But there were several factors to check the British from committing themselves hastily. Any definite assurance might precipitate that very conflict with Turkey that Britain, on moral even more than on material grounds, was striving so hard to avoid. The religious problem was a complex one, and Britain, with millions of Moslem subjects, had to consider the issues carefully before supporting a challenge to the Sultan of Turkey, who as holder of the Khalifate was their spiritual head. Hussein, as the Sherif of Mecca and descendant of the Prophet, counted for much, but it was doubtful whether he had the temporal weight to lay claim to the Khalifate.
When Turkey entered the War against Britain, these considerations lost much of their force. The Sherif might not have adequate weight for the Khalifate, but he had enough to be a counterpoise to the Jihad. At Kitchener’s instigation a fresh message was sent through Abdulla. It gave the Sherif a definite assurance that if he and the Arabs actively aided Britain in the War, she would recognize and support their independence in return.
Another cautious reply came back to Cairo. It was more definite on the subject of neutrality, but intimated that the Sherif’s position in Islam made it impossible for him to break with Turkey immediately. His hesitation this time was largely explained by the fact that he was still sounding other Arab leaders; his third son, Feisal, had gone to Syria to gauge the value of the Arab secret society there which had just appealed to him for support in a proposed mutiny.
But in essentials the Sherif had already rendered Britain a service greater than any that could be expected in the material realm. For he had refused, much to the Turks’ indignation, to proclaim the Jihad from the Holy Cities, and thus had largely drawn its sting.1 Outside Turkey itself the Jihad would have little meaning despite the assiduous efforts of Turkish and German “missionaries.” Britain had a war with Turkey on her hands, but to ail intents she was saved the back-breaking burden of a Holy War.
In this state of more than benevolent neutrality the relations between Britain and the Sherif remained throughout 1915. It would have been exchanged much earlier for active intervention if the British project of a landing near Alexandretta had been fulfilled. For in this event a mutiny had been arranged among the Arab troops of the Turkish Army in Syria. On the other hand, Arab assistance might also have ceased much earlier, because the Arabs’ idea was apparently to make the embarrassed Turks an offer of peace in return for a recognition of their independence, so that they might have a chance of keeping it even if the British failed to win the War. So long as the Alexandretta landing hung fire Feisal advised his father to hang back, until the prospects became clearer. When the British landed, instead, on Gallipoli, he went thither as an officer in the Turkish Army to watch the trend of the struggle. Meantime Sir Henry McMahon, the new High Commissioner in Egypt, seconded by Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan, fulfilled the Foreign Office policy of cultivating the friendship with Hussein.
In July a promising bud appeared on the Arab side. The British pressure, and the Turkish losses, on Gallipoli, together with Townshend’s advance in Mesopotamia, had an influence on this initiative. News travels fast through the desert. A closer influence was exerted by hunger-pressure at home. The Hejaz was being ground between an upper and a nether millstone—on the one hand, the Red Sea blockade which Britain partially enforced, and might tighten, against the Hejaz; on the other, the partial land blockade which the Turks had instituted, through their control of rail traffic, as punishment for the Sherif’s refusal to proclaim the Jihad against Britain. Writing to McMahon, the Sherif requested that Britain would guarantee the independence of all Arab lands as the reward of a revolt against Turkey. The bud had a long stem, longer than the British cared to contemplate.
For his detailed proposals were that Britain should acknowledge Arab independence within an area that stretched from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Indian Ocean, excluding merely the Aden Protectorate, and from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. He followed up this immense vision of empire with a private letter in which he begged that the annual donation from Egypt to the Holy Cities might be resumed. Without it, the Hejaz faced bankruptcy, for the interruption of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca had deprived this barren land of its chief source of revenue.
The British, in answering, donned Hussein’s discarded mantle of caution. Their reply abounded in cordiality, assured the Sherif that Britain would arrange for the transmission of the pious donations if he would guarantee their safety, remarked that the discussion of boundaries was premature, and dropped the question of the Khalifate in discreet silence.
To the Sherif, not unnaturally, the warmth of these expressions of friendship suffered a chill in transmission. He communicated his feelings to McMahon, who began to press upon the Foreign Office the urgency of giving the Arabs an adequate guarantee. The overcast prospects of the Gallipoli expedition gave a deeper emphasis to McMahon’s arguments, which were backed by very detailed information as to the political conditions in the Arab lands.
This had been gathered and collated not only by the military intelligence branch in Egypt—of which Lawrence was a nominally humble, if actually invaluable, and equally obstreperous, member—but even more by a group of experts that McMahon had gathered round him. This collection of travellers, archaeologists, and political officers was transformed a few months later in February, 1916, into an “Arab Bureau,” under the direction of Dr. Hogarth, who, by one of the war’s strange metamorphoses had come to bear the stripes of a Commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
During the first part of the War the Government of India, in virtue of its concern with Aden, had been responsible for dealing with Arab questions on the whole Red Sea Coast. Distance did not lend enchantment to its view, nor help its information. At the end of March, 1915, responsibility for Arab affairs down to a point eighty miles south of Mecca was transferred to the High Commissioner in Egypt. The change brought not only an increase of efficiency but an increased value to the Allied cause.
