At the same time, Lawrence was living the old proverb of success having a thousand fathers. Exacerbated by its proximity to Cairo, Aqaba was now plagued by that most noxious of bureaucratic envoys, the advisor, each determined to prove his worth by coming up with his own list of dubious recommendations. In late August, a newly arrived intelligence officer, taken aback by the lack of professionalism among the Arab troops, urged on Cairo the immediate dispatch of the Imperial Camel Corps, an elite British camel cavalry force. Lawrence was forced to take time from his other duties to undermine the plan. “One squabble between a [Camel Corps] trooper and an Arab,” he wrote Clayton on August 27, “or an incident with Bedouin women, would bring on general hostilities.” Politic enough to concede some of the intelligence officer’s other points, he closed on a dismissive note. “I don’t think that any [report] of the Arab situation will be of much use to you unless its author can see for himself the difference between a national rising and a [military] campaign.”
Coincidentally, when Clayton received that note, he was already considering doing a little field research of his own. On September 1, he arrived in Aqaba from Cairo, marking his first visit to the war front that had consumed his energies for over a year.
As always, it seemed the general had something of a hidden agenda to his visit. Over a month earlier, he’d received a curious letter from Mark Sykes in London. Clayton had seen no reason to share its contents with Lawrence during his subordinate’s recent stay in Cairo—the two had been in daily contact at the Arab Bureau throughout the second week of August—but for reasons known only to him, he had brought the letter to Aqaba for that purpose.
When Sykes had returned to London from his Middle East sojourn that summer, it had been to a radically altered political landscape. As Entente leaders were learning to their shock and dismay, President Woodrow Wilson’s talk about making “the world safe for democracy” had been more than just sanctimonious rhetoric; the price for American intervention in the war was to be self-determination for oppressed peoples, and the annulment of the maze of secret pacts between governments—in effect, the beginning of the end of the imperial era. It was a measure of just how desperate Great Britain and France had become—between them, they had suffered some five million casualties in three years of war—that formerly voraciously acquisitive politicians in both capitals were now scrambling to learn the strange vocabulary of “non-annexation” and “autonomy.”
Few were more adroit at executing this about-face than Mark Sykes. With astonishing speed, the politician had refashioned himself an enlightened postimperial statesman, a champion of self-determination. The best course in the Middle East, Sykes now argued, was for both Britain and France to renounce any imperialist claims whatsoever, since it was clear, as he informed Gilbert Clayton in his letter of July 22, that “colonialism is madness.” In its place, what he envisioned was a kind of political finishing school administered by the Western powers, a period in which the benighted races of the Middle East might be instructed in Western values and systems and then sent on their merry way. Lest anyone find all this jarring coming from the coauthor of the most infamous imperial pact in modern history, Sykes had a handy solution; as he advised the War Cabinet in mid-July, henceforth all references to the Sykes-Picot Agreement should be discarded in favor of “the Anglo-French-Arab Agreement.”
Not everyone was impressed by Sykes’s new incarnation. Over time, a growing consensus in the Foreign Office leadership held that Britain had cut a very bad deal in Sykes-Picot, and blame had naturally affixed to its poorly supervised coauthor; as War Cabinet member George Curzon commented, “[Sykes] appears to think that the way to get rid of suspicion is always to recognize what the other party claims and to give up, when asked, our claims.” Confidence in Sykes was further eroded by the continuing controversy over his and Picot’s purported accord with King Hussein in May, and by his leadership role in promulgating the sacking-of-Jaffa story, now viewed by many as a backdoor scheme to prod the government into fully supporting the Zionist camp. Matters came to a head in early July when Arthur Nicolson, the under secretary of state for foreign affairs, had sought to unravel for the War Cabinet precisely what other commitments the government had made in the Middle East over the previous two years, and how those might square with its promises to King Hussein. All but calling Sykes a liar—“it is a little difficult to be sure that the papers in the Department represent the whole of what actually passed”—Nicolson urged that “the opinion of Sir Mark Sykes should be invited before the matter is pursued further, as he alone will be able to state with authority how far any evasion or modification of our engagements to [Hussein] are likely to be resented by Arab opinion.”
