In his defense, though, it’s not as if the Syrian governor didn’t have a lot of things to be irritable about. Indeed, by the middle of March 1915 he was buffeted by such an array of crises as might cause the most cheerful person to feel a bit put-upon. Under the circumstances, the first of these crises, manifested on the morning of March 22, bordered on the perverse: locusts.
The Spanish consul in Jerusalem, a dapper young man named Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, happened to be working in his office that morning when he noticed the sky suddenly darken dramatically, as if there were occurring a solar eclipse. “Upon peeking out from the balcony I saw that an immense cloud had completely obscured the light of the sun.” As Ballobar watched, the cloud descended, revealed itself to be millions upon millions of locusts. “The ground, the balconies, the roofs, the entire city and then the countryside, everything was covered by these wretched little animals.”
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the horde moved on, headed east toward Jericho, but in subsequent days, reports of the locust plague started coming in from across the breadth of central Palestine. They told of entire orchards and fields stripped bare of every leaf and seedling within hours, of farm animals and briefly unattended infants being blinded, the insects feeding on the liquid in their eyes.
The Holy Land had experienced locust plagues in the past, but nothing in modern memory compared to this. Nor could it have come at a worse moment. Joined to the pressures of the war effort—tens of thousands of Syrian farmers had been drafted, the requisitioning of farm animals and machinery had been wanton—the pestilence was sure to make an already troubled spring planting season infinitely worse, and cause massive food shortages and price increases. Indeed, Consul Ballobar noted, within hours of the locust swarm touching down in Jerusalem, wheat prices in the city’s bazaars had spiked.
True to his self-image as a reformer, Djemal Pasha didn’t form a committee or appoint some toady to deal with the problem, the typical Ottoman response to a crisis. Instead, he immediately summoned Syria’s most celebrated agricultural scientist, the thirty-nine-year-old Jewish émigré Aaron Aaronsohn.
The meeting between the two fiercely headstrong men took place on March 27 and, per Djemal’s preference, was conducted in French. It got off to a rocky start. Along with outlining the modern techniques that could be used to combat the infestation, Aaronsohn took the opportunity to bluntly criticize the army’s wholesale requisitions that had left the region on the brink of ruin even before the locusts appeared. According to the story Aaronsohn would later tell, the governor finally interrupted his tirade with a simple question: “What if I were to have you hanged?”
In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, “Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America.”
Djemal apparently liked that answer. Before the ending of their meeting, he had appointed Aaronsohn inspector in chief of a new locust eradication program, and granted him near-dictatorial powers to carry it out. If any petty officials got in Aaronsohn’s way, the governor let it be known, they would have to answer to him.
But if the locust plague could be delegated to an expert, that was not the case with Djemal’s other concerns that March.
For some time he had been sitting on information that suggested the empire’s “Arab problem” might be far more serious than anyone in Constantinople appreciated, that in Syria they might be sitting on something of a volcano.
Shortly after Turkey joined the war in November, a unit of Turkish counterintelligence officers had broken into the shuttered French consulate in Beirut, and there they had found a passel of documents in a concealed wall safe. Those papers laid bare a long-standing secret relationship between the French consul and a number of Arab leaders in Beirut and Damascus opposed to the Young Turk government. Not just opposed; many of the proposals these men had put to the French consul—for Syrian independence, for a French protectorate in Lebanon—were nothing short of traitorous.
But administering a corrective to the querulous Nablus elders had been one thing; moving against the Beirut and Damascus consulate plotters was a good deal trickier. Many were well known throughout the Arab world, and their execution or exile might provoke the very Arab rebellion Turkey sought to avoid. It might also raise alarm in the greater Arab Muslim world, including in the “captive” lands of Egypt and French North Africa, just when Constantinople was trying to stir these communities to the cause of pan-Islamic jihad. Consequently, Djemal had seen no choice but to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Tucking the Beirut dossier away in his Damascus office, he had endeavored to keep the malcontents close by feigning normalcy and reverting to the old Ottoman standby of handing out sinecures and honorary positions. That tactic might ultimately win the plotters to his side, or conversely reveal how extensive their conspiratorial circles actually were, but it was still worrisome to have these traitors at large at the very moment that an Allied invasion of Syria had suddenly grown more likely.
