I walked out of the lobby into yellow sunlight and a swell of traffic, and trudged around the perimeter of the Ezbekiyya Gardens, which stood directly opposite the hotel. They had been closed to the public ever since a girl had been raped there in broad daylight, Khalid had informed me. Through the railings, the gardens looked faded and unkempt, but on 15 December 1914, when T. E. Lawrence took up his quarters in the Grand Continental, they were the showpiece of the city, bursting with exotic shrubs such as Australian beefwood, Madagascan flame and Cuban royal palm. Lawrence found Cairo very much alive. Though war with Turkey had been declared two months earlier, the news had done nothing to diminish the appeal of its winter season, and the frenzied circuit of receptions, masked balls, dinner parties, picnics, gymkhanas, race meetings and tennis parties went on unabated. The high points of the season were the glittering galas orchestrated at the Sultan Hussain Kamil’s Abdin Palace, and at the British Residency at Qasr ad-Dubbara, where Sir Hugh Mc-Mahon had recently succeeded Lord Kitchener as British Agent. There were other gaieties and amusements aplenty for the gentleman with time on his hands. He might play a round of golf or even some polo at the Khedivial Sporting Club on Zamalek island, sip coffee at two piastres a cup at Groppi’s or the Café Egyptien, quaff Bass ale at the Savoy Buffet, ogle the prohibited but no less risqué performance of Ghawazi dancing-girls at the Eldorado, join a moonlit donkey-ride to the Pyramids at Giza, or enjoy a comfortable weekend’s snipe-shooting in the Nile delta.
Imminent war had lent a certain dash to the figures of British officers residing in elegant hotels such as the Continental and Shepheard’s, and eligible subalterns were much in demand among wintering débutantes. After dark, dozens of stiff-backed young men in tailored uniforms and highly polished Sam Browne belts and boots, with forage-caps worn at the regulation angle, would float like peacocks through Ezbekiyya. Second-Lieutenant Lawrence did not appear to belong among these magnificent editions of British manhood. Small, long-haired, dishevelled, he was so far from possessing a military bearing that he rarely looked at anyone directly in the eye. Indeed, he claimed that he would not even recognize his own mother if she arrived unexpectedly, and had perfected the art of talking for twenty minutes without revealing that he had no idea whom he was talking to. Certainly, he did not emulate the sartorial style of his military peers. His trousers were slack and unpressed, his buttons unpolished, his pockets usually undone, his Sam Browne belt, if worn at all, was worn loose and dangling. He often wore the insignia of different ranks on either shoulder-strap, so that it was impossible to tell at any given moment whether he was a humble Second-Lieutenant or an unlikely-looking Lieutenant-Colonel. His cap was worn askew, with his straw-coloured hair protruding from beneath, and was not even graced with a badge – the ultimate snub to military convention, and the visible expression of his conviction that he was a ‘civilian in uniform’. In place of carefully bulled boots he wore patent-leather evening shoes, and a blood red tie instead of a khaki one. His future commanding officer in the Hejaz, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Joyce, would later write of his first encounter with Lawrence that he recalled only ‘the intense desire on my part to tell him to get his hair cut and that his uniform and dirty buttons sadly needed the attention of his batman’.1 His lack of cap-badge led him into difficulties for which he seemed to have a bizarre relish. Once, while attempting to cash a cheque at Messrs Cox and Co. in Cairo, for instance, the manager inquired as to his unit. ‘Haven’t got one,’ Lawrence replied, without elaborating. The manager then had the Army List brought. ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ Lawrence told him, ‘my name is not on it, but I should like to have my cheque cashed.’ Finally, as Lawrence refused to produce any references, the manager regretted that he would have to cable to Britain before he could cash the cheque.2
Lawrence tended to saunter rather than march, and ignored all salutes given to him as assiduously as he ignored his superior officers, speaking to everyone, whether senior or junior in rank, in the same matter-of-fact, studious, eccentric, pedantic Oxford tones. He gave the impression, carefully cultivated, in fact, of being a misplaced and absent-minded Oxford don who had somehow drifted into military uniform, and actually referred to the Intelligence Department as ‘the faculty’. He made no secret of his disdain for regular army officers, for red-tape military bureaucrats and for public-school hunting-shooting-and-fishing hearties, though he still took a certain snobbish pride in telling his mother that he was working alongside ‘Lord Anglesey, Lord Hartington and Prince Alexander of Battenburg’.3
