Once the shelling ceased, the attacking infantry units climbed out of their forward staging trenches to begin their advance across no-man’s-land. Unfortunately for them, the end of the artillery barrage also cued the defenders that the ground assault was now under way, enabling them to quickly return to their own forward trenches and mow down the exposed attackers as they approached. In just this way, by early 1916, men had died by the hundreds of thousands in trenchworks across the breadth of Europe.
Despite the failure of these tactics across a wide spectrum of Europe’s varied topography, Lieutenant General Aylmer had apparently seen no means to improve upon them on the flat and featureless landscape of central Iraq. It also seemed to escape him that it was these same ruinous tactics, employed by General Townshend in his effort to take Baghdad, that were necessitating his rescue mission in the first place. In the two months since he had set off for Kut with some twenty thousand British and Indian troops, Aylmer had three times hurled his men in frontal assaults over bare ground against the entrenched Turks. Each time, the British Indian army had eventually carried the field, if only through sheer numerical dominance—they outnumbered the Turks by at least two to one—and only at astounding cost; in the first two weeks, the relief force had suffered some ten thousand casualties, or half its strength.
This was no cause for undue alarm among senior commanders downstream, apparently, for they soon began shuttling some fifteen thousand more men up to Aylmer for a second push. By early March, this replenished force had advanced upriver until it came to the Turkish trenchline in Dujaila, the last obstacle standing between the rescuers and Kut just beyond. Having learned at least a little from his earlier battles, Aylmer had decided on a night march to the very edge of the Turks’ artillery range in Dujaila, a quick sunrise bombardment, and then a dash for the Citadel that dominated the pancake-flat plain. It was shortly before dawn, while his guns were being silently unlimbered into place for the coming barrage, that he learned of the 36th Indian’s remarkable news.
But Fenton Aylmer was clearly not a man who liked surprises, even good ones. After hastily conferring with his senior commanders, it was decided that the preemptive capture of the Turkish stronghold posed too great a departure from the battle plans already worked out to be adequately supported. The 36th Indian was ordered away from the Citadel and back to the main British line; from there, they could recross the plain and seize the fortress once the opening artillery bombardment had been completed.
When finally the British bombardment commenced—not at dawn as planned, but at 8 a.m.—all element of surprise had been lost, the Dujaila Citadel hurriedly manned by Turkish troops ferried over from across the river. It was another hour before the British frontal assault began. Very quickly, another four thousand imperial troops had fallen in no-man’s-land, without a single one reaching the Citadel.
That engagement at Dujaila represented the last best chance the British had to save their besieged army in Kut. Over the previous two months, they had suffered fourteen thousand casualties trying to rescue an army of twelve thousand—and they weren’t quite done yet. For his efforts, Fenton Aylmer was quietly relieved of command three days after Dujaila and shuffled off to a back-base job. Perhaps in recognition of his uneven achievements in Iraq, as well as his attempted cover‑up of the Citadel fiasco—his official battle report would make no mention of the 36th Indian’s report—his knighthood would be delayed until 1922.
In the wake of the Dujaila debacle, and in light of the dire situation facing Townshend’s army at Kut—reports indicated the garrison would run out of food by mid-April—Lord Kitchener set to hatching a desperate scheme. In its pursuit, on the morning of March 22, 1916, the passenger ship Royal George slipped from its berth at Port Suez and turned south into the Red Sea, embarking on a fourteen-day journey around the Arabian Peninsula to southern Iraq. On board was T. E. Lawrence. He carried with him a letter of introduction from High Commissioner Henry McMahon to Sir Percy Cox, British India’s chief political officer in Iraq.
“My dear Cox,” the letter read, “I send these few lines to introduce Captain Lawrence who is starting today for Mesopotamia under orders from the W.O. [War Office] to give his services in regards to Arab matters. He is one of the best of our very able intelligence staff here and has a thorough knowledge of the Arab question in all its bearings. I feel sure that you will find him of great use. We are very sorry to lose so valuable a man from our staff here.
“I hope things are going well on your side. We are anxiously awaiting news of Townshend’s relief but have heard nothing for ages.”
The purpose of Lawrence’s mission was actually twofold, one overt, the other very much veiled. In view of the ongoing crisis at Kut, Kitchener and his allies in the Egyptian intelligence staff hoped the British Indian commanders in Iraq might finally see the wisdom of trying to work with the indigenous Arab tribes that should have been their natural allies all along. The plan was to start sending out a group of Iraqi Arab officers who had defected from the Turks and were now working for the British in Egypt, so that they might forge alliances with local Iraqi tribal leaders, as well as peel away disgruntled Arab units of the Ottoman army.
It was hard to imagine how any of this could be done in time to save Townshend, however, and this gave rise to the second purpose of Lawrence’s mission. Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend’s army go in return for one million English pounds’ worth of gold.
If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he’d very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.