But in Syria, every problem had its counterproblem. Whereas the Beirut dissidents consisted almost exclusively of so-called progressives, Arab urban liberals infused with European ideas of nationalism and self-determination, in late March Djemal also faced a crisis with Arab conservatives, those spurred to outrage by the Young Turks’ modernist—and, to their eyes, secularist—reforms. This conservative crisis was about to quite literally show up at the governor’s door in the form of a soft-spoken thirty-one-year-old man named Sheikh Faisal ibn Hussein.
Faisal was the third of four sons of Emir Hussein, a tribal leader in the immense Hejaz region of western Arabia. Of much greater import, Faisal’s father was the sherif, or religious leader, of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the most recent scion of the Hashemite clan that had served as the guardians of the Islamic holy land since the tenth century.
Relations between the Young Turks and Emir Hussein had been strained from the very outset, and time had done nothing to improve matters. Almost medieval in his conservatism, over the years Hussein had viewed the stream of liberalist edicts emanating from Constantinople with ever-deepening antipathy; his discontent ranged from the Young Turks’ emancipation of women and promotion of minority rights, to its chipping away at the civic authority of religious leaders, even to its efforts to curb slavery, still a common practice in the Hejaz. Tellingly, the most tangible focus of Emir Hussein’s rancor was the proposed extension of the Hejaz Railway from Medina to Mecca. Far from viewing the extension as a sign of progress, a way to ease the travel of Muslim pilgrims making the hajj to the holy city, Hussein saw it as a Trojan horse for Constantinople to exert greater control over the region, and specifically over him. The result had been an endless series of clashes between the Constantinople-appointed Hejaz civilian governors and the emir and his sons.
The tensions had only grown worse—and the consequences obviously far graver—since Turkey came into the war. Given that he was one of the most respected religious figures in the Muslim world, Hussein’s noncommittal response to the call to jihad in November was quickly noted by all, and was viewed as a major reason for its tepid effect thus far. Similarly, appeals for national unity in the war effort had done nothing to bring about a rapprochement in the long-standing feud between Ali, Hussein’s eldest son, and the current governor of Medina, a feud that at times had come close to open combat. Then there had been the emir’s feeble response to Djemal’s request for volunteers to join in the Suez assault. Instead of the thousands of tribal fighters the regime had counted on, Abdullah, Hussein’s second son, had shown up in Syria with a mere handful.
Yet despite all this provocation, Hussein and his sons had to be handled with even greater delicacy than the Beirut malcontents. If from a narrow military standpoint the Hejaz lacked the strategic importance of Syria—it consisted of a few small cities surrounded by vast deserts at the farthest fringe of th
e empire—the Hashemite emir’s singular ability to bestow or deny his religious blessing on Constantinople’s actions gave him extraordinary power. Thus a kind of standoff ensued. Obviously, the Young Turks either wanted Hussein to fall in line or to be rid of him, but to move against him in too crude a fashion was to invite a ferocious conservative backlash. For his part, Hussein had to know that there was a limit to the Young Turks’ patience, that pushing them too far was to invite in the soldiers.
That standoff had recently experienced a perilous rupture. In January, Hussein’s eldest son, Ali, claimed to have uncovered a plot by the governor of Medina to overthrow Hussein and replace him with a more pliant religious figure. This was the reason for Faisal’s impending arrival in Syria. Emir Hussein was sending him out of the deserts of Arabia to confront the Constantinople regime, both to express his outrage at the overthrow plot and to demand that the provincial governor be removed.
