But even if all this could be accomplished, Prüfer had pointed out, capturing the canal just might not ultimately be very significant. After all, with the British navy in complete command of the seas, it wasn’t as if the Suez would suddenly become useful to the Germans or Turks. As for the argument that cinching off this maritime shortcut would disrupt the flow of British territorial troops to Europe by forcing them to take the long way around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, this was certainly true, but the two- to three-week delay that would cause hardly rose above the level of inconvenience. To the German intelligence agent, the plans for a second Suez operation had seemed to underscore the old maxim that war can kill all things except bad ideas.
Against this, though, a powerful, personal lure had worked on him: Detachment 300, the “glamour” of air war. In contrast to the hideous reality of life and death in the trenches, an aura of romance had instantly attached to this newest form of warfare, with the pilot aces of all sides transformed into newsreel heroes and matinee idols. Prüfer, never much of a man’s man, clearly reveled in being in the company of such Übermenschen at Beersheva, and the months he spent with Detachment 300 were undoubtedly among the happiest of his life, a carefree time of late-night drinking sessions, or flying off to Jerusalem or Jaffa at a moment’s notice to attend diplomatic receptions or social dances. There seemed to be an almost starstruck quality to it; in contrast to the scant details Prüfer normally jotted in his wartime diary—when he bothered to keep it at all—he made careful note of the names of most all the Detachment 300 pilots for posterity. In the dropping of his note in front of the Hotel Fast to order up a meal, the soft-spoken former scholar was emulating the pranks of his new, larger-than-life comrades—and undoubtedly deriving considerable pride over his excellent aim.
Very shortly after that lark, however, had come news of the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz. Apparently forgetting his own oft-repeated assertion that the Arabs were too cowardly to ever rebel, Prüfer’s first response had been a certain smugness, remarking in his diary, “I rightly warned them about the Sherif [Hussein].” As the revolt spread, however, and one Turkish garrison after another in Arabia came under siege, he remembered his old mentor, Max von Oppenheim, and the tremendous efforts the propaganda chief had made to forestall this day from coming. “The situation in Arabia goes badly for the Turks,” he noted in early July. “Poor Oppenheim!”
But Prüfer had soon turned his attention back to more immediate concerns, as preparations got under way for the new Suez offensive. As an aerial spotter, he quite literally had a bird’s-eye view when the Turkish vanguard launched its attack against the British railhead at Romani, some twenty-five miles east of the canal, on the morning of August 4, 1916. While that vantage point afforded him the opportunity to hurl a few bombs down on the enemy—bombs that in those early days of air combat were little more than large hand grenades—it also allowed him to grasp the full magnitude of the Turco-German defeat as it unfolded over the next two days.
Hoping to catch the British in a flanking move, the attacking force was instead caught out in the open and enveloped. By the afternoon of August 5, the Turkish army was in headlong retreat, having suffered some six thousand casualties, about one-third its total strength, and a toll that undoubtedly would have been higher if the British hadn’t slowed their pursuit out of sheer exhaustion in the 120-degree heat.
The rout at Romani ended forever the Turco-German dream of “liberating” Egypt. It also ended Prüfer’s four-month idyll with Detachment 300, for it forced him to finally acknowledge something he’d tried very hard to ignore: he was desperately ill. There had been terse little clues to it in his diary for some time—“I am unwell,” he had noted back in mid-May—but now, his face sunken and his weight down to little more than a hundred pounds, even his handwriting betrayed him; gone was his emphatic, jerky script, replaced by a trembling, barely legible scrawl. Diagnosed as suffering from both cholera and tuberculosis, he was placed on medical leave and shuttled back to Germany in early October. After several weeks’ recuperation in a Berlin hospital, he began helping out in the mapping division of the Reserve General Staff on Wilhelmstrasse.
In that capacity, the arc of Curt Prüfer’s wartime experience completed a curious reverse symmetry with that of one of his adversaries in the field, British army captain T. E. Lawrence. During the first two years of the war, Lawrence had spent most of his time deskbound in the mapping room of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, while Curt Prüfer seemed to be everywhere: launching sabotage and spying missions against British Egypt, participating in two major offensives, unmasking potential enemies of the Ottoman and German cause throughout Syria. By the end of 1916, it was now Lawrence who was in the field as Prüfer whiled away his days in a mapping room in Berlin.
And a most prosaic existence it was. By January 1917, with his medical leave in Germany extended, Prüfer found himself battling with the local food rationing office in Berlin over his bread allotment. As he complained in cables to both his former colleagues in Constantinople and senior officials at the foreign ministry, without written confirmation of his leave extension, the Bread Commission was refusing to issue him the required ration card, and he beseeched their help in sorting out the problem as soon as possible. It was a very long way from dropping dinner orders out of airplanes.
Furthermore, there was the strong likelihood that it was with such mundane concerns that Curt Prüfer’s wartime career would end. With his congenitally frail health, the Orientalist had only been inducted into the German military back in 1914 through the intercession of Max von Oppenheim, and his health was obviously far more ravaged now. Once again, though, the self-proclaimed baron from Cologne would come to his protégé’s aid, offering Prüfer an escape route from his semi-invalid duties in Berlin.