In the face of such criticism, Sykes assumed a petulant, defensive crouch. Curiously, he also focused on a particular junior British army officer as a source of his troubles: Captain T. E. Lawrence. In a self-pitying note to Secretary Balfour’s secretary on July 20, Sykes presented his two years of toil on Middle Eastern affairs as an exercise in thankless self-sacrifice. “Hitherto the work has been fairly successful, but I have had to contend, as you know, with many difficulties: the prejudices of the past both British and French, the mutual suspicions and susceptibilities of out-of-date minds, the anti-British policy of Brémond, the anti-French attitude of Lawrence.”
But perhaps this focus wasn’t so curious after all. Only a handful of people grasped the full tapestry of contradictions and half-truths Sykes had woven in the Middle East, but most of these—men like Gilbert Clayton and Reginald Wingate—were too much servants of the system to ever fully confront him; if things did blow up, they would keep their grumbling to a minimum and look for ways to muddle through. But then there was Lawrence, the non–club member who wouldn’t hesitate in shaming Sykes if given the platform—and in the wake of his triumph at Aqaba, he increasingly had that platform.
In addition, Lawrence now had the ability to seriously damage the diplomatic framework Sykes had spent two years building. Imperfect though it was, it protected British interests in the region while giving a little bit of something to most everyone else. Now, with Lawrence’s de facto military alliance with Allenby joined to his long-standing determination to wrest Syria from France, and quite suddenly the little captain was elevated from nuisance to formidable threat. It was apparently in hopes of neutralizing that threat, through both flattery and thinly veiled condescension, that Sykes devoted a portion of his July 22 letter to Clayton. It was that same letter Clayton brought with him to Aqaba to show Lawrence.
“Lawrence’s move is splendid and I want him knighted,” Sykes had written in reference to Aqaba’s capture. “Tell him [that] now that he is a great man he must behave as such and be broad in his views. Ten years’ tutelage under the Entente and the Arabs will be a nation. Complete independence [now] means Persia, poverty and chaos. Let him consider this, as he hopes for the people he is fighting for.”
Combined with all he knew of Sykes’s past machinations, and coming so close on the heels of his confrontation with Aaronsohn in Cairo, Lawrence could not stomach the letter’s patronizing tone. Perhaps also it touched a chord of ego; if not a “great man,” Lawrence was now most certainly his own, and he wasn’t about to be dictated to by Mark Sykes. In a scathing seven-page letter to the politician, couched as an earnest request for guidance, he methodically held up each of Sykes’s schemes to scrutiny before exposing their gaping holes: “What have you promised the Zionists, and what is their programme? I saw Aaronsohn in Cairo, and he said at once the Jews intended to acquire the land-rights of all Palestine from Gaza to Haifa, and have practical autonomy within. Is this acquisition to be by fair purchase or by forced sale and expropriation? … Do the Jews propose the complete expulsion of the Arab peasantry, or their reduction to a day-labourer class?”
He then turned to the matter of French “help” to the Arabs in developing Syria, the canard that Sykes had tried to foist on Hussein at Jeddah. “The Arabs can put their revolt
through without French help, and therefore are disinclined to pay a price only to be made known to them in the future.… The Sherif will succeed, given time and a continuance of our help, [and] he will take by his own efforts (don’t assume virtue for the mules and cartridges we supply him; the hands and heads are his) the sphere we allotted to our foreign-advised ‘independent Syria,’ and will expect to keep it without imposed foreign advisors. As he takes this sphere of his, he will also take parts of the other spheres not properly allotted to an Arab state [under Sykes-Picot]. His title to them will be a fairly strong one—that of conquest by means of the local inhabitants—and what are the two Powers going to do about it?”
At the letter’s close, Lawrence assumed a slightly more conciliatory tone, recognizing the realpolitik reality that “we may have to sell our small friends in pay for our big friends,” but pointed out that, contrary to Sykes’s perpetually sunny pronouncements, “we are in rather a hole. Please tell me what, in your opinion, are the actual measures by which we will find a way out?”
