If he was finally a bit closer to the action, one thing that hadn’t changed was Lawrence’s gift for irritating his military superiors. Within weeks of his arrival a number of senior officers began grumbling about the slight young man in the Savoy mapping room, both his cheeky manner and unkempt appearance. But Lawrence’s talent for annoying was not limited to his appearance and speech; he was also a very skilled writer. As the intelligence unit’s acknowledged “Syria hand,” in early 1915 he set to work on a long report describing the topography, culture, and ethnic divisions of that broad swath of the Ottoman Empire. Not for Lawrence the tentative, modifier-laden language that, then as now, tended to lard such background reports; instead, in “Syria: The Raw Material” he laid out his opinion of its various cities and peoples in refreshingly blunt—at times comically arrogant—prose. Typical was his withering appraisal of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem is a dirty town which all Semitic religions have made holy.… In it the united forces of the past are so strong that the city fails to have a present; its people, with the rarest exceptions, are characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through.”
The remarkable utility of that first sentence—its ability in a mere twelve words to denigrate one of the world’s most fabled cities, three major religions, and to offend the Christian sensibilities of every high-ranking British diplomat or general who might read it—was surely the source of considerable pride to Lawrence.
WILLIAM YALE INDULGED in portentous language as he described the mood aboard the refugee-packed freighter that carried him from Beirut to Alexandria in mid-November 1914. Having just escaped the dreadful wartime pall that had descended over Ottoman Palestine, he wrote that “to everyone on board ship, Egypt was a place of refuge where there was nothing to fear. It never occurred to me then that a different kind of terror would soon engulf the land of the Pharaohs.”
Rather than pillaging soldiers or religion-crazed vigilantes, however, the terror to which Yale referred took the form of tens of thousands of transiting Australian soldiers who, having been released after weeks spent on board crammed transport ships from their homeland, were rapidly transforming ancient Cairo into a raucous whiskey-soaked bordello. Even his experience with the boisterous American roustabouts in Jerusalem couldn’t prepare Yale, ever the puritanical Yankee at heart, for the scenes he saw constantly playing out in the city’s streets: the fights, the pawings of passing women, the soldiers blacked out in gutters from drink. In his estimation, such outrageous carryings-on could only tarnish British prestige in the eyes of the locals, “for the Egyptians, like many others in the Near East, looked upon the British as a coldly superior race. These hot-blooded, lusty, undisciplined Australians of 1914 … were a revelation.”
From his perch in Jerusalem, Yale had been eyewitness to the Ottoman Empire’s long, slow tumble into the war. On November 3, as word of the Turkish war declaration spread, crowds of Muslim men had begun gathering in the Old City, their numbers constantly swelled by others pouring in from the outlying villages. That evening, Yale and other Western expatriates watched from an upper balcony of the Grand New Hotel as an unending stream of young men passed through the Old City’s Jaffa Gate on their way to Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem’s holiest Muslim shrine, beating their chests and chanting their readiness to die for the faith.
“[It] sent shivers up and down our spines,” he would recall. “Consciously or unconsciously, we sensed in every fiber of our being, that these men were stirred with that same religious fervor with which, some 800 years before on this self-same street, their ancestors had matched forces with our Crusading forebears.”
It had also helped convince Yale and his supervisor, A. G. Dana, that it was time to get out. Three days later they were at Jaffa harbor negotiating their way on board a refugee-laden freighter. By a circuitous route aboard other overladen ships, they finally reached Egypt, and the new terror of carousing Australian soldiers, on November 17.
Their arrival was noted by an alert British intelligence officer. On the Alexandria dock, Yale was escorted to an office to be debriefed on all he had seen or heard in Palestine in recent days. To his questioner’s pleasant surprise, it seemed the American oilman had been very observant during his flight from Syria, and was able to provide estimates of Turkish troop strengths in a number of towns and cities in southern Palestine. He also confirmed that German officers were everywhere in the region and that along with truck convoys of war matériel and battalions of marching Turkish soldiers, the Germans appeared to be heading south.
