Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (38 page)

Busy as he was with map work, and digesting intelligence reports into concise and useful documents for General Maxwell and Maxwell’s staff—Lawrence described himself self-deprecatingly as “bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen-wiper"—his view of the Middle East was inherently that of Cairo, rather than Delhi. He did not see the Arabs as “natives,” and he had no sympathy for traditional colonialism, whether British or French. He was well aware of events that were taking place in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, since he, Woolley, and Newcombe all worked together in one room, and ate all their meals together, so it would have been hard for them to keep secrets from each other, even had they wanted to. Since they worked for Colonel Clayton, they also had a broader knowledge than other staff officers of what was happening. Clayton not only was in charge of the army’s Intelligence Department, which reported to General Maxwell, but also ran the Egyptian civilian intelligence service, which reported to the high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, and in addition was the representative in Cairo of the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate. For a man with three masters—one of whom, Wingate, combined a high military position and a civil position—Clayton was a model of patience, tact, and objectivity; and unlike many “spymasters” he does not seem to have tried to keep those who worked for him out of the larger picture.

As a result, Lawrence was one of the best-informed persons in Cairo—he made, corrected, and “pieced together” maps; he interrogated Turkish prisoners of war; he kept a record of the positions and the movements of each division of the Turkish army; he wrote and produced (with Graves) the official handbook of the Turkish army for the use of officers; and he was in constant telegraphic communication with London, Paris, Saint Petersburg, and Khartoum. His keenness, energy, and capacity for hard work drew people’s attention—as did his superior tone and his determination to impose his own opinion on other people, however much higher in rank or more experienced they were. Thus he set about changing the whole system for transliterating Arabic place-names on maps, stepping sharply on the toes of numerous experts, and causing considerable distress in the Survey Department.
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The head of the Surveyor-General’s Office in Cairo, Sir Ernest Dowson, had once said of Lawrence, “Who is this extraordinary little pip-squeak?” but quickly changed his mind and came to admire him, though adding that the young officer had a rare talent for annoying people when he chose to be difficult. Dowson saw a lot of him, since among other duties Lawrence almost immediately became the liaison between the Intelligence Office, the Survey Department, and the Egyptian Government Printing Press. There is no question that Lawrence was a busy and well-informed young man, so busy indeed that when his brother Will stopped briefly at Port Said on the way home to England to join the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry as a second-lieutenant in March 1915, Lawrence was unable to meet him, and they were only able to speak by telephone. Will reported home in a letter mailed from Marseille that his brother Ned was now a staff-captain and that Egypt was “as quiet as a mouse,” so their mother need have no concerns on his account.

Lawrence certainly knew that Arab nationalists had been in touchwith British high officials in Cairo even before Turkey entered the war, suggesting the possibility of an Arab revolt financed and armed by Britain. This was a delicate subject, all the more so while Britain and the Ottoman Empire were still at peace. In the first place, just as the British government in India was strongly opposed to Arab nationalism because it might spread to Indian Muslims, the authorities in Egypt were reluctant to encourage anything that might bring Egyptians into the streets protesting against British rule in Egypt. In the second place, hardly anybody had a clear idea of how strong the various groups of nationalist Arabs were, or what they wanted, whereas French ambitions in the area were clearly understood. Clayton himself had had several interviews with Aziz el Masri, an Arab figure of some importance in Turkish politics, whose secret support for Arab independence had led to his exile in Egypt before the outbreak of war. He had been lucky to leave with his life, since he had been condemned to death by his former colleagues. Aziz el Masri (or, as Clayton referred to him, Colonel Aziz Bey) was an impressive figure, but since what he sought was an independent Mesopotamia, his ambitions were directly opposed to those of the British government in India, and all the more so once Indian army troops had occupied Basra. Indeed, two of his collaborators, including Nuri as-Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, were deported from Basra to India by Sir Percy Cox.

