THE OLD War Office Building at the corner of Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall in central London is an imposing neo-baroque structure, a five-story monolith of white Portland stone with thirty-foot-high cupolas at each of its corners. Inside, it has the feel of a particularly elegant gentlemen’s club, with marble staircases linking its floors, great crystal chandeliers, and mosaic-tiled hallways. In the more select of its nearly one thousand rooms, the walls are oak-paneled with niches cut out for marble fireplaces. In autumn 1914, this building was headquarters to Great Britain’s Imperial General Staff, those seniormost officers tasked with overseeing their nation’s war effort. It was also to this building that T. E. Lawrence, at last done with his Wilderness of Zin report, was dispatched in mid-October to take up his new position as a civilian cartographer in the General Staff’s Geographical Section.
By then, “Section” was rapidly becoming a misnomer, for within a week of Lawrence’s arrival, the last of the office’s military cartographers was shipped off to the battlefront in France, leaving just him and his immediate supervisor behind. Thus Lawrence quickly found himself doing the work of a half dozen men: organizing the various war-theater maps, adding new details as reports came in from the front, briefing senior commanders on those maps’ salient features.
One might imagine that for a young man—Lawrence had just turned twenty-six—to be suddenly thrust into the very nerve center of his nation’s military command, to be in daily conference with generals and admirals, would be a heady experience. But one would imagine wrong. To the contrary, Lawrence seemed to take a decidedly jaundiced view of his new surroundings, its denizens fresh grist for his mordant wit.
Part of his disdain may have stemmed from how much military culture resembled that of the English public school system of which he was a product: the endless bowing and scraping to authority; the rigidly defined hierarchical structure as denoted by the special ties worn by upperclassmen and prefects in the schools, by the number of hash marks and pips on coatsleeves in the military; the special privileges bestowed or denied as a result. As Lawrence quipped to a friend shortly after arriving at the War Office, it appeared that the truly grand staircases of the building were reserved for the exclusive use of field marshals and “charwomen,” or cleaning ladies.
His lack of awe probably also derived from the overall caliber of the building’s occupants. With most active-service military officers now in France, the General Staff had been filled out with men brought up from the reserves or mustered out of retirement, and even to Lawrence’s untrained eye it was clear many hadn’t a clue of what they were supposed to be doing. As in any institution, this sense of inadequacy was often masked by an aura of extreme self-importance: at the War Office, freshly minted colonels and generals were forever striding briskly down hallways, memos in hand, or calling urgent staff meetings, or sending one of the Boy Scout messenger boys up to the Geographical Section for the latest map of Battlefield X, to be supplied ten minutes ago.
One by-product of this climate of puffery, however, was that it led directly to Lawrence’s being inducted into the military, the circumstances of which provided him with one of his favorite later anecdotes.
Shortly after starting at the General Staff, he was ushered into the august presence of General Henry Rawlinson. Rawlinson was about to leave London to take up command of British forces in Belgium, and Lawrence had been summoned to brief him on the newly updated Belgian field maps. Except, according to Lawrence, Rawlinson went apoplectic at the sight of his civilian dress, and bellowed, “I want to talk to an officer!” Since the Geographical Section now consisted of just two men, Lawrence was immediately bundled off to the Army and Navy Store, there to get himself fitted out as a second lieutenant, while the paperwork for his “commission” was hastily drawn up. The uniform wouldn’t truly solve the problem, however; in the years ahead, Lawrence’s disregard for military protocol, manifested both in a usually unkempt appearance and a relaxed manner that bordered on the insolent, would drive his superior officers to distraction time and again.
But if he was now in the military, however haphazardly, Lawrence’s work at the War Office was bringing him no closer to the arena of action. Since he fell below the minimum height standard of the British army, he needed a situation where his expertise might outweigh his physical shortcomings, and the only possible scenario meeting that criterion was, once again, if Turkey came into the war.
