Prüfer’s authority became especially worrisome to William Yale in the winter of 1916 when he discovered that he and the German intelligence agent were locked in a three-way competition—the third was the ubiquitous Ballobar—for the same woman, a beautiful Jewish-American girl living in Jerusalem. Concerned that her American suitor might soon be arrested, the girl finally confided to Yale that Prüfer frequently interrogated her about him and his activities. “Clearly I was under suspicion.”
Surviving in wartime Syria required not only a finely honed selfishness, but a hardening of the heart. In this, Yale, the consummate survivor, was not at all immune. Every day for months on end, he had to step over the bodies of the dead and dying as he traversed Jerusalem. Every week he heard stories of those who had fallen from favor being disappeared, either figuratively in the form of banishment or quite literally in the form of the gibbet-gallows. To protect himself and his interests in such a place, he became increasingly cold-blooded, too, so much so that he would eventually turn on his closest friend. To his later embarrassment, this didn’t stem from matters of personal safety; William Yale did it for oil.
Prior to his first meeting with Djemal Pasha in the spring of 1915, Yale had decided to divide Socony’s petition for concessionary rights in Palestine into two separate requests, figuring that to ask for the entire half million acres desired at one fell swoop was to invite a backlash. The problem was that, having long since sewn up the concessionary rights to the first quarter million acres and done nothing with them, by the spring of 1916 the oilman had still not mustered the gall to ask after the second.
What he needed was some kind of opening to alter the playing field, but just what that might be was hard to imagine—especially since Djemal had clearly cottoned to Socony’s game. At the beginning of 1916, the Constantinople office had labored mightily to obtain concessionary rights to several large tracts around Damascus, going so far as to make the American consul in that city, Samuel Edelman, their point man in the effort. In late March, however, after Edelman took the matter up with “the supreme factor in these regions”—an obvious reference to Djemal—he cabled back to Socony with some bad news. “[Djemal] says that while recently in Constantinople, the Minister of Mines said to him [that] Standard Oil was not working for the benefit or interest of Turkey, but to shut off competition. So long as this suspicion hangs over you, [it] will not be possible to obtain further concessions.”
Shortly after that rebuff, however, an opening suddenly presented itself when Yale was once again summoned to Djemal’s headquarters at the German Hospice. As the governor explained, he had recently received reports from military officers in the field of a large pool of oil collected at the base of a mountain in the southern desert. Since this oil was already on the surface, Djemal pointed out, it should be an easy matter to start collecting and refining it at once. As a personal favor, he wanted Yale to go and investigate the site, a small chain of mountains below Beersheva known as Kornub.
Yale instantly realized this “find” was the very same one that J. C. Hill had spotted from a Judean hillside two years earlier, and which he and Rudolf McGovern had ascertained to be iron tailings. But this seemed a detail not worth mentioning to Djemal Pasha. Instead, Yale said he would be happy to investigate the Kornub site, so long as the governor could see his way to approving a few more concessionary tracts. When he left the German Hospice that day, the Standard representative had the pasha’s consent to another quarter million acres of Palestine.
But while preparing for this next concession-procurement expedition Yale suddenly encountered a problem with his best friend, Ismail Hakki Bey. During the first great concession-buying expedition of the previous summer, Ismail Bey had succumbed to Yale’s entreaties to accompany him on the vague assurance that Socony would compensate him for his services; even though the businessman had no proprietary interest in those concessions, he had relented. To be sure, that collaboration was rooted in more than mere friendship for both men. While Ismail Bey’s cultured company was a welcome addition to the scrofulous assortment of soldiers and government functionaries who formed the rest of Yale’s retinue, the American also looked to his well-connected friend to smooth out any difficulties that might arise with stubborn landowners or extortionate local officials. From Ismail Bey’s perspective, with Socony clearly planning a massive exploration project in Palestine at some point in the future, it only made good business sense to attach to the undertaking however he could.
