Zionist historian Isaiah Friedman was more specific: “How deeply Sir Mark Sykes was impressed by Aaronsohn can be gathered from the confident and close relations which later developed between them.” Citing other British wartime officials who would soon be heavily influenced by Aaronsohn’s views, Friedman argued that “it would be reasonable to suppose that it was he who was the decisive influence in Sykes’s conversion to Zionism.”
Indeed, even if he second-guessed it as his days in London dragged on, Aaronsohn’s diary entry on the Broadway Gate meeting alluded to the alliance that was already taking form. “FitzMaurice is in favour of the ‘fait accompli’ in Palestine,” he jotted, meaning a Jewish homeland, “[but] the Allies are not yet in agreement.… [Sykes] hopes we will succeed in altering the English viewpoint, ‘but it requires work.’ ”
Where Aaronsohn would contribute to that work was in Cairo. On November 24, the same day that he worried in his diary over the impression he might have made on Sykes, the scientist began packing for the ship that would take him to Egypt. There he would join forces with British military intelligence and try to reactivate his long-dormant spy ring. In Egypt Aaronsohn would also eventually reunite with Mark Sykes. Together, they would concoct a scheme that was to help dramatically reshape the British government’s view on the creation of a British-protected Jewish homeland in Palestine.
DESPITE THE FUROR his November 17 memo had spawned, with Lawrence’s brief sojourn to the Hejaz at an end, there were no plans to send him back. To the contrary, Gilbert Clayton intended to put his literary skills and fluency in Arabic to use in a new desk job in Cairo, heading up the Arab Bureau’s fledgling propaganda department. That Lawrence was to escape this mundane fate was due to the intercession of a most unlikely patron: Reginald Wingate.
Shortly after learning he would be taking over from McMahon in Cairo, and thus in direct charge of the Hejaz operation, Wingate had petitioned for an expanded roster of advisors and intelligence officers to serve in Arabia; of most pressing concern was to attach a liaison officer to Faisal in the mountains above Rabegh. The logical choice to head up this British military mission, all agreed, was Lawrence’s titular supervisor at the Arab Bureau, Stewart Newcombe. But with Newcombe on assignment in Europe until sometime in December, Wingate urged that someone else be sent as his temporary stand-in, and he quite naturally thought of the impressive young captain who had just visited him in Khartoum. On November 12, the day after Lawrence left the Sudanese capital, Wingate cabled Clayton in Cairo suggesting that Lawrence be sent back to Yenbo to manage things until Newcombe arrived. Clayton, thinking of the propaganda department he wanted Lawrence to head, tried to deflect the request, but Wingate wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Pending Newcombe’s arrival,” he reiterated on November 14, “I wish Lawrence to proceed to Yenbo by first possible opportunity. It is vitally important to have an officer of his exceptional knowledge of Arabs in close touch with Faisal [at this] critical juncture.” He then reassured Clayton this was to be only a temporary measure, and that Lawrence would be returned to Cairo once Newcombe came on the scene. Under such pressure, Clayton had no choice but to relent.
Of course, all this occurred before Lawrence wrote his incendiary memorandum taking direct aim at Wingate’s plans in Arabia. By the time Wingate saw that memo, his lavish praise of Lawrence was already a matter of record, as was his insistence that Lawrence return to Yenbo. Even if Wingate wished to punish the young captain for his temerity, there was now no graceful way to do it.
But excelling at bureaucratic infighting is not simply about coming out on top. True mastery comes with the ability to so cover one’s tracks as to appear utterly blameless, and this was a game Clayton and Lawrence played with consummate skill. Before the month of November was over, Colonel Brémond would receive a stern telegram from the commander in chief of the French armed forces, Marshal Joseph Joffre. After obliquely referring to an “agreement” worked out with the British—the Sykes-Picot pact—Joffre rebuked Brémond for ever suggesting that France wished to prevent an Arab capture of Medina. “The already known state of mind of the British and the Sherif could lead to the belief that we are trying to renege on the arrangements made and could have serious consequences for the development of our plans in the Levant. It is important, therefore, that your attitude does not lend itself to such an interpretation.”
