Despite the rustic nature of his new surroundings, Yale was undoubtedly pleased to be out of Cairo and away from a job that had seemed increasingly futile. Shortly before leaving for the front, he had finally heard back from the State Department in regard to the message he had sent about Faris Nimr and his cell of pro-American Syrian conspirators fully two months earlier. If not for prompt reply, his message had been deemed important enough to go up to the desk of the secretary of state himself. “Referring your report No. 28,” read Secretary Lansing’s cable of July 9, “continue noncommittal attitude relative American attitude towards Syria.”
THE NEWS CAME to Lawrence as a jolt, but an exceedingly pleasant one. On June 18, he and Lieutenant Colonel Alan Dawnay, the new overall coordinator of operations in northern Arabia, went to General Headquarters to outline the plan for the Arabs’ independent advance into Syria. They met there with General William Bartholomew, one of Allenby’s chief deputies. Bartholomew listened to their presentation for a few minutes before shaking his head with a smile; as he told his visitors, they had come to Ramleh three days too late.
As Dawnay and Lawrence soon learned, what had transpired in Palestine over the previous month was one of the very rare instances in World War I when an army had been readied for combat operations ahead of schedule. In recent weeks, a steady flood of British and Indian army troops had arrived from Iraq and the subcontinent, taking the place of those Allenby had been forced to send on to Europe, and tremendous effort had been made in getting these troops into the line and swiftly integrated with the rest of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. So successful had this push been that at a senior staff meeting at headquarters on June 15, it was concluded the army would be “capable of a general and sustained offensive” into the Syrian heartland as early as September.
For Lawrence, it meant there was now no reason for the Arabs to risk an unsupported advance into Syria. Instead, with Allenby’s timetable closely matching that devised by Lawrence and Dawnay for the Arabs, the rebels could simply dovetail their operations with those of the EEF. Of course, timetables had a way of getting upended in the Middle East, so Lawrence was greatly relieved when on a subsequent visit to headquarters on July 11 he learned a firm launch date for the EEF offensive had been chosen: September 19.
In the interim, a political development had made the prospect of re- attaching the Arabs to the British effort even more attractive. In early May, a group of seven Syrian exile leaders claiming to represent a broad spectrum of Syrian society had written an open letter demanding to know in clear and unequivocal language precisely what Great Britain and France envisioned for their nation’s future. London and Paris had tried to ignore the so-called Seven Syrians letter for as long as possible, but this time international attention wouldn’t allow it; the matter had finally been dropped into the laps of the two men most responsible for the enduring controversy, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. After much back-and-forth, in mid-June Sykes and Picot had answered the Seven Syrians that in those lands “emancipated from Turkish control by the action of the Arabs themselves during the present war,” Britain and France would “recognize the complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs inhabiting those areas and support them in their struggle for freedom.”
To Lawrence, here, finally, was the reaffirming of the promise of independence that he and the Arab rebels had been seeking for so long. But the formulation also reaffirmed the caveat that Lawrence had always suspected lay beneath the surface: Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. In light of this, the rebels had every reason to join the coming British offensive. After his consultations at headquarters on July 11, Lawrence hurried back to Cairo, and then on to Aqaba, to start planning for the long-delayed Arab advance north.
One of the first tasks before him in that regard was to finally bring to an end Faisal’s long and perilous flirtation with the Turkish general Mehmet Djemal. In late July, Lawrence passed along to David Hogarth a copy of the peace offer letter that Faisal had sent to Djemal on June 10. The cover story Lawrence concocted to explain how he had come into possession of such an explosive document—he claimed to have surreptitiously obtained it from Faisal’s scribe—was absurd on its face, but apparently had a sufficiently Arabian Nights flavor to pass muster with his superiors.
