Newcombe, his work in southern Palestine finished, had visited Carchemish in May en route to England. But of course Carchemish was not really en route to anywhere, and Newcombe’s true motive for the detour had been to continue overland to Constantinople in order to spy on the progress being made by the Turks and Germans on the Baghdad Railway—and in particular on their tunneling projects in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains. He had succeeded in making the journey, but had been so closely watched as to be unable to study the tunneling work in any detail. In his June letter, Newcombe asked if Lawrence and Woolley might follow the same path on their return to England and glean what they could. Rather taking to their new roles as military intelligence sleuths, the archaeologists readily agreed.
That journey proved to be another extraordinarily fortuitous happenstance, but one that would ultimately play out very differently from Lawrence’s trip to Aqaba. In the Taurus and Amanus Mountains he would identify a crucial—and potentially devastating—Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, one that, despite his most strenuous efforts during the coming war, would never be exploited.
BACK IN HIS garden cottage at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford, Lawrence sat down to write a long letter to a friend, James Elroy Flecker, on the last Monday of June 1914. The bulk of the letter was taken up with a picaresque description of a melee that had occurred between the German railway engineers and their workers in Jerablus in May. But what is most interesting about the letter is what it doesn’t mention. On the day that Lawrence wrote it—Monday, June 29—the front page of almost every newspaper in Britain told of the previous day’s assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife, in the streets of Sarajevo by Serbian revolutionaries.
The news out of Sarajevo seemed to make just as little impression on Curt Prüfer and William Yale. His long Nile cruise with Richard von Below over, by the end of June 1914, Prüfer was living in Munich, eking out a modest living giving public lectures on Oriental languages; in his diary, he made no mention of the Balkan assassinations. As for William Yale, hard at work on the road project below Hebron, it appears he didn’t even hear of them until some weeks later.
All of which was actually quite understandable; the public had become thoroughly inured to the endless saber-rattling of the European imperial powers, the “crises” that seemed to boil up and fall away every few months, and there was no reason to think this one would play out any differently. But Sarajevo was the crisis that counted, because those who wanted war made it count. A very slow-burning fuse had been lit, one that would take over a month to burn through, but when it did, in the first days of August 1914, it would trigger a continent-wide war that would ultimately carry everyone down into the abyss together.
In his letter to Flecker on June 29, Lawrence wrote that he expected to be in England for another two or three weeks, and “thereafter Eastward” to Carchemish. But Lawrence’s days as an archaeologist were over.
Chapter 4
To the Last Million
Sir: I have the honor to report that conditions are going from bad to worse here.
U.S. CONSUL GENERAL IN BEIRUT, STANLEY HOLLIS, TO SECRETARY OF STATE, NOVEMBER 9, 1914
On the afternoon of August 7, 1914, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Britain’s newly appointed secretary of state for war, was called to his first cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and other senior ministers.
Kitchener’s selection for the War Office had come about almost by chance. On a brief visit back to England from his post as British agent to Egypt, he was just boarding a ship to leave when war was declared. Asquith, figuring that appointing Britain’s most famous military hero to lead that effort might have a salutary effect on public morale, had skipped over a long line of prospective candidates in giving the position to Kitchener.
At the time, boosting public morale seemed among the least of the prime minister’s concerns. In Britain, as elsewhere across Europe, war euphoria had gripped the populace, with great crowds gathering in public squares to cheer the news. Most predictions were that this war would be a very quick one, and in villages and cities across the continent, reserve soldiers, anxious to escape the drudgery of factory and farm, despaired at not being called up before this grand adventure passed them by. The situation was slightly different in Britain, one of the few European nations without mandatory conscription, but within days of the war declaration the British government was already contemplating a halt in recruitment, adjudging that it already had more volunteers signed up than it could ever possibly need.
But in that summer of 1914, most everyone was overlooking a crucial detail: that the weapons of war had changed so radically over the previous forty years as to render the established notions of its conduct obsolete. It was rather simple stuff, easy to miss—the machine gun; the long-range artillery shell; barbed wire—but because of this oversight, Europe was about to tumble into an altogether different conflict from what most imagined.
One reason Europe’s imperial powers missed the warning signs was that these new instruments of war had previously been employed almost exclusively against those who didn’t have them—specifically, those non-Europeans who attempted to resist their imperial reach. In such situations, the new weapons had allowed for a lopsided slaughter not seen since the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and more than any other single factor had accounted for the dramatic expansion of Europe’s colonial empires into Asia and Africa in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
It is perversely appropriate, then, that among the few people who did appreciate this new face of war and the problems it would pose was the man who had officiated over more of these one-sided battlefield slaughters than probably anyone else alive: Lord Kitchener. At the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener had trained his Maxim machine guns on horsemen charging with spears; at a cost of forty-seven British army dead, he had killed ten thousand of the enemy in a single morning. But what would happen when the other side had Maxims too? Kitchener had a pretty good idea. At that cabinet meeting on August 7, where some other ministers imagined a conflict lasting months or even weeks, the newly appointed war secretary predicted years. “It will not end,” he told his colleagues, “until we have plumbed our manpower to the last million.”
