This may have been just what Faisal wanted, for he claimed he told the French officers that ‘treaties were made and unmade and not in the West only—but that between Great Britain and the Arabs were unwritten bonds of mutual understanding which had probably as strong an influence as the innate sympathy of a civilised man for the success of a small and oppressed people.’ Britain, not France, would be the partner of his ambitions.
Lawrence would have endorsed all that Faisal said. Newcombe too, for he was thought by the French to have been of Lawrence’s mind, even though he favoured a British occupation of Syria.28 Wingate, Murray and Clayton concurred, at least in so far as they were prepared to do all that they could to exclude the French from active co-operation with Faisal’s forces in Syria. What the French took as curmudgeonly British obstruction could be justified on strategic grounds. If Faisal was to make headway in Syria and harass the northern section of the Hejaz line and thereby assist Murray’s operations to the west, he needed a port close to the front through which men and materials could be landed. Only Aqaba could satisfy his needs, although it lay within the vilayet (Turkish administrative district) of Syria and, therefore, in an area allocated by the Sykes—Picot agreements to France. If the French gained Aqaba they would never permit it to be used by the Arabs to foment a Syrian national movement, and so Arab assistance to Murray’s forces would be severely limited.
Hussain had urged the capture of Aqaba in December and, on 31 January, Brémond heard that Newcombe and Faisal were discussing how it could be taken. With Aqaba as a springboard, Faisal would be free to canvas Syria on his own and the nationalist movement’s behalf. To forestall this, Brémond visited Murray at Ismailia on 5 February and proposed a British landing at Aqaba and the establishment there of an aerodrome which would be guarded by French Muslim units then on standby at Port Suez.29 He was politely rebuffed, but before leaving he warned Murray that if Britain would not co-operate he would seek Italian assistance. On his way back to Hejaz, Brémond ordered the captain of his ship to heave to off Aqaba so that he could estimate its garrison and assess the strength of its defences. He saw no one. At the end of June the Italian Military Mission to Hejaz on board the cruiser Calabria also spied out Aqaba.30
Aqaba had interested British strategists since the beginning of the war, when naval landing parties had temporarily occupied the port. Less than a hundred miles from the Hejaz railway, it was the obvious base for sabotage operations and even a permanent occupation of the line. For this reason Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, recommended the seizure of Aqaba in June 1916 in order to isolate Medina, but McMahon ruled out such an operation on the ground that the Egyptian Expeditionary Force could not spare the men. The same kite was flown by Murray a month later, and he was warned off by Robertson, who dreaded another sideshow which would eat up reserves and possibly become another Gallipoli.31 Still, Murray authorised an aerial survey of Aqaba and its hinterland during August which revealed that the port was thinly defended and that Wadi et Yutm to the east offered good sites for landing strips.32
Brémond’s proposition had put Murray in a quandary. Shortly before the Frenchman presented himself at HQ, Murray had turned down Wingate’s request for an Aqaba expedition because it would deprive him of a brigade needed for the forthcoming Gaza offensive. 33 Now he was faced with the likelihood that a Franco–Italian force would occupy the port, which they would then deny to the Arabs. This would have suited Brémond, who openly hoped that the Arab Revolt would stagnate in Hejaz. Matters were further complicated in April when Naval Intelligence got word that a unit of German mine–laying specialists were operating out of Aqaba. On 19 April Wemyss despatched three warships to the port which sent ashore landing parties. Three-quarters of the eighty-man garrison ran off, leaving the sailors free to demolish the mine-laying facilities.34
It was imperative to pre–empt the French, so early in April Faisal, with Wingate’s backing, agreed to seize the port as part of his projected armed excursion into eastern Syria. Faisal and Newcombe were the principal architects of a plan which was finally settled on 20 May.35 Newcombe was to take charge of 1,500 Arabs who would be mustered at al Wajh on 24 June and then transported to Aqaba by RN warships. Their disembarkation on 15 July would coincide with a landward assault on the port by Huweitat irregulars, who had already eliminated the chain of Turkish posts between Aqaba and Maan. Faisal, leading a larger force, would already have ridden cross-country to al Jawf in the Syrian desert, which he was scheduled to reach by 7 July. From there he would turn northwards to el Azraq where Lawrence and Awda would be waiting with supplies which would include the 3,000 camels promised by the Anazah at the beginning of April.36 Then Faisal would proceed towards the Hawran and fulfil his promise to raise the Druze.