In Cairo, Yale was forced to wait while his bosses back at 26 Broadway decided what to do with him and the other Socony employees scattered across the Middle East. From the standpoint of Standard’s Kornub project, the Ottoman entry into the war only made a bad situation worse. With the British and French navies now imposing a blockade of their new enemy’s coastline—and in the Ottoman era this meant the entire eastern Mediterranean shoreline, from Palestine to the southeastern corner of Europe—there certainly would be no early opportunity to develop that concession. The fundamental question facing Socony, then, was whether to retreat from the Middle East for the time being and bring their people home, or to keep them in place in hopes of some hard-to-foresee improvement in the near future.
Yale was still waiting for the answer when, one day in late December, there came a knock on the door of his room at the National Hotel. He didn’t immediately recognize his visitor—the man was young and in a British army uniform, two characteristics that described much of Cairo just then—but there was something in the gaze of his piercing blue eyes that stirred a memory.
“Hello, Yale,” the visitor said with an amused, lopsided grin. “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m Lawrence of British Intelligence. We met at Beersheva last January.”
Yale remembered then, and no doubt also remembered the delight with which the cocky young archaeologist had set out to demolish his “playboy” cover story.
As quickly became evident, this meeting, too, was to be an interrogation of sorts. Even before entering the war, Constantinople had been moving troops down into Palestine in obvious preparation for an attack on the Suez Canal, and that pace was now accelerating. Lawrence, having himself arrived in Egypt just days earlier, had thought to scan the registry logs of incoming foreigners and had come upon Yale’s name. He now wanted to learn everything there was to know about the road that Standard Oil had been building below Hebron: its precise route, its composition and drainage, whether it could be used by the Turks to bring heavy weaponry south.
“When he secured all the information I had,” Yale recalled, “he began talking about the situation in Palestine. I soon discovered that, although I had just arrived from there, this officer knew far more than I did. It was then that I began to learn of the efficiency of the British Intelligence Service and to understand something of the ability of young Lawrence.”
That evening, Lawrence wrote up his findings for his superiors at military intelligence. It made for rather unpleasant reading. While the Hebron-Beersheva road was not finished, Socony had completed work on the most difficult stretch, the descent through the Judean hills to the edge of the desert. Perhaps drawing on his engineering experience at the Panama Canal, William Yale had made sure the road was cut with a gradual enough gradient to allow for heavy-truck traffic—one so gradual, in fact, that the roadbed could easily be converted to a railroad. Until then, British war planners had assumed that any significant Turkish-German advance toward the Suez from southern Palestine would be largely confined to the established narrow pathway close to the Mediterranean shoreline. With their Hebron road, Standard Oil and William Yale had inadvertently provided the Turks with the capability of expanding their field of operations by some thirty miles.
ON THE MORNING of November 21, 1914, less than three weeks after Turkey entered World War I, Ahmed Djemal Pasha, one of the “Three Pashas” triumvirate that now ruled the Ottoman Empire, left Constantinople to take up his n
ew dual positions as commander of the Fourth Army and governor of Syria. His true authority was far greater than the titles suggested: supreme military and political ruler of all Ottoman lands south of Anatolia and west of Iraq, an area that comprised over half of the empire’s remaining total landmass. As befitting that authority, his first order of business was to lead the Turkish army to the Suez Canal and strike at the heart of British Egypt.
Over the next three years, Djemal Pasha would come to thoroughly dominate life in Syria, his actions credited with causing much of what was to come. In his dual capacities as a military and political leader, he would also come into regular contact with—and at varying times employ the services of—three very different men: Aaron Aaronsohn, Curt Prüfer, and William Yale.