Naturally, these were words few wanted to hear, let alone pay heed to. And so as if imagining that nothing had really changed since the last great bout of European wars in Napoleonic times, the Scottish Highlanders gathered up their bagpipes and kilts, the French cuirassiers and Austrian lancers donned their armor breastplates and plumed helmets and, to the accompaniment of buglers and drums, marched gaily off to battle, not realizing until too late that their Europe was now to become an abattoir, a slaughtering pen into which, over the next four years, some ten million soldiers, along with an estimated six million civilians, would be hurried forward to their deaths.
One would need to return to the Dark Ages or the depredations of Genghis Khan to find a war as devastating. By point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe—colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars—and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day’s casualty rolls—with fifty-eight thousand Allied so
ldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world—and judge that the numbers “cannot be considered severe.”
The effect of all this on the collective European psyche would be utterly profound. Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.
In the process, though, the European public would come to question some of the most basic assumptions about their societies. Among the things they would realize was that, stripped of all its high-minded justifications and rhetoric, at its core this war had many of the trappings of an extended family feud, a chance for Europe’s kings and emperors—many of them related by blood—to act out old grievances and personal slights atop the heaped bodies of their loyal subjects. In turn, Europe’s imperial structure had fostered a culture of decrepit military elites—aristocrats and aging war heroes and palace sycophants—whose sheer incompetence on the battlefield, as well as callousness toward those dying for them, was matched only by that of their rivals. Indeed, in looking at the conduct of the war and the almost preternatural idiocy displayed by all the competing powers, perhaps its most remarkable feature is that anyone finally won at all.
In the end, the European public would look back on their war celebrations of August 1914 as if from a different age entirely, a death dance performed by gullible primitives. It would also give rise to an exquisite irony. In this titanic struggle waged for empire—protecting it, expanding it, chipping away at others’—four of the six great imperial powers of Europe would disappear completely, while the two survivors, Britain and France, would be so shattered as to never fully recover. Into the breach would come two dueling totalitarian ideologies—communism and fascism—as well as a new imperial power—the United States—that, given the bad name its predecessors had attached to the label, would forever protest its innocence of being one.
But in August 1914 all this was in the future. For now, Europe was gripped by a kind of giddy relief that the years of posturing were over, that der Tag had finally arrived.
In this, the Lawrence family of Oxford was in no way immune. Within days of the war’s declaration, Frank Lawrence, the second youngest and most military-minded of the five Lawrence boys, was given his commission as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Gloucester Battalion. In India, Will Lawrence swiftly made plans to return to England in order to enlist, while Bob, the eldest, signed on with the Royal Army Medical Corps. By month’s end, that left just fourteen-year-old Arnold and twenty-six-year-old “Ned” at home.
For T. E. Lawrence, this home stay was imposed by forces beyond his control. Although the Ottoman Empire had not joined in the August rush to war, expectations in London were that it soon might—and probably on the side of the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If that came to pass, the mapping expedition of southern Palestine that Lawrence and Leonard Woolley had recently participated in could be of great military importance. Under orders from Kitchener himself, the two young archaeologists were told to forgo any thought of enlisting until they had completed their report. So as others his age trooped off to boot camp that August, Lawrence shuttled between his Polstead Road cottage and the archives of the Ashmolean Museum, feverishly putting the final touches on The Wilderness of Zin.
If Lawrence was mindful of the report’s significance, his comparative lassitude infected him with a growing sense of desperation. In early September, he and Woolley contacted Stewart Newcombe, their supervisor on the Palestine expedition and now a ranking officer in military intelligence, seeking his help in landing positions there. Newcombe advised patience. Should Turkey enter the war on Germany’s side, he explained, their services as Near East experts would be urgently needed, and arranging their appointment would only be hampered if in the meantime they threw themselves into the maw of the military bureaucracy.
That advice didn’t sit at all well with Lawrence. Surely adding to his gloom was that in those opening days the war did seem headed for the early conclusion that most predicted—except with the wrong side winning.
In provoking the conflict, German strategy had been predicated on an extremely bold, even reckless scheme. The plan was to only lightly defend its eastern frontier and cede ground against Russia’s advancing armies, while launching a massive offensive against the French and British armies to the west in hopes of knocking those countries out of the war before they could fully mobilize. With that front thus closed down, the Germans could then turn their full attention to the Russians.
