After that meeting with Shalaan, Lawrence returned to his companions waiting in Wadi Sirhan with an iron resolve to compel Britain to uphold her pledges to the Arabs. He would do so by personally leading the Arabs onto an expanded Syrian battlefield, a campaign that would enable them to lay claim to the lands they conquered and thus cheat the French of their imperial designs. “In other words,” Lawrence wrote, “I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.”
This was, he admitted, “an immodest presumption.”
LAWRENCE WASN’T THE only Western intelligence agent afoot in Syria that June. In fact, at one point during his impetuous reconnaissance trek to the north, he came within three miles of crossing paths with his old nemesis, Curt Prüfer.
Since returning from Germany in March, Prüfer had rarely left the comparative comfort of his desk job at the intelligence bureau headquarters in Constantinople. The grand partnership of German government and industry envisioned by Max von Oppenheim had largely withered on the vine, with German businessmen understandably loath to invest in a region grown more destitute and fractured by the day. Prüfer had instead spent much of his time trying to arrange for the publication of a new series of pro-German propaganda pamphlets, only to be beset with niggling queries from Berlin over printing costs and bureaucratic obstacles thrown up by obdurate Ottoman censors.
In mid-May, he decided to break from this tedious routine by conducting an extended inspection tour of the German propaganda centers and libraries that Oppenheim had established across Syria the year before. These field trips were also what made Prüfer a good intelligence agent, providing him with a firsthand view that often conflicted with the sugarcoated communiqués and cables that crossed his desk. Even so, on this outing he was in for a shock.
As often happens in war, by the spring of 1917 the outside world was gaining a rather clearer picture of what was happening inside the Ottoman Empire than the empire’s own inhabitants. Much of that insight was coming from American consular officials who had begun vacating their posts following the break in U.S.-Ottoman diplomatic relations in April. In debriefings in Switzerland and Washington and London, these officials told of a land where hundreds of thousands of civilians had succumbed to disease or starvation, where vast territories were in a state of near-open rebellion, and where army units suffered desertion rates of 25, 30, even 40 percent. The more perceptive of these recent evacuees also reported on the growing friction between Turkish and German military units, a mutual antipathy that had occasionally led to violence, and of the general population’s utter apathy, their most fervent desire simply for the war to end and life to become tolerable again.
Certainly, Prüfer had received glimmers of all this while in Constantinople. Even if downplayed, reports from the field told of food shortages and epidemics, of flagging morale among both the Turkish citizenry and soldiers. But none of that truly prepared Prüfer for the ravages awaiting him when he boarded an interior-bound train at Haidar Pasha station on May 21. Most telling from Prüfer’s standpoint were the deprivations he personally had to endure on this journey. Gone were the special train cars put on for his comfort and the official banquets held in his honor. Instead, and despite being one of the most important German officials in the Middle East, his travel now was aboard packed and dilapidated trains that frequently broke down or were shunted to sidings for hours, even days, for no apparent reason, the only accommodation to be found in filthy and flea-infested hostels. The spare diary he kept of that two-month odyssey, brief entries made in a penciled scrawl, consisted of an almost unbroken litany of complaint.
Adding to Prüfer’s misery, and rather epitomizing the ruin about him, was an intermittent toothache that steadily worsened until his entire jaw was inflamed. A dentist tentatively diagnosed scurvy, a disease now rampant in Syria and caused by a simple vitamin C deficiency. Until two years earlier Syria had been one of the great citrus-growing regions of the world, but in the face of a chronic coal shortage most of its fruit trees had been cut down to provide fuel for train engines.
Yet despite seeing all this with his own eyes, Curt Prüfer seemed determined to miss its import. As he reported to senior diplomats in Berlin, the reason his and Max Oppenheim’s shared dream of pan-Islamic jihad had thus far failed to galvanize the Muslim masses was mostly just a matter of poor communication. “Hysterical propaganda that focuses on enemy atrocities are a waste of time,” he wrote. “The peoples of the Turkish empire aren’t stupid, they know what is going on around them.”
