“Please tell Monsieur Picot,” Sykes ended his May 5 cable to Wingate, “that I am satisfied with my interview with Faisal and the King, as they both now stand at the same point as was reached at our last joint meeting with the 3 Syrian delegates in Cairo.”
What Mark Sykes didn’t know, of course, was that in Faisal ibn Hussein he had been speaking with a man quite aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement—courtesy of T. E. Lawrence—and in no way did Sykes’s vague and generalized discussion of that pact on May 2 match up with what the Arab leader already knew. Nevertheless, whether hewing to the Arab negotiating tradition of not tipping one’s hand until absolutely necessary, or worried that Lawrence would be exposed as his source, Faisal had not confronted the diplomat over his obfuscations at the time.
Not that he was in any better position to do so when Sykes stopped back by on May 7. Faisal’s knowledge of the true framework of Sykes-Picot, as opposed to the bastardized version Sykes had chosen to tell him, was the great and dangerous secret that he and Lawrence shared, and to reveal it now could only invite disaster: for Faisal, estrangement and perhaps abandonment by his British benefactors; for Lawrence, immediate transfer and probable court-martial.
On the other hand, Lawrence did have sanctioned knowledge of Sykes-Picot, which meant he on his own could confront Sykes over the sanitized version told to Faisal—and, presumably, to Hussein. All indications are that Lawrence provoked just such a confrontation. Neither man was to make record of their meeting in Wejh, but it appears to have been a highly contentious one. From that day on, Lawrence’s attitude toward Sykes would be hostile. For his part, Sykes would miss few chances to try to denigrate or marginalize Lawrence in any way he could.
On a more personal level, it seems that encounter with Sykes in Wejh came to simultaneously haunt Lawrence and to provide a certain kind of relief. He stood vindicated in not trusting in the honor of his government, and in imparting to Faisal its secret plan to betray the Arab cause. To whatever degree his conscience had been bothered by that decision, in the slippery schemes of Mark Sykes it was now cleansed.
At the same time, he appreciated that in his countryman was a particularly formidable rival. By comparison, Édouard Brémond was easy, his various schemes made predictable by his singular pursuit of French hegemony. Mark Sykes, by contrast, was a man ruled by whim, who didn’t feel bound by—perhaps at times didn’t even remember—the myriad promises that tripped so easily from his lips. He was able to stay ahead of it all by a talent for deceit, but since he was in a position of power, pulling the levers from Jeddah to London and all points in between, at the end of the day there would probably be no final appeal to British ideals of honor or justice, all would be sacrificed to convenience. The only recourse for the Arabs, then, was to try to change the facts on the ground, to strike a blow that might upend the plans of the dealmakers.
It was with such thoughts that, two days later, Lawrence set out on the long and dangerous trek toward Aqaba. For what would soon become one of the most audacious and celebrated military exploits of World War I, his accompanying “army” consisted of fewer than forty-five Arab warriors.
Chapter 13
Aqaba
Never doubt Great Britain’s word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear.
KING HUSSEIN TO HIS SON FAISAL, MAY 1917
His Sherifial Majesty [King Hussein] evidently suffers from the defects of character and ignorance of system common to Oriental potentates.… The task of guiding an Oriental ruler or government in the way they should go is no light one—as I know to my cost—and you have my fullest sympathy. It must be heartbreaking work at times.
REGINALD WINGATE TO CYRIL WILSON, JULY 20, 1917
It was a moment when the awful burden of leadership fell upon Lawrence as if a great weight, reminiscent of what had occurred in Wadi Kitan two months earlier. Then, the mantle of authority had required him to execute a man. Now it required him to try to save one, but quite possibly to lose his own life in the effort.
It was midmorning on May 24, his party’s fifth day in El Houl. Arabic for “the Terror,” El Houl is a vast trackless and waterless expanse in northern Arabia empty of even the smallest signs of life, and Lawrence had dreaded that leg of their journey to Syria ever since leaving Wejh. Reality had been worse than the imagining. Within hours of entering El Houl, the forty-five-man caravan had been buffeted by a ferocious headwind, “a half-gale,” in Lawrence’s estimation, “so dry that our shriveled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped.” The wind, and the burning, blinding sand it kicked up, continued almost without pause for the next four days.
