Faced at the end of 1915 with failure at Gallipoli, an enforced retreat in Iraq and prospects of a new Turkish assault on the Suez Canal, the British government had little choice but to press ahead with plans to subvert the Turkish empire through an Arab alliance. The creation of a fissure between the Arabs and the Turks would be a masterstroke which would divide the Ottoman empire and blunt the Pan-Islamic sword.
There were several stumbling-blocks in the way of an Arab-British understanding. Arab nationalists were by no means universally convinced of the long–term value of co-operation with Britain, an aggressive imperial power which over the past century had made no secret of its ambitions to dominate the Middle East. Moreover, as Lawrence soon discovered, many educated Arabs followed the course of the war in Europe through newspapers, and what they read was not always reassuring. Throughout 1916, 1917 and most of 1918 an Allied victory over Germany did not seem predetermined, and prudent Arabs realised that it was in their interests to hedge their bets by keeping lines open to Turkey and Germany.
Inside the India Office and in Delhi the prospect of an Arab alliance caused deep consternation. Lord Hardinge called it ‘a Frankenstein Monster,’ predicted that like the original it would plague its creators, and refused any contribution to the costs of the Arab revolt, which, he hoped, would swiftly collapse.20 It was dangerously absurd for Britain to foster Arab nationalism on one hand and on the other allow India to annex Iraq, where by the winter of 1915-16 there were already pockets of Arab resistance to the new British imperial order.
There were French as well as Indian objections to the Arab alliance. These emerged during the extended Anglo-French discussions in late 1915 which attempted to settle what could and what could not be offered as inducements to the Arabs. The French were inflexible over Syria and even demanded additional territory in northern Iraq as the price for their consent to the Arab alliance. French greed appalled Asquith, but it had to be stomached by his Cabinet. The ministers were under pressure from the War Office, which saw the Arab alliance as a quick way out of Middle Eastern difficulties and an end to fears about Pan-Islamic agitation. This was the case laid before the Cabinet on 23 March 1916 by General Macdonogh, who urged the signing of an immediate agreement with Hussain, the Sharif of Mecca. He spoke with the voice of Cairo, where in January Lawrence drew up a memorandum on the benefits which would follow an Arab uprising led by Hussain.21 It pleased Clayton, who on 1 February forwarded it to the Foreign Office, where it would serve as ammunition to be used against those who held back for fear of offending France.
Lawrence’s contribution to the debate on the Arab alliance was boldly written and sweeping in its arguments, too much so for one Foreign Office official accustomed to bland departmental prose, who labelled the piece ‘Partial and highly coloured’. Perhaps for these reasons he thought Gertrude Bell the author. Lawrence offered a clear analysis of Meccan politics and an explanation of the motives of Hussain. He pictured him as a princeling who expected to harness Britain to his private ambition, which was to make himself Caliph and emancipate the Arabs ‘from their present irritating subjection’. A foe to both the Young Turks and Pan-Islamic agitators, Hussain’s ‘activity seems beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the break–up of the Islamic “bloc” and the defeat and disruption of the Ottoman Empire’.
