for more than forty minutes-and all hostility in the audience ceased.”

Surely adding to the warm reception Aaronsohn received in the United States was the news of the British capture of Jerusalem on December 9. Since the beginning of the war, few events had more electrified the American public, Jews and Christians alike, and it was quickly leading to a spirited national debate over the future dispensation of the Holy Land. Nowhere was this debate more p.r.o.nounced than within the Jewish community, and the early hesitation of American Zionists to embrace the Balfour Declaration was rapidly falling away.

However, Aaronsohn's charm offensive was not nearly so successful with the man Chaim Weizmann and his British supporters regarded as crucial to their American effort, Louis Brandeis. He had several cordial meetings in Was.h.i.+ngton with the Supreme Court justice, but Brandeis remained decidedly cool to the idea of an American delegation joining the Zionist Commission soon to be on its way to Palestine; this, Brandeis pointed out, would lend the appearance of official American support for Britain's Palestinian endeavor-which, of course, was precisely the British goal.

The second and more sensitive aim of the British Zionists-an American declaration of war on the Turks-was made fairly plain in a letter from Weizmann to Brandeis in mid-January. ”It must be abundantly clear,” Weizmann wrote, ”that there is a complete coincidence of American-British-Judean interests as against Prusso-Turkish interests.... This is why I think that a Jewish Palestine must become a war aim for America exactly in the same way as [German-occupied] Alsace Lorraine and an independent Poland.”

With that, Brandeis had evidently heard enough. As far back as April 1917, Weizmann had enlisted Brandeis to secure Woodrow Wilson's support for the Jewish homeland idea, and the Supreme Court justice had pursued that effort as far as his sense of ethics allowed. Now, not only was Weizmann asking him to lean on the president to dramatically expand the American war effort, but referring to the vague ”national home for the Jewish people” noted in the Balfour Declaration as ”Jewish Palestine.” Brandeis finally wrote Weizmann a terse cable stating that American partic.i.p.ation in the Zionist Commission was ”now impossible.” It was the beginning of a rift between two of the world's most prominent Zionist leaders that would never fully heal.

AT THE RIDGELINE, Lawrence drew up on his camel to survey the shadowed town of Tafileh in the ravine below. It was a distinctly uninviting place, and as he was soon to discover, home to a situation quite unlike any he had encountered over his sixteen months in the Arabian war theater.

It was the morning of January 20, 1918. Five days earlier, a mixed force of Bedouin warriors and a five-hundred-man unit of the Arab Legion that had been training in Aqaba had stormed into Tafileh, located in a mountain valley in southern Syria, and chased out the town's small Turkish garrison. To the north lay the Arabs' next objectives, the larger settlements of Kerak and Madeba. Lawrence had come to a.s.sist in the operations against those towns, and to then push on to the northern sh.o.r.e of the Dead Sea; if all went to plan, it would be there, in the vicinity of the ancient city of Jericho, that the Arab rebels would finally forge a direct land link with General Allenby's army in Jerusalem.

But as guerrilla fighters throughout history have discovered, it is one thing to conduct hit-and-run raids against the enemy, and quite another to take population centers and hold them to one's side. While modern insurgency and counterinsurgency experts have coined a term for the process-”hearts and minds”-the bare truth is there are no hearts or minds to be won. Instead, the essential focus of civilians caught in a guerrilla war zone is simply to stay alive, and they will cast their lot with whichever side best ensures that-until that side doesn't anymore, at which point the civilians will move to the other side. In this most primal of contests, appeals to nationalism or ideology are next to worthless; ”allegiance” is won by providing security or instilling terror, or through some combination of the two.

In the streets of ”liberated” Tafileh, Lawrence encountered a perfect ill.u.s.tration in miniature of this hearts-and-minds fallacy. There had been no joyous celebrations among those townspeople at being freed from the Turkish yoke or at the notion of a united Arab nation; rather, Tafileh's merchants and small farmers and shepherds saw themselves as caught between two bad choices. They regarded the marauding Bedouin warriors with equal parts fear and hatred, viewed them as little more than camel-borne bandits. If less apprehensive of the disciplined Arab Legion, they quite naturally saw this large force as a potentially calamitous drain on their meager food supplies, and had quickly hidden away whatever stores they could. Behind this was a collective fear of what would happen if the Turks retook the valley, the reprisals likely to follow, and as usually occurs in such situations, this had produced a sharp divergence of opinion over where safety best lay.

”Affairs are in rather a curious state here,” Lawrence reported to Gilbert Clayton on January 22. ”The local people are divided into two very bitterly opposed factions, and are therefore terrified of each other and of us. There is shooting up and down the streets every night, and general tension. We are taking steps about police, etc., which will allay this state of nerves, and I hope produce enough supplies for us to go on with.”