This seemed more unlikely than ever. With the war settling into paralysis—on the Western Front both sides were now frantically throwing up trenchworks—where was the incentive for anyone else to wade into the morass? “Turkey seems at last to have made up its mind to lie down and be at peace with all the world,” Lawrence lamented to Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, on October 19. “I’m sorry, because I wanted to root them out of Syria, and now their blight will be more enduring than ever.”
But just two weeks later, his fears were put to rest. On November 2, with Enver Pasha’s faction having finally won out, Turkey came into the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
For Lawrence, more good news soon followed. In the wake of Turkey’s declaration, Stewart Newcombe was recalled from the French theater to head up a new military intelligence unit in Cairo, the city slated as headquarters for Britain’s war effort in the Near Eastern theater. It was to be a very small unit, just a handful of men with extensive knowledge of the region, and Newcombe immediately tapped both Lawrence and Leonard Woolley to join it.
“Now it’s Cairo,” Lawrence wrote Winifred Fontana again in early December, clearly in a much-improved mood. “All goes well except among the Turks.”
IT WAS A land denuded. Although Aaron Aaronsohn had been prepared for the onslaught of the requisition squads following the Ottomans’ entry into the war, their depredations went beyond even his worst imaginings. Across Syria, crops, farm vehicles, and draft animals were seized and hauled away in the name of wartime exigency, their hapless owners indemnified with hastily scribbled receipts that all knew would never be redeemed. And just as the agronomist had feared, the pillaging appeared particularly uninhibited in the Jewish colonies. At Zichron Yaakov, according to biographer Ronald Florence, “Aaron Aaronsohn watched Turkish soldiers systematically take clothing (including women’s lingerie and baby clothes), carts, wagons, water buffaloes, agricultural implements, tools, firearms, medical instruments (including those for obstetrics), microscopes, and the fence posts and barbed wire needed to protect the fields.” Eventually, most of Zichron’s irrigation piping would go as well, leaving its fields and orchards to wilt from lack of water. Aaronsohn was only able to avoid a similar despoiling of the agricultural research station at Athlit through the determined intercession of local Ottoman officials and the posting of armed guards.
The agronomist might have resigned himself to the idea that these plunderings were part of the inevitable sacrifices to be made in wartime if they actually served the war effort; instead, they were gutting Syria from within, doing the enemy’s work for them. In his travels over the coming months, he would see great stacks of confiscated wheat rotting in government storage yards, an uncovered mound of three thousand sacks of sugar in the city of Nablus left to dissolve in the winter rains, “to the delight of the street boys.” To repair a bridge in Beersheva, Aaronsohn later reported, engineers had put in a request for twenty-four barrels of cement. Instead, the zealous requisition squads had gathered up four hundred barrels, all of which “were destroyed by rain before being used, with the result that the bridge remained without repairs.”
While it could be argued that the Jewish colonies suffered disproportionately in these seizures simply because they had more and better matériel to take, the actions of the Constantinople regime certainly added to their misfortunes. Within days of Turkey joining Germany and Austria-Hungary in the conflict, the caliph, the supreme religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, issued a fatwa that this was now a holy war, that in
protection of the faith it was the sacred duty of every Muslim to join the jihad against Islam’s foreign, Christian enemies. Although this call to jihad lost some of its luster among those who noticed that the Ottomans had just joined an alliance with two Christian and imperial powers, it did have the intended effect of inflaming the Muslim masses; in towns and cities across the empire, young Muslim men took to the streets and military induction centers to declare their willingness to fight and die for the cause. Of course, this fatwa had the simultaneous effect of alarming the empire’s Christian and Jewish populations, compelling the governor of Syria to issue a hasty explanation that the jihad only applied to its foreign enemies.
If that clarification mollified many in the Christian community, which comprised nearly 30 percent of the empire’s inhabitants, its calming effect was far more limited in the Jewish community. Part of their continuing fear surely derived from their small numbers—“small” having an unfortunate tendency to translate as “vulnerable” in wartime—but it also stemmed from the contentious position the Jewish colonists occupied in the social fabric of Palestine.
