So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.
T. E. LAWRENCE TO HIS FAMILY, FEBRUARY 1915
Soon after taking up his post at the Savoy Hotel, Lawrence commandeered the largest wall in the office and covered it with a massive sectioned map of the Ottoman world. In his idle moments, he would stand against the opposite wall and gaze upon it for as long as time permitted, taking in all its vastness.
By January 1915, he was awaiting the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal with a certain impatience. One reason was that he had little doubt of its outcome. To reach the canal, the Turks first had to cross 120 miles of the inhospitable Sinai Peninsula. From his knowledge of that expanse, and especially of its limited water sources, Lawrence was convinced the attacking force would, by necessity, be quite small—surely not the 100,000 soldiers some alarmists in the British military hierarchy were suggesting—and thus easily repelled.
But the chief reason for his impatience was that he was already contemplating the next chapter in the Near East war, the one to come once the Turkish assault had been turned back. It would then be time for the British to go on the offensive, and gazing upon his maps at the Savoy, Lawrence was seeking out those places where an invading force might strike at the Ottoman Empire to most devastating effect.
One truly odd feature of that map had undoubtedly long since occurred to him: despite its enormous size and tenuous political cohesion, from the standpoint of geography that empire was astoundingly well protected.
The political and spiritual core of the Ottoman world was of course the ancient city of Constantinople, along with the mountainous region of Anatolia, the ancestral heartland of the Turks, that lay to its east. This concentration inevitably conjured a tantalizing prospect to British war planners, the chance to “decapitate” their enemy: if that city and that region could be seized, there was little doubt that all else would quickly collapse.
Except that any possible path to doing so presented enormous obstacles. With both of Turkey’s European neighbors, Greece and Bulgaria, still neutral in the war, there was little maneuvering room to try an overland approach on Constantinople from the west. In theory, Britain’s Russian allies could attempt an eastern advance from their position at the far end of Anatolia, but already being bled white by the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Russians were likely to exhaust their available manpower and matériel before getting very far in the mountainous terrain. As for a southern approach, that meant either a ground force trudging up through the Anatolian heartland where local resistance would be fierce—and, again, the mountains—or a naval flotilla running the gauntlet of Turkish forts lining the three-mile-wide Dardanelles strait. There was simply no easy way.
But the alternative, to start at some point on the Ottoman Empire’s periphery, looked even worse. British Indian forces had seized the oilfields of southern Iraq in the first days of the war, but an overland march from there meant a seven-hundred-mile slog through river swamplands and desert before the Anatolian frontier was even reached. Likewise, an advance from Egypt meant first crossing the desolate Sinai Peninsula, then crashing up against Turkish forces massed in the narrow chokepoint of southern Palestine.
But amid this whole great expanse, there did exist one exquisitely vulnerable point in the Ottoman Empire’s wall of natural defenses. It was the Gulf of Alexandretta, at that spot in northwest Syria where the long north-south coastline of the eastern Mediterranean shore bumps up against the far more rugged coastline of Anatolia. Not only was Alexandretta possessed of the best deep natural harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, a critical asset for amphibious operations, but the relatively flat landscape just to its east afforded ample room for ground troops to maneuver for a push farther inland.
But these were military considerations, ones that a number of senior British officers in Egypt had cottoned to even before Lawrence’s arrival. What Lawrence uniquely saw, both from his familiarity with the region—Jerablus lay just one hundred miles east of Alexandretta—and his firsthand view of Ottoman society, was the political.
One of the great hidden dangers for any empire going to war is that within its borders are often large communities of people who want absolutely nothing to do with it. And the longer a war and its deprivations continue, the more resentful these communities become, and the more susceptible to the promises and propaganda of one’s enemies. Most of the dueling empires of Europe were grappling with this internal danger as their war stretched on, but whatever problems the Europeans faced in this regard—and in some cases they were considerable—paled to insignificance next to those facing the Young Turks in Constantinople. Quite simply, given the extremely polyglot nature of their realm, most any course of action they might take that would win the support of one segment of the population was all but guaranteed to alienate another. This quandary had been illustrated by the mixed results of the call to jihad in November. While that call had momentarily excited the Muslim youth, it had terrified the empire’s non-Muslim populations. At the same time, many conservative Muslim Arabs, already mistrustful of the Young Turks’ perceived favoritism toward ethnic Turks, viewed it as a cynical attempt by an increasingly secular regime to play the religion card.
But if the Ottoman Empire was a mosaic, it was also one of distinct patterns, where various “colors” predominated or diminished across its expanse. And if one studied this mosaic from a slight remove, there was one spot on this great expanse where many of these patterns came to a confluence, creating a kind of ethnic and religious ground zero: Alexandretta.
Already, for reasons of distance and the relatively scant resources being allotted to it, Lawrence was convinced that a conventional war against Turkey wouldn’t work. Instead, the British needed to pursue a so-called irregular strategy. That meant taking advantage of the internal fissures of their enemy’s society, forging alliances with its malcontents. The Alexandretta Basin was the demarcation line between the Turkish world of Anatolia to the north and the great Arab world to the south—and as Lawrence well knew from his years at Jerablus, the Arabs of northern Syria had grown to deeply resent their Turkish overseers. Alexandretta also stood at the edge of the heartland of the Armenians, a people who had suffered periodic massacres at the hands of their Turkish neighbors; surely no people had more reason to rebel against Constantinople than they. In Lawrence’s view, quite aside from its purely military advantages, a British landing at Alexandretta was almost certain to spark uprisings of both Syrians and Armenians against the Turks, uprisings that would naturally complement the British effort.
But Lawrence also had firsthand information that made the idea even more enticing. The principal highway linking Anatolia to the south passed through the Alexandretta Basin, and as Lawrence knew from his time in the region, that highway was in terrible condition. In addition, the Hejaz Railway that linked Constantinople to its Arab realms passed through the basin—or, to put it more accurately, partially linked, because what Lawrence also knew, courtesy of his journey through the region six months earlier at the behest of Stewart Newcombe, was that two crucial spans of that railway in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains north of Alexandretta were nowhere near completion. This meant that the Turks would have no way of responding quickly if an invasion force took control of the basin, and in the slowness of their response, all points to the south, cut off from resupply or reinforcement, might quickly fall. With just a comparative handful of soldiers in Alexandretta, then—Lawrence estimated a mere two or three thousand would be needed—the British had the potential of not only splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, but of taking one-third of its population and over half of its land area out of the war in one fell swoop.
Lawrence wasn’t alone in identifying Alexandretta’s extraordinary vulnerability; the Turks were keenly aware of it too—so keenly, in fact, that it had already caused them to submit to one of the more humiliating episodes of World War I.
On December 20, 1914, a lone British warship, HMS Doris, had appeared off Alexandretta and, in a brazen game of bluff, issued an ultimatum to the local Turkish commander: release all foreign prisoners in the town, as well as surrender all ammunition and railway rolling stock, or face bombardment. In desperation, for they had no guns to resist such an attack, the Turks had threatened to kill one British prisoner for every one of their citizens killed in the bombardment. That threat, in blatant violation of the Geneva and Hague war conventions, had sparked outrage within the diplomatic community and been quickly countermanded by the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople. Instead, a bizarre compromise was reached: in return for the British not shelling the town, the Turks agreed to destroy the two train engines that were sitting in Alexandretta station. Except, the embarrassed Turks were soon forced to admit, they had neither the explosives nor the expertise to uphold their end of the deal, so on the morning of December 22, a demolitions expert from the Doris was given safe passage to come ashore and blow the trains up. Understandably, the British government’s attention to the Doris affair largely centered on the death-threat aspect, but to Lawrence the incident laid bare just how panicked the Turks were of what could be done to them in Alexandretta.
