As he’d shown repeatedly during his time in Arabia, if Brémond found one approach to a desired goal blocked, he immediately set out in search of another. And if that first goal was made unattainable or redundant, he simply recalibrated his sights to something else. What made this agility even more impressive was that, as both political and military point man for French policy in Arabia, Édouard Brémond was juggling two largely contradictory agendas at once: to ensure that France enjoyed equal standing with her ally, Great Britain, in all matters related to the war effort there, but also to try to limit that war effort from within.
His long and ultimately fruitless campaign to put an Allied force ashore in Rabegh had been only the most overt of these efforts. During the same period, he had been urging on Hussein the establishment of a French-Ottoman bank in Jeddah, an institution that might lend financial credits to the Hejaz government at very attractive rates. British officers examining Brémond’s bank proposal had quickly judged it to be an economic trap—with no means to pay back the loans, the Hussein regime would soon become beholden to its French creditors—and scuttled the plan. Then there was the colonel’s perennial lobbying to have French officers attached as advisors to the various Arab rebel formations; while he achieved some success with Abdullah and Ali—a half dozen French specialists had been dispatched to their camps in December—he’d had little with Faisal, who remained deeply wary of Gallic intentions.
With the advance on Wejh, Brémond had seen a new opportunity. Once that Red Sea port was captured from the Turks, the entire focus of the Arabian conflict would shift north some two hundred miles. That would render the Turkish threat to Jeddah and Mecca essentially moot—and with it any argument for an Allied force in Rabegh—but it would offer up an even more enticing target: the Turks’ last principal outpost on the Red Sea, the small port of Aqaba.
Observed on a map, Aqaba’s extraordinary strategic importance was plain to anyone. Situated at the end of a hundred-mile long ribbon of water that forms the southeastern boundary of the Sinai Peninsula, the port was ideally situated to serve both as a staging ground for attacks into the population centers of southern Palestine, a mere hundred miles to the north, and for launching raids on the Hejaz Railway, the lifeline of the Turkish garrison in Medina, just sixty miles to the east. In fact, Brémond had broached the idea of an assault on Aqaba with his British military counterparts shortly after his arrival in Cairo in the summer of 1916. The notion had found considerable favor among the British, but with the Arab Revolt still struggling very far to the south at that time, had been deemed premature.
By late January 1917, it was premature no more. Not only did the Arabs now control the Red Sea coast as far north as Wejh, but General Murray’s ponderous advance across the Sinai Peninsula in prelude to his Palestine offensive was nearly complete. Lying in the gap between these two forces was Aqaba. Its control by the Allies would secure Murray’s right flank, ensuring that no Turkish counteroffensive could be launched from that direction, and it would bring the Arab rebels much closer to their British army suppliers in Egypt.
Of course, the plan might also finally bring about the fulfillment of Brémond’s not-so-secret agenda: keeping the Arab Revolt bottled up in the Hejaz. Far away from the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, King Hussein (he had declared himself such in late October) could hardly object to a sizable British and French presence in Aqaba. And with that presence, the principal Allies could dictate to their Arab junior partners just where they might go and what they might do; any Arab dissent on that point and the pipeline of Allied weapons and gold upon which they depended could simply be cut off. Better yet, all of this could be accomplished under the guise of helping the rebel cause by moving their forward base to a place where they could more easily carry out their railway attacks.
In mid-January, even before Wejh had been taken, Brémond began discussing this idea with his superiors in Paris, and found enthusiastic support. While Paris would pursue the matter at the departmental level in London, the French liaison in Cairo and Brémond in Jeddah were commanded to lobby for the Aqaba scheme among the regional British leadership. Brémond knew just where to turn. In addition to touting the plan to British officers in the Hejaz, he put it before his most reliable ally in the Cairo power structure, Reginald Wingate, newly ensconced as British high commissioner to Egypt. Wingate liked the idea so much that he immediately took it to General Archibald Murray.
