Putting that network together had been exceedingly delicate work for Aaronsohn. Within the Jewish yeshuv, or community, was one faction that actively supported the Central Powers, another that secretly supported the Entente, while the vast majority simply wanted to stay out of the whole mess and hope for the best. What united almost everyone, however, was staunch opposition to any action that might bring more adverse Ottoman attention; even for those quietly praying for the British to come, they would lend their assistance once they were ashore, but to do anything beforehand was just too dangerous for everyone. Only by very gingerly sounding out their friends and acquaintances had Aaronsohn and Feinberg managed to recruit some dozen like-minded members of the community willing to spy for Great Britain preemptively.
That remained a theoretical enterprise, however. Over the course of that winter, there had been several sightings of the British spy ships off the coast of Athlit, and the British had even sent messages ashore, but through an improbable string of bad luck, contact had never been made. For Aaron Aaronsohn, it was a maddening predicament. Three times they’d tried to connect with the British, and three times it had gone wrong, with the last try nearly resulting in Feinberg’s death. Then, in the early spring of 1916, he came up with a new idea.
From his travels, Aaronsohn had learned that the Turkish army suffered from a massive shortage of lubricating oil; indeed, he could scarcely have not learned it since the earsplitting screech of oilless axles had become a kind of perpetual background music in Syria. Reading through a scientific journal one day, the agronomist came upon an article about a team of European scientists who had devised a method of converting sesame seed oil into lubricating oil. If there was one thing the Ottoman Empire had no shortage of it was sesame seeds, and it was with this proposal—to learn the extraction method from scientists in Germany and apply it to the Turkish war effort—that Aaronsohn came to Djemal’s Damascus office one day in May.
Travel anywhere in the Ottoman Empire now required a vesika, or permit, and one of the few people who could approve the sort of journey Aaronsohn was proposing was Djemal Pasha himself. The governor was undoubtedly very suspicious. He didn’t really trust Aaronsohn—or pretty much any Jew, for that matter—and there had recently been that strange business of his assistant caught wandering in the Sinai. To let such a man out of his clutches, even for a visit to an allied nation, was to take a great chance.
Against this, though, was Djemal’s desperate need for lubricating oil for his army, a need the Standard Oil Company of New York seemed in no hurry to fulfill despite the staggering concessions he’d given them in Syria. In his usual brusque way, the governor quickly granted Aaronsohn’s vesika for passage to Constantinople; once there, the scientist would need to clear more bureaucratic hurdles before continuing on to Berlin. But, of course, Aaronsohn had no intention of stopping at Berlin. Instead, he hoped to slip across the German frontier into a neutral country and there make contact with British intelligence; he just hadn’t figured out that part of the plan yet.
· · ·
LAWRENCE SET OUT for the return to Cairo from Iraq aboard a British troopship on May 11. In the past year, he had lost two brothers to this conflict that seemed to have no end, and if by mid-1916 the bankruptcy of the British war effort was everywhere evident, nowhere was it more so than here on its eastern flank. In just thirteen months, Britain had suffered some 350,000 casualties at the hands of “the sick man of Europe,” had failed—and failed totally—where a ragtag collection of Balkan militias and armed peasants had repeatedly succeeded just three years earlier. As if that weren’t enough, he was just then returning from an experience that, on both a personal and historical level, laid bare that bankruptcy like no other: a futile bid to save the lives of twelve thousand starving and defeated men, a shameful act of groveling in which he’d been forced to take part because the generals who had cast those men to their doom felt it beneath their dignity to do so.
Lawrence would come away from his Iraqi sojourn with two abiding thoughts. One was of the self-defeating arrogance with which the British Indian army had blundered into the country: “By brute force they marched into Basra. The enemy troops in Irak [sic] were nearly all Arabs in the unenviable predicament of having to fight on behalf of their [Turkish] secular oppressors against a [British] people long envisaged as liberators, but who obstinately refused to play the part.” Their already keen sense of superiority swollen by Basra’s easy capture, the British Indian commanders had been contemptuous of local support, even of the need for a defendable supply line, and had instead heedlessly marched their men up the Tigris to ruin. It may have been with the Iraq debacle in mind that Lawrence would later remark, “British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.”
On a more philosophical level, what Lawrence took from Kut was a deepening antipathy for the imperialist cause. As he would write in Seven Pillars, “We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by the thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.… All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.”
Still, Lawrence was determined that it should not have all been in vain. During his fourteen-day journey back to Egypt, he composed a long report on all he had been witness to in Iraq, a scathing critique of everything from the British Indian army’s docking and warehousing systems, to the inadequacy of its seniormost generals, to the mindless stupidity of their battlefield strategies. But this, too, was to be an effort wasted. After reading Lawrence’s incendiary report and learning it was to be passed on to General Archibald Murray, the overall commander of British forces in Egypt, senior officers in the Cairo military intelligence unit decided it was far too indelicate for the general’s sensibilities; shortly before the report was to be sent to Murray, they carefully scissored out all of Lawrence’s most inflammatory passages, thus ensuring that even now the grim lessons of Kut would stay unlearned. So thoroughly did the censors do their job that it is believed only one copy of Lawrence’s original Iraq report survived intact.