The success of the plan rested on the unproven ability of Arab forces to synchronise their movements and on a belief that Turkish forces in eastern Syria would be thrown into confusion by the attack on Aqaba and by the presence in the desert of large Arab contingents. Furthermore, it was intended that the sudden appearance of Faisal’s Beduin would trigger local uprisings which the Turks would be too thinly spread to handle. There was no way of calculating the Turco-German response to this audacious stratagem. They were not totally unprepared. A report from Damascus sent by agent ‘Maurice’ which reached Cairo on 27 May noted a recent increase in the hand–outs of gold among the Anazah and Rwallah. Nuri Shalaan’s son Nawaf was reportedly pro–Turkish and it was feared he might sway his father in that direction.37 A Turkish agent, probably close to Faisal and possibly the same man who had given the warning of the attack on al Wajh, reported the departure of Lawrence’s column on 9 May with an indication of its destination. 38 Ten days later military posts between Maan and Aqaba were being reinforced.
Lawrence knew that the French were considering a coup against Aqaba and that Faisal intended to seize the port as part of his proposed armed demonstration in eastern Syria. The outlines for these operations had been first laid by Clayton in November 1916 shortly before Lawrence’s return from Khartoum.39 Both men appreciated that possession of Aqaba was vital, although Lawrence had deep apprehensions about Faisal’s Syrian diversion. In the Seven Pillars he recalled fears that precipitate action by Faisal and the Syrians could easily end in a disaster which would cripple all future attempts to liberate the area. Lawrence favoured a piecemeal campaign in which the occupation of Aqaba would be the opening move.
He was attached to the party of thirty–six men which left al Wajh as the representative of the British government, whose prestigious endorsement was needed to give Faisal the authority he needed to convert the Syrian sheiks. As a token of British backing for the Prince, Lawrence carried 20,000 gold sovereigns, of which half were earmarked for Druze leaders, or so Adjudant Lamotte heard. Before the group set off, Lamotte took their photograph and was told that they would be back in five weeks, which was not so.
Lawrence’s party was commanded by the Sharif Nasir, a kinsman of Faisal whom Lawrence found ‘most capable, hard working and straightforward’. Less to his liking was Nasib al Bakri, Faisal’s Interior Minister, who had been entrusted with negotiations. He ‘is volatile and short-sighted, as are most town-Syrians’ and Lawrence suspected he would not carry out his orders.
Lawrence left two accounts of what passed. The first comprised a bundle of secret official reports written in Cairo during the second week of July 1917 (some of which were published in 1938), and the second was set down in the Seven Pillars.40 According to his reports, the first phase of the expedition was an eastwards trek towards an Kabk which was interrupted by the demolition of the section of railway track at Kilo 810. The party of thirty-six reached an Kabk and the point of rendezvous with Awda and his Huweitat warriors on 2 June. For the next fortnight Nasir and Nasib camped there and at nearby Kaf, where they used Lawrence’s sovereigns to recruit Huweitat, Shararat and Rwallah tribesmen for the attack on Aqaba.
According to the reports he wrote in Cairo, the se
cond phase of the expedition began on 4 June, when Lawrence and two servants rode north-east into the Syrian desert on the first leg of a circular tour through Turkish-held Syria. On 8 June the trio approached Tadmor and then turned eastwards towards Baalbek Yarmud in eastern Lebanon. Returning southwards, Lawrence passed near Damascus, entered the Jebel Druze and then continued through el Azraq to an Kabk. The journey lasted fourteen days.
At each stage of the expedition, Lawrence met local notables. Near Tadmor he had planned to arbitrate a feud between the Bishr and the Huweitat, but one party failed to appear. A small railway bridge was blown up in the Baalbek Yarmud region to please local tribesmen. ‘The noise of dynamite explosions we find everywhere the most effective propagandist measure possible.’ Outside Damascus he spoke with Aziz al Ridha al Rikabi, a former Turkish general and Mayor of the city, a future Hashemite adherent as yet unwilling to risk an open statement of his loyalties. Passing through the Laja district Lawrence met a local sheik, and at Salkhad he had discussions with the Druze Sultan Salim al Atrash, another secret Hashemite sympathiser who delivered the terms on which his followers would rise. The Druze would not rebel until British forces occupied Nablus in northern Palestine, a line they consistently followed until October 1918. They were a hard-hearted people disinclined to throw away their considerable privileges, including exemption from conscription and taxation. At el Azraq Lawrence faced more trimming, this time from practised hands: Nuri Shalaan and his son Nawaf repeated their old plea that they would take the plunge the moment the Druze declared themselves for Faisal. They were ‘playing a double’, but Lawrence felt assured they would join the Allies when ‘we require them’.