Although a mere second lieutenant relegated to collating maps, by virtue of his attachment to the military intelligence unit Lawrence was in the unique position of having his ideas disseminated to the highest levels of the British war-planning structure. It is surely no coincidence that while an Alexandretta landing had been discussed before, the scheme took on new urgency shortly after his arrival in Cairo. Judging by its telltale idiosyncratic approach to grammar, Lawrence was almost certainly the author of a crucial January 5, 1915, military intelligence memorandum on the subject: “We have been informed from two good sources that the Germans in command in Syria dread nothing so much as a landing by us in the north of Syria—they say themselves that this would be followed by a general defection of their Arab troops. There is no doubt that this fear is well founded, and that a general Arab revolt, directed by the Pan-Arab military league, would be the immediate result of our occupation of Alexandretta.”
The lobbying had an effect. On January 15, 1915, just one month after his arrival in Cairo, Lawrence sent an update to his old mentor in Oxford, David Hogarth. Because the letter had to clear military censors, he adopted a deliberately vague tone: “Our particular job goes well. We all pulled together hard for a month to twist ‘them’ from what we thought was a wrong line they were taking—and we seem to have succeeded completely, so that we today have got all we want for the moment, and therefore feel absolutely bored.”
The “them” he alluded to were senior British war planners in Cairo and London, while the “job” was an amphibious landing at Alexandretta. The only holdup now, it seemed to Lawrence, was for the long-awaited Turkish assault on the Suez Canal to be put safely in the past.
SO GREAT WAS his men’s morale that for a brief time even Djemal Pasha was stirred by the thought that it just might work out after all. “Everyone was absolutely convinced that certainly the Canal would be crossed,” he recalled, “that we should dig ourselves in securely on the further bank, and that the Egyptian patriots would then rise and attack the English in the rear.”
One source of this soaring optimism within the ranks of the Ottoman Fourth Army at the end of January 1915 was the extraordinary fortitude they had shown in crossing the Sinai, a shining example of what was possible when Turkish doggedness was joined to German organization. Making that 120-mile crossing had been months in the planning and involved almost superhuman logistical arrangements. Overseen by German officers, engineering units had fanned out across the desert beforehand, tapping wells for the oncoming troops, building rainwater reservoirs, and laying in depots of ammunition. Great teams of oxen had hauled the disassembled pontoon bridges needed to ford the Suez Canal, as well as the army’s heavy artillery, while some twelve thousand camels had been gathered up from as far away as central Arabia to ferry supplies. In early January, the army of thirteen thousand men set out along three different paths through the desert, and despite the deprivations of that march—each man’s daily food ration consisted of just a half pound of biscuits and a handful of olives—by the end of the month the attack force was encamped just a few miles east of the canal, ready to strike. Certainly the British in Egypt knew an attack was imminent—their spotter planes had photographed and occasionally shot at some of the Turkish formations—but they seemed to have no idea how large the force might be or where along the hundred-mile length of the canal it would come. It was this that had put Djemal’s troops in such good spirits.
“I used to talk to the troops every night about the victory in store,” he wrote, “and what a glorious victory it would be. I wanted to keep the sacred flame alive in the whole force.… If, by some unanticipated stroke of good fortune, this enterprise … had brought us success, we should naturally have regarded it as a good omen for the final liberation of Islam and the Ottoman Empire.”
One man who little shared in these high hopes was Major Curt Prüfer. Along with a small contingent of other German junior officers, he had endured the hard rigors of that desert crossing, and attributed all its success to the meticulous planning of the chief German military advisor to Djemal, a lieutenant colonel with the colorful name of Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein. Still, planning had its limits, and even if Prüfer wasn’t a professional soldier—just like T. E. Lawrence, he had received his officer’s commission with no actual military training—he appreciated that the changed face of modern war almost surely meant problems for the coming offensive. In particular, in the age of aerial reconnaissance, then just in its infancy, the British undoubtedly had a far better idea of their enemy’s strength and intentions than the Turks imagined.
This was confirmed to Prüfer by his own reconnaissance missions to the canal. The plan of attack called for the Turkish army’s flanks to make diversionary feints at the north and south ends of the waterway, while the main force of some sixty-five hundred men stormed across near its midpoint, just above the Great Bitter Lake. When Prüfer joined a forward scouting party that crept close to the canal on the morning of January 25, he observed just two British dredgers and a handful of small lighter boats in the lake. Three days later, however, the British presence had grown to several transport ships and two cruisers, a number that expanded to some twenty ships by January 30. In the meantime, Prüfer had experienced a close call when a British warplane dropped two bombs on the main headquarters encampment.
“I confess that the hammering of the bombs, the powerful explosions and the black billowing smoke, frightened me,” he noted in his diary, “although I did my best to hide it. In the camp, everyone ran pell-mell.”
To Prüfer, it all pointed to a coming disaster. “The enemy cruisers in the lake control the situation,” he wrote upon returning from the January 30 scouting mission. “We will be destroyed before we have actually come into the vicinity of the channel.” That night, he ate his “hangman’s meal,” asparagus and French toast.
The assault finally came in the early-morning hours of February 3, 1915. Taking advantage of a brief sandstorm that screened their actions from view, Turkish engineers hastily assembled their ten pontoon bridges at the water’s edge as the foot soldiers massed behind, ready to charge across. At a crucial moment, however, a British searchlight picked up the activity; in a barrage of rifle and artillery fire, seven of the pontoon bridges were quickly destroyed. That may have been a blessing in disguise for the Fourth Army, for it limited the slaughter. As it was, the approximately six hundred Turkish soldiers who had managed to reach the far shore before their escape routes were cut off were all either soon killed or compelled to surrender.
Prüfer had been given the quixotic task of leading forward a long wagon train hauling sandbags; the plan called for the sandbags to be used both to block the canal and to create a bridge to the far shore. Instead, he spent most of the day scrambling from one point of chaos on the front lines to the next as British naval shells exploded all around.
By nightfall, Djemal and his senior German advisors concluded that the situation was hopeless, and a general retreat back across the Sinai desert began. To most everyone’s surprise, the British made no attempt to pursue the fleeing army, enabling its withdrawal to be as orderly and disciplined as had been its advance.
Despite his own bleak assessment on the eve of battle, the setback on the canal seemed to cast Curt Prüfer into despondency. Nursing a slight arm wound—he’d apparently been hit by shrapnel during the assault—he holed up in Hafir el Andscha, an oasis town at the eastern edge of the Sinai, to file dispatches to Max von Oppenheim and Hans von Wangenheim, the German ambassador to Turkey. He was blunt, even derisive, over the campaign’s failure to trigger an Egyptian uprising.
“Despite all our agitation,” he wrote Oppenheim, “despite the thousands of [jihadist] pamphlets, we did not have any deserters.… The Egyptians are even cowardly in desperation, and lack any genuine love of fatherland.”
But his disappointment clearly had deeper roots. Ever since teaming up with Max von Oppenheim, the former Oriental scholar had fervently embraced the notion of a pan-Islamic jihad against Germany’s imperial enemies. Not just the battle but the entire Sinai campaign gave the lie to that. From the very outset, tensions were evident between the Turkish and Arab components of the assault force, and these had only worsened with time. Many of the Arab units fled as soon as the shooting began, or never deployed in the first place, while some went over to the enemy. Prüfer heaped particular scorn on the Bedouin nomad warriors, many of whom he had personally recruited to act as scouts and who similarly melted away on the decisive day. Indeed, just about the only unifying element detectable among this fractious lot was antipathy for their German advisors; even many Turkish officers had adopted a policy of “passive resistance” to any direction offered by the Germans throughout the campaign.
