After the massacre at Aba el Lissan, Lawrence and the Arab warriors had raced toward the sea. As they crested the mountains and descended the Wadi Itm toward Aqaba, the fighters passed one empty Turkish blockhouse and trenchline after another, final proof of the brilliance of Lawrence’s contrarian scheme. “The enemy had never imagined attack from the interior,” he noted, “and of all their great works, not one trench or post faced inland.”
In contrast to its dramatic rendering in David Lean’s movie, the fall of Aqaba was somewhat anticlimactic. After a tense two-day standoff, with both sides running desperately short of food, the Turkish commander finally accepted that his situation was hopeless and surrendered the port on July 6 with barely a shot fired. With the white flag raised, the rebels raced into Aqaba on their camels and splashed into the sea in celebration of their audacious victory.
But for Lawrence, the long ordeal was not quite over or the triumph secure. There were now nearly twelve hundred men crowded into Aqaba, some six hundred Arab fighters and an equal number of Turkish prisoners, but desperately little food. He also knew that it would only be a matter of time—and likely a short time—before the Turks in the Syrian interior mustered a sufficient force to march over the mountains to retake Aqaba. Such an advance might be slowed by manning the mountain guardhouses with rebel units, but as Lawrence knew from past bad experience, relying on Arab tribesmen to hold defensive positions, even formidable ones, was never a safe bet. Just as vital as Aqaba’s fall, then, was to now get word of it to the British so that supplies and reinforcements could be rushed in.
The next day, and accompanied by just eight warriors, Lawrence set out in the direction of Egypt, hoping to cross the 150 miles of desert that lay between Aqaba and the British lines at the Suez before it was too late.
Chapter 14
Hubris
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is.
T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917
On the morning of July 10, 1917, Gilbert Clayton was seeing to one of his drearier tasks, composing the weekly status report on the Arabian war theater for the military intelligence director in London. As he had done many times in recent months with only the slightest variation, he prefaced the memo with the comment that “nothing has occurred of great importance in the Hejaz since I last wrote,” before providing a quick rundown of battle plans yet to be acted upon, small successes that should have been greater, opportunities squandered.
Shortly after the report went out the door to the telegraph office, a tiny figure in a dirty Arab robe wandered into Clayton’s office. Taking his visitor for a local favor seeker, or perhaps an enterprising beggar boy, the distracted general was in the process of shooing him out the door when he noticed the familiar lopsided grin, the piercing light blue eyes. It was T. E. Lawrence.
Sitting his emaciated subordinate down, Clayton urgently pressed for details on all that had transpired in the two months since Lawrence had set off into the Arabian interior and vanished from view. The general then dashed off an excited postscript to his weekly status report: “Since writing the above and just as I send it to the mail, Captain Lawrence has arrived after a journey through enemy country which is little short of marvelous.” There followed a brief synopsis of the capture of Aqaba, as well as of Lawrence’s intelligence-gathering mission across Syria. “I have not yet been able to discuss his journey with Lawrence as he has only just arrived and is somewhat exhausted by 1,300 miles on a camel in the last 30 days.… I think, however, that you would be interested in the above brief sketch of a very remarkable performance, calling for a display of courage, resource and endurance which is conspicuous even in these days when gallant deeds are of daily occurrence.”
Ironically, some of Lawrence’s greatest travails in reaching Cairo had come in trying to navigate the British lines. The previous afternoon, he and his small band of escorts had reached the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, having made the 150-mile trek from Aqaba in an astounding forty-nine hours, only to find the British guardposts there abandoned (due to a cholera outbreak, Lawrence would later learn). Finding an operable field telephone, he repeatedly called over to the army’s ferry transport office on the opposite shore to request a boat, only to be just as repeatedly hung up on. At last he reached a logistics officer who knew him from Wejh, and a launch was sent.
