By coincidence, the man who was to play a singular role in generating that intrigue arrived in Cairo on November 17, 1915, just the day after Lawrence had complained to Edward Leeds of his peaceful life there. His name was Mark Sykes—or, more formally, Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet of Sledmere.
Few people in history have so heedlessly caused so much tragedy. At the age of thirty-six, the handsome if slightly doughy Sykes epitomized that remarkable subclass of British aristocrats of the late imperial age known as the “Amateurs.” Despite its somewhat derogatory modern connotation, the term derives from the Latin “for the love of,” and in this context denoted a select group of wealthy and usually titled young men whose breeding, education, and freedom from careerist pressures—it was considered terribly déclassé for such men to hold down bona fide jobs—allowed them to dabble over a broad range of interests and find all doors flung open to them. Raised on a thirty-thousand-acre ancestral estate as the only child of a Yorkshire aristocrat, Sykes, like so many of his fellow Amateurs, seemed intent on living the lives of ten “ordinary” men. Educated at Cambridge, he had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire, authored four books, been a soldier in the Boer War, served as parliamentary secretary to the chief administrator of Ireland and honorary attaché to the British embassy in Constantinople—and those were just the highlights up to the age of twenty-five. In the succeeding eleven years before his arrival in Cairo that autumn, he had married and had sired five children—a sixth would soon be on the way—won a reputation as an accomplished caricaturist, invented an early version of the overhead projector and, since 1912, served as the Conservative member of Parliament for Hull Central.
Sykes’s appearance in Cairo was a result of the most recent addition to his résumé. The previous spring, Lord Kitchener had appointed him as an advisor to the de Bunsen Committee, an interdepartmental government board designed to guide the British cabinet on Middle Eastern affairs. Unsurprisingly, Sykes had quickly emerged as the dominant member of that committee, and in July 1915 set out on an extended fact-finding mission to the region with the intention of imparting his firsthand impressions to the cabinet upon his return.
Lawrence and Sykes first met that August, during Sykes’s stopover in Cairo on the outgoing leg of his fact-finding mission. Like most everyone else, Lawrence took a quick liking to the charming and personable MP. He and others in the Cairo intelligence staff were also gratified to finally find someone in the senior branches of the British government who appeared to appreciate their ideas for unconventional warfare. That estimate was initially fortified upon Sykes’s return to Egypt in November; he had spent the previous two months meeting with officials in British India, a group vehemently opposed to the war-by-proxy plots emanating out of British Egypt, and the returned Sykes made no secret that his sympathies lay with the Egyptian approach.
Yet for all his astounding achievements, Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world’s messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden—no less tiresome for being God-given—to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact. Sykes’s special skill in this regard was a talent for bold and refreshingly concise writing, the ability to break down complex issues into neat bulleted-point formulas that provided the illusion of almost mathematical simplicity. He was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed.
One example—there were to be many more in the years just ahead—was an analysis he composed during his August stopover in Cairo that purported to chart the various intellectual elements at work in the Middle East. After first dividing those elements between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns,” Sykes offered up subcategories. Thus, Class I of the Ancients were the orthodox (“hard, unyielding, bigoted and fanatical”), while Class I of the Moderns (“the highest type”) denoted “a person of good family who has entirely absorbed a Western education,” not to be confused with the Class II Moderns, who were “the poor, incompetent, or criminal who have received an inferior European education and whose minds by circumstances or temperament or both are driven into more sinister channels than the first class.” Not content to end there, Sykes proceeded to apply his formula to various regions of the Middle East, offering his British readers an easy-to-follow guide to their nation’s standing in each. It was not a pretty picture in a place like Egypt, frankly: from the Class I, II, and III Ancients, absolute hostility, benevolent apathy, and mild approval, respectively, joined to constitutional opposition and unforgiving enmity among the Class I and II Moderns.
It certainly wasn’t the first time such silly racialist formulas had been put to paper, but it spoke volumes to the British leadership’s own smugness—as well, no doubt, to their perpetually harried states in grappling with a conflict that spanned the globe—that such drivel, well organized and confidently stated, took on the flavor of wisdom. Upon Sykes’s return to London and a bravura performance before the de Bunsen Committee, the British government would essentially hand off to the thirty-six-year-old Amateur one of the thorniest—and from a historical standpoint, most profoundly important—assignments of World War I: sorting out the competing territorial claims of Great Britain and her allies in the Middle East.
Only belatedly would British leaders recognize another aspect of Sykes’s character, one that might have given them pause had they spotted it earlier. Perhaps to be expected given his frenetic pace and catholic range of interests, Mark Sykes had a very hard time keeping his facts, even his own beliefs, straight. Impressed by the last person he had spoken with, or the last idea that had popped into his fecund mind, he was forever contradicting positions or policies he had advocated earlier—often mere days earlier.
Lawrence began to get a glimmer of this in the time he spent around Sykes during that November stopover. There was something altogether disquieting about the cavalier way the young MP disregarded inconvenient evidence that didn’t fit his currently held view, often only to seize on that same evidence when his opinion changed. As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements … a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it.”