The impression was reinforced both by the general stream of reports as to unrest in the Turkish dominions and by special information concerning the Arab secret societies within the Turkish Empire and their preparations for a rising. In Mesopotamia there was the Ahad, a military brotherhood, composed of Arab officers in the Turkish Army who were bent on gaining military knowledge so that they might the more effectively destroy their masters when the moment was ripe. Some of its members were in high positions, and stayed in them throughout the War, working insidiously rather than openly. A larger society, predominantly civil, was the Fetah in Syria. This was so organized, and so assiduous in cultivating adherents at home and possible allies abroad, that its activities were more difficult to hide. The way that the Turks, so contrary to their usual habit, were refraining from measures of suppression seemed a testimony to the wide dimensions of the movement and suggested that the Turks might find it wiser to bribe it than to break it. If that course were taken the Jihad might become a dangerous reality.
Hence both McMahon and Maxwell urged the British Government at home, and Kitchener in particular, to do something more definite to encourage the Sherif and towards meeting his proposals. As a result, McMahon was instructed in October to tell the Sherif that Britain pledged herself to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the boundaries he had proposed, subject to certain exceptions. These were the districts, not purely Arab, that lay along the Syrian coast from the Taurus Mountains down to the west of Damascus. But the reservations were also made, first, that the assurance was limited to those parts of the Arab territories where Britain was free to act without detriment to the interests of France; and, second, that the districts of Basra and Baghdad would be subjected to a measure of British control.
These terms stretched far, but the elasticity of the contract lay mainly in its power of contraction. The real significance lay in the reservations, which had a vagueness that spelt confusion among those who formulated them as
well as among those who heard them. By reason of them Britain was to be involved in an entanglement with Arab policy akin to that in which she had been involved for a hundred years in her effort to adjust herself to Turkish policy. The entanglement might have its origin in the casuistry of policy, in that inability of nations to rise even to the relatively low standards of honest dealing that prevail among individuals. But its embarrassments would be due in large measure to the relatively high standard of honour attained by the individuals who were instruments of that policy. England’s policy would once again run on the rocks of the Englishman’s conscience, and provide yet another object-lesson of the dangers of following Machiavelli without being thoroughly Machiavellian.
Although McMahon had pressed the Foreign Office to arrange terms of alliance with the Arabs, he was disquieted by the vagueness of those on which he was instructed to negotiate an agreement, and he sent a warning to the Foreign Office in which he emphasized the importance of keeping faith with the Arab leaders as well as the dangers of underrating the possible development of the Arab movement. Further, he urged the need for unity of control over all negotiations.
In the meantime, however, the Foreign Office had been using that eminent but erratic political traveller, Sir Mark Sykes, as another agent on Kitchener’s initiative—and his own. After carrying out a secret mission to the Middle East, Sykes was deputed by the Foreign Office to enter into negotiations with M. Georges Picot, representing France, as to the future boundaries of the Arab States and the respective spheres of influence of Britain and France—in the prospective partitioning of the Turkish Empire among its conquerors. One wonders whether any of the parties remembered a previous occasion in Palestine when a condemned man’s cloak was thus divided up before he passed away. A recollection of that undying story might have prepared them for another resurrection.
The discussions eventually had issue in a map, which remains an historical curiosity. On it were marked the zones defined in the Sykes-Picot agreement, which laid the powder-trail of controversy. A Blue Zone showed where a French administration would be established. It covered all Syria north of Acre and west of Damascus and Aleppo, and extended well into Asia Minor. A Red Zone similarly indicated where Britain would establish an administration. It comprised the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. Two further zones, “A” and “B,” showed respectively the French and British spheres of influence, where they would support an Arab State or confederation of States. These zones embraced the desert and its fringes. “A” was a triangular area of which the base ran from Aleppo to the Sea of Galilee, while the apex was at Rowanduz near the Persian frontier. This put the important city of Mosul into the French sphere of influence. “B” area lay to the south, its western boundary running from the Sea of Galilee along the Jordan to the Dead Sea, then out to the coast at Gaza, and along the old Sinai frontier to Aqaba. To the east it went as far as the boundary of the projected Red Zone in Mesopotamia.
Arrangements had also to be made for Russia to have an adequate meal off Turkey’s carcass. After further negotiations, Notes were exchanged, in May, 1916, between the three powers, which defined their respective portions. If we picture them in terms of the natural simile, France and Britain were to have the wings of the turkey, Russia to have the breast, the Arabs were allotted the “innards” and legs, while the head and neck were left.
The trouble that arose over this division was due not merely to its prematurity but to its obscurity. While Sykes was the hand on the carving knife in these arrangements with Picot, McMahon was negotiating with the Arabs. And the left hand of Britain’s foreign policy did not know what the right was doing.
Indeed, the first intimation that McMahon received was when Sykes returned to Cairo and in conversation, producing a map, remarked, “What do you think of my treaty?” Like a high velocity shell, the burst thus coincided with the sound.