Oddly, in London, the most immediate effect of this fresh revelation of Faisal’s perfidy was to reactivate the debate, begun several months earlier but gone a bit dormant, on exactly which high honorific should be bestowed upon him. The episode pointed out a truly bizarre aspect of early-twentieth-century Britain: amid the bloodiest war in human history, and coinciding with a period so dark that the very survival of the British Empire was at stake, more than a dozen of the most important officials of that empire found the time in their schedules to voice their opinions, often repeatedly, on which medal should be given to a thirty-three-year-old desert prince. In doing so, all had ignored the counsel of the one Briton who knew that prince best, T. E. Lawrence, and his suggestion that Faisal wasn’t much interested in medals.
On the morning of August 7, 1918, Lawrence gathered with his sixty-man bodyguard on the shore at Aqaba. His preceding weeks had been a blur of frantic preparation, and there was still a tremendous amount to be done before the Arabs would be ready to launch their September attack into the Syrian heartland. For Lawrence, though, the back-base grunt work of war—of organizing supply convoys, of plotting the movement of men and weapons across maps—was at an end; that day, he and his men were setting off for the interior, and would not return until the great battle had been joined and decided.
Embarking on that journey undoubtedly also raised a haunting “what if” in Lawrence’s mind. In October 1917, on the eve of the British army’s first advance into Palestine, General Allenby had asked Lawrence how the Arab rebels might contribute to the assault. Fearing a slaughter of the rebels, Lawrence had kept the Arab contribution to a minimum, instead proposing his ill-fated charge against the Yarmuk bridge. How differently things might have turned out save for his hesitation at that time. If the Arabs had gone all in, this last year of crushing stasis might have been averted, the war already over; also averted, of course, would have been Deraa, Tafileh, and the deaths of Daud and Farraj.
But now was the time to atone for all that. That morning in Aqaba he told his bodyguards in their colorful robes to prepare for victory, promised the Syrians among them that they would soon be home. “So for the last time we mustered on the windy beach by the sea’s edge, the sun on its brilliant waves glinting in rivalry with my flashing and changing men.”
THE HEADQUARTERS OF the German army on the Western Front was a network of pleasant châteaus and stately hotels in the small Belgian resort town of Spa. It was there, on the morning of July 31, 1918, that Curt Prüfer and Abbas Hilmi II were ushered into a conference room to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II. As Prüfer recorded in his diary, Wilhelm gained “the best impression” of the deposed khedive of Egypt, and was visibly impressed by his grand plans for the reconquest of his homeland from the British. At the end of the interview, the kaiser turned to Prüfer and said, “I request that you see me next time in a free Egypt.”
But if the German emperor’s spirits had been buoyed by the visit, it produced a more muted reaction in his two guests. The kaiser had aged greatly during the war, and now seemed diminished, even slightly befuddled. To Prüfer, attuned to the trappings and protocol of military life, it was clear that the German emperor no longer commanded much of anything, that for all his ostentatious medals and martial bearing he was now almost as much a figurehead as Abbas Hilmi.
It was very different from what either man had expected when they’d left Constantinople on July 23. In testament to the high hopes placed on their mission, they had been seen off at the station by an official Turkish government delegation that had included Interior Minister Talaat. But then had come the long, slow journey through the heartland of the Central Powers, images of dep
rivation and decline everywhere. To both men, the land and its people looked utterly spent, the situation far worse than just months earlier, and it belied the optimistic pronouncements continuing to burble from the German high command and its talk of the approaching final victory.
If not before, they had surely grasped the fiction of those pronouncements once they reached Spa. On July 17, the last of the five German offensives collectively known as the Kaiserschlacht, or Kaiser’s Battle, that had been launched on the Western Front since March had been halted. Their number reduced by 700,000 more casualties, the remnants of the German armies were now falling back toward the Hindenburg Line, a fantastically elaborate wall of defensive fortifications that ran the length of northern France and that the Germans had begun building in 1917. Not only was there to be no German “final victory,” but also no foreseeable end to the war; from behind the Hindenburg, Germany might hold out indefinitely, the battle grinding on without victors or vanquished for a long time to come.