To endure in such situations, humans tend to retreat into a kind of closed-off mental state, their entire focus honed to simply trying to reach the end. Such was the case with Lawrence and Auda’s party in El Houl, so much so that on the morning of May 24, no one seemed to take note of the riderless camel padding alongside the others. Perhaps they assumed she was one of the baggage camels that traditionally lagged behind, or that her rider had switched to another camel and was to be found elsewhere along their extended line. Most likely, in their semihibernative states they simply couldn’t be roused to care. When finally Lawrence investigated the mysterious camel, he discovered it was the mount of Gasim.
“A fanged and yellow-faced outlaw,” Gasim was a native of the Syrian city of Maan, and Lawrence had brought him along on the trek in hopes that he might make contact with other Arab nationalists in his hometown. Of course, this also made Gasim an outsider among the traveling Howeitat and Ageyl tribesmen and, in the harsh code of the desert, just as friendless in a crisis as the condemned Hamed had been at Wadi Kitan. As Lawrence recounted, Gasim’s status now “shifted the difficulty to my shoulders.”
Perhaps indicative of the stress El Houl had put on his own reasoning skills, Lawrence made a most foolhardy decision, not only to go back alone in search of Gasim, but not even to tell the others he was doing so. Within a very short distance, he discovered, all trace of their path had vanished, the camels’ tracks in the sand swept away by the scouring wind, and then the caravan itself receded until it was lost in the murk. To somehow find Gasim and then return to the caravan, Lawrence could only rely on the compass readings he’d periodically noted in his diary and trust he hadn’t erred.
It was fifteen days since they had set out. In Bedouin tradition, a number of tribal chiefs, including Faisal, had accompanied them the first few miles out of Wejh by way of farewell, and then the forty-five or so travelers had headed off into the northeastern darkness, the last anyone in the Hejaz would hear of them for over two months.
They traveled light. Along with a few rifles and 20,000 gold sovereigns—to be disbursed among Syrian tribal leaders they hoped to win to the rebel cause—each man carried in his saddlebags some forty-five pounds of flour. That and water would be their staples until they reached their initial staging ground, the Wadi Sirhan depression on the Syrian frontier, in an estimated three weeks’ time.
Despite being struck by a new round of fever and boils, Lawrence would recall the first days of that journey in almost idyllic terms, the beginning of a great adventure. It was also during this time that there occurred one of the more intriguing side stories to his time in Arabia, the account of how he came to obtain his two camp orderlies, given the names Daud and Farraj in Seven Pillars (their actual names were Ali and Othman).
It occurred during a day of idleness when, as Lawrence rested his weary boil-covered body in the shadow of a rock escarpment, a young boy rushed up beseeching his help. Having fled from a nearby Ageyl encampment, Daud offered that his best friend, Farraj, was about to be severely beaten by the camp commander for accidentally burning down a tent; a word from Lawrence, the boy suggested, might stay the punishment. That theory was discredited when Lawrence took the matter up with the passing Ageyl camp commander, Saad, a few moments later. Explaining that the two boys were constantly getting into trouble and that an example had to be made, Saad inste
ad offered a Solomon-like solution in deference to Lawrence’s appeal: Daud could halve his friend’s punishment by submitting to the other half himself. “Daud leaped at the chance,” Lawrence wrote, “kissed my hand and Saad’s and ran off up the valley.”
In Seven Pillars, Lawrence would strongly suggest that the Farraj-Daud relationship was a sexual one, describing it as “an instance of the eastern boy-and-boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable.” In the process, Lawrence was to add to speculations—still a point of heated debate in some circles nearly a century later—about his own sexuality. Much of that speculation stems from his description of the “two bent figures, with pain in their eyes, but crooked smiles upon their lips,” who showed up at his camp the next morning and begged to be taken on as his servants:
“These were Daud the hasty and his love-fellow, Farraj, a beautiful, soft-framed, girlish creature, with innocent smooth face and swimming eyes.” After first trying to turn the boys away, explaining he had no need of servants, Lawrence finally relented, “mainly because they looked so young and clean.” From that day on, the mischievous antics of Daud and Farraj would provide lighthearted relief to Lawrence’s travels.
