VI
Although British leaders from 1914 onward had professed faith in the leadership of Hussein within the Arab world, in 1917 and 1918 they felt driven to reassess the validity of that belief.
As Britain moved to complete her conquest of the Arabic-speaking world of the Middle East, British officials began to worry about the local opposition that they might encounter. Clayton’s endeavors, beginning in 1914, to arrive at an understanding with separatist leaders from Baghdad and Damascus had foundered on their objection to being ruled by non-Moslems. Now that Damascus was on Britain’s line of march the question was how Damascenes could be won over to the Allied cause and to the Allied scheme for the future of the Middle East. That Feisal had agreed to the Allied program might carry no weight with them.
In the summer of 1918 William Ormsby-Gore told the Zionist Political Committee in London that “The Syrian ‘Intelligentzia’ lawyers and traders constituted the most difficult and thorny problem of the Near East. They had no civilisation of their own, and they had absorbed all the vices of the Levant.”51
Sir Mark Sykes seems to have started worrying about the Syrian problem the year before in the context of pledges he intended Britain to keep to her allies—and her allies to keep to her. His concern was that Syrians might not accept the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the terms outlined by Sir Henry McMahon to the Sherif Hussein. In 1917 he asked the Arab Bureau to set up a meeting for him with Syrian Arabs leaders in Cairo, apparently in order to arrive at an agreement with them that would be consistent with the secret accords with France and with the Hejaz—accords whose existence, however, he could not reveal to them. He claimed he had succeeded; in his own hand he noted that “The main difficulty was to manoeuvre the delegates into asking for what we were prepared to give them, without letting them know that any precise geographical agreement had been come to.”52 The “precise geographical agreement” must have meant the Damascus-Homs-Hama-Aleppo line that was to be the westward frontier of Arab independence in Syria under the agreement with al-Faruqi in 1915 and with France in 1916.
But reports arrived from various quarters that the Ottoman government might be planning to pre-empt Arab nationalism by granting autonomy to Syria immediately. That would leave Britain in the awkward position of sponsoring the claims of King Hussein as against an indigenous Arabic leadership in Damascus that threatened to be far more popular in the Syrian provinces.
Toward the end of 1917 Sykes cabled Clayton: “I am anxious about Arab movement. Letters indicate difficulty of combining Meccan Patriarchalism with Syrian Urban intelligensia.” Quick as always to invent a new expedient, Sykes proposed to create an Arab executive committee to promote unity. Clayton must have said it could not be done, for Sykes responded: “Agree as to difficulty but military success should make this easier.” Sykes said that Picot should be persuaded to reassure the Syrians that France was in favor of their eventual independence. The same arguments were to be used on Picot on behalf of the Arabs that had been used on him on behalf of Zionism: that it was better to give up something in the far-off Middle East than to risk losing the war, and with it a chance to regain Alsace and Lorraine—provinces closer to home.53
Sykes was arguing that Britain could honor all pledges, and accommodate the Syrians as well, if only reasonable concessions were made all around. Clayton, as always, pictured Britain’s wartime commitments as embarrassments to be shed, and replied to Sykes that “There is no doubt a very real fear amongst Syrians of finding themselves under a Government in which patriarchalism of Mecca is predominant. They realize that reactionary principles from which Sherif of Mecca cannot break loose are incompatible with progress on modern lines.” Proposing to move away from the alliance with Hussein, he said that Feisal as an individual might be acceptable as head of a Syrian confederation, but only with a spiritual, not a political, role for his father. No such plan, however, and no committee or announcement or propaganda would be of any effect, Clayton continued, if the basic problem were not addressed. And that problem, he hinted (though he did not put it in these words), was posed by the pledges Sykes had made to the French and to the Zionists. As against the probable Turkish maneuver of setting up an autonomous Syrian government, nothing would be of any avail, he argued, because of the general fear in the Arabic-speaking world that Britain planned to turn Syria over to France. This was compounded, he claimed, by the public pledge just made to Zionism. The only solution was to obtain from France a clear public announcement denying that she intended to annex any part of Syria.54
Another approach was urged by Osmond Walrond, a former member of Lord Milner’s staff who knew Egypt from before the war and who had come out to serve in the Arab Bureau in Cairo. As Walrond saw it, Britain was neglecting the Arab secret societies, and accordingly he set out to cultivate their support. Walrond wrote to Clayton in the summer of 1918 to describe his conversations with members of these societies. He said that he had asked them to elect a small committee to represent them so that he could deal with them. They had elected a committee of seven members.55 Apparently Walrond’s intention was to repeat Sykes’s maneuver of the year before with another group of Cairo Arabs suspicious of Hussein: arrange for them to accept a statement of Britain’s plans for the Middle East so that they, like Hussein, would be tied into acceptance of those plans.