“The holy war,” Prüfer informed his old mentor from Hafir el Andscha, “is a tragicomedy.”
Djemal Pasha had a rather more upbeat assessment. While the assault obviously hadn’t led to the Egyptian uprising he had hoped for, the action would cause the British to keep more troops in reserve in Egypt, making fewer available to fight elsewhere. Moreover, by his calling off the engagement when he did, his army was still largely intact. At the same time, as they made their respective ways back across the Sinai, Djemal and Prüfer undoubtedly shared a mounting sense of unease. Given the tit-for-tat nature of the war, a British retaliatory offensive would come soon. The only question was where, and from their own recent difficult journeys across Syria, both knew the likeliest spot: the Alexandretta Basin.
It wasn’t just the broken railways and “canal” roads of that chokepoint that were cause for worry. In the nationwide scramble for reliable frontline troops, the Turks had been forced to leave the safeguarding of the Alexandretta region to two second-rate divisions composed almost exclusively of Syrian Arabs. Resentful of their Turkish overseers at the best of times—and these weren’t the best of times in the Ottoman world—it was highly probable that these Arab units would quickly collapse at the first sign of an Allied landing, perhaps even switch sides.
In fact, Djemal Pasha’s anxiety over Alexandretta had already led him to commit a singularly reckless act. Desperate to mask the city’s abject vulnerability, it was he who had issued the threat to execute British prisoners back in December when HMS Doris stood offshore. Now, in the wake of Suez, the Syrian governor was sure the British would turn to Turkey’s Achilles’ heel once more, and this time there would be no negotiating, no way to stop them.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to snatch defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one’s own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray. In early 1915, the British military would navigate its way to a fiasco of such colossal proportions as to require all three of these factors to work in concert.
With the brushing back of the Turkish assault on the Suez on February 3, Lawrence and other members of the intelligence unit in Cairo assumed that plans for a landing at Alexandretta would immediately get under way. Instead, the war strategists in London had already begun focusing on a different spot on the Ottoman coastline: the Dardanelles strait below Constantinople.
One of the earth’s more peculiar natural formations, the Dardanelles is a narrow, fjordlike waterway flanked by the Turkish Asian mainland on its eastern bank and the mountainous Gallipoli peninsula on its western. After a twisting thirty-mile-long course between the mountains, the gorge opens up at its northern confluence to the inland Sea of Marmara, at the far end of which lies Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. For obvious reasons, the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, letting onto the Mediterranean, has always been regarded as the maritime gateway to that city, and since ancient times every civilization that has controlled the region has maintained fortifications there. The Ottoman forts that dotted the high slopes above the strait in early 1915 had been erected on the ruins of Byzantine forts, which in turn had been built on the ruins of Greek and Roman ones.
“Forcing the Narrows” had been an alluring notion for British war planners ever since Turkey came into the war, and for none more so than the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. As he repeatedly pointed out to the British cabinet—often to the point of tiresomeness, as was his style—with a defenseless Constantinople lying just to the north of that strait, here lay the chance to swiftly decapitate their Turkish adversaries and take them out of the war. Further arguing for a Dardanelles breakthrough was an appeal for aid from Russia, hard pressed by German and Austro-Hungarian forces in the north. With Russia’s northern ports either iced in or patrolled by marauding German U-boats, the only possible maritime route for such aid, Churchill argued, was from the south.
As consensus for a Dardanelles naval operation grew in London, those in Cairo advocating an Alexandretta landing found themselves increasingly outmaneuvered; with the Royal Navy focused on the former, they were told, it would be spread too thin to support an operation in the latter. On its face, this contention was absurd. Even the most pessimistic War Office assessment had concluded that Alexandretta could be seized by about 20,000 troops—far more than the two to three thousand envisioned by Lawrence, but still a pittance compared with the numbers idly staring across no-man’s-land on the Western Front. The real issue was institutional myopia. Since the Dardanelles had now become the first priority in the Near East, any action at Alexandretta fell under the classification of a diversion, and among senior British war planners, with their nineteenth-century notions of massing all available force at a single point, diversion was shorthand for distraction.
Joined to this was stone-cold arrogance. Turkey was a third-rate power, its soldiers ill-fed, ill-trained, poorly armed, and mutinous. In just the past five years, they had been beaten by the Italians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Montenegrins. Most recently, they had been swatted away from the Suez Canal and slaughtered by the Russians at the battle of Sarikamish in eastern Turkey. “Taking the Turkish Army as a whole,” one British officer had reported to his superiors in November 1914, “I should say it was [a] militia only moderately trained, and composed as a rule of tough but slow-witted peasants as liable to panic before the unexpected as most uneducated men.” Just what chance did this rabble have against the might of the British Empire? Ergo, why nip at their heels at Alexandretta when they could be beheaded at Constantinople?
But there was an altogether different issue at play as well, one that had nothing to do with military strategies or hubris and everything to do with politics. Since the start of the war, the French had laid claim to Syria, a spoils-of-war prize that it would take possession of once the conflict ended. Even though the Alexandretta enclave fell just outside the generally recognized borders of greater Syria, all the British talk of the Syrian uprising that was sure to follow an Alexandretta landing—talk, ironically enough, that Lawrence himself had done much to generate in his reports to London—made the French extremely edgy. Put simply, if there was to be an Allied move into the Syrian region, the French wanted to be in on it from the outset in order to take control of the situation. That was understandable as far as the argument went, perhaps, but then came the kicker: since France, hard pressed on the Western Front, had no troops to spare for such an enterprise, it meant that the entire region, including Alexandretta, should be militarily off-limits even to its allies.
Whether justified or not, in Lawrence’s mind it was this French objection, far more than British War Office shortsightedness, that scuttled the Alexandretta plan. In mid-February, as word of the French position circulated among the stunned Savoy Hotel intelligence staff, he wrote a short letter to his parents in which he bitterly noted, “So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.”
Initially, however, it appeared that Lawrence’s indignation might be misplaced, and the Dardanelles gambit a success. On February 19, a joint British and French flotilla appeared off the southern entrance to the strait and with their long-range guns proceeded to shell the Turkish fortresses there at will. With the Turks able to muster only token return fire, most of their outer forts were soon pounded to rubble, leading the British fleet commander to confidently predict that by methodically working its way up the strait and destroying whatever Turkish fortifications remained, his armada might reach Constantinople within two weeks’ time. That city’s residents clearly agreed with him. As the Allied fleet sailed off to resupply for the big push, Constantinople’s imminent fall seemed such a foregone conclusion that the nation’s gold reserves were rushed to a safe haven in the Turkish interior, and many senior government officials quietly hatched personal contingency plans to flee.
One who didn’t share this view was T. E. Lawrence. To the contrary, holding out hope that until the Dardanelles operation got under way in earnest there might still be a chance to overrule the French, he used the lull after the February 19 bombardments to continue pushing for an Alexandretta landing, but to little avail. With the senior British military command now deaf to his arguments, he finally reached out to the one person he knew who was well connected to the British political hierarchy, David Hogarth.
Although Lawrence had always assumed an informal, collegial tone with his mentor, his letter to Hogarth on March 18 was of a very different order: beseeching, even demanding. After outlining the crucial importance of taking Alexandretta—“the key of the whole place, as you know”—and warning of the danger should it fall into the hands of any other power, he all but gave Hogarth a set of marching orders to combat the various forces lined up against the plan: “Can you get someone to suggest to Winston [Churchill] that there is a petrol spring on the beach (very favourably advised on by many engineers, but concessions always refused by the Turks), huge iron deposits near Durt Yol 10 miles to the north and coal also.… Then go to the F.O. [Foreign Office] if possible. Point out that in [the] Baghdad Convention, France gave up Alexandretta to [the] Germans, and agreed that it formed no part of Syria. Swear that it doesn’t form part of Syria—and you know it speaks Turkish.… By occupying Alexandretta with 10,000 men we are impregnable.”