In some respects, the short, powerfully built Djemal seemed an unlikely choice for such a position. Born in 1872 to a low-level Ottoman officer, he had sought a career in the military as a matter of course, and risen unremarkably through the ranks before throwing his lot in with the reformist-minded conspirators of the Committee of Union and Progress in the early 1900s. A fairly obscure figure until the 1913 coup that enabled the CUP to rule by fiat, Ahmed Djemal was then appointed military governor of Constantinople. Less than a year later, with the emergence of the so-called Three Pashas triumvirate, the forty-two-year-old officer became one of the three public faces of the shadowy committee that controlled the empire.
Undoubtedly one reason for Djemal’s elevation was his personal magnetism. As Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey, would recall, “Whenever he shook your hand, gripping you with a vise-like grasp and looking at you with those roving, penetrating eyes, the man’s personal force became impressive.” This does not imply that Morgenthau at all cared for Djemal, instead seeing in his charisma a malevolent force best rendered in overheated, racialist-tinged prose. “His eyes were black and piercing, their sharpness, the rapidity and keenness with which they darted from one object to another, taking in apparently everything with a few lightning-like glances, signalized cunning, remorselessness, and selfishness to an extreme degree. Even his laugh, which disclosed all his white teeth, was unpleasant and animal-like.”
A more nuanced view was offered by another American who had extensive dealings with Djemal during the war. Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, would recall observing the governor at an afternoon tea party in wartime Beirut, a social event to which even the expatriate citizens of Turkey’s foes had been invited. Djemal was “gay, debonair, interested, wandering about with his hands in his pockets, or lounging on the arm of a big chair, the other arm of which was occupied by a charming European lady.” Noting the governor’s love of children and overt displays of affection toward his wife—“unusual among Orientals”—Bliss saw in Djemal a man caught between an overwhelming vanity and a core kindness, “a character teeming with conflicting elements: cruelty and clemency, firmness and caprice, ideality [sic] and hedonism, self-seeking and patriotism.”
These conflicting personality traits mirrored Djemal’s political views. Indeed, he seemed to embody the internal contradictions that lay at the heart of the Young Turk movement, caught as it was between West and East, modernity and tradition, between awed admiration of the European powers and bitter resentment. A devout Muslim who embraced the jihadist credo of pan-Islam, Djemal had also been one of the most vocal Young Turk leaders in advocating that the empire’s ethnic and religious minorities be given full civil rights. An aesthete who loved European music and literature, and who enjoyed nothing more than practicing his French in the expatriate salons of Constantinople, he also exhorted his countrymen to purge their nation of corrupting Western influence. Dreaming of a Turkish and Islamic renaissance that would return the Ottoman Empire to its ancient splendor, he was at heart a technocrat, intent on pulling his nation into modernity through the building of roads and railways and schools.
“He had the ambition of creating a Syria which he could exhibit with pride to an admiring Europe,” Bliss wrote. “I think it would not be unfair to call him a personal patriot. He was inordinately vain. He wanted a reformed Turkey, but he wanted pre-eminently to be known as the Chief Reformer.”
To try to achieve that, Djemal would rely on the skills he had honed in his fitful rise through the treacherous political currents of the CUP, the ability to turn in the blink of an eye from graciousness to ferocity, an adroitness with both the peace offering and the dagger. As those who lived in the lands encompassed by his new southern posting were soon to discover, Djemal Pasha could be wonderfully solicitous in trying to keep potential enemies on his side, but if flattery and sinecures and promises didn’t appear to do the trick, he was perfectly willing to go with the old standbys of exile and execution.
As his train pulled out of Constantinople’s Haidar Pasha station, the challenges of reforming Syria were soon to be put in stark relief—the initial hurdle Djemal faced was just getting there. The first part of that long journey went smoothly enough, a pleasant two-day train ride through central Anatolia, but the troubles started when they reached the depot town of Mustafa Bey, at the northern edge of the Gulf of Alexandretta. There, embarrassed officials informed Djemal that the onward track to the city of Alexandretta (modern-day Iskenderun) had recently washed out in a number of places. The pasha switched to an automobile, but only briefly; after mere yards on the main “highway” to Alexandretta, the car was mired up to its wheel wells in mud. A four-hour horseback ride finally brought Djemal to the seaside town of Dort Yol. There, a tiny two-man tramcar was found that, certain optimists believed, might be light enough to navigate the damaged coastal rail line and finally deliver the pasha and his chief of staff to Alexandretta, ten miles farther along.