Working against that, though, was the h.o.a.rding carried out by the villagers, a development already causing food shortages in the valley and enormous price increases in whatever was available. This, in turn, was fueling growing resentment among the populace, and growing anger among the warriors. ”I'm sorry not to be able to send you proper figures of quant.i.ties of supplies here,” Lawrence concluded his January 22 report, ”but have been very busy since I got here in trying to find out who was for us, and where they were. The conflicts of ideas, local feuds, and party interests are so wild (this being the moment of anarchy the whole district has been longing for for years), that hardly anyone could straighten them out in a hurry.”

But the situation was about to get much worse. The day after writing to Clayton, Lawrence learned that a sizable Turkish force was on its way to retake Tafileh.

By the time he reached Tafileh, Lawrence had been back in Arabia from his Jerusalem-Cairo sojourn for a full month. He'd spent that time taking stock of the Arab Revolt, conferring with Faisal in Aqaba, preparing for what was to come next. Shortly after his return, he'd joined in a foray against the Hejaz Railway aboard the newest British weapon to be introduced to the Arabian front, the Rolls-Royce armored car. While the two armored cars had inflicted only minor damage on the Turkish outpost they targeted, it was immediately apparent to all that this new weapon fundamentally changed the desert war. Now, with an absolute minimal investment of men and materiel, the British could thoroughly dominate the railway, attacking its isolated Turkish garrisons and disrupting the line almost at will. With such dominance there at last came acceptance in British military leaders.h.i.+p of the argument Lawrence had been trying to make for nearly a year: there really was no good reason to push for the fall of Medina; better to leave those thousands of marooned enemy soldiers precisely where they were.

His preparations had also been personal. In the wake of his ordeal at Deraa, Lawrence set about organizing his own private army, or bodyguard. ”I began to increase my people to a troop,” he wrote, ”adding such lawless men as I found, fellows whose dash had got them into trouble elsewhere.” His recruitment of the ”lawless” was quite deliberate and clever. Troublemakers within their own tribes, perhaps even outcasts altogether, these men would ultimately be loyal to Lawrence alone, a consideration that also explained the inclusion of the two camp miscreants, Farraj and Daud, in their number. It was a bond of personal loyalty for which the bodyguard unit would pay dearly, however; by Lawrence's estimate, nearly sixty of them would be dead before war's end.

It was with this expanded retinue that, on January 10, Lawrence had set off to join the ongoing operation at Tafileh. As he'd been informed by General Allenby's staff in Jerusalem, the British army in Palestine probably wouldn't be sufficiently rested and reequipped to embark on their next push until mid-February. In light of that delay, Lawrence and the war planners had come up with a fairly modest interim scheme for the Arab rebels. Avoiding the string of major population centers of the Syrian interior-still under Turkish control and a long way from the reach of British forces in Palestine-the rebel army would instead clear the ground in between, the Moab Plateau mountains just to the east of the Dead Sea, then forge a link with the British near Jerusalem. Capturing Tafileh had been the first objective in this campaign, and next up were the larger towns of Kerak and Madeba, but all was suddenly cast into doubt by the news that the Turks were marching on Tafileh.

If hewing to their past tactics, the Arabs would have taken this opportunity to pack up and melt away. Lawrence was enough a student of guerrilla insurgencies, however, to realize that the rules of warfare had now abruptly changed. Just as in Tafileh, the residents of Kerak and Madeba were sitting on the sidelines, waiting to cast their lot with the winner. This meant that the fate of the three towns was inextricably linked, that if Tafileh was abandoned, any chance in Kerak or Madeba was lost too. In essence, the rebels had no choice but to stand and fight.

That effort got off to a very shaky start. On the afternoon of January 24, the vanguard of the Turkish force of some one thousand soldiers sent down from Kerak entered the Tafileh valley from the Wadi Hesa gorge a few miles north of town. In quick order, they pushed the thin rebel picket line all the way back to the town's outskirts. Fortunately for the rebels, night fell before the Turks could fully press their advantage; under the cover of darkness, the commander of the Arab Legion hastily withdrew his forces all the way to the southern end of the valley. ”Everybody thought we were running away,” Lawrence would report to Clayton. ”I think we were.”

Before dawn, Lawrence ventured into the town and saw firsthand the effect of the Legion's withdrawal on the residents. ”Everyone was screaming with terror, goods were being bundled out of the houses into the streets, which were packed with women and men. Mounted Arabs were galloping up and down, firing wildly into the air, and the flashes of the Turkish rifles were outlining the further cliffs of the Tafileh gorge.”

Observing that a small picket force still held a bluff north of town, Lawrence urgently sent word back to the Legion commander for reinforcements and machine guns to be brought up, then hurried to the bluff himself. As morning broke, the situation for the tiny force there-perhaps thirty Arab warriors and an equal number of Tafileh residents-turned ”rather difficult.”

