Surely adding to the warm reception Aaronsohn received in the United States was the news of the British capture of Jerusalem on December 9. Since the beginning of the war, few events had more electrified the American public, Jews and Christians alike, and it was quickly leading to a spirited national debate over the future dispensation of the Holy Land. Nowhere was this debate more pronounced than within the Jewish community, and the early hesitation of American Zionists to embrace the Balfour Declaration was rapidly falling away.
However, Aaronsohn’s charm offensive was not nearly so successful with the man Chaim Weizmann and his British supporters regarded as crucial to their American effort, Louis Brandeis. He had several cordial meetings in Washington with the Supreme Court justice, but Brandeis remained decidedly cool to the idea of an American delegation joining the Zionist Commission soon to be on its way to Palestine; this, Brandeis pointed out, would lend the appearance of official American support for Britain’s Palestinian endeavor—which, of course, was precisely the British goal.
The second and more sensitive aim of the British Zionists—an American declaration of war on the Turks—was made fairly plain in a letter from Weizmann to Brandeis in mid-January. “It must be abundantly clear,” Weizmann wrote, “that there is a complete coincidence of American-British-Judean interests as against Prusso-Turkish interests.… This is why I think that a Jewish Palestine must become a war aim for America exactly in the same way as [German-occupied] Alsace Lorraine and an independent Poland.”
With that, Brandeis had evidently heard enough. As far back as April 1917, Weizmann had enlisted Brandeis to secure Woodrow Wilson’s support for the Jewish homeland idea, and the Supreme Court justice had pursued that effort as far as his sense of ethics allowed. Now, not only was Weizmann asking him to lean on the president to dramatically expand the American war effort, but referring to the vague “national home for the Jewish people” noted in the Balfour Declaration as “Jewish Palestine.” Brandeis finally wrote Weizmann a terse cable stating that American participation in the Zionist Commission was “now impossible.” It was the beginning of a rift between two of the world’s most prominent Zionist leaders that would never fully heal.
AT THE RIDGELINE, Lawrence drew up on his camel to survey the shadowed town of Tafileh in the ravine below. It was a distinctly uninviting place, and as he was soon to discover, home to a situation quite unlike any he had encountered over his sixteen months in the Arabian war theater.
It was the morning of January 20, 1918. Five days earlier, a mixed force of Bedouin warriors and a five-hundred-man unit of the Arab Legion that had been training in Aqaba had stormed into Tafileh, located in a mountain valley in southern Syria, and chased out the town’s small Turkish garrison. To the north lay the Arabs’ next objectives, the larger settlements of Kerak and Madeba. Lawrence had come to assist in the operations against those towns, and to then push on to the northern shore of the Dead Sea; if all went to plan, it would be there, in the vicinity of the ancient city of Jericho, that the Arab rebels would finally forge a direct land link with General Allenby’s army in Jerusalem.
But as guerrilla fighters throughout history have discovered, it is one thing to conduct hit-and-run raids against the enemy, and quite another to take population centers and hold them to one’s side. While modern insurgency and counterinsurgency experts have coined a term for the process—“hearts and minds”—the bare truth is there are no hearts or minds to be won. Instead, the essential focus of civilians caught in a guerrilla war zone is simply to stay alive, and they will cast their lot with whichever side best ensures that—until that side doesn’t anymore, at which point the civilians will move to the other side. In this most primal of contests, appeals to nationalism or ideology are next to worthless; “allegiance” is won by providing security or instilling terror, or through some combination of the two.
In the streets of “liberated” Tafileh, Lawrence encountered a perfect illustration in miniature of this hearts-and-minds fallacy. There had been no joyous celebrations among those townspeople at being freed from the Turkish yoke or at the notion of a united Arab nation; rather, Tafileh’s merchants and small farmers and shepherds saw themselves as caught between two bad choices. They regarded the marauding Bedouin warriors with equal parts fear and hatred, viewed them as little more than camel-borne bandits. If less apprehensive of the disciplined Arab Legion, they quite naturally saw this large force as a potentially calamitous drain on their meager food supplies, and had quickly hidden away whatever stores they could. Behind this was a collective fear of what would happen if the Turks retook the valley, the reprisals likely to follow, and as usually occurs in such situations, this had produced a sharp divergence of opinion over where safety best lay.
