So far as all ranks of the troops engaged were concerned, it was a brilliant victory, and had the early part of the day been normal, victory would have been secured.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL CHARLES DOBELL, ON THE BRITISH DEFEAT AT GAZA, MARCH 28, 1917
With the ramshackle outskirts of Wejh just coming into view in the predawn light, Lawrence ordered his small camel train to a halt. He hadn’t bathed since leaving Abdullah’s camp four days earlier, and out of a sense of propriety he wished to change out of his filthy, dust-caked robes before presenting himself to Faisal.
It was April 14, 1917. Lawrence had been gone from Wejh for just a little over a month, but he was returning to a world transformed. Indeed, the changes that had occurred in that thirty-five-day span, both on the global and Middle Eastern stages, were of such a magnitude he probably had difficulty absorbing them all at once.
In mid-March, just days after he had set off for Abdullah’s camp, the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty in Russia had come to an abrupt end. Faced with paralyzing industrial strikes by workers demanding an end to the war, and a semimutinous army that refused to move against those workers, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. The provisional government that had replaced the czar vowed to keep Russia in the Entente, but with the chaos worsening, there was growing doubt in other European capitals about just how long Petrograd might stand to that commitment. In fact, though no one yet realized it, the seed of the new Russian government’s destruction had already been sown through one of the most successful subversion operations in world history. On April 1, the German secret police had quietly gathered up a group of leftist Russian exiles, men just as opposed to the new moderate regime as they had been to the czar, and arranged their passage home. Among the returning malcontents was a Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, soon to become better known by his nom de cadre, Lenin.
But as unsettling as developments in Russia were to the British and French leadership, they proved a boon in another sphere. President Woodrow Wilson’s loathing of the retrograde czarist regime had played a key role in his refusal to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Entente. With the new moderate government in Petrograd, Russia was suddenly “a fit partner for a League of Honor” in the American president’s view. In concert with Germany’s renewed U-boat war in the Atlantic, and the exposure of an outrageous German scheme to lure Mexico into attacking the United States, it had provided Wilson with the political cover to finally declare war on Germany at the beginning of April. Given the staggering logistics involved in building the tiny American peacetime army into a major fighting force, and then transporting it across the Atlantic, it would be a long time before the American “doughboys” might significantly contribute to the Western Front battlefields—most war planners estimated at least a year—but the news came as a tremendous relief in France and Great Britain, both sliding ever closer to financial collapse as the war ground on.
There had also been a momentous event in the Middle East. On March 26, the same day that Lawrence set out to attack the railway garrison at Aba el Naam, General Archibald Murray had at last thrown his army against the Turkish trenchworks at Gaza. In a confused and fitful battle that had continued into the following day, the British had repeatedly appeared on the verge of a decisive victory, only to find new ways to fritter away their advantage, finally calling off their assault as Turkish reinforcements drew near. The result was quite different from the “great success” that Aaron Aaronsohn had noted in his diary, or the “brilliant victory” that Murray’s on-the-ground commander reported in his initial communiqué. Instead, and despite outnumbering the Turkish garrison by at least three to one, the attacking British had suffered over four thousand casualties while inflicting less than half that number on their enemy and leaving them in control of the battlefield. The outcome amply justified the taunting Turkish leaflet dropped on British lines in the aftermath: “You beat us at communiqués, but we beat you at Gaza.” By the time of Lawrence’s return to Wejh on April 14, General Murray was gearing up his forces in southern Palestine for another try.
In Lawrence’s telling, though, that day was most memorable for yet another event: his first encounter with Auda Abu Tayi.
Since his first visit to the Hejaz, Lawrence had heard of the legendary exploits of Auda Abu Tayi, a leader of the fierce Howeitat tribe of northwestern Arabia. For even longer, Faisal had been waging a charm offensive to bring the chieftain in on the side of the rebel cause, sending emissaries with notes and presents and promises, entertaining a parade of Auda’s tribal lieutenants. Now, with the capture of Wejh placing the rebels at the outer proximity of Howeitat territory, Auda had finally come down to the coast to meet Faisal in person. At some point during Faisal’s and Lawrence’s reunion meeting that day, Auda was invited to join them.