But here, at last, was something approximating good news for Djemal Pasha, for if there was anyone within the troublesome Hussein family who he felt might be the voice of reason, it was Faisal. Like his older brothers, Faisal had been raised and educated within the sultan’s inner court in Constantinople, but it appeared this civilizing influence had taken special hold in Hussein’s unassuming third son. In Faisal there was a caution, even a timidity, that might be exploited with gentle words and charm—and though the unlucky Nablus elders hauled into his office might have gone away with a differing opinion, charm was something of a Djemal specialty. When Faisal and his retinue rolled into town, the governor intended to greet him with all the pomp and fanfare of a visiting dignitary.
LESS THAN A mile away from the German Hospice, at the German military headquarters in downtown Jerusalem, Curt Prüfer also took a keen interest in the imminent arrival of Faisal ibn Hussein. He had a rather harder-edged view, however, of how to win the Hussein family to the Turco-German cause. Back in October 1914, even before Djemal Pasha’s arrival in Syria, Prüfer had dispatched his own spies to the Hejaz to get a sense of where Emir Hussein’s true loyalties lay. His conclusion, as he’d reported to Max von Oppenheim in early November, was that the emir in Mecca was essentially on the payroll of British Egypt and thus “English through and through.”
Beyond his obvious political and religious differences with the Young Turks, the problem with Hussein extended to geography. One of the most isolated and impoverished regions of the Ottoman Empire, the Hejaz had an economy that was almost wholly dependent on the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, by the Muslim faithful to Mecca, the bulk of whom came from either India or Egypt. The arid Hejaz also relied on imported grain to feed its people, and much of that came across the Red Sea from Egypt or British Sudan in the form of government-subsidized religious offerings. With the British navy’s undisputed control of the Red Sea, it would be a simple matter to cut off both the pilgrim traffic and food supplies to the Hejaz, an action that would quickly take the region to utter ruin. This was the sword that hung over his head, Hussein had intimated to Constantinople, and the underlying reason why he had to tread so carefully before the regime’s demands.
But to Curt Prüfer it was all a rather outrageous bluff. Put simply, the British would never risk incurring the wrath of the Muslim world by starving out, let alone invading, the Islamic holy land; Germany should be so lucky. At the same time, Hussein, as the guardian of Mecca and Medina, wouldn’t dare go over to the British, for that same Muslim wrath would then be directed at him. Instead, the wily old emir in Mecca was playing both sides, keeping the British at bay—and their food subsidies and pilgrim traffic intact—through advertising his differences with Constantinople, and keeping Constantinople at bay through touting the contrived British threat.
The problem was, the Turks would not challenge Hussein nor allow their allies to do so. Since arriving in the region, Prüfer and the other German intelligence agents had been explicitly forbidden from involving themselves in Hejazi affairs in any way. Even during Faisal’s upcoming visit, Djemal intended to screen the young sheikh from his German advisors as much as possible. Instead, the Syrian governor would undoubtedly pursue the same course the Young Turks had adopted with the Hussein family for the past six years—solicitousness and flattery blended with veiled threats—and to the same negligible effect.
What made all this especially maddening to Prüfer was that Hussein was one of the linchpins in bringing the pan-Islamic jihad to full flower. Without the Hashemite leader’s blessing, that fatwa remained a concoction of the Young Turk regime; with his blessing, fires might be ignited throughout the Middle East and beyond.
In his November report to Oppenheim, Prüfer had concluded that the emir was “luckily powerless and in our hands.” The challenge now was to convince everyone else—Djemal, the Young Turks in Constantinople, Hussein himself—that this was true.
THERE IS LITTLE indication that Lawrence was following events in the Arabian Peninsula, or was even aware of them, during his first few months with the intelligence unit in Cairo—understandable given his almost obsessive focus on Syria. That changed when he made the acquaintance of Ronald Storrs, the British Oriental secretary to Egypt.
With his pencil-thin mustache and fondness for white linen suits, Storrs cut a dandyish figure among the predominantly uniformed British population of wartime Cairo, a Cambridge-educated aesthete with an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, Renaissance art, and classical literature. Shipping out to Egypt as a young man, he had passed through a number of positions in the British administration there before winning appointment as Oriental secretary in 1909 at the age of twenty-eight.