By the usual standards of British politeness and understatement, Murray’s response was withering. “In reply to your letter referring to Brémond’s proposal,” he wrote Wingate on January 22, “my opinion, from the purely military point of view, is that the [previous] objections to landing a force at Rabegh apply with equal if not greater force to a landing at Aqaba.” Therein followed Murray’s usual litany of fears about mission creep, before he turned to demolishing Wingate’s contention that control of Aqaba would enable the Allies to strike inland at the Hejaz Railway. “The country in the neighborhood of Aqaba is extremely rough and rocky,” the general explained, and any push inland would be over a terrain only certain rare breeds of camels could traverse. “To sum up, therefore,” Murray wrote, “the French proposal to land troops at Aqaba offers, from a military point of view, so few advantages and such serious disadvantages, that I can only suppose that it has been put forward without due consideration and I do not propose to entertain it.”
Along with testiness, another feature of Archibald Murray’s leadership style was a tendency to needlessly compartmentalize information. As he well knew when writing to Wingate, the chief impediment to an eastern advance from Aqaba was not simply “rough and rocky” terrain but that terrain’s near impassability. A few months earlier he had detailed a junior officer in the Arab Bureau office to analyze a series of aerial reconnaissance photos taken of the Aqaba region. In his report, that officer had pointed out that the port was nestled in the very shadows of a massive range of rugged mountains that rose steadily for thirty miles inland before descending over an equally inhospitable landscape to the interior desert where the Hejaz Railway lay. The only way through that wall of rock was a narrow gorge known as the Wadi Itm, along which the Turks had built a network of fortified blockhouses and trenchworks, leaving any military force foolhardy enough to attempt a crossing exposed to constant ambush and sniper fire. The issue, then, was not taking Aqaba—that was the easy part—but in ever being able to move off its beach. A heedless move here was to invite a miniature replay of the Gallipoli debacle—or a full-scale reprise, depending on how determined military commanders became to compound their initial error.
Inexplicably, however, Murray chose not to share this salient information with Wingate, nor evidently with the growing chorus of other British officers advocating an Aqaba landing. In the absence of that information, Murray’s scornful reply to the proposal appeared to be just another manifestation of his timidity and bad temper. That was certainly the view Colonel Brémond came away with upon hearing the news through the diplomatic filter of Reginald Wingate.
“You can confidentially inform Brémond,” Wingate cabled his underlings in Jeddah on January 24, “that we have already given fullest consideration here to [the] proposal to land troops at Aqaba, but in view of our present military commitments in Sinai and elsewhere it must be discarded. We fully recognize the advantages of this scheme, but the troops and transport necessary to undertake a successful expedition against the railway [from Aqaba] are not available.”
To Édouard Brémond, a man who’d previously been able to play Wingate to great effect, all this apparently sounded less like an emphatic “no” than a coquettish “maybe.” Days later, the French colonel boarded a naval frigate in Jeddah harbor for the run up the coast to Wejh to put his proposal directly to the one man whose desires just might override Murray’s: Faisal ibn Hussein.
The two men met on the afternoon of January 30, with the more fluent Arabic-speaking Stewart Newcombe acting as interpreter. Brémond info
rmed Faisal that he was on his way to Egypt to inspect his men at Port Suez, before continuing on to Cairo. There, he intended to lobby the British high command to send a brigade to seize Aqaba, a force to be complemented by two French-Senegalese battalions that were sitting idle in the French port of Djibouti, at the southern mouth of the Red Sea.
Although Faisal had also set his sights on Aqaba, he refused to endorse Brémond’s plan; as Newcombe would report, “Faisal afterwards told me that he would like British troops to help him, but did not want any help from the French or to have anything to do with them.” On the heels of that meeting in Wejh, Brémond immediately proceeded to Port Suez and then to Cairo, where he sought out a most unlikely listener. “[Brémond] called to felicitate me on the capture of Wejh,” Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, “saying that it confirmed his belief in my military talent and encouraged him to expect my help in an extension of our success.” That “extension,” of course, was the colonel’s scheme for an Allied landing at Aqaba.