But already in these early days of the journey, the party faced a worrisome problem. Virtually all their camels, both the baggage and mounted ones, suffered from the virulent mange endemic to Wejh, and without even the rudimentary unguents to control it—butter was a traditional desert remedy—many were quickly going lame or mad from it. The epidemic may have contributed to the deaths of two of the baggage camels that, during a climb through a particularly narrow defile, lost their footing and plunged to the rocks below. None of this bode well as they came to the edge of El Houl.
“In all Faisal’s stud of riding-camels,” Lawrence noted, “there was not one healthy. In our little expedition every camel was weakening daily. [Auda’s chief lieutenant] Nasir was full of anxiety lest many break down in the forced march before us and leave their riders stranded in the desert.”
The torturous nature of the passage across El Houl was reflected in the small pocket diary Lawrence carried. Instead of the voluminous notes he normally kept on his travels, the few short fragments he managed there grew steadily more disjointed, almost nonsensical. And then, on the fifth day, Gasim disappeared.
In deciding to turn back for the lost man, Lawrence surely knew that Gasim was probably already dead; for anyone caught out in El Houl without shelter or water at that time of year, life expectancy could be measured in terms of hours. He surely also knew that if he’d made the slightest miscalculation in his compass readings, he too would soon expire. Still, he persevered—and finally, he was lucky. After an hour and a half of riding, he spotted a small black object in the far distance, an object that, as he approached, took the form of a staggering and delirious Gasim. Hoisting the man onto the back of his own camel, Lawrence turned and raced to find the others.
In David Lean’s epic film, the rescue of Gasim would be immortalized in a ten-minute scene, culminating in Lawrence finally rejoining his comrades to their relieved and raucous cheers, his noble act cementing his image as a true “son of the desert.” The reality was quite different. By the code of this brutal landscape, Gasim had brought his death upon himself by having failed to secure his camel when he stopped to relieve himself, and, rather than praised, Lawrence was berated by some of his comrades for having risked his life for one clearly so worthless. Furthermore, the caravan commander now administered another beating to Daud and Farraj for letting Lawrence go back alone.
ON MAY 26, 1917, two days after Lawrence’s rescue of Gasim, King George V and his War Cabinet received some gladdening news. It came in the form of a top-secret cable from Reginald Wingate in Cairo, a report on Mark Sykes’s latest triumphant visit to Arabia.
Following on Sykes’s earlier solo visit, he and his French diplomatic counterpart, François Georges-Picot, had recently met with King Hussein in Jeddah in hopes of thrashing out a settlement between the Arabs and the French over the future status of Syria. Since their desires were almost diametrically opposed—Hussein still insisting that postwar Syria be part of a greater independent Arab nation, the French just as insistent that it come under French control—there had been little expectation of success. The first day’s session confirmed this prognosis. After a tense three-hour confrontation on May 19, Picot and Hussein had parted ways even more intransigent than before.
It came as a shock, therefore, when the following morning Hussein had his interpreter read aloud to the European envoys a bold proposal: the king was now ready to accept the same future French role in the “Moslem-Syrian littoral”—presumably meaning the coastal, Lebanon portion of Syria—as the British were to assume in the Iraqi province of Baghdad. Since a victorious British army had recently placed Baghdad under military occupation, and the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement called for keeping the province under direct British control indefinitely, this Baghdad-Lebanon equation of Hussein’s had the effect of suddenly ceding to the French most everything they were asking for in Lebanon. As Sykes reported to Wingate with what could only have been gross understatement, “Monsieur Picot received this very well and relations became cordial.”
It was a remarkable achievement. Against all odds, Sykes had managed to make a crucial first cut through the great Gordian knot created by Britain’s conflicting pacts and promises in the Middle East.