But there was yet another side to Sykes’s personality that boded ill for the crucial role he was about to assume. It seems the man was something of a sneak. Whether due to a need to prove he was always the cleverest person in the room, or a con man’s desire to get one over simply for the sport of it, the young Amateur would make an art form out of bending the truth to suit his needs, of playing one side against another by withholding or manipulating crucial information. The result would be a most peculiar place in history for Mark Sykes: it’s hard to think of any figure who, with no true malice intended and neither a nation nor an army at his disposal, was to wreak more havoc on the twentieth century than the personable and brilliant young aristocrat from Yorkshire, havoc that a small group of his countrymen, including T. E. Lawrence, would try very hard to set right.
Which isn’t to suggest that Sykes uniquely possessed these traits. Indeed, when it came to duplicity, the Amateur had a lot of very accomplished competitors in the Middle East just then.
AT THE SAME time that Sykes was holding court in Cairo, an enigmatic robed figure was circulating through the bazaars and teahouses of a number of towns in western Syria. He was an exceedingly soft-spoken man in his midthirties, well-off and cultured, judging by the quality of his dress and classic Arabic diction. Because of his pale complexion and blue eyes, most who encountered him probably took the traveler for a Circassian, that ancient mountain people originally from the Black Sea region, many of whom have almost Nordi
c features. This was a misconception Curt Prüfer likely made no effort to correct. He was conducting this clandestine mission at the behest of Djemal Pasha. Its purpose was to find out where the real sympathies of the people of Syria lay.
By that autumn, the need for an unbiased assessment of Syrian public opinion was becoming acute both for the governor and his German advisors. With the Allied misadventure in Gallipoli showing signs of winding down, there was once again the threat of an enemy landing somewhere on the Syrian coast. If the Allies put ashore in Lebanon, how would the Lebanese Christians and the Druze religious minority respond? And what of the Jews, centered just below in Palestine? With the persecution of the Armenians in Anatolia continuing unabated, surely many in Syria’s Jewish community were worried they might be next. Above all, what of the Arabs? Djemal Pasha had already begun to move against the Arab conspirators unmasked in the French consulate documents, and Emir Hussein in Mecca was a continuing source of concern, but what of the great masses of Arabs elsewhere?
For five weeks, and assuming a variety of personas and disguises, Prüfer wandered Syria. Along the way he talked with Jewish colonists, Arab shopkeepers, and Christian landowners, with westernized aristocrats and Bedouin sheikhs and fellaheen. By early December 1915, the German spy felt he’d sufficiently taken the nation’s pulse to report his findings to Djemal and the German embassy in Constantinople.
In brief, he had found the greatest discontent among the Christians, nearly all of whom, he believed, secretly sympathized with the Entente powers. But Prüfer saw little real danger here, both because of the Syrian Christians’ comparatively small numbers and because their “aptitude for treason” was surpassed by a “cowardice that prevents them from trying to realize their dreams.”
Of somewhat greater concern, in his estimation, was the Jewish population, and specifically of that subgroup among them known as the Zionists. While “official Zionism says it only wants to create in Palestine a center for Jewish language and civilization, and is not at all interested in politics,” Prüfer wrote, this was clearly not true. Rather, their ultimate aim was to create an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine, a goal far more likely to be achieved by an Entente victory than a Central Powers one. Still, and for much the same reasons as with the Christians, Prüfer saw little cause for alarm: “Being by nature cowardly and without initiative, the Jews will not dare to commit subversive acts unless an armed enemy force was already in the country.”
Most heartening was what the German spy had discerned in the Arab Muslim community, by far the largest of the three. Partly due to the “fair and severe” measures Djemal had already conducted against those Arab leaders suspected of secessionist leanings, Prüfer found the Arab independence movement in a greatly weakened state. “Among the middle classes, reformism has barely any supporters,” he wrote, “and among the small landowners, merchants and workers, who constitute the bulk of the population, the government and its cause seems to be popular.” Even if an Arab uprising was somehow launched, Prüfer suggested in his usual trenchant way, it would receive little mass support “due to the frivolousness of the population.”
This generally rosy assessment came with a major caveat, however; if the British did put ashore in Syria, latent sympathies would come to the fore. In that eventuality, the invaders could certainly find willing local collaborators. Prüfer provided Djemal with a long list of the names of “unreliables,” mostly prominent Christian and Muslim Arab businessmen, as well as “all Zionist party chiefs,” who should be immediately sent into internal exile in the case of an Allied landing.
This last suggestion triggered alarm within the German embassy. Just that August, Djemal had made use of the documents seized from the French consulate in Beirut to execute eleven prominent Arab leaders in one of the city’s main squares. That event had stirred outrage in the Arab world, and Germany certainly didn’t need one of its own intelligence officers providing the Syrian governor with more names for his hit list. In forwarding the report to the foreign ministry in Berlin, the German ambassador in Constantinople noted that he’d given Prüfer the following warning: “At the slightest indiscretion, the population could raise the charge that we are causing rigorous measures, like expulsions. In the future, please couch your suggestions to Djemal of this nature with cautious restraint.”
