Part 29 (1/2)

36 ”In many ways”: Report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, August 25, 1917; NARA RG84, Entry 58, Volume 399.

37 ”grossly exaggerated”: Townley to Balfour, August 10, 1917; PRO-FO 371/3055.

38 Even Aaron Aaronsohn: Aaronsohn, ”The Evacuation Menace,” undated but late July 1917; PRO-FO 141/805.

39 Of even greater import: Lawrence to Wilson, Intelligence Memo, undated but circa April 21, 1917; PRO-FO 686/6, f. 88.

40 ”a highly mobile”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 224.

41 ”Everyone was too busy”: Ibid., p. 225.

42 ”Auda is to travel”: Wilson to Clayton, ”Note on the Proposed Military Plan of Operations of the Arab Armies,” May 1, 1917; PRO-FO 882/6, f. 351.

43 ”The element I would”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 226.

44 ”We now have a chance”: Wilson to Clayton, March 21, 1917; PRO-FO 882/12, f. 199201.

45 When Wilson forwarded: Wingate to Foreign Office, April 27, 1917; MSP-41d.

46 ”On 2nd May”: Sykes to Wingate, May 5, 1917; MSP-41d.

Chapter 13: Aqaba.

1 ”Never doubt Great Britain's”: As related by Wilson to Clayton, May 24, 1917; PRO-FO 882/16, f. 113.

2 ”His Sherifial Majesty”: Wingate to Wilson, July 20, 1917; PRO-FO 882/7, f. 35.

3 Now it required: Lawrence's account of his journey to and capture of Aqaba is drawn from Seven Pillars, book 4, chapters 3944, pp. 227312.

4 After a tense three-hour: Sykes to Wingate, May 23, 1917; MSP-41b, p. 3; slightly different version in PRO-FO 371/3054, f. 329.

5 ”Monsieur Picot received”: Sykes to Wingate, May 23, 1917; MSP-41b, p. 5; slightly different version in PRO-FO 371/3054, f. 330.

6 Even those senior officials: Tanenbaum, France and the Arab Middle East, 19141920, pp. 1718.

7 ”Although Sykes and Picot”: Wilson to Clayton, May 25, 1917; PRO-FO 882/16, p. 5.

8 ”[Hussein] stated to Faisal”: Newcombe, ”Note” on Sykes-Picot meeting with King Hussein, May 20, 1917; GLLD 9/9.

9 The only way Hussein: Despite Sykes's repeated a.s.sertions to the contrary, there is ample evidence that he didn't disclose the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement to King Hussein at their May 1917 meetings. Well into 1918, Cyril Wilson and other British officers in conference with Hussein consistently reported that the king had no knowledge of the part.i.tions of the Arab ”nation” called for in that agreement, but instead continued to believe that the far more generous framework specified in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence remained in effect. To cite only the example discussed here, it's exceedingly hard to imagine that Hussein would have agreed to the Baghdad-Lebanon formulation had he known beforehand of the proposed dispensation of Baghdad province as specified in Sykes-Picot. As Tanenbaum (France and the Arab Middle East, p. 17) points out: ”It did not make sense for a leader of a rebellion to ask an outside power to annex the territory for which he was fighting and hoped to rule.”

10 In their back-and-forth: McMahon to Hussein, October 24, 1915, as cited by Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p. 420.

11 ”for a short time”: Report by Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office, ”Memorandum on British Commitments to King Husein [sic],” December 1918; PRO-FO 882/13, p. 7, f. 225.

12 ”he knows that Sir Mark”: ”Note by Sheikh Fuad El Khatib taken down by Lt Col Newcombe,” undated but May 1917, p. 3; PRO-FO 882/16, f. 133.

13 ”If we are not going to see”: Wilson to Clayton, May 24, 1917; PRO-FO 882/16, f. 111.

14 ”we are deeply grateful”: Faisal Hussein, ”To All Our Brethren-The Syrian Arabs,” trans. May 28, 1917; SADD Wingate Papers, 145/7/89.

