Faisal had displayed that same spirit in Yenbo. On December 20, when it was clear the Turks were falling back toward Medina, he had beseeched his brother Ali to come north out of Rabegh with his army of some seven thousand, while Faisal took his own forces back up into the mountains; the hope was to catch the withdrawing Turks in a pincer movement. Alas, Ali proved no better a warrior leader than brother Zeid. Within days, his army had panicked and turned back for Rabegh on yet another erroneous rumor of a Turkish force ahead, and a disappointed Faisal saw no option but to return with his own men to Yenbo.
To most other British officers who observed the incident, it was another example of the ineptitude of the Arab forces, that at least twice now they had fled the field on the mere rumor of a Turkish presence. Lawrence saw things quite differently. Fresh from their recent rout in the mountains, the prudent course would have been for Faisal to keep his men under the protection of the British naval guns at Yenbo while they regrouped; instead, he had tried to leap to the offensive the moment an opportunity presented itself. It spoke of a determination in Faisal sorely lacking in his brothers.
In a similar vein, with both Rabegh and Yenbo now looking at least temporarily secure, Faisal returned to the idea of taking his campaign north and seizing the port town of Wejh. With Wejh in rebel hands, not only would the British supply line from Egypt be brought two hundred miles closer, but the easier terrain would allow for more frequent raids inland against the Hejaz Railway. Over long discussions with Lawrence, the two came up with a stripped-down version of Faisal’s earlier plan, one that relied far less heavily on support from his now proven unreliable brothers.
But planning that advance must have been a bittersweet exercise for Lawrence. As he well knew, his time in Arabia was rapidly drawing to a close. Despite a series of delays in Europe, Stewart Newcombe would soon be on his way to take up his permanent position with Faisal, and Lawrence bundled back to his desk job at the Arab Bureau.
It was a fate he had tried to forestall through a campaign of quiet subversion ever since returning to the Hejaz. A chief target of that campaign had been his temporary field supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Wilson. Quite aware of Wilson’s fierce opposition to even his temporary posting in Arabia, Lawrence had sought to sidestep the resident agent in Jeddah by playing directly to the higher powers in Cairo. That scheme had started with his very first cable back to Gilbert Clayton on December 5. “One of the things not fixed when I came down here,” Lawrence wrote, “was my [supervisory] chief, and my manner of reporting. It is probably through Colonel Wilson, but as there is a post going to Egypt tonight I am sending this direct.”
In fact, it had been made perfectly clear to Lawrence that Wilson was his chief in the field, so his confusion on this point was more than a little disingenuous. It established a precedent, however, one that Lawrence soon reemployed when Wilson tried to clip his wings by appointing him to the lowly post of supply officer in Yenbo. In protesting this assignment to Clayton—“I regard myself as primarily an Intelligence Officer, or liaison with Faisal”—Lawrence also thought to explain that he was sending his latest reports to Cairo, rather than routing them through Wilson, because “if they are to be any good at all they should reach you within a reasonable period of dispatch—and to send them to Jeddah is only [the] waste of a week or ten days.” That rationale would have lost some of its persuasiveness had it been known that Lawrence was actually on a ship en route to Jeddah when he wrote it.
As December wore on, his campaign became only more overt. Not for Lawrence any beseeching pleas for reconsideration; instead, he assumed the posture that his continuing on in Arabia was a foregone conclusion. “If I am to stay here,” he wrote Clayton’s deputy at the end of the month, once again sidestepping Wilson, “I will need all sorts of things. Have you any news of Newcombe? The situation is so interesting that I think I will fail to come back. I want to rub off my British habits and go off with Faisal for a bit.” As if that desire was somehow already a part of his government’s planning, Lawrence then laid out his intentions. “When I have someone to take over here from me, I’ll go off. Wadi Ais is the unknown area of N. Hejaz, and I want to drop up and see it, [and] anything behind Rudhwa will be worth while.”
