But the count was a man of catholic enthusiasms, and in addition to archaeology and horse racing and slave girls, there was one that Germany’s imperial rivals in the Near East found particularly irksome: Max von Oppenheim wanted to rearrange the regional political chessboard through stoking the fires of Islamic jihad.
He had begun formulating the idea shortly after taking up his consular position in Cairo. In Oppenheim’s estimation, the great Achilles’ heels of Germany’s principal European competitors—Great Britain, France, and Russia—were the Muslim populations to be found within their imperial borders, populations that deeply resented being under the thumb of Christian colonial powers. As the only major European power never to have attempted colonization in the Muslim world, Oppenheim propounded, Germany was uniquely positioned to turn this situation to its advantage—especially if it could forge an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. If it came to a Europe-wide war, Oppenheim posited in a flurry of reports to the German foreign ministry, and the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople could be persuaded to call for a holy war against the Christian occupiers of their former lands, what would happen in British-ruled Egypt, or French Tunisia, or the Russian Caucasus?
One person who was itching to find out was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Forwarded some of Oppenheim’s “war by revolution” treatises, the German emperor quickly became a committed proponent of the jihad notion. Wilhem saw to it that Oppenheim, “my feared spy,” was promoted at the Cairo embassy, assuming the somewhat ironic title of chief legal counsel.
Until the blessed day of pan-Islamic jihad came, there was plenty of work to be done in British Egypt. Through the early 1900s, Oppenheim spent much of his time—and not a little of his personal fortune—quietly wooing a broad cross section of the Egyptian elite opposed to British rule: tribal sheikhs, urban intellectuals, nationalists, and religious figures. While he had already won the kaiser to his jihadist ideas, in 1907 Oppenheim gained another adherent in the form of his new subordinate, Curt Prüfer. Enough with scholarly articles and Egyptian shadow plays; under the tutelage of his charismatic supervisor, Prüfer now saw the opportunity to spread gasoline over the region, put a match to it, and see what happened.
With his accent and command of Arabic far superior to Oppenheim’s, the new dragoman became the key liaison between the embassy and the Egyptian capital’s assorted malcontents. In particular, Prüfer carefully cultivated a friendship with the khedive (roughly equivalent to viceroy) of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi II, the local Ottoman head of state, whom the British had maintained on the throne even as they stripped him of all authority. Understandably, this arrangement had never sat well with the khedive, a resentment Prüfer did his best to nurture. The two German agents provocateurs didn’t limit their ministrations to the Cairene mewling class. In early 1909, Prüfer and Oppenheim set out on a wide-ranging tour of the Egyptian and Syrian hinterlands, where, disguised in Bedouin garb, they endeavored to promote the twin causes of pan-Islam and anticolonialism among the tribesmen.
But one doesn’t get Montblanc pens named after them by sticking to a routine, and in late 1910, Count von Oppenheim made a surprising announcement: he was leaving his legal counsel post at the embassy to return to his first true love of archaeology. Specifically, the count had decided it was high time to begin his excavations at Tell Halaf, the Neolithic ruins he had discovered in northern Syria, and which had now sat undisturbed for over a decade.
The understandable relief with which British authorities in Cairo greeted this news—they had been trying for years to find some pretext to have Oppenheim deported—was leavened by a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when a quick glance at a map revealed that Tell Halaf lay precisely alongside the proposed path of the Baghdad Railway. This was a massive public works project underwritten by the Ottoman government that was designed to link Constantinople to its easternmost—and reportedly, oil-rich—territory of Iraq (or Mesopotamia, as it was still commonly referred to in the West). Over the virulent objections of Britain and France, in 1905 the Ottomans had awarded the construction project, and the generous concessionary rights that went with it, to Germany.
But even if rid of “the kaiser’s spy,” the British in Egypt couldn’t let their guard down. In his place, Count Max von Oppenheim had left behind in Cairo a very dedicated and resourceful protégé.
THE HEADQUARTERS FOR the Carchemish dig was a small compound about a half mile from the ruins, a former licorice company storehouse on the outskirts of the village of Jerablus. It was here that T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley lived, as well as entertained the small groups of Western travelers who found their way to the excavation site with growing frequency. Over the course of their three years there, the two men continually added new rooms and storage sheds to the original structure, until the Jerablus “station” made for both a comfortable and expansive home. It was a place Lawrence came to regard as his sanctuary. As he wrote to his family in the summer of 1912, after having made a trip of just a few days to the Syrian coast, “I seem to have been months away from Jerablus, and am longing for its peace.”
But in the Near East, the very notion of peace was rapidly becoming an anachronism as the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire gained momentum. In 1911, the Italians invaded Libya, setting off a bloody war that eventually led to an Ottoman defeat. Overlapping that conflict came the First Balkan War, in which the Ottomans lost most of their remaining European possessions, immediately followed by the Second Balkan War. The grim news had a cascading effect. By 1913, when the Young Turks staged a second coup to take over the reins of government outright, small-scale rebellions and separatist movements had sprung up across the breadth of what remained of the empire, with even local chieftains and clan leaders sensing that the moment had come to finally throw off the Ottoman yoke.
