To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Neither party, however, was a fully fledged organization with a broad base of followers. Instead, each was a grouping of political thinkers and activists, rooted in the urban middle class and themselves the products of a Europeanization which sat uncomfortably with Islamic rhetoric. They constituted an educated and professional élite, frustrated by an increasingly direct British rule which blocked them from major office. Their ideologies paid no attention to the economic plight of the fellahin, the Egyptian peasantry. In 1904 929,000 fellahin farmed individual plots of less than 5.5 acres. Kitchener, as consul-general from 1911, set out to improve the material conditions of the fellahin, prohibiting mortgages on these smallholdings in order to curb indebtedness, and protecting the rights of primary producers in their negotiations with the cotton dealers. Conflicting commercial interests, therefore, cut across nationalist or Muslim fusion.87

  In August 1914 Kitchener was in London, the Khedive was recuperating in Constantinople, and the newly formed legislative assembly was adjourned. Lutfi urged the prime minister, Hussein Rushdi Pasha, to declare war against the Central Powers, demanding that Britain in exchange acknowledge Egypt’s independence of Turkey. Rushdi recognized that the British occupation made neutrality unsustainable, but proved too weak to exploit the opportunity for any reciprocal concession. On 5 August Egypt declared war on the Central Powers.

  The position of the Khedive was thus increasingly awkward. His anti-British sympathies were overt; but his dealings with the Germans made him progressively more dependent on the almost equally uncongenial Turks. It is not clear precisely how either Abbas Hilmi or Wangenheim imagined they would execute a German-sponsored coup in Cairo. Most probably they looked to the army and the police. But in that case they were naive: fourteen of the seventeen infantry battalions of the Egyptian army were stationed not in Egypt but in the Sudan. However, on 4 September Enver revealed that forty senior Egyptian officers had pledged loyalty to the Committee of Union and Progress. If Abbas Hilmi was to return to Cairo in triumph it had to be with Turkish sponsorship. He was therefore forced to accept Enver’s challenge that he place himself at the head of a Turkish army to invade Egypt.

  The British, angered by the Khedive’s past conspiracies against them and still anxious to preserve Turkish neutrality if possible, saw Abbas Hilmi rather than Enver as the villain of the piece. London’s ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Louis Mallet, therefore completed the transformation of the Khedival holiday into permanent exile. Within Egypt the convening of the legislative assembly, scheduled for November 1914, was postponed, and on 20 October Rushdi outlawed assemblies of more than five people. On 2 November martial law was established. Thus, when on 7 November war with Turkey was announced in Egypt, possible pro-Ottoman demonstrations had already been pre-empted. Under the provisions of martial law, the legislative assembly was prorogued sine die. As importantly, several hundred Egyptian officials with nationalist leanings were interned or exiled. If there was an underground conspiracy in favour of the Khedive or of Turkey (and the direct evidence that there was is confined to Wangenheim’s reports from Constantinople),88 it was now definitively quashed. On 18 December Britain declared Egypt a protectorate, thus terminating Ottoman sovereignty. On the following day Abbas Hilmi was deposed, and his uncle, Hussein Kamil, declared Sultan.

  Therefore, as 1914 closed the British hold on Egypt tightened. But German and Turkish hopes of a popular rising did not diminish. Deprived of up-to-date intelligence, they listened to exiled nationalists who assured them that the first Turkish soldier to arrive on the Suez Canal would cause all Egypt to rise.89 This chimed in well with Oppenheim’s exaggerated predictions from Berlin. More tangible were the offers of support from the Bedouin of the Sinai desert. About 50,000 Arab volunteers, including Syrians and Druses, joined the Turkish 4th army. Their role was to agitate among the Muslims of the Indian and Egyptian armies along the canal.90 But the educated Egyptians of 1914 were contemptuous of the nomads to the east, and were reluctant to subscribe to Arab nationalism.91 Furthermore, the Turks failed to exploit Abbas Hilmi, the figure who might conceivably have drawn together these otherwise divergent threads. Whether Abbas withdrew from the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal because of Enver’s inclinations or his own is unclear. Probably both factors operated. By pleading his wounds as his public excuse, he distanced his objectives from the Turks’, looking instead to Austria-Hungary as a less interested advocate of Egyptian independence.92 By the year’s end he and his entourage had moved to Vienna, and in autumn 1915 to Switzerland. Thus the Turks came on not as the liberators of Egypt from British rule, but as its invaders. Educated Egyptians admired Germany, and cheered that country’s victories in the cinemas of Cairo in February 1915.93 The cotton trade was crippled by the closure of markets and the downturn in demand, forcing the cash-hungry fellahin to trade their jewellery to meet taxes. But the Egyptians did not turn their passive anti-British inclinations into pro-Turkish activism. Without that, the Turkish attack was numerically too weak to succeed.