· · ·
IT WAS LESS a failed regime, perhaps, than a fantastically deluded one. Across the breadth of Syria by the close of 1916, an estimated half-million people had already died of starvation or disease, and conditions appeared slated to only grow worse in the new year. On the military front, Turkish forces had been thrown back from the Suez Canal anew, the garrison in Medina was one of the last holdouts against the Arab rebels in the Hejaz, and the British were once again marching up the Tigris toward Baghdad. Yet in his governor’s mansions in Jerusalem and Damascus, Djemal Pasha continued to pore over blueprints for new canalworks and roadways, continued to attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the inauguration of schools and hospitals. It was as if he clung more tenaciously to his self-image as a progressive reformer because of the cascade of ruin all around him rather than in spite of it.
Perhaps one reason was that the Syrian governor was becoming ever more divorced from the power elites in Constantinople. In the Ottoman capital, the criticisms of Djemal had reached new heights with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, but in what was now an established pattern, those criticisms ran the gamut from his having been too harsh—a common view, one embraced by most historians, was that his executions of the Arab nationalist leaders had provoked the rebellion—to his being far too lenient. To this latter charge, Djemal’s penchant for glibness didn’t help his cause; when Julius Loytved-Hardegg, the German consul in Damascus, asked whatever had possessed him to allow Faisal ibn Hussein to leave for Arabia on the eve of the revolt, Djemal replied that he’d done it to test Faisal’s true colors. As Loytved-Hardegg acerbically noted in his report of the meeting, “the present time doesn’t seem especially appropriate” for such a test.
Also irritating to Constantinople was Djemal’s curious streak of courtliness toward Europeans in general, and the French in particular, as evidenced by his continuing to allow many of these “belligerent nationals” to stay on in Syria without restriction. A notable exception to his Europhilia was the European nation to which his government was militarily allied; Djemal loathed most everything about Germany and its culture, and could be quite expansive in enumerating its deficiencies to anyone within earshot.
As the war ground on, however, and Frenchmen became a rarer commodity in Syria—thanks in no small part to the ferreting-out skills of German agents like Curt Prüfer—the governor seemed to transfer his affections to a different expatriate community, the Americans. To the cloistered faithful of the American Colony, a conservative religious sect that had established itself in Jerusalem in the 1890s, Djemal was a frequent and welcome guest; surviving photographs show Colony children crawling over Djemal’s lap, much to his evident delight. Similarly, Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), was so grateful for Djemal’s support of the institution, ensuring that it received subsidized food shipments in the midst of the Lebanon famine, that in late January 1917 he invited the governor to be the university’s commencement speaker.
At that time, the U.S. consul in Damascus, Samuel Edelman, was having his own rather odd experience with Djemal, one that began with his answering a summons to the governor’s Damascus office on January 20. For some months, Edelman had been trying to arrange the safe passage from Syria of some five hundred American citizens eager to escape the worsening conditions, but his efforts had been stymied by Ottoman authorities. Certainly not helping matters was the recent reelection of Woodrow Wilson as president. Despite the campaign slogan that had helped carry him to reelection—“He kept us out of the war”—there were growing signs that Wilson intended to bring the United States in on the side of the Allies, and Constantinople was understandably loath to release hundreds of foreigners with firsthand knowl
edge of the situation in Syria, and whose government might soon join the enemy camp. In his meeting with Edelman on January 20, Djemal offered a novel solution. As the nonplussed consul cabled to his embassy in Constantinople, Djemal would now agree to let the five hundred Americans leave so long as they gave their word of honor “not to discuss Ottoman affairs until the end of war.” Not surprisingly, American diplomats swiftly agreed to these patently unenforceable terms and set about arranging the departure of their citizens from Syria.
But it wasn’t as if Djemal was compliant to the entreaties of all Americans. One who didn’t get his way in one particular incident was the Standard Oil representative in Syria, William Yale.
Despite the steadily worsening conditions in Jerusalem, the American oilman had proven himself supremely adaptable to his surroundings. With the Turkish currency collapsed in value and speculators subject to hanging, Yale had embarked on a complicated black-market scheme that involved the buying and reselling of gold and paper scrip in different towns across Palestine that, after expenses, netted him a tidy 10 percent profit. On one occasion, when the governor of Jerusalem had balked at renewing Socony’s concessionary permits, Yale had blackmailed the man by threatening to denounce him to the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople, as well as to inform the governor’s wife of his illicit love affair.
