This had been evident most recently amid the intensified campaign against the Hejaz Railway. To spur the Arab fighters to action, Lawrence had joined other British officers in urging Faisal to decamp from Wejh and make for the main rebel staging ground at Wadi Ais. Faisal had brushed aside these entreaties, alternately pleading a shortage of camels and the need to remain on the coast to personally meet with the various tribal delegations coming in to join the revolt, stances that led some British officers to quietly conclude the man was a bit of a coward. That assessment was neither fair nor true—certainly it had taken enormous courage to pull off the tightrope act that Faisal had performed for so many months between Djemal Pasha and the Arab nationalists in Damascus—but it was a very different type of courage than the unalloyed thirst for battle of a man like Auda Abu Tayi.
Further diminishing Faisal in Lawrence’s eyes was a propensity for vacillation. Perhaps it came with being a conciliator and patient listener, but the emir—Faisal and his brothers had advanced to that title upon their father declaring himself king in October—had the disconcerting habit of falling away from seemingly firmly held positions under the urgings and opinions of whoever next caught his ear; as Lawrence would later remark, “Faisal always listened to his momentary adviser, despite his own better judgment.”
As a recent example, back in February Lawrence had divulged to Faisal precisely why signing on to an Allied-managed attack on Aqaba posed a potential trap for the Arabs—and had put himself at great risk in doing so. Thus educated, Faisal had scotched all talk of a precipitous move on the port. After a brief absence from Wejh in early March, however, Lawrence had returned to discover Faisal once again fallen under the sway of his tribal allies, and back to advocating an immediate assault. It required another round of persuasion on Lawrence’s part to talk Faisal down.
In fact, it seemed that yet another about-face had spurred Faisal’s plaintive note to Lawrence in Wadi Ais pleading for his immediate return. In late March, rumors had reached Wejh that the French were about to launch an amphibious landing on the Syrian coast—some rumors held they were already ashore—raising the specter of Syria being stolen away in a French fait accompli. Faisal’s apprehensions had been further stoked by a visit from Édouard Brémond on April 1, and a new press by the colonel to attach French “liaison” officers to the Arab forces in Wejh. Faisal had again rebuffed Brémond, but his visit had fueled the Arab leader’s anxiety to make for Syria via Aqaba as soon as possible. As a result, one of Lawrence’s first tasks upon reaching Wejh on April 14 was to ascertain that the French rumors were untrue, and to calm Faisal down once more. Along with being tiresome, this suggestibility in the emir was dangerous; Lawrence might refocus him now, but what would happen the next time an Aqaba-urging chieftain or the mischievous Colonel Brémond came calling?
There was an obvious answer, of course: to immediately make for Aqaba—and with control of that port, for points farther north—by implementing the daring inland-approach scheme Lawrence had begun to map out in his mind. Moreover, among the Arab chieftains gathered in Wejh that day was just the sort of fearless, single-minded fighter who might bring that scheme to fruition: Auda Abu Tayi.
Except a new complication now presented itself, one directly tied to Faisal’s changeability. Back at the beginning of March, amid Faisal’s renewed anxiety to move on Aqaba, a British officer in Wejh had thought to apprise Gilbert Clayton of the news. Clayton had sent a top-secret directive in reply, one addressed to Lawrence and only two other British officers in Arabia. That directive hadn’t reached Wejh by the time Lawrence had left for Abdullah’s camp, but it was among the correspondence awaiting his return on April 14.
“The move to Aqaba on the part of Faisal,” Clayton had written, “is not at present desirable.” While claiming his main concern was that Faisal not be distracted from operations against the Hejaz Railway, Clayton hinted at the true reason in the letter’s close. “It is questionable whether, in the present circumstances, the presence of an Arab force at Aqaba would be desirable, as it would unsettle tribes which are better left quiet until the time is more ripe.”