By the beginning of September, it appeared as if the Germans might succeed beyond their wildest dreams. On the Western Front, their armies had swept through neutral Belgium and then turned south, scattering the disorganized French and British forces before them. They now stood on the banks of the Marne River, just thirty miles from Paris. The surprise had come on the Eastern Front, where rather than simply employing defensive stalling tactics as planned, a vastly outnumbered German army had leapt to the attack; it had already annihilated one blundering Russian invasion force, and was about to destroy another. “Home by Christmas” suddenly seemed a conservative slogan, and for the soldiers of the Triple Entente—Great Britain, France, and Russia—a haunting one.
But then in the second week of September the tide abruptly turned. In the engagement that would become known as the “miracle of the Marne,” the British and French checked the German advance and began slowly to push them back through the French countryside. This war was not going to be the “short, cleansing thunderstorm” the German chancellor had so confidently predicted; instead, after six weeks of combat, as many as half a million men were already dead, and stalemate was setting in.
For Lawrence, to be holed up in the leafy confines of Oxford at such a time, poring over a half-inch-to-the-mile map of an empty desert a thousand miles from the nearest battlefield, must have felt a terribly painful academic exercise. What’s more, he surely reasoned, the reversal of fortunes in France meant his purgatory was likely to continue; if the Turks hadn’t come into the war when it appeared Germany was running the table, why do so now when the Germans were retreating?
“I am writing a learned work on Moses and his wanderings,” he acidly wrote to a friend in Lebanon on September 18. “I have a horrible fear that the Turks do not intend to go to war.”
IF LAWRENCE HADN’T appreciated the warning signs in the run‑up to war, William Yale, overseeing the construction of the Standard Oil road in southern Palestine, missed them completely. In fact, just as a telegram delivered to an Oklahoma oilfield had presaged his being dispatched to the Near East, so a second telegram to his remote construction camp in the Palestinian desert nearly a year later informed him of the war’s outbreak.
With all work on the road project brought to an immediate stop, Yale hurried back to Jerusalem that August. He found a city in tumult. Among the sizable expatriate community of Europeans and Americans, most families were already packing up for the journey home. Leaving ahead of them in answer to their governments’ general mobilization calls were the French and German men of fighting age (the British wouldn’t initiate a draft until early 1916).
“We went down to the railroad station to see them off,” Yale remembered. “Like young collegians on their way to a football game they shouted, cheered, and sang. As the train for Jaffa pulled out of the yards, the Germans in one car sang enthusiastically Deutschland über alles, while the Frenchmen in another car sang just as lustily, La Marseillaise. The friends of yesterday were off on their great adventure.”
In contrast to the frenzied activity around him, the American oilman suddenly found he had little to do. With the United States staying out of the war, Socony headquarters ordered Yale to remain in Palestine, figuring he could at least watch over the company’s soon-to-arrive oil drilling equipment until they decided on their next move. But even this caretaker task was soon mooted. Invoking a state-of-emergency decree, the Ottoman government requi
sitioned the incoming fleet of Standard Oil trucks as soon as they were unloaded at the Jaffa docks. Shortly afterward, the British navy stopped the freighter bringing most of Socony’s piping and drilling machinery to Palestine and diverted all of it to an impoundment lot in Egypt.
With the community of foreigners in Jerusalem now reduced to a handful, Yale passed his time that late summer by playing tennis and canasta, and engaging in long, obsessive discussions with his fellow expatriates about what might come next in world events. A special focus of these discussions was trying to read the tea leaves of regional politics, sifting for clues as to whether or not the Young Turks in Constantinople would take their country into the fray. For a young man given to action, this imposed quietude was maddening, and Yale grew increasingly anxious for something to do.
But the old admonishment to be careful what you wish for soon found application when Yale was asked to play minder to a dozen unruly American oil workers. The men, most from Texas or Oklahoma, had been part of the intended work crew at the Kornub drilling site, and had been aboard the same freighter that the British diverted to Egypt. With time on their hands and money in their pockets, the oil workers proceeded to cut such a scandalous swath through the streets of Cairo—no mean feat in that libertine city—that the local Socony office had sent telegrams to headquarters urging that they be returned to the United States. Instead, 26 Broadway decided to forward the men to Yale, perhaps hoping that a stint in the Holy Land might serve to reacquaint them with their Christian virtues.
If so, that hope was misplaced. If anything, the opportunity to tread the land of Jesus seemed to spur the oilmen to even more outrageous public behavior. In observing this, as well as their office’s rapidly dwindling cash reserves—the war in Europe had brought a temporary halt to international money transfers—Yale and his supervisor decided that a neat solution to both problems lay in withholding the men’s pay and instead placing them on five-dollar-a-week allowances. Sensitive to the workers’ disappointment with this arrangement, on allowance day Yale took to disbursing the money with one hand while holding a loaded six-shooter in the other.
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