The oilman could have harbored few illusions about what lay in store for him—as a twenty-nine-year-old single man with no dependents, draftees didn’t come any more Class I than William Yale—and it was a prospect that filled him with dread. Part of it was that, as opposed to most of his countrymen, he had already seen the hideous face of modern war—not the slaughter in the trenches in France, but the equally grotesque spectacle of civilians dying en masse from starvation and disease in Syria. He’d observed subtler facets of it during his long slow journey across southern Europe to get home: the bread lines that had stretched for blocks in Vienna, the looks of crushing resignation among a company of French soldiers waiting on a train platform for transport to the front. He also undoubtedly saw exactly where military induction would take him. Perched as he was at the upper end of conscription age (thirty in May 1917, raised to forty-five just three months later), in combination with his college education and aristocratic pedigree, he would almost surely be shunted into an officer-training academy. Once there, given his business background and technical expertise, he would just as surely be further shunted along to the supply-and-logistics orbit of the quartermaster’s office. And since the United States had only declared war on Germany, meaning practically everyone was to be sent to the Western Front, Yale would most likely spend his war “career” ticking off checklists at some supply depot well behind the lines in rural France.
This was not at all the future that the ambitious oilman saw for himself, and he was brash enough to believe that the four years he’d just spent in the Ottoman Empire might make him an attractive candidate for a more meaningful position somewhere in the governmental or military hierarchy. After spending a mere weekend at the Yale family’s upstate New York retreat, reuniting with the parents and siblings he hadn’t seen since 1913, William Yale returned to New York City and hit the hustings.
The result was demoralizing. Despite his calling on every business and college acquaintance he could think of, few had any suggestions for where an “Eastern hand” might fit into the larger scheme of things in a nation at war. He called on Socony headquarters at 26 Broadway, figuring that though their Middle Eastern operations were likely to remain suspended for the conflict’s duration, they might find something else overseas for an employee who had served them so loyally and in such difficult circumstances. That plan fell through when, meeting with one of the Socony directors, the pugnacious Yale lambasted the company’s recent decision to stop paying the salaries of their native employees in the Middle East, pointing out that this pittance for a corporation like Socony was life-sustaining for those trapped in the war zone. Alas, Yale discovered after being ordered from the office, his listener had been the author of that directive.
Despairing of finding anything in New York, he went to Washington, D.C., sustained by the thought that in the locus of power, surely someone would appreciate what he had to offer. As his calling card, Yale wrote up a detailed report on all he had seen and heard in Syria. “Three years of war,” he wrote, “have reduced Palestine to a deplorable condition, the villages depleted by military drafts, devastated by cholera, typhus and recurrent fever, and typhoid has resulted in reducing the population [by] probably over 25%.” The situation was even worse in Lebanon, he reported, where, according to one of his Turkish military informants, at least 30,000 civilians had already starved to death, and unconfirmed rumors put the figure at over 100,000.
Of possibly greater interest to his prospective readers was the oilman’s attention to military matters. Yale had clearly put his long rail journey from Jerusalem to Constantinople to good use, listing a number of critical bridges and embankments along the line that, if bombed, would all but cripple the Turks’ ability to bring supplies or reinforcements from Anatolia to Syria or Iraq. He also pinpointed the location of an array of critical German military installations along the route, including a wireless relay station in the Amanus Mountains made conspicuous by the Swiss chalet-style German barracks alongside it. “I saw also German aeroplanes and hospital units going south. One German aeroplane division of twenty-three aeroplanes, I was informed by the German captain in charge, was on its way to Beersheva.” He was even able to report that between 150 and 200 German transport trucks were now carrying supplies to Turkish forces in southern Palestine “over a new military road which connects Jerusalem, Hebron and Beersheba,” while tactfully omitting that this was the same road on which he had overseen construction for Standard Oil in 1914.
In recent weeks, Allied officials had started to glean something of conditions inside the Ottoman Empire from debriefings of the evacuated American consular officers, but these were nothing compared to William Yale’s report. Even if three months out of date, it represented one of the most detailed and reliable analyses of the situation in Syria to emerge since the beginning of the war. On June 27, Yale strode into the State, War and Navy Building (now the Old Executive Office Building) next to the White House and dropped his report off at the offices of the secretary of state himself, Robert Lansing. He followed up with a personal letter to Lansing three days later.
After noting that “the disposition of Palestine will probably be one of the big questions to be decided” in any postwar peace conference, Yale suggested to the secretary that “if the United States of America is to play her part in the solution of a problem so intricate and important, her statesmen must have at their disposition reports of unbiased men who had a first-hand knowledge of the country and its people. It is for such service, whether it be in diplomatic or secret service work, or relief work in Palestine, that I am prepared to resign my present position with the Standard Oil Company of New York, and offer my services to the Government of the United States.”