A year and a half earlier, he had been magically elevated from civilian to second lieutenant because a general visiting the General Staff map room demanded to be briefed by an officer. Now Lawrence’s superiors in Cairo had abruptly rushed through his temporary promotion to captain, effective his first day at sea, presumably to spare the very senior military commanders he would be meeting in Iraq from the indignity of conferring with a second lieutenant.
A rather more baffling episode had occurred just four days before he’d boarded the Royal George. On March 18, the small French military legation in Cairo had been temporarily recalled to France and, in long-standing military tradition among the European powers, the occasion was marked by the liberal disbursement of medals and honorifics. Quite inexplicably, considering his consistent efforts to thwart French ambitions in the region, the outgoing legation had selected Lawrence for the Légion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest awards. Compounding their error, the following year they awarded him the Croix de Guerre avec palme.
Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amusement in placing the medal around the neck of a friend’s dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford.
ON THE MORNING of April 5, the Royal George slipped into the bay of the dreary, low-slung port city of Basra, and a Royal Navy launch was sent out to collect its most important passenger, the newly minted Captain T. E. Lawrence.
As Lawrence soon discovered in Basra, the overt objective of his mission to Iraq, to coax British Indian commanders into launching a hearts-and-minds campaign among the local tribes, had already been mooted. In a series of cables to London while he had been in transit, the new commander in chief of the Indian Army Expeditionary Force in Iraq, General Percy Lake, had already dismissed the scheme as “undesirable and inconvenient.”
But as Lawrence conferred with that leadership during his first days in Basra, it was clear that another, more insidious element had doomed his political mission, a toxic fusion of racism and British notions of
military superiority. Despite the fresh example of the disaster at Gallipoli—maybe even because of it—many senior British commanders simply couldn’t accept that they might lose to the “rabble” of the Ottoman army yet again. This attitude wasn’t isolated to the narrow-minded generals of British India, but extended all the way to the supreme commander of British forces, General William Robertson, back in London. Upon hearing of the generous surrender terms offered to Townshend by Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander at Kut, after the defeat of Aylmer’s relief column, Robertson had responded, “My general information is to the effect that the difficulties of the Turks are serious. I regard Khalil Bey’s overtures as a confirmation of this and as an indication that, given determined action on our part, success is assured.”
In other words, in the upside-down worldview that this war against its military and cultural inferiors had induced in the British high command, an offer of honorable surrender was only evidence of the enemy’s weakness, and that two relief efforts had ended in abject failure meant a third was sure to succeed.
By the time Lawrence was shuttled up the Tigris River to join the frontline headquarters staff on April 15, this third relief effort was well under way. After the fiasco at Dujaila, there had been a wholesale shakeup of that staff, with Aylmer replaced by a certain Major General George Gorringe. Unfortunately, the changes hadn’t extended to the tactical playbook. Displaying the same fondness for frontal assaults against an entrenched enemy as his predecessor, Gorringe neatly replicated the record of Aylmer’s first relief effort—ten thousand dead and wounded, no breakthrough—in almost precisely the same two-week span.
That final failure ended the uncomfortable existence Lawrence had endured ever since reaching the Snakefly, the British headquarters ship docked in the Tigris River below Kut. As word had spread among the officers on board of the clandestine purpose of his mission—to try to ransom out the Kut garrison—the young captain from Egypt had been pointedly shunned by most everyone. But now, having suffered some twenty-three thousand casualties across nine separate engagements without ever reaching Kut, and with that trapped garrison rapidly nearing starvation, the generals in charge belatedly accepted that Kitchener’s scheme was the only option left.
But even at this eleventh hour, there would be time for an element of farce. Since neither General Townshend nor the commanders hoping to rescue him wished to have such an ignominious endeavor attached to their reputations, through the last days of April, Townshend and General Lake waged a duel of cablegrams, each arguing that the other should carry out the negotiations. Instead, it would ultimately fall on three junior officers—Colonel Edward Beach, Captain Aubrey Herbert, and Captain T. E. Lawrence—to make one last attempt to save the dying men of Kut.
IT HAD ALL the trappings of a Victorian parlor-room melodrama: the dashing and excessively handsome young nobleman, a requisite coterie of flirtatious but chaste women, the cold-blooded archvillain, even the innocent abroad, that out-of-his-depth character who, after various twists and turns, would provide the story with its moral conclusion. Where the small expatriate community of wartime Jerusalem differed from any theatrical counterparts was in the consequences to be paid for ending up on the wrong side of the narrative: imprisonment, exile, even execution. What was also different, of course, was the world that lay beyond those parlor-room windows, not the pleasant English countryside or a tony London street, but a city consumed by death, its streets and alleyways littered with those succumbed to starvation or typhus, its public squares frequently featuring men hanging from gibbet-gallows.
