It seems Sykes was inspired to his master deception by pondering the very issue that had made such a mess of the initial Picot-Hussein meeting on May 19: Picot’s insistence that France enjoy the same role in coastal Syria as the British were to assume in Baghdad. At the time, Sykes had been deeply irritated by this linkage—he wanted to keep French and British desiderata in the Middle East quite separate—and he had left the discussions in a dispirited mood. However, once back on HMS Northbrook, the British warship that had brought the envoys to Jeddah and upon which they were staying, an obvious solution to his dilemma apparently occurred to Sykes.
The reason Hussein was resisting the Lebanon-Baghdad linkage was simply because he didn’t want any French presence anywhere, not because he somehow knew Baghdad was slated to fall under permanent British control. The only way Hussein could have known that was if Sykes had told him of that clause in Sykes-Picot, and Sykes most certainly had not.
Instead, the last word Hussein had on British intentions in Baghdad was the vague accord he had reached with High Commissioner Henry McMahon back in late 1915. In their back-and-forth correspondence, McMahon had argued that, in light of Britain’s economic interests in Iraq, the provinces of Basra and Baghdad would require “special administrative arrangements” within the future Arab nation, implying some measure of British control. In response, Hussein had offered to leave those provinces under British administration “for a short time,” provided that “a suitable sum [was] paid as compensation to the Arab kingdom for the period of occupation.” From all this, Sykes surmised, Hussein still held to the belief that any British presence in Iraq was to be along the lines of a short-term leasing arrangement, but that those provinces’ ultimate inclusion in the greater independent Arab nation was secure. Indeed, on several recent occasions, Hussein had enigmatically assured his closest confidants, including both Faisal and Fuad al-Kutab, that he had an ironclad British promise about Iraq’s future “in his pocket,” even as he refused to show them the actual letters from McMahon.
To Sykes, it opened up a tantalizing prospect. Between Hussein’s ignorance of Sykes-Picot, and Picot’s ignorance of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, it might be possible to forge an agreement in which both sides thought they were gaining the upper hand. The ultimate beauty there was that with both sides believing they’d essentially tricked the other, neither would want to risk scuttling the deal by getting into specifics. On that same afternoon of May 19, Sykes sent an urgent message ashore from the Northbrook asking that Fuad al-Kutab visit him.
At that meeting, Sykes impressed on Fuad the need to limit Hussein’s overtures on the following day to just two points. The first, little more than a goodwill gesture, was for Hussein to announce that he would withhold support from a group of Syrian exiles who were soon to embark on an international lobbying campaign for Arab independence. The second, and obviously vastly more important, was for Hussein to cede to the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. To the nonplussed al-Kutab, Sykes was reassuring, repeatedly telling the advisor to leave the matter in his hands and he would see to everything.
Even so, Hussein was wary of agreeing to the plan. He finally relented, al-Kutab related, because “he knows that Sir Mark Sykes can fight for the Arabs better than he himself in political matters, and knows that Sir Mark Sykes speaks with the authority of the British government and will therefore be able to carry out his promises.” Besides, Hussein reminded al-Kutab once more, he had “a letter from Sir Henry McMahon which promises all I wish. This I know is alright, as the British government will fulfill her word.”
The following morning, Fuad delivered Hussein’s proclamation as directed. That afternoon, as the Northbrook sailed out of Jeddah harbor, Georges-Picot could believe France had just been handed Lebanon, while King Hussein could believe he had just maneuvered France into accepting the future independence of all of Syria.
Even if not grasping the fraud that had been perpetrated, Wilson and Newcombe were sufficiently appalled by Sykes’s cavalier approach to demand a full accounting in their letters to Clayton. Wilson urged that Sykes be compelled to put in writing what he believed had been agreed to in Jeddah, and that Hussein be told precisely what British intentions truly were. “If we are not going to see the Sherif through,” Wilson wrote, “and we let him down badly after all his trust in us, the very ‘enviable’ post of Pilgrimage Officer at Jeddah will be vacant, because I certainly could not remain.”
