Both Faisal and Lawrence were stunned. As Chauvel recounted, Faisal fiercely argued that it was his understanding “from the advisor whom Allenby had sent him”—meaning Lawrence—that in return for ceding Palestine, “the Arabs were to have the whole of Syria, including the Lebanon.” Furthermore, he flatly refused to have a French liaison officer attached to him, “or to recognize French guidance in any way.”
At this tense impasse, Allenby turned to Lawrence. “But did you not tell him that the French were to have the Protectorate over Syria?”
“No, sir,” Lawrence responded, according to Chauvel, “I know nothing about it.”
“But you knew definitely that he, Faisal, was to have nothing to do with the Lebanon?” Allenby persisted.
“No, sir,” Lawrence replied, “I did not.”
Allenby tried to defuse the situation by offering that these were only temporary measures, that all would be resolved at the great postwar peace conference being planned, but Faisal would have none of it; he knew full well that temporary measures in such circumstances had a tendency to become permanent ones. It left the British commander with only military rank to fall back on. Allenby reminded Faisal that, technically, both he and the Arab Northern Army remained under his overall command; as a result, the rebel leader had no choice but to obey orders.
After perhaps an hour, a shaken Faisal Hussein left the Victoria Hotel, to be greeted, ironically, by an enormous crowd of supporters. Lawrence did not accompany him. Instead, he stayed behind in the hotel stateroom to make a request of General Allenby.
THE DAM HAD burst. Through the rest of October, the EEF and their Arab allies pursued the remnants of the Turkish armies north, swiftly overwhelming whatever rearguard resistance the enemy could offer. It wasn’t until the end of the month that Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, the future Kemal Ataturk, finally managed to establish a new defensive line at the very edge of the Turkish Anatolian heartland. By then, though, all of Syria was gone and the Constantinople regime was suing for peace. That culminated in the Armistice of Mudros on October 31; at just about the same time, the fallen Three Pashas—Djemal, Enver, and Talaat—slipped aboard a German torpedo boat and made their escape across the Black Sea.
But it wasn’t just the Turkish dam that had burst. In one of the more peculiar chain reactions in history, given that their military efforts had been largely autonomous, all the Central Powers had come to their breaking points at precisely the same moment, and all now fell together—Bulgaria at the end of September, and then Turkey and Austro-Hungary in the span of a mere six days. As might be expected, Germany held out the longest, but only by the matter of a week. With their vaunted Hindenburg Line overrun in a half dozen places and their soldiers surrendering en masse, in the early morning hours of November 11, German negotiators met with their Allied counterparts in a railroad car in a French forest to sign papers of armistice, scheduled to take effect at 11 a.m. that same day. In a fittingly obscene finale to this most senseless of wars, a number of Western Front units continued to fight right up until that eleventh hour was struck, with the result that some four thousand more soldiers died on the last morning of the war.
Curt Prüfer had observed much of this staggering cascade of events from the vantage point of Switzerland, to which he had crossed in late September. Even as all fell down around him, the German spymaster had continued with his scheme to try to woo the wayward eldest son of Abbas Hilmi back into the Central Powers’ fold, the keystone, in some inscrutable way, toward forging a German-Turkish-Egyptian alliance that might yet ride to triumph in the Middle East. A mentally unstable sadist Abdel Moneim may well have been, but he still had enough wits about him in October 1918 to realize that his German suitor’s scheme was ludicrous. At the end of that month, an empty-handed Prüfer crossed back over to Germany, just in time to witness the final fall of his beloved Fatherland.
For a time, Aaron Aaronsohn had also been a distant observer of the events of that autumn—in his case, from the even farther remove of the United States. In mid-October, however, with the downfall of the Central Powers clearly imminent, he hurried aboard a passenger ship in New York for the return to England. Once Turkey and Germany capitulated, Aaronsohn knew, all attention would turn to the international peace conference being planned in Paris, and he was determined to make his presence there known, to press for the promises given to the Zionists in the Balfour Declaration.