Whether wholly accurate or not, Lawrence was given to penning very incisive and closely observed first impressions of people—and few made a bigger first impression on him than Auda Abu Tayi. “He must be nearly fifty now (he admits forty),” Lawrence noted in a wartime dispatch, “and his black beard is tinged with white, but he is still tall and straight, loosely built, spare and powerful, and as active as a much younger man. His lined and haggard face is pure Bedouin: broad low forehead, high sharp hooked nose, brown-green eyes, slanting outward, large mouth.”
Beyond Auda’s arresting physical appearance lay his charisma and peerless reputation as a desert warrior. “He has married twenty-eight times, has been wounded thirteen times, and in his battles has seen all his tribesmen hurt and most of his relations killed. He has only reported his ‘kill’ since 1900, and they now stand at seventy-five Arabs; Turks are not counted by Auda when they are dead. Under his handling, the [Howeitat] have become the finest fighting force in Western Arabia.… He sees life as a saga and all events in it are significant and all personages heroic. His mind is packed (and generally overflows) with stories of old raids and epic poems of fights.”
Although left unsaid, it would seem one reason Lawrence was so taken with Auda Abu Tayi was the stark contrast he drew to Faisal ibn Hussein. While Lawrence still had a profound appreciation for Faisal as the political guide of the Arab Revolt, the man who could gain and keep the fractious clans and tribes to the banner of the greater cause, it had become increasingly clear that King Hussein’s third son was not a natural warrior. To the contrary, and in opposition to the image Lawrence had first presented to his army superiors, Faisal appeared to quite abhor violence and to go out of his way to avoid participating in it personally, “a man who can’t stand the racket,” as Cyril Wilson once drily observed.
This had been evident most recently amid the intensified campaign against the Hejaz Railway. To spur the Arab fighters to action, Lawrence had joined other British officers in urging Faisal to decamp from Wejh and make for the main rebel staging ground at Wadi Ais. Faisal had brushed aside these entreaties, alternately pleading a shortage of camels and the need to remain on the coast to personally meet with the various tribal delegations coming in to join the revolt, stances that led some British officers to quietly conclude the man was a bit of a coward. That assessment was neither fair nor true—certainly it had taken enormous courage to pull off the tightrope act that Faisal had performed for so many months between Djemal Pasha and the Arab nationalists in Damascus—but it was a very different type of courage than the unalloyed thirst for battle of a man like Auda Abu Tayi.
Further diminishing Faisal in Lawrence’s eyes was a propensity for vacillation. Perhaps it came with being a conciliator and patient listener, but the emir—Faisal and his brothers had advanced to that title upon their father declaring himself king in October—had the disconcerting habit of falling away from seemingly firmly held positions under the urgings and opinions of whoever next caught his ear; as Lawrence would later remark, “Faisal always listened to his momentary adviser, despite his own better judgment.”
As a recent example, back in February Lawrence had divulged to Faisal precisely why signing on to an Allied-managed attack on Aqaba posed a potential trap for the Arabs—and had put himself at great risk in doing so. Thus educated, Faisal had scotched all talk of a precipitous move on the port. After a brief absence from Wejh in early March, however, Lawrence had returned to discover Faisal once again fallen under the sway of his tribal allies, and back to advocating an immediate assault. It required another round of persuasion on Lawrence’s part to talk Faisal down.
In fact, it seemed that yet another about-face had spurred Faisal’s plaintive note to Lawrence in Wadi Ais pleading for his immediate return. In late March, rumors had reached Wejh that the French were about to launch an amphibious landing on the Syrian coast—some rumors held they were already ashore—raising the specter of Syria being stolen away in a French fait accompli. Faisal’s apprehensions had been further stoked by a visit from Édouard Brémond on April 1, and a new press by the colonel to attach French “liaison” officers to the Arab forces in Wejh. Faisal had again rebuffed Brémond, but his visit had fueled the Arab leader’s anxiety to make for Syria via Aqaba as soon as possible. As a result, one of Lawrence’s first tasks upon reaching Wejh on April 14 was to ascertain that the French rumors were untrue, and to calm Faisal down once more. Along with being tiresome, this suggestibility in the emir was dangerous; Lawrence might refocus him now, but what would happen the next time an Aqaba-urging chieftain or the mischievous Colonel Brémond came calling?