”The Turks were working through the pa.s.s and along the eastern boundary ridge of the plain,” Lawrence reported, ”and concentrating the fire of about fifteen machine guns on the face and flank of the rather obvious little mound we were holding. They were meanwhile correcting the fusing of their shrapnel, which had been grazing the hilltop and bursting over the plain, and were [now] beginning to sprinkle the sides and top of the hill quite freely. Our people were short of ammunition, and the loss of the position was obviously only a matter of minutes.”

But the holding action on the bluff proved crucial. By the time the position was abandoned, the main Arab force had hurried forward with their machine and mountain guns to form a new line on a parallel ridge a mile and a half behind. Amid this, there occurred one of those small, seemingly insignificant deeds upon which battles are often decided. During his own dash back to safety, Lawrence had shown the presence of mind to count off his paces, and he calculated that the distance between the abandoned bluff-the position the Turks would soon occupy-and the Arabs' new defensive line was right around thirty-one hundred yards. No sooner had the main Turkish force settled upon the bluff and deployed their own heavy weaponry than they were engulfed in a storm of mortar fire from the Arabs' mountain guns.

With the Turks pinned down in the center, Lawrence drew on his knowledge of military history to conduct a cla.s.sic pincer attack, dispatching small units of fighters out in a wide arc to work their way behind the unsuspecting enemy. Shortly after 3 p.m., the trap was sprung, the Arab machine gunners on the flank pouring fire into the now completely exposed Turks on the bluff. With their machine- and mountain-gun crews quickly wiped out, the Turkish troops wavered and then began a disorganized scramble for the safety of the Wadi Hesa gorge. Except there was no safety to be found there either. With all semblance of cohesion gone, throughout the evening and into the night, the fleeing Turks were set upon by Arab cavalrymen and marauding Bedouin, even mountain villagers bent on vengeance or loot. Of the thousand Turkish soldiers who marched into Tafileh, Lawrence estimated their losses at some five hundred dead and wounded, with another two hundred captured, but even this may have been on the low side; he later heard reports that no more than fifty made it back to Kerak, the rest picked off one by one in the gorge. It had come at a cost of some twenty-five Arabs killed, and perhaps three times as many wounded.

The rout at Tafileh was a cla.s.sic Napoleonic-style trap, and one that would shortly win Lawrence the Distinguished Service Order medal. Yet it was an action he himself would describe as ”villainous,” a pointless exercise in one-upmans.h.i.+p. ”We could have won by refusing battle, foxed them by maneuvering our center as on twenty such occasions before and since.” Instead, by engaging the enemy in a conventional battle, the Arabs had lost one-sixth of their strength to casualties, making an advance on Madeba or Kerak all but impossible for the near future. ”This evening,” he wrote, ”there was no glory left, but the terror of the broken flesh, which had been our own men, carried past us to their homes.”

But at Tafileh, Lawrence would exhibit a new and unsettling trait: hatred for the enemy, an element of fury at their stupidity for having attacked him. Even if he might lament the fate of the ”thousand poor Turks” who had marched into Tafileh, it was bereft of the compa.s.sion that had once marked him. Indeed, upon hearing of the Turks still being ma.s.sacred in the gorge long after the battle had been won, Lawrence did nothing. ”I should have been crying-sorry for the enemy,” he recounted in Seven Pillars, ”but after the angers and exertions of the battle, my mind was too tired to care to go down into that awful place and spend the night saving them.”

Six months earlier, in the wake of a similarly one-sided battle at Aba el Lissan, Lawrence had ensured that the mortally wounded enemy be placed along a streambank so that they might at least have water while they died. At Tafileh, even those Turks lightly wounded were left out unattended as a fierce snowstorm came in that night; by morning, all were dead. ”It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war, but no special reproach lay on us for it. We risked our lives in the blizzard ... to save our own fellows, and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks.”

Chapter 17.

Solitary Pursuits It might be fraud or it might be farce, [but] no one should say that I could not play it.

T. E. LAWRENCE ON HIS ROLE IN THE ARAB REVOLT, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.

Doggedness and a thirst for adventure had carried William Yale far from his aristocratic origins. In 1908, those traits had taken him to the steaming jungles of the Panama Ca.n.a.l Zone and, shortly after, to the oilfields of Oklahoma and the backwaters of the Ottoman Empire. In the autumn of 1917, they had brought him to Cairo, the locus of the Allied war effort in the eastern Mediterranean, with the ambiguous t.i.tle of special agent to the United States Department of State. That a.s.signment also dropped him into a new kind of jungle, a maze of different interests vying for power in the future Middle East.

”These interests crossed and recrossed each other,” Yale would write, ”creating a confused tangle of intrigues and policies which was almost impossible to disentangle, and back of these policies and intrigues were the interested groups in France and Great Britain: capitalistic, religious, cultural. Added to these complications was the problem of Zionism and Jewish desires.... No more fascinating and interesting task could be given a man than that of attempting to understand and report upon this most complex of problems.”