By contrast, William Yale experienced the climax of the war firsthand. Through October, he followed the victorious British army north through Syria, and was in Aleppo when news of the German armistice came. Afterward, he made his way back to Cairo, not at all sure what his future held. Reluctant to go home, but with little to do in Egypt, he fixated on trying to get himself attached in some capacity to the American delegation at the upcoming Paris Peace Conference. “I feverishly wrote report after report,” he recounted, “hoping that through them I could persuade someone to order me to Paris. My reports grew poorer and poorer.”
That decline in quality apparently did the trick, for in late December Yale received a cable ordering him to the French capital. He was to report there to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, to serve as their “expert on Arabian affairs.” As Yale would write in a moment of rare modesty, “the title flabbergasted me.”
Paradoxically, of the various spies and intelligence agents who had parried with one another across the Middle East over the previous few years, the one most completely removed from events at the war’s close was T. E. Lawrence. He had ensured that on the afternoon of October 3, in the second-floor stateroom of the Victoria Hotel in Damascus.
Once Faisal had left that room after his meeting with Allenby, Lawrence had turned to the general and requested to be given leave. Apparently, Allenby initially assumed it was a request for a few days’ rest—that was easy enough to arrange and certainly well deserved—but Lawrence clarified that he wanted to leave altogether, to go home to England. At first, Allenby flatly refused; the Syrian campaign was still a very active one, it relied greatly on British officers whom the Arabs trusted, and they trusted no one more than Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence.
According to Henry Chauvel, Lawrence then raised the stakes considerably by telling Allenby “that he would not work with a French Liaison officer, and that he was due for leave and thought he had better take it now and go off to England.” Whether in anger at Lawrence’s insubordination or in respect at his sense of honor—the accounts of Chauvel and Lawrence differ on this—Allenby finally relented. “Yes,” he told Lawrence, “I think you had.”
Since late 1916, Lawrence had waged a quiet war against his own government, and now he had lost. What would soon become clear, however, was that he intended to continue that fight off the battlefield, in the conference halls and meeting rooms of peacetime Paris. He may have asked to leave Damascus out of exhaustion, but it was also to prepare for the next round in the struggle for Arab independence.
The following afternoon, Lawrence was conducted out of Damascus. He was leaving the city he had invoked as a battle cry for two years. One hundred and fifty miles to the northeast of Damascus lay Jerablus, the place where he had spent the happiest days of his life. To Damascus or Jerablus, Lawrence would never return.
Epilogue
Paris
Blast the Lawrence side of things. He was a cad I’ve killed.
T. E. SHAW, ALIAS OF T. E. LAWRENCE, TO H. C. ARMSTRONG, OCTOBER 6, 1924
Everything T. E. Lawrence had fought for, schemed for, arguably betrayed his country for, turned to ashes in a single five-minute conversation between the prime ministers of Great Britain and France. In London on the morning of December 1, 1918, David Lloyd George took aside a visiting Georges Clemenceau and bluntly outlined just what Britain wanted in the Middle East: Iraq and Palestine. In tacit exchange, although Lloyd George would always deny it, France would have free rein in Syria. It was a proposed “solution” to the spoils-of-war contest that had strained British
and French relations ever since they had cast their covetous eyes toward the Middle East, and that had now taken on great urgency; with the Great War finally over and the Paris Peace Conference about to begin, it was vital that Britain and France present a unified front against the American president, Woodrow Wilson, with his high-minded talk of a “peace without victory” and the rights of oppressed peoples to self-determination. Faced with this imminent American threat, Clemenceau quickly acceded to Lloyd George’s proposal.
In essence, the two imperial victors had not only affirmed the basic structure of the Sykes-Picot Agreement but gone beyond it, giving themselves more and the Arabs even less. But in the time-honored tradition of European secret deals, it was to be a while before anyone outside the British and French prime ministers’ closest circles would have any knowledge of that extraordinary accord. Certainly T. E. Lawrence had no intimation of it.