A more promising approach—that is, one less likely to be vetoed outright by India—had been made before the war, by Emir Abdulla—second son of Sharif Hussein, emir of Mecca—on a visit to Cairo. Abdulla’s concern was that the Turkish government might attempt to depose, remove, or assassinate his father, and replace him with somebody more compliant. This was not an empty threat. One son, Emir Feisal, was in Constantinople, ostensibly as a deputy in the Turkish parliament, but in fact in a position of comfortable house arrest as a hostage for his family’s loyalty; and Sharif Hussein himself had spent more than fifteen years in Constantinople with his family as a “guest” of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The sharifian family was widely respected, even revered, both as being directly descended from the Prophet and for its role as guardian of two ofthe three holiest cities in Islam. Consequently, the family was an object of suspicion to the Turkish government, all the more so since Mecca, in the Hejaz, was so far removed from the centers of Turkish power that before the building of the single-line railway to Medina, the journey to Mecca could take weeks or months. Even after the completion of the railway, there was still a daunting journey of 250 miles on camel or on foot from Medina to Mecca across a forbidding desert dominated by predatory Bedouin. Abdulla’s importance and diplomatic skill were such that he not only met with Ronald Storrs but may have met with Kitchener himself; but neither of them was able to offer any meaningful support so long as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire were at peace (or to provide Abdulla with the half a dozen modern machine guns he wanted). The moment they were at war, however, Storrs suggested reopening the discussion with Abdulla; and Kitchener, now in London as secretary of state for war, agreed.

Abdulla, speaking for his father, sought British support against the Turks, and after a series of messages from Mecca to Cairo to London and back, it was given, on the condition that the sharif (and “the Arab nation”) assist Britain in the war against Turkey. Kitchener not only had given his approval but had sought the approval of the prime minister and Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, thus committing Britain in principle to arm and finance a revolt in the Hejaz against the Turks under the leadership of Sharif Hussein. The timing of the revolt and the exact meaning of the phrase “Arab nation” were left undefined for the moment; still, at one stroke, Great Britain had committed itself to the creation of an Arab state and to the leadership of Sharif Hussein and his sons. Kitchener went even farther. In his message to Abdulla, he not only alluded to an Arab state but as good as pledged Britain to support Sharif Hussein as a new caliph, replacing the Turkish sultan: “It may be,” Kitchener wrote, falling into language as stately and opaque as that of Hussein himself, “that an Arab of the true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina, and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil which is now occurring.”

Since Kitchener’s utterances, not unlike those of the sharif, tended to be Delphic, it is hardly surprising that his message of October 30, 1914, has been a source of controversy for the past ninety-five years. That and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are among the most fiercely disputed documents in the history of British diplomacy. It is clear enough, though, that British policy now promised “the Arabs” (without as yet defining who and where they were) a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire if they helped to defeat the Turks, and offered the sharif (and his family) a role of special political and religious importance within such a state, as well as suggesting that he should assume spiritual leadership of all Muslims everywhere (something that was hardly in the gift of the British government). Not surprisingly, these assurances were accepted with alacrity by the sharif, and very shortly afterward he offered the first proof of his allegiance to the Allies’ cause.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire the sultan, though now hardly more than a figurehead, in his role as calpih proclaimed a jihad against the Allies. The proclamation appeared to have had little effect on Muslims in India, in North Africa, or even in Egypt. Although the sharif of Mecca had been expected to announce his adherence to the jihad, he showed no sign of doing so. His silence on the matter was deafening, and registered clearly in Constantinople and Berlin.

It may or may not be true that the British acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind,"
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but certainly their policy for the Middle East was improvised in haste and as something of an afterthought, by men who were overwhelmed by the sheer size and ferocity of the war only three months after it had begun. However, when Lawrence arrived in Cairo, British policy, at any rate on the surface, appeared to coincide with his own view, except for the intrusion of the Indian army and government into Mesopotamia, which Lawrence opposed from the start. He plunged into his duties in Cairo with enormous enthusiasm—and daily expandedthem in every direction. He was convinced that British policy would lead to the creation of an independent Arab state, one that would, of course, include “his” Arabs, Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi among them, and would eventually include Syria, where he had spent the four best years of his life.

