Another new factor argued for Alexandretta, one for which the mercurial personality of Djemal Pasha could be thanked. In tacit opposition to his co-pashas in Constantinople, Djemal had given refuge to at least eighty thousand Armenian survivors of the Anatolian killing fields, and had organized many of the Armenian men into labor battalions. These refugees and labor battalions were concentrated in the Alexandretta region—some eight thousand had been put to work on the railroad tunnels being cut through the Amanus and Taurus Mountains—and even if they might be grateful to the pasha who had at least temporarily saved their lives, this Armenian population would most certainly regard arriving British soldiers as liberators and rush to their side. Attending that, of course, would be the public relations coup—an aspect of war Lawrence was always sensitive to—of Britain freeing untold thousands of Christian Armenians from servitude or death.
Through the strenuous lobbying of Lawrence and other members of the Cairo military intelligence staff, by late October the two most important British officials in Egypt—High Commissioner Henry McMahon and Major General John Maxwell, commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force—had been won over to the revived Alexandretta scheme. Better yet, these two men were about to hold a summit meeting with a visiting Lord Kitchener to decide the future course of the war in the eastern Mediterranean. The stars were finally aligning, so much so that Lawrence felt confident the seemingly impregnable walls of military idiocy were about to be breached.
“Things are boiling over this weekend,” Lawrence wrote to a friend on November 4, on the eve of the Kitchener summit meeting, “and we have never been so busy before! This is a good omen, and a thing to make one very content.”
The meeting between Kitchener, McMahon, and Maxwell took place on a ship off the Aegean island of Mudros on November 10 and 11. After an initial reluctance, the war secretary, too, came to embrace the Alexandretta plan, and fired off a cable to the prime minister urging its immediate approval.
But in London the idea had a more mixed reception. Amid the continuing carnage on the Western Front, the British high command was already struggling to find enough new men to throw into that meat grinder, and the notion of siphoning off matériel and soldiers—the revised Alexandretta plan now called for as many as 100,000 troops—was a difficult sell. Additionally, the misadventure at Gallipoli was hardly an advertisement for the wisdom of new amphibious landings on the Ottoman Front. In a flurry of cables passed between Kitchener’s ship and various ministries in London, a debate ensued.
At this crucial moment, a French liaison officer attached to Kitchener’s shipboard retinue decided the matter, firing off a cable to Paris alerting his government to the British deliberations.
Having been under the impression that they had killed off the Alexandretta scheme back in the winter of 1915, the French government now felt compelled to do so in more explicit form. On November 13, the French military attaché in London handed a letter to General William Robertson, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff and overall commander of the British army. After reasserting France’s economic and political interests in Syria, the letter stated that “French public opinion could not be indifferent to anything that would be attempted in a country that they consider already as being intended to become a part of the future [French-controlled] Syria; and they would require of the French Government that not only could no military operation be undertaken in this particular country before it has been concerted between the Allies, but even that, should such an action be taken, the greater part of the task should be entrusted to the French troops and the Generals commanding them.”
Its obtuse diplomatic language aside, the letter essentially repeated France’s earlier objections to an Alexandretta landing: since France intended to take over Syria after the war, French forces needed to be in the vanguard of any military operation in the area, and since no French troops could currently be spared for such a mission, that precluded any mission being conducted at all. What was shocking this time around, though, was that the French would actually commit such a squalid argument to paper. British historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote of the French directive that “this must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy’s life-line and of protecting our own.” By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially “accessories to the crime,” that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line—the narrow front of southern Palestine—an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties.
To the disbelief of Lawrence and others on the intelligence staff in Cairo, the Alexandretta plan was quashed anew, never to seriously be raised again.
Back in February 1915, when the plan had first been scuttled, Lawrence had bitterly suggested to his family that France was the true enemy in Syria. In the wake of the second scuttling in November 1915 was born an enmity that would cause him to view all future French actions in the region with utter distrust.
SOON AFTER THE death of her son Frank, Sarah Lawrence had chided her second son, “Ned,” for something that clearly remained a sore point: his failure to visit Frank at his military boot camp in late 1914, prior to Ned’s departure for Egypt. T. E. Lawrence had responded to his mother’s criticism with a logic so matter-of-fact as to border on the perverse. “I didn’t go say goodbye to Frank,” he explained, “because he would rather I didn’t, and I knew there was little chance of my seeing him again; in which case, we were better without a parting.”