FOR ANYONE SEEKING to justify the web of conflicting agreements that Great Britain had spun for itself in the Middle East by the spring of 1916, there were actually several strong arguments close at hand.
Perhaps the most obvious is succinctly conveyed in the old maxim that all is fair in love and war. By May 1916, the war had already killed millions of young men across Europe, and the future appeared to promise only more of the same; if double dealing and unsupportable promises might inch that conflict toward some kind of conclusion, who could reasonably argue against it?
There was also a matter of semantics, of how one defined “independence.” While today the word’s meaning seems obvious and universal, that was not at all the case in 1916. For many Europeans, steeped in the condescension of the late imperial age, independence didn’t mean letting native peoples actually govern themselves, but something far more paternalistic: a new round of “the white man’s burden,” the tutoring—and, of course, the exploiting—of native peoples until they might sufficiently grasp the ways of modern civilization to stand on their own at some indeterminate point in the future. For those holding such a view—and this probably included not only a majority of the senior statesmen of Great Britain but of every other nation in Europe—the distance between “independence” on the one hand, and “mandates” or “zones of control” or “suzerainty” on the other, didn’t appear to be the chasm of contradiction that others saw.
There was also a simple, cynical argument to be made: that the tangle of competing promises didn’t much matter because it was probably all going to end up as an academic exercise anyway. Even the most starry-eyed imp
erialist had to recognize there was something faintly ludicrous about Britain and France sitting around and divvying up the postwar Middle East at a time when, if not outright losing that war, they certainly weren’t winning it. As for Emir Hussein, he had been talking about an insurrection against Constantinople since even before the war, and there was still precious little sign of it happening. In the unlikely event that both the Arab revolt did come off, and the Entente did manage to win the war, the complications would be the best sort of problem to have, one that could be dealt with down the road.
By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city’s Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein’s followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz.
By an odd twist of fate, the westerner who had done more than any other to bring that revolt to fruition would never learn of it. Shortly before 5:00 p.m. on that same day, a Royal Navy battleship cruiser, HMS Hampshire, left its port in northern Scotland to transport War Secretary Horatio Kitchener to Russia. Less than three hours later, the Hampshire struck a German mine and quickly sank in high seas. Nearly every man on board perished, including Kitchener.
Just two weeks earlier, Lawrence had returned from his failed mission to Iraq to resume his desk job at the Savoy Hotel. His future looked much like his past: paper-shuffling, mapmaking, writing up strategies and reports that would never be acted on. Instead, with the news out of Mecca, he would soon have the war of his dreams, one that would catapult him into prominence, and then into legend.
Chapter 8
The Battle Joined
The Hejaz war is one of dervishes against regular troops—and we are on the side of the dervishes.
T. E. LAWRENCE, NOVEMBER 3, 1916
To break the tedium of the hot, slow voyage down the Red Sea, the officers of HMS Lama organized an impromptu pistol-shooting competition on the afternoon of October 15, 1916, their second day out from Port Suez. Taking advantage of a calm sea, they lined bottles along one of the converted merchant steamer’s rails, then gathered by the far rail to take turns attempting to blast them to pieces.
The activity was not particularly pleasing to the Lama’s most important passenger, the Oriental secretary to Egypt, Ronald Storrs. He had hoped for a nap in the torpor following lunch, but found it impossible amid all the gunfire, especially once the ship officers advanced to experimenting with a captured Turkish black-powder rifle. “A detonation about equal to that of an 18-pounder cannon,” Storrs noted in his diary. “Conceived the idea, for my return, of holding up any northbound vessel and boarding her.”
One of the standouts in the shooting competition was Storrs’s traveling companion, T. E. Lawrence, who had taken up target practice as a hobby during his days at Carchemish and become an expert marksman. Excepting Lawrence’s fondness for gunplay, Storrs was quite pleased to have his friend along on this trip. On his two earlier passages down the Red Sea to Jeddah, the Oriental secretary had despaired at the lack of interesting company. Already on this one, the “supercerebral” Lawrence had given him a painstaking tutorial on the Playfair Cipher, an ingenious cryptographic system as simple to construct as it was hard to decode, and, as was their habit back in Cairo, the two had spent much of the rest of the time discussing classical literature and art.
As with Storrs’s earlier trips to Jeddah, this October voyage was a result of the Arab Revolt, now a little more than four months old. Having served as a principal conduit between the British government and Emir Hussein in the laborious negotiations leading up to that event, the Oriental secretary had been a natural choice to continue in the role once the battle was joined. By October 1916, however, the Arab Revolt was fast reaching a crisis point, and it was an open question just how much longer it might remain a concern to Ronald Storrs or anyone else.