In mid-1918 Sir Mark Sykes accordingly addressed a declaration of British intentions to Walrond’s committee of seven Syrians in answer to questions ostensibly raised by them. It was an official declaration, approved by Sykes’s superiors at the Foreign Office, but did not break new ground. Like so much that came from the pen of Sir Mark Sykes, it restated the same intentions for the postwar Middle East but in different words. Outside the Arabian peninsula, the Arab world was to fall under varying degrees of European influence or control. In effect, Sykes’s Declaration to the Seven—later to be a subject of much controversy—recognized complete Arab independence only within the Arabian peninsula, for it offered such recognition only to areas that had been independent before the war or that had been liberated by the Arabs by themselves as of the date of the declaration.
Sykes could go no further in assuaging Arab suspicions of French intentions in Syria and Lebanon without securing France’s cooperation in issuing a joint pledge. In the autumn of 1918 the French government was finally persuaded to join the British Foreign Office in issuing a new statement of Allied intentions designed to allay Arab fears—and American suspicions. The Anglo-French declaration of 8 November 1918 was broadly phrased to suggest full support for the creation of indigenous governments in the Middle East; but it was designed to mislead, for, on French insistence, it did not refer specifically to Arab “independence.”56 French officials seemed as unlikely as their British counterparts to follow the idealistic path that Sir Mark Sykes—with an eye toward accommodating the views of Wilson and the Americans—had marked out for them.
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THE BATTLE FOR SYRIA
I
As the summer of 1918 drew to a close, Sir Edmund Allenby gave the order to advance on Syria, and foresaw that Liman von Sanders would expect him to repeat the strategy he had employed in southern Palestine. In the Jerusalem campaign, Allenby had feinted at the coast but lunged eastward to deliver his attack in the interior. In attacking northern Palestine, he therefore did exactly the reverse: he feinted inland, while launching his main attack along the coast. His purpose was to achieve overwhelming local numerical superiority along the coast so as to break through the Turkish lines at the most favorable point for his Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) cavalry.
Although he held an overall two-to-one advantage in effectives (69,000 against 36,000, according to his estimates), he boldly left much of his roughly 65-mile-long line undefended in order to concentrate the maximum number of troops on the coast; he relied on control of the air and on brilliantly effective intelligence operations to keep the enemy away from the gaps in his own defensive line.
By night the bu
lk of Allenby’s forces silently moved west to concentrate in the olive and citrus groves of the lightly defended coastal plain, where they were camouflaged and remained undetected. By day small units marched east, and then returned to march east over and over again, raising great clouds of dust which persuaded the Turks that a vast army was on the march to attack inland. In the east, too, small British units threw up what appeared to be large camps, stabled with what appeared to be horses. East of the Jordan, British agents allowed it to be discovered that they were bargaining for large quantities of forage.
Deceived, Liman von Sanders concentrated his forces inland in eastern Palestine, and when the attack came his armies were caught off balance. So effective was Allenby’s offensive that it was not until days after it had begun that the Ottoman commanders came to appreciate the real situation.
At 4:30 in the morning of 19 September 1918 nearly 400 British cannon suddenly opened fire on the surprised and outnumbered (45,000 against 8,000) Ottoman defenders of the coastal plain. Fifteen minutes later the infantry attack commenced. British, French, and Indian troops pushed the overwhelmed defenders aside, as the cavalry poured through the gaping hole in the Ottoman lines to win the battle of Megiddo—the “Armageddon” of the Bible.
At dawn, special bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force attacked telephone and telegraph exchanges behind enemy lines, effectively cutting off all communications. Other R.A.F. warplanes guarded the skies over enemy airports, keeping German reconnaissance planes on the ground. Liman and his field commanders were cut off from information and from one another.
As Ottoman units reeled backward, they found their lines of retreat blocked by British units which had raced before and behind them to secure control of the key roads. The ANZAC cavalry galloped northward for thirty miles along the coastal plain, but then cut inland, threatening to cut off the Ottoman line of retreat toward Damascus. British military aircraft bombed and strafed the retreating Turks. Meanwhile the few units Allenby had deployed in the east finally attacked inland. In the predawn darkness of 23 September battalions of the Jewish Legion seized control of the crucial Umm esh Shert ford across the Jordan river. The Second Australian Light Horse Brigade went across it, and by evening the Ottoman forces east of the river found themselves enveloped in a giant pincer.
At Ma’an, in the south of Transjordan, above Aqaba, the Turkish garrison which had been beseiged by Feisal’s forces ever since their arrival from Aqaba the year before, held out until Australian cavalry arrived to accept their surrender and protect them against the massacre threatened by the Arab besiegers. Further north, Feisal’s Camel Corps disrupted the railroad lines upon which the main Turkish forces depended.
On 25 September Allenby ordered an advance on Damascus, while the remnant of the Ottoman forces broke and fled.1 The occupation of the principal towns of the Syrian provinces was imminent; decisions about occupation policy were made rapidly. There is still controversy as to who made them and why.
II
In the summer Allenby had told London that, subject to his own supreme military authority, he would accept French advisers to deal with civil administration in areas of special interest to France, so long as London would tell him what areas these were and whether they were still defined by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.2 Although the Cabinet and its Eastern Committee strongly favored discarding the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Foreign Office reaffirmed the agreement by directing Allenby to follow its territorial outlines. Leo Amery, of the War Cabinet secretariat, bitterly blamed the political chiefs of the Foreign Office—Balfour and Cecil—for this.3 Amery’s colleague, Sir Mark Sykes, however, was the Foreign Office official directly responsible for policy in Syria and, presumably, the person who made or recommended the decision in the first instance.