Whether or not Hogarth actually had the clout to execute such instructions, it was already too late. On the very day Lawrence sent his letter, March 18, the Allied fleet returned to the mouth of the Dardanelles to resume their bombardment campaign. This time, matters didn’t go at all as planned.
For the first three hours, the Allied armada pounded away at the coastal forts with much the same ease as in February. The trouble started when the first line of ships was commanded to fall back to make room for the second. During the February bombardment, the Turks had taken note of an odd habit of the Allied fleet, that when reversing course they almost invariably turned their ships to starboard; on the chance that this tradition would continue, they had recently laid a single string of mines in an inlet the Allies would traverse on a starboard turn. Sure enough, at about 2 p.m. the retiring Allied first line steered directly into the minefield. In quick succession, three warships were sunk, and three more heavily damaged.
Although the term “mission creep,” with all its negative connotations, didn’t exist in 1915, it probably should have. In analyzing the March 18 minefield fiasco, British war planners came to the reasonable conclusion that the Dardanelles couldn’t be cleared by sea power alone. What they failed to conclude was that the campaign should be abandoned in favor of something different. To the contrary, the Allies were now going to double down, with the naval effort at the strait to be augmented by a ground offensive.
It would be some time before anyone realized it, but that decision was to be one of the most fateful of World War I, ultimately extinguishing any hope that the conflict in the Middle East—and by extension, that in Europe—might be brought to an early end. In the interim, the regime in Constantinople, which just days earlier had been flirting with abandoning the capital, was given a new lease on life as the Allies again paused operations in order to cobble their ground force together.
IN THE MIDWINTER of 1915, the Standard Oil Company of New York finally decided what to do with William Yale. Releasing him from Cairo, that modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah so assaultive to his Yankee sensibilities, he was ordered to return to Constantinople.
With greater cunning than perhaps any other international corporation, Socony had looked upon the unfolding tragedy of World War I and been determined to play it to their advantage. In fact, in the very first days of the war it had come up with a plan whereby it might supply the petroleum needs of both warring European blocs by reflagging its tankers to the registry of neutral nations. While that scheme had been exposed, Yale discovered that Socony had now devised an ingenious new system to smuggle oil to Turkey through neutral Bulgaria. But this was minor compared with what Standard was planning next, and it was to achieve that greater plan that Yale had been brought back to Turkey.
What the bosses at 26 Broadway had come to realize was that so long as the Europe-wide war continued—and, just as crucially, so long as the United States kept out of it—they had the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire practically to themselves. With their British, French, and Russian competitors boxed out until the war ended, they now had a golden opportunity to grab up as many oil concessions in the Near East as they desired—and since they were the only major company still in operation in the region, they could do so at rock-bottom prices. The scheme traded on Turkey’s desperate need for oil, a vital commodity if it was to have any hope of competing militarily. The oil coming through Socony’s Bulgarian smuggling operation was a pittance compared with what was needed, and to meet this need Standard held out a possible solution: Palestine.
In various geological studies going back to the late 1800s, data suggested that central Palestine might well be the site of one of the world’s great untapped oil reservoirs. The mapping team that William Yale had been a part of in 1913–14 had examined only a tiny portion of that area, some forty-five thousand acres, limited as it was by the boundaries of the concessionary zones. Standard wanted to massively increase its Palestine holdings, and it now saw a way to make that happen.
Just prior to Yale’s return, Socony officials in Constantinople had told the Ottoman government that after careful consideration, they had regretfully concluded that the area covered by their seven concessions in Kornub was simply too small to be financially viable to exploit. If such a conclusion seemed odd coming so soon after Socony had embarked on a massive effort to develop those concessions, a naturally more pressing question for an oil-starved regime in the midst of a war was, just how many more acres did Standard feel they needed? The answer: a half million more, or, put in more tangible terms, pretty much the entire breadth of central Judea from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean, an area covering about one-tenth of the current state of Israel.
Except there was a key detail in all this that Socony saw no reason to trouble the Turks with. It had no intention of actually drilling for oil, let alone refining it, until after the war was over. Its sole goal was to use the “golden hour” that the war afforded to lock up those 500,000 acres for the future, a future that, provided the right pressure was brought to bear on the right diplomats and politicians, wouldn’t depend in any way on which side eventually won.
As the Socony employee with the most experience in Palestine, William Yale was to be the point man for getting control of that land. The first job at hand, though, was to change Turkey’s mining laws; these were archaic and complex and an impediment to the kind of land grab Standard was hoping to achieve. To this end, the Constantinople Socony office set to work compiling a comprehensive set of new mining-law recommendations for the Turkish parliament—an undertaking eased by their having put the secretary of the Turkish senate on their payroll—and also placed Yale on the drafting committee. In just this way, the twenty-seven-year-old Yale, less than eighteen months removed from his roustabout duties in an Oklahoma oilfield, became instrumental in rewriting the commercial laws of a foreign empire.
THE GERMAN HOSPICE is a magnificent building of yellow stone and slate that sits on the ridgeline of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Today its austere lines are softened by the cypress and pine trees that surround it, but when it was constructed in the early 1900s, under the orders and specifications of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, its bare grounds and prominent position on the ridge gave it more than a passing resemblance to a Bavarian castle.
Built to accommodate German pilgrims and clergy visiting the Holy Land, the hospice has the feel of a particularly pleasant medieval monastery, rough-stone stairways connecting its different floors, open internal passageways giving onto views of its cloistered gardens. On the ground floor is a great chapel made of stone, its fusion of stained glass windows and Moorish-style archways reminiscent of the Great Cathedral in Córdoba. So grand is the hospice that Djemal Pasha chose to make it his Jerusalem headquarters during World War I, the city where he and his German liaison officer, Curt Prüfer, returned after their ill-fated Suez sojourn in February 1915.
In Jerusalem, the governor quickly became known for exhibiting a degree of irritability in the administration of his office. His new personal secretary, a twenty-one-year-old reserve officer named Falih Rifki, caught a glimpse of this on the first day he showed up for work at the hospice in the winter of 1915. Ushered into Djemal’s inner sanctum, Rifki watched as the governor briskly signed his way through a high stack of papers placed before him and then taken away by three attending officers, oblivious to the twenty or so other men who stood in one corner of the room, pale and trembling with fear. When Djemal at last finished with his paperwork and turned to the clustered men, elders from the Palestinian town of Nablus, it was to ask if they understood the gravity of their unspecified crimes. The Nablus elders, apparently not appreciating that the question was meant to be rhetorical, began to protest their innocence and plead for mercy.
“Silence!” Djemal thundered. “Do you know what the punishment is for these crimes? Execution! Execution!” He let that news sink in for a bit, before continuing in a calmer tone, “But you may thank God for the sublime mercy of the Ottoman state. For the moment I shall content myself with exiling you and your families to Anatolia.”
After the men had offered their profuse thanks and been hustled out, Djemal turned to Rifki with a shrug. “What can one do? That’s how we get things done here.”
The episode rather exemplified Djemal Pasha’s managerial style, a man for whom the term “mercurial” might have been coined. Forever oscillating between raging severity and gentle magnanimity, often within the same conversation, he kept everyone around him permanently off balance, incapable of predicting his likely response to a situation. Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, recalled a meeting between Djemal and a favor-seeking Briton at which the governor bluntly refused every request made of him, until a sealed envelope was opportunely delivered by an aide. Reading the contents, Djemal broke into a broad smile.
