Certainly, Prüfer had done little to endear himself to the British authorities in Cairo, having continued with the pan-Islamic destabilizing efforts of his mentor, Max von Oppenheim. Most alarming to the Cairo authorities, Prüfer had long maintained a close relationship with a host of anti-British Egyptian figures, as well as with the disgruntled khedive himself. Indeed, on several occasions, Egyptian secret police had tracked the good doctor to clandestine meetings with some of British Egypt’s most committed and dangerous enemies.
Consequently, placing such a man in the khedival library seemed a bit like putting an arsonist in a fireworks factory; shortly after Prüfer’s name was put forward, the British diplomatically informed the Germans that his candidacy was “unsuitable.” The Germans pressed their case, with the German ambassador in Cairo taking his spirited defense of Prüfer’s nomination directly to Kitchener. At the end of October 1911 the German ambassador to Great Britain, Count Paul Metternich, took the matter all the way up to British foreign secretary Edward Grey.
But the more the Germans pushed on the Prüfer issue, the more suspicious the British became. In early 1912, Kitchener informed the German embassy that the issue had been referred to the Egyptian government’s Ministry of Education, where Prüfer’s candidacy had been rejected anew. It was an utterly transparent maneuver—the so-called Egyptian government would do exactly Britain’s bidding—but it did finally bring an end to the matter. For Prüfer, it was a professionally devastating turn of events. Not only had he been publicly humiliated in losing the directorship, but with the intelligence reports of his intrigues now well known throughout the British government, he was effectively prevented from advancing further at the German embassy in Cairo.
But that was the least of it. However much the elitist structure of German society had been reformed in other spheres, those changes had not permeated into the diplomatic branch of the foreign ministry; in 1912, as in 1812, that branch was the province of the German aristocracy, its counts and princelings and noblemen. Indeed, no better example existed of the near impossibility of an outsider being admitted to this exclusive club than the long and futile struggle of Prüfer’s mentor, Count von Oppenheim.
Although highly educated and clearly brilliant, Oppenheim possessed one fatal flaw in the eyes of the German diplomatic branch—he was of Jewish ancestry—and that had been enough to defeat his many efforts over some two decades to win a transfer from the far less prestigious consular branch. He probably came closest in 1898, when his request was accompanied by a raft of supporting letters from gentile German aristocrats, friends of his from the Union Club in Berlin, except that Oppenheim had the misfortune of submitting his petition at the same time as another Jew. In the entire history of the German diplomatic service there had been only one Jewish member, a Rothschild, and the notion that there might suddenly be two more cast alarm.
“I am absolutely persuaded,” a senior foreign ministry official wrote in response to the situation, “that what we have here is not a question of one Jew, but of his numerous coreligionists who will press through the breach which he makes.… If [even] one is let in, a cry of lamentation will ensue if others are refused.” On such concerns, both applications were promptly denied.
On paper, the chances of Curt Prüfer—a lower-middle-class commoner with a doctorate from a middling university—passing into the foreign ministry’s higher ranks looked nearly as bleak as Oppenheim’s, but his Oriental secretary appointment had afforded a glimmer of hope; this was the one consular branch position where an elevation into the diplomatic branch occasionally occurred. Obviously, the odds of that happening would have been vastly improved had Prüfer assumed the library directorship. Conversely, having fought for that posting and lost, his odds now were exactly nil.
Through 1912 and most of 1913, Prüfer struggled on, but he found it impossible to escape the cloak of ignominy that had been cast over him. With the Egyptian secret police now watching his every move, even his adventurist activities as Oriental secretary were greatly curtailed. It was for this—and perhaps also a simple desire to try something completely new with his life—that he finally tendered his resignation and went off to join Richard von Below. What he went away with was an abiding hatred for the British, the “natural enemy” of Germany, now also the people who had destroyed his career.
On a broader level, though, the controversy that surrounded Prüfer over the library directorship neatly illustrated a particularly ominous feature of the early 1910s. While it already strained credulity that Lord Kitchener, the uncrowned sovereign of twelve million people in one of Britain’s most important vassal states, had been compelled to personally engage in that controversy, how had it ever escalated to the point where the British foreign secretary and his closest advisors were enjoined? Did these men really have nothing better to do with their time than compose and debate lengthy memoranda over the job placement of a low-level German embassy official in Cairo?
In the answer to that question lies one of the keys to how World War I happened. By the early 1910s, with all the European powers perpetually jockeying for advantage, all of them constantly manufacturing crises in hopes of winning some small claim against their rivals, a unique kind of “fog of war” was setting in, one composed of a thousand petty slights and disputes and misunderstandings. It wasn’t just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers—and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings—of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prüfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?
THE GULF OF Aqaba is a narrow, hundred-mile-long inlet of the Red Sea that separates the craggy desert mountains of Arabia to one side from a similar set of mountains on the Sinai Peninsula to the other. At the northernmost end of the Aqaba inlet is the Jordanian town of the same name.