The letter was perhaps the most searing indictment ever penned of Sykes’s actions in the Middle East, but it was one the politician would never see. On September 7, with Clayton having returned to Cairo from his Aqaba visit, Lawrence routed the letter through his office for onward transmission to London; upon reading its contents, however, Clayton thought better of it. As he explained in a note to Lawrence, he didn’t wish to provide Sykes with anything that “may raise him to activity,” especially now that the increasingly discredited Sykes-Picot Agreement seemed headed for oblivion. “It is in fact dead,” Clayton wrote, “and if we wait quietly, this fact will soon be realized. It was never a very workable instrument and it is now almost a lifeless monument.”
In this appraisal, Gilbert Clayton couldn’t have been more wrong, but Lawrence wasn’t in a position to argue the point. In what was becoming something of a pattern between them, by the time Clayton sent his note, Lawrence had already set off for the interior and a new strike against the Turks.
WILLIAM YALE FIRST sensed something amiss when, checking into London’s Savoy Hotel on September 7, he noticed the abundance of “painted ladies” circulating through its lobby. As he sadly noted in his diary the following day, it appeared the once-grand old hotel had become “to all intents and purposes a house of assignation.”
The puritanical Yale had little time to dwell on the squalidness of his surroundings, however, for he was to stay very busy in London. Through Leland Harrison’s helpful cable to the American ambassador, the new special agent gained quick entrée to many of the top British officials involved in Middle Eastern affairs. Amid these meetings, Yale was flattered to discover that his Syria report had been hailed as one of the most incisive documents to emerge from that vital corner of enemy territory, circulated and studied at some of the highest levels of the British political and military leadership; he was happy to meet with debriefers from various intelligence units, and to provide them with whatever further details he could.
Rather soon, though, Yale’s attention turned away from trying to gain a broad view of the Middle Eastern situation—from his own experience in the region, he knew that any truly useful insights were likely to be found in Cairo—and toward a particular aspect of it: the British government’s growing flirtation with the Jewish Zionist community.
His curiosity was piqued by a peculiar story circulating in British newspapers that told of an unnamed Jewish chemist who had supposedly given the government “certain secrets” pertaining to the manufacture of explosives. “This Jewish chemist,” Yale wrote in his diary on September 12, “who, when asked what reward he desired, replied that personally he wished nothing, but that he was a Jew and that he wished that in a Peace Conference the Allies would give special consideration to the question of the Jews in Palestine.” According to the newspaper accounts, the British government had secretly promised the scientist to do so.
Even if Yale didn’t yet have the name of the chemist—it was Chaim Weizmann, of course—what he found intriguing was that the government had made no public attempt to deny or diminish the account, which strongly suggested it was true. Over his next week in London, the new American intelligence operative sounded out an array of officials on just what British policy might be in regard to the Jews in Palestine, only to receive an array of conflicting responses.
Perhaps one reason for this, Yale concluded, was that there seemed little agreement among British Jews over just what arrangement they hoped for. Some of those in the Zionist community argued for nothing less than a Jewish nation in Palestine, others merely for a guarantee of increased immigration, while some anti-Zionist leaders fiercely denounced the movement as a dangerous new tool for Jewish marginalization, a handy weapon for anti-Semites to question the loyalty of Jews to the nations of their birth. In trying to sort through the controversy, it seemed plain to Yale that the British government was contemplating some sort of overture in connection with the Jews and Palestine, but that precisely what that would be had not yet been decided.
After two weeks, Yale felt he had gleaned all he could in London, and was anxious to get on to Cairo. First, though, there was someone he very much wanted to talk with in Paris, a Zionist leader whose name had come up often in recent days, and who had just arrived in France from Egypt: Aaron Aaronsohn.
IT IS AN enduring myth about the battle for Arabia: the fantasy of the “clean war,” of Arab warriors, stirred after centuries of crushing subjugation, rallying to the cry of freedom; of those same warriors bravely charging down sand dunes to fall upon their hapless and cruel oppressors.