The sandbagging of Reginald Wingate was even more impressive, however. On November 23, as the tempest over Lawrence’s memorandum continued to rage, Clayton sent a “private” cable to Wingate in Khartoum suggesting that all blame for the controversy rested with Murray. Perhaps calculating that the bad blood between the sirdar and the EEF commander meant the particulars would never get sorted out, Clayton went so far as to suggest that it was Murray who had compelled Lawrence to write the offending report.
Evidently, Wingate had a pronounced naïve streak: “I have no doubt that Lawrence has done all this in perfectly good faith,” he wrote Cyril Wilson on the same day he received Clayton’s cable, “but he appears to me to be a visionary and his amateur soldiering has evidently given him an exaggerated idea of the soundness of his views on purely military matters.” Clearly alluding to Murray, he went on, “I am principally annoyed in all this matter, not so much on account of the apparent want of straightness on the part of certain people who should be above that sort of thing, but on account of the huge loss of time when I am working at very high pressure.”
Either Wingate never did figure out the extent to which he had been played by Clayton and Lawrence, or he was an unusually forgiving man; in just eight months, he would spearhead the effort to award Lawrence the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor, for valor in the field.
But not everyone was so quick to ascribe the best of intentions to the upstart army captain. One who took a far more jaundiced view was Cyril Wilson, the British official who had most closely observed Lawrence in Arabia, and would serve as Lawrence’s direct superior officer upon his return. Wilson argued strongly against that return on even a temporary basis, and when presented with a fait accompli let Gilbert Clayton know his feelings. “Lawrence wants kicking,” he wrote the Arab Bureau head, “and kicking hard at that; then he would improve. At present I look upon him as a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs etc. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, running [His Majesty’s] ships and everything else. He put every single person’s back up I’ve met, from the Admiral down to the most junior fellow on the Red Sea.”
Of all the deceptions put to paper about the events of that November, however, surely the most brazen was one Lawrence penned about himself. It concerned that day toward the end of the month when he was summoned to Clayton’s office and told he was being sent back to Arabia as a temporary liaison officer to Faisal ibn Hussein. According to Lawrence’s account in Seven Pillars, “I urged my complete unfitness for the job.”
Chapter 10
Neatly in the Void
The situation is so interesting that I think I will fail to come back.
T. E. LAWRENCE, IN ARABIA, TO CAIRO HEADQUARTERS, DECEMBER 27, 1916
From the crest of the hill, the night-wrapped valley of Nakhl Mubarak yielded a startling sight. As Lawrence would recount, glimpsed through the fronds of the date-palm plantations was “the flame-lit smoke of many fires,” while the valley echoed with the braying of thousands of excited camels, gunshots, and the calls of men lost in the darkness.
Accompanied by four tribal escorts, Lawrence had set out from the port of Yenbo earlier that evening, December 2, 1916. Their destination was Faisal’s camp in the mountainous enclave of Kheif Hussein, some forty-five miles inland. With good camels beneath them and riding steadily, the group had anticipated making the camp just around daybreak. Instead, a mere five hours into their ride and just twenty-five miles from the coast, they came upon this puzzling scene in Nakhl Mubarak; no one in Lawrence’s party had any ide
a who these masses of armed men in the valley below might be.
Dismounting, the group quietly descended from the ridgeline until they came to a deserted home at the valley’s edge. After corralling the camels and secreting his British charge within the home, the lead escort slipped a cartridge into his carbine and set out alone on foot to investigate. He shortly returned with shocking news: the men were Faisal’s army. Remounting their camels, the group proceeded into the heart of the valley, the scene more bewildering to Lawrence by the minute. “There were hundreds of fires of thorn-wood, and round them were Arabs making coffee or eating, or sleeping muffled like dead men in their cloaks, packed together closely in the confusion of camels.”
They found Faisal at the center of the encampment, sitting before his tent with several aides and a scribe. With illumination provided by slaves holding lanterns, he was alternately dictating orders and listening to battlefield reports being read aloud to him, the picture of placidity. It was some time before he dismissed his retinue so that he might explain the situation to his British guest. That situation wasn’t good; it was little short of disastrous, in fact.