“I now can grant all your requests,” he announced. “I have just received a decoration from the Czar of Bulgaria, and at such times I always grant the first favors presented.”
One effect of this style, of course, was that issues were never truly resolved; knowing that most any harsh edict might be countermanded or, conversely, a granted favor soon rescinded, petitioners learned to beseech Djemal for consideration when he was reported to be in a good mood—or, trusting in the law of averages, to simply beseech him repeatedly.
In his defense, though, it’s not as if the Syrian governor didn’t have a lot of things to be irritable about. Indeed, by the middle of March 1915 he was buffeted by such an array of crises as might cause the most cheerful person to feel a bit put-upon. Under the circumstances, the first of these crises, manifested on the morning of March 22, bordered on the perverse: locusts.
The Spanish consul in Jerusalem, a dapper young man named Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, happened to be working in his office that morning when he noticed the sky suddenly darken dramatically, as if there were occurring a solar eclipse. “Upon peeking out from the balcony I saw that an immense cloud had completely obscured the light of the sun.” As Ballobar watched, the cloud descended, revealed itself to be millions upon millions of locusts. “The ground, the balconies, the roofs, the entire city and then the countryside, everything was covered by these wretched little animals.”
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the horde moved on, headed east toward Jericho, but in subsequent days, reports of the locust plague started coming in from across the breadth of central Palestine. They told of entire orchards and fields stripped bare of every leaf and seedling within hours, of farm animals and briefly unattended infants being blinded, the insects feeding on the liquid in their eyes.
The Holy Land had experienced locust plagues in the past, but nothing in modern memory compared to this. Nor could it have come at a worse moment. Joined to the pressures of the war effort—tens of thousands of Syrian farmers had been drafted, the requisitioning of farm animals and machinery had been wanton—the pestilence was sure to make an already troubled spring planting season infinitely worse, and cause massive food shortages and price increases. Indeed, Consul Ballobar noted, within hours of the locust swarm touching down in Jerusalem, wheat prices in the city’s bazaars had spiked.
True to his self-image as a reformer, Djemal Pasha didn’t form a committee or appoint some toady to deal with the problem, the typical Ottoman response to a crisis. Instead, he immediately summoned Syria’s most celebrated agricultural scientist, the thirty-nine-year-old Jewish émigré Aaron Aaronsohn.
The meeting between the two fiercely headstrong men took place on March 27 and, per Djemal’s preference, was conducted in French. It got off to a rocky start. Along with outlining the modern techniques that could be used to combat the infestation, Aaronsohn took the opportunity to bluntly criticize the army’s wholesale requisitions that had left the region on the brink of ruin even before the locusts appeared. According to the story Aaronsohn would later tell, the governor finally interrupted his tirade with a simple question: “What if I were to have you hanged?”
In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, “Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America.”
Djemal apparently liked that answer. Before the ending of their meeting, he had appointed Aaronsohn inspector in chief of a new locust eradication program, and granted him near-dictatorial powers to carry it out. If any petty officials got in Aaronsohn’s way, the governor let it be known, they would have to answer to him.
But if the locust plague could be delegated to an expert, that was not the case with Djemal’s other concerns that March.
For some time he had been sitting on information that suggested the empire’s “Arab problem” might be far more serious than anyone in Constantinople appreciated, that in Syria they might be sitting on something of a volcano.
Shortly after Turkey joined the war in November, a unit of Turkish counterintelligence officers had broken into the shuttered French consulate in Beirut, and there they had found a passel of documents in a concealed wall safe. Those papers laid bare a long-standing secret relationship between the French consul and a number of Arab leaders in Beirut and Damascus opposed to the Young Turk government. Not just opposed; many of the proposals these men had put to the French consul—for Syrian independence, for a French protectorate in Lebanon—were nothing short of traitorous.
But administering a corrective to the querulous Nablus elders had been one thing; moving against the Beirut and Damascus consulate plotters was a good deal trickier. Many were well known throughout the Arab world, and their execution or exile might provoke the very Arab rebellion Turkey sought to avoid. It might also raise alarm in the greater Arab Muslim world, including in the “captive” lands of Egypt and French North Africa, just when Constantinople was trying to stir these communities to the cause of pan-Islamic jihad. Consequently, Djemal had seen no choice but to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Tucking the Beirut dossier away in his Damascus office, he had endeavored to keep the malcontents close by feigning normalcy and reverting to the old Ottoman standby of handing out sinecures and honorary positions. That tactic might ultimately win the plotters to his side, or conversely reveal how extensive their conspiratorial circles actually were, but it was still worrisome to have these traitors at large at the very moment that an Allied invasion of Syria had suddenly grown more likely.
But in Syria, every problem had its counterproblem. Whereas the Beirut dissidents consisted almost exclusively of so-called progressives, Arab urban liberals infused with European ideas of nationalism and self-determination, in late March Djemal also faced a crisis with Arab conservatives, those spurred to outrage by the Young Turks’ modernist—and, to their eyes, secularist—reforms. This conservative crisis was about to quite literally show up at the governor’s door in the form of a soft-spoken thirty-one-year-old man named Sheikh Faisal ibn Hussein.
Faisal was the third of four sons of Emir Hussein, a tribal leader in the immense Hejaz region of western Arabia. Of much greater import, Faisal’s father was the sherif, or religious leader, of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the most recent scion of the Hashemite clan that had served as the guardians of the Islamic holy land since the tenth century.
Relations between the Young Turks and Emir Hussein had been strained from the very outset, and time had done nothing to improve matters. Almost medieval in his conservatism, over the years Hussein had viewed the stream of liberalist edicts emanating from Constantinople with ever-deepening antipathy; his discontent ranged from the Young Turks’ emancipation of women and promotion of minority rights, to its chipping away at the civic authority of religious leaders, even to its efforts to curb slavery, still a common practice in the Hejaz. Tellingly, the most tangible focus of Emir Hussein’s rancor was the proposed extension of the Hejaz Railway from Medina to Mecca. Far from viewing the extension as a sign of progress, a way to ease the travel of Muslim pilgrims making the hajj to the holy city, Hussein saw it as a Trojan horse for Constantinople to exert greater control over the region, and specifically over him. The result had been an endless series of clashes between the Constantinople-appointed Hejaz civilian governors and the emir and his sons.
The tensions had only grown worse—and the consequences obviously far graver—since Turkey came into the war. Given that he was one of the most respected religious figures in the Muslim world, Hussein’s noncommittal response to the call to jihad in November was quickly noted by all, and was viewed as a major reason for its tepid effect thus far. Similarly, appeals for national unity in the war effort had done nothing to bring about a rapprochement in the long-standing feud between Ali, Hussein’s eldest son, and the current governor of Medina, a feud that at times had come close to open combat. Then there had been the emir’s feeble response to Djemal’s request for volunteers to join in the Suez assault. Instead of the thousands of tribal fighters the regime had counted on, Abdullah, Hussein’s second son, had shown up in Syria with a mere handful.
Yet despite all this provocation, Hussein and his sons had to be handled with even greater delicacy than the Beirut malcontents. If from a narrow military standpoint the Hejaz lacked the strategic importance of Syria—it consisted of a few small cities surrounded by vast deserts at the farthest fringe of the empire—the Hashemite emir’s singular ability to bestow or deny his religious blessing on Constantinople’s actions gave him extraordinary power. Thus a kind of standoff ensued. Obviously, the Young Turks either wanted Hussein to fall in line or to be rid of him, but to move against him in too crude a fashion was to invite a ferocious conservative backlash. For his part, Hussein had to know that there was a limit to the Young Turks’ patience, that pushing them too far was to invite in the soldiers.