Having thus far failed to ignite a pan-Islamic jihad in the Middle East that would play to Germany’s political and military benefit, Oppenheim, according to Prüfer biographer Donald McKale, was now expanding his ambitions into the economic sphere. What he envisioned, in the wake of the coming Central Powers victory, was a vast German economic consortium that might dominate commerce and resource development throughout the region for decades to come. In the count’s scheme, the vehicle for this domination was to be a unique partnership between the German government and the nation’s private industrial conglomerates, the two working hand in glove for both personal and national interest. A man with a deep, perhaps exaggerated appreciation for the power of the printed word, Oppenheim worked up an alluring packet of brochures and prospectuses to dazzle German businessmen with visions of the wealth that could soon be theirs in the far-off lands of the Ottoman Empire.
As Oppenheim explained to would-be investors, nothing more exemplified the symbiotic relationship between public and private that he envisioned for the East than the role soon to be assumed by his young protégé, Curt Prüfer, in Constantinople. As the new head of the German intelligence bureau there, Prüfer would also serve as the primary conduit for investors trying to navigate Turkey’s bureaucratic shoals. German industrialists could hardly ask for a better friend; here was a man who not only knew the region and Young Turk power structure intimately, but had a proven record of getting things done by whatever creative means necessary.
Just as with his notion of anticolonial Islamic jihad, Max von Oppenheim’s economic scheme would prove a bit ahead of its time, presaging as it did the so-called national corporatism model first successfully harnessed by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, and then to even more spectacular effect a decade later by Mussolini’s protégé, Adolf Hitler. For Curt Prüfer in 1917, however, it simply meant a return to the field. In late February, he bid goodbye to his mapping-room colleagues in Berlin and set out for the Middle East once more.
FOR COLONEL ÉDOUARD BRÉMOND, watching Captain T. E. Lawrence come off the deck of HMS Suva in Jeddah harbor on December 12 must have been a particularly gladdening sight, something very much like revenge. Even if
he’d yet to put together that Lawrence was the prime mover behind the rebuke he had received from the French War Ministry weeks earlier, Brémond most certainly now recognized him as a troublemaker, the man who more than any other British field officer had poisoned the well for sending Allied troops to Arabia. But now a rather different figure stood before the French colonel, one shorn of his arrogance and supreme self-assurance. Lawrence was just coming in from Yenbo, where he had witnessed firsthand the pell-mell retreat of Faisal’s forces before the advancing Turks, and the experience seemed to have stripped the irksome little captain of his romantic notions of the brave Arab warrior.
Perhaps it was the belief that they were finally on the same page, or perhaps Brémond couldn’t resist the temptation to stick the knife in a little, but on the Jeddah dock he informed Lawrence that he was just then on his way to meet with Reginald Wingate in Khartoum. In light of the unfolding crisis on the Arabian coast, he intended to once again press for the dispatch of an Anglo-French force to Rabegh.
Lawrence had no doubt Brémond would find a receptive audience. Sure enough, on December 14, and with Colonel Brémond at his side, Wingate fired off another secret cable to the Foreign Office and General Murray in Cairo urging that a brigade be sent as soon as possible. “I can see no alternative or practical means of assisting Arabs, and of saving Sherif’s movement from collapse,” Wingate wrote. “Sherif has cancelled his original application to us to dispatch European troops, but is [now] genuinely alarmed at situation and, in Colonel Brémond’s opinion, with a little pressure would again ask for them.” The immediate question before them, Wingate argued, “is whether we shall make a last attempt to save Sherif and his Arabs in spite of themselves.”
Except, unbeknownst to most everyone at that moment, the immediate crisis in western Arabia had actually already passed. On the night of December 11, just hours after Lawrence left Yenbo on the Suva, a large Turkish force had approached the town, only to hesitate upon seeing the British ships in the harbor, their searchlights illuminating the surrounding countryside as if in daylight. Apparently the Arabs’ mortal fear of artillery was shared by the Turks, for this force soon turned back from Yenbo; within days, aerial reconnaissance showed it had retreated into the mountains, perhaps was even on its way back to Medina. While this development didn’t necessarily mean an end of the Turkish threat to the coastal towns, it did create breathing space—and breathing space wasn’t at all helpful to the two escalationists in Khartoum. In coming weeks, Wingate and Brémond would find several more occasions to press for intervention, but they had lost their last best chance with the Turkish withdrawal outside Yenbo.