“Affairs are in rather a curious state here,” Lawrence reported to Gilbert Clayton on January 22. “The local people are divided into two very bitterly opposed factions, and are therefore terrified of each other and of us. There is shooting up and down the streets every night, and general tension. We are taking steps about police, etc., which will allay this state of nerves, and I hope produce enough supplies for us to go on with.”
Working against that, though, was the hoarding carried out by the villagers, a development already causing food shortages in the valley and enormous price increases in whatever was available. This, in turn, was fueling growing resentment among the populace, and growing anger among the warriors. “I’m sorry not to be able to send you proper figures of quantities of supplies here,” Lawrence concluded his January 22 report, “but have been very busy since I got here in trying to find out who was for us, and where they were. The conflicts of ideas, local feuds, and party interests are so wild (this being the moment of anarchy the whole district has been longing for for years), that hardly anyone could straighten them out in a hurry.”
But the situation was about to get much worse. The day after writing to Clayton, Lawrence learned that a sizable Turkish force was on its way to retake Tafileh.
By the time he reached Tafileh, Lawrence had been back in Arabia from his Jerusalem-Cairo sojourn for a full month. He’d spent that time taking stock of the Arab Revolt, conferring with Faisal in Aqaba, preparing for what was to come next. Shortly after his return, he’d joined in a foray against the Hejaz Railway aboard the newest British weapon to be introduced to the Arabian front, the Rolls-Royce armored car. While the two armored cars had inflicted only minor damage on the Turkish outpost they targeted, it was immediately apparent to all that this new weapon fundamentally changed the desert war. Now, with an absolute minimal investment of men and matériel, the British could thoroughly dominate the railway, attacking its isolated Turkish garrisons and disrupting the line almost at will. With such dominance there at last came acceptance in British military leadership of the argument Lawrence had been trying to make for nearly a year: there really was no good reason to push for the fall of Medina; better to leave those thousands of marooned enemy soldiers precisely where they were.
His preparations had also been personal. In the wake of his ordeal at Deraa, Lawrence set about organizing his own private army, or bodyguard. “I began to increase my people to a troop,” he wrote, “adding such lawless men as I found, fellows whose dash had got them into trouble elsewhere.” His recruitment of the “lawless” was quite deliberate and clever. Troublemakers within their own tribes, perhaps even outcasts altogether, these men would ultimately be loyal to Lawrence alone, a consideration that also explained the inclusion of the two camp miscreants, Farraj and Daud, in their number. It was a bond of personal loyalty for which the bodyguard unit would pay dearly, however; by Lawrence’s estimate, nearly sixty of them would be dead before war’s end.
It was with this expanded retinue that, on January 10, Lawrence had set off to join the ongoing operation at Tafileh. As he’d been informed by General Allenby’s staff in Jerusalem, the British army in Palestine probably wouldn’t be sufficiently rested and reequipped to embark on their next push u
ntil mid-February. In light of that delay, Lawrence and the war planners had come up with a fairly modest interim scheme for the Arab rebels. Avoiding the string of major population centers of the Syrian interior—still under Turkish control and a long way from the reach of British forces in Palestine—the rebel army would instead clear the ground in between, the Moab Plateau mountains just to the east of the Dead Sea, then forge a link with the British near Jerusalem. Capturing Tafileh had been the first objective in this campaign, and next up were the larger towns of Kerak and Madeba, but all was suddenly cast into doubt by the news that the Turks were marching on Tafileh.