In that first moment of safety, two months to the day since he had set out from Wejh, Lawrence’s strength finally gave out, and it was all he could do to drag himself to the Port Suez officers’ billet at the Sinai Hotel. “After conquering its first hostile impression of me and my dress,” he wrote, “[the hotel] produced the hot baths and the cold drinks (six of them) and the dinner and bed of my dreams.”
His ordeal continued into the next day. Barefoot and still clad in his ragged Arab robes, Lawrence was repeatedly stopped and questioned by military police during his train journey to Cairo. His luck turned on the train platform at Ismailia when he caught the notice of a senior British naval officer who recognized him from his Red Sea crossings. It was a fortunate meeting; the military high command in Cairo was quickly alerted to what had happened in Aqaba, and by that afternoon the first supplies and reinforcements were being rushed to the rebel-held port.
On the Ismailia platform, Lawrence also learned of a major development that had occurred in his absence. Following his defeat at the Second Battle of Gaza, Archibald Murray had been removed from command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. His replacement, a cavalry general named Edmund Allenby, had arrived in Cairo less than two weeks earlier. Initially, Lawrence greeted this news with dismay. It had taken months of painstaking ministrations by himself and Clayton and everyone else at the Arab Bureau to even partially win over the prickly Murray to the idea of supporting the Arab Revolt. Now they would have to start over from scratch, and Lawrence envisioned many more months lost in the education of Edmund Allenby.
But upon reaching Cairo, Lawrence was to discover something else. Already, word of his exploits was spreading through the British military command, and to electrifying effect. Coming on the heels of the defeat at Gaza, the stasis in the Hejaz, and the ceaselessly grim news from Europe—another Allied offensive on the Western Front had failed, the French army was mutinying, the Russian government was collapsing—here was some genuinely cheering news, a sterling example of British daring and pluck. Even beyond the fantastic manner in which it had been achieved, Aqaba’s capture meant the Arab war effort had abruptly leapfrogged 250 miles to the north and made the task of carrying that effort into Syria dramatically simpler.
Curiously, though, it was Lawrence’s subsidiary feat, his long and perilous journey through the Syrian heartland, that seemed to most capture the imagination and accolades of his countrymen. Part of it was surely the romantic image it conjured, one with many antecedents in British military lore: the lone adventurer (never mind that Lawrence had actually been accompanied by two scouts) sneaking behind enemy lines in disguise and with a bounty on his head, his clandestine meetings with would-be conspirators, the threat of betrayal and tortured death stalking his every turn. Certainly it was this aspect that most inspired Reginald Wingate in recommending Lawrence be awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military decoration. As Wingate pointed out, what “considerably enhanced the gallantry” of Lawrence’s exploit was that it had been conducted amid “a highly venal population” even with a £5,000 Turkish reward on his head.
Lawrence, as noted, minimized the importance of that trek. Indeed, the few details he ever provided on it were in an obliquely worded four-page report he wrote immediately upon his arrival in Cairo. Ever the strategist, however, he evidently realized that in the official reaction to his Syrian adventure, he h
ad been handed a powerful instrument to further his goals. He deftly wielded that instrument when brought before the new EEF commander, General Edmund Allenby.
Given the elaborate decorum that existed within the British military of 1917, it’s hard to imagine a more incongruous meeting than the one that took place at the Cairo General Headquarters on the afternoon of July 12. Nicknamed “Bloody Bull” for his explosive temper, Edmund Allenby was a towering man with the physique of a boxer gone slightly to seed, an intimidating presence even when not clad in his general’s dress uniform. On the opposite side of his desk sat the wraithlike Captain T. E. Lawrence, perhaps 135 pounds when healthy but now reduced to less than a hundred by the rigors of his desert exploits, dressed in a white Arab robe and turban and, by his own account (though it seems improbable), shoeless; Lawrence’s uniform had been destroyed by moths during his long absence from Cairo, so he would claim, and he had yet to find time to replace it.