Some of those problems the colonists had brought on themselves. In Zichron Yaakov, as in most other “first-wave” Jewish settlements, the émigrés had gradually built their way to prosperity through adopting Palestine’s long-established fellaheen system, employing landless or tenant Arab peasants to perform much of the manual labor. By contrast, many of the socialist-minded Russian émigrés of the second aliyah denounced this arrangement as exploitive and feudalistic; in pursuit of creating “the new Jewish man,” they propounded, all work should be done by Jews themselves. For the unfortunate fellaheen, it wasn’t hard to see the downside to both these approaches, one perpetuating the plantation system that had kept their families impoverished and disenfranchised for generations, the other denying them employment ostensibly for their own good—or, as Aaron Aaronsohn would caustically put it, “generously forbidding them to work at all.”
Exacerbating the friction was that in the eyes of many of their Muslim Arab neighbors, the Jews were a dhimmi, or inferior people. Even for those Palestinians whose lives were unaffected by the Jewish influx, perhaps actually improved by it, the image of Jews living better than themselves—to say nothing of the further level of privilege many enjoyed courtesy of the Capitulations—added another layer of bitterness. Beginning with the first aliyah, there had been sporadic attacks on Jewish colonies by local villagers, and the occasional murder of a colonist caught out alone on the road.
But the colonists hadn’t accepted this situation passively. In the early 1900s, several Jewish paramilitary forces, most notably the Gideonites and Bar Giora, were formed on settlements particularly hard hit by marauders, and they began contracting their protection services out to other colonies. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see where this would lead; before long, the Gideonites and Bar Giora were conducting punitive raids against Arab villages they deemed as hostile or responsible for prior attacks, ensuring new rounds of retaliatory attacks by the Arabs.
Taken together, then, by the autumn of 1914 the Jewish colonists in Palestine understandably felt nervous. Between the jihad fatwa and the requisition seizures and the revoking of the Capitulations, the most pressing question was just how much the local Ottoman officials—many not partial to the Jews at the best of times—would come to their aid if matters turned truly nasty.
In Zichron Yaakov, an answer to this question soon began to form, and it was not a comforting one. Aaron Aaronsohn’s younger brother Alex had been caught up in the army’s conscription sweeps of September, and when he finally managed to finagle a medical release and return home two months later it was with disturbing news: after the call to jihad, Alex and all the other Jews and Christians in his conscription unit had been stripped of their weapons and consigned to labor battalions. Then, in late November, came a new edict demanding that privately owned firearms be handed in to the authorities, resulting in another army requisition squad descending on Zichron Yaakov. When the residents professed to have no weapons—they had taken the precaution of burying them in a nearby field—the Turkish commander grabbed up four men, including the luckless Alex Aaronsohn, and hauled them off to Nablus to be beaten until they remembered otherwise. It wasn’t until the same commander allegedly threatened to turn his attentions to the young women of Zichron that the weapons were finally surrendered, and Alex and the others released.
For many of the Jewish émigrés across Palestine, it was all beginning to feel like a prelude to the pogroms they thought they had left behind in Europe, especially when in early December the Young Turk who governed Palestine, Djemal Pasha, announced that the citizens of “belligerent nations” must either take Ottoman citizenship or face deportation. This naturally most directly affected the Russian Jewish minority, and within days, some eight hundred Russian Jews were rounded up in Jaffa for expulsion. The docks of that city were soon crowded with other Jews trying to get out on any ship that would take them, and to any safe haven that might accept them.
A number of Zichron Yaakov residents joined in this exodus, but the Aaronsohn family was not among them. Even though the family patriarch, sixty-six-year-old Ephraim, was still alive, it was really his eldest son who now decided important matters in the family, and for Aaron Aaronsohn there was no decision to be made. Palestine was their home. Moreover, it was the site of all his scientific work, and of the dream that sustained him. “I am always watched,” he wrote one of his American benefactors in mid-January, “and well-intentioned friends are strongly advising me to leave the country as soon as I have the opportunity. But I have no intention to run away—yet.” Still, Aaronsohn’s faith in the state had been deeply shaken. “As a staunch supporter of the Turks from olden days, I feel sorry and ashamed for all I have heard and seen in these last weeks.”