In this, the once-idyllic environs of northern Syria were in no way immune. Given the ethnic composition of the region—the population was overwhelmingly Arab or Kurd, with the presence of ethnic Turks largely limited to local representatives of the Ottoman power structure, its mayors and police and tax collectors—Lawrence had developed a rather simplistic moralist view of its inhabitants: love for the noble Arab; wary respect for the blustering Kurd; hatred for the cruel Turk. As a result, he was quite pleased when the local Kurdish tribes threatened an insurrection in 1912, and by the increasingly open defiance that he saw playing out in the streets of Jerablus by the once-cowed Arabs toward their Turkish overlords. The Ottoman thrall over the population—in Lawrence’s view, a thrall based on fear and corruption and the sheer soul-grinding machinery of an inept bureaucracy—was rapidly slipping, and it was very hard to see how they might ever restore it. That estimation delighted him.
But it wasn’t just the roiling within the Ottoman Empire that was being felt in northern Syria. There was also the spreading intrigue of the European imperial powers, all of them maneuvering everywhere in search of some advantage against their rivals. In particular, the arrival on the scene of the infamous Count Max von Oppenheim seemed a clear indication that the region was now part of the ever-expanding European chessboard. Having ostensibly returned to Syria to begin excavations at Tell Halaf, some one hundred miles to the east of Carchemish, Oppenheim dropped by the Jerablus station for a visit one afternoon in July 1912.
“He was such a horrible person,” Lawrence wrote his youngest brother, “I hardly was polite—but was interesting instead [sic]. He said [the Carchemish ruins] were the most interesting and important discoveries he had ever seen barring his own.”
Before long, Lawrence and Woolley began hearing rumors of the count’s supposedly shoddy work at the Tell Halaf site, stories of great cartloads of treasures being illegally hauled away, bound for Berlin. They also couldn’t help notice that after years of lackadaisical progress on the Baghdad Railway—and in the Ottoman world, “lackadaisical” joined to “progress” tended to evoke geological comparisons—the pace of work suddenly accelerated once Oppenheim appeared. So accelerated, in fact, that
by late 1912 the German engineers and their advance crews had set to work on one of the most technically complicated segments of the rail line, a trestle bridge over the fast-flowing Euphrates River. By remarkable coincidence, the site for that bridge was directly alongside the village of Jerablus.
Throughout 1913 and well into 1914, the two groups of Western workers who improbably found themselves in this same remote corner of northern Syria had an alternately amicable and contentious relationship. The German railwaymen in Jerablus assisted the British archaeologists by hauling away the discarded stone from their excavations for use in their railroad embankments. In turn, the Germans frequently sought out the Britons—and, with his fluent Arabic, especially Lawrence—to mediate in their perpetually tense relations with local workers. A chief source of that tension was the difficulty the Germans had in finding good help, their best workers routinely jumping ship for the higher wages and more respectful supervision of Lawrence and Woolley.
Very soon, these two groups would be on opposite sides of a world war, and a different railroad—the Hejaz line, running from Damascus seven hundred miles south to the city of Medina—would become the most vital transportation link in the Middle Eastern theater of that conflict. The knowledge Lawrence gained from watching the railway construction in Jerablus was undoubtedly of great assistance to him when, in a few years’ time, he would make blowing up the Hejaz Railway a personal pastime.
AT MIDMORNING ON September 15, 1913, twenty-six-year-old William Yale was part of a three-man crew “pulling rods”—detaching and stacking drill sections, just about the most miserable job to be had in an oilfield—in the Kiefer field of northern Oklahoma when a courier on horseback approached. Minutes later, the Kiefer straw boss called Yale over to hand him a telegram. It was from the corporate headquarters of the Standard Oil Company of New York, and it was succinct: “Report to New York immediately.”
After graduating from his eponymous university in 1910, Yale had struggled to find his calling until, in 1912, he came across a notice soliciting applicants for the “foreign service school” of the Standard Oil Company of New York. On a whim, he applied.
Operating out of Standard’s corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York, the “school” consisted of a four-month intensive lecture and seminar program, designed to educate its applicants in all aspects of the petroleum industry, as well as to instill in them the “Standard man” ideal. Just what that ideal might consist of was difficult to say, for by 1912 Standard Oil was the most infamous corporation in the history of international commerce, its name synonymous with capitalist greed run amok.
Through cutthroat tactics devised by its principal shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades that by the early 1900s it controlled nearly 90 percent of the nation’s oil production. For nearly as long, it had operated a complex web of front companies and shell corporations that had defeated the efforts of every “trust buster” lawman trying to break its stranglehold. Finally, in 1911, just the year before Yale’s job application, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Standard to be an illegal monopoly and decreed it be broken up into thirty-four separate companies.
Whether this divestiture truly ended the Standard monopoly is still the subject of debate, but it did have the effect of forcing its component parts to specialize, either to focus on supplying regional domestic markets or on building international exports. Among the most aggressive in this latter sphere was the new Standard Oil Company of New York—often referred to by its acronym, Socony—the second largest of the thirty-four “baby Standards.”
