LAWRENCE’S WORST FEARS had been misplaced, as he discovered when he reached Wejh on February 6 and rushed into hurried conference with Faisal. It was certainly true that the Arab leader was keen to move on Aqaba, but he was just as keen that the French play no role in it; if anything, his meeting with Colonel Brémond a week earlier had served to only deepen Faisal’s distrust of the Frenchman.
At the same time, Lawrence was perhaps secretly grateful to Brémond for having raised the Aqaba issue, for it had alerted him to the great struggle inevitably to come over that town’s fate. In fact, that struggle was already under way, and the French colonel’s gambit was but one small part of it.
Wejh was now the forward base camp of the Arab Revolt, and almost every day new tribal delegations were coming in to meet with Faisal and sign on to the revolutionary cause. Most of these tribes were from the desert and mountain expanses to the east and north, the revolutionary frontier opened by Wejh’s capture, and these new recruits naturally wanted to take action in their own backyard. That meant rolling up the Red Sea coast toward Aqaba. Simultaneously, Faisal was coming under intense pressure from his Arab military advisors—primarily Syrian officers who had been captured or had deserted the Ottoman cause—to carry the fight farther north into their homeland. Both the shortest and easiest path to do so lay through Aqaba.
To these clamorings could be added those of the British officers now operating in the Hejaz, beginning with the head of the military mission, Stewart Newcombe. For the British field officers, Aqaba’s seizure would mean a much shorter communication and supply line to Egypt, as well as control of the entire northern Arabian coastline. Even Gilbert Clayton back in Cairo urged in a January memo that the brigade once slated for Rabegh be put ashore at Aqaba. In the face of this chorus, Lawrence surely realized that his protestations on the town’s physical obstacles would ultimately be drowned out. Indeed, if the examples of Kut and Gallipoli and a score of battlefields on the Western Front were any guide, the very impracticality of an Aqaba landing would draw British war planners to it like moths to the flame.
Lawrence’s contrarian view was unlikely to be much better received by the Arabs. As with all revolutionary movements, the animating force behind the Arab Revolt was passion, and that was a sentiment fueled by daring and boldness, quite antithetical to pleadings for caution or restraint. Besides, if Aqaba were excluded, the Arabs’ only other viable path into Syria was the inland route along the Hejaz Railway, a perilous option so long as the Turkish garrison in Medina stood at their backs. That option also meant relying on a very long and tenuous supply line to the coast, a line that would become more tenuous the farther north the Arabs pushed—although this concern possibly lay more in the theoretical realm than the practical; given the Arabs’ current rate of progress in the inland theater of operations, it might not be the current generation of fighters that reached Damascus, but their grandchildren.
For all these reasons, Lawrence could strenuously counsel Faisal against going to Aqaba, could even expound on the trap he believed Édouard Brémond was setting for him there, but it was unlikely to serve as anything more than a temporary brake. But due to his unique position in the British intelligence apparatus—privy to the innermost strategic and political planning being done in Cairo, but also operating in the field where those plans were to be implemented—Lawrence perceived something else as well.
In 1917, the European powers still held to the imperial mind-set that one’s claim to primacy in a place was directly linked to the expenditure of blood and treasure in taking it, that legitimacy was established by quite literally planting one’s flag in the soil. This ultimately was why the French, with precious few troops to spare for operations in the Middle East, had scuttled the British plans to go ashore in the Gulf of Alexandretta in 1915, why they remained so uneasy about Murray’s upcoming offensive into Palestine, and why, conversely, they wanted every available French soldier in the region to partake in any storming of Aqaba. It was only their physical presence, so they believed, that ensured their imperial claims would be honored.
This was not a peculiarly Gallic outlook, but one that very much infected the British as well. In all the talk of taking Aqaba, what most everyone envisioned, including Faisal, was basically a replay of the Wejh operation: an amphibious landing of Arab troops aboard British vessels, an advance against the Turkish garrison heavily supported by British naval guns, a new influx of British supplies and matériel once the town had fallen. Except Aqaba, in contrast to Wejh, was a town of enormous strategic importance to the British, and one that lay far outside the Islamic “holy land” zone that had caused them to tread so gingerly in the environs of Mecca. Having expended British blood and treasure to seize it, the British military planners’ temptation to claim Aqaba as their own—and simultaneously to relegate the Arabs to a subservient role—would prove all but irresistible. When that happened, the Arabs would be caught by the throat. For the first time, the two principal Entente allies, Britain and France, would have a sizable joint military force in the Middle East, and if forced to choose between French and Arab wishes, there could be little question which side British leaders in Cairo—or if not Cairo, London—would come down on. The most likely result would be the marooning of the Arabs in Aqaba, either explicitly or tacitly blocked from continuing north.
In short, then, Édouard Brémond was the least of Faisal’s problems. As the Rabegh episode had shown, Lawrence could handily outmaneuver Brémond by playing the anti-French card when Gallic interests clashed with those of the British, but it would be a very different game in a situation where British and French interests dovetailed. In essence, Faisal was well primed to spot French perfidy, but what about British perfidy?