Lawrence had responded very differently in March 1915 when he learned that the ship transporting his brother Will back to England from India was passing through the Suez Canal. Not having seen Will since his visit to Carchemish in 1913, Lawrence had briefly put aside his work at the Savoy Hotel, mounted his Triumph motorcycle, and raced the eighty miles out to Port Suez to meet his brother’s ship when it docked.
Just before he got there, however, a skirmish broke out somewhere along the canal, delaying Will’s ship. Instead of a face-to-face meeting, all the brothers were able to arrange was a brief ship-to-shore telephone conversation. That same evening, Lawrence remounted his motorcycle and returned to his work in Cairo.
In volunteering to serve as an aerial spotter for the Royal Flying Corps, Will had chosen a position that came with one of the shortest life expectancies for any soldier in World War I. On October 23, 1915, Will was killed when his plane was shot down over France, his body never recovered. He was twenty-six years old, and had been at the front for less than a week.
The effect of losing two brothers in just five months seemed to draw Lawrence even deeper into his emotional shell. For the next several months, his letters home grew steadily more infrequent and terse. Indeed, while he had quickly dropped nearly all mention of Frank in writing to his parents, there is no record of his even acknowledging Will’s death at the time, save for one oblique allusion. It was in a short note he sent home that December:
I’m writing just a few words this morning, because it has surprised me by being Christmas day. I’m afraid that for you it will be no very happy day; however you have still Bob and Arnie left at home, which is far more than many people can have. Look forward all the time. Everything here is as usual, only we had a shower of rain yesterday, and it has been cool lately.
Chapter 7
Treachery
It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it. I personally cannot foresee the situation in which we may find ourselves at the end of the war, and I therefore think that any discussion at the present time of how we are going to cut up the Turkish Empire is chiefly of academic interest.
BRITISH GENERAL GEO
RGE MACDONOGH, DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, JANUARY 7, 1916
On November 16, 1915, T. E. Lawrence penned a note to an old friend, Edward Leeds, one of the Ashmolean curators back in Oxford. It had been just three weeks since the death of his brother Will, and Lawrence was in a forlorn mood. After apologizing for his long silence, he told Leeds it was partly due to the demands of his job, “and partly because I’m rather low because first one and now another of my brothers has been killed. Of course, I’ve been away a lot from them, and so it doesn’t come on one like a shock at all, but I rather dread Oxford and what it may be like if one comes back. Also they were both younger than I am, and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo.”
If war is an inherently confounding experience, Lawrence could be forgiven that November for finding his particularly so. In the eleven months since he had arrived in Cairo, he had been largely confined to a suite of offices in the Savoy Hotel, a world away from the Western Front killing fields that had taken the lives of his brothers. Even more bewildering, he had expended his greatest energies not on battling the enemy, but engaged in “paper-combat” against the parochial interests of Britain’s military bureaucracy and those of its closest ally, France.
The uselessness of those struggles was plain to see on the great map of the Ottoman Empire tacked to the wall of the Savoy offices. In November 1915, after a year of war in that theater and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the map remained virtually unchanged.
In Gallipoli, the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force still clung to their blood-soaked beachheads, but even those tiny toeholds in Turkey were soon to disappear; in a cruel irony, the Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli, just then about to get under way, was to be the only well-executed phase of the entire campaign. In Anatolia, the suffering of the Armenians continued unabated, and was now being joined by that of the would-be Arab secessionists in Syria, their leadership decimated by Djemal Pasha’s secret police. A landing in Alexandretta that might have aided both groups now seemed a dead issue, even if for reasons no one in Cairo could quite discern (it would still be some weeks before the London War Office got around to informing Egypt of the French government’s formal spiking of the plan). In its stead, there was now growing talk of a conventional frontal assault against the entrenched Turkish forces at the far end of the Sinai in Palestine. Should that offensive be successful—and the example of Gallipoli offered scant reason to think it would—the British army would then be consigned to a long, slow grind north toward the Turkish heartland. Just about the only bright spot anywhere on that map was in Iraq. There, a British Indian army had steadily advanced up the Tigris River over the past seven months, and by mid-November stood at the gates of Baghdad. Even if that city at the Ottoman periphery were taken, however, it was hard to see its material effect on Constantinople, a thousand miles away.
Almost by default, then, Lawrence had increasingly looked to Arabia as the one place left that afforded a ray of hope, where the unconventional war he was convinced was needed to defeat the Turks might be waged. This hope had been given new vigor just days earlier. In the wake of Mohammed al-Faroki’s revelations, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, had rushed off a new letter to Emir Hussein acceding to nearly all his territorial demands for an independent Arab nation in payment for a British-allied Arab revolt. On November 5, an equally accommodating reply had come in to Cairo from Hussein. A few smaller points still needed to be worked out, but there was now a broad agreement in place for an Arab uprising against Turkey.