His eccentric appearance belied his incisive mind, however, and he vowed to end incompetence. Put in charge of all maps supplied to GHQ, by the Survey of Egypt, he determined to go through map-production like a dose of salts. The topography of many theatres of the war was little known, and place-names were spelled in a wild variety of different ways, many of them bearing little relation to the way they were pronounced by natives. Although Lawrence knew that there was no foolproof system of transliterating Arabic, and would later take great pride in spelling Arabic names ‘anyhow’, he recognized that a consistent scheme must be developed which bore some resemblance to the actual pronunciation. He lost no time in criticizing the Survey’s transliteration system to the Director of the Reproduction Office, W. H. Crosthwaite, who had himself invented it. He similarly affronted W. M. Logan, Director of the Map Compilation Office, who objected strongly to being bossed about by this impudent little upstart. Ernest Dowson, Director of the Survey, recalled, however, that ‘it was not only the pompous, the inefficient and the pretentious whose cooperation Lawrence’s ways tended to alienate. Many men of sense and ability were repelled by the impudence, freakishness and frivolity he trailed so provocatively.’4 Cairo was very far in spirit from Carchemish, where Lawrence had been one of only two Europeans in a vast area, a sort of unofficial consul, a local employer and a man of great consequence. He was suddenly aware, perhaps, that the game he was playing here was a much bigger one, and with his instinctive feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, he was seeking desperately to establish himself in a position. He stood aloof from the social whirl, and was definitely not one of those to be found decorating the bar-stools in the Continental: he was not teetotal, he said, but merely lacked the sociability to enjoy a cosy drink. He had always felt ill at ease with the Egyptians, but his few forays into the streets now convinced him that they actually hated their British overlords. ‘Cairo is unutterable things,’ he wrote after settling in. ‘I took a day off last month and went and looked at it: no more: – and to think that – this folly apart – one might have been living on that mound in the bend in the Euphrates, in a clean place, with decent people not far off. I wonder if one will ever settle down again and take an interest in proper things.’5
In February 1915 Lawrence’s racing bicycle arrived from England, and he would cycle to work every morning from the Continental to GHQ, in the Old Savoy Hotel, which stood in what is today Talaat Harb Square, on a site now occupied by a department store. The Intelligence Department to which he had been posted was directed by his friend Stewart Newcombe, and consisted to begin with of only three other officers: Leonard Woolley and two Unionist MPs recently drafted in, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert. Despite congenial stories which later emerged about ‘The Five Musketeers’, there were two factions in the office from the start, for Newcombe, Lawrence and Woolley knew each other well from the Negev survey, while Lloyd and Herbert were both Welshmen, both old Etonians, and had both served as Honorary Attachés to the British Embassy in Constantinople. They were Oriental dabblers of the Hogarth stamp, speaking a dozen languages between them, and Herbert already had a reputation as an adventurer, having fought alongside the Turks in the Balkans and in Yemen. A younger son of the Earl of Carnarvon, he was later immortalized as John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle: ‘You will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Meccan pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen
of Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherd’s huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes.’6 Lawrence was both attracted and repelled by the self-assured, dilettantish aristocrat, and thought him ‘quaint’ and ‘a joke, but a very nice one’.7 Herbert reciprocated Lawrence’s half-admiring, half-deprecating attitude, calling him ‘gnomish’ and ‘half-cad’, but admitting that he had a touch of genius. Lloyd, who divided his time between his constituents, the East, and his work as director of a bank, was another upper-class Welshman whom Lawrence found ‘exceedingly noisy’ but valued for his knowledge of trade and politics, and his air of confidence. He remained in touch with Lloyd after he and Herbert left for Gallipoli and travelled with him later in the campaign. Both Lloyd and Herbert were uncomfortable with Newcombe, however, and objected to taking orders from this highly intelligent and able, but sadly ‘underbred’ Sapper. Lawrence’s view was different: ‘Newcombe is… a most heavenly person,’ he wrote. ‘He runs all the spies, & curses all the subordinates who don’t do their duty and takes the raw edges off generals and things. Without that I should have gone mad, I think.’8 Newcombe’s immediate superior was the éminence grise of Middle East intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert ‘Bertie’ Clayton, a veteran of the Egyptian army, who had fought