But then Hussein seemed to equivocate somewhat. In his next letter, received by Storrs in December, the emir repeated his intention to “avoid any action detrimental to the British,” but also indicated that any outright break with Turkey would have to wait until sometime in the indefinite future. And there the matter rested. In the months since Hussein had sent that last message, there had been no word out of Mecca.
To Lawrence, the details of this secret correspondence with Hussein came as something of a revelation. Since arriving in Cairo, he had devoted great energy to gauging the possibility of an Arab revolt in Syria, a revolt that, almost by definition, would be reliant on so-called progressives: businessmen and intellectuals disaffected by the corruption of the Constantinople regime, minorities yearning for equality, Arab officers and conscripts frustrated by the military’s Turkish chauvinism. Of conservative Arabia he knew virtually nothing.
Yet from a political standpoint, Lawrence quickly appreciated the Hejazi potential. An alliance with Hussein would inoculate the British against the charge that it was fomenting rebellion as a means of taking over the Middle East; as guardian of the holy cities, it would be quite unthinkable to most Muslims that Emir Hussein had entered a partnership with land-grabbing infidels. To the contrary, a revolt starting in the Hejaz and under his leadership would carry the imprimatur of religious sanction, neatly nullifying the Islam-versus-Crusaders propaganda being promoted by the Turks and Max von Oppenheim.
But trying to assess where things stood in the absence of any new communication from Hussein was a perplexing process. On the one hand, he did appear to be living up to his promise of neutrality, as evidenced by his continuing noncommittal stance on the call to jihad. On the other hand, he had recently sent his third son, Faisal, to meet with Djemal Pasha in Syria, and to then proceed to Constantinople for more meetings with the Young Turk leadership. Since Faisal was generally considered to be the most moderate and sober-minded of Hussein’s sons, the obvious conclusion was that Hussein was inching his way back toward a rapprochement with Constantinople and that the brief, tantalizing prospect of an Arab revolt in the Hejaz had slipped from British hands.
For his part, Lawrence soon had far more pressing concerns than trying to read the tea leaves of Hejazi politics. By early April 1915, all attention in British Egypt had turned to the upcoming naval and ground offensive against the Dardanelles.
DURING THE FIRST weeks of April, a vast flotilla of ships began to assemble along the northern coast of Egypt, while in the tent cities that dotted the shoreline, tens of thousands of soldiers were kept busy hauling supplies and practicing combat drills. They were members of the newly formed Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (Med-Ex for short) soon to be on their way to strike at the head and heart of the Turkish enemy. Despite the tedium of their wait, the mood of the troops was exuberant, keen.
With T. E. Lawrence, the sentiment was foreboding. The trepidation he had felt from the outset of the Dardanelles operation only deepened after he and other members of the Cairo intelligence unit were sent up to the staging area to brief its commanders on what they might expect at the other end. “The Med-Ex came out, beastly ill-prepared,” Lawrence wrote David Hogarth on April 20, “with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do.” Most shocking of all to Lawrence, to plot their ground offensive, the Med-Ex senior staff had arrived in Egypt with exactly two copies of an obsolete quarter-inch-to-the-mile map of the Dardanelles region.
But when it came to committing folly, British war planners were just warming up. The principal landing zones for Med-Ex, it had been decided, would be on the Gallipoli peninsula, that thin ribbon of rugged mountains that forms the Dardanelles’ western shore. Rarely more than six or seven miles across, the peninsula runs northward for some fifty miles before finally broadening out onto the European mainland. In selecting where to go ashore, the British could have chosen any number of spots along Gallipoli’s length where a ground force, once gaining the ridgeline and climbing down to the opposite shore—a distance of less than three miles in places—would have split the Ottoman army in two and trapped any enemy forces positioned below that line. Of course, the best option might have been to sidestep the peninsula completely and put in at the Gulf of Saros at its northern end. An invasion force coming ashore in that broad bay would not only maroon all the Turkish troops garrisoned on Gallipoli, but would then have a virtually unimpeded path through easy countryside to Constantinople, just 100 miles away. This was certainly the greatest fear of General Liman von Sanders, the German commander recently appointed by the Turkish government to oversee the Dardanelles defense; in anticipation of a landing at Saros, he had placed his headquarters and fully a third of his army there.
The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli’s southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic—even mere common sense—argued against it. Not only would a landing force there be vulnerable to defenders dug in on the heights above them, but completely exposed to whatever long-range Turkish artillery remained operable in their nearby fortresses. And even if such a force managed to scale the heights and seize those forts, the Turkish defenders could then begin a slow withdrawal up the peninsula, throwing up new trenchlines as they went, neatly replicating the static trench warfare that had so paralyzed the armies on the Western Front. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile-long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire—yet it was precisely here that Med-Ex was going ashore.
Along with condescension for the enemy, always a perilous mind-set for an army, that decision was apparently born of sheer bureaucratic obduracy. Since the Dardanelles campaign had been conceived as a naval operation, the success or failure of the expanded mission would continue to be judged through the narrow lens of its original objective—clearing the straits—leaving its planners quite blind to the idea of trying a different approach that might ultimately achieve the same end. Incredibly, it seems the Gallipoli strategists had less rejected alternative landing sites than never seriously considered them.