Yale’s special appeal to Djemal Pasha came in the autumn of 1916, and it arose when a trusted—or perhaps bribed—censor at the telegraph office in Jerusalem came to Yale and his business partner, Ismail Hakki Bey, with disturbing news. According to the censor, Djemal had just received an anonymous letter accusing Ismail Bey of belonging to a revolutionary group with ties to the Arab Revolt leader, Faisal Hussein. Further, the letter stated that “a young American was financing the group,” a clear reference to Yale.
Since such an accusation, if believed, was tantamount to a death sentence, the two men rushed to Djemal’s office at the German Hospice and demanded to see the letter. To their profound shock, they recognized the handwriting as that of Selim Ayoub, one of the other two Jerusalem businessmen involved in the Kornub oil concessions. “Ismail Bey and I were so angry at the man’s underhanded, unscrupulous action,” Yale recalled, “we demanded that he and his whole family be exiled.”
In his memoir, Yale professed to have been on “intimate, friendly terms” with Ayoub and his family, and he surely knew what such a banishment would mean to the man’s wife and children: utter destitution in the best of circumstances, slow death from disease or starvation in the worst. Yale also seemed to have rather forgotten that he’d threatened Ismail Bey with a very similar charge the year before. In any event, Djemal refused to give the aggrieved oilmen full satisfaction; while agreeing to send Selim Ayoub into exile, he decreed that the rest of the Ayoub family could remain in Jerusalem. With twenty years’ distance on the event, Yale would note in his memoirs, “I am glad that Djemal acted less cruelly than the rest of us.”
THE MARCH ON Wejh began at an oasis village northeast of Yenbo, and in wondrously exotic fashion. To Lawrence, the scene was both splendid and barbaric, as if the medieval histories he had devoured as a child had suddenly come to life. “Faisal in front, in white,” he wrote. “[Chieftain] Sharraf on his right, in red headcloth and henna-dyed tunic and cloak, myself on his left in white and red. Behind us 3 banners of purple silk with gold spikes, behind them 3 drummers playing a march, and behind them a wild bouncing mass of 1,200 camels of the bodyguard, all packed as closely as they could move, the men in every variety of colored clothes and the camels nearly as brilliant in their trappings—and the whole crowd singing at the tops of their voices a war song in honor of Faisal and his family! It looked like a river of camels, for we filled up the wadi to the tops of its banks, and poured along in a quarter-of-a-mile long stream.”
For Lawrence, this entrancing spectacle was to be very short-lived. Despite all his maneuverings of the past month, earlier that morning a cable had arrived in Yenbo announcing that Stewart Newcombe was finally on his way from Egypt; Lawrence was instructed to wait in Yenbo for his replacement’s arrival, at which point his posting in Arabia would come to an end. As a result, after accompanying the grand cavalcade north for a mere hour or so, Lawrence had no choice but to bid Faisal farewell and return to the coast.
But there was to be no handover of authority in Yenbo. Instead, with Newcombe encountering another last-minute delay in Cairo, it was decided the two officers would meet up in the small rebel-held port of Um Lejj, halfway along the coast to Wejh, where they could intercept Faisal’s army as it moved north. Accordingly, on January 14, Lawrence hopped on HMS Suva and made the short run up to Um Lejj and a reunion with Faisal. With the rebel force pausing there to reprovision, it was a fleeting reminder to Lawrence of both the adventure he’d had over the previous six weeks and of all he was about to miss. “I wish I had not to go back to Egypt,” he wistfully wrote his family from Um Lejj on January 16. “Anyway, I have had a change.”
Except there was still no word of Newcombe. By the seventeenth, and with the rebel march scheduled to resume the next morning, Lawrence quietly entertained the hope that perhaps his superior still might not make it in time, in which case he would have “no choice” but to accompany Faisal on to Wejh. By that evening, and with still no sign of Newcombe, Lawrence’s hopes seemed realized; leaving a note for Newcombe in Um Lejj—“So I miss you by a day!”—he raced out to the desert to rejoin Faisal.
In fact, it was by considerably less than a day. No sooner had the Arab army broken camp that morning, Lawrence happily ensconced alongside Faisal, than two horsemen appeared coming from Um Lejj at a full gallop. One of them was Newcombe, finally arrived to take up his position as head of the British military mission to the Hejaz.