ON THE MORNING of December 15, 1914, a French steamer six days out of Marseilles approached the low, hazy horizon of northern Egypt. Among those on board was T. E. Lawrence, come to take up his new position with the military intelligence unit of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo. Accompanying him was the man who would be his immediate supervisor in that post, Captain Stewart Newcombe.
Cairo in 1914 was a city of less than one million, a place of wide boulevards and beautiful parks, of elegant riverfront promenades along the Nile. At that time, the Great Pyramids of Giza were some ten miles beyond the city’s reach, their hard-stone crowns visible from the rooftop of most any tall building downtown.
But even more than its physical appearance, what made 1914 Cairo such a beguiling place was its status as one of the world’s greatest crossroads, its layer upon layer of history going back over a millennium. The Old City remained a labyrinthine maze of alleyways and tiny shops, old palaces and mosques tucked into its back streets, and even if the occupying British had managed to erect a European veneer here and there in their thirty years of rule, the Egyptian capital remained a deeply exotic and mysterious place, unknowable in the way of all truly grand cities.
This was certainly part of what had entranced Lawrence upon his first visit to Cairo three years earlier. But if the city was physically little changed from 1911, in other ways 1914 Cairo was virtually unrecognizable. Since the outbreak of war in Europe, it had become a transit point for hundreds of thousands of territorial troops from India, Australia, and New Zealand passing through the Suez Canal on their way to the Western Front. As happens with R&R stops in most every war, these soldiers had quickly turned much of Cairo into a vast red-light district, places where most anything and anyone could be purchased for the right price.
That situation, scandalous to conservative Cairenes, had only grown worse in the days since Turkey joined the war. With a Turkish assault on the Suez Canal now all but certain—indeed, the governor of Syria, Djemal Pasha, had publicly vowed as much at the end of November—tens of thousands of British and territorial troops were now being held back in Egypt to meet the threat. This was rapidly t
urning Cairo into a military encampment in its own right, its downtown streets awash with strutting officers and columns of marching foot soldiers. If the Cairenes had never been thrilled about the presence of their British imperial overseers at the best of times—and they hadn’t—they regarded them now with a seething and growing antipathy.
To provide office space and lodging for the officers tasked to manage this burgeoning military force, the British quickly took over most of the city’s finer hotels. One of these was the Savoy, an eclectic blend of British Victorian and Indian Moghul architectures near the east bank of the Nile. Upon their arrival, the staff of Stewart Newcombe’s new military intelligence unit set up shop in three large rooms on an upper floor of the Savoy, while taking bedrooms at the Grand Continental Hotel immediately adjacent.
Initially the unit consisted of just five men, and was more likely to be taken for some kind of Oxbridge peer-review panel than a group dedicated to the black arts of intelligence and counterespionage. Along with the two Oxford-educated archaeologists, Lawrence and Woolley, were two young aristocrats, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert, both sitting members of Parliament. Soon after arriving in Cairo, Lawrence wrote to his old friend Edward Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum to describe their various functions: “Woolley looks after personnel, is sweet to callers in many tongues, and keeps lists of persons useful or objectionable. One [George] Lloyd, who is an M.P. of sorts and otherwise not bad, looks after Mesopotamia, and Aubrey Herbert, who is a quaint person, looks after Turkish politics. Between them in their spare time they locate the Turkish army, which is a job calling for magnifiers.” As for his own duties, Lawrence wrote, “I am bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen wiper.”
In truth, Lawrence was far more than that. Because he had briefly worked in the Geographical Section of the London War Office, he was put in charge of the unit’s mapping room. As all braced for the coming Suez attack, this was an assignment that kept him working from early morning to late at night.
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