During Lawrence’s first visit in October, Faisal had outlined an elaborate plan to take his war campaign north, a way to reduce the Turkish threat to Rabegh and Mecca by giving the enemy something new to worry about. That scheme depended on Faisal working in close concert with the fighting units of his three brothers. While Abdullah harassed the Turkish forces around Medina, Faisal would move the bulk of his army northwest through the mountains to Kheif Hussein before closing on the Turkish-held port of Wejh, some two hundred miles above Yenbo. Simultaneously, Zeid would come up to protect the approaches to Yenbo, while Ali brought his army out of Rabegh to guard a crucial intersection on the pilgrims’ road to Mecca.
Lawrence had thought the plan too complicated by half, reliant as it was on a level of coordination among the four brothers nearly impossible to achieve across the great expanse of western Arabia. He’d conveyed his doubts to Gilbert Clayton in his reports at the time, but apparently had been less persuasive with Faisal; in mid-November, Faisal had put the scheme into effect.
For a short while all had gone accordingly, with Faisal taking most of his forces north to Kheif Hussein. At his back, however, twenty-year-old Zeid inexplicably left one of the mountain paths leading to Yenbo completely unguarded, and it was this path that a Turkish mounted patrol found. Suddenly finding the Turks between them and their escape route to the coast, Zeid’s charges had promptly scattered in disarray. That had only been stage one of the fiasco, however. When they learned of Zeid’s collapse, and fearful that they too might soon be stranded in the mountains, Faisal’s followers had succumbed to a similar panicked stampede from Kheif Hussein. Faisal and his lieutenants had finally halted the flight there in Nakhl Mubarak, but even this, he confided to Lawrence that night, probably wouldn’t hold; with the advancing Turks now to the east and south, it seemed just a matter of time before his entire force—what was left of it—fell all the way back to Yenbo port itself.
Operating on practically no sleep, Lawrence spent the next forty-eight hours alternately conferring with Faisal and circulating among the fighters in Nakhl Mubarak, trying to better gauge the magnitude of the crisis. He then raced back to Yenbo to raise the alarm. When he sat down to send an urgent message to Clayton on the morning of December 5, he was in a state of both exhaustion and despondency. “I had better preface by saying that I rode all Saturday night, had alarms and excursions all Sunday night, and rode again all last night, so my total of sleep is only three hours in the last three nights and I feel rather pessimistic. All the same, things are bad.”
As Lawrence well knew, the Arab rout in the mountains was much more than just a military setback. Uniting the northern tribes to his leadership had required months of painstaking and delicate work on Faisal’s part, and that was now rapidly coming apart. In his report to Clayton, Lawrence enumerated those tribes that had already abandoned Faisal—or appeared ready to—and warned how those defections not only threatened to leave the road open to a Turkish capture of Mecca, but to a collapse of the Arab Revolt itself. The crucial point, Lawrence wrote, was that Faisal was now “a tribal leader, not a leader of tribes,” and it would take a long time to repair the damage. In this, too, there was a parallel to the Crusader armies of the Middle Ages that Lawrence had studied; the extreme fragility of alliances between disparate and largely autonomous groups meant unity was always one small setback away from unraveling.
But it was also a personal fiasco for Lawrence. In his October reports, he had readily conceded the difficulty of ever organizing the Arab fighters into a conventional fighting force—he’d figured that a single company of Turkish soldiers, properly entrenched in open country, could defeat them—but had been both eloquent and persuasive in emphasizing their potency as a defensive force. “Their real sphere is guerrilla warfare.… Their initiative, great knowledge of the country, and mobility, make them formidable in the hills.” Not just formidable; in Lawrence’s estimation, in such a role they would be all but impregnable. “From what I have seen of the hills between Bir Abbas and Bir Ibn Hassani,” he had written, “I do not see how, short of treachery on the part of the hill tribe[s], the Turks can risk forcing their way through.” To the contrary, with the hills “a very paradise for snipers,” he was confident that a mere one or two hundred men could successfully hold any possible line of Turkish approach toward the coast.