That admonition may have come too late. With Prüfer’s report already in hand, the Syrian governor seemed to conclude that his flexible approach to problem-solving—alternating between the rose and the dagger without readily discernible pattern—was the best way to outwit his growing list of enemies. On December 18, he had ordered a much larger roundup of those implicated in the French consulate files, a dragnet ultimately ensnaring some sixty members of the Arab intelligentsia of Beirut and Damascus.
Perhaps those arrests put Djemal in a happier mood, for he showed far greater magnanimity when another man of increasingly questionable loyalty, Aaron Aaronsohn, came calling at his Damascus office in January.
THE SPY SHIP NEVER came.
On the moonless night of November 8, 1915, Absalom Feinberg had finally been slipped back ashore at Athlit from a British spy ship, and had immediately given an ecstatic Aaron Aaronsohn the good news: he’d made contact, the British eagerly awaited whatever intelligence they could pass on, and arrangements were now in place to make that happen.
With the spy ship scheduled to return in two weeks, the two men immediately set out on long-range reconnaissance missions to update their information, Aaronsohn heading north, Feinberg to the south. Under the guise of conducting scientific surveys for the agricultural research station, they surreptitiously noted the location of new Turkish army camps and supply depots and trenchworks, tracked the movements of trains and troop formations, meticulously jotted down in tiny script in their notebooks most anything they thought might be useful to the British.
But when they returned to Athlit and waited on the appointed night, the spy ship didn’t come, nor on the next night, or the one after. As their wait dragged into early December, Aaronsohn and Feinberg grew increasingly puzzled, and then anxious; obviously, something somewhere had gone wrong, but the longer their wait extended, the more likely their nocturnal activities would come to the attention of the Turkish militia’s night patrols. On the other hand, if they relaxed their vigil and missed the boat’s appearance, the British might conclude that the conspirators had backed out or been caught and simply give up.
Despairing of the spy ship ever showing, by December 8, the impetuous Feinberg had come up with a new plan: he would reestablish contact by somehow maneuvering his way past the Turkish armies massed in southern Palestine, then cross over the Sinai no-man’s-land to the British lines at the far end. If stopped by a Turkish patrol, he would claim to be doing fieldwork on locusts. That alibi had the benefit of credence. Just days earlier, a great new swarm of locusts had appeared over Judea, the first since the previous spring, and Aaronsohn had determined they were coming from Egypt over the Sinai land bridge. It still seemed a terribly risky venture, but, consumed by his own anxieties over reaching the British, Aaronsohn relented; Feinberg set out for the south that very night.
Soon after there came anxiety of a very different sort. In Constantinople, Aaronsohn’s younger sister Sarah had for some time been looking for a way to escape her unhappy marriage and return to her family in Palestine. In mid-November, with her husband away on an extended business trip, she found her opening upon hearing that a Jewish relief official would soon be departing Constantinople for a tour of the Jewish colonies. Pleading to be taken along, on November 26, the twenty-five-year-old Sarah boarded a train at Haidar Pasha station and set off on the long journey home.
Dark rumors had abounded for months of what was happening to the Armenians in the Anatolian countryside, but the combination of poor communications and rigorous censorship had enabled the Ottoman regime to conceal the extent of the brutality from the general population to a fairly remarkable degree. This didn’t a
pply, of course, to anyone whose travels took them through the killing fields. By the time Sarah Aaronsohn was reunited with her brother in Palestine on December 16, she was in a state of shock over what she had witnessed during her journey. The agronomist would later recount that “she saw the bodies of hundreds of Armenian men, women and children lying on both sides of the railway. Sometimes Turkish women were seen searching the corpses for anything that might be of value; at other times dogs were observed feeding on the bodies. There were hundreds of bleached skeletons.” In the grisliest incident, Sarah claimed she had watched as her train was besieged by thousands of starving Armenians at one remote station; in the stampede, dozens fell beneath the wheels of the train, much to the delight of its conductor. Sarah fainted away at the spectacle, only to be remonstrated by two Turkish officers when she came to for her evident lack of patriotism.
Aaron Aaronsohn had long heard the Armenian horror stories on his own travels, but had tended to discount them as part of the eternal Syrian rumor mill. To have them confirmed by his sister—and to learn the slaughter was ongoing—made it all hideously real. It also led the agronomist inexorably to a grim question: who next? If the Young Turks could perpetrate this atrocity against the nation’s two million Armenians, how much easier to do the same to its eighty thousand Jews?
Then came more bad news. In the Sinai, Absalom Feinberg had been stopped by a Turkish army patrol not at all impressed by his locust fieldwork cover story. Instead, they had hauled him back to Beersheva under suspicion of being a spy. In early January, he was transferred to the prison in Jerusalem to await possible trial; if found guilty of the worst potential charge against him, that of treason, Feinberg would undoubtedly have a quick appointment with the gibbet-gallows.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 22