As for why Lawrence might perceive all of this while others didn’t, and why he was so ready to doubt the fidelity of his own government, the answer was simple: the Sykes-Picot Agreement. So long as that pact stood, British betrayal of the Arab cause in deference to its French ally was virtually preordained, most all the pledges contained in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence to be nullified. Indeed, because of that pact, the British government might have their own strong motive for putting the Arabs in a box at Aqaba; by denying them the opportunity to actively participate in the liberation of Syria and other Arab lands, the British could then renege on their promises to the Arabs with a much clearer conscience.
But in trying to explain all this to Faisal—to impress upon him the need to turn away from the trap in Aqaba and make for Syria by the inland route; to not trust in the French, but not in the British either—Lawrence had only one potential instrument at his disposal: once again, Sykes-Picot.
In the British army of 1917—as indeed, in any wartime army at any point in history—the divulging of a secret treaty to a third party was considered a consummate act of treason, one sure to win the offender a long prison sentence if not an appointment with a firing squad. Yet at some point during those early days of February in Wejh, Lawrence took Faisal aside and did precisely that, revealing to him both the existence and the salient details of Sykes-Picot.
That Lawrence appreciated the enormity of what he had done is clear from the subsequent efforts he made to cover his tracks. In his own writings, as well as in queries put to him by various biographers, he remained resolutely vague about when he first learned of Sykes-Picot and how much he knew of its specifics, implying that he hadn’t been in a position to actually tell Faisal very much. In fact, Sykes-Picot is not at all a complex document—it runs a mere three pages—and Lawrence almost certainly had a complete familiarity with it no later than June 1916, when it was circulated through the intelligence offices in Cairo. Similarly, in Seven Pillars he fashioned a false chronology whereby his hasty return to Wejh after meeting with Brémond in Cairo was born of the need to warn Faisal of the Frenchman’s plan—“[Brémond] ended his talk ominously by saying that, anyhow, he was going down to put the [Aqaba] scheme to Faisal in Wejh”—an assertion that only worked by
failing to mention that Brémond had already put the scheme to Faisal four days earlier. Lawrence’s purpose for this omission, presumably, was to establish the idea, if it ever did come to light that he had divulged Sykes-Picot to Faisal at this juncture, that he had only done so to sabotage the conniving French. For British readers and officials alike in postwar Britain, this anti-French twist would make for a far more pleasing explanation than the alternative, his action less a treasonous offense than a perfectly understandable, even admirable, one.
It was all a construct that Lawrence’s biographers—at least those in the lionizing camp—have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence’s life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to assist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew?
Surely part of it was rooted in a peculiarly British sense of honor. To probably a greater degree than in any of the other warring nations in Europe, the British ruling class in 1917 still fiercely held to the notion that their word was their bond. Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government’s secret policy in the Middle East—that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away—were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. Lawrence may have felt this more viscerally by virtue of being where the fighting and dying was taking place, but he was hardly alone in his disgust.
Another part of it may have stemmed from the rekindling of boyhood fantasies. As Lawrence would write, “I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us.” Here in Arabia was suddenly the chance to be the knight-errant of his childhood readings, the liberator of an enslaved and broken people, and with this came a sense of purpose far stronger than any appeal to petty nationalism or to an empire that every day was further proving its unworthiness and obsolescence.
Whatever the combination of motives—and Lawrence may not have fully grasped them himself—the effect of his revelation to Faisal was both immediate and dramatic. The Arab leader now understood that despite their promises, the British were not going to simply cede Syria; if the Arabs wanted it, they would have to fight for it. Within days of Lawrence’s return to Wejh, other British officers were noting with puzzlement how Faisal had suddenly cooled on the idea of an Aqaba operation; instead, his sole focus was on carrying his rebellion to points farther north, into the Syrian heartland itself.
It was the same news Édouard Brémond heard on his next visit to Wejh on February 18. With Lawrence sitting in, Faisal informed the French colonel that he was now firmly opposed to an Aqaba landing, and instead intended to redouble his efforts inland. He once again turned down Brémond’s offer of French advisors, explaining that he had no need for them, and even offered an arch apology for the ever-broadening scale of his military plans; he would happily concentrate his efforts on Medina, he told Brémond, if only he had the same French artillery “to reply to the guns which the French had supplied to the Turks.” Outflanked once again, Lawrence gleefully noted, Brémond had little choice but “to retire from the battle in good order.”
In subsequent weeks, the various British officers stationed in Wejh continually tried to rein in Faisal’s suddenly lofty plans, to get him to focus on the immediate matters at hand. To little avail. As one of those officers, Major Pierce Joyce, would write on April 1, “I am still of the opinion that Sherif Faisal’s whole attention is directed towards the North.… I have endeavored to confine Faisal to local ambitions and military operations, but from somewhere he has developed very wide ideas.”