Whatever possessed Brémond to tip his hand to Lawrence? The simplest explanation—that he saw the Aqaba plan as so beneficial to all concerned that even the obstreperous Lawrence might embrace it—is also the least likely. By now, Brémond was fully aware of Lawrence’s abiding distrust both of him and of French intentions in the Middle East, a distrust so deep that he was likely to oppose any French proposal on the basis of its origin alone. Indeed, by Lawrence’s own account, he instantly heard in Brémond’s Aqaba plan an echo of his hidden motive in the Rabegh scheme, a way for the Allies to assume de facto control over the Arab Revolt and keep it out of Syria.
But what Brémond surely didn’t appreciate was that the man sitting across from him that morning at the Savoy probably knew the Aqaba region as well as any European alive. Not only had Lawrence negotiated that landscape during his 1914 Wilderness of Zin expedition, but it was he who had studied the Aqaba aerial maps at the behest of General Murray, to deeply pessimistic results. Brémond may have envisioned Aqaba being a grand cul-de-sac for the Arabs, but in Lawrence’s estimation, it would be for any British and French troops sent there, too.
When Lawrence tried to explain this to Brémond, however, the Frenchman remained utterly sanguine. In fact, he let drop that once his lobbying efforts in Cairo were done, he intended to return to Wejh to prod Faisal further on the matter.
There may have rested the colonel’s true motive in seeking Lawrence out that morning. The little Oxford upstart had been the most eloquent—and, as bad luck would have it, influential—of Brémond’s British opponents during the Rabegh episode, and the Frenchman surely didn’t want Lawrence on hand in Cairo to pour water on any pro-Aqaba fires he might light among the British high command. By further letting slip that he would soon return to Wejh for another meeting with Faisal, Brémond may have been hoping that Lawrence would immediately make haste for Arabia, thereby removing himself from the arena where decisions were actually made.
If this was Brémond’s goal, it worked perfectly. “Now I had not warned Faisal that Brémond was a crook,” Lawrence recounted. “Newcombe was there [in Wejh], with his friendly desire to get moves on.… It seemed best for me to hurry down and put my side on their guard against the [Aqaba] notion.”
Within hours of his meeting with Brémond, Lawrence left Cairo for Port Suez, there to board the first ship for Wejh.
IT WAS A small but telling sign of the changes that war had brought. In June 1915, when William Yale had taken his first carriage ride to the Mount of Olives to meet Djemal Pasha, the horses had trotted up the steep cobblestoned road with ease. Now, in February 1917, that same journey was torturously slow, the emaciated horses in their harnesses so weakened from two years of food shortages that it appeared they might die in the effort. “It seemed we would never reach the German Hospice,” Yale recalled. The oilman persevered, though, for it was absolutely vital that he reach the Syrian governor.
By that winter of 1917, Yale could feel the walls closing in on him in Jerusalem. Part of it had to do with his nationality. Over the past two and a half years of war, the grudging respect with which the United States had initially been regarded by nearly all the combatants, its annoying stance of neutrality offset by its efforts at peacemaking, had steadily eroded to something approaching disgust. In Britain and France, it took the form of a despair that the American government might ever recognize how its own welfare dictated that it side with the “democracies” against the “dictatorships.” In the Central Power nations, it took the form of a growing bitterness at an American foreign policy that, for all Woodrow Wilson’s pious talk of being a neutral arbitrator, clearly favored the Entente. And for all concerned was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of “free trade,” the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.
By early 1917, however, with Woodrow Wilson’s reelection campaign safely behind him, there were growing signs that the status quo might soon end, with the United States entering the war on the side of the Entente. Should that happen, those Americans still residing in Central Power nations could expect to come in for some unpleasant treatment, and probably none more so than William Yale. With his bare-knuckled approach to commerce—bribery, threats, and blackmail had been his stock-in-trade—the oilman had made a lot of enemies during his time in Palestine, business rivals and aggrieved local government officials who might quite enjoy seeing the long-protected American “neutral” reclassified as a “belligerent” and hauled off to an internment camp.
Yet as the menacing signs had built that winter, a personal sense of duty had prevented Yale from asking the Standard Oil office in Constantinople for permission to leave Jerusalem. Instead, he and his trusty bodyguard, Mustapha Kharpoutli, made contingency plans to try a dash for British Egypt should the Americans come into the war, even as both knew the odds of success in such an enterprise were virtually nil.