But when approached by Yale in the late spring of 1916 for his help with the next round of concession-buying, Ismail Bey balked. In the Arab way of doing business, one’s word was inviolate. Ismail Bey had now seen enough of the American way to know that Yale’s assurances of compensation were quite meaningless; what he needed was a written contract. Confronted by this request, Yale explained that as a mere purchasing agent for Socony, he hadn’t the authority to pen such a guarantee, but that if Ismail Bey “wished to know my personal opinion, it was that he had better have confidence in the Company.”
That wasn’t good enough for Ismail Bey; he informed his friend that without such a written guarantee, he couldn’t help him.
This placed Yale in a most difficult spot. Over the course of their two-and-a-half-year friendship, he’d come to know all of Ismail Bey’s seven children, and had frequently dined in his Jerusalem home. As in any true friendship, the two had also shared confidences: on Yale’s part, of the British nurse he had met in Jerusalem before the war and hoped one day to marry; on Ismail Bey’s part, of his low opinion of the Ottoman government in general, and his resentment of Djemal Pasha in particular. Compounding Yale’s difficulty was the very prominence of the Husseini name in Syria. Since Ismail Bey had relatives scattered in high government positions throughout the region, a rift between them might not be a matter of simply parting ways; if the businessman chose to stand in his way, the same doors that had previously been flung open for Socony could now be slammed shut.
As Yale recounted in his memoir, “I looked at him and said, ‘Well, Ismail Bey, much as I will dislike doing it, if you do not agree to cooperate with me, I shall go at once to Djemal Pasha and tell him that you are blocking me, that you are pro-British and are tied up with British interests.”
It marked a dramatic transformation in William Yale. In 1911, while working for a wealthy Bostonian industrialist, Yale had refused the pleas of his own bankrupted and desperate father for an introduction to his employer, feeling that trading on his position to arrange such a meeting would be improper. Just five years later, Yale was threatening his best friend with probable death—and not an easy death, but likely one that would only come after protracted torture and after his wives and children had been cast into a destitute exile—over a business deal.
But it worked. “I studied his face anxiously as I awaited his response,” Yale would recall. “Rather abruptly he replied, ‘I’ll assist you; I’ll trust the Company.’ And he did work loyally with me as long as I represented the Company in Palestine.”
KHALIL PASHA’S HEADQUARTERS encampment consisted of a single round tent set some four miles back from the front lines at Kut. It was midafternoon before the three British officers, having at last completed their grueling blindfolded journey from no-man’s-land, were ushered inside.
Khalil was a trim man in his midthirties with piercing brown eyes and the handlebar mustache favored by Turkish officers—by all Turkish males, in fact—and despite the desolation of his surroundings, he still retained something of the dapper manner he had perfected in the salons of Constantinople. Aubrey Herbert, during his prewar days as an honorary consul in the Ottoman capital, had come to know Khalil quite well, and once he and his companions had settled in the tent he tried to break the ice with some opening pleasantries. “Where was it that I met Your Excellency last?” Herbert asked in French.
Khalil apparently had a good memory. “At a dance at the British embassy,” he replied, also in French. From there, though, th
e conversation took a far more somber turn.
It was April 29, and the three British officers had set out for this meeting early that morning, climbing over the forward parapet of a British trenchline and into no-man’s-land under the cover of a white flag. Before them stretched six hundred yards of waist-high meadow grass, at the far end of which rose the earthen berm of the Turks’ trenchworks. Walking to a spot roughly equidistant between the two lines, they stopped and waited for several hours for some response from the Turkish side, buffeted both by the steadily rising heat and by the swarms of blowflies feeding on the rotting corpses that lay all about them. At last, the three men were taken over to the Turkish line, where they were blindfolded and put on horses to take them to Khalil’s headquarters. Having badly hurt his knee in a fall a few days earlier, Lawrence quickly found that he couldn’t ride; taken off his horse but still in blindfold, he was led by the hand by a Turkish soldier, stumbling and limping the four miles to Khalil’s tent.