Perhaps his four years abroad left Yale blind to the complexity—to some minds, the hypocrisy—of the new Wilson doctrine. Yes, the American president fully intended to impose his notion of “a lasting peace” on the warring world—that had been his price for entering the conflict—but, reflective of his nation’s isolationist core, this was to be done while involving the United States in as few long-term foreign entanglements as possible. As a consequence, the very item Yale imagined to be his ace in the hole, his expertise in enabling the United States to “play her part” in the Middle East, was exactly the sort of thing the Wilson administration hoped to avoid. Little surprise, then, that his overture to Lansing was met with a resounding silence. The baffled oilman then drew on an old Yale University contact to funnel his report to the head of the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Department, only to meet the same response.
Out of desperation, Yale played what must have seemed his very last card. During his journey across Europe that spring, he had met with the British military attaché to Switzerland and asked about the possibility of joining on with British military intelligence. The attaché had not been at all encouraging but, impressed by Yale’s breadth of knowledge on the Middle East, suggested that if no other options presented themselves once he returned home, Yale might call on the British ambassador to Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice. With the military attaché’s note of introduction in hand, Yale did so on the morning of July 9.
Serendipity had an odd way of intervening at crucial moments in William Yale’s life, but never in quite so unlikely a way as on July 9. In calling at the British embassy, Yale fully expected to be told the ambassador was away or in a meeting, the same brush-off he’d received from many other men far less busy or powerful over the previous month. Instead, he was immediately ushered into Spring-Rice’s office.
“Where did you get your name?” the astonished ambassador asked by way of greeting. “My first wife was a Yale, one of the last members of the family in Wales!”
IT WAS LESS a battle than a massacre. As dawn of July 2 broke, the Arab warriors circled through the hills surrounding the pass at Fuweila in cautious search of the Turkish relief battalion. They found them in a mountain close just below Fuweila known as Aba el Lissan, encamped and still asleep along the b
anks of a stream. Incredibly, the Turkish commander hadn’t taken the precaution of putting scouts on the surrounding ridgelines, enabling the Arabs to quietly spread out among the overhanging rocks and encircle their slumbering enemy. Once in position, they began to snipe at the men trapped below.
It became a ferociously hot day, the hottest Lawrence could ever remember in Arabia, and this greatly contributed to the desultory nature of the fight. Despite the overwhelming advantage afforded by their command of the heights, the Arab attackers found they could only lie upon the rocks to shoot down at the enemy for a few moments at a time; to linger any longer was to be burned through their thin robes, even to have skin peeled from their bodies in swatches. Into the afternoon, the erratic contest continued, the Turks below huddling in clefts along the stream for protection, the Arabs above them hopping from one overlook to the next in search of a clean shot.
By Lawrence’s account, it was a flippant comment on his part that finally changed the battle’s tenor. Overcome by the heat, he had sought refuge in the shade of a narrow gulley that also offered up a thin rivulet of water. He was found there by Auda Abu Tayi.
“Well, how is it with the Howeitat?” Auda teased, recalling Lawrence’s past gibes at his tribesmen. “All talk and no work?”
Lawrence teased back, remarking that the Howeitat “shoot a lot and hit a little.”
The remark seemed to enrage the chieftain. Flinging his headgear to the ground, he charged back up the hill shouting for his men to disengage and to take to their horses waiting below. Fearing his comment had so offended Auda that the Howeitat were now leaving the fight, Lawrence clambered up the slope to make amends. He found Auda standing alone and glowering down at the enemy. “Get your camel if you want to see the old man’s work,” Auda said.
Hurrying down to the protected hollow where the main camel-mounted Arab force had waited all day to make their charge into Aba el Lissan, Lawrence mounted his prized camel, Naama, and climbed to a nearby ridge. He was just in time to see Auda and his fifty Howeitat horsemen charge into the valley from an adjacent ridge at full gallop.
“As we watched,” Lawrence recalled in Seven Pillars, “two or three [Howeitat] went down, but the rest thundered forward at marvelous speed, and the Turkish infantry, huddled together under the cliff ready to cut their desperate way out towards Maan in the first dusk, began to sway in and out, and finally broke before the rush.”
The 350 camel troops were swiftly ordered forward as well. Among the Turkish infantrymen, trapped and exhausted and now being charged by a mounted enemy from two sides, any semblance of defense swiftly collapsed. Suddenly, it was every man for himself, and in Aba el Lissan that day, this simply meant death came quicker.
By his account, Lawrence missed much of it. Due both to Naama’s speed and to his position at the fore of the camel charge, he had found himself well out in front of his attacking comrades; Lawrence had managed to get off just a few rounds with his pistol before Naama was shot dead beneath him, sending him plummeting to a rough landing among the rocks. When finally he gathered his wits about him, the battle was already winding down. To his chagrin, he also discovered that Naama hadn’t actually been killed by the Turks; judging by her fatal wound, a point-blank shot to the back of the head, Lawrence had accidentally shot her himself.
The carnage in Aba el Lissan was as vicious as it was one-sided. Just two Arab fighters were killed in the attack, and a handful wounded. By contrast, of the 550 Turkish soldiers trapped in the valley, perhaps 100 managed to make their escape in the direction of Maan, leaving some 160 captive and another 300 dead or dying. As Lawrence would allude in Seven Pillars, some of these deaths were not the result of battle, but of the Arabs’ thirst for vengeance for the killing of the Howeitat civilians several days before.