That standoff had recently experienced a perilous rupture. In January, Hussein’s eldest son, Ali, claimed to have uncovered a plot by the governor of Medina to overthrow Hussein and replace him with a more pliant religious figure. This was the reason for Faisal’s impending arrival in Syria. Emir Hussein was sending him out of the deserts of Arabia to confront the Constantinople regime, both to express his outrage at the overthrow plot and to demand that the provincial governor be removed.
But here, at last, was something approximating good news for Djemal Pasha, for if there was anyone within the troublesome Hussein family who he felt might be the voice of reason, it was Faisal. Like his older brothers, Faisal had been raised and educated within the sultan’s inner court in Constantinople, but it appeared this civilizing influence had taken special hold in Hussein’s unassuming third son. In Faisal there was a caution, even a timidity, that might be exploited with gentle words and charm—and though the unlucky Nablus elders hauled into his office might have gone away with a differing opinion, charm was something of a Djemal specialty. When Faisal and his retinue rolled into town, the governor intended to greet him with all the pomp and fanfare of a visiting dignitary.
LESS THAN A mile away from the German Hospice, at the German military headquarters in downtown Jerusalem, Curt Prüfer also took a keen interest in the imminent arrival of Faisal ibn Hussein. He had a rather harder-edged view, however, of how to win the Hussein family to the Turco-German cause. Back in October 1914, even before Djemal Pasha’s arrival in Syria, Prüfer had dispatched his own spies to the Hejaz to get a sense of where Emir Hussein’s true loyalties lay. His conclusion, as he’d reported to Max von Oppenheim in early November, was that the emir in Mecca was essentially on the payroll of British Egypt and thus “English through and through.”
Beyond his obvious political and religious differences with the Young Turks, the problem with Hussein extended to geography. One of the most isolated and impoverished regions of the Ottoman Empire, the Hejaz had an economy that was almost wholly dependent on the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, by the Muslim faithful to Mecca, the bulk of whom came from either India or Egypt. The arid Hejaz also relied on imported grain to feed its people, and much of that came across the Red Sea from Egypt or British Sudan in the form of government-subsidized religious offerings. With the British navy’s undisputed control of the Red Sea, it would be a simple matter to cut off both the pilgrim traffic and food supplies to the Hejaz, an action that would quickly take the region to utter ruin. This was the sword that hung over his head, Hussein had intimated to Constantinople, and the underlying reason why he had to tread so carefully before the regime’s demands.
But to Curt Prüfer it was all a rather outrageous bluff. Put simply, the British would never risk incurring the wrath of the Muslim world by starving out, let alone invading, the Islamic holy land; Germany should be so lucky. At the same time, Hussein, as the guardian of Mecca and Medina, wouldn’t dare go over to the British, for that same Muslim wrath would then be directed at him. Instead, the wily old emir in Mecca was playing both sides, keeping the British at bay—and their food subsidies and pilgrim traffic intact—through advertising his differences with Constantinople, and keeping Constantinople at bay through touting the contrived British threat.
The problem was, the Turks would not challenge Hussein nor allow their allies to do so. Since arriving in the region, Prüfer and the other German intelligence agents had been explicitly forbidden from involving themselves in Hejazi affairs in any way. Even during Faisal’s upcoming visit, Djemal intended to screen the young sheikh from his German advisors as much as possible. Instead, the Syrian governor would undoubtedly pursue the same course the Young Turks had adopted with the Hussein family for the past six years—solicitousness and flattery blended with veiled threats—and to the same negligible effect.
What made all this especially maddening to Prüfer was that Hussein was one of the linchpins in bringing the pan-Islamic jihad to full flower. Without the Hashemite leader’s blessing, that fatwa remained a concoction of the Young Turk regime; with his blessing, fires might be ignited throughout the Middle East and beyond.
In his November report to Oppenheim, Prüfer had concluded that the emir was “luckily powerless and in our hands.” The challenge now was to convince everyone else—Djemal, the Young Turks in Constantinople, Hussein himself—that this was true.
THERE IS LITTLE indication that Lawrence was following events in the Arabian Peninsula, or was even aware of them, during his first few months with the intelligence unit in Cairo—understandable given his almost obsessive focus on Syria. That changed when he made the acquaintance of Ronald Storrs, the British Oriental secretary to Egypt.
With his pencil-thin mustache and fondness for white linen suits, Storrs cut a dandyish figure among the predominantly uniformed British population of wartime Cairo, a Cambridge-educated aesthete with an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, Renaissance art, and classical literature. Shipping out to Egypt as a young man, he had passed through a number of positions in the British administration there before winning appointment as Oriental secretary in 1909 at the age of twenty-eight.
It was a position he was born for. Along with being a decorous presence at the official receptions and galas of which the British community in Cairo was especially fond, Storrs acted as the right-hand man of the resident British consul general to Egypt, a behind-the-scenes monitor of the nation’s myriad political intrigues. His star had risen considerably when Lord Kitchener assumed that post in 1911. Quickly coming to regard Storrs as his most trusted lieutenant—the Oriental secretary had been instrumental in torpedoing Curt Prüfer’s appointment to the khedival library directorship, for example—Kitchener had maintained their relationship even after his appointment to war secretary in August 1914. Since he fully intended to return to his Egyptian post once the war was over, Kitchener had left his protégé behind in Cairo to serve as his eyes and ears.
But there was rather more to it than that. In Kitchener’s service, Ronald Storrs was the crucial conduit in a game of political intrigue so sensitive it was known to only a handful of men in Cairo, London, and Mecca, the possessor of perhaps the most dangerous secret in the Middle East. By befriending T. E. Lawrence and bringing him in on that secret, Storrs would set the young intelligence officer on the course that was to bring him fame and glory.
At least initially, that friendship was based on the supremely ordinary, a mutual love of classical literature. As the rather fusty Storrs related of Lawrence in his memoir, “We had no literary differences, except that he preferred Homer to Dante and disliked my preference for Theocritus before Aristophanes.”
At some point in the winter of 1915, their discussions turned to more current topics, specifically to the covert mission that Storrs was conducting for Lord Kitchener.
The story had begun a year earlier, in February 1914, when Abdullah ibn Hussein, the thirty-two-year-old second son of Emir Hussein of Mecca, came calling in Cairo. While the emir’s disenchantment with the Constantinople regime was becoming fairly common knowledge by that point, Abdullah pushed matters into a whole new realm; granted a brief meeting with Kitchener, he attempted to sound out the consul general on what British reaction would be to an outright Arab revolt in the Hejaz.
Kitchener took pains to sidestep the query. After all, Britain and Turkey were still at peace then, and it simply wouldn’t do for the former to encourage revolt in the latter. When Abdullah returned to Cairo two months later hoping for a second meeting, Kitchener foisted him off on his Oriental secretary.
Whatever limited subtlety Abdullah had managed with Kitchener, it was absent from his meeting with Storrs. “I found myself being asked categorically whether Britain would present the Grand Sharif [Hussein] with a dozen, or even a half dozen machine guns,” Storrs recalled. “When I enquired what could possibly be their purpose, he replied (like all rearmers) for defence; and, pressed further, added that the defence would be against attack from the Turks. I needed no special instructions to inform him that we could never entertain the idea of supplying arms to be used against a friendly power.”