15 ”I do not attach very”: Clayton to Sykes, July 30, 1917; SADD Clayton Papers, 693/12/30.

16 ”short statement of fact”: Wilson to Symes, June 20, 1917; PRO-FO 882/16, f. 127. Many historians contend that it was King Hussein and Faisal, not Mark Sykes, who dissembled about the substance of their meetings in May 1917. In The Question of Palestine, Isaiah Friedman wholeheartedly accepts Sykes's version, a.s.serting (p. 206) that at their preliminary, early May meeting, ”Feisal's misgivings were set at rest by Sykes's explanation of the Anglo-French Agreement ... The interview with Hussein on 5 May went off equally well.” Sykes's only fault, in Friedman's view, was a failure to make a personal record of his and Picot's subsequent talks with Hussein. ”For this omission,” he writes, ”Sykes had to pay the penalty when a year later, to his surprise, Hussein feigned ignorance of the Anglo-French Agreement and pretended to have learned of it first from Djemal Pasha's Damascus speech ... ”

Not only Hussein's protestations, but Sykes's own actions, belie this contention. On May 12, 1917, just one week after his first meeting with Hussein, Sykes attended a high-level strategy meeting at Reginald Wingate's Cairo office. At that meeting, Sykes described in detail the agreement he and Picot had reached with the Cairo-based Syrian ”delegates” nearly three weeks earlier, but made no mention of the vastly more important accord he had supposedly reached with Hussein just days prior. One reason may have been that this May 12 conference was attended by Colonel Cyril Wilson, the official British liaison to Hussein, and a person uniquely positioned to refute such an a.s.sertion.

As for the subsequent meetings Sykes and Picot held with Hussein, it's difficult to discern any possible motive for two career military officers, Stewart Newcombe and Cyril Wilson, whose missions in the Hejaz would have been made markedly easier if Sykes's account of those meetings were true, to so vehemently refute it.

17 ”The whole question”: Symes to Wilson, June 26, 1917; PRO-FO 882/16, f. 12930.

18 As for Faisal: Wilson to Clayton, May 20, 1917; SADD Wingate Papers, 145/7/36.

19 ”They saw in me”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 2526.

20 ”Can't stand another day”: Lawrence as quoted by Wilson, Lawrence, p. 410 n. 40.

21 ”Clayton. I've decided”: Ibid., p. 410 n. 41.

22 Lawrence's northern: Lawrence, Seven Pillars (Oxford), chapter 51.

23 ”Very old, livid”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 546.

24 ”I saw that with my answer”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars (Oxford), chapter 51.

25 ”In other words”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 26.

26 In debriefings: In his debriefing of July 6, 1917, in London, Samuel Edelman, the U.S. consul in Damascus, reported a 25 percent desertion rate among Anatolian Turkish soldiers brought to Syria, a rate surely surpa.s.sed by less loyal elements of the empire; PRO-FO 371/3050.

27 The more perceptive: See PRO-FO 371/3050, File 47710.

28 The spare diary: Prfer, Diary, May 21July 18, 1917; HO.

29 As he reported to: Prfer to Mittwoch, April 12, 1917; NARA T149, Roll 365, Frame 399.

30 ”the High Command has”: Engle, The Nili Spies, p. 129.

31 Now, in mid-June 1917: The account of William Yale's 1917 return to the United States is drawn from Yale, It Takes So Long, chapter 7.

32 The situation was even worse: Yale, ”PalestineSyria Situation,” to U.S. State Department, June 27, 1917; NARA 763.72/13450.

33 ”the disposition of”: Yale to Secretary of State Lansing, June 30, 1917; YU Box 2/ Folder 48.

34 ”no guns, no base”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 306. For an account of the battle at Aba el Lissan, see also Lawrence, ”The Occupation of Akaba,” undated; PRO-FO 882/7, f. 6368.