What followed in Paris was a yearlong shadow play that first raised hopes of a new era in relations between nations, Woodrow Wilson’s vaunted “new world order,” only to degenerate into backroom deals, vengeful treaties, and arbitrary borders. Many books, foremost among them Margaret MacMillan’s definitive Paris 1919, have been written about the Paris Peace Conference and the immensely complicated maneuverings of great powers and nationalist supplicants. As far as the Middle East was concerned, the byzantine machinations meant, in the end, virtually nothing. “The Great Loot,” the carving up of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, would now come to pass.
Not that Lawrence did not try mightily to advance the Arab cause. Acting as Faisal’s counselor during the Paris talks, he constantly floated schemes to give them control of the lands they had fought so fiercely for, while he also lobbied senior British statesmen and wrote passionate editorials in the Arabs’ defense. But Lawrence’s usefulness to the British government had ended. In an exquisite irony, at precisely the same time he was becoming a household name in Britain—an estimated one million Britons, including the king and queen, would flock to see Lowell Thomas’s lecture show “With Allenby in Palestine, and Lawrence in Arabia”—government officials were penning memos calling Lawrence “a malign influence,” and “to a large extent responsible for our troubles with the French over Syria.” Finally, he was simply stripped of his credentials at Paris and barred from assisting Faisal in the talks. Lawrence had lost the peace.
There was at least one extraordinary aspect of Lawrence’s diplomatic efforts, however, that bears emphasis. Having long known that control of the Palestine portion of Syria was lost to the Arabs, Lawrence and Faisal sought an ally to affirm their nationalist aspirations for the rest of it. They found such an ally in Chaim Weizmann. By the close of 1918, the Zionists had strong patrons in both the British and American governments, but what made those governments nervous was the continuing—in fact, growing—hostility of the Palestinian Arab population to the Zionists’ goals. So what if Hashemite support for the Zionist program in Palestine could be traded for Zionist support of an independent Arab Syria? Over the course of that December, Lawrence, Faisal, and Weizmann worked out the details for such a mutually beneficial relationship, culminating in a joint proclamation on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference.
In that proclamation, Faisal and Weizmann announced their intention to work together in Paris, and in recognition of each other’s claims. Surely the most controversial of the nine articles of the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement was the fourth: “All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” To this document, Faisal—or more likely, Lawrence—had inserted a key closing proviso. The agreement was only valid so long as Syrian independence was achieved; barring that, it was null and void.
Yet in their desperation to find a supporting partner at the peace conference, Lawrence and Faisal had chosen to ignore several crucial details. While the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement offered a fairly detailed outline for the administration of Palestine, nowhere did it specify what Palestine actually consisted of. Further, in reaching his accord with Weizmann, Faisal had quite flagrantly turned his back on the doctrine of self-determination for Palestine, placing him in a weakened—some would say hypocritical—position in invoking that same doctrine for the rest of Syria. Most troublesome, Chaim Weizmann had recently made public just what he and other Zionists envisioned as the future status of Palestine. “The establishment of a National Home for the Jewish people,” he had announced in mid-November, “is understood to mean that the country of Palestine should be placed under such political, economic and moral conditions as will favor the increase of the Jewish population, so that in accordance with the principle of democracy, it may ultimately develop into a Jewish Commonwealth.”
By going into partnership with the Zionists under such circumstances, Faisal had just handed his more conservative Arab and Muslim rivals a powerful weapon to use against him. One who would soon wield that weapon to devastating effect was King Hussein’s chief rival in Arabia, ibn-Saud, and his fundamentalist Wahhabist followers.
IN THE LAST sentence of his memoir, William Yale referred to the Paris Peace Conference as “the prologue of the 20th century tragedy.” Yale served as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs to the American delegation in Paris and, like Lawrence, put forth great efforts to achieve a sustainable peace in the region. As with his British counterpart, with whom he sometimes aligned himself, these efforts were thwarted at every turn.