By instruction, Lawrence was to now return to Um Lejj and board the next ship for Cairo. On the spur of the moment, however, Stewart Newcombe decided on a different plan. This handover was far too rushed, and while he’d no doubt stumble his way to a familiarity with Faisal and his chief lieutenants during the continuing trek to Wejh, that process might be greatly eased if his stand-in of the past six weeks remained on hand to make the introductions. When Newcombe suggested this alternative to Lawrence, he encountered no resistance.
DURING HIS LONG and dreary days of waiting in London, Aaron Aaronsohn had fixed his gaze on Cairo, the place where he imagined British inertia might finally be overcome. It wasn’t quite working out that way. “A hundred times daily I curse the moment when we decided to work with them,” he raged in his diary on January 5, 1917. “Better for us to stagnate with the Turks and keep our illusions about the Allies than to approach them and see this hopeless incompetency. If the Boches [Germans] are finally beaten by these kakers they will have reason to doubt God and Justice.”
Aaronsohn had arrived in Port Said in mid-December with the intention of immediately proceeding to Cairo to present his letters of introduction to Gilbert Clayton at the Arab Bureau. Instead, the British authorities meeting his ship had been more impressed by his dubious legal status—he was still a citizen of the Ottoman Empire—and had quarantined him in Alexandria. Shortly afterward, a young captain from the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau (EMSIB), William Edmonds, showed up with the news that he was to serve as Aaronsohn’s liaison.
The agronomist’s initial high opinion of Edmonds—“not only very intelligent but very shrewd as well”—rapidly diminished when it became clear the intelligence agent’s function was more to mollify Aaronsohn with the appearance of progress than to actually liaise him to anyone of substance. An indication of where Aaronsohn stood in the larger scheme of things was revealed when he inquired into the possibility of being reimbursed for some of the expenses he’d incurred in reaching London and then coming on to Egypt, a cost he estimated at about £1,500. Edmonds blanched at the figure; with the miserliness with which British officialdom was already infamous, he pointed out that no expenses could be reimbursed without proper rece
ipts, and instead proposed placing Aaronsohn on a stipend of £1 a day, a sum that didn’t even cover his Alexandria hotel bill. The proud scientist immediately refused.
“Until now,” he vented in his diary that night, “I have encountered nothing but distrust and reticence, smallness and pettiness. I must try and control my nerves so that I can establish another connection with Absa,” he wrote, referring to Absalom Feinberg, the deputy he had left behind in Athlit. “Then, he can continue the work if he wants to. So far as I am concerned, I have had enough of it. I am not going to continue working under such conditions.”
Driving Aaronsohn’s pique was that he’d heard nothing of what might be happening in Palestine for the past eight months. His whole purpose in coming to Egypt had been to finally link the British with his spy network in Athlit, and instead he was wasting his time quibbling about receipts and meeting with low-level functionaries.
What the scientist didn’t appreciate was that he still wasn’t fully trusted. Just as with the intelligence analyst back in London who’d concluded that Aaronsohn’s information was so accurate it might indicate he was really a Turkish spy, so that analyst’s counterparts in Cairo were grappling with the conundrum that this suspicion posed: how to link up with Aaronsohn’s spy network, should it actually exist, while simultaneously blocking him from making contact with his Turkish counterintelligence handlers, if that was his true game? Aaronsohn may have unwittingly added to these doubts by repeatedly asking to talk with the intelligence officer that Absalom Feinberg had made contact with in 1915, Leonard Woolley. His British handlers were very slow to inform Aaronsohn that Woolley was now a Turkish captive, his ship having been torpedoed in the Gulf of Alexandretta over the summer, and Aaronsohn’s constant invoking of Woolley’s name in the absence of that information surely raised more eyebrows.
Shortly before Christmas, the British thought they’d come up with a clever way around their dilemma. Edmonds informed Aaronsohn that, at long last, a spy ship was being dispatched to make contact with Athlit; might Aaronsohn care to send along a personal message? The agronomist saw through the ploy at once and flew into one of his trademark tempers. Unless he went on the boat personally, he told Edmonds, he’d simply end all relations then and there; far better that than allowing the British to send in “some blunderer” who might get all his people killed.
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