McMahon’s fingers in the Arab Bureau, Lawrence among them, were still more cut off from the knowledge of the reality. Although they later gained an inkling, the Sykes-Picot agreement only became known to the Arab contestants when it was made known to the world by the Bolshevik Government publishing broadcast the secret treaty which it found in the archives after the Russian Revolution. To lessen the shock Sykes and Picot were sent to the Hejaz early in May, 1917, at the urgent request of the Arab Bureau, so that they might explain to Feisal and Hussein the broad provisions of the treaty and the intentions of the British Government.
But by the time they arrived the collapse of the British offensive against Gaza had made the vista of Syria remote, and hence the two commissioners deemed it best to leave their treaty in a gentle haze when interpreting it to Hussein. In this they were perhaps helped by the difficulty of translation into Arabic.
That, however, was a long way ahead. Early in 1916 the negotiations with the Sherif ended in an agreement to take action as soon as the moment was ripe. If he made objection to various points in the guarantee, it is unlikely that, with his experience of the ways of diplomacy, he was wholly deluded either as to the ambiguity or the complexity of the issues that underlay its broad phrases. That he was sufficiently satisfied at the time is suggested by the fact that McMahon was not forced to offer an additional inducement which he had been authorized to make. This was to abandon the reservation about Basra and Baghdad if that concession was necessary to turn the scales.
The Sherif, it is true, had other more urgent considerations to hasten his decision. The British naval blockade of the Arabian coast was inevitably aggravating the internal distress caused by the lack of pilgrims. The Turkish attitude was foreboding danger both to his own rule and to the chance of a successful rising.
Relieved of the British pressure at the Dardanelles, the Turks deemed the moment opportune to crush the Arab movement within their own ranks and territories. Early in 1916 Jemal Pasha suddenly swooped on the secret society in Syria. Arab units were dispersed to distant parts and suspected rebels were put to death wholesale. Apart from those brought to summary trial and execution, the gendarmerie were turned loose to punish the Arabs and their families in the Turk’s too familiar style. These measures were brutally effective not only in quenching the intended rising, but in deterring most of the Syrian Arabs from taking an active part in the later Arab advance. On the other hand, they forfeited such allegiance as the Arabs had hitherto given the Turks and sapped the morale of the Arab troops in the Turkish Army, to its ultimate cost.
Feisal himself was in Syria at the time of these massacres, as an unwilling and unwelcome guest of Jemal. Although he was an object of suspicion, the Turks felt that it was still unwise to strike directly at him and his family. But he was compelled to swallow frequent insults, and, worse still, was taken out by Jemal with malicious pleasure to watch the hanging of his Arab sympathizers and intending supporters.
The turn of the Hejaz Arabs was likely to come next. Indeed, a special Turkish force under Khairi Bey was being formed in Constantinople for dispatch by rail to Medina, whence it was intended to march to Mecca, there to “show the flag” and overawe the Arabs, before moving on to the Yemen. Such an overland march was an innovation, and to make it possible the force was organized as a mobile column 3,500 strong with a light field battery and two machine-gun companies.
The force was accompanied by a German mission of small size but considerable importance under Major von Stotzingen, who bore letters of recommendation one of which, from Countess Schlieffen, was phrased with unconscious humour—“He does not obtrude his personality and has not those characteristics which often make the Germans disliked in foreign parts.” His orders were to set up a wireless station on the coast in order to open up communication with German East Africa, as well as back to Turkish General Headquarters. Stotzingen was also to direct anti-British propaganda in Darfur, the Sudan, Abyssinia, and Somaliland. For this purpose the party included a German adventurer, Karl Neufeld, who had been rescued by the British from the Kha
lifa’s grip after the battle of Omdurman in 1898 and had been expelled from the Sudan by them on the outbreak of war in 1914.
The ultimate purpose of the mobile column seems to have been more than merely sedative. For in July, 1915, one of the two Turkish divisions in the Yemen—the other had to watch the Idrissi, the bitterly anti-Turk Emir of Subayyeh—fell on the small British force at Lahaj and drove it back into Aden. An Indian Brigade landed three weeks later and temporarily raised the siege, but after its departure the Turks remained a potential menace to our hold on Aden, being themselves provisioned by the Imam of the Yemen for two years after they had been cut off from home by the rising in the Hejaz. If they had been reinforced by the new mobile column, Aden itself might have been stormed. The interception of this danger, as well as of Stotzingen’s mission, was not the least of the services to Britain achieved by the Arab Revolt.
The dispatch of the column was the danger signal which, reversing the usual order, released the train of action. Feisal, who had been advising delay after the frustration in Syria, was himself a witness of the preparations to send these Turkish reinforcements, and he realized that the immediate dangers of delay outweighed the potential advantages.
Nevertheless the revolt opened under serious material handicaps. In fulfilment of the agreement with Hussein, Wingate had begun to send rifles and ammunition, as well as money and food, across the Red Sea from the Sudan. But both McMahon and Wingate had been anxious for the Sherif to hold his hand until he had been more fully equipped. They were still urging delay when the news travelled back that the rising had taken place—on June 5th, 1916.
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