In stepping out into no-man’s-land that morning, all three men were acutely aware of the humiliating nature of the task they’d been given. So dishonorable was this bribery attempt that Edward Beach would never publicly reveal the mission’s true purpose, Lawrence would only write of it in the most euphemistic fashion, while Aubrey Herbert couldn’t even bring himself to commit the words to the anonymity of his private diary; writing in his journal the previous evening, he noted that the only items they had to bargain with were “Townshend’s guns, exchange of Turkish prisoners, and another thing.” Even this ambiguity was ultimately too revealing; when Herbert’s diary was published after the war, that clause was excised altogether.
But as the three officers soon learned in Khalil Pasha’s tent, they actually had even less to bargain with than that. Unbeknownst to them when they’d set out, early that morning an increasingly unhinged Townshend had abruptly agreed to an unconditional surrender. Following military protocol, he then destroyed his remaining pieces of artillery. This act infuriated Khalil Pasha—he had desperately wanted to get his hands on those guns—and it left Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence with little to offer the Turkish commander beyond the gold ransom.
This the British officers couched in terms of a kind of humanitarian assistance package for the civilian residents of Kut. Surely, they suggested, those innocents had suffered just as badly as the trapped British soldiers through the five-month siege, and some form of financial recompense seemed in order. Khalil Pasha saw through the artifice at once and airily brushed the proposal away.
The negotiating party fared a bit better in asking for a transfer of wounded soldiers. With the Kut garrison now surrendered, the Turkish commander agreed to let British steamers come up with food supplies and take out the worst wounded. This concession encouraged Colonel Beach, the senior negotiator, to try his last card: an exchange of able-bodied prisoners, the survivors in Kut in return for the Ottoman prisoners the British had taken since first coming ashore in Iraq.
With an arch expression, Khalil offered an alternative arrangement, a one-for-one exchange of British soldiers for Turkish ones, a separate exchange for Indian soldiers and Arabs. The British officers weren’t quite sure what to make of this offer, but when Herbert remarked that many Arab troops in the enemy army had fought valiantly and Khalil would be lucky to have them back, the Turkish commander’s manner abruptly changed. Holding up a list of the POWs held by the British, Khalil pointed out the preponderance of Arab names. “Perhaps one of our [Turkish] men in ten is weak or cowardly,” he said, “but it’s only one in a hundred of the Arabs who are brave.… You can send them back to me if you like, but I have already condemned them to death. I shall like to have them to hang.”
Realizing they were being toyed with, the British officers dropped the matter. A short time later, Khalil Pasha gave an affected yawn and announced that he was tired, that he still had many other matters to attend. So ended the last chance to rescue the garrison in Kut. From Khalil’s headquarters, Lawrence, Herbert, and Beach were escorted back to the front line but, as darkness had now fallen, were invited to stay the night inside a Turkish encampment. As Lawrence pointedly wrote in his diary, “they gave us a most excellent dinner in Turkish style.”
The following morning, the three officers were led down to the riverbank. In the daylight, they saw one body after another floating by on the Tigris’s swift current. They were Ottoman soldiers, succumbed to cholera or typhus or battle wounds, and so indifferent were their commanders that their bodies had been tossed into the river rather than buried.
That same day, Townshend formally surrendered his forces at Kut. Both his army and the relief columns that were slaughtered trying to rescue it had been composed largely of Indian soldiers, and to whatever degree racism had contributed to their expendable treatment by their British commanders, those men were now to suffer even worse at the hands of the Turks. With most put to work essentially as slave labor on the Baghdad Railway, of the ten thousand Indian soldiers and camp-followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one-third would live to see the war’s end.
A happier fate was in store for General Townshend. Taken to Constantinople, he spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island in the Bosporus, where he was given use of a Turkish naval yacht and frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his three prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despite the near-starvation conditions in Kut, had weathered the ordeal quite nicely. In a testament to the element of collegiality that persisted among the imperial ruling classes even in wartime, a number of Turkish government officials sent Townshend congratulatory notes on the occasion of his knighthood by King George V in October 1916.