This was certainly the assessment of generals and war planners on the other side of the front. Even with the flood of American soldiers finally beginning to reach France, the most optimistic Allied strategists were talking of a breakthrough in the summer of 1919, while their more conservative colleagues foresaw the struggle continuing far beyond; some analyses had the war going well into the mid-1920s.
Yet as with nearly every other assessment among the wise men of the Entente, these estimates were to be proven wrong. After the deaths of some sixteen million around the globe, the end was coming, and with a speed few could comprehend. Improbably, that collapse would start in one of the most remote and seemingly insignificant corners of the world battlefield, the deserts of Syria.
Chapter 18
Damascus
We ordered “no prisoners,” and the men obeyed.
T. E. LAWRENCE, OFFICIAL REPORT ON EVENTS IN TAFAS, OCTOBER 1918
It was September 12, 1918. The world war had now entered its fiftieth month. In contemplating its various battlefronts on that day, Allied military and political leaders were held in a certain thrall, their growing conviction that the enemy was nearing collapse tempered by the memory of how many times they had been wrong about this in the past. On the Western Front, the Germans had now ceded the last of their gains in the Spring Offensive to regroup behind the Hindenburg Line. The first Allied test against that defensive wall, the most formidable network of fortifications ever built, was to be a joint French-American operation near the Meuse River, scheduled for the end of the month. On the Southern Front, Italian commanders, at last chastened at having suffered over 1.5 million casualties over three years of war for no gain, were working up modest plans to move against an Austro-Hungarian army that had stood on the far bank of the Piave River for nearly a year. In the Balkans, a joint army of French, Serbs, Greeks, and Britons was preparing to push against a Bulgarian army in Macedonia. With the fresh memory of millions dead, the Allies viewed these proposed thrusts as of the testing-the-waters ilk, a chance to make some incremental gains before winter shut down offensive operations until the following spring, perhaps for even longer. British prime minister Lloyd George had recently floated a proposal to delay any all-out advance against Germany until 1920, when the American army would be fully ashore in France and Allied strength might be truly overwhelming.
In this climate, people went about their lives with a sense of cautious optimism or quiet trepidation, depending on which side of the battle lines they dwelt, a budding belief that the worst war in human history was finally inching toward some kind of resolution, even if the particulars and timetable for that resolution remained as indistinct as ever.
On that September 12, Aaron Aaronsohn was on a passenger ship five days out of Southampton, bound for New York. Having returned to England from the Middle East in August, he had spent a frustrating few weeks shuttling between Paris and London trying to win support for his Palestinian land-buying scheme. That effort had been complicated by his usual sparring with Chaim Weizmann and other British Zionist leaders, and Weizmann and Mark Sykes had seen a way both to be temporarily rid of the irksome agronomist and to put him to good use by proposing that he embark on another rallying-the-troops mission to the American Jewish community. Once Aaronsohn’s ship put into New York harbor, he had a full roster of meetings and talks planned that might keep him busy in the United States for months.
Curt Prüfer’s summer had steadily mutated from the strange to the surreal. After arranging Abbas Hilmi’s audience with the kaiser at the end of July, he had spent weeks shuttling the pretender to the Egyptian throne around the German countryside, with official meetings and banquets in the khedive’s honor interspersed with stays at the country estates of princelings and countesses. In the mountain resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in mid-August, the pair had met up with the kaiser’s sister, Princess Viktoria von Schaumburg-Lippe, and her eclectic retinue of hangers-on, and had spent ten days in rather debauched merriment even as the news from the war front grew bleak.
“Growing intimacy with the princess and Gräfin Montgelas and Seline von Schlotheim,” Prüfer noted in his diary on August 30, referring to the kaiser’s sister and two courtesans in her entourage. “In the evenings, boozing, dancing and flirting, hectic room parties and the like.”