Yale placed much of the blame on his own government. To him, the grand enterprise in Paris seemed a rather perfect reflection of Woodrow Wilson’s peculiar blend of idealism and arrogance. In the American president’s almost comic fondness for tidy enumerated lists—his “Fourteen Points” had been followed by his “Four Principles,” his “Four Ends,” and finally his “Five Particulars”—was the hint of a simplistic mind-set, as if solving the world’s myriad messy problems was merely a matter of isolating them into their component parts and applying quasi-mathematical principles. Nowhere was this more problematic than when it came to Wilson’s cherished and oft-cited notion of “self-determination.” While the phrase certainly sounded good, in the mashed-together cultures of Europe and the Middle East of the early twentieth century, where faith and ethnicity and nationalism were all exerting tremendous and often opposing pulls, just whose claim to self-determination was to win out over others? London and Paris had repeatedly warned Wilson on the dangers of opening up this Pandora’s box, but there had never been any indication that the president was listening.
To William Yale’s mind, all of this was actually symptomatic of perhaps the greatest paradox underlying the American role at the Paris Peace Conference: Woodrow Wilson’s grand vision of a new world order rested on a bedrock of profound ignorance. That was made clear on the very day Yale arrived in Paris and met with his new supervisor, William Westermann, and the other members of the American delegation’s Middle Eastern research section. Granted, the Middle East was a lesser American concern at the peace conference since the United States hadn’t gone to war with Turkey, but it still struck Yale that Westermann, a classics professor from the University of Wisconsin, might have rounded up a panel with at least some familiarity with the region. Instead, they included a specialist in Latin American studies, an American Indian historian, a scholar on the Crusades, and two Persian linguistics professors.
The picture was completed when Yale was handed a briefing book on Syria, a 107-page compendium of historic, economic, and political data that was serving as the principal guide in formulating American policy in the region. The Report on the Desires of the Syrians didn’t require a lot of study on Yale’s part; almost all the citations in those sections dealing with events since 1914 were drawn from a single source, a State Department special agent in Cairo named William Yale.
Several times Yale saw opportunities for championing the cause of Arab self-determination, but they always slipped away on the tide of American inaction. At a meeting with Faisal in mid-February 1919
, Yale was taken aback when the Arab leader bluntly proposed an American mandate in Syria, vastly preferring the supposedly disinterested Americans to the French. By then, however, Yale had already been with the American delegation in Paris long enough to realize that, virtuous principles aside, the Wilson administration was more interested in dictating solutions to the rest of the world than in assuming any responsibility of its own. And there was another problem, one that may not have been readily apparent to non-Americans. Its brief burst of international involvement notwithstanding, the United States was already showing signs of sliding back into an isolationist spirit, with Wilson and his Republican opponents who dominated in Congress increasingly at loggerheads. What it meant for all those in Paris looking to the United States for leadership was that time was not on their side, that the longer things dragged on, the less likely the Americans would have the ability or even the interest to do much at all. Very quickly, for Yale and others in the American Middle Eastern division, there came the deeply dispiriting sense that matters were slipping away. “We fought over boundary lines as if the destiny of the world depended upon it,” Yale recalled of that time. “We fumed and fussed because Wilson and [his chief advisor Edward] House seemed to pay no attention to what we were doing. It all seemed strangely academic and futile to me.”
As the peace conference extended, the folly of Yale’s mission would only grow increasingly absurd. In the late spring of 1919, he was appointed to an American fact-finding committee, the King-Crane Commission, which, in pursuit of Wilson’s self-determination principle, was dispatched to determine the desires of the former denizens of the Ottoman world, “to take a plebiscite,” in Yale’s skeptical view, “of a vast sprawling empire of 30,000,000 inhabitants.” Unsurprisingly, after a tour of two months, and scores of meetings in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, the message the commission had heard in each place was unequivocal: the vast majority of people wanted either independence or the Americans. In light of this, the commission came up with a sweeping set of recommendations that placed the United States at the forefront of administering a solution to the Middle Eastern puzzle. That solution, however, did not at all resemble what had already been secretly agreed to by the British and the French, nor what the Wilson administration was willing to take on. At least here, the administration was prepared to act with great dispatch; the King-Crane reports were swiftly locked away in a safe, not to be seen or read by the outside world for the next three years.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 68