While other baby Standards turned inward, Socony looked at the great world beyond and saw a plethora of burgeoning markets thirsting for petroleum. It was to coordinate and standardize its marketing approaches in these far-flung spots that the company had launched its foreign service school. William Yale, an enthusiastic pupil, would call the program’s teaching methods “far more effective and efficient” than anything he’d encountered at either prep school or university.
And the Socony administrators clearly liked what they saw in William Yale. At the conclusion of his coursework, he was selected to stay on and dispatched to take a firsthand look at oil production in the United States in preparation for future work abroad. Through the autumn of 1912, Yale shuttled to a variety of Standard oilfields in the Midwest, tasked only to write up weekly reports on what he observed and send them back to Socony headquarters.
But the endless tour of oilfields had soon become monotonous to the restless Yale. In early 1913, he wrote to his New York supervisors asking to be given a field job, arguing that if he was to learn any more about the oil business it would have to be by doing rather than observing. That letter undoubtedly further endeared him to 26 Broadway; the notion that a college man—an Ivy League graduate, no less—would request to toil as a laborer indicated just the sort of employee Standard was looking for. Yale was soon sent to the new Cushing field in western Oklahoma to work as a roustabout.
For a time, he reveled in the hard labor. Living in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end, Yale worked a succession of Oklahoma fields, where he cleared drill sites, laid piping, hauled machinery, and constructed derricks. He had been doing this for several months when the cable arrived from New York.
Just three days removed from the Kiefer field, Yale walked into the lobby of the Socony corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan. There, he was taken up to the thirteenth-floor office suite of Standard’s vice president, William Bemis. Yale found two other men already waiting in the suite, hats in hand, and all three maintained a respectful silence as the officious Bemis fired off directives to his scurrying staff.
“My mind was in a dream world,” Yale recounted, “as I listened to him dictating instructions to his secretary about shipments of kerosene oil to Shanghai, about contracts for asphalt to pave the streets of a city in India, and contracts with the Greek government for fuel oil to supply the Greek navy at Piraeus.”
When finally Bemis turned his attention to the three waiting men, it was to inform them that they had been selected for a special overseas assignment, that in just two days’ time they would board SS Imperator in New York harbor for its voyage to Calais, France. From there, they would travel overland across the length of Europe to Constantinople, where they would receive further instructions from the manager of Standard’s branch office. Before dismissing them, Bemis stressed to the three men that they were embarking on a highly confidential mission. As such, they were to tell no one of their ultimate destination or of their affiliation with Standard Oil. Instead, they were to pass themselves off as wealthy “playboys” en route to a Grand Tour of the Holy Land, a charade lent credence by their deluxe travel accommodations: the Imperator was the newest and most luxurious passenger ship plying the Atlantic crossing, their rail passage to Constantinople was to be aboard the fabled Orient Express, and they would be traveling first-class the entire way.
But upholding the playboy ruse was easier said than done for Yale’s two companions. J. C. Hill, the leader of the team, was a rough-around-the-edges crew boss from the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Rudolf McGovern was a dour and socially awkward geologist in his late twenties. Even if these two could manage to put on airs suggesting that they came from money—and that seemed doubtful—they hardly seemed prime candidates for a pilgrimage to biblical sites. Perhaps wisely, their answer to the playboy directive was to interact with the ship’s other first-class passengers as little as possible.
William Yale had no such difficulties. To the contrary, the voyage was like a disorienting return to his former life. Among the Imperator’s first-class passengers were a great many young people, the offspring of America’s industrial magnates and landed aristocracy, setting off on their requisite Grand Tour of Europe, the sort of tame adventure that until a few years earlier would have been his lot.
Yale would recall one peculiar detail of that
journey. The Imperator (German for emperor) was the new flagship of the Hamburg-America Line, and at every dinnertime its German officers rose to offer a toast to “der Tag” (the day). Unschooled in the nuances of German, Yale assumed that the gesture was in quaint celebration of the day just lived; it would be some time before he understood it was actually a kind of code, a toast in giddy anticipation of the coming world war, then less than a year away.
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1913, the same day that William Yale received his cable at the Kiefer oilfield ordering him to New York, T. E. Lawrence was at the train station in Aleppo, sixty miles to the west of Carchemish, awaiting the arrival of his brother Will.
Of his four brothers, Lawrence had always been closest to Will, the middle child and just two years his junior. Upon learning that his brother was leaving England to take up a teaching position in India, he had implored Will to stop off in Syria en route.
Despite their closeness, the visit must have been the source of some anxiety for Lawrence, who had long since been consigned to the role of family bohemian; it was easy to imagine that his brother might be quite shocked by the primitiveness of his surroundings and to report back as much to Oxford. Lawrence needn’t have worried. After the two spent some ten days together at Jerablus, Lawrence saw Will off at the local train station for the return to Aleppo, a moment Will recounted in a letter to their parents:
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