For a junior staff officer, he seems to have had no hesitation in writing long, opinionated reports on strategy. No sooner was he settled into the Continental Hotel than he prepared an essay on the advantages of seizing the port of Alexandretta (now Iskenderun). The attraction of the scheme was that it could be carried out, in Lawrence’s opinion, with a relatively limited number of troops, would provide the Royal Navy with a major deepwater harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, and would at one stroke cut Turkey off from its empire in the south and bring British troops directly into Syria, instead of having the British fight their way north over the hilly and easily defended territory from Gaza to Jersualem. Kitchener, whether encouraged by Lawrence or not, took a similar point of view, but the Alexandretta scheme was doomed from the start. The French distrusted any move that would bring British troops into Syria, which France intended to have as its share of the Turkish empire, along with Lebanon; also, there was a competing plan, hatched in part by Churchill, to use the fleet to break through the Dardanelles, threaten Constantinople, and open up the Black Sea to Allied shipping.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1915, Lawrence energetically pushed the Alexandretta scheme, apparently without anybody in Cairo or London questioning why an obscure temporary second-lieutenant was dabbling in grand strategy. He went on to write a long, persuasive, closely reasoned report on Syrian politics, which was once again read at the highest levels, where it seemed to dovetail with Kitchener’s opinions. Lawrence’s impressive knowledge of Syrian secret political societies (any political discussion that involved opposition to Turkish rule had to be, by definition, secret), and of the desires of the very different peoples who lived in Syria, was well-informed, realistic, and compelling, as was his conclusion that a functional Arab state would have to include Damascusand Aleppo, and if possible the littoral area and ports of Lebanon, under an administration flexible enough to include desert dwellers and city dwellers as well as Maronite Christians. He doubted that there was any such thing as Syrian “national feeling,” but thought that the binding force of a Syrian state would be the Arabic language, and foresaw the possibility that Lebanon might need to be treated separately because of its large Christian minority. Palestine, he concluded sensibly, would present a wholly different set of problems. Anybody reading these documents would have to conclude that Lawrence’s four years at Carchemish and his travels throughout Syria and Lebanon had given him an extraordinary knowledge both of the Arabs’ hopes and of the reality (and complexity) of the situation in the Arab-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In February, the Turks carried out their long-awaited attack on the Suez Canal, but it failed, since they had counted on an Egyptian uprising, which was not forthcoming. This was the attack that prevented Lawrence from meeting his brother Will. In March the Franco-British naval assault on the Dardanelles took place; it failed when six of the eighteen battleships engaged were either seriously damaged or sunk by mines, so that the hesitant naval commander, Admiral de Robeck—who had replaced the even less bold Admiral Carden at the last moment, when Carden had a collapse attributed to stress—decided to break off the attack. Many people—first and foremost Winston Churchill—have since argued that if de Robeck had not given in to his fears he could have pushed on to Constantinople, and that Turkey might have collapsed with an Allied fleet anchored off the Golden Horn. Instead, the result was that British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops were landed on Gallipoli in April, to take the Turkish forts and allow the strait to be swept clear of mines—an attempt that dragged on until December 1915 and cost the Allies nearly 150,000 casualties, including more than 44,000 killed. The failure at Gallipoli caused the Turkish attitude toward the Allies to harden, and led to the genocide of the Armenians, since they represented the largest Christian population in the Ottoman Empire. It also resulted in the final shelving of the Alexandretta scheme, for which there werenow neither sufficient troops nor sufficient shipping. Other results included a weakening of Kitchener’s position as Britain’s warlord, a setback to Winston Churchill’s career (Gallipoli would raise questions about his judgment until May 1940), and Lawrence’s growing conviction that Turkey would somehow have to be attacked on the periphery, rather than frontally.