None of this could have given much comfort to Faisal. It was intelligence of limited value, which merely affirmed what Lawrence and his superiors already knew. Hedged promises of future support were common currency in wartime Syria. The month before, agent ‘Maurice’ had acquired some which added to the reassuring impression that there was a groundswell of pro-British and pro-Faisal sentiment in Syria. There was always a drawback: direct action against the Turks would only follow the victorious advance of Allied armies. As Lawrence had discovered, inter-communal jealousies were still strong and any stepping out of line by townsfolk and villagers invited chastisement of the kind which was still being meted out to the Armenians. Lawrence fully appreciated this and always emphasised that sabotage operations had to be confined to Beduin, whose desert homeland offered a degree of immunity to Turkish retaliation not available to sedentary communities.
Lawrence did not expect much open resistance from the settled regions he had visited. In his programme for future guerrilla operations, submitted to the War Office on 16 July, he concentrated on activities centred on the desert bases of el Azraq and el Jefre which would be directed against the Damascus-Maan section of railroad. He also proposed the use of these bases for long-range raids against the Dera-Haifa line which would be aimed against the bridges in the Yarmuk Valley. Further north he suggested attacks on the line below Aleppo by Beduin based in the Jebel Shomariye. Unremitting pressure on these lines would hamper Turkish troop movements and might even encourage local resistance once it was clear that the Turks could not long shift men for punitive actions. Even the Hawran Druze might be nudged towards a descent on Dera. Again everything hinged on the Druze.
There is nothing of all this in the Seven Pillars beyond a reference to Lawrence’s unquiet state of mind on the eve of his journey: ‘A rash adventure suited my mood’ which, to judge from an all but erased note in his campaign jottings, was almost suicidal.41
Clayton. I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all our sakes try and clear up this show before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie.
This is all very perplexing. Soon after, in the Seven Pillars version, Lawrence admitted to the haziest knowledge of what McMahon had offered Hussain and how the boundaries of French and British concessions in the Middle East had been drawn by Sykes and Picot. In the Seven Pillars he also confessed to bewildered shame when Nuri Shalaan proffered ‘a file of British documents’ allegedly filled with official promises, and asked which one he ought to believe. Lawrence remained silent about their contents and who had drawn them up. What is more bewildering is that, in his report to Clayton, Lawrence claimed he met Nuri and his son at el Azraq towards the end of the Syrian trip. Maybe then he briefly succumbed to a mood of despair. It would have been understandable, not in terms of what others had or had not promised the Arabs, but because all his Syrian contacts, including Nuri, had responded to his calls for bold commitment with wary procrastination.
Lawrence was taking enormous risks by penetrating enemy territory where pro-Turkish sympathies were still widespread. There was, he claimed, a £5,000 reward for his capture, which, if true, suggests that Turkish intelligence was aware of his activities. In fact, the head money was a general reward first announced some months earlier by Fahreddin Pasha for British officers taken dead or alive.42
Whether he travelled in search of intelligence or whether to get killed Lawrence’s exploit won him great respect in Cairo and London. What Robertson called his ‘adventurous and successful journey’, together with the Aqaba coup, established Lawrence’s reputation as an able, daring and gallant officer.43 Fifty years later this was challenged by al Nasib, who was adamant that Lawrence remained at an Kabk and Kaf during the fortnight of his passage through Syria. Moreover al Rikabi denied ever having met Lawrence during 1917: the entire episode was a figment of his imagination, a fantasy akin to those he had concocted during his pre-war Syrian excursions.44
In 1917 Lawrence had not lost his taste for tale-telling. Soon after he returned to Cairo, St Quentin sent a report to Paris which included stories of how, before the war, Lawrence had ridden about Syria on horseback or motorbike disguised as a Beduin (a bizarre fancy), had spied on the Hejaz railway with Woolley, had been arrested and spent three weeks locked up in Urfa before he escaped.45 These were all falsehoods and must have come directly from Lawrence or else from what he had told others. A wide gulf separates such petty perjuries from the submission of a bogus report which deceived close friends like Clayton as well as general officers in Cairo and London and whose conclusions were later embodied in General Staff plans. However much Lawrence disliked the army as an institution, he was a loyal soldier and not untouched by the gentlemanly codes of honour which bound officers together. These embraced many of the chivalric virtues he admired.