the Dervishes at Omdurman beside Lord Kitchener. Clayton was the archetypal grey man: quiet and unassuming, he was, as Lawrence discovered, ‘far bigger …than [he] appeared at first sight’. Before the war he had served as Sudan Agent in Cairo, and Intelligence Director to the Sirdar or C-in-C of the Egyptian Army, Sir Reginald Wingate – who doubled as Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1914, he had been brought back into the army by General Sir John Maxwell, the General Officer Commanding British Forces in Egypt, who had given him carte blanche to run intelligence operations. Clayton’s position was all-powerful, and he took it upon himself not only to gather intelligence but also to nudge policy judiciously where he felt it was required. Even before war with Turkey had been declared, Clayton had received Storrs’s suggestion of raising an Arab Revolt with enthusiasm, and was an early supporter of the Hashemites. He had sent a letter to Kitchener early in 1914 urging an immediate approach to Hussain. Lawrence later confessed admiration for Clayton’s far-sightedness and detachment and particularly for the free hand he gave to his subordinates, yet his description of his influence, ‘like water or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything’, is not entirely flattering.9 Lawrence also got to know Storrs well, and the two men found each other convivial company. They shared literary tastes, and Storrs would often return to his flat to find Lawrence already there, curled up in an armchair reading Latin or Greek: ‘I found him from the beginning an arresting and intentionally provocative talker,’ Storrs recalled, ‘liking nonsense to be treated as nonsense and not casually or dully accepted or dismissed. He could flare into sudden anger at a story of pettiness, particularly official pettiness or injustice.’10 Lawrence later admitted that he thought Storrs the most brilliant Englishman in the Middle East, but commented that his influence would have been even greater had he been more single-minded. Storrs was sometimes irritated by Lawrence’s lack of social etiquette, recalling that he had once arranged a special dinner party of four guests for Lawrence, who had failed to turn up without offering any excuse: ‘He only told me long afterwards,’ Storrs wrote, ‘that I had more than “got back at him” by explaining that I shouldn’t have minded if he had warned me in time to get someone else.’11
Lawrence referred to himself as ‘bottle washer and office boy pencil sharpener and pen wiper’ of the department, but in fact, though the most junior officer in rank, he shared fully in the work. The raison d’être for the British presence in Egypt was the defence of the Suez Canal, and opinion was divided as to how this should best be accomplished. There were those ‘Westerners’ who believed that the Western Front in Europe was the ‘real’ war, and an active campaign in any other theatre merely a ‘sideshow’. They lobbied for a purely defensive policy in Egypt, a policy which Lawrence, like the rest of the Intelligence Department, actively contested. They were ‘Easterners’, who believed that attack was the best means of defence and pushed for a British invasion of the Ottoman Empire, specifically a landing at Alexandretta on the coast of Syria. Lawrence, who was later to claim falsely that the Alexandretta scheme was his idea, was certainly one of its most passionate advocates. He believed that the moment the British landed in Syria, the Syrians would revolt against the Turks, and Arab elements in the Ottoman armies would mutiny, establishing an Arab government there before the French, who had designs in Syria, could prevent them. Lawrence had scented revolution in the air while at Carchemish in 1913, and well knew that the ordinary Syrians were not prepared to get rid of one foreign master merely to make way for another and even more alien one. Though the Alexandretta landing proposal was well received by the cabinet, it was vetoed by the French, who recognized as well as Lawrence the dangers it entailed for their colonial policy. Soon it was eclipsed by plans for a mass landing at Gallipoli, and Lawrence turned his attention to the Assir, the mountainous and fertile region of Arabia which lay immediately south of the Hejaz. The Porte held little sway in this remote corner of Arabia, and the Assir’s ruler, al-Idrisi, was a notorious opponent of the Turks. In February, the Anglo-Indian Government concluded a treaty with al-Idrisi, paying him a stipend of £7,000 per year, and for a while Lawrence nurtured high hopes that his followers would revolt against the Turks and carry the revolution north in the name of the Emir of Mecca: ‘I think Newcombe & myself are going down to [Qunfidhdha – in the Assir] as his advisers,’ he wrote. ‘If Idrisi is anything like as good as we hope we can rush right up to Damascus, & biff the French out of all hope of Syria. It’s a big game and at last one worth playing.’12 Al-Idrisi proved a damp squib, however, and as for the Emir of Mecca himself, throughout the first part of 1915 he had maintained an ominous silence.