In late April, the Med-Ex soldiers on the Egyptian coast began piling into the troopships that would take them across the eastern Mediterranean to Gallipoli. Lawrence, looking back over his failed efforts of the previous months, not just Alexandretta but a range of other schemes that he and the Cairo intelligence unit had concocted only to see shelved, could scarcely conceal his anger in another letter to Hogarth:
“Arabian affairs have gone all to pot. I’ve never seen a more despicable mess made of a show. It makes one howl with fury, for we had a ripping chance there.” He ended on a somewhat forlorn note: “Push on A[lexandretta] therefore, if you can; it seems to me the only thing left for us.”
When he wrote that letter, on April 26, Lawrence did not know how bad the mess was about to become. Just the day before, Med-Ex had gone ashore at Gallipoli.
AT ABOUT 6:15 on the morning of April 25, SS River Clyde, a converted collier out of Liverpool, closed on a small, gently arcing beach—code-named V Beach—at Cape Helles, the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. Crammed belowdecks were some two thousand British soldiers. Coming in on the gentle seas alongside the Clyde were five or six launches, each towing several open cutters, likewise crammed to their gunwales with more soldiers. At about one hundred yards out, the cutter skippers cast off their towlines and distributed oars so that their crews might row the rest of the way to shore. From that shore came no sign of life at all. It appeared, just as hoped, that the landing at Cape Helles had caught the Turks completely off guard.
A damned good thing, too, for the slapdash preparations made for those going ashore at V Beach—and the notion of sending men onto an enemy beach in unarmored and motorless wooden boats wasn’t the worst of it—suggested trouble if they met any resistance. In an Alexandria shipyard, workers had started in on a camouflage paint job of the River Clyde but had run ou
t of time; as a result, as the collier approached V Beach that morning, its muted battleship gray was offset by enormous splotches of tan primer, making it stand out against the sea as if illuminated. Then there was the small matter of the Clyde being unable to actually reach the beach. The plan instead was to run her aground offshore and then to maneuver several fishing boats into the gap, lashing them together to create a makeshift bridge from ship to shore. At that point, the disembarking soldiers would emerge from four portals cut into the Clyde’s bow, pass along two gangways to the fishing boats, then clamber over those until finally they reached the beach. It’s hard to imagine that such blithe preparations would have attended a landing against Stone Age Pacific Islanders, let alone against a modern army, but such was the contempt with which British war planners held the Turks.
As the cutters neared the beach, the only sounds floating over the quiet bay were of boat engines and the dipping of oars, of men talking and laughing—perhaps a bit louder than normal out of relief at their uneventful landing. It was when the lead boats were just yards off the beach that the Turkish machine gunners, secreted in strategic vantage points along the shoreline, opened up.
The men in the open cutters never had a chance. One after another, these boats were shot to pieces or capsized, the gear-laden soldiers within them drowning in the surf or picked off after becoming entangled in the barbed wire that been strung below the water’s surface. Most of the very few who made it onto the beach alive were soon cut down by raking machine-gun fire.
Those coming off the Clyde fared little better. Time and again, work crews emerged from the protected steel hull to try to lash the ersatz pontoon bridge together, only to be shot down almost immediately or to similarly drown in the surf. When finally a bridge of sorts was established, the soldiers emerging onto the gangways were easy targets; of the first company of two hundred men to go out the portals, only eleven reached shore. Many of the early casualties on the gangways actually died of suffocation, pinned beneath the growing heaps of dead and wounded of those coming behind. Whoever did manage to make the beach huddled for safety behind a six-foot-high sand escarpment at its landward edge, scant protection against machine-gun bullets. By late afternoon, there were so many dead men in the water that, as a British captain on the scene observed, “the sea near the shore was a red blood colour, which could be seen hundreds of yards away.”
By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. So bewildered was General von Sanders by his enemy’s idiocy that for the next day he remained convinced the southern landing was a mere feint and that the main invasion force was still coming elsewhere. This left it to a local Ottoman divisional commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, acting on his own accord, to repeatedly hurl his men against the invaders clinging to their tiny beachheads in an attempt to throw them back into the sea.
The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying. As for the Ottoman commander, Mustafa Kemal, the world would soon hear more about him; in 1922, he would emerge as the savior of the reconstituted Turkish republic and become better known by his honorific, Kemal Ataturk.
BUT IT WASN’T just the estimated half million soldiers killed or wounded on either side of the trenchline who would fall victim to the consequences of Gallipoli. On the very day the British came ashore, April 25, the Constantinople regime ordered the roundup of some two hundred Armenian intellectuals and business leaders whom it accused of being potential fifth columnists for the invaders. It was the beginning of a brutal “cleansing operation” against the Ottoman Empire’s Christian minority—a genocide in the view of many—that would result in the deaths of as many as a million Armenians and Assyrians over the next year.