Testament to its tenuous slapdash nature was the manner in which the outside world had learned of it in the first place. That had coincided with Storrs’s first voyage to Arabia in June.
From coded messages secreted out of Mecca, the launch date for the long-delayed uprising had finally been set for June 16, and so Storrs had gone across to Jeddah from the Sudan on June 1 to meet up with Abdullah, the emir’s second son and—should it actually come off—the rebellion’s chief field commander. Except Abdullah was nowhere to be found. After dispatching an envoy to Mecca with a request that Abdullah come to the coast as soon as possible, Storrs had spent the next four days trolling the Arabian shoreline aboard a British warship looking for some sign of either Turkish or Arab military activity. The dreary port towns had appeared even more soporific than usual.
On June 5, the envoy had finally returned from Mecca with a message from Abdullah. “To the most honoured and respected Mr. Storrs,” the letter began. “I deeply regret I am unable to meet you personally, but an urgent need has called me and taken me, so my brother will come to you with all the news.” That brother was twenty-year-old Zeid, the youngest of Hussein’s four sons, and Storrs was directed to go to Samima, a tiny coastal village south of Jeddah, where Zeid would make his appearance the following morning. Whatever exasperation Storrs felt over these complications was tempered by a peculiar development: according to the envoy, the date for the revolt’s launch had been moved up from June 16 to June 10. The Oriental secretary had long come to accept that timetables rarely held in the Arab world, but he could hardly recall an occasion when one had been moved forward.
Yet when finally he made contact with Zeid on the following morning, the revised launch date now a mere four days away, there was little hint of urgency. Instead, the cryptic young man had ushered Storrs into his field tent erected on the beach, where he engaged in extended pleasantries and chitchat while a retainer prepared coffee. Once the coffee was served, Zeid handed Storrs an “execrably written” letter from his father, detailing his plans for the coming revolt, as well as a request for £70,000 worth of gold to help bankroll the rebel forces. When Storrs pressed Hussein’s son on precisely how they intended to defeat the enemy, it became evident that tactical considerations remained at the rudimentary stage. “We will summon the Turks to surrender,” Zeid replied, “and shoot them if they refuse.”
The Oriental secretary had barely been able to hide his impatience. The British had been funneling gold and rifles to Hussein for many months now, and Storrs had heard these grand plans—plans unblemished by any attempt at actual execution—for nearly as long; as he and other British agents had informed Hussein many times, no more funds would be released until the revolt began. It was when Storrs reiterated this message on the Samima beach that Zeid finally got around to dropping an interesting bit of news: “I am then happy to be able to announce to you that it began yesterday at Medina.”
Hustling Zeid and his chief lieutenant back to the waiting warship, Storrs settled the two men at a hastily prepared breakfast table on the afterbridge, where he and the two military intelligence officers who had accompanied him from Cairo pumped the young sheikh for details. After alerting Cairo to the news, and quickly composing notes of congratulation to Hussein and Abdullah, Storrs gathered up whatever items were close at hand that might provide immediate encouragement to the rebel leaders: £10,000 worth of gold from the ship’s safe; five cartons of cigarettes for Faisal and Abdullah, the two smokers in the family; the promise of a Maxim machine gun, to be delivered in one week’s time. Lending all this momentous activity a homey touch was the wanderings of a small desert gazelle, bought in some Red Sea bazaar as a ship’s mascot, that alternated between pronging the visitors with his horns in a bid for attention and feeding on whatever cigarettes were left lying about.
It had taken some time for clear battle lines to be drawn in the Hejaz. Capitalizing on the element of surprise of the first few days, Hussein’s rebels quickly overpowered the tiny Turkish force in Mecca and, with the help of
a British naval bombardment, the all-important port of Jeddah. In Taif, Hussein’s “summer capital” in the mountains below Mecca, Abdullah’s fighters took possession of the town while isolating the Turkish garrison of some three hundred troops in their well-defended fort. Matters didn’t go nearly so well in Medina, the Hejaz’s largest city. There, the rebels, emboldened by reports of the quick success in Mecca, had charged into the teeth of a vastly larger and entrenched Turkish garrison, some ten thousand soldiers, and been slaughtered by machine-gun and artillery fire. A month into the revolt, an uneasy stasis had set in, Hussein’s forces firmly in control of Mecca and Jeddah and several of the smaller southern coastal towns, the Turks just as firmly in control of the railhead city of Medina, 150 miles to the north of Mecca, as well as the coastal towns on the Red Sea’s upper reaches.
From a political standpoint, news of the Arab Revolt had been joyously received in Cairo and London. Coming on the heels of the fiascoes at Gallipoli and Kut, here at long last was some good news out of the Middle East. Most crucially, by virtue of his violent break with Constantinople, Hussein—both custodian of Islam’s holiest shrines and one of the Arab world’s most respected leaders—had fairly laid to rest any lingering fear that the Turks and Germans might finally galvanize their pan-Islamic jihad.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 26