To turn to Lawrence’s accusers, whose evidence has been accepted by two biographers, Mousa and Stewart: although al Rikabi entered Faisal’s service after the war, he and his family may have felt uneasy about the admission of treason against his former Ottoman masters and colleagues. Moreover, in the post-Suez era in the Middle East, few Arabs would have been willing to admit conspiracy with a British officer who was now widely regarded as a cunning agent of imperialism. Nasib in particular had every reason to mistrust Lawrence and blackguard him. At an Kabk Lawrence made very clear his scepticism about Faisal’s intended Syrian coup, which, with good reason, he feared would misfire and jeopardise all future operations. In the Seven Pillars he accused Nasib of treachery because he had considered putting himself rather than Faisal at the head of the Syrian revolt. Nasib remembered their rows. ‘Lawrence,’ he recalled in the 1960s, ‘was inclined to double-dealing, slander and dissemination of discord.’ One bone of contention was al Atrash and the Druze, to whom Nasib secretly delivered £7,000 of Lawrence’s hoard, which he felt would be better spent on the proven Awda and his Huweitat.
Other British agents were busy in Syria while Lawrence was abroad, although he had no contact with them. A synopsis of their recent findings was passed from the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London to Cairo on 14 July.46 There was news of tribal unrest near Baalbek Yarmud, where Lawrence had blown up a bridge, of extensive troop movements through Dera towards Damascus and rumours of 20,000 reinforcemen
ts, including Austrians, who were shortly due in Syria. There were also the commonplace reports of quarrels between Turkish and German officers which always heartened the British. Strangely for such an assiduous gatherer of intelligence, Lawrence’s report includes no mention of this kind of information. Given the hazards he was facing, he made very limited use of his trek through enemy territory.
The French were given no details of Lawrence’s incursion into what was to be their post-war sphere of influence, although an account of operations near Maan and the taking of Aqaba was later passed to Brémond and St Quentin. They were able through their own agents and sources to follow his party’s activities, but got no indication of their whereabouts between 8 and 29 June when they heard reports of him in the desert east of Maan.47 Lawrence’s version of what he did between 4 and 18 June ultimately hangs on his word against those of two eyewitnesses, one of whom disliked him. For Lawrence to have created a completely untrue report based on a fictional mission would have been an act of supreme folly. If his deception had been uncovered, and given the presence of a network of agents already in Syria this was a possibility, he would have been discredited and removed from any position from which he could fulfil his dream of helping the Arabs to nationhood. Yet the question must also be asked whether his post-war addiction to masochistic guilt derived solely from his sense of having misled the Arabs. Here Professor Falls provides a small clue. As co-author of the official history of the Middle East campaign, he was in one of the best positions to appreciate what happened there. Falls admired Lawrence’s ‘genius’ but warned that his version of events needed to ‘be treated with caution, since he occasionally exaggerated without shame or scruple’.48
No shades of ambiguity cloud Lawrence’s exploits during the final phase of his mission. Between 20 June and 7 July he was present with Arab irregular forces who undertook a brief and highly successful campaign which ended with the capture of Aqaba. Wingate was delighted. He had cherished Aqaba as a base for Faisal for six months and after reading Lawrence’s report he cabled the War Office. Captain Lawrence had passed through enemy lines, moved among a ‘highly venal population’ with a price on his head, which ‘considerably enhances the gallantry of his exploit’, and had taken an enemy port. ‘I strongly recommend him for an immediate award of the Victoria Cross, and submit that this recommendation is amply justified by his skill, pluck and endurance.’ It was, but the regulations governing the award dictated that brave deeds must be witnessed by another British officer. Furthermore, though this was and is less well known, the medal could be awarded only if the recipient had a 90 per cent chance of losing his life. Instead Lawrence received a Companionship of the Bath. What mattered most to him was that he had shown what the Arab irregulars could achieve on their own and fighting in their own way. His faith in them had been tested and proved; they were a force to be reckoned with.
Golden Warrior, The Page 27