Both from his own relationship with Gilbert Clayton, the consummate strategist, and from what he had gleaned in the corridors of the intelligence bureau in Cairo, Lawrence quickly grasped the subtext of the general’s words. He’d been exactly right in his warnings to Faisal in February—the British wanted Aqaba for themselves—but to accomplish that, they didn’t wish to merely put the Arabs in a box; they now didn’t want the Arabs there at all. (In fact, Clayton would soon make this point explicit in a note to Reginald Wingate: “The occupation of Aqaba by Arab troops might well result in the Arabs claiming that place hereafter, and it is by no means improbable that after the war Aqaba may be of considerable importance to the future defence scheme of Egypt. It is thus essential that Aqaba should remain in British hands after the war.”)
On April 14, Lawrence could try to deny the thrust of Clayton’s March 8 directive any way he wished—that with the passage of five weeks, it was now out of date; that merely stating what was or was not “desirable” didn’t rise to the level of an explicit order—but he surely understood the peculiarly oblique nature of British military-speak well enough to know that going ahead with his Aqaba plan now would be seen as a clear contravention of his superior’s wishes. Then again, this was a man who just two months earlier had revealed to Faisal the details of a diplomatic pact so secret that only a handful of people in the upper reaches of the British government knew of its existence.
At some point during that remarkable day of April 14—and most likely when the three of them were alone in Faisal’s tent—Lawrence put his Aqaba proposal to Faisal and Auda. In Auda’s quick and hearty agreement to the proposal was confirmation of what Lawrence had sensed in the chieftain from the outset. “After a moment I knew,” he wrote, “from the force and directness of the man, that we would attain our end. He had come down to us like a knight-errant, chafing at our delay in Wejh, anxious only to be acquiring merit for Arab freedom in his own lands. If his performance was one-half his desire, we should be prosperous and fortunate.”
ON APRIL 18, 1917, just four days after Lawrence’s return to Wejh, a French destroyer slipped from an Italian port and headed southeast into the Mediterranean. On board were the two midlevel government functionaries who, a year previously, had secretly carved the future Middle East into British and French spheres of control and lent their names to the process: Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Their destination was Alexandria, Egypt, and their mission was to bring political order to the region’s rapidly changing military situation.
Or at least so the situation had appeared when the idea of their journey had first been broached several months earlier. Despite a record of dismal stalemate on virtually every battlefront since the start of the war, neither the British or French government had broken itself of the habit of squabbling over the spoils of victory long before victory had been achieved. In early 1917, with General Archibald Murray gearing up for his march into Palestine, their wrangling had inevitably turned to the Middle East.
Intent on defending their imperial claim to Syria, France had launched a two-pronged initiative. The first had been to scrounge up its scant military units in the region for the purpose of attaching them to Murray’s army. When this overture, couched as an act of Entente solidarity, was initially turned down by the British on the pretext that operational planning was too far advanced to allow for their integration, it had triggered furious French charges of betrayal. British commanders on the ground were forced to relent, but not at all happily. “Of course it is impossible to decline to have these French troops,” Murray’s deputy, General Lynden-Bell, confided to a member of the Arab Bureau in mid-March, “but you can imagine what a terrible nuisance they will be to us.”
On the diplomatic front, Paris had also insisted that a French political officer accompany Murray’s army as it advanced into Palestine, a further nuisance, o
f course, but one that London found just as difficult to refuse. When in January France had announced that this political officer was to be Georges-Picot, Britain suddenly found the need to have a political officer of its own to accompany him—and who better than Picot’s old negotiating partner, Mark Sykes?
But this new mission put the MP for Hull in a somewhat tricky spot. During his discussions with Picot over where to draw their lines of Middle Eastern control, Sykes had never felt the need to inform the Frenchman—or any other Frenchman, for that matter—as to how those lines might conflict with commitments already made to King Hussein. Nowhere was this conflict more glaring than in Syria, a land the British had now essentially “sold twice,” recognizing its independence in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, recognizing its domination by France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
This was not an immediate problem so long as Picot remained in France, Hussein’s rebel armies remained in the Hejaz, and the Turks still ruled Syria, but now, with Archibald Murray’s imminent march into Palestine and both Sykes and Picot slated to be in his train, those delicate walls of separation were about to crumble. As he anticipated his trip to Egypt, Mark Sykes could only have foreseen unpleasantness ahead.