Hussain had already shown tokens of his goodwill by attempting to persuade the Imam Yahya not to join the Turkish attack on Aden and restraining the ‘Mad Mullah’ of Somaliland–not for long as it turned out, for he was on the warpath in March 1916. More to Britain’s advantage, Hussain had refused the proclamation of the jihad in Mecca and restricted Turkish army recruitment in Hejaz. In the short term, Hussain sought the expulsion of the Turks from Hejaz, where a revolution would suit Britain. ‘If,’ Lawrence argued, ‘we can arrange that this political change shall be a violent one, we will have abolished the threat of Islam, by dividing it against itself, in its very heart. There will then be a Khalifa in Turkey and a Khalifa in Arabia, in theological warfare, and Islam will be as little formidable as the Papacy when Popes lived in Avignon.’ The theology but not the imagery had been provided by Wingate, whose adviser, Sayyid Ali al Murghani, had told him that Hussain could lay a justifiable claim to the caliphate.22
As for the outcome of these manoeuvres, Lawrence concurred with Indian views about the Arabs’ administrative ineptitude, but claimed that their anarchic tendencies would be to Britain’s post-war advantage. The Arabs were ‘even less stable than the Turks’, he observed. ‘If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.’ Throughout his paper, Lawrence assumed that political power within the Arab movement would remain the monopoly of tribal autocrats like Hussain. He never mentioned republican and democratic nationalists. Foreign annexation of Arab land was abhorrent and, Lawrence warned, harmful to Britain’s future interests. ‘Colonisation by a European power other than ourselves’ (that is, France) would lead straight to ‘conflict with the interests we already possess in the Near East.’ That the Arabs would accept some form of British control was taken for granted and Lawrence offers no suggestions as to how the French could be persuaded to forgo their post-war colonial consolation prize in Syria.
When he wrote this memorandum, Lawrence was still assigned to the cartographic section of intelligence and was continuing with his routine office duties. It shows that he was keeping in touch with everything which passed through his office (for example, the reference to the activities of the ‘Mad Mullah’) and that his thinking was in tune with the official line taken by McMahon, Wingate and Clayton. If his treatment of Hussain appears cynically Machiavellian, it must be remembered that in January 1916 Britain was fighting for her life in a war where final victory seemed elusive and distant. At the time Cairo was jammed with officers and men just back from Gallipoli–Lawrence said he once counted fifty-four generals–and the news from the Iraq front was chilling. Any device which could hurt the enemy and accelerate victory deserved careful examination. Furthermore, as Lawrence recognised, if an anti-Turkish revolt in Hejaz could be engineered, then the credibility of Turco–German, Pan–Islamic propaganda would be irreparably damaged.
At the beginning of 1916 everything depended on Hussain, who had been bargaining by letter with Sir Henry McMahon since the previous June. He was a hesitant revolutionary who intended to show his hand only after he had wrung the best possible terms from Britain. On 9 March 1916, the Cabinet approved the payment to him of a monthly subsidy of £125,000, and he was promised Royal Navy assistance and arms. Orders were given on 14 March for the shipment of 5,000 rifles and a quarter of a million rounds of ammunition to Port Sudan, where they were to be handed over to Hussain’s agents.23 As to what Hussain would get in the way of territory, the issue would be clouded by later claims and counter–claims over Syria, a province which he already cherished. At least as early as June 1916 he had got some inkling of the agreements for shared spheres of influence and annexation in the area, which is hardly surprising given that they had long been the subject of speculation in the French press.24
Not that this mattered greatly in 1916. Then the Arab Revolt was a gamble for all concerned. The final stakes were less important than when and how the first die was thrown. Hussain could not afford to haggle over–long. Time was running out for him since Turkish intelligence had uncovered evidence of his underhand dealings with the British by mid–January 1916.25 News that the von Stotzingen mission would arrive in Medina in April, accompanied by an escort of 3,000 men commanded by Khari Bey, concentrated Hussain’s mind. The return from Damascus of his son Faisal would have also helped bring the Sharif nearer to the moment of truth, since he brought with him news that Jamal Pasha, the Governor of Syria, was beginning a crackdown on local nationalists. Details of the wave of arrests, courts martial and public hangings during April and May suggested tha
t a limit existed to Turkish tolerance of dissent.