It wasn’t all just parlor games, though. In Abbas Hilmi, Prüfer was in the company of one of the world’s most indefatigable schemers, and as the outlook for the Central Powers dimmed, the German spy chief seemed to latch onto the Egyptians’ grandiose plots with a kind of anxious fervor. One involved trying to lure Abbas’s son and heir, Abdel Moneim, out of Switzerland. As the ex-khedive explained, his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations—which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British—but if Prüfer could somehow lure Abdel Moneim to Germany, his father could then arrange his marriage to the daughter of the new Ottoman sultan, thereby cementing Abbas’s own claim to Egyptian rule. It was surely an indication of just how divorced from the real world Prüfer was becoming that all this struck him as both a fine and important idea, one to be taken up at the highest levels of the foreign ministry.
But if the German spymaster increasingly lived in a deluded parallel universe, it was one in which he had a great deal of company. Not only did senior foreign ministry officials urge Prüfer to proceed with the Abdel Moneim overture, but they beseeched him for help on another matter. Alerted to the conciliatory letter Faisal Hussein had written Turkish general Mehmet Djemal back in June, they now seized upon the idea of brokering a peace deal with the Arab rebels as a last-minute solution in the Middle East—a solution that perhaps would include their dear friends in the Young Turk leadership, but perhaps not. Prodded by the foreign ministry for possible intermediaries to carry Germany’s own secret peacemaking initiative to Faisal, Prüfer passed along the name of a contact helpfully provided by Abbas Hilmi.
If less colorful, William Yale’s late summer was also proving frustrating. By September 12, he had spent more than a month in his tent at the British General Headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, in the foothills below Jerusalem. In that time, the State Department special agent—now reconstituted as the American military attaché to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force—had learned virtually nothing from the British military command of Allenby’s much-rumored coming offensive. This had not been for lack of effort; Yale had attended any number of intelligence briefings at which British officials seemed in quiet competition with each other to impart nothing of substance, and had suffered through a host of tedious senior staff dinners even less illuminating. His repeated requests to tour the British front lines were put off with one excuse after another. He was finally given a partial explanation for this by a certain Captain Hodgson, the British officer detailed to serve as minder to the foreign attachés. “I’ll tell you, Yale,” Hodgson revealed, “I was told to show you as little as possible, as you were a Standard Oil man.”
Yet the
British had also unwittingly handed Yale an opening. Testament to the low regard with which they held the foreign military attachés in general, and him in particular, they had isolated them in the same corner of Bir-es-Salem as another distasteful group of camp followers: the resident press corps. From this motley assortment of British and Australian newspaper correspondents, far less restricted in their movements than the attachés, Yale was able to glean at least something of what was being planned, enough so that by September 12 he knew “the big show” was soon to get under way. He didn’t know when, let alone where, but in the growing sense of urgency that permeated General Headquarters, in the shifting of troops and matériel that the journalists reported seeing on their travels, were the unmistakable signs that Allenby’s offensive was imminent.
But beyond their qualms over Yale’s Standard Oil connection, General Headquarters actually had good reason for their climate of secrecy; what they were planning in Palestine constituted a very intricate ruse. In recent weeks, an array of British army units had been brought up from Palestine’s coastal plain to take up positions around Jerusalem, their new tent encampments sprawling over the Judean hillsides. Amid this re- deployment, Allenby had moved his forward command headquarters to Jerusalem. Simultaneously, local purchasing agents had been dispatched to different tribes in the Amman region with orders to buy up enormous amounts of forage, enough to feed the horses and camels of a large army, come late September. To the watching Turks, the conclusion was inescapable: the British offensive was coming soon, and its target was to be the same Salt-Amman region where British attacks had failed twice before. In fact, however, those new tent cities were empty, Allenby’s move to Jerusalem had been a charade, and the forage-buying effort was a red herring. Rather, the British plan was to strike at the very opposite end of the line, to sweep north along the Palestinian coastal shelf and then turn inland so as to envelop the Turks from three sides.
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