There was an obvious answer, of course: to immediately make for Aqaba—and with control of that port, for points farther north—by implementing the daring inland-approach scheme Lawrence had begun to map out in his mind. Moreover, among the Arab chieftains gathered in Wejh that day was just the sort of fearless, single-minded fighter who might bring that scheme to fruition: Auda Abu Tayi.
Except a new complication now presented itself, one directly tied to Faisal’s changeability. Back at the beginning of March, amid Faisal’s renewed anxiety to move on Aqaba, a British officer in Wejh had thought to apprise Gilbert Clayton of the news. Clayton had sent a top-secret directive in reply, one addressed to Lawrence and only two other British officers in Arabia. That directive hadn’t reached Wejh by the time Lawrence had left for Abdullah’s camp, but it was among the correspondence awaiting his return on April 14.
“The move to Aqaba on the part of Faisal,” Clayton had written, “is not at present desirable.” While claiming his main concern was that Faisal not be distracted from operations against the Hejaz Railway, Clayton hinted at the true reason in the letter’s close. “It is questionable whether, in the present circumstances, the presence of an Arab force at Aqaba would be desirable, as it would unsettle tribes which are better left quiet until the time is more ripe.”
Both from his own relationship with Gilbert Clayton, the consummate strategist, and from what he had gleaned in the corridors of the intelligence bureau in Cairo, Lawrence quickly grasped the subtext of the general’s words. He’d been exactly right in his warnings to Faisal in February—the British wanted Aqaba for themselves—but to accomplish that, they didn’t wish to merely put the Arabs in a box; they now didn’t want the Arabs there at all. (In fact, Clayton would soon make this point explicit in a note to Reginald Wingate: “The occupation of Aqaba by Arab troops might well result in the Arabs claiming that place hereafter, and it is by no means improbable that after the war Aqaba may be of considerable importance to the future defence scheme of Egypt. It is thus essential that Aqaba should remain in British hands after the war.”)
On April 14, Lawrence could try to deny the thrust of Clayton’s March 8 directive any way he wished—that with the passage of five weeks, it was now out of date; that merely stating what was or was not “desirable” didn’t rise to the level of an explicit order—but he surely understood the peculiarly oblique nature of British military-speak well enough to know that going ahead with his Aqaba plan now would be seen as a clear contravention of his superior’s wishes. Then again, this was a man who just two months earlier had revealed to Faisal the details of a diplomatic pact so secret that only a handful of people in the upper reaches of the British government knew of its existence.
At some point during that remarkable day of April 14—and most likely when the three of them were alone in Faisal’s tent—Lawrence put his Aqaba proposal to Faisal and Auda. In Auda’s quick and hearty agreement to the proposal was confirmation of what Lawrence had sensed in the chieftain from the outset. “After a moment I knew,” he wrote, “from the force and directness of the man, that we would attain our end. He had come down to us like a knight-errant, chafing at our delay in Wejh, anxious only to be acquiring merit for Arab freedom in his own lands. If his performance was one-half his desire, we should be prosperous and fortunate.”
ON APRIL 18, 1917, just four days after Lawrence’s return to Wejh, a French destroyer slipped from an Italian port and headed southeast into the Mediterranean. On board were the two midlevel government functionaries who, a year previously, had secretly carved the future Middle East into British and French spheres of control and lent their names to the process: Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Their destination was Alexandria, Egypt, and their mission was to bring political order to the region’s rapidly changing military situation.
Or at least so the situation had appeared when the idea of their journey had first been broached several months earlier. Despite a record of dismal stalemate on virtually every battlefront since the start of the war, neither the British or French government had broken itself of the habit of squabbling over the spoils of victory long before victory had been achieved. In early 1917, with General Archibald Murray gearing up for his march into Palestine, their wrangling had inevitably turned to the Middle East.
Intent on defending their imperial claim to Syria, France had launched a two-pronged initiative. The first had been to scrounge up its scant military units in the region for the purpose of attaching them to Murray’s army. When this overture, couched as an act of Entente solidarity, was initially turned down by the British on the pretext that operational planning was too far advanced to allow for their integration, it had triggered furious French charges of betrayal. British commanders on the ground were forced to relent, but not at all happily. “Of course it is impossible to decline to have these French troops,” Murray’s deputy, General Lynden-Bell, confided to a member of the Arab Bureau in mid-March, “but you can imagine what a terrible nuisance they will be to us.”