The evidence of these measures, the German mission and reinforcements for the Hejaz garrison, which already stood at 16,000, convinced Hussain that he could no longer safely run with both the hare and the hounds. His untrustworthiness exposed, he was faced with the possibility that the Turks would introduce coercive measures and replace him as sharif. He appealed for direct British assistance in the form of a diversionary attack on Alexandretta which would force the Turks to pull troops out of Hejaz, but this was refused. As it was, his fears were inflated. Neither the Turkish government nor its German advisers were troubled by Hussain’s treachery and his uprising was confidently expected to flop. The Germans believed, with some justification, that he was bribable, and Enver Pasha predicted that his fanaticism would quickly exasperate the British. If his activities became a serious nuisance, then he was to be assassinated.26
On the British side, the directions of arrangements for the Arab Revolt were in the hands of a new agency, the Arab Bureau, which had been set up in January 1916. It had been the creation of a committee of officials from the War, Foreign and India Offices which had been formed to work out how best Britain’s future policy towards the Arabs could be co–ordinated and implemented. The Bureau’s godfather had been Sir Mark Sykes, the mercurial thirty-seven-year-old baronet and MP who had travelled in the Middle East before the war. After raising a battalion from his estates on the Yorkshire wolds, he had been appointed to liaise between the War and Foreign Offices on all aspects of Middle Eastern policy. A Roman Catholic and Zionist, Sykes had negotiated the Anglo-French agreement, known as the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which set out the boundaries of the post-war Middle East. Sykes also recognised the value of an alliance with Hussain and he took care to staff the Bureau with men of like mind. The pro-Turkish Wyndham Deedes was therefore kept out.27
Sykes was a frequent visitor to Cairo, where, according to Hogarth, he ‘inspired, encouraged and always taught us something’. Lawrence mistrusted him and his policies. In the Seven Pillars (written after Sykes’s death in 1919) Lawrence portrayed him as ‘a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences’, and then went on to describe him in terms which could easily have applied to himself:
His ideas were of the outside; and he lacked the patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it, until its old likeness and its new unlikeness together drew a laugh; and laughs were his triumphs. His instincts lay in parody: by choice he was a caricaturist rather than an artist, even in his statesmanship. He saw the odd in everything, and missed the even.
At root of this criticism was Lawrence’s refusal to forgive Sykes for his accommodation of French interests in Syria and his backing for the Zionists which, during late 1917 and early 1918, threatened to create a rift between Lawrence and Faisal. There may also have been an element of jealousy in Lawrence’s reaction to Sykes. Brilliant men are often suspicious of each other and Lawrence may have envied Sykes his self-assurance and extensive connections in Whitehall, which enabled him to impose his own views on government policy.
Whether or not Lawrence was aware of it, Sykes was also a romantic Tory anxious to protect the Arabs from the corruption of the modern world and its ideas. He disliked those Arab radicals who dreamed of bringing ‘European Jacobinism to Sunni Mohammedanism’ and was disgusted that Iraq, ‘this land of poetry and ignorance’, would be swamped by ‘the ideas of the lowest Anglo-Saxon savages’ which included ‘respectability and over eating’.28 Lawrence would have approved.
It was with Sykes’s creation, the Arab Bureau, that Lawrence’s future lay. It ran all Arab propaganda, collected and recorded all Arab intelligence and acted as an instrument of British policy towards Arabs everywhere. It was housed in three rooms in the Savoy Hotel, adjacent to the GHQ intelligence offices, and cost £4,000 a year. Its director answered to the Foreign Office through the High Commissioner in Egypt and through Clayton to the Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. It was an Admiralty intelligence officer, Lieutenant–Commander Hogarth, who was appointed director over Clayton’s candidate, Colonel Parker, and after a briefing in London he took up his duties on 25 March 1916. An ex-Sudan civil servant turned army intelligence officer, Kinahan Cornwallis, was Deputy Director, Philip Graves attended to Turkish business and the press, A.B.fforde represented the interests of India, and Gertrude Bell was sent to Basra as the Bureau’s temporary agent in Iraq. There was a small staff of typists.