But that second meeting with Abdullah had been in April 1914, and by the following September, matters had changed a great deal. As he waited to see if Turkey would come into the war, now–War Secretary Kitchener had reason to recall his earlier conversation with Hussein’s son and to appreciate that he might have a unique opportunity awaiting him in Arabia. Rather than work through senior officials in the British military or civilian administrations in Egypt, Kitchener sent an encrypted cable to his old Cairo office: “Tell Storrs to send secret and carefully chosen messenger from me to the Sharif Abdullah to ascertain whether, should present German influence in Constantinople coerce [Turkey into] … war against Great Britain, he and his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us.”
Hussein’s reply, which arrived just as Turkey joined the war, was tantalizing. While stating that he would endeavor to stay neutral, Hussein hinted that with sufficient external support and concrete promises from Britain to stay out of internal Arabian affairs, he might lead his “immediate followers into revolt.”
Seizing on that prospect, Kitchener swiftly sent another message that dramatically upped the ante. Should the Arabs join with Britain, rather than merely stay neutral, Kitchener wrote, “Great Britain will guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sherifate against all external foreign aggression, in particular that of the Ottomans. Till now we have defended and befriended Islam in the person of the Turks [sic]; henceforward it shall be in that of the noble Arab.”
But then Hussein seemed to equivocate somewhat. In his next letter, received by Storrs in December, the emir repeated his intention to “avoid any action detrimental to the British,” but also indicated that any outright break with Turkey would have to wait until sometime in the indefinite future. And there the matter rested. In the months since Hussein had sent that last message, there had been no word out of Mecca.
To Lawrence, the details of this secret correspondence with Hussein came as something of a revelation. Since arriving in Cairo, he had devoted great energy to gauging the possibility of an Arab revolt in Syria, a revolt that, almost by definition, would be reliant on so-called progressives: businessmen and intellectuals disaffected by the corruption of the Constantinople regime, minorities yearning for equality, Arab officers and conscripts frustrated by the military’s Turkish chauvinism. Of conservative Arabia he knew virtually nothing.
Yet from a political standpoint, Lawrence quickly appreciated the Hejazi potential. An alliance with Hussein would inoculate the British against the charge that it was fomenting rebellion as a means of taking over the Middle East; as guardian of the holy cities, it would be quite unthinkable to most Muslims that Emir Hussein had entered a partnership with land-grabbing infidels. To the contrary, a revolt starting in the Hejaz and under his leadership would carry the imprimatur of religious sanction, neatly nullifying the Islam-versus-Crusaders propaganda being promoted by the Turks and Max von Oppenheim.
But trying to assess where things stood in the absence of any new communication from Hussein was a perplexing process. On the one hand, he did appear to be living up to his promise of neutrality, as evidenced by his continuing noncommittal stance on the call to jihad. On the other hand, he had recently sent his third son, Faisal, to meet with Djemal Pasha in Syria, and to then proceed to Constantinople for more meetings with the Young Turk leadership. Since Faisal was generally considered to be the most moderate and sober-minded of Hussein’s sons, the obvious conclusion was that Hussein was inching his way back toward a rapprochement with Constantinople and that the brief, tantalizing prospect of an Arab revolt in the Hejaz had slipped from British hands.
For his part, Lawrence soon had far more pressing concerns than trying to read the tea leaves of Hejazi politics. By early April 1915, all attention in British Egypt had turned to the upcoming naval and ground offensive against the Dardanelles.
DURING THE FIRST weeks of April, a vast flotilla of ships began to assemble along the northern coast of Egypt, while in the tent cities that dotted the shoreline, tens of thousands of soldiers were kept busy hauling supplies and practicing combat drills. They were members of the newly formed Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (Med-Ex for short) soon to be on their way to strike at the head and heart of the Turkish enemy. Despite the tedium of their wait, the mood of the troops was exuberant, keen.
With T. E. Lawrence, the sentiment was foreboding. The trepidation he had felt from the outset of the Dardanelles operation only deepened after he and other members of the Cairo intelligence unit were sent up to the staging area to brief its commanders on what they might expect at the other end. “The Med-Ex came out, beastly ill-prepared,” Lawrence wrote David Hogarth on April 20, “with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do.” Most shocking of all to Lawrence, to plot their ground offensive, the Med-Ex senior staff had arrived in Egypt with exactly two copies of an obsolete quarter-inch-to-the-mile map of the Dardanelles region.
But when it came to committing folly, British war planners were just warming up. The principal landing zones for Med-Ex, it had been decided, would be on the Gallipoli peninsula, that thin ribbon of rugged mountains that forms the Dardanelles’ western shore. Rarely more than six or seven miles across, the peninsula runs northward for some fifty miles before finally broadening out onto the European mainland. In selecting where to go ashore, the British could have chosen any number of spots along Gallipoli’s length where a ground force, once gaining the ridgeline and climbing down to the opposite shore—a distance of less than three miles in places—would have split the Ottoman army in two and trapped any enemy forces positioned below that line. Of course, the best option might have been to sidestep the peninsula completely and put in at the Gulf of Saros at its northern end. An invasion force coming ashore in that broad bay would not only maroon all the Turkish troops garrisoned on Gallipoli, but would then have a virtually unimpeded path through easy countryside to Constantinople, just 100 miles away. This was certainly the greatest fear of General Liman von Sanders, the German commander recently appointed by the Turkish government to oversee the Dardanelles defense; in anticipation of a landing at Saros, he had placed his headquarters and fully a third of his army there.
The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli’s southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic—even mere common sense—argued against it. Not only would a landing force there be vulnerable to defenders dug in on the heights above them, but completely exposed to whatever long-range Turkish artillery remained operable in their nearby fortresses. And even if such a force managed to scale the heights and seize those forts, the Turkish defenders could then begin a slow withdrawal up the peninsula, throwing up new trenchlines as they went, neatly replicating the static trench warfare that had so paralyzed the armies on the Western Front. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile-long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire—yet it was precisely here that Med-Ex was going ashore.
Along with condescension for the enemy, always a perilous mind-set for an army, that decision was apparently born of sheer bureaucratic obduracy. Since the Dardanelles campaign had been conceived as a naval operation, the success or failure of the expanded mission would continue to be judged through the narrow lens of its original objective—clearing the straits—leaving its planners quite blind to the idea of trying a different approach that might ultimately achieve the same end. Incredibly, it seems the Gallipoli strategists had less rejected alternative landing sites than never seriously considered them.
In late April, the Med-Ex soldiers on the Egyptian coast began piling into the troopships that would take them across the eastern Mediterranean to Gallipoli. Lawrence, looking back over his failed efforts of the previous months, not just Alexandretta but a range of other schemes that he and the Cairo intelligence unit had concocted only to see shelved, could scarcely conceal his anger in another letter to Hogarth:
“Arabian affairs have gone all to pot. I’ve never seen a more despicable mess made of a show. It makes one howl with fury, for we had a ripping chance there.” He ended on a somewhat forlorn note: “Push on A[lexandretta] therefore, if you can; it seems to me the only thing left for us.”
When he wrote that letter, on April 26, Lawrence did not know how bad the mess was about to become. Just the day before, Med-Ex had gone ashore at Gallipoli.
AT ABOUT 6:15 on the morning of April 25, SS River Clyde, a converted collier out of Liverpool, closed on a small, gently arcing beach—code-named V Beach—at Cape Helles, the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. Crammed belowdecks were some two thousand British soldiers. Coming in on the gentle seas alongside the Clyde were five or six launches, each towing several open cutters, likewise crammed to their gunwales with more soldiers. At about one hundred yards out, the cutter skippers cast off their towlines and distributed oars so that their crews might row the rest of the way to shore. From that shore came no sign of life at all. It appeared, just as hoped, that the landing at Cape Helles had caught the Turks completely off guard.