In 1914, Aqaba was nothing more than a tiny fishing village, its thousand or so inhabitants settled into a collection of crude huts sprinkled about the shoreline. Yet it was Aqaba, more than any other spot in the roughly four thousand square miles that he and his Royal Engineers were mapping, that obsessed Captain Stewart Newcombe.
In trying to anticipate the path an invasion force might take from Ottoman Palestine to reach the Suez Canal, certainly the most logical route was across the very top of the Sinai Peninsula, close to the Mediterranean. This was an established land crossing going back millennia, and its water sources, if meager, had been tapped and welled for just as long. Inland, the harsh Zin Desert seemed to afford few real possibilities, an assessment gradually being confirmed by Newcombe’s men. By early February 1914, they had surveyed much of the border region’s interior, and while finding a few Bedouin trails and wells, had uncovered nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size.
But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the Sinai-Palestine demarcation line, represented a wild card. With its outlet on the Red Sea, troops could be ferried into the village and then marched west. For well over a decade, persistent rumors had the Turks secretly building a railroad spur linking Aqaba to the Arabian interior, complementing the mountain trail already in existence. Rumors aside, it was known that at least two “roads” originated somewhere in the Quweira mountains above Aqaba, trails long used by local Bedouin to launch raids into the Sinai. Taken all together, it meant the Turks might have the potential of launching an invasion force across the Sinai from the very southern end of the buffer zone, even while British attention was focused at the more obvious northern end.
Understandably, then, Stewart Newcombe viewed getting into Aqaba as the most crucial aspect of his entire mission to Zin. In mid-February 1914, he turned his attention to how he might do it and who should accompany him.
History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem
of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane. Such was the case with Captain Newcombe’s choosing a companion for the journey to Aqaba.
Theoretically, he could have pulled any one of the Royal Engineers off his five surveying parties, but as much as their technical expertise might come in handy, he was expecting a cold reception in the village, and the sight of two British officers rolling in would be unlikely to improve it. He also could have chosen Leonard Woolley, whose somewhat fusty manner would lend credence to this being a foray of purely scientific interest. But instead he chose Lawrence. One reason was that he genuinely enjoyed his company, but another was Lawrence’s peculiar skill at polite belligerence that Newcombe had observed in a variety of forms since the early days of the expedition, a skill likely to be called upon in Aqaba.
Joined by Dahoum, Newcombe and Lawrence showed up in Aqaba in mid-February, and, just as Newcombe had expected, their welcome was a decidedly icy one. The municipal governor, professing to have no knowledge of their project, immediately forbade them from doing any mapping or photographing or archaeological work in the region. But just as Newcombe had also expected, these strictures only spurred Lawrence to greater initiative. “I photographed what I could,” Lawrence would recount in a letter to a friend, Edward Leeds, “I archaeologised everywhere.”
Of special interest to Lawrence—and this interest may have mainly derived from the opportunity to flagrantly disregard the governor’s orders—were the ruins of a fortress on a small island just a few hundred yards off the Aqaba shore. He secretly arranged for a boatman to take him to the island, only to have the man promptly arrested by the governor’s police. Undeterred, Lawrence crafted a crude inflatable raft and, together with Dahoum, paddled out to the island.
It was an easy enough passage going out, but rather a different story on the return. With both the current and wind against them, it took Lawrence and Dahoum hours to make the shore, at which point the local police, long since alerted, took them into custody. The furious governor placed the pair under armed escort for their journey out of Aqaba. Unfortunately for the men detailed to this mission, the unwanted entourage simply provided Lawrence with an amusing new challenge.
“I learnt that their orders were not to let me out of their sight,” he wrote his family a week later from a town fifty miles to the north, “and I took them two days afoot over such hills and wadis as did [them in]. I have been camped here for two days, and they are still struggling in from all over the compass.”
As a bonus, during this forced march Lawrence had stumbled across the two “great cross-roads” that the Bedouin raiding parties used for their forays into the Sinai.
All of this would prove profoundly useful to Lawrence. In just a little over three years’ time, he would use the knowledge gained from his escapades in Aqaba to conquer that strategic village in a manner that no one else could conceive of, a feat of arms still considered one of the most daring military exploits of modern times.
UPON PARTING WAYS with J. C. Hill in Jerusalem in early January, William Yale and Rudolf McGovern set out for the Kornub massif. Reaching it a few days after their humiliating encounter with Lawrence in Beersheva, they immediately had reason to recall a very basic law of chemical properties: namely, that it is not just oil mixed with water that gives off an iridescent sheen. In the right concentrations, a wide variety of minerals can, including iron, and it was precisely this—stagnant water rich in iron tailings—that Hill had observed through his binoculars from thirty miles away.
Crestfallen but determined to make the most of their arduous trip, Yale and McGovern spent several days collecting rock samples and drilling boreholes. From this, they determined there was oil in Kornub—McGovern was fairly certain of that—but whether it existed in anything near commercially viable quantities seemed unlikely. The two then returned to Jerusalem, there to relay the sobering news to Socony headquarters.