It was a position he was born for. Along with being a decorous presence at the official receptions and galas of which the British community in Cairo was especially fond, Storrs acted as the right-hand man of the resident British consul general to Egypt, a behind-the-scenes monitor of the nation’s myriad political intrigues. His star had risen considerably when Lord Kitchener assumed that post in 1911. Quickly coming to regard Storrs as his most trusted lieutenant—the Oriental secretary had been instrumental in torpedoing Curt Prüfer’s appointment to the khedival library directorship, for example—Kitchener had maintained their relationship even after his appointment to war secretary in August 1914. Since he fully intended to return to his Egyptian post once the war was over, Kitchener had left his protégé behind in Cairo to serve as his eyes and ears.
But there was rather more to it than that. In Kitchener’s service, Ronald Storrs was the crucial conduit in a game of political intrigue so sensitive it was known to only a handful of men in Cairo, London, and Mecca, the possessor of perhaps the most dangerous secret in the Middle East. By befriending T. E. Lawrence and bringing him in on that secret, Storrs would set the young intelligence officer on the course that was to bring him fame and glory.
At least initially, that friendship was based on the supremely ordinary, a mutual love of classical literature. As the rather fusty Storrs related of Lawrence in his memoir, “We had no literary differences, except that he preferred Homer to Dante and disliked my preference for Theocritus before Aristophanes.”
At some point in the winter of 1915, their discussions turned to more current topics, specifically to the covert mission that Storrs was conducting for Lord Kitchener.
The story had begun a year earlier, in February 1914, when Abdullah ibn Hussein, the thirty-two-year-old second son of Emir Hussein of Mecca, came calling in Cairo. While the emir’s disenchantment with the Constantinople regime was becoming fairly common knowledge by that point, Abdullah pushed matters into a whole new realm; granted a brief meeting with Kitchener, he attempted to sound out the consul general on what British reaction would be to an outright Arab revolt in the Hejaz.
Kitchener took pains to sidestep the query. After all, Britain and Turkey were still at peace then, and it simply wouldn’t do for the former to encourage revolt in the latter. When Abdullah returned to Cairo two months later hoping for a second meeting, Kitchener f
oisted him off on his Oriental secretary.
Whatever limited subtlety Abdullah had managed with Kitchener, it was absent from his meeting with Storrs. “I found myself being asked categorically whether Britain would present the Grand Sharif [Hussein] with a dozen, or even a half dozen machine guns,” Storrs recalled. “When I enquired what could possibly be their purpose, he replied (like all rearmers) for defence; and, pressed further, added that the defence would be against attack from the Turks. I needed no special instructions to inform him that we could never entertain the idea of supplying arms to be used against a friendly power.”
But that second meeting with Abdullah had been in April 1914, and by the following September, matters had changed a great deal. As he waited to see if Turkey would come into the war, now–War Secretary Kitchener had reason to recall his earlier conversation with Hussein’s son and to appreciate that he might have a unique opportunity awaiting him in Arabia. Rather than work through senior officials in the British military or civilian administrations in Egypt, Kitchener sent an encrypted cable to his old Cairo office: “Tell Storrs to send secret and carefully chosen messenger from me to the Sharif Abdullah to ascertain whether, should present German influence in Constantinople coerce [Turkey into] … war against Great Britain, he and his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us.”
Hussein’s reply, which arrived just as Turkey joined the war, was tantalizing. While stating that he would endeavor to stay neutral, Hussein hinted that with sufficient external support and concrete promises from Britain to stay out of internal Arabian affairs, he might lead his “immediate followers into revolt.”
Seizing on that prospect, Kitchener swiftly sent another message that dramatically upped the ante. Should the Arabs join with Britain, rather than merely stay neutral, Kitchener wrote, “Great Britain will guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sherifate against all external foreign aggression, in particular that of the Ottomans. Till now we have defended and befriended Islam in the person of the Turks [sic]; henceforward it shall be in that of the noble Arab.”
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