A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  But in the confusion of advance and retreat, the actors in the drama of Damascus’s liberation did not follow the script that Allenby and Clayton had written for them. The Ottoman government did not remain in the city; it fled with the retreating Turkish army at about noon on 30 September, leaving disorder behind. Local Arab notables, the Emir Abd el Kader and his brother Said, descendants of the Algerian warrior who had fought the French a century before and had been subsidized to live in exile, moved at some point into some sort of control of the city. The Abd el Kader brothers, whom Lawrence regarded as personal enemies and, perhaps, as supporters of Hussein and Islam rather than of Feisal and nationalism,** claimed to have raised the Hejaz flag on the afternoon of 30 September in the name of Hussein. Thus when the Arab flag was finally hoisted, it had nothing to do with the Foreign Office’s plan; Damascene Arabs did it on their own.

  At first light on the morning of 1 October, an Australian cavalry brigade that had been ordered to cut the Ottoman retreat along the Homs road north of Damascus, decided to go through Damascus to reach the Homs road, and entered the city; whereupon Said Abd el Kader, surrounded by notables, officially welcomed them. Thus the honor of being the first Allied troops to enter Damascus fell to the Australians, contrary to plan.

  An hour later General Chauvel and his staff joined Major-General Sir George Barrow, the local divisional commander, a few miles south of the city. Lawrence was supposed to be staying with Barrow, and Chauvel wanted to see him in order to start making arrangements for preserving the existing civil administration of the city. To his chagrin, Chauvel discovered that Lawrence had slipped away early in the morning, without permission and without informing anyone, to follow the Fifth Cavalry Division into Damascus. Chauvel borrowed a car and drove into Damascus himself to find out what was happening.

  By now the Allenby-Clayton plan for Feisal to liberate the city was in tatters. Feisal was still days away, while the British and Australians were in Damascus, either trying to move through the streets or hoping to find out what was going on. Chauvel, who had been ordered not to lead his men into the city, now followed them in instead.

  T. E. Lawrence, Chauvel’s A.W.O.L. staff liaison officer, had taken his favorite battered old Rolls-Royce armored car that morning and—with a fellow British officer, W. E. Stirling, and Nuri el-Sa’id, an ex-Ottoman officer who was a chief Feisal loyalist—had driven to the city and found that some of Feisal’s tribal allies, who had arrived earlier, had accepted the Abd el Kaders as Damascus’s governors. Executing a swift coup d’état, Nuri ordered the Abd el Kaders to withdraw and appointed his own pro-Feisal candidate as governor. Then an irate General Chauvel arrived, demanding explanations.

  Lawrence, making excuses, said he had assumed Chauvel wanted him to scout out the situation, and claimed that he had been on the verge of returning to tender his report.

  When Chauvel then asked Lawrence to bring the governor to him, Lawrence presented Nuri’s candidate, claiming that he was the governor. Chauvel called that nonsense, pointing out that Nuri’s candidate was obviously an Arab, while the Ottoman governor would have been a Turk. But Lawrence replied that the Ottoman governor had fled (which was true), and that the people had elected Nuri’s candidate to take his place (which was false).

  Taking Lawrence’s word for it, Chauvel confirmed the appointment of Nuri’s pro-Feisal candidate as governor. According to Chauvel’s own account, he soon learned that Nuri’s candidate was supported by only a small pro-Feisal clique, and that the population as a whole was disturbed by the appointment; but Chauvel did not see how he could change the appointment after having announced it. However, faced with serious disorders, he marched his British forces through the city on 2 October in an attempt to overawe opposition. This was exactly what Allenby and Clayton had hoped to avoid: the population aroused, Christian troops defiling through the streets of a great Moslem city to restore order, and Feisal’s Arab troops—whose presence was meant to reassure local opinion—still nowhere in sight.

