This was certainly an assessment shared by Curt Prüfer, who was also in Constantinople that spring. In curious fashion, Germany’s improved situation was allowing him to return to the first great conspiracy he had been involved with, one that had long looked dead but was now suddenly given new life.
For the past six months, Abbas Hilmi II, the deposed khedive of Egypt, had occupied apartments on an upper floor of the Pera Palace hotel in the city. There, he had joined that peculiar class of aristocracy to be found in most every European capital during World War I, the princelings and marquises and nawabs placed on ice by their imperial patrons on the off chance that they might prove useful at some point in the future. During that time, the task of keeping the former khedive entertained and feeling important had largely fallen to Curt Prüfer. In contrast to his more sober-minded duties as director of the German intelligence bureau, dealing with Abbas and his eclectic entourage was often more akin to babysitting. According to Prüfer biographer Donald McKale, “He kept Abbas Hilmi’s bickering advisers, who denounced each other as ‘English spies,’ under surveillance, and counseled the ex-Khedive on his difficulties with his son, his three former wives, and a French mistress.”
It’s clear, though, that the German intelligence chief also saw Abbas Hilmi as a useful sounding board. Abbas derided the secret negotiations with Faisal Hussein as quite pointless; the Constantinople clique would never actually cede what Faisal was demanding, and Faisal surely knew it. A much better solution, the ex-khedive opined, was for himself to become ruler of Egypt and then fashion a quasi-independent Arab nation with Hussein and Faisal—one on very friendly terms with Turkey and Germany, Hilmi undoubtedly hastened to add.
That had been so much idle talk in the autumn of 1917, but by early 1918 what had seemed far-fetched, even delusional, took on the patina of possibility. By then, the first reliable reports of civic unrest in Egypt were reaching the outside world, with the normally quiescent population enraged by Britain’s draconian martial law rule, as well as by the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement. Then, of course, had come the final collapse of Russia, the string of battlefield successes by Germany and Turkey, the increasing signs that the Arab rebels in Arabia and Syria might be looking for a way out of their alliance with the duplicitous British. For all these reasons, by that April, the idea that Abbas Hilmi II might somehow ascend to the Egyptian throne didn’t seem so crazy after all—and if that happened, Curt Prüfer’s patient ministrations at the Pera Palace might pay spectacular dividends for Germany.
Abbas clearly sensed his stock rising, too, so much so that he resurrected a long-cherished goal, one he had first put to Max von Oppenheim three years earlier but which had been consistently denied him. As he informed Curt Prüfer, before anything could be decided about Egypt, he needed to meet with the kaiser. Somewhat nonplussed, Prüfer said he would see what he could do.
WHEN LAWRENCE MET General Allenby for afternoon tea on May 15, both men were at a low ebb.
After his fruitless trek to Atatir, Lawrence had hurried down to join the Arab assault on the railhead town of Maan. By the time he got there on April 13, operations were already under way.
The order of battle had called for the attackers to first strike at Maan’s outlying guardhouses in hopes of luring the main Turkish garrison out of its entrenched positions around the railway station. Initially the operation had proceeded as planned, with one outer-ring Turkish post after another falling to the rebels. On April 17, however, the Iraqi commander of the Arab army, tiring of the extended waiting game, overruled the counsel of his British advisors to order a frontal assault on the train depot. The approach proved just as futile at Maan as it had on a thousand other World War I battlefields. “There was nothing to do,” Lawrence wrote, “but see our men volleyed out of the railway station again. The road was littered with crumpled khaki figures.”
Lawrence had stayed on in the Maan area for several more days, assisting other British officers in railway destruction operations to the south, but the battle for the crucial railway town had already been decided by that futile frontal attack. While British military communiqués made much of the damage done to the Hejaz Railway below Maan—with some sixty miles of track torn up, the Turkish garrison in Medina was now stranded for good—it was a paltry achievement when measured against the offensive’s objectives.
But even more dispiriting news had awaited Lawrence when he reached Allenby’s headquarters in Ramleh on May 2. Over the previous six weeks, Allied forces on the Western Front had only barely withstood two massive German offensives. In anticipation of a third, Allenby had been ordered to stand to the defense and to release tens of thousands of his best frontline troops for service in France. It meant there was to be no push on Damascus, that all the losses of the previous month—the failed British cavalry raid on Salt, the disastrous frontal assault at Maan, the death of Farraj in the desert—had been for naught. To top things off, just prior to Lawrence’s arrival in Ramleh, the same British cavalry commander who’d been thrown out of Salt the first time had decided to have another go; by May 2, and after another fifteen hundred casualties, the last stragglers of this fresh British defeat were drifting back across the front lines.
All of which meant that by the time of Lawrence’s next visit to headquarters and his tea with General Allenby on May 15, both men had been forced to acknowledge that the prospects of a breakthrough on the Syrian front were just as distant as ever—in fact, a good deal more distant, for in the interval since Lawrence’s last trip to headquarters, Allenby’s army had been poached a second time by the Western Front generals. All told, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now slated to lose some sixty thousand soldiers for service in France, about half of its frontline strength, and while London had committed to covering those losses with troops brought over from Iraq and India, it meant the Syrian front would be dormant for many months to come.