It would be some time before Lawrence and other British officers involved in the Middle Eastern theater came to appreciate that there had been yet another casualty at Gallipoli: the chance for a sweeping Arab revolt against the Turks, one that conceivably could have stretched from the Hejaz to northern Syria and clear over to Iraq. The details of this missed opportunity wouldn’t be fully known for well over a year, not until Lawrence came face-to-face with Emir Hussein’s soft-spoken third son, Faisal, and learned there had been a good deal more to his journey north in the spring of 1915 than met the eye.
In January 1915, at almost the same time that he learned of the Medina governor’s plot to overthrow him, Emir Hussein had been visited in Mecca by a Syrian man named Fawzi al-Bakri. A long-standing and trusted member of the emir’s retinue, on that visit al-Bakri had revealed that he was also a high-ranking member of al-Fatat, a secret society of Arab nationalists headquartered in his hometown of Damascus with cells throughout Syria and Iraq. Having learned of Hussein’s secret correspondence with the British, the al-Fatat leadership had sent al-Bakri to Mecca with a proposal: a joint revolt against Constantinople by al-Fatat in Syria and the emir’s forces in Hejaz, to be supported by the British and with Hussein serving as its spiritual leader.
Rather than give a definitive reply to this proposal, the cautious Hussein had instead sent Faisal north on a dual mission: to gauge the family’s current standing in Constantinople, but also to assess the true prospects for an alliance with al-Fatat.
Arriving in Damascus in late March, Faisal politely declined Djemal Pasha’s invitation to stay at the governor’s mansion, explaining that he had already accepted the hospitality of a prominent Damascene family: the al-Bakris. In that home, shielded by high walls, Faisal held a long series of talks with the al-Fatat conspirators, and it was the delicate negotiations at those talks that largely explained why his stay in Damascus, originally intended to be brief, extended to some three weeks.
Journeying on to Constantinople, the young sheikh deftly worked the other side of the street. In meetings with the other two members of the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver and Talaat, as well as the newly arrived Max von Oppenheim, Faisal repeatedly expressed his family’s fealty to the Ottoman cause, going so far as to sign an accord with Enver that appeared to finally put to rest many of the issues standing between Constantinople and his father. In mid-May, and to the accompaniment of an elaborate farewell ceremony organized by a grateful regime, he boarded a train at Haidar Pasha station for the return to Syria.
But that journey was into a world transformed. Just weeks after the landings in Gallipoli, already tens of thousands of Armenians were being banished from their homes and sent into internal exile, and the view out Faisal’s train window was onto an unending horror show of starving women and children—and suspiciously few men—being herded along to God knows where at bayonet point. From the standpoint of the proposed Arab revolt, more grim news awaited him in Damascus. From his al-Fatat confederates, Faisal learned that many of the Arab-dominated military units in the region—units the conspirators had counted on for support when the revolt came—were already being dispatched to the Gallipoli killing fields, replaced by regime-loyal Turkish regiments.
Despite the radically changed atmosphere, perhaps because of it, the al-Fatat plotters had urged on Faisal a document to take to his father, and through him to the British in Egypt. Soon to become known as the Damascus Protocol, it consisted of a list of conditions whereby, with British assistance, al-Fatat might still be able to launch their revolt. As Faisal set out for his return to Mecca, the sole copy of the protocol was hidden in the boot of his most trusted bodyguard.
In preparing for Faisal’s arrival in Syria back in March, Djemal Pasha had regarded the emir’s third son as his last best hope to quell Hussein’s restive heart. In fact, the Syrian governor was quite right in this estimation, if for all the wrong reasons. At
a Hussein family conclave held at their summer palace in June, it would be Abdullah and Ali who would lobby their father for immediate rebellion against Constantinople, while Faisal, recent witness to all that Gallipoli had wrought—the Armenians dying en masse along the Anatolian roadways, the dispersal of the Arab units from northern Syria—would urge caution.
The knowledge of all this lay in the future for T. E. Lawrence. In the days and weeks after the Gallipoli landings, as he read through the cascade of grim battle reports coming over the wire at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, it may have been just as well that he remained ignorant of the Damascus Protocol and of the would-be British allies waiting in Syria and the Hejaz. An absolute precondition for their revolt, the al-Fatat conspirators and Hussein would belatedly inform Cairo, a prerequisite upon which all their actions depended, was a British landing at Alexandretta.
Chapter 6
The Keepers of Secrets
You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come.
T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916
Finding the demands of his mapping-room duties at the Savoy at least temporarily eased by the departure of the Med-Ex army, in April 1915 Lawrence took over the task of editing an intelligence digest, a compendium of reports from around the region to be distributed to the upper echelons of the British military command. He described the undertaking with his trademark sarcasm to a friend in England:
“We edit a daily newspaper, absolutely uncensored, for the edification of twenty-eight generals; the circulation increases automatically as they invent new generals. This paper is my only joy. One can give the Turkish point of view (in imaginary conversations with prisoners) of the proceedings of admirals and generals one dislikes, and I rub it in in my capacity as editor-in-chief. There is also a weekly letter to ‘Mother’ [the London War Office] in which one japes on a grander scale yet.”
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