  MAP 27. THE SUEZ REGION

  The Turkish force dispatched to conquer Egypt totalled 19,000 men.94 The British troops in Egypt, albeit scattered over the country and of varying quality, mustered 70,000. The Turkish weakness, however, was not determined by excessive faith in the rebellious demeanour of the Egyptian people, nor by the demands of other fronts and especially of the Caucasus. It was the product of logistical constraints. As it was, the force used exceeded the numbers that German transport experts considered could be fed and watered at such distances from their railhead and across the Sinai desert.

  Not until 1918, and the completion of the Taurus link, would Turkey possess the railway communications to enable it to mount an attack on Egypt in sufficient style. On the war’s outbreak the internal reorganization of the Palestine railways was taken in hand by Meissner, the German engineer responsible for the Hejaz railway. But, for all his ingenuity and improvisation, Jerusalem was not linked to Beersheba until 17 October 1915. Thus, in 1914 the Turks relied on camel columns to move supplies for the then-railhead at Sileh to their forward base at Beersheba. The camels covered the 170-kilometre journey in eight days, consuming part of their load on the way. Intermediate stages had therefore to be prepared. A road was built between Hebron and Beersheba. Nonetheless, at Beersheba there were more camels than fodder, and many died of starvation. The whole undertaking required 30,000 camels, of which only 11,000 were allocated for the actual advance across the Sinai desert.

  Such demands drove up prices, and the camel-dealers insisted on payment in gold, which came from Germany. Drivers and overseers proved as hard to procure as the camels themselves. Enver, in his plan of 22 October, promised an attack within six weeks. That proved impossible.

  The 4th Turkish army had been warned on mobilization in August that its probable role would be the invasion of Egypt. But both the army’s commander, Zekki Pasha, and his chief of staff opposed the scheme. Zekki was concerned for internal order in Syria and for the vulnerability of the coastline to British naval attack. Enver therefore passed the task direct to VIII corps, circumventing Zekki, and appointing Kress von Kressenstein as the corps’s chief of staff. VIII corps’s commander embraced the task with zeal, but not until mid-November was Zekki relieved of his command. His replacement was Djemal, the minister of marine. Thus, at a stroke, Enver resolved two problems. His most obvious rival in Constantinople was moved to Syria, enabling Enver to assume de facto command of the navy as well as the army. Secondly, the 4th army became the vehicle for pan-Islamic aggression. Djemal ordered a holy flag to be brought from Mecca. On 20 December it was paraded through Jerusalem, and it, together with a number of Arab priests, accompanied the expedition. The symmetry and virtual simultaneity of the two offensives— Enver’s pan-Turanian attack in the Caucasus and Djemal’s pan-Islamic thrust on Egypt—revealed the personal rivalry that underpinned (and undermined) the direction of Turkish strategy. Djemal was no soldier. His relationship with his chief professional
adviser, Kress von Kressenstein, was therefore of fundamental importance. British intelligence thought it fraught from the outset; certainly by 1917 the clash between the two on operational matters had become fundamental. But in his memoirs Kress was restrained, and even at times complimentary, in his account of Djemal. Djemal spoke French but was not himself, Kress concluded, anti-German. The problem was one of access. Not until later in 1915 would Kress actually become chief of staff in the 4th army; in 1914–15 that post was held by Werner von Frankenberg. But Kress felt that if he could get to see his army commander, then on the whole they could resolve their differences.