If hewing to their past tactics, the Arabs would have taken this opportunity to pack up and melt away. Lawrence was enough a student of guerrilla insurgencies, however, to realize that the rules of warfare had now abruptly changed. Just as in Tafileh, the residents of Kerak and Madeba were sitting on the sidelines, waiting to cast their lot with the winner. This meant that the fate of the three towns was inextricably linked, that if Tafileh was abandoned, any chance in Kerak or Madeba was lost too. In essence, the rebels had no choice but to stand and fight.
That effort got off to a very shaky start. On the afternoon of January 24, the vanguard of the Turkish force of some one thousand soldiers sent down from Kerak entered the Tafileh valley from the Wadi Hesa gorge a few miles north of town. In quick order, they pushed the thin rebel picket line all the way back to the town’s outskirts. Fortunately for the rebels, night fell before the Turks could fully press their advantage; under the cover of darkness, the commander of the Arab Legion hastily withdrew his forces all the way to the southern end of the valley. “Everybody thought we were running away,” Lawrence would report to Clayton. “I think we were.”
Before dawn, Lawrence ventured into the town and saw firsthand the effect of the Legion’s withdrawal on the residents. “Everyone was screaming with terror, goods were being bundled out of the houses into the streets, which were packed with women and men. Mounted Arabs were galloping up and down, firing wildly into the air, and the flashes of the Turkish rifles were outlining the further cliffs of the Tafileh gorge.”
Observing that a small picket force still held a bluff north of town, Lawrence urgently sent word back to the Legion commander for reinforcements and machine guns to be brought up, then hurried to the bluff himself. As morning broke, the situation for the tiny force there—perhaps thirty Arab warriors and an equal number of Tafileh residents—turned “rather difficult.”
“The Turks were working through the pass and along the eastern boundary ridge of the plain,” Lawrence reported, “and concentrating the fire of about fifteen machine guns on the face and flank of the rather obvious little mound we were holding. They were meanwhile correcting the fusing of their shrapnel, which had been grazing the hilltop and bursting over the plain, and were [now] beginning to sprinkle the sides and top of the hill quite freely. Our people were short of ammunition, and the loss of the position was obviously only a matter of minutes.”
But the holding action on the bluff proved crucial. By the time the position was abandoned, the main Arab force had hurried forward with their machine and mountain guns to form a new line on a parallel ridge a mile and a half behind. Amid this, there occurred one of those small, seemingly insignificant deeds upon which battles are often decided. During his own dash back to safety, Lawrence had shown the presence of mind to count off his paces, and he calculated that the distance between the abandoned bluff—the position the Turks would soon occupy—and the Arabs’ new defensive line was right around thirty-one hundred yards. No sooner had the main Turkish force settled upon the bluff and deployed their own heavy weaponry than they were engulfed in a storm of mortar fire from the Arabs’ mountain guns.
With the Turks pinned down in the center, Lawrence drew on his knowledge of military history to conduct a classic pincer attack, dispatching small units of fighters out in a wide arc to work their way behind the unsuspecting enemy. Shortly after 3 p.m., the trap was sprung, the Arab machine gunners on the flank pouring fire into the now completely exposed Turks on the bluff. With their machine- and mountain-gun crews quickly wiped out, the Turkish troops wavered and then began a disorganized scramble for the safety of the Wadi Hesa gorge. Except there was no safety to be found there either. With all semblance of cohesion gone, throughout the evening and into the night, the fleeing Turks were set upon by Arab cavalrymen and marauding Bedouin, even mountain villagers bent on vengeance or loot. Of the thousand Turkish soldiers who marched into Tafileh, Lawrence estimated their losses at some five hundred dead and wounded, with another two hundred captured, but even this may have been on the low side; he later heard reports that no more than fifty made it back to Kerak, the rest picked off one by one in the gorge. It had come at a cost of some twenty-five Arabs killed, and perhaps three times as many wounded.