Not that Lawrence could possibly have imagined that this truly resolved matters. To the contrary, a perverse mind-set had settled in among the warring European powers by that autumn of 1915, one that suggested the situation in the Middle East was about to become far more complicated and contentious.
To understand this mind-set, one had to appreciate the paralysis that held over the larger map of the war. On the Western Front, the four-hundred-mile-long strip of no-man’s-land separating the French and British armies from those of the Germans had barely moved in a year. While much less static, a different kind of stalemate had set in on the Eastern Front. There, after being mauled by German forces on its northwestern frontier in the first days of the war, Russia had taken revenge on the hapless Austro-Hungarian armies on its southwestern, only to be mauled anew when Germany came to Austria-Hungary’s rescue. It established a deadly pattern—Russian success against Austria-Hungary negated by German success against Russia—that would continue into 1917. For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war’s end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties.
Of course, stasis is a two-way street, and if this broader map yielded no good news for the Entente, the same held true for the Central Powers.
Given this stunning lack of progress earned at such horrific cost, it might seem reasonable to imagine that the thoughts of the various warring nations would now turn toward peace, to trying to find some way out of the mess. Instead, precisely the opposite was happening.
It’s a question that has faced peoples and nations at war since the beginning of time, and usually produced a terrible answer: in contemplating all the lives already lost, the treasure squandered, how to ever admit it was for nothing? Since such an admission is unthinkable, and the status quo untenable, the only option left is to escalate. Thus among the warring states in Europe at the end of 1915 it was no longer a matter of satisfying what had brought them into the conflict in the first place—and in many cases, those reasons had been shockingly trivial—but to expand beyond them, the acceptable terms for peace not lowered, but raised. This conflict was no longer about playing for small advantage against one’s imperial rivals, but about hobbling them forever, ensuring that they might never again have the capability to wage such a devastating and pointless war.
But defeating one’s enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain. In modern European custom, that need had been sated by the payment of war reparations into the victor’s coffers, the grabbing of a disputed province here or there, but that seemed rather picayune in view of this conflict’s cost. Instead, all the slaughter was to be justified by a new golden age of empire, the victors far richer, far grander than before. Naturally, this simply propelled the cycle to its logical, murderous conclusion. When contemplating all to be conferred upon the eventual winners, and all to be taken from the losers, how to possibly quit now? No, what was required was greater commitment—more soldiers, more money, more loss—to be redeemed when victory finally came with more territory, more wealth, more power.
While the Central Powers had their own imperial wish list in the event of victory, one that also grew more grandiose as time went on, for the Entente powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia there really was only one place that offered the prospect of redemption on the scale required: the fractured and varied lands of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, by the autumn of 1915 that empire was now often referred to by cynics in the Entente capitals simply as “the Great Loot.”
For all three powers, the war in the Middle East was now to become about satisfying the imperial cravings—desiderata, as it was politely known—they had long harbored. The czars of Russia had been angling to grab Constantinople for at least two hundred years. Similarly, France had enjoyed a special status as protector of the Ottoman Empire’s Catholic population in Syria since the sixteenth century; if that empire was to be dismantled, then that region should rightly go to her. For its part, Britain had long been obsessed with protecting the land approaches to India, its “jewel in the crown,” from encroachment by its imperial
rivals— paradoxically, Russia and France foremost among them. Then there was the religion factor. All three of the principal Entente powers were devoutly Christian nations in 1915, and even after six hundred years it still grated many that the Christian Holy Land lay in Muslim hands. In carving up the Ottoman Empire there was finally the chance to replay the Crusades to a happier ending.
What probably most propelled these old desires into the realm of possibility were the secret negotiations between Britain and Emir Hussein. As those negotiations became less secret among the Allies, and the prospect of an Arab revolt more real, it produced not so much a piquing of imperial appetites as a mighty collective slavering.
By late November, France, tipped to Britain’s dealings with Hussein and anxious to stake its claim, would hastily compile its own ambitious set of desiderata for the region. French demands would soon be joined by those of Russia. Confronted by the gluttonous wishes of its principal allies—allies today perhaps, but probably rivals again tomorrow—Britain would suddenly decide that it too was in an acquisitive mood, and never mind the promises it had so recently made to Hussein. Maneuvering for their own spot at the feeding trough would ultimately come Italy and even neutral Greece. All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their ineptitude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage, all was about to become shrouded in treachery and byzantine maneuver.
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