But when it came to political gamesmanship, the Arabs were not necessarily rubes themselves. With his secret knowledge of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, courtesy of Lawrence, Faisal was understandably aghast at what his father had agreed to, and quickly sought to turn the tables. On May 28, he issued a public proclamation to the Syrian people calling them to arms in the cause of Arab independence, while heaping praise on Great Britain for her aid in that mission. “Doubtless in doing so,” Faisal wrote, “her sole object is to see in the world an independent Arab government, established and administered by the Arabs, without any modification of the boundaries of its country.” The French came in for similar treatment. After thanking France for her past contributions in Syria, Faisal noted that “we are deeply grateful to her for having joined her Ally in recognizing our independence.”
Far from an accord, then, the real result of Sykes’s charade in Jeddah was a deepening of the gulf between Arab and Allied aspirations in the Middle East, a schism that was soon to have very ugly and lasting repercussions. In the interim, British policymakers reverted to the strategy they knew best: do nothing, see what comes next, and hope that it all works out in the end. When asked about Faisal’s proclamation, so at odds with the agreement ostensibly reached days earlier, Sykes shrugged it off as a propaganda ploy meant for domestic Arab consumption. When Clayton finally got around to taking Wilson’s and Newcombe’s complaints to Sykes, it was with an escape clause built in. “I do not attach very great importance to this,” he wrote of Hussein’s apparent confusion, “as I think that events will be too strong for him and that, in the end, he will have to fall in line, or fall out.”
One man who wouldn’t let things drop was the dogged Cyril Wilson. In late June 1917, fully a month after he’d first sent his complaints to Cairo and received no satisfaction, he wrote to Reginald Wingate’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Symes, urging that Sykes be made to write out a “short statement of fact” on exactly what had been agreed to at Jeddah. As Wilson pointedly noted, “there cannot be any harm in writing a fact [sic] which Sir Mark Sykes, I understand, states he clearly explained to the Sherif.”
But paper trails had already caused enough problems in the Middle East, and Symes saw no reason to add to them. “The whole question is at present in a state of flux,” he answered Wilson, “and depends entirely on various developments in the war. It is therefore quite impossible to lay down anything in the least definite, and all we can do is to keep the various factions in play so far as possible until the situation becomes more clear. It is a difficult position, I know, but there it is.”
On a pathetic note, perhaps the stoutest defender of British honor in the wake of the Jeddah meetings was the man most victimized by them, King Hussein. Upon learning of the overture made on the decks of the Northbrook, Faisal got into a heated argument with his father, until Hussein finally cut him off with a rebuke: “These words are from a father to his son. Never doubt Great Britain’s word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear.”
· · ·
IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a refuge, but Lawrence saw it very differently: a place of torment and pestilence, a nightmarish landscape to be escaped as soon as possible.
Running in a northwest-to-southeast diagonal through the borderlands of Arabia and Syria (modern-day Jordan), the two-hundred-mile-long Wadi Sirhan is more properly a geological depression, a hundred-million-year-old narrow drainage valley for when this desolate corner of the world had abundant water. In 1917, the wadi was where Auda Abu Tayi arranged to have his Howeitat kinsmen assemble to
meet the tiny force he and Lawrence were bringing up from Wejh.
As Lawrence noted in Seven Pillars, with its ample water wells and relative lushness, Wadi Sirhan should have seemed a veritable paradise after their crossing of El Houl. Instead, at least two aspects made the place barely tolerable. The first was its poisonous snakes. There were horned vipers and puff adders and cobras, and they seemed to be everywhere—tucked beneath rocks, draped on bushes, coiled at water’s edge—and as a man with an almost phobic fear of snakes, Lawrence never found a moment of true peace. Not that his fears were all that irrational; within days of arriving in Wadi Sirhan, three of the men who had made the passage from Wejh were dead from snakebites, and four others nearly so. Neither did the local “remedy” inspire much confidence, consisting as it did of binding a victim’s wound with snakeskin plaster and then reciting Koranic verses over him until he died.