The rout at Tafileh was a classic Napoleonic-style trap, and one that would shortly win Lawrence the Distinguished Service Order medal. Yet it was an action he himself would describe as “villainous,” a pointless exercise in one-upmanship. “We could have won by refusing battle, foxed them by maneuvering our center as on twenty such occasions before and since.” Instead, by engaging the enemy in a conventional battle, the Arabs had lost one-sixth of their strength to casualties, making an advance on Madeba or Kerak all but impossible for the near future. “This evening,” he wrote, “there was no glory left, but the terror of the broken flesh, which had been our own men, carried past us to their homes.”
But at Tafileh, Lawrence would exhibit a new and unsettling trait: hatred for the enemy, an element of fury at their stupidity for having attacked him. Even if he might lament the fate of the “thousand poor Turks” who had marched into Tafileh, it was bereft of the compassion that had once marked him. Indeed, upon hearing of the Turks still being massacred in the gorge long after the battle had been won, Lawrence did nothing. “I should have been crying-sorry for the enemy,” he recounted in Seven Pillars, “but after the angers and exertions of the battle, my mind was too tired to care to go down into that awful place and spend the night saving them.”
Six months earlier, in the wake of a similarly one-sided battle at Aba el Lissan, Lawrence had ensured that the mortally wounded enemy be placed along a streambank so that they might at least have water while they died. At Tafileh, even those Turks lightly wounded were left out unattended as a fierce snowstorm came in that night; by morning, all were dead. “It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war, but no special reproach lay on us for it. We risked our lives in the blizzard … to save our own fellows, and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks.”
Chapter 17
Solitary Pursuits
It might be fraud or it might be farce, [but] no one should say that I could not play it.
T. E. LAWRENCE ON HIS ROLE IN THE ARAB REVOLT, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
Doggedness and a thirst for adventure had carried William Yale far from his aristocratic origins. In 1908, those traits had taken him to the steaming jungles of the Panama Canal Zone and, shortly after, to the oilfields of Oklahoma and the backwaters of the Ottoman Empire. In the autumn of 1917, they had brought him to Cairo, the locus of the Allied war effort in the eastern Mediterranean, with the ambiguous title of special agent to the United States Department of State. That assignment also dropped him into a new kind of jungle, a maze of different interests vying for power in the future Middle East.
“These interests crossed and recrossed each other,” Yale would write, “creating a confused tangle of intrigues and policies which was almost impossible to disentangle, and back of these policies and intrigues were the interested groups in France and Great Britain: capitalistic, religious, cultural. Added to these complications was the problem of Zionism and Jewish desires.… No more fascinating and interesting task could be given a man than that of attempting to understand and report upon this most complex of problems.”
Smart enough to grasp his utter unpreparedness—he was literally the only American field intelligence officer for the entire region—Yale quickly scoured the English-language bookstores in Cairo for histories of the Middle East. He cultivated relationships with an array of Egyptian and émigré community leaders, and frequently dropped by the Arab Bureau offices at the Savoy Hotel for informal chats with its intelligence officers. In the time-honored tradition of both journalists and spies everywhere, he diligently put in many hours at the favored watering holes of diplomats and senior military officers; in Cairo in 1917, that most frequently meant the pleasantly appointed rooms of the Turf Club on the Nile island of Gezira.
As Yale soon discovered, the fraternizing aspect of his mission actually required minimal exertion. That’s because most every player in the Cairo political swirl was only too eager to present his case to an official of the United States, the newest and, if Woodrow Wilson had his way, most influential member of the Allied military partnership. There was one notable exception, however. “The French made no effort to contact me,” Yale recalled. “The formality and exclusiveness of the[ir] officials repulsed me, and a certain inherent timidity kept me from making further advances.”
But if playing to his tenacious spirit, at least initially the Cairo posting offered precious little in the way of adventure. Following General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem in December, Yale sought permission from British authorities to visit the Palestine battlefront, a request denied on the grounds that only accredited military liaison officers were allowed. The real reason, Yale eventually deduced, was British concern that granting access to an American would require they do the same for their more meddlesome allies—the Italians and Greeks were constantly asking—at a time when they had their hands full in Palestine just trying to sandbag the French.
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