But during that tea, and amid describing the massive reorganization his army was currently undergoing, Allenby happened to mention the Imperial Camel Corps. This was an elite unit that had been sitting idle in the Sinai for the past six months, and the general now planned to convert it into a conventional horse-mounted cavalry and discard its camels.
From the very outset of the Syrian campaign, the greatest logistical hurdle facing the Arab rebels had been a shortage of both transport and riding camels, a problem that had only grown worse as the size and scope of operations expanded. Because of that shortage, supply lines were always stretched to the breaking point, proposed actions scaled back or canceled outright for lack of mounts. What’s more, the frequent camel-purchasing forays of Lawrence and other British officers had depleted the available stock throughout the region, leading to extortionate prices for the few decent animals left. Now, with the proposed disbanding of the Imperial Camel Corps (ICC), some two thousand of the finest riding mounts in the entire Middle East would suddenly become available.
To Lawrence, it raised an obvious question: “What are you going to do with their camels?” he asked Allenby.
Allenby laughed. “Ask Q.”
“Q” was the British quartermaster general, who explained that the camels had been promised to an incoming Indian army division for use as transport. The quartermaster general flatly rejected Lawrence’s appeals, but Allenby was swayed by his argument that using these prize animals for mere transport would be a colossal waste. At dinner that evening, the commander in chief asked Lawrence how, if given the ICC mounts, he proposed to use them.
Lawrence had, of course, anticipated the question. In addition, he divined a silver lining to the British cavalry’s ill-fated second attack on Salt. As a result of that failure, the Turks would now be convinced that any future British attack would probably come at that same spot—after all, repeatedly smashing up against the enemy’s strongest points had become something of a British World War I tradition by now—and align their troops accordingly. With the Turks concentrating their forces in the Salt-A
mman region, it would allow Lawrence, utilizing the new ICC camels from his desert hideout in Azraq, to strike behind the enemy’s lines and over a wide range of targets. These included the most vital target in all of lower Syria: the railhead town of Deraa, the junction of the principal lifeline of the Turkish forces facing the British in Palestine. At the headquarters dinner table, Lawrence gave Allenby his reply: “To put a thousand men into Deraa any day you please.”
While those men might not be able to permanently hold Deraa, Lawrence explained, they would certainly have time to blow up the crucial railroad bridges in Yarmuk, leaving the Turkish forces in Palestine virtually cut off from supply or reinforcement. At this, Allenby turned to the quartermaster general and shook his head in mock sadness: “Q, you lose.”
With the promise of the ICC camels, Lawrence rushed back to Faisal’s headquarters. The news had an electrifying effect on the warrior chieftains gathered there, for the “gift” of the two thousand thoroughbreds meant the Arabs could finally take their revolt to the far north in a substantive way. No longer would they be limited to sniping, hit-and-run attacks; by putting enough mounted fighters in the field, they could storm and hold population centers.
It also meant—and this had been a crucial aspect of Lawrence’s thinking—that the Arabs might loosen the British tether. It would still be some time before the ICC camels were delivered, and then they would need to be acclimated to the harder forage of Syria, but within two or three months’ time, the Arab rebels wouldn’t have to rely on the actions of the British, now stalemated in Palestine. Instead, they could take their war into the Syrian heartland independently, and with that independence would come the chance to snatch Syria for themselves. It was, Lawrence wrote, “a regal gift, the gift of unlimited mobility. The Arabs could now win their war when and where they liked.”
· · ·
SINCE ARRIVING IN Cairo, Aaron Aaronsohn had fallen into a dark and downcast mood. Part of it may have stemmed from his marginalized role with the Zionist Commission, the unseemly manner with which he’d been relegated to the sidelines, but his return to the region after a seven-month absence also made fresh the tragedy that had befallen his NILI organization. In Cairo, he was reunited with two of his brothers, Alex and Sam, and from them he learned more details of their sister’s ghastly end. Particularly enraging to the agronomist was how Sarah and the other NILI members had been essentially handed over by their own kind, the Zichron Yaakov Committee going so far as to post a bounty on the head of the NILI fugitive Joseph Lishansky. Zichron still lay well behind Turkish lines in the spring of 1918, but in contemplating his return there, Aaronsohn noted in his diary that “if I should seek revenge on all the cowards and scoundrels, there would be hardly a half dozen people with whom I could shake hands.”
More than anger, though, the memory of Sarah, or Sarati, and his fallen best friend, Absalom Feinberg, seemed to act as a kind of haunting presence on the scientist, constantly intruding on his thoughts. On one occasion, for example, he had been flabbergasted to see William Ormsby-Gore put a telephone call through to Jerusalem. “To telephone from Cairo to Jerusalem!” he marveled in his diary. “If only Sarati and Absa could have lived to see that!”
This haunting only grew worse when the Zionist Commission left Egypt for Palestine at the beginning of April. Aboard the night train taking them past Gaza, a solitary Aaronsohn stood by a window to stare out at the passing countryside. Ever the agronomist, he took note of the poor state of the fields—“very little winter cereals, and of a poor quality”—while observing that nothing appeared to have really changed in his two-year absence. “Still,” he noted, “we travel by train—and we are with the English! Absa, Absa, where are you? Sarati?”