A damned good thing, too, for the slapdash preparations made for those going ashore at V Beach—and the notion of sending men onto an enemy beach in unarmored and motorless wooden boats wasn’t the worst of it—suggested trouble if they met any resistance. In an Alexandria shipyard, workers had started in on a camouflage paint job of the River Clyde but had run out of time; as a result, as the collier approached V Beach that morning, its muted battleship gray was offset by enormous splotches of tan primer, making it stand out against the sea as if illuminated. Then there was the small matter of the Clyde being unable to actually reach the beach. The plan instead was to run her aground offshore and then to maneuver several fishing boats into the gap, lashing them together to create a makeshift bridge from ship to shore. At that point, the disembarking soldiers would emerge from four portals cut into the Clyde’s bow, pass along two gangways to the fishing boats, then clamber over those until finally they reached the beach. It’s hard to imagine that such blithe preparations would have attended a landing against Stone Age Pacific Islanders, let alone against a modern army, but such was the contempt with which British war planners held the Turks.
As the cutters neared the beach, the only sounds floating over the quiet bay were of boat engines and the dipping of oars, of men talking and laughing—perhaps a bit louder than normal out of relief at their uneventful landing. It was when the lead boats were just yards off the beach that the Turkish machine gunners, secreted in strategic vantage points along the shoreline, opened up.
The men in the open cutters never had a chance. One after another, these boats were shot to pieces or capsized, the gear-laden soldiers within them drowning in the surf or picked off after becoming entangled in the barbed wire that been strung below the water’s surface. Most of the very few who made it onto the beach alive were soon cut down by raking machine-gun fire.
Those coming off the Clyde fared little better. Time and again, work crews emerged from the protected steel hull to try to lash the ersatz pontoon bridge together, only to be shot down almost immediately or to similarly drown in the surf. When finally a bridge of sorts was established, the soldiers emerging onto the gangways were easy targets; of the first company of two hundred men to go out the portals, only eleven reached shore. Many of the early casualties on the gangways actually died of suffocation, pinned beneath the growing heaps of dead and wounded of those coming behind. Whoever did manage to make the beach huddled for safety behind a six-foot-high sand escarpment at its landward edge, scant protection against machine-gun bullets. By late afternoon, there were so many dead men in the water that, as a British captain on the scene observed, “the sea near the shore was a red blood colour, which could be seen hundreds of yards away.”
By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. So bewildered was General von Sanders by his enemy’s idiocy that for the next day he remained convinced the southern landing was a mere feint and that the main invasion force was still coming elsewhere. This left it to a local Ottoman divisional commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, acting on his own accord, to repeatedly hurl his men against the invaders clinging to their tiny beachheads in an attempt to throw them back into the sea.
The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying. As for the Ottoman commander, Mustafa Kemal, the world would soon hear more about him; in 1922, he would emerge as the savior of the reconstituted Turkish republic and become better known by his honorific, Kemal Ataturk.
BUT IT WASN’T just the estimated half million soldiers killed or wounded on either side of the trenchline who would fall victim to the consequences of Gallipoli. On the very day the British came ashore, April 25, the Constantinople regime ordered the roundup of some two hundred Armenian intellectuals and business leaders whom it accused of being potential fifth columnists for the invaders. It was the beginning of a brutal “cleansing operation” against the Ottoman Empire’s Christian minority—a genocide in the view of many—that would result in the deaths of as many as a million Armenians and Assyrians over the next year.
It would be some time before Lawrence and other British officers involved in the Middle Eastern theater came to appreciate that there had been yet another casualty at Gallipoli: the chance for a sweeping Arab revolt against the Turks, one that conceivably could have stretched from the Hejaz to northern Syria and clear over to Iraq. The details of this missed opportunity wouldn’t be fully known for well over a year, not until Lawrence came face-to-face with Emir Hussein’s soft-spoken third son, Faisal, and learned there had been a good deal more to his journey north in the spring of 1915 than met the eye.
In January 1915, at almost the same time that he learned of the Medina governor’s plot to overthrow him, Emir Hussein had been visited in Mecca by a Syrian man named Fawzi al-Bakri. A long-standing and trusted member of the emir’s retinue, on that visit al-Bakri had revealed that he was also a high-ranking member of al-Fatat, a secret society of Arab nationalists headquartered in his hometown of Damascus with cells throughout Syria and Iraq. Having learned of Hussein’s secret correspondence with the British, the al-Fatat leadership had sent al-Bakri to Mecca with a proposal: a joint revolt against Constantinople by al-Fatat in Syria and the emir’s forces in Hejaz, to be supported by the British and with Hussein serving as its spiritual leader.
Rather than give a definitive reply to this proposal, the cautious Hussein had instead sent Faisal north on a dual mission: to gauge the family’s current standing in Constantinople, but also to assess the true prospects for an alliance with al-Fatat.
Arriving in Damascus in late March, Faisal politely declined Djemal Pasha’s invitation to stay at the governor’s mansion, explaining that he had already accepted the hospitality of a prominent Damascene family: the al-Bakris. In that home, shielded by high walls, Faisal held a long series of talks with the al-Fatat conspirators, and it was the delicate negotiations at those talks that largely explained why his stay in Damascus, originally intended to be brief, extended to some three weeks.
Journeying on to Constantinople, the young sheikh deftly worked the other side of the street. In meetings with the other two members of the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver and Talaat, as well as the newly arrived Max von Oppenheim, Faisal repeatedly expressed his family’s fealty to the Ottoman cause, going so far as to sign an accord with Enver that appeared to finally put to rest many of the issues standing between Constantinople and his father. In mid-May, and to the accompaniment of an elaborate farewell ceremony organized by a grateful regime, he boarded a train at Haidar Pasha station for the return to Syria.
But that journey was into a world transformed. Just weeks after the landings in Gallipoli, already tens of thousands of Armenians were being banished from their homes and sent into internal exile, and the view out Faisal’s train window was onto an unending horror show of starving women and children—and suspiciously few men—being herded along to God knows where at bayonet point. From the standpoint of the proposed Arab revolt, more grim news awaited him in Damascus. From his al-Fatat confederates, Faisal learned that many of the Arab-dominated military units in the region—units the conspirators had counted on for support when the revolt came—were already being dispatched to the Gallipoli killing fields, replaced by regime-loyal Turkish regiments.
Despite the radically changed atmosphere, perhaps because of it, the al-Fatat plotters had urged on Faisal a document to take to his father, and through him to the British in Egypt. Soon to become known as the Damascus Protocol, it consisted of a list of conditions whereby, with British assistance, al-Fatat might still be able to launch their revolt. As Faisal set out for his return to Mecca, the sole copy of the protocol was hidden in the boot of his most trusted bodyguard.
In preparing for Faisal’s arrival in Syria back in March, Djemal Pasha had regarded the emir’s third son as his last best hope to quell Hussein’s restive heart. In fact, the Syrian governor was quite right in this estimation, if for all the wrong reasons. At a Hussein family conclave held at their summer palace in June, it would be Abdullah and Ali who would lobby their father for immediate rebellion against Constantinople, while Faisal, recent witness to all that Gallipoli had wrought—the Armenians dying en masse along the Anatolian roadways, the dispersal of the Arab units from northern Syria—would urge caution.
The knowledge of all this lay in the future for T. E. Lawrence. In the days and weeks after the Gallipoli landings, as he read through the cascade of grim battle reports coming over the wire at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, it may have been just as well that he remained ignorant of the Damascus Protocol and of the would-be British allies waiting in Syria and the Hejaz. An absolute precondition for their revolt, the al-Fatat conspirators and Hussein would belatedly inform Cairo, a prerequisite upon which all their actions depended, was a British landing at Alexandretta.