  Kress had completed his reconnaissance of southern Syria on 23 October. He had conducted it without adequate maps and with insufficient intelligence. The only German map was on a scale of 1:1,400,000. Captured British maps on scales of 1:250,000 and 1:125,000 would compensate, but not until 1916. Nonetheless, Kress plumped for the most difficult of the three possible routes across the Sinai desert.

  The obvious line of march lay along the Mediterranean coast from El Arish. But the water here was brackish, the going soft and sandy, and progress observable by the British vessels off the coast. The southern route, by way of Akaba and Nekhl, used by pilgrims from Egypt to Mecca, was lengthy and also vulnerable to British sea-power in the headwaters of the Red Sea. The central approach, tracing a virtually direct line from Beersheba to Ismailia, had countervailing advantages. It promised the greatest chance of surprise. Being across limestone, the going was good. The expedition would have to carry its own water for three or four days, but there were cisterns at Moiya Harab. The rains of November 1914 were unusually heavy; they frustrated the Turks’ road and railway construction in Syria, but they filled the wells in Sinai. From Moiya Harab the Turks could strike the canal at two points where it could be bridged and where it was close to the adjacent sweet-water canal.

  The central route, nonetheless, confirmed the small size of the Turkish force. The three divisions of VIII corps were under strength and, more significantly in the demonology of the Ottoman army, made up of Arabs; two Anatolian divisions reinforced the corps, but were kept back in the attack.95 There were those who wanted to postpone operations until the expedition could be better equipped and prepared. Kress may have been among them. Certainly Djemal saw himself as the deliverer of Egypt from British bondage. He wanted a supply dump in the desert sufficient to keep his forces active on the Suez Canal for a month, not a week. Falkenhayn at OHL disagreed. For him a rapid thrust on the canal now, with its impact on other theatres, was more important than a major victory later. After his defeat at Sarikamish Enver followed the line of the German high command. The effect of this division of objective was to please neither side. The Turkish advance did not get under way until 14/15 January 1915, three weeks after Kress’s original starting date. But when it did leave it was short of artillery and ammunition, of all that it needed to sustain operations for more than a brief period.96

  Djemal’s command was divided into two echelons. The first included two small columns, advancing from El Arish to Kantara and from Nekhl to Suez, along the northern and southern routes. Their task was diversionary. The first echelon’s main column, about 10,000 men, with pontoon equipment and a 15 cm heavy howitzer battery, was to attack south of Ismailia. The second echelon, totalling 8,000 men, was to follow sufficiently slowly to allow the transport of the first echelon to return and the wells to refill. Meanwhile the first echelon was to pause until the second came up. Djemal planned to get across the canal at the first rush, securing a bridgehead on the western bank, and then holding Ismailia for four to five days until he could concentrate his forces there. By then, he hoped, all Egypt would have risen in his support.

  In 1907 the idea that rebellion was the greatest danger to the British in Egypt was one shared by the Committee of Imperial Defence. In a study prompted by a dispute over the frontier with Palestine, it accepted the general staff’s verdict that only a small raiding force of 1,000 to 3,000 men, mounted on camels, could cross the Sinai desert. The effectiveness of such an attack would therefore be contingent on its domestic impact.

  But not all participated in the general staff’s equanimity about the scale of the external danger. Sir John French said that the Turks could get a force of 100,000 men to the Suez Canal. By 1911–12 the War Office was more receptive to such calculations, partly because it was anxious to prevent the Admiralty abandoning the eastern Mediterranean. The intelligence network created to provide early warning of any attack found several routes across the desert and more abundant water supplies than previously imagined. Transport replaced water as the most likely constraint on an Ottoman army. In 1913–14, with the archaeologists Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence as cover, the Palestine Exploration Fund extended the surveying work of British intelligence towards Palestine, and in particular monitored the progress of the railway. Estimates of the size of the Turkish army in Syria climbed as 1914 unfolded, not least because the Bedouins the British used as spies tended to exaggerate what they saw. Tighter border controls after August, although they blocked the flow of human intelligence, did not revise the totals downwards. On 10 January 1915 Gilbert Clayton, the head of military intelligence in Egypt, echoed French’s fears of almost a decade earlier; he reckoned that there were 100,000 men available for the invasion of Egypt, and that they could be on the canal in two weeks’ time.