Contrary to the charge of his detractors, T. E. Lawrence actually played a minimal role in creating this myth. Far more it stemmed from the need of a shattered postwar public to find even a trace of grandeur in a war so utterly grotesque. There was not a lot of material to work with from the Western Front, where countless thousands had simply vanished in puffs, atomized by artillery, or been entombed forever beneath its mud. By contrast, Arabia was all berobed warriors and charging camels and flapping banners, a touch of medieval pageantry amid the inglorious slaughter. That image and the need for it dimmed under the weight of a second, even more horrific world war, but then David Lean’s 1962 film resurrected it for a new generation.
Lawrence’s greatest contribution to the literature of war was that, despite his open advocacy for the Arab cause, fidelity to the truth compelled him to try to convey what it was really like. As he made clear in Seven Pillars, while many Arabs joined the fight out of a sincere desire to be rid of the Turks, sincerity was helped along by British gold and the prospect of bountiful loot. On the battlefield, the rebels’ enemies were not just Turks but fellow Arabs, warriors from tribes that had missed out on the British gold or taken that of the Turks, clans with whom they had blood feuds or who were freelancers out scouting for loot themselves.
Nor did that battlefield bear much resemblance to the scenery of popular imagination. Instead of the picturesque expanses of sand dunes often associated with the region, much of the Arabian and Syrian deserts consist of dreary gravel plains and barren stone mountains, similar in many respects to the less picturesque corners of Utah or Arizona. In traversing this terrain, Lawrence and his Arab allies survived on a diet of mutton, camel meat, and bread in good times, raw flour in the less good. These meals were chased down with water often drawn from brackish springs or algae-covered ponds, or from wells contaminated by the Turks with rotting animal corpses. Seeking out shade to escape the withering heat of midday often meant encountering that strange and cruel phenomenon common to deserts the world over, great swarms of biting black flies.
But of all the components to the myth, perhaps the most erroneous is the notion of a “clean war.” On this most severe of landscapes, the badly wounded on both sides were often left behind to die, the lucky ones dispatched with a bullet to the head. Subsisting on whatever was left over once their captors had their fill, prisoners died in droves from hung
er and thirst—when the victors bothered to take prisoners at all. And in contrast to the clearly delineated death zones of the Western Front, this was a battlefield on which combatants and civilians were intermingled, where the completely innocent could suddenly find themselves caught amid the bullets and knives.
It was early on the afternoon of September 19 when the ten-car train rounded the bend from the south. Lawrence waited until the train’s second engine had started over the short bridge, and then he detonated his fifty-pound gelignite mine. Instantly, a plume of black smoke shot a hundred feet into the air and billowed out to either side at least as far. Once the report of the explosion and the screech of ripping metal died away, there came a brief, eerie silence. Then the killing began in earnest.
To complement the Arab warriors he intended to recruit along the way, Lawrence had brought along from Aqaba two fellow Western officers—a Briton he nicknamed “Stokes” for the Stokes trench mortar he carried, an Australian nicknamed “Lewis” for the two Lewis machine guns in his care—and they had pre-positioned themselves and their weapons on a rocky ledge just three hundred yards from the bridge. As the smoke cleared, it was revealed that only the train’s engines and lead carriage had fallen into the culvert below the collapsed bridge, the remaining seven carriages sitting upright and immobile on the tracks. Rows of Turkish soldiers sat on the roofs of these carriages, and they were now mowed down by the Lewis machine guns, “swept off the top like bales of cotton.”
Starting to recover from their shock, a number of Turks scrambled for the relative shelter of the culvert under the bridge. The first mortar that Stokes fired at them went a little wide. After he adjusted the weapon’s elevating screw, his second shell dropped directly in their midst. The sudden carnage there, Lawrence noted in his official report, caused the survivors to panic and race “towards some rough country 200 yards N.E. of the line. On their way there the Lewis gun[s] killed all but about twenty of them.”
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