Lawrence surely knew something of Allenby’s war record, including that it was a somewhat checkered one. During the British withdrawal at the battle of Mons in August 1914, Allenby had ordered his cavalry regiment to stand their ground before a much larger advancing German force, thereby enabling the rest of the beleaguered army to make an orderly retreat. Coincidentally, it was during that same battle that Archibald Murray, then the chief of the Imperial General Staff and monitoring the British retreat from a central command post, had fainted away from the tension. Much more recently, however, Allenby’s star had been eclipsed at the battle of Arras, where he was criticized for being slow to take advantage of breaches in the German line to drive his men forward—a relative point, perhaps, in an engagement that saw the British advance less than two miles at the cost of 150,000 casualties.
As with Murray, then, Allenby’s transfer to Egypt was meant as a demotion, but where this had induced a kind of crippling caution in Murray, Lawrence sensed it might spur something very different in Allenby. In the general’s office that afternoon, he proceeded to paint a wondrously ambitious portrait of what the Arab rebels now stood poised to achieve. So long as Aqaba was quickly bolstered as the chief staging point, he explained, the Arabs could at last take their fight into the Syrian heartland. And not in any small way; in Lawrence’s telling, there was now the opportunity to set the whole region aflame.
To complement the threadbare report on his Syrian spying mission, Lawrence had made a little hand-drawn map to illustrate his plan to the general. It depicted no fewer than seven prospective Arab forces attacking the Turks across the length of Syria, as far west as the Lebanon coast and as far north as the cities of Homs and Hama, one hundred miles above Damascus. While he cautioned in his cover note that “there is little hope of things working out just as planned,” if even some aspects of Lawrence’s blueprint came to fruition, the bulk of Turkish forces deployed across northern and eastern Syria would find themselves stranded, unable to advance or even to easily retreat.
There was a catch, though. For this grand Arab uprising to succeed, Lawrence told Allenby, it required a simultaneous British army breakthrough in southern Palestine. Once that had been achieved, the two forces could move north in lethal tandem, the Arab irregulars shutting down the Hejaz Railway and marooning the Turks in their garrison towns in eastern Syria, while the British army, their inland flank protected by the Arabs’ actions, advanced up the western coastal shelf. In Lawrence’s plotting, even the quick capture of Damascus and Jerusalem were within the realm of possibility.
But there was another small catch. The fighters who would serve as the crucial linchpin to this Arab strike force, the Bedouin of eastern Syria, traditionally trekked farther east in autumn in search of better forage for their camels, effectively leaving the war theater. To make use of these essential warriors, Lawrence explained, action would have to commence no later than mid-September, or in about two months’ time.
It’s not altogether clear how much of this extravagant vision Lawrence himself actually believed. Even if flushed by his recent triumph at Aqaba, he was surely still too much the pragmatist to imagine that all the inertia and tribal squabbling that forever shadowed the Arab Revolt would somehow now melt away. He’d also undoubtedly had enough experience with the British military to know that haste was not its strong suit. Most likely, in putting forward his grandiose scheme he saw the chance to win over the new British commander in chief—unschooled in the sluggish pace with which events moved in the region, eager to redeem his soldier’s reputation in the wake of Arras—to his own vision of a joint Arab-British liberation of Syria. It was a vision Allenby would have to embrace or reject quickly, of course, since Lawrence had also set a ticking clock.
But if there was an element of bluff in all this, who could possibly catch him out? T. E. Lawrence was now a celebrity in Cairo, the magical manager of Arab tribes, as well as the only British officer to have personally taken the pulse of their potential fifth columnists inside Syria. Even if he knew those prospective collaborators were nowhere near ready to rise up in two months, it’s not as if anyone else knew. Instead, so long as the almost inevitable delay tripped up the British timetable, his secret knowledge of Arab unpreparedness would remain safe, and in the meantime he would have forged an alliance—and a mutual dependency—that couldn’t be broken.
In Seven Pillars, Lawrence all but admitted to this game: “Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”
And it was a performance that succeeded brilliantly. At the end of their meeting, the general raised his chin and announced, “Well, I will do for you what I can.”