On 25 September the War Office instructed Wingate in Cairo and Allenby at headquarters that if Syria were to fall within the sphere of any European power, that power was to be France.4 The terms of that instruction left open the possibility that it might not fall within the sphere of a European power—that Feisal might achieve his independence. However, Allenby was instructed to employ French officers for all areas of civil (as distinct from military) administration. According to the War Office cables, if Allenby were to take Damascus, “it would be desirable that in conformity with Anglo-French agreement of 1916 he should if possible work through an Arab administration by means of a French liaison.”5
Flags were to indicate the designated areas of temporary administration. The hoisting of Hussein’s flag over Damascus and other important Syrian cities once they were captured was authorized, and indeed ordered, by the Foreign Office.6 The flag was the black, white, green, and red one that Sykes had designed (see page 315) and it served two political purposes: it boosted Hussein’s claim to leadership in Arab Syria,* and it reminded France that inland Syria was designated for at least nominal Arab independence.
At a conference in the Palestinian town of Jenin on 25 September, Allenby approved the plans of Australian General Harry Chauvel—who was in charge of the operation—for the advance on Damascus. Chauvel, according to his later notes, raised the issue of occupation policy. Damascus, he said, was a city of 300,000 people; it was too big to be handed over to a military governor and a mere handful of assistants. Allenby replied that Chauvel should retain the Ottoman governor and administration, and supply them with whatever extra military police they might need to keep order. Chauvel asked about rumors that the Arab movement was to have the government of Syria, but Allenby replied that any decision would have to wait until he came to Damascus himself. He added that, “if Feisal gives you any trouble, deal with him through Lawrence who will be your liaison officer.”8
There was a flurry of cables between London, Paris, and the Middle East. Although Allenby had told Chauvel to keep the Turkish administration in Damascus in place for the time being, the Foreign Office told the French government that Allenby would deal with a provisional Arab administration in Damascus—in line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement—through a French liaison officer.9 In turn, the French government agreed that the Allies should recognize the Arabs as a belligerent power—in other words, as an ally.10 These communications between Britain and France show that the Foreign Office expected Allenby to replace the Turkish administration in Damascus with an Arab one sooner or later; but that it believed the Sykes-Picot arrangements would not come into play until then.
Armed with these agreements, the Foreign Office got the War Office to send Allenby new and important instructions, developing policy themes that had been hinted at before. The Syrian lands that Allenby was in process of occupying were to be treated as “allied territory enjoying the status of an independent state” rather than as occupied enemy territory. It was in this connection that the Foreign Office issued its much-discussed directive that “It would be desirable to mark the recognition and establishment of native Arab rule by some conspicuous or formal act such as the hoisting and saluting of the Arab flag at important centres.”11
Sykes (if that is who it was) went on in the cable to outline a characteristically ingenious scheme. The existing agreement with France was that wherever in the Syrian provinces Britain established a military administration, France was entitled to have her officers exercise all civilian administration on behalf of the Allies. In the telegram of 1 October, Allenby was instructed to limit his area of military administration to the bare minimum, limiting the French role correspondingly. The Foreign Office also told him to reduce British military administration in Transjordan as well, so that the French could not say that Britain’s action in inland Syria was part of a plot to reduce France’s role there—which of course it was.
Wingate, who had read the cables, wrote to Allenby that “it will be very interesting to see how the Sherifian Flag and the French liaison is taken by all and sundry.”12 In effect, the Foreign Office had instructed Allenby to carry out the formal requirements of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, while (as advocated by Mark Sykes) rev
ising the spirit of the agreement. This was a solution satisfactory neither to the French, who wanted more, nor to Feisal or the Arab Bureau, who wanted France to have nothing at all.
As required by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, France was to be given direct control of the coastline. Inland Syria was to be independent—not independent in name only, as envisaged by the agreement—but substantively independent; but France would have her official liaison officer, as required, and later would presumably have her official adviser at Feisal’s court. Syria’s ruler, as indicated in the McMahon correspondence, would be a Hashemite. The hoisting of Sykes’s flag over Damascus and the towns of Homs, Hama, and Aleppo thus would symbolize the weaving together of all the strands of British Middle Eastern policy along the lines that Sykes had always advocated. He had said all along that he had shaped Britain’s commitments to be consistent with one another, and that all would fit within the formal framework of the agreement that he had devised.
Meanwhile on 29 September it was decided at General Allenby’s field headquarters that Feisal’s Arabs should be the only Allied troops to enter and occupy Damascus—presumably to forestall resistance by a possibly hostile Moslem metropolis to a Christian occupation.* Feisal was three days away, so in the meantime the ANZAC cavalry units pursuing the fleeing Turks were instructed to ride around, rather than through, Damascus.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 39