“Never shall I forget this journey by trolley on the slippery track,” Djemal wrote. “More than once we went in danger of our lives as in pouring rain we passed along the coast, which was watched by enemy ships.… We reached Alexandretta after a journey during which the trolley passed over rails which, in some places, hung suspended over a void for fifteen to twenty metres, and in others were under water.”
But more bad news awaited the pasha. The road onward to Aleppo, the only link between Alexandretta and the interior of northern Syria, was now impassable—although “impassable” was perhaps an understatement. Repairs had been started on the road some time earlier, but had progressed no further than removing all its crowning stones. Those stones now lay in high stacks along either side, leaving the road to form, in Djemal’s words, “a perfect canal.” As he would exclaim in his memoir, “And here is the only road which keeps my army in touch with the home country!”
By the time Djemal finally reached his headquarters in Damascus on December 6, more than two weeks after his departure from Constantinople, he’d come to a fairly obvious conclusion: the Suez attack should be postponed until some of the very basic issues of supply lines and infrastructure were dealt with. He made the mistake, though, of sharing this thought with the young German intelligence officer who had been awaiting his arrival in Damascus and had been assigned to serve as Djemal’s liaison to the German high command: Major Curt Prüfer.
To Prüfer, there could be no question of delaying the Suez offensive. As he wrote to Max Oppenheim after learning of Djemal’s hesitation, support for the jihad among the Syrians was tepid to begin with, and in the event of a postponement, “undoubtedly the carefully manufactured enthusiasm would disappear and the old indifference, if not hostility, takes its place.” What’s more, such a delay would provoke “the total discouragement of the Egyptians, who are cowards anyway.”
It was a rather curious stance for Prüfer to take, since most of his letter to Oppenheim consisted of reasons why an attack on the canal was almost sure to fail, his contention that “the means are not sufficient to the task.” But Prüfer may have had a darker motive in urging it forward. In Constantinople, he had been eyewitness to the protracted struggle to bring Turkey into the wa
r, and as he surely knew from intelligence reports reaching him in Damascus, there were still those in the CUP leadership maneuvering to back out of the German alliance and sue for peace with the Entente. An assault on the Suez would end all that. From that point on, Turkey would be joined at the hip to Germany, and it would win or die along with it.
Shortly afterward, Djemal received a terse cable from Constantinople: the Suez attack was to go forward without delay.
Chapter 5
A Despicable Mess
So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.
T. E. LAWRENCE TO HIS FAMILY, FEBRUARY 1915
Soon after taking up his post at the Savoy Hotel, Lawrence commandeered the largest wall in the office and covered it with a massive sectioned map of the Ottoman world. In his idle moments, he would stand against the opposite wall and gaze upon it for as long as time permitted, taking in all its vastness.
By January 1915, he was awaiting the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal with a certain impatience. One reason was that he had little doubt of its outcome. To reach the canal, the Turks first had to cross 120 miles of the inhospitable Sinai Peninsula. From his knowledge of that expanse, and especially of its limited water sources, Lawrence was convinced the attacking force would, by necessity, be quite small—surely not the 100,000 soldiers some alarmists in the British military hierarchy were suggesting—and thus easily repelled.
But the chief reason for his impatience was that he was already contemplating the next chapter in the Near East war, the one to come once the Turkish assault had been turned back. It would then be time for the British to go on the offensive, and gazing upon his maps at the Savoy, Lawrence was seeking out those places where an invading force might strike at the Ottoman Empire to most devastating effect.
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