For William Yale, it was an exceedingly strange, fishbowl existence. With very little to do in the way of work, most every afternoon he met up to play bridge with an eclectic group of friends—a Greek doctor, an Armenian doctor, a retired Turkish colonel, and the Greek bishop of Jerusalem—that diversion giving over in the evenings to larger gatherings in the salons of various middle-aged expatriate women. At these soirees, dominated by dancing and the playing of parlor games, a peculiar sexual dynamic took place. Since there were few single expatriate women remaining in Jerusalem—and any attention paid to one could be quickly interpreted as an interest to marry—the single men flirted, openly and competitively, with the married women in attendance, often in plain view and with the acquiescence of their husbands. It was all quite harmless and innocent.
But there was nothing truly harmless in wartime Jerusalem, as Yale discovered when he became the favorite of Madame Alexis Frey, an attractive middle-aged French widow who enjoyed the status of grande dame of the city’s salon scene. Yale’s standing with Frey so rankled one of his competitors, a middle-aged Christian Arab who headed the Turkish Tobacco Régie, or monopoly, in Syria, that the man took Yale aside one day to make a proposal. “How about we divide the ladies of Jerusalem up between the two of us,” the businessman said. “For myself, I will reserve Madame Frey, and you can have all the rest.”
Yale initially dismissed the proposition as a joke, but thought differently when he next went to the Régie office to purchase his monthly ration of cigarettes, only to be told by the clerks they’d been instructed to not sell to him. That posed a problem since, true to its definition, the Régie was the only place tobacco could be obtained in wartime Jerusalem. Shortly afterward, Yale was informed by the Jerusalem chief of police that his challenger from the Régie was plotting intrigues against him.
“I began to realize that I was up against a jealous, unscrupulous person who would go to great lengths to rid himself of a rival,” Yale recalled. “As my business demanded that my position should be such that I be on friendly terms with the Turkish officials and authorities, I saw I was playing a dangerous game. I decided to let Madame Frey settle the issue, so I told her to send Monsieur X packing or our affair was over.”
When Madame Frey explained that that was quite impossible given the Régie man’s prominence, the American oilman withdrew from the Frey salon in a huff. Yale’s manservant, a grizzled old Kurd named Mustapha Kharpoutli, came up with an alternative solution. “Oh Master,” he counseled Yale, “I know where ‘the pig’ goes every evening, so give the order and I will finish with him.” As Kharpoutli explained, the Régie man left a particular woman’s house every night at midnight. “It’s on a lonely street. I will kill him tonight if you tell me to.”
Yale declined that offer, and shortly after his friends engineered a brief rapprochement with Alexis Frey. It was a risky business, for the city’s thicket of martial law edicts afforded almost endless possibilities for a rival to exact revenge; during Frey’s next curfew-violating salon, her home was raided and half the attendees hauled off to jail, presumably after a tip-off from the jealous Régie man.
The episode served to remind Yale that his life now was like a game of musical chairs, one with extremely high stakes. The ultimate arbiter of that game, of course, was Djemal Pasha. On his word, most anyone could be cast into prison or summarily banished to some distant village in the Syrian wastelands—if often only to be just as swiftly released or restored according to Djemal’s whim.
To stay in Djemal’s good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European “belligerent” nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential. William Yale’s relationship with the Conde de Ballobar was a tricky one: a good ally to have if matters went awry, but also his most formidable competition when it came to fishing in Jerusalem’s sparse pool of attractive and available women.
For day-to-day protection, Yale was much more likely to turn to another pillar of Jerusalem society, a charming middle-aged aristocrat named Ismail Hakki Bey al-Husseini, one of the three Jerusalem businessmen from whom Socony had obtained the original Kornub concessions back in the spring of 1914. Yale had developed a friendship with Ismail Bey during his extended stay in Pales
tine prior to the war’s outbreak. That had quickly resumed upon Yale’s return in 1915, and by the spring of 1916 the oilman considered Ismail Bey his closest friend in the Middle East. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that the Husseinis were one of the most powerful and well-respected families in all of southern Syria, Ismail Bey being a particularly prominent member.
But if the expatriate community had its protectors, it also had its predators. Of these, none was more dreaded than a young German officer who flitted in and out of the city with some regularity, Curt Prüfer. As Count de Ballobar noted of Prüfer, despite “his harmless appearance [he] is nothing less than a secret agent of the German government,” and “in possession of an extraordinary talent.” What made Prüfer such a figure of menace, quite beyond the creepiness factor of his whispery voice, was that he seemed to be the one German whom Djemal Pasha trusted implicitly. Run afoul of Curt Prüfer, and even the determined entreaties of Count de Ballobar or Ismail Hakki Bey might prove useless. Even the entreaties of Djemal Pasha, in fact. One afternoon, Yale happened to be visiting an expatriate couple he was friendly with when their front door was kicked in by Prüfer and two accompanying policemen. While the couple had claimed to be Swiss, it was an open secret within the foreign community—and to Djemal Pasha—that they were actually French, a detail Prüfer had apparently just uncovered. When he demanded the couple be cast into internal exile, an unhappy Djemal had no choice but to sign the expulsion order.
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