· · ·
ON A MORNING in early April, a courier on horseback appeared at the al-Bakri farmstead outside Damascus summoning Faisal Hussein to Djemal Pasha’s offices in the city. This was hardly out of the ordinary. Faisal had returned to the Syrian capital at Djemal’s request three months earlier and had frequent dealings with the governor. When Faisal arrived at Djemal’s office that morning, however, he found him in a strangely cool, controlled mood.
After coffee had been served and pleasantries exchanged, Djemal slid a piece of paper across his desk. It was a telegram from Enver Pasha in Constantinople, and it concerned a letter the generalissimo had just received from Faisal’s father in Mecca. It was less a letter than an ultimatum: if the Young Turks wished to retain his friendship, Hussein warned, they needed to recognize him as the hereditary ruler of the Hejaz, and to end the ongoing trial of the five dozen Arab nationalist leaders in Lebanon.
It placed Faisal in a very dangerous spot. Upon his return to Damascus in January, he had quickly discovered that the odds for a successful Arab revolt in Syria had radically diminished since his earlier visit. Many of the would-be political leaders of such a revolt had been banished or gone into hiding as a result of Djemal’s purges, while the military component had been decimated at Gallipoli. While Faisal had alerted his father to this changed situation, judging by his petulant telegram, Hussein didn’t grasp just how dire matters stood.
“Effendim,” Djemal recounted Faisal as saying, “you’ve no idea what a grief this is to me. This telegram is certainly the result of some great misunderstanding. I can positively assure you that my father means nothing wrong.”
Instead, Faisal attributed the “misunderstanding” to his father’s difficulty with the Turkish language; obviously, some scribe had mistranslated his father’s Arabic text and mangled it into something far different than intended. In Djemal’s office that morning, Faisal offered to cable his father and, by explaining that his words had been misconstrued, undoubtedly obtain his immediate renunciation of the offending letter.
But as tiresome as Djemal Pasha was finding the machinations of Hussein and his sons, he also rather enjoyed watching Faisal squirm. Dismissing the young sheikh from his office, he instead composed his own letter to Emir Hussein. After expl
aining why he couldn’t possibly release the Damascus defendants—“a government which pardoned traitors would be accused of weakness”—Djemal further suggested that with the nation in a war where its very survival was at stake, this perhaps wasn’t the best time for Hussein to pursue the business of making his title hereditary. He then took the gloves off: “I should also draw your attention to the following aspect of the matter. Let us assume the Government complied with your demand solely because they wanted to keep you from being troublesome in the difficult times through which we are passing. If the war came to a victorious conclusion, who could prevent the Government from dealing with you with the greatest severity once it is over?”
However imperfect his knowledge of the Turkish language, Emir Hussein surely understood the threat in those words. And just in case there was still any uncertainty, Djemal soon turned his attention to the Lebanon show-trial defendants. On May 5, and despite Faisal’s continued pleas for clemency, he signed execution orders for twenty-one of those found guilty. Early the next morning, the condemned were led into public squares in Damascus and Beirut and hanged.
In concert with another event, those executions finally brought the long, tortured dance between the Young Turks and the Hashemite ruler in Arabia to an end. Just weeks earlier, Djemal Pasha had dispatched a new force of some thirty-five hundred crack troops to Medina. He had assured Hussein that the unit was en route to Yemen, at the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, but Hussein wasn’t convinced, suspecting they were really coming for him. In the wake of the May 6 executions, Hussein decided the time for dithering was over, and sent word to Faisal to get out of Damascus.
At about the same time that Faisal was preparing to do so, Djemal Pasha received another supplicant, Aaron Aaronsohn. In the four months since he had returned to his post as head of the locust eradication program, the agronomist had been a fairly frequent visitor to the governor’s Damascus office during his travels through the region. He’d been happy to be able to report to Djemal that the second wave of locusts hadn’t spawned, and so posed no threat in the future; even by late March, their numbers had begun to dwindle. What he hadn’t shared with the Syrian governor, of course, was that he’d used the cover of his scientific fieldwork to establish an extensive network of prospective Jewish spies across Palestine.
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