Curiously, and for reasons Yale and McGovern couldn’t begin to fathom at the time, 26 Broadway didn’t seem to share their sense of disappointment. The two were told to lie low in Jerusalem, which they did until mid-March, and were then dispatched for more fruitless exploration of the last of the three prospective concessionary zones, in the hill region of Thrace just to the west of Constantinople. Tucked away in the backwaters of the Ottoman Empire, Yale remained unaware that news of the Kornub “strike” had triggered a complex diplomatic tug-of-war, one that was playing out across four continents and involving ambassadors, ministers of state, and some half dozen international corporations.
When the British had pinpointed the location of Socony’s interests in Palestine, courtesy of Lawrence’s interrogation of Yale outside Beersheva, alarm had spread throughout the government. With access to oil now considered a matter of national security in light of the Royal Navy’s ongoing oil-conversion program, taking control of any new fields was not merely an economic concern but a political one. There followed a complicated series of maneuvers in which the British authorities tried to sabotage the Kornub deal and arrange for a British oil company to obtain the concessions. In this cause they relied on information from one of the Palestinian concession holders, Suleiman Nassif, who deftly played each side against the other to his own benefit. It was at this juncture that McGovern’s disheartening report on Kornub finally reached New York, but by then it was too late. Caught up in the spirit of competition, Socony not only disregarded McGovern’s findings but ultimately paid a far higher price for the Kornub concessions than intended.
None of this was known to Yale and McGovern until they returned to Constantinople from Thrace in late April. There they were met by their old boss, J. C. Hill, who informed them that, having just secured the Kornub concessions for a period of twenty-five years, Socony was now gearing up for a massive exploration project in the region, one that would entail building roads, erecting worker camps in the desert, bringing in trucks and drilling equipment and heavy machinery. Furthermore, Socony was sending the three of them to Egypt, there to oversee the purchasing and to coordinate the delivery of all the matériel needed. That this was an area of expertise in which they had no knowledge was deemed unimportant; by the late spring of 2014, Yale, McGovern, and Hill were in Egypt contemplating a daunting stack of purchasing manuals in Socony’s Alexandria office.
But in this new task, the three men could draw on a powerful guiding principle: they were Standard men, and above all else, William Yale was increasingly coming to realize, that meant taking charge, making decisions. Within a few days of sifting through those purchasing manuals, and without ever seeking the counsel of someone who might know what they were doing, they had ordered up some $250,000 worth of drilling equipment (about $30 million in today’s equivalent) for the inauguration of Socony’s new operation in the Kornub. That equipment, purchased from a variety of vendors throughout the United States, would take several months to arrive in Palestine—actual drilling was scheduled to begin on November 1—but in the meantime, an enormous amount of work was to be done.
The first step was to cut a road from Hebron down through the Judean foothills, and then across some twenty miles of virtually trackless desert to Kornub. This aspect of the project would prove immensely important in the near future. Yale was put in charge of this, and he contracted the best road builder in Palestine to do it. Even so, there were glitches. A near riot developed in Hebron when the road surveyors took to marking the walls of houses in their path with crosses in white paint, a symbol the devoutly Muslim residents interpreted as marking them for conversion to Christianity. On another occasion, Bedouin riflemen attacked one of the construction crews out in the foothills; the assault was finally repelled by Socony’s own private militia.
But as Yale was well aware, the biggest hurdles awaited at either end of that road. All the drilling equipment being brought over from the United States would need to come in a
t the Mediterranean port of Jaffa—except there were no cranes in Jaffa capable of unloading such heavy machinery. Then there was the niggling little detail to be worked out at the other end of the line. One thing that makes a desert a desert is, of course, a lack of water, and while McGovern had managed to locate a few small wells in the Kornub area, the supply seemed barely sufficient for the twenty-man work crew that would be living there, let alone provide the huge amounts needed for the highly water-dependent drilling process. As with so many other parts of the project, however, this issue failed to set off alarm bells within Socony, and if a problem isn’t acknowledged, does it really need a solution?
As work got under way, Yale was held by an ever-deepening sense of foreboding. “Secretly,” he wrote, “I dreaded the mess, which seemed an inevitable outcome of the systemless way the Chief [J. C. Hill] handled matters.”
UPON HIS RETURN to Syria from his Zin adventure in early March, Lawrence found a letter waiting for him from David Hogarth. It contained wonderful news. Impressed by word of the previous season’s discoveries, the British philanthropist who was the primary sponsor of the Carchemish project had finally set aside enough funds to keep the excavations going for an extended period—two more years at least, and possibly for as long as it took for the site to be thoroughly explored. With this cheerful news, Lawrence planned to quickly finish the Wilderness of Zin report for the Palestine Exploration Fund during his upcoming break in England, and then hurry back to Carchemish for an early beginning to the next digging season.
For his return to England, Lawrence planned to first detour to Baghdad and then pass down the Tigris River to the Indian Ocean, figuring the much longer sea voyage this would entail would give him more time to work on the Zin report. Instead, just as that season’s dig was closing down in early June, a letter from Stewart Newcombe changed his plan.
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