  It was not until the morning of 3 October that Lawrence announced that Feisal and several hundred followers were about to arrive, and asked permission to stage a triumphal entry into the city for them. Later, Chauvel grumblingly wrote that “Seeing that he, Feisal, had had very little to do with the ‘conquest’ of Damascus, the suggested triumphal entry did not appeal to me very much but I thought it would not do harm and gave permission accordingly.”14

  It was arranged for 3:00 that afternoon, but General Allenby’s schedule would not allow for it. Allenby had only a few hours to spend that afternoon in Damascus, and called on Feisal and Lawrence to attend him at the Hotel Victoria, where he had established himself. Allenby’s visit was prompted by Chauvel’s appointment of the pro-Feisal Arab to the governorship which, in turn, activated the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the inter-Allied agreement that Allenby would deal with an Arab administration in Syria through the French. Had Allenby’s original orders been carried out—to retain a Turkish governor for the time being—this complication would have been postponed, but now it had to be faced. Allenby did not blame Chauvel, but indicated that what he had done had given rise to complications with the French which required a meeting with Feisal immediately.

  Allenby, Chauvel, Feisal, and their respective chiefs of staff were present at the conference, as were officers of the British mission to the Hejaz, an officer of the Arab Bureau from Cairo, and Feisal’s chief commander. Lawrence acted as interpreter.

  At the meeting the British commander spelled out in specific detail for the Arabian prince the arrangements that had been agreed upon by Britain and France, and asserted his determination to enforce them until and unless they were modified at the Peace Conference. The terms were exactly those that Sir Mark Sykes and the Foreign Office had instructed him to uphold. Any hopes that Lawrence may have entertained, or inspired in Feisal, that Clayton and Allenby would help them connive at subverting the Foreign Office’s policy were dashed that afternoon. Feisal’s bitter disappointment was not that the Arab confederation would not include Palestine—he said he accepted that—but that it did not include the Lebanon (that is to say, the Lebanon, or “white,” Mountains), and that Syria was not to be free of French control.

  According to Chauvel’s minutes of the meeting, Allenby (referred to as “the Chief”) plainly told Feisal:

  (a) That France was to be the Protecting Power over Syria.

  (b) That he, Feisal, as representing his Father, King Hussein, was to have the Administration of Syria (less Palestine and the Lebanon Province) under French guidance and financial backing.

  (c) That the Arab sphere would include the hinterland of Syria only and that he, Feisal, would not have anything to do with the Lebanon.

  (d) That he was to have a French Liaison Officer at once, who would work for the present with Lawrence, who would be expected to give him every assistance.

  Feisal objected very strongly. He said that he knew nothing of France in the matter; that he was prepared to have British Assistance; that he understood from the Adviser whom Allenby had sent him that the Arabs were to have the whole of Syria including the Lebanon but excluding Palestine; that a Country without a Port was no good to him; and that he declined to have a French Liaison Officer or to recognise French guidance in any way.

  The Chief turned to Lawrence and said: “But did you not tell him that the French were to have the Protectorate over Syria?” Lawrence said: “No, Sir, I know nothing about it.” The Chief then said: “But you knew definitely that he, Feisal, was to have nothing to do with the Lebanon.” Lawrence said: “No, Sir, I did not.”

  After some further discussion, the Chief told Feisal that he, Sir Edmund Allenby, was Commander-in-Chief and that he, Feisal, was at the moment a Lieut.-General under his command and that he would have to obey orders. That he must accept the situation until the whole matter was settled at the conclusion of the War. Feisal accepted this decision and left with his entourage, except Lawrence.15

&nbs
p; Neither Feisal nor Lawrence had been candid with the plainspoken Allenby. The terms outlined to them were those of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with which all of them were well acquainted. What Feisal meant in denying knowledge of those terms (Lawrence explained later in London) was that he had not been informed of them officially.16 For himself, Lawrence had not even that excuse; he had simply lied.*

  As Feisal left the meeting, Lawrence told Allenby that he was unwilling to serve alongside a French adviser to Feisal. Lawrence said that he had accumulated some leave time and would like to take it immediately and return to Britain. Allenby agreed. By all indications, he was not at all angry with Lawrence; far from it, for he encouraged Lawrence to go to London to argue his case to the Foreign Office in person.