If he kept it low-key with Lawrence, Allenby let his enthusiasm be known to his superiors, including General William Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff and the overall coordinator of the British war effort. “The advantages offered by Arab co-operation on lines proposed by Captain Lawrence,” he cabled Robertson on July 19, “are, in my opinion, of such importance that no effort should be spared to reap full benefit therefrom.… If successfully carried out, such a movement, in conjunction with [British] offensive operations in Palestine, may cause a collapse of the Turkish campaigns in the Hejaz and in Syria and produce far-reaching results, both political as well as military.” So vital did Allenby view the scheme that he passed on Lawrence’s concern of losing the eastern Bedouin to their autumn grazing grounds should there be a delay. “I therefore ought to be prepared to undertake such operations as may be possible with the force at my disposal by the middle of September.”
Even Robertson, a committed “Westerner” loath to entertain ambitious plans in the East, was quickly sold on the idea; at the culmination of a flurry of cables between Cairo and London that July, he promised to immediately send Allenby as many as fifty thousand more troops for his upcoming Palestine offensive. It all marked an astounding turnaround in fortunes for the Arab Revolt. Just two months earlier, the rebels had been regarded as little more than a sideshow nuisance by Archibald Murray; now they were setting the timetable for the next British offensive in Palestine.
But the newly strengthened Arab-British alliance also signaled a change on the political front, one that General Allenby may not have appreciated or cared about, but that T. E. Lawrence most certainly did. Until recently, British planners had been pondering strategies to minimize the Arab rebels’ role in Syria out of deference to their French allies. Now, by signing on to Allenby’s plan—which really meant Lawrence’s plan—the British military was setting on a course that completely ignored French concerns, and would eventually cast the whole framework of Sykes-Picot in doubt.
That was all a bit in the future, however, and in the interim, praise for Lawrence’s exploits continued to come in from all quarters. Though he was found to be ineligible to receive the Victoria Cross (one of its stipulations is that the heroic deed must be observed by a fellow Briton), he was soon promoted to major, as well as named a
Companion of the Order of the Bath, one of the highest levels in the British chivalric system available to junior military officers.
Amid his newfound celebrity, in early August Lawrence was asked to jot down his insights on working with Arabs for those British officers being sent for duty in the Hejaz, to share his secrets of success in a realm where so many others had come to crushing despair. The result was a short treatise he entitled Twenty-Seven Articles. Some of his recommendations were commonsense, while others must have seemed rather exotic to his pupils. “A slave brought up in the Hejaz is the best servant,” he advised, “but there are rules against British subjects owning them, so they will have to be lent to you. In any case, take with you an Ageyli [tribesman] or two when you go up country. They are the most efficient couriers in Arabia, and understand camels.”
Above all, Lawrence counseled his readers to shuck their English ways, to so totally immerse themselves in the local environment as to know its “families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads.”
Within the parochial British military culture of 1917, Twenty-Seven Articles had the force of revelation—and indeed, the tract continues to have profound influence today. Amid the American military “surge” in Iraq in 2006, the U.S. commander in chief, General David Petraeus, ordered his senior officers to read Twenty-Seven Articles so that they might gain clues on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Presumably skipped over was Lawrence’s opening admonition that his advice applied strictly to Bedouin—about 2 percent of the Iraqi population—and that interacting with Arab townspeople “require[s] totally different treatment.”
AARON AARONSOHN AND Captain Ian Smith had never been close. From their first meeting, Smith, the EMSIB (Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau) liaison to the spy ships operating out of Port Said, had made little attempt to hide his low regard for the Jewish spy ring in Palestine. From that inauspicious beginning, Smith—“always an idiot” in the agronomist’s estimation—had seemed to go out of his way to slight Aaronsohn and his confederates in ways large and small, as if it were the British who were doing a great favor to the Jewish spies rather than the reverse.
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