Even with his criticisms, however, Prüfer failed to detect the fissures already cracked open all about him. He had frequently written that the Syrian Arabs were too cowardly to rise up against the Turks, and nothing he saw on this journey caused him to reassess that view. On June 3, while Prüfer was in Damascus, T. E. Lawrence was in a village a mere three miles away, plotting with an Arab nationalist leader on how to bring the Arab Revolt into the Syrian capital. Prüfer had been even more dismissive of the Jewish settlers in Palestine, calling them docile and obedient. June 12 saw the German intelligence chief staying at a crude little hotel in the Palestinian village of Zammarin, just one mile from the Jewish settlement of Zichron Yaakov that was the hub of the NILI spy network.
· · ·
SARAH AARONSOHN’S VISIT to Cairo in mid-April had been planned as a very brief one, a chance to meet with her brother and for the two of them to coordinate NILI’s activities for the coming months. On the next sailing of the Managem, Sarah and her chief NILI deputy, Joseph Lishansky, were to be slipped back ashore at Athlit and the spying campaign resumed. Instead, there had ensued such a string of bad luck—two abortive sailings, a bout of malaria that landed Sarah in a hospital for two weeks—that it seemed an open question whether she and Lishansky would ever get home at all. By the end of May, the pair were right back at their Egyptian starting point.
If Aaron Aaronsohn was understandably frustrated by these delays—he had never intended Joseph Lishansky to leave Athlit in the first place, and the spy network was surely foundering in both his and Sarah’s absence—he was also experiencing a bit of a change of heart. A loner at the best of times, he nevertheless enjoyed his sister’s companionship in Cairo and was coming to rely on her levelheaded advice in his battles with the British bureaucracy. He now decided it would be cruel to return her to Athlit after all. “I do not see the necessity of it,” he confided in his diary on May 31, “now that the most precious time is past.”
Convincing the iron-willed Sarah Aaronsohn of this, however, was an altogether different matter. When her brother broached the idea, her response was immediate and adamant: she was going back to Palestine no matter what. The agronomist tried a different tack. During her stay in Cairo, Sarah had become a familiar figure to many of the British officers her brother associated with, an object of admiration for the very dangerous work she was conducting. At the same time, some of these officers, imbued with an old-fashioned code of chivalry, had hinted to Aaron Aaronsohn that it was a tad unseemly for a woman to continue to face such “manly” perils. This view was most persistently put forward by Aaronsohn’s erstwhile handler, William Edmonds, and Aaronsohn arranged for the EMSIB captain to raise it anew one evening while he and Sarah sat in the lounge of the Continental Hotel.
“Madam,” Edmonds stiffly addressed Sarah, “the High Command has authorized me to thank you very much for all that you have done for us. They urge you not to return to Palestine. Egypt is open to you. You can stay here as long as you wish. What you have done up to now is valuable, and it is enough.”
While thanking the captain for the offer, Sarah Aaronsohn instantly saw through the charade. Turning to her brother, she said, “If you know me, give me the means to return. If you don’t provide them for me, I’ll find my way back myself.”
On June 15, the spy ship Managem sailed
once more. This time it managed to reach Athlit, and both Sarah Aaronsohn and Joseph Lishansky went ashore. When Aaron Aaronsohn got the word, it provoked a complicated reaction, relief and regret intermixed. As events would prove, this latter sentiment was quite justified; he would never see either his sister or Lishansky again.
ON THEIR FAST racing camels, Auda and Lawrence set off ahead of the others to inspect the water wells of Bair. Following behind was the fighting force that had been painstakingly assembled in Wadi Sirhan over the previous three weeks: some five hundred tribal fighters, mostly Howeitat, ready to strike a blow against their Turkish overlords. All had left Wadi Sirhan two days before, June 18, in the highest of spirits.