This conviction was one of the cornerstones of Lawrence’s argument against sending Allied troops into Arabia, and he had maintained it even after troubling evidence to the contrary. At the beginning of November, after rumors of a Turkish advance had sent Ali’s men fleeing from the hills above Rabegh, Lawrence had intimated to Édouard Brémond that matters would have turned out differently if Faisal had been in charge. As events now made clear, in this estimation he had been absolutely one hundred percent wrong.
Perhaps it was embarrassment over how badly he had misjudged the situation, or perhaps even in his exhaustion Lawrence remained the ever-vigilant bureaucratic strategist, but before sending off his pessimistic cable to Clayton, he thought to scribble a postscript. If reprinted in the Arab Bulletin, his cable would soon be read by all those in the British leadership who had been won to his nonintervention argument, so he jotted, “don’t use any of above in Bulletin or elsewhere; it is not just—because I am done up.”
In response to the deepening crisis, British naval ships began massing off Yenbo; if the worst did come to pass and Faisal’s men were put to siege in that town, the ships might at least lay down artillery fire on the surrounding open plain to slow the Turkish advance. True to Faisal’s prediction, on the morning of December 9, the vanguard of his spent force began drifting into the port with the news that they’d been flushed from Nakhl Mubarak by another Turkish push; by the time the last stragglers came in, the some five thousand warriors Lawrence had seen under Fai- sal’s banner just one week earlier had been reduced to fewer than two thousand. While a handful of the missing three thousand had fallen in battle, the vast majority had simply abandoned the fight and gone home to their villages.
So dispiriting was the atmosphere that even Lawrence now had second thoughts about his most stoutly held belief. Writing to Clayton again on December 11, he announced that “Faisal has now swung around to the belief in a British force [being deployed] at Rabegh. I have wired this to you, and I see myself that his arguments have force. If Zeid had not been so slack, this would never have got to this pass.” He added a bitter afterthought: “The Arabs, outside their hills, are worthless.”
On that same day, Lawrence painted an even more dire picture to Cyril Wilson. Without British troops in Rabegh, he wrote, Faisal was now of the opinion that the whole revolution might collapse within three weeks’ time.
TO THE PUZZLEMENT of many residents, on the morning of May 31, 1916, a German warplane had appeared in the skies over Jerusalem and proceeded to execu
te a series of tight circles just to the west of the walled Old City. Finally, a small weighted object was thrown from the plane that landed in the street directly in front of the Hotel Fast, the favored watering hole of German officers in Jerusalem. Upon closer inspection, the packet was found to be a bundled German flag with a note inside from Curt Prüfer. He was returning to the city that evening, the note explained, and he wanted his cook to prepare a “good dinner” for him. It was the sort of flamboyant act that Prüfer probably never would have performed in his prior incarnation as a spy chief, but it was very much in keeping with the colorful antics of his new comrades in arms, the spotters and machine gunners and flying “aces” of the German Fliegertruppen, or Flying Corps.
In preparation for a renewed Turco-German offensive against the Suez Canal, in the early spring of 1916 a new German air squadron had been brought down and based in Beersheva, at the eastern end of the Sinai Peninsula. Tiring of his propaganda and surveillance duties in Syria and eager to play an active role in the coming attack, Prüfer had petitioned to be made an aerial spotter for Field Aviation Detachment 300.
The request was a somewhat puzzling one, given that Prüfer had remained dubious about the wisdom of a second attempt on the Suez since having participated in the first. As far back as August 1915, in a detailed report to the German ambassador in Constantinople, he’d argued that for such an offensive to have even a minimal chance of success, it could not at all resemble Djemal’s haphazard “reconnaissance in force” of the previous February, but would require a massive investment of manpower and resources: road- and railway-building crews, crack Turkish troops, German aircraft and officers and artillery. Of course, he pointed out, the very scale of that investment meant a multiplying of the logistical hurdles in keeping such a force supplied and fed and watered across the Sinai sands. Simultaneously, it rendered the notion of somehow catching the British by surprise “unthinkable.” “With all their war machines,” he wrote, “you’d have to conduct a siege and bash their defenses with artillery before you could march into Egypt, after which you would need to maintain a line of supply from Palestine and Syria.”
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