But also to grow worse in Palestine was Aaronsohn’s pariah status. At one banquet honoring the visiting commission, a group of local Jewish elders refused to sit with the man who had “endangered the Yishuv” through his spying activities. At several other meetings with Jewish delegations, Aaronsohn was excoriated for the alleged strong-arm tactics he had displayed in disbursing international relief funds in the early days of the war. One of the few times any gratitude was shown him came during a welcoming ceremony in the Jewish enclave of Tel Aviv in Jaffa, the same community whose purported plight he had publicized following Djemal Pasha’s evacuation order. As hundreds of young members of the Maccabean Society, a Jewish civic organization, serenaded the visiting commission members, Chaim Weizmann leaned to Aaronsohn’s side. “Well, Aaron,” Weizmann said, “you have a great share in all this—and you paid a big price.”
That moment was an anomaly, however. Weizmann’s mission to Palestine was far too sensitive to allow for discord, whereas Aaronsohn was a man loath to ever turn the other cheek. After a commission member took Aaronsohn aside to urge that he bridge over a dispute he was having with one Jewish settlement delegation, the scientist haughtily replied that “to bridge it over would mean to establish social relations which are repugnant to me. If my attitude is not prudent, fine.”
With Aaronsohn’s feuds extending even to other commission members, Weizmann steadily pushed the agronomist further to the periphery. At times, quite literally; in the group photographs taken of the commission during their time in Palestine, Aaronsohn is usually seen standing off to one side—when included in the portraits at all. By the end of April, he had effectively parted ways to go off and work on a project of his own.
Ironically, that venture was to produce perhaps the most tangible result of the commission’s trip, for by late May, Aaronsohn had completed a remarkable blueprint for agricultural development in southern Palestine. In the papers and maps he passed to Windham Deedes at the Arab Bureau was the proposal to quickly put some quarter million acres of uncultivated and “Crown” (held by the Turkish government) land under the plow to help ease the continuing wartime food shortages. Under Aaronsohn’s scheme, the project would be placed under British military control, but with the farming done by Jewish settlers and funding provided by Zionist banks; the Zionist Commission pledged at least a half million pounds. In its execution, all would benefit: food would be provided to the destitute, so the Arabs would see the material advantage of an increased Jewish presence in Palestine, and the prospect of a decent life would entice more Jews to come.
Of course, once the period of military administration ended, perhaps four or five years, title to the quarter million acres would pass to the Zionists. But as Gilbert Clayton sunnily opined to the Foreign Office in voicing his support for Aaronsohn’s plan, “a small favor granted to one community can easily [be] counterbalanced by similar privileges afforded to the others and thus, in the normal course of administration, gradual progress can be made without causing friction and discontent.”
Even with the contribution of his land scheme, however, Aaronsohn remained an outcast with the Zionist Commission—and what held for that panel quite naturally extended to its British benefactors. At the end of May, when General Allenby held a state dinner in Jerusalem for the soon-departing commission, the only associate not invited was Aaron Aaronsohn.
· · ·
TO SKIRT ORDERS with which he disagreed, Lawrence frequently relied on an old standby of Victorian literature: the message that goes missing or isn’t delivered in time. This ruse had been denied him when it came to the British effort to force an entente between the Arab rebel leaders and the Zionists; in this sphere, Lawrence could only delay or impede at the edges. Back in February 1918, when Gilbert Clayton had ordered Lawrence to press Faisal on the matter, his subordinate had replied that he hoped to arrange a Faisal visit to Jerusalem in the near future, and “all the Jews there will report him friendly. That will probably do all you need, without public commitment, which is rather beyond my province.”
For an army major to tell a brigadier general what his needs were and the limits he would go in supplying them was no more acceptable in 1918 than it is today, but Clayton apparently accepted Lawrence’s response with equanimity;
he surely calculated that even this partial compliance to his order was better than nothing, since there was simply no one else in the British command with Lawrence’s influence on Faisal.
Lawrence changed tactics somewhat when Clayton returned to the topic in May. In light of the continuing suspicions that Chaim Weizmann and his commission were encountering among the Arab population in Palestine, Weizmann had proposed a meeting between him and Faisal. The British leadership in Palestine had heartily embraced the idea and, on May 22, Clayton sent a telegram to Lawrence in Aqaba seeking his counsel. “What arrangements do you suggest?” the general asked. “I am of opinion you should be present at interview.… Let us have your views on above points at an early date, please.”
Lawrence certainly received the message—he was in Aqaba the following day—but there is no record of his answering. On May 24, with the timetable for Weizmann’s proposed visit now firmed up—he was scheduled to sail for Aqaba in just five days—another secret cable was fired off, this time from Allenby’s headquarters to the attention of the overall Aqaba base commander. “Interview would take place at Arab headquarters to which they would motor. Wire if this is convenient to Sherif Faisal and Lawrence. It is important latter should be present at interview. Urgent reply requested.”
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