As for where Faisal might have developed those ideas, senior British officers remained baffled. Certainly, they didn’t suspect Captain Lawrence. In an early March report to Cairo, Cyril Wilson’s deputy in Jeddah singled Lawrence out for praise, calling him of “inestimable value.”
FOR DJEMAL PASHA, the options were narrowing. Since the beginning of the year, the signs that the British would soon launch their long-awaited offensive in southern Palestine had grown increasingly obvious. By February, Turkish units had steadily ceded ground all the way to the outskirts of the town of Gaza, and still the British were closing; German aerial spotters reported a veritable sea of tent encampments and supply depots strung along the new, British-laid railway clear back to El Arish, forty miles away. While estimates of the British attack force varied, the one certainty was that it vastly outnumbered the some twenty thousand Turkish defenders standing to meet it.
It was a disparity that Djemal despaired of closing, for everywhere across the empire, the Ottoman army was stretched to the breaking point: actively engaged on two fronts in Europe, squared off against the Russians in eastern Anatolia, and now falling back before a second British Indian invasion force in Iraq. Even if any troops could be spared from these other fronts—and the reality was, they couldn’t—it seemed all but impossible that they might reach Palestine in time to meet the British attack. With no other choice, then, Djemal had reluctantly turned his gaze to the ten thousand troops still holding Medina.
Any thought of abandoning that Arabian city was an extraordinarily painful one, which is probably why the governor had put it off until the eleventh hour. Not only did Medina anchor the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway, but Turkish control was absolute, never seriously threatened by the disorganized and outgunned Arab rebels who sporadically sniped about its edges; as such, it stood as a bulwark against the schemes of Emir Hussein to spread his revolt north. To give up Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, would also be to hand the rebels and their British paymasters a tremendous psychological victory, the mantle of religious primacy in the eyes of the greater Muslim world.
On the other hand, the Turkish troops in Medina were some of the finest to be found in the Ottoman Empire, and led by one of its ablest generals, Fakhri Pasha; their presence on the Palestine front could make the difference between victory and defeat. And so, under the urging of Enver Pasha and the German military high command in Constantinople, in late February Djemal sent down word that Medina was to be given up, its garrison to begin the long trek back up the Hejaz Railway to Syria and hurried into the trenchlines in Gaza.
That order drew an immediate and ferocious response from a man named Ali Haidar. In the wake of Hussein’s revolt the previous summer, Constantinople had handpicked Haidar as the new “legitimate” mufti of Mecca and bundled him south to assume his position of supreme religious authority. Haidar had ventured no farther than Medina, of course, but there he had established a kind of “puppet papacy” in rivalry to Hussein’s regime in Mecca. If rejected by most Hejazi Arabs, Haidar’s claim to being the true guardian of Islam’s holiest shrines had given sufficient pause to the international Muslim community to blunt Hussein’s appeal. All that would be lost if Medina was abandoned. “The news horrified me,” Haidar wrote in his memoir. “Hastily I sent a strongly-worded telegram to Djemal in which I said the very idea of deserting the Holy Tomb was utterly shameful, and that it should be protected to the last man, if necessary.”
The mufti clearly knew his audience, for just days after issuing his Medina withdrawal order, Djemal abruptly rescinded it; the city would stay in Turkish hands, and the outnumbered troops bracing for the British attack in Palestine would have to manage as best they could on their own.
But in one of those odd little wrinkles of history, the brief and quickly resolved Turkish debate over the future of Medina was about to have far-reaching consequences. That’s because British military cryptographers intercepted and decoded Djemal Pasha’s cable ordering the garrison’s withdrawal, but failed to intercept his subsequent cancellation order. As a result, the Arab rebels and their British advisors would devote their energies of
the next several months responding to an event that wasn’t going to happen. It was also in these circumstances that T. E. Lawrence would eventually have his greatest epiphany about the Arab Revolt and how it should be fought.
AS INSTRUCTED, LAWRENCE was waiting at the dock when the Nur el Bahr, an Egyptian patrol boat, put into Wejh on the morning of March 8. There he took delivery from a British army courier of two rather extraordinary documents.
The first was a transcript of Djemal Pasha’s cable ordering the abandonment of Medina. As soon as could be organized, Djemal had instructed, the Turkish garrison was to begin moving up the Hejaz Railway, taking all artillery and other war matériel with them, and to form a new defensive line in the Syrian city of Maan, five hundred miles to the north. From there, whatever troops could be spared were to be rushed to the redoubt of Gaza in southern Palestine.
The second was a directive from Gilbert Clayton in Cairo. With General Murray’s Palestine offensive now just weeks away, it was vital that no reinforcements reach the Turkish defenders in Gaza, which meant every effort should be made to halt the Medina garrison’s departure. With the technical support of their British advisors, the Arab rebels were to dramatically expand their attacks on the Hejaz Railway, rendering as much damage to it as possible, and to make a blocking stand against the withdrawing Turkish units if necessary. With his usual propensity for discretion, Clayton suggested that neither Faisal nor the other Arab commanders need be informed of the reason for this escalation.
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