Then there were the banquets. Wadi Sirhan constituted the lower reaches of the domain of Nuri Shalaan, one of the most powerful tribal chieftains of southern Syria, and Auda had immediately set off to meet with Shalaan and gain his permission for the rebels’ presence there. This left Lawrence to stand as one of the chief guests of honor at the nightly feasts of rice and mutton put on by the gathered Howeitat clans. As any westerner who has been their guest might attest, Bedouin hospitality can be so overwhelming as to border on the oppressive, and so it quickly became for Lawrence. Each night, different impoverished families competed to play host to the travelers from Wejh, and in Lawrence’s lavish description of these banquets, what starts out as colorfully folkloric gradually veers toward the grotesque, especially when he lingers on the image of swollen-bellied children gathered at the periphery of the feasts, anxiously awaiting their chance to swoop in and snatch up any leavings from the communal tray.
“The landscape was of a hopelessness and sadness deeper than all the open deserts we had crossed,” Lawrence wrote. “Sand or flint or a desert of bare rocks was exciting sometimes, and in certain lights had the monstrous beauty of sterile desolation; but there was something sinister, something actively evil in this snake-devoted Sirhan.”
But Lawrence’s torments went beyond reptiles and too much mutton. In those quiet days of waiting, with more and more tribes coming in to negotiate their alliance with the rebel emissaries, he became acutely aware of the cloak of deception he wore.
It was a deception that operated on multiple levels. On the day they had set out from Wejh, most of Lawrence’s companions knew only the official reason for their journey: to rally the Syrian tribes and prepare for Faisal’s advance north. Knowledge of the concrete objective, the capture of Aqaba, was held by only a very small handful of men. Indeed, it’s possible the full plan was known only to Lawrence, that even Auda and Faisal hadn’t the complete picture.
His romantic reputation aside, Auda was essentially a desert raider and, as such, primarily interested in plunder. Since there would be precious little by way of loot in Aqaba, Lawrence may well have kept matters vague at the outset, operating on the premise that at some point during the expedition he could convince Auda that Aqaba’s capture would serve his long-term interests better than whatever more obvious spoils lay close to hand. As for Faisal, in the wake of Lawrence’s departure from Wejh, he once again lobbied his British advisors for an early advance on Aqaba. Perhaps this was a ruse on Faisal’s part, a way to further mask Lawrence’s true destination from his colleagues, but it seems equally likely that the Arab leader did so because he hadn’t been apprised of precisely what that destination was. Of course, these were mere tactical deceptions, made necessary by the exigencies of war, but it meant the ultimate onus of leadership—not to mention of possible failure and the catastrophe this would unleash on those around him—rested on Lawrence’s shoulders alone.
What made all this infinitely more burdensome was the greater deception that lay beyond: the planned betrayal of the Arabs at the Allies’ hands. It seems Lawrence had only grasped the full scope of this double cross at his meeting with Mark Sykes just before his departure from Wejh, and it clearly weighed heavily on him on the journey north. Of this, Lawrence obviously could confide even less in his traveling companions, and his sense of guilt became overwhelming in the face of the endless stream of tribal delegations coming into Wadi Sirhan to join the fight for Arab independence.
“They saw in me a free agent of the British Government,” he wrote, “and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward.” It was a role that left Lawrence “continually and bitterly ashamed,” for “it was evident from the beginning that if we won the war, these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest advisor of the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff.”
But of course Lawrence could do no such thing. As an alternative, he chose to remove himself from the scene. “Can’t stand another day here,” he jotted in his journal on June 5. “Will ride N[orth] and chuck it.”