Within several days of that threat passing, a somewhat chastened Lawrence was back in Yenbo, trying to figure out with Faisal what might come next. They were aided in their planning by a rather momentous development in London. Just weeks earlier, the coalition government of Herbert Asquith had fallen, and been replaced by a new coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The new prime minister was determined to break with the “Westerner” mind-set that had prevailed in London since the beginning of the war, which held that ultimate victory could only be achieved on the Western Front. That mind-set had led to the deaths of some 400,000 British soldiers by the end of 1916, with no end or breakthrough in sight. Instead, Lloyd George wanted to pursue an “Easterner” policy, to try to “knock out the props” of the enemy war machine by striking at its weakest spots. At least by comparison to the seemingly impregnable wall of the Western Front, that meant the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
Shortly after Lawrence’s return to Yenbo, this new focus became evident in an increased British presence on the Hejazi coast—not the thousands of regulars hoped for by Wingate and Brémond, but rather an assortment of instructors and advisors tasked to transform the undisciplined Arab rebel bands into a credible fighting force. The most interesting of these expanded operations took place in Yenbo, the northernmost rebel-held port and now deemed relatively safe from Turkish attack. With the Hejaz Railway, the Turks’ lifeline to their garrison in Medina, situated a mere ninety miles inland, the British envisioned using Yenbo as the staging ground for a committed campaign of sabotage attacks on the railroad, and to this end they brought in a colorful figure named Herbert Garland. A tall, rangy Scotsman, Garland had been a chemist before the war and by tinkering in the training grounds in Cairo had become a self-taught expert in blowing things up. In the few forays the Arabs had conducted against the Hejaz Railway prior to his arrival, they had simply torn up the tracks with picks and shovels, a very simple business to mend, and Garland now set about teaching them the fine art of placing an explosive charge beneath a rail in such a way as to mangle it beyond repair. In the doldrum rebuilding days at Yenbo of early January 1917, one of Major Garland’s most attentive students was T. E. Lawrence.
But despite his dealings with Garland and the several other British advisors now setting up shop in the port town, there was something that set Lawrence quite apart from his countrymen. Part of it was obvious: his dress.
During Lawrence’s visit to the Arab encampment in Nakhl Mubarak in early December, Faisal had suggested he dispense with his British army uniform in favor of Arab dress; that way, the British liaison officer could circulate through the camp and call upon Faisal at his leisure without drawing undue attention. Lawrence had taken to this suggestion with alacrity, donning the white robes and gold sashing normally reserved for a senior sheikh. He had changed out of those robes during his brief run down the coast to Jeddah, but had immediately put them on again upon his return to Yenbo.
Yet he stood apart for far more than just his attire. Taking his temporary posting as Faisal’s liaison very much to heart, Lawrence largely eschewed the British tent settlement at the water’s edge to spend most of his time at the sprawling Arab encampment several miles inland. There, and with far more tolerance than most other British officers might reasonably muster, he set about adapting to the peculiar lassitude with which Faisal ran his “army.”
The typical day started with a dawn wake‑up call by an imam, then a leisurely breakfast where Faisal conferred with his senior aides and various tribal leaders. This was followed by a long morning stretch during which any man in the encampment could come to petition Faisal over some concern or grievance; as Lawrence quickly noted, few of these audiences had any direct connection to the war effort. This open-house session only ended with the serving of lunch, often a two-hour affair attended by more aides and tribal leaders, after which Faisal might spend a couple of hours dictating messages to his scribes. That work done, it was more chitchat until an evening meal consumed at an even more languorous pace than the previous one. After that, more dictations by Faisal, more conversations with elders, the reading of reports from various scouting parties, an unhurried, undirected process that might stretch well past midnight—even right up to the imam’s dawn call that signaled it was all about to start over again.
For a famously impatient and ascetic man like T. E. Lawrence, it must have been a kind of agony. In normal times, he was so indifferent to food and meals that his preference was to eat standing up and to finish in less than five minutes. Probably even more trying for a man who abhorred physical contact—he avoided even the shaking of hands if he could do so without offense—was the easy affection on constant display in the Arab camp, the endless embraces and kissing of cheeks, the casual holding of hands.
But Lawrence also recognized that this was the Arab way of war and peace. Faisal was not just a wartime leader, but a Hejazi chieftain, and the long, seemingly purposeless conversations were the glue that kept his fractious coalition together. In this culture, Faisal was not a general who issued orders—at least not to men not of his tribe—but a consensus builder compelled to cajole, counsel, and listen. Certainly, none of this was going to change to accommodate the Arabs’ British advisors. To the contrary, Lawrence understood, it was he and his countrymen who had to adapt if they hoped to be accepted and effective.
It was a pretty simple truism, but one that many of his colleagues, steeped in British notions of both military and cultural hierarchy, had a very hard time with.
Animating Lawrence’s determination to adapt was the figure of Faisal ibn Hussein himself. Even in the darkest days of the revolt, when he had visited the Arabs’ temporary refuge at Nakhl Mubarak, Lawrence had been struck by Faisal’s unshaken ambition, a quality that had tempered his own pessimism over the situation. As he had reported to Gilbert Clayton on December 5, “I heard [Faisal] address the head of one battalion last night before sending them out to an advanced position over the Turkish camp at Bir Said. He did not say much, no noise about it, but it was all exactly right and the people rushed over one another with joy to kiss his headrope when he finished. He has had a nasty knock in Zeid’s retreat, and he realized perfectly well that it was the ruin of all his six months’ work up here in the hills tying tribe to tribe and fixing each in its proper area. Yet he took it all in public as a joke, chaffing people on the way they had run away, jeering at them like children, but without in the least hurting their feelings, and making the others feel that nothing much had happened that could not be put right. He is magnificent, for to me privately he was most horribly cut up.”
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