As a consequence, what Auda and Lawrence discovered at Bair was deeply dispiriting. All three of the oasis’s principal wells had recently been dynamited by the Turks, reduced to heaps of broken stones and still-smoldering timbers. By good luck, the charge they had placed on a fourth well a short distance away had failed to detonate, affording the rebel force just enough water to sustain themselves and their camels, but the larger message was a grim one: the Turks were onto them.
While it might seem counterintuitive, the desert is one of the more difficult places to keep one’s presence a secret. Travelers are wedded to moving between available sources of water, and on a landscape where others are also constantly on the move, crossing a desert is rather akin to traveling a highway possessed of very few side roads. Among the tribes of southeastern Syria, a great many had heard of the rebel force being mustered in Wadi Sirhan by that third week in June, and inevitably, so had the Turks. By blowing the wells at Bair, the first principal water source west of Wadi Sirhan, the Turks hoped to block their enemy’s advance before it even got under way.
While that mission had failed just enough to allow the rebels and their animals to stay alive in Bair, it cast grave doubt over the next proposed leg of their march. Seventy miles to the southwest of Bair stood the crossroads town of Maan, astride the Hejaz Railway and the strategic hub of the entire region. Lawrence’s plan was to skirt below the heavily garrisoned town and continue toward Aqaba, but this scheme was dependent on finding water at Jefer, another series of desert wells just twenty-five miles to the northeast of Maan. The problem was that once the Turks in Maan figured out the rebels were heading for Aqaba—and at this point even “the most civilian owl could not fail to see that”—they could send a demolition team out to destroy the Jefer wells long before the rebels got there.
The key, then, was to devise a screen, to confuse the Turks both as to where the rebels currently were and where they might be headed. From Bair, emissaries were sent to area tribes with word that the rebel force was still organizing itself back in Wadi Sirhan; surely at least one of these tribes would pass this “intelligence” on to the Turks to curry favor. Simultaneously, small units of fighters were dispatched to conduct pinprick attacks throughout the region.
Lawrence had laid some of the groundwork for this screen during his earlier trip north. In early June, he had led a handful of local recruits and blown up a small bridge of the Hejaz Railway north of Damascus; that attack, occurring hundreds of miles from any previous action by the rebels, had so alarmed Turkish authorities that they’d briefly been convinced a local insurrection was about to get under way. For the expanded screening operation out of Bair, Lawrence chose to lead the most ambitious effort himself. On June 21, he and some one hundred fighters struck out from the oasis and made for the railhead town of Amman, 150 miles to the north.
It was to be a peculiar kind of exercise, and one that constantly put Lawrence’s skills of persuasion to the test. Time and again, he had to stay his Arab companions from the pitched battles they desperately craved, reminding them this was meant to be a show of force, a game of bluff in which a destroyed railway culvert sent just as powerful a message to the enemy as a blown‑up train. This wasn’t at all the way the Arab tribesmen thought battle should be joined, but as they were scant in number and dependent on mobility, Lawrence was determined that they avoid protracted firefights or anything else that might delay their quick return to Bair. This imperative of speed, however, also had a nasty side effect; simply put, this was a force with neither the time nor the capacity to deal with prisoners.
While preparing the ambush on the Turkish garrison at Aba el Naam three months earlier, Lawrence and his companions had been inadvertently discovered by a wandering shepherd boy. Fearing the boy would alert the Turks to their presence if released, but with the shepherd increasingly distraught at being separated from his flock, the ambush party had finally resorted to a somewhat comical solution: they tied the boy to a tree for the duration of the battle, then cut him free as they fled. In their hit-and-run operations around Amman, the raiders hadn’t the luxury of such consideration.
On one occasion, they encountered a traveling Circassian merchant. Unable to take him along as a prisoner but reluctant to let him go— most Circassians were Turkish sympathizers—many in the raiding party argued for his quick execution. By way of compromise, they instead stripped the man naked and sliced the soles of his feet open with a dagger. “Odd as was the performance,” Lawrence noted mildly, “it seemed effective and more merciful than death. The cuts would make him travel to the railway on hands and knees, a journey of an hour, and his nakedness would keep him in the shadow of the rocks till the sun was low.” While the Circassian’s ultimate fate is unknown, the merciful aspects of leaving a naked and crippled man out in the Syrian desert in June might reasonably be debated.