The choice of phrase, “chuck it,” was an interesting one, for what Lawrence now proposed was a trek into the heart of Turkish-held Syria, a journey so hazardous as to be practically suicidal. In Seven Pillars, he would attempt to rationalize this decision by explaining that he wished to venture into the north to “sound its opinions and learn enough to lay definite plans. My general knowledge of Syria was fairly good, and some parts I knew exactly, but I felt that one more sight of it would put straight the ideas of strategic geography given me by the Crusades.”
Implicit in this quest was the hope, slender though it might be, that if the Arab Revolt could be raised in the Syrian heartland, the imperialist designs of France might yet be subverted. Pressing up against this hope, though, was the far likelier outcome: that in revolt, the Syrians would fight and die for a cause already lost.
Lawrence’s anguish at the situation was evident in the scribbled message he wrote Gilbert Clayton in the margin of his notebook. “Clayton. I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way. For all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes any further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.” Figuring the notebook would eventually find its way into British hands should he die on his mission, Lawrence left the notebook in Wadi Sirhan and set off for the north in the company of just two guides.
It was to be perhaps his most audacious exploit of the entire war, a circuitous four-hundred-mile tour through enemy territory that carried him to the border of Lebanon and to the very outskirts of Damascus. The feat would win him a nomination for the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military decoration, yet also endure as one of the most mysterious and least-documented episodes in Lawrence’s life. This was very deliberately so. The sole report he would eventually submit to his superiors in Cairo recounting the odyssey would run to just four pages. In Seven Pillars, a 650-page book studded with exhaustive disquisitions on the flora and geological features of obscure desert basins, Lawrence’s northern expedition is dispensed with in a few paragraphs and derided “as barren of consequence as it was unworthy of motive.”
What is known about that journey is that, time and again, Lawrence secretly met with prospective allies in the Arab Revolt—tribal leaders and urban nationalists—only to be greeted with profound hesitation. It was the classic conundrum of guerrilla warfare: Faisal’s rebels needed local support to pave their way into Syria, but the locals couldn’t reasonably be asked to rise up without the aid and armed support of the rebels. In that riddle, and in how terribly wrong events could go if the right balance wasn’t achieved, Lawrence felt the weight of his and Britain’s deceit more keenly than ever.
From both a political and personally defining standpoint, Lawrence’s most consequential encounter came toward the end of his journey, when he stopped in Azraq, a desert oasis in southeastern Syria, to meet with Emir Nuri Shalaan. Testament to Shalaan’s preeminence in th
e region, it was to him that Auda Abu Tayi had sped weeks earlier seeking permission to use Wadi Sirhan as a gathering point for his Howeitat tribesmen. Since even before the Arab Revolt began, King Hussein had sent emissaries to Shalaan in an attempt to win him and his vast Rualla tribe to the cause, and for just as long the emir had nimbly danced along the knife’s edge, hinting he might soon be ready to join the rebellion, only to then nudge back toward the Ottoman side. It wasn’t just his authority that made Shalaan an imposing figure, however; in Lawrence’s hand, the chieftain appeared almost the spectral personification of death itself:
“Very old, livid, and worn, with a gray sorrow and remorse upon him, and a bitter smile the only mobility of his face. Upon his coarse eyelashes the eyelids sagged down in tired folds, through which from the overhead sun, a red light glittered into his eye sockets and made them look like fiery pits in which the man was slowly burning.”
But perhaps this somewhat overwrought description stemmed from something else about Nuri Shalaan. Despite his isolation in the desert, it seemed the Rualla chieftain was well informed on the various promises the British had made to Hussein and other Arab leaders in the Hejaz over the previous two years. By way of taking Lawrence’s measure, Shalaan brought out copies of these conflicting documents, laid them before his visitor, and asked which ones he should believe. “I saw that with my answer I would gain or lose him,” Lawrence recounted, “and in him the outcome of the Arab movement.”
Lawrence counseled that Shalaan should trust in the most recent of the British promises. It seemed to assuage the desert chieftain, but of course simply brought a new measure of guilt to Lawrence’s burdened conscience.
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