But then a rather ingenious solution had come to him. What if, instead of to King Hussein, he brought Georges-Picot before a group of Syrian exiles with no knowledge of the promises made to the Arabs? In their ignorance, these Syrians might be grateful to accept whatever crumbs of limited self-rule the British and French were willing to throw their way, and that gratitude might in turn lead the French to soften their imperialist demands. On February 22, Sykes had written to Reginald Wingate, the British high commissioner to Egypt, asking for his help in organizing just such a delegation of Syrian exiles in Cairo, men with whom he and Picot could discuss the future status of their homeland. Should it be necessary to include a delegate from the Hejaz on the committee, Sykes suggested it be “a venerable and amenable person who will not want to ride or take much exercise.” In a remarkable act of brio, Sykes also thought to enclose with this letter a series of quick sketches he had worked up toward the design of a new rebel flag. (Curiously, it may have been in flag design where Mark Sykes’s true talents lay. King Hussein would eventually adopt one of Sykes’s designs as his own.)
Startled by Sykes’s cynical request, Wingate sent a cable to the Foreign Office pointing out that since it was to King Hussein that Britain had made its commitments, surely it should be Hussein who chose the delegation to meet with Sykes and Picot. Sykes quickly shot down that idea, suggesting to Wingate that “it does not appear necessary to give King Hussein the impression that the future of Syria is to be considered de novo [anew].” In any event, Sykes hinted, the high commissioner was making more of all this than need be. “What we really want are a few men of good standing, representatives of the Arab National Party, to represent the Syrian Moslem point of view, sign manifestos and approve any local arrangements that may be made.”
As a result of these building pressures, it must have come as something of a guilty relief to Mark Sykes when, just as final preparations were being made for his and Picot’s trip to Egypt, news came of Murray’s March 26 setback at Gaza. Surely Murray’s next push would succeed—it was hard to imagine Turkey’s absurd streak of good luck lasting much longer against British might—but in the meantime, the delay would give Sykes time to navigate the complex minefield awaiting him in Cairo.
This minefield was not limited to the Syrian question. Over the past few months, Mark Sykes had been quietly working on another scheme that, if all worked out, would neatly outmaneuver his traveling partner, François Georges-Picot.
Under the original terms of Sykes-Picot, Palestine was to be separated from the rest of Syria and placed under the “international administration” of the three principal Entente powers, Britain, France, and Russia. Within months of coauthoring that arrangement, however, Sykes had seen the opportunity to go a good deal better. By playing to the various Palestinian constituencies—and most especially to Jewish Zionists, with their deep distrust of France and utter hatred for czarist Russia—it might be possible for Britain to scuttle the joint administration idea as unworkable, and to place Palestine under a solely British protectorate. Sykes had been harshly rebuked when he’d floated this idea past the Foreign Office leadership in the spring of 1916—Secretary Grey had instructed him to “obliterate” the thought from his memory—but now, a year later, the notion had flowered anew in Sykes’s fertile mind.
One reason was that Secretary Grey was now a thing of the past, forced out of office with the rest of the Asquith government in December 1916. With its “Western” focus, the Asquith regime had always been wary of diplomatic schemes that might inflame relations with the ever-sensitive French, but that was a lesser concern with the new “Eastern”-tilting administration of David Lloyd George and his foreign minister, Arthur Balfour. Anxious for a breakthrough in the war somewhere—anywhere—they had brought a new emphasis to Eastern operations, and if success there meant stepping on French toes, it was a small price to pay.
Sykes had benefited from another important change in the new government. A chief complaint against the Asquith administration had been its lack of clear and constant direction in the war, and in response Lloyd George had created a so-called War Cabinet, a cabal of just five senior statesmen with sweeping powers to oversee most all aspects of the British military effort. Surely a sign of the new administration’s appetite for creative solutions had been the promotion of Mark Sykes to the position of assistant secretary to the War Cabinet, placed in charge of Middle Eastern affairs.