  The potential for panic was obvious. The fear of revolution could now be allied to the threat of a full-dress invasion, and Milne Cheetham, acting chief at the British residency in Cairo, took exactly that line.97 But neither Kitchener in London nor the commander-in-chief in Egypt, Sir John Maxwell, would support him. Maxwell, appointed on 18 August 1914, was an old Egyptian hand. He had, in T. E. Lawrence’s words, ‘a mysterious gift of prophesying what will happen, and a marvellous carelessness about what might happen. There couldn’t be a better person to command in Egypt. He takes the whole job as a splendid joke.’98 He saw the Sinai not as a military highway but as an obstacle. He also shared the widespread belief, based on the Balkan wars and confirmed by most of the British army’s reports since, that the only strength of the Turkish army was the hardiness of the Anatolian peasant, and that even he was ill trained and ill motivated.

  For much of 1914 the War Office persuaded itself that the main offensive orientation of the Turkish army was towards the Caucasus and Russia. By the end of November both the director of military intelligence in London and the intelligence department in Cairo had reversed this assumption. They now saw the principal danger in Egypt and regarded the deployment in the Caucasus as defensive. Nonetheless, the Ottoman concentration in Syria could also be seen as defensive: the build-up might be designed to parry a British amphibious landing from the Mediterranean.

  The Committee of Imperial Defence had canvassed this very option in 1906-7. Its secretary, Sir George Clarke, said that the best defence of Egypt would be a pre-emptive thrust against Turkish communications, aimed either at Haifa or at Alexandretta. Maxwell’s underestimation of the threat from Palestine was therefore driven by contradictory but ulterior motives. At one level he recognized the diversionary thrust of German strategy, determining that he should not be caught by it but should ship troops to France as fast as possible. Yet at another, the shield of the Sinai was the means to enable a sword to be thrust into Syria. In November 1914 an amphibious operation at Haifa was proposed; in December Maxwell, Kitchener, and Sir Charles Callwell (the director of military operations) focused on Alexandretta, the hinge of Turkish communications from southern Anatolia to its Arab possessions. Thus the defence of Egypt would be given an offensive form. British counsels were therefore sorely tempted by exactly the considerations which had fired the fears of Zekki and the hopes of Germany. In January, however, the War Office calculated that such an undertaking would require 21,000 men; its scale and its likely duration led to its postponement.99

  Meanwhile, Maxwell had received abundant intelligence of Turkish intentions
. Robert Mors, a German by descent but a lieutenant in the Egyptian police, who had been recruited by Prüfer to co-ordinate terrorism in Egypt, was captured in late October. On the strength of the information he provided the British rounded up possible supporters of the Central Powers.100 Kress’s reconnaissance was reported by the Greek consul in Damascus. From November onwards accounts of a Turkish build-up in Syria reached Cairo by way of refugees and of the British military attaché in Sofia. On 15 January British intelligence reckoned that the Turks had six infantry divisions between Adana and Beersheba. Although the Turks advanced by night, aerial reconnaissance— conducted by long-range French seaplanes—enabled their movements to be followed. Bad weather disrupted observation for almost two weeks after 5 January, but on 18 January between 30,000 and 40,000 troops were spotted in the sector Beersheba-Libni-El Arish. What had been seen was VIII corps, bound for the central route, in the act of passing the diversionary forces destined for the northerly route. However, the first impressions were of a larger body designed to follow the coast road alone. Cloud prevented further reconnaissance until the 24th, by which time there was no evidence of major forces to the north, and by 27 January the intelligence department was clear that the principal thrust was in the centre. But Maxwell could not divest himself of two preconceptions—that the Turkish forces in Sinai were possibly twice as strong as they were, and that they would use the northern route for the larger body.101