Lawrence was never on the payroll of the Bureau, although like his brother intelligence officers he was frequently assigned to work for it. Much of its work overlapped with that of GHQ intelligence and Hogarth was always free to secure the services of army intelligence specialists like Lawrence. In the first weeks of the Bureau’s existence, Lawrence contributed material to a dossier on Arab ‘personalities’, leading figures whose future allegiance had to be ascertained. For a time in January 1916 he was helped by Gertrude Bell, whose particular expertise was the tribes of Iraq which she knew from her pre-war travels. Soon after, he presented a report on the Syrian camel trade.
The genesis of the Arab Revolt and the Arab Bureau is covered in early sections of the Seven Pillars. Next to nothing is said about the extent and success of Turco-German subversion during 1915 and 1916, which the revolt was designed to frustrate. Nor are there any signs of the hard-headed perception and appeal to self-interest which marked Lawrence’s Hussain memorandum. Instead the manipulators of the Arabs reappear as nation-builders.
We called ourselves ‘Intrusive’ [actually the telegraphic codename of GHQ intelligence, Cairo] as a band; for we meant to break into the accepted halls of English foreign policy, and build a new people in the East, despite the rails laid down for us by our ancestors.
The brotherhood of visionaries, Lawrence, Clayton, Storrs, Lloyd, Hogarth, Cornwallis, Newcombe, Parker, Herbert, Philip Graves and the wavering Sykes, move into action and enlighten their superiors. Thanks to their persuasiveness, Britain adopts the Arab cause and it thrives because of their dedication. In fact, it was the so-called converts, Kitchener, McMahon and Wingate, who were the first and most influential advocates of an Arab alliance, but for reasons which had to do with winning the war and preserving the British empire.
There is no room for such base motives in Lawrence’s narrative and they are deliberately excluded. The wary procrastinator Hussain becomes an idealist in arms:
The Young Turks in his eyes were so many godless transgressors of their creed and their human duty–traitors to the spirit of the time, and to the highest interests of Islam. Though an old man of sixty–five, he was cheerfully determined to wage war against them, relying on justice to cover the cost.
In fact it was the British taxpayer rather than ‘justice’ who footed the bill, as Mark Sykes drily remarked in June 1916, soon after hearing the news of Hussain’s rebellion. ‘The Sharif,’ he wrote, ‘has hitherto regarded us as an unfailing source of Bakshish and rifles,’ and his action had been prompted solely by the fear that his plots had been uncovered by the Turks, who were set on bringing him to heel.29
The omissions and distortions of the first part of the Seven Pillars set the pattern for much which is to follow. Since Lawrence was not writing an orthodox history he saw no need to adhere to the truth. The chicanes of the secret war of ideologies, the manipulation of nationalism and the backstairs trafficking in territory, concessions and bribes which were the real background to the Arab Revolt had no place in an epic written to illustrate the triumph of an idea and the sufferings and tenacity of its followers. By their own determination and sacrifice on the battlefield, Lawrence’s Arabs would regenerate themselves and find dignity and nationhood. If Lawrence had such visions at the beginning of 1916, he kept them to himself and dispassionately presented the Arab Revolt as a stratagem which would bring Britain untold advantage in her struggle to deflect the wav
e of Islamic fanaticism which Turkey and Germany were bent on unleashing.
The prospect of the Arab Revolt had a further attraction for Lawrence. Once under way it would have to be an unorthodox war since it would be months, even years before the Arabs could train and field a conventional army. There would therefore be openings for an imaginative, adventurous young officer who had long hoped that he might be able to do something for the Arabs.
IV
Adventures in Blunderland: Iraq, April 1916
On 20 March 1916, Lawrence went by train to Port Said, and joined the liner Royal George bound for Kuwait. There he embarked on the fast mail steamer Elephanta for Basra. He was travelling under orders from Sir Henry McMahon and Clayton, who had entrusted him with a mission which required experience of everyday intelligence work, a detailed knowledge of the preparations then in hand for Hussain’s rebellion and, most importantly, considerable forbearance and tact. Lawrence showed all these qualities even though he would claim in the Seven Pillars that at this time, ‘I was all claws and teeth, and had a devil.’
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