There now came another test of Lawrence’s leadership. From his interrogation of one of the prisoners, he learned that Maan itself was very lightly garrisoned—and considerably more so now given the fate of the Aba el Lissan relief column. As word of this spread among the Arab fighters, a clamor went up for the force to double back and fall upon the railhead town; Maan offered up a golden opportunity for plunder, while the sad little port town of Aqaba offered nothing.
It was an absolutely pivotal moment, and Lawrence could feel the objective that had borne him these past two months slipping away. Even if the Arab fighters managed to take Maan, it would be a purely temporary victory; the Turks would counterattack in force, and that would see the path to Aqaba, now virtually clear, shut down forever. What’s more, it would effectively mean the end of the fighting force he and Auda and the other tribal chieftains had so patiently cobbled together. By July 2, they had “no guns, no base nearer than Wejh, no communications, no money even, for our gold was exhausted, and we were issuing our own notes, promises to pay ‘when Aqaba is taken’ for daily expenses.” Aqaba now had to be taken as a matter of survival.
With Auda’s help, Lawrence at last managed to turn the warriors away from the easy promise of Maan. Both to put more distance between their men and that temptation and out of fear of attack by Turks or marauding rival tribes, they resolved to set out for Aqaba that same night. But this decision raised another, troubling issue: what to do with the enemy wounded? It was agreed that those able to walk would join their fellow prisoners and, watched over by a rearguard detail, be herded along in the direction of Aqaba. As for the twenty or so Turks too badly wounded to travel, they were to be left behind, placed beside the stream so that at least their imminent deaths might not come from thirst.
While the Arab warriors began breaking camp for the onward night march, Lawrence set off alone down the valley to where the day’s slaughter had taken place. He hoped to gather enough coats or blankets off the Turkish corpses to make those being left by the streambank a bit more comfortable in their last hours, but he found that scavenging parties had already discovered the dead and stripped them naked. The scene, and Lawrence’s reaction to it, was to lead to one of the eeriest passages in his autobiography:
The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs, and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over their plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God knew how many toils and pains of this sort.
At last turning away from the dead, Lawrence rejoined the warriors for the march on to Aqaba, now just forty miles away over the mountains.
IN LAWRENCE’S TWO-MONTH absence, the Anglo-Arab military campaign in the Hejaz continued in its usual fitful rhythm. Through May and June, British demolition parties, usually accompanied by bands of Arab warriors, made their periodic forays inland to do damage to the Hejaz Railway. Their reports noted the occasional success—a blown bridge here, a wrecked train there—but even more frequently complained of the unreliability and lack of discipline among their Arab confederates. Higher up the chain of command, British commanders remained exercised about galvanizing the rebels to finally carry out their blocking operation in the El Ula region northwest of Medina, but the sense of imperative for the scheme was gradually withering under the evidence that the Turks had no intention of leaving Medina. Faisal, now enjoying the title of Commander of Arab Forces, had instead set his sights on his march into Syria. Among those British officers privy to Faisal’s fantastically ambitious blueprint for that advance—this from a man who had barely budged from Wejh in four months—enthusiasm tended to be restrained. “It is somewhat difficult to examine in any detail Sherif Faisal’s plan,” one such officer reported at the e
nd of May, “which is characterized throughout by a remarkable freedom from conventional restrictions in regard to time, space, arrangements for supply, or the disposition and possible action of the enemy.”
Looking over the reports from the field, Gilbert Clayton in Cairo filed a weekly status report on the Hejaz situation to the director of military intelligence in London. Throughout May and June, these memoranda were usually prefaced by the comment that very little had changed since the previous one. But if all remained static in the Hejaz—“satisfactory” was the word Clayton preferred—by late June, his spies inside Syria were reporting a rather dramatic uptick in rebel activity. By the time Clayton penned his report of July 5, these reports were coming in from all across southern Syria: “active hostility” by the Howeitat tribe near Maan; an attack on the Turkish garrison at Fuweila; a raid on a Turkish camel-grazing party near Shobek; a sabotage operation on the rail line outside Bir el Shedia.
“It is not known what are the present whereabouts of Captain Lawrence, who left for the Maan area or Jebel Druze area some time ago,” Clayton noted in that same report, “but lately an Arab rumor came into Wejh to the effect that he and the small party with him had blown up a large iron bridge south of Maan. These activities in the Maan area are probably the outcome of Captain Lawrence’s arrival in that neighborhood.”
Gilbert Clayton had it only partly right. What he couldn’t have known was that Lawrence and his Arab confederates were actually responsible for nearly all the actions in southern Syria he reported on that day, just as they had been for most of the other attacks across the breadth of Syria, some of them over three hundred miles behind enemy lines, that had taken place over the previous month. He also couldn’t have known that on July 5, Lawrence was not in the neighborhood of Maan, but rather sixty miles to the southwest, negotiating the surrender of the Turkish garrison in Aqaba.
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