  Feisal, having withdrawn from the meeting, returned to lead his tardy and compromised triumphal entry into Damascus, riding at the head of between 300 and 600 mounted men. Perhaps with encouragement from Lawrence (who later denied it), Feisal then sent a commando force of a hundred of his followers to Beirut, which they entered unopposed and where they raised the Arab flag of the Hejaz on 5 October. The following day the alarmed French sent warships into Beirut harbor and landed a small contingent of troops. On 8 October Indian troops of Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force entered the city. Allenby took command of the situation by ordering Feisal’s force to lower the Arab flag and withdraw; when they did so, the French were left in control. Later François Georges Picot arrived to act as France’s civil and political representative in the area, subject to the supreme authority of Allenby as commander-in-chief.

  Clayton advised Feisal to rein back his followers in Lebanon; on 11 October, he wrote to Wingate that “I have told Feisal…that he will only prejudice his case before the Peace Conference if he tries to grab…It is not an easy problem. I hope that with a certain amount of give & take on both sides a modus vivendi will be reached…”17

  The French armed forces in Beirut in fact proved too weak to affect the full annexationist program that the colonialist party in France desired, and French agents therefore pursued a fall-back position to provide for the possibility that their claim to the whole of Syria might fail.** The plan, conceived by French officers in the field, was to carve out of Syria an independent state that would include not only the Christian areas of Mount Lebanon but also a large area of predominantly Moslem territories, and which was to be ruled by Maronite Christians under French sponsorship.19 Activities on behalf of this plan further contributed to the fragmentation of political life that had already begun to cause unrest behind Allied lines.

  Beneath the surface of Allenby’s orderly arrangements of the chain of command, feuds, intrigues, and factionalism seethed in the wake of the disappearance of Ottoman authority. Bedouins clashed with city dwellers. Former enemies moved to take over Feisal’s movement from within. Obscure quarrels were settled in dark places. In Damascus, Emir Abd el Kader was shot and killed by pro-Feisal police, supposedly while trying to escape when they came to arrest him.

  The natural environment was even more out of control. The British cavalry had been afflicted by malaria as it passed through Turkish-held territories where sanitation had been neglected; after a fortnight of incubation, the disease struck down whole regiments as the conquest of the Syrian provinces was being completed. Malaria was followed by influenza that proved to be not just debilitating but massively fatal.

  III

  Allenby—from his headquarters in the Middle East—arranged a warm reception for Colonel Lawrence in London as he arrived to plead the case against France. At the end of October, Lawrence appeared before the Eastern Committee of the Cabinet and reported that Picot proposed to impose French advisers on Feisal, but that Feisal claimed the right to choose whatever advisers he wanted. Moreover, he wanted either British or—oddly, in view of the enmities that developed later—American Zionist Jewish advisers.20

  Feisal, according to Lawrence, relied on the provisions of the Declaration to the Seven, the document in which Sir Mark Sykes outlined Allied intentions to anti-Feisal Syrian émigré leaders in Cairo. In Feisal’s name, Lawrence misconstrued the declaration, claiming that it promised independence to the Arabs in any area they liberated themselves. (In context, it is clear that the declaration promised independence only in areas that had already been liberated by Arabs as of the date of the declaration in June 1918; areas in Ottoman hands as of that date were placed in a separate category.) Feisal himself misconstrued the declaration even further; reportedly, he claimed to have an agreement with the British and French according to which the first one to arrive at any city won the right to govern it.21

  Lawrence began to maintain that Feisal’s troops in fact had been the first to enter Damascus, declaring that 4,000 tribesmen associated with Feisal’s cause had slipped into the city during the night of 30 September—1 October and thus had been the first Allied troops to arrive. But there was first-hand evidence that the 4,000 tribesmen were entirely imaginary. Nobody saw them there; and nobody saw them enter or leave—even though they would have had to pass through British lines to do so.22

  In the Eastern Committee and in the Cabinet, Lawrence nonetheless found a sympathetic audience for his plea that French influence or control should not be introduced into the Moslem Arabic-speaking Middle East. He also found important allies in the press.