In late 1914, an Indian youth had been arrested by the British authorities while attempting to cross the North West Frontier from Afghanistan and India. Sewn into the seams of his clothing were pieces of linen which carried the details of a world-wide plot to raise an Islamic Jihad or Holy War against Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Triple Entente. The youth was the emissary of an Indian renegade called Barakat Allah, an agent of the Turkish government in Kabul, and had been on his way to meet contacts in India, who were to encourage Indian troops in the British army to mutiny, assassinate their foreign leaders and attack their quarters. He was, it turned out, just one of thousands of agents, preachers, scholars, holy men, spies and agitators being dispatched by the Committee of Union and Progress to infiltrate India, Persia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Libyan desert and the Sudan. The Jihad plot was intended to set the Islamic world ablaze. On 7 November, only a week after the declaration of war, the Sheikh al-Islam – the highest religious official in the Ottoman Empire – had declared the fatwa, making it the personal duty of every Muslim to take up arms against the Allies. A central tenet of the Jihad, though, was the protection of the Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, and without the blessing of their steward, Sharif Hussain, the fatwa was a worthless scrap of paper.
His blessing Hussain had refused staunchly to give. In November he had written to Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War, that he would support the Jihad with all his heart and pray for its success, but he could not endorse it openly for fear that the British Red Sea fleet would immediately launch a blockade. The population of the Hejaz was dependent on grain imported from British India, and its people would eventually be faced with famine, and might even – he suggested – revolt against Ottoman rule. He paid lip service to the Porte to the extent of raising a force of mujahidiyyin – Islamic volunteers – but simultaneously contacted the great chiefs of the Arabian Peninsula: Ibn Sa’ud of the Nejd, Ibn Rashid of the Shammar, the Imam Yahya of Yemen, and al-Idrisi of the Assir, in great secrecy, explaining
why he had failed to support the Jihad, and eliciting their attitude towards the Turks. Of these, Ibn Sa’ud, who was receiving a substantial stipend from the Anglo-Indian Government, resolved to stay neutral and watch the outcome. His rival Ibn Rashid – who feared him – decided consequently to throw in his lot with the Turks. The Imam Yahya, facing the British in Aden, did the same, and al-Idrisi, now receiving a cash incentive from Britain, had always been implacably anti-Turk. Jamal Pasha, Military Governor of Syria as well as Commander-in-Chief of Turkish forces there, was preparing the Ottoman 4th Army for an assault on the Suez Canal. The attack was scheduled for February 1915, and the CUP hoped it would spark off a revolt by the Egyptians against their infidel masters, the British. That Hussain refused to play his part in stirring up his co-religionists infuriated them, and although they were powerless but to accept his refusal officially, they decided to get rid of him secretly by assassination or arrest. Unfortunately, the principal of the plot, Vehib Pasha – Governor of the Hejaz – mysteriously lost a trunk containing compromising documents, which was handed to ‘Ali, Hussain’s eldest son. The Sharif now had first-hand proof of the Machiavellian duplicity which lay beneath the Porte’s assurances that the Hejaz railway was the only bone of contention between them. He decided to send his third son, Feisal, to Istanbul to confront the CUP with the evidence of its own calumny. Meanwhile, he was able to take some comfort from the fact that the Hashemites were not entirely alone.
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