Yet for those familiar with Sykes’s modus operandi there was something about this breakthrough that should have given pause. In contrast to his usual prolixity on all manner of topics, his full report on the Jeddah meetings, the most important diplomatic discussions between the Allies and King Hussein to date, ran a mere four pages, with Hussein’s startling Lebanon concession dealt with in a single sentence. Additionally, neither Sykes nor Picot had pressed Hussein to commit his offer to paper, nor had they managed to obtain a copy of the pledge the king’s interpreter had read aloud. Even those senior officials in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs who had been fervently wishing for just such a resolution quickly began to suspect there was something altogether too neat about the deal struck in Jeddah.
Those concerns took tangible form when Stewart Newcombe arrived in Cairo on May 27 and walked into Gilbert Clayton’s office. Both he and Cyril Wilson had been present for at least some of the proceedings in Jeddah, and had written up their own accounts of what had taken place. Newcombe also brought the written account of Fuad al-Kutab, Hussein’s interpreter and the man who had actually presented the proposal. While they differed in specifics, all three indicated it had actually been Mark Sykes, not Hussein, who had first come up with the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. More troubling, the king appeared to have come away with a radically different idea from the Allied envoys of what that formula meant.
The most exercised over the matter was Cyril Wilson. “Although Sykes and Picot were very pleased at this happy result,” he wrote, “and the Sherif had made the [Lebanon-Baghdad] proposition himself, I did not feel happy in my own my mind, and it struck me as possible that the Sherif, one of the most courteous of men, absolutely loyal to me and with complete faith in Great Britain, was verbally agreeing to a thing which he never would agree to if he knew our interpretation of what the Iraq situation is to be.”
In his distressed—and rather repetitive—twelve-page letter to Clayton, Wilson detailed how he had repeatedly pressed Sykes to clarify exactly what Hussein intended by the offer, only to have his concerns brushed aside. Instead, Wilson reported, the entire affair had been marked by a breezy refusal on Sykes’s part to get into particulars.
If less emotional, Newcombe’s protest was in many ways more striking. His time in the Hejaz had been a difficult one, he had little faith in the Arab rebels as a viable fighting force, and yet the episode in Jeddah had left him perturbed. Central to his apprehensions was a conversation he’d had with Hussein’s son Faisal, who had also been in Jeddah during the envoys’ visit. In making his startling
offer, Newcombe reported, “[Hussein] stated to Faisal very vehemently that he was perfectly willing to do this because Sir Mark Sykes, representing the British government, had told him to, and that as Sir Mark Sykes had advised him to leave everything in [his] hands, he felt glad to do so, having absolute trust in the British government.”
From Newcombe’s vantage point as a British officer, this assurance by Sykes, conjoined to Hussein’s obviously limited awareness of what he was agreeing to, meant the British government now had a moral obligation to see the Arab Revolt through to the end. “Otherwise we are hoodwinking the Sherif and his people, and playing a very false game in which [British] officers attached to the Sherif’s army are inevitably committed, and which I know causes anxiety in several officers’ minds in case we let them down.”
For all their unease, however, Wilson and Newcombe were either too diplomatic to call Sykes out directly, or too credulous to piece the whole scheme together. In actual fact, what had occurred in Jeddah was not a potential misunderstanding, but an intricate and very cleverly executed deception on Mark Sykes’s part.
The cornerstone for that deception had been laid three weeks earlier, during Sykes’s first visit to Arabia. In his similarly spare report of that trip, Sykes asserted that he had fully explained the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Hussein and Faisal, and won their grudging acceptance. While that wasn’t at all Faisal’s assessment of their meeting, the British envoy could be confident that British officialdom would surely take his word—a sitting member of Parliament and a baronet no less—over that of an erratic Arab tribal chieftain and his warrior son. Of course, there was at least one other person who knew that Sykes had lied about his candor during that first trip, and whom British officialdom just might listen to. This was T. E. Lawrence, but to Sykes’s good fortune, Lawrence had now fallen from view, embarked on his northern trek, and he remained totally incommunicado during Sykes’s crucial return visit to Jeddah with Picot.
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