Just as crucial had been Sykes’s discussions with Aaron Aaronsohn in October and November. Following those conversations, and reanimated to the potential of using Zionism as a pro-British vehicle in Palestine, Sykes had quietly held a series of meetings with British Zionist leaders through the early winter of 1917. These discussions had culminated in an extraordinary conference with a group of leading British “Jewish gentlemen” at a London townhouse on the morning of February 7, 1917; what made this gathering extraordinary was Sykes’s opening announcement that he was there without the knowledge of either the Foreign Office or the War Cabinet, and therefore their discussions had to remain secret. Among the eight men in attendance were Lord Walter Rothschild, former home secretary Herbert Samuel, and a man soon to figure very prominently in Sykes’s Palestine schemes, the incoming president of the English Zionist Federation, Chaim Weizmann.
A forty-three-year-old émigré from czarist Russia, the dynamic, goateed Weizmann was an erstwhile chemistry lecturer at the University of Manchester who over the previous decade had emerged as one of the most articulate and persuasive voices of British Zionism. A prominent figure at international Zionist conferences, he was also intent on converting rhetoric to action; in 1908, he had helped create the Palestine Land Development Company, chartered to buy up agricultural land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. What had most brought Weizmann to the attention of British officials, however, was his work in chemistry. Shortly before his meeting with Sykes, he had developed a revolutionary process to create synthetic acetone, a key component in explosives, and in making his discovery available to the British munitions industry he had won the government’s undying gratitude. (This surely negated any taint that might have attached to his also being the older brother of Minna Weizmann, the erstwhile lover of Curt Prüfer, who had been arrested as a German spy in Egypt in 1915.) Serendipitously, during his tenure at Manchester, Weizmann had also won the sympathies of his local member of Parliament to the Zionist cause; that MP was Arthur Balfour, the new British foreign secretary.
At that February 7 gathering, the British Jewish leaders had emphatically stated precisely what Mark Sykes hoped to hear: that there was simply no way the international Zionist movement in general, nor the Zionist settlers in Palestine in particular, would accept a joint Entente administration in Palestine. To the contrary, all demanded sole Br
itish control of the region, or, as one of the attendees put it, “a Jewish State in Palestine under the British Crown.” In response, Sykes announced his readiness to present the Zionist viewpoint to the War Cabinet. He also suggested that the assembled dignitaries begin lobbying their religious brethren elsewhere to that goal, even “offering to make War Office telegraph facilities available to them so they could communicate secretly with leading Zionists in Paris, Petrograd, Rome and Washington D.C.”
At the same time, the politician from Hull couldn’t quite part with his penchants for blithe optimism and the dissembling statement. As far as Arab sensibilities were concerned, Sykes opined at the February 7 meeting, he could see no objection on their part to increased Jewish settlement in Palestine—an interesting assertion considering that, even at this late date, no Arab was aware the Entente powers had any designs on Palestine at all. (He obviously could not have known Lawrence was just then telling Faisal about the Sykes-Picot accord.) His suspicions undoubtedly aroused by Sykes’s queries on the desirability of a joint administration, Lord Rothschild had then bluntly asked what promises had been made to the French in the region. To this, Sykes made the astonishing reply that “the French have no particular position in Palestine and are not entitled to anything there.” These were just two more faulty assertions—the first perhaps an exercise in wishful thinking, the second an outright lie—to join all the others Mark Sykes had promulgated in recent months, an ever-growing corpus of half-truths and conflicting schemes that even he would soon begin having difficulty keeping straight.
In the meantime, he was clever enough to realize that all was very fluid, that a precipitating event or a changed set of circumstances on the ground might upend everything once again, rendering some of his entanglements moot and giving rise to new opportunities to achieve his goals—as variable as those goals might be. What’s more, as he sailed to Egypt that April, Sykes was about to be reunited with a man who understood the need for bold action: Aaron Aaronsohn.
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