  At the end of November 1918, The Times published several anonymous articles, written by Lawrence, providing a much exaggerated account of what had been accomplished by Feisal’s forces and stating that the account came from an eyewitness correspondent. Lawrence’s version of the facts began to be circulated in other periodicals as well, much to the annoyance of the Australian troops in Syria. The official “pool” news correspondent of the London newspapers with Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force wrote that “An article was printed in an official paper circulated among the troops that the Arab Army was first in Damascus. The credit of winning Damascus and being the first in the city belongs to the Australian Light Horse, and General Chauvel was quick to have the error rectified.”23

  For personal as well as political reasons, Lawrence continued to maintain the pretense that Feisal’s forces had liberated Damascus; and so great was his artistry that he succeeded in insinuating at least some of his version into the historical record. Yet he must have known that sooner or later his fraudulent claim would be exposed for what it was. In the 1920s, when the poet and novelist Robert Graves, a friend who was writing a biography of Lawrence, proposed to base his account of the liberation of Damascus on that supplied by Lawrence in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence cautioned him: “I was on thin ice when I wrote the Damascus chapter and anyone who copies me will be through it, if he is not careful. S.P. [Seven Pillars] is full of half-truth here.”24

  IV

  Lawrence used his version of the Damascus campaign to attempt to persuade his government to jettison the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which almost all officials with whom he spoke wanted to disavow. Gilbert Clayton had written to Lawrence in 1917 that though Britain was bound in honor to the agreement, it would die of its own accord if ignored: “It is in fact dead and, if we wait quietly, this fact will soon be realized.”25 In 1918 Clayton told Picot that the agreement no longer could be applied because it was “completely out of date.”26

  The Eastern Committee hoped to rescind—rather than merely ignore—the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and had thought that the Foreign Office would arrange to modify or rescind it in the context of negotiations with respect to how the occupied territories were to be administered. The Foreign Office did no such thing, but took the position that Britain was absolutely bound by the agreement unless France agreed to change or cancel it. When Lord Curzon, the chairman of the Eastern Committee, learned the terms that had been worked out with France, he observed with some asperity that “The Foreign Office appeared now to be relying upon the Sykes-Picot Agreement from which the Committee had hitherto been doing their best to escape.”27

&nb
sp; Sir Mark Sykes, who had worked out the terms of the administrative arrangements with the French, persisted in believing that the Sykes-Picot Agreement met current needs. In the spring of 1917 he wrote to Percy Cox, chief political officer of the British administration in Mesopotamia, that one of its virtues was that it was framed in such a way as not to violate the principles that Woodrow Wilson’s America and the new socialist Russia espoused with respect to national self-determination and nonannexation. “The idea of Arab nationalism may be absurd,” he wrote, “but our Congress case will be good if we can say we are helping to develop a race on nationalist lines under our protection.” Hussein may not give much help in the war physically, he continued, but he gives moral help that France ought to recognize, and “I think French will be ready to co-operate with us in a common policy towards the Arab speaking people.”28

  David Hogarth, head of the Arab Bureau, wrote to Gilbert Clayton at that time that nobody both took the Sykes-Picot Agreement seriously and supported it, except for Sir Mark Sykes.29 This was a slight exaggeration, because officials of the Foreign Office, which Sykes joined, also took the pact seriously, but it was not far from the truth.

  Lord Curzon stated that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not only obsolete “but absolutely impracticable.”30 As chairman of the Eastern Committee, which was in charge of defining British desiderata for the postwar Middle East, he made it clear that Britain would like the French out of Syria altogether.31 But a War Office representative told the committee that the only way to break the agreement was to operate behind “an Arab facade” in appealing to the United States to support Wilson’s theories of self-determination.32

  Curzon said that “When the Sykes-Picot Agreement was drawn up it was, no doubt, intended by its authors…as a sort of fancy sketch to suit a situation that had not then arisen, and which it was thought extremely unlikely would ever arise; that, I suppose, must be the principal explanation of the gross ignorance with which the boundary lines in that agreement were drawn.”33