Then, on February 1, Germany had announced a resumption of its unrestricted U-boat campaign against all merchant vessels supplying its European enemies, a move that would inevitably target American ships and seemed almost designed to provoke an American war declaration. That didn’t immediately materialize, but just days later, after Wilson took the interim step of breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany, Yale received the cable he’d been desperately awaiting: the Standard office in Constantinople ordered him to leave Palestine and make his way to the Ottoman capital. In great relief, the American swiftly packed up his office papers and personal belongings, eleven suitcases and footlockers in all, in preparation for the long train ride north.
It was then that Yale discovered he was caught in something of a riddle. As with everyone else in wartime Syria, he needed a travel permit, or vesika, in order to leave Jerusalem. Since he was a foreigner, however, his permit had to be personally authorized by Djemal Pasha, and Djemal now rarely left Damascus. For agonizing days, Yale tried to think of some way out of this conundrum, until finally he received a tip that Djemal was coming to Jerusalem on a brief fact-finding mission. It was this that spurred his anxious trip up the Mount of Olives that February morning.
But even as he waited in the main hallway of the German Hospice for the chance to buttonhole the Syrian governor, William Yale found his trademark self-confidence deserting him. “America was on the verge of war with Germany,” he recalled, “and there was nothing I could do to be of use to Djemal Pasha. To make matters worse, I had [earlier] been accused of being a member of a revolutionary Arab group. Certainly I could not expect Djemal Pasha to feel kindly towards me.”
Perhaps another factor weighing on Yale was the singularly unproductive role he had performed at the behest of his employers while in Jerusalem. Despite being given concession over a vast swath of Judea by Djemal Pasha, Standard Oil had failed to produce a single drop of Palestinian oil for the Turkish military machine.
As Yale waited in the hospice foyer, Djemal at last emer
ged from a far doorway and, surrounded by a coterie of high-ranking German and Turkish military officers, strode briskly down the corridor toward him. But the oilman froze, didn’t even try to get the governor’s attention as he swept past. Appalled by his own timidity, Yale simply stared after the receding entourage until someone called to him, “Mr. Yale, what on earth are you doing here?”
Turning, Yale saw that his questioner was a man named Zaki Bey, the former military governor of Jerusalem. A courtly and cultured figure, in the early days of the war, Zaki Bey had endeavored to shield Jerusalem’s foreign community from the harsher edicts of both the Constantinople regime—he had reportedly warned the Greek Orthodox patriarch to hide his church’s valuables ahead of a government seizure warrant—and the resident German intelligence corps. For his conciliatory actions, Zaki Bey had ultimately been forced from office by the Germans, but had somehow remained a member in good standing of Djemal Pasha’s inner circle. Just as important, given the circumstances of the moment, Zaki Bey was a member in good standing of William Yale’s biweekly bridge club. After hearing of the American’s predicament, the former governor tore off the last page of a government document, hastily scribbled out a travel authorization on the back, and sped down the corridor in pursuit of Djemal. Shortly afterward, he returned, the signed vesika in hand.
“As the horses jogged wearily down the Mount of Olives,” Yale wrote, “I hummed with joy. After two long years of exile during which time I had seen the increasing misery of war entangle those about me, I now held in my hand a paper which would start me on my way home.”
Of course, what the future held once he reached that home was an open question. If the Americans did finally enter the war, Standard Oil’s operation in the Middle East would be shut down for a long time to come. Thus idled, Yale would probably be let go or shunted back to the lowly work he’d performed in the American oilfields. In contemplating this uncertainty, the oilman apparently decided that whatever debt of gratitude he might owe to Djemal Pasha for allowing his escape from Palestine, it was a debt best kept to acceptable limits. During the long train ride back to Constantinople, a grinding, stop-and-start ordeal of nearly three weeks, Yale took very careful note of all that he observed out its windows: German and Turkish troop movements, the status of railway construction projects, the location of military encampments and ammunition storehouses. Depending on what the future brought, that information might be of great use to someone—and it might also be very useful to William Yale.
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