By the time the raiding party returned to Bair, Lawrence had every reason to feel confident. In response to their disinformation effort, the Turks had just dispatched a four-hundred-man cavalry unit to hunt down the phantom rebel force in Wadi Sirhan. Over the previous week, the Arabs had carried out a series of hit-and-run strikes across the length of southern Syria with no discernible pattern. By now, the Turks surely thought the next attack could come most anywhere, and were distracted from the still-distant target of Aqaba. With such confidence, the rebel force moved on the water wells of Jefer.
Sure enough, the Turks had destroyed the Jefer wells too, but with only slightly more efficiency than they’d shown at Bair. One of the wells was only partially collapsed, and a daylong repair effort restored it to use. While that project was under way, Lawrence received the most remarkable news of all.
A few days earlier, a flying column had been sent to rally the tribes residing in the foothills to the southwest of Maan and in the direction of Aqaba. Together, they had attacked the Turkish blockhouse at Fuweila, occupying a high point astride the Maan-Aqaba road. Initially that attack had accomplished little, the tribesmen easily driven off by the entrenched soldiers, but then the Turks in Fuweila had launched a reprisal raid. Falling on a nearby Howeitat settlement, they had cut the throats of everyone they found: one old man and a dozen women and children. Blind with rage, the Arab warriors had renewed their assault on the Fuweila blockhouse, overrun it, and slaughtered every soldier within. As a result, one of the chief Turkish strongpoints on the Aqaba road was suddenly gone, the path over the mountains virtually clear. Scrambling to action, the rebel force in Jefer raced for Fuweila.
Their excitement was to be short-lived. As they skirted below Maan on the afternoon of July 1, word came that a relief force of some 550 Turkish soldiers had left Maan en route to Fuweila that morning. That force was now somewhere on the road ahead of them.
It placed Lawrence in a deep quandary. With their greater mobility, the Arabs might be able to get ahead of the relief column and continue on toward Aqaba, but that would mean leaving a sizable Turkish force, already on the march, close behind them on the Wadi Itm trail—in effect, almost the precise scenario that Lawrence had persistently warned would be the result of an amphibious landing. There really was only one choice: to find the Turkish relief column and destroy it.
IT HAD BEEN nearly four years since William Yale sailed from New York harbor aboard SS Impera
tor, a “playboy” embarked on a tour of the Holy Land should any of his fellow passengers ask. Now, in mid-June 1917, he was returning to a city in the grips of a patriotic frenzy. Across Manhattan, buildings were festooned with enormous American flags, windows were framed with red-white-and-blue bunting, and a fevered excitement still carried on the air two months after President Wilson had brought the country into the war.
One reason for the sustained excitement may have been that it was still a long way off before war’s more disagreeable aspects—specifically, dead and maimed soldiers—would begin to intrude on the festivities. Since 1914, Wilson had deliberately kept the American army near its paltry peacetime size as a roundabout way to defeat the interventionists; after all, with a standing army of just over 120,000 soldiers, about one-twentieth the size of any of the major European powers, what could the United States possibly contribute to the war effort? Most estimates were that it would be up to a year before an American army—now slated to grow to well over one million—might contribute to the European battlefield in any significant way.
Further slowing matters was evidence that, beyond the flag-waving, the American public was showing a marked hesitancy in signing on for the fighting and dying. Wilson had been under the impression that his high-blown rhetoric alone would serve to bring a flood of volunteers to the army recruitment centers, but it seems most of his countrymen got lost somewhere between his old boast that the United States was “too proud to fight” and his new exhortation that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” By mid-May 1917, fewer than 100,000 young men had enlisted for this crusade, leading to the enactment of a draft law for the first time since the American Civil War. Consequently, when Yale stepped off his ship in New York harbor that June, one of his first errands was to register with the local Selective Service board.
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