On the diplomatic front, Paris had also insisted that a French political officer accompany Murray’s army as it advanced into Palestine, a further nuisance, of course, but one that London found just as difficult to refuse. When in January France had announced that this political officer was to be Georges-Picot, Britain suddenly found the need to have a political officer of its own to accompany him—and who better than Picot’s old negotiating partner, Mark Sykes?
But this new mission put the MP for Hull in a somewhat tricky spot. During his discussions with Picot over where to draw their lines of Middle Eastern control, Sykes had never felt the need to inform the Frenchman—or any other Frenchman, for that matter—as to how those lines might conflict with commitments already made to King Hussein. Nowhere was this conflict more glaring than in Syria, a land the British had now essentially “sold twice,” recognizing its independence in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, recognizing its domination by France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
This was not an immediate problem so long as Picot remained in France, Hussein’s rebel armies remained in the Hejaz, and the Turks still ruled Syria, but now, with Archibald Murray’s imminent march into Palestine and both Sykes and Picot slated to be in his train, those delicate walls of separation were about to crumble. As he anticipated his trip to Egypt, Mark Sykes could only have foreseen unpleasantness ahead.
But then a rather ingenious solution had come to him. What if, instead of to King Hussein, he brought Georges-Picot before a group of Syrian exiles with no knowledge of the promises made to the Arabs? In their ignorance, these Syrians might be grateful to accept whatever crumbs of limited self-rule the British and French were willing to throw their way, and that gratitude might in turn lead the French to soften their imperialist demands. On February 22, Sykes had written to Reginald Wingate, the British high commissioner to Egypt, asking for his help in organizing just such a delegation of Syrian exiles in Cairo, men with whom he and Picot could discuss the future status of their homeland. Should it be necessary to include a delegate from the Hejaz on the committee, Sykes suggested it be “a venerable and amenable person who will not want to ride or take much exercise.” In a remarkable act of brio, Sykes also thought to enclose with this letter a series of quick sketches he had worked up toward the design of a new rebel flag. (Curiously, it may have been in flag design where Mark Sykes’s true talents lay. King Hussein would eventually adopt one of Sykes’s designs as his own.)
Startled by Sykes’s cynical request, Wingate sent a cable to the Foreign Office pointing out that since it was to King Hussein that Britain had made its commitments, surely it should be Hussein who chose the delegation to meet with Sykes and Picot. Sykes quickly shot down that idea, suggesting to Wingate that “it does not appear necessary to give King Hussein the impression that the future of Syria is to be considered de novo [anew].” In any event, Sykes hinted, the high commissioner was making more of all this than need be. “What we really want are a few men of good standing, representatives of the Arab National Party, to represent the Syrian Moslem point of view, sign manifestos and approve any local arrangements that may be made.”
As a result of these building pressures, it must have come as something of a guilty relief to Mark Sykes when, just as final preparations were being made for his and Picot’s trip to Egypt, news came of Murray’s March 26 setback at Gaza. Surely Murray’s next push would succeed—it was hard to imagine Turkey’s absurd streak of good luck lasting much longer against British might—but in the meantime, the delay would give Sykes time to navigate the complex minefield awaiting him in Cairo.
This minefield was not limited to the Syrian question. Over the past few months, Mark Sykes had been quietly working on another scheme that, if all worked out, would neatly outmaneuver his traveling partner, François Georges-Picot.
Under the original terms of Sykes-Picot, Palestine was to be separated from the rest of Syria and placed under the “international administration” of the three principal Entente powers, Britain, France, and Russia. Within months of coauthoring that arrangement, however, Sykes had seen the opportunity to go a good deal better. By playing to the various Palestinian constituencies—and most especially to Jewish Zionists, with their deep distrust of France and utter hatred for czarist Russia—it might be possible for Britain to scuttle the joint administration idea as unworkable, and to place Palestine under a solely British protectorate. Sykes had been harshly rebuked when he’d floated this idea past the Foreign Office leadership in the spring of 1916—Secretary Grey had instructed him to “obliterate” the thought from his memory—but now, a year later, the notion had flowered anew in Sykes’s fertile mind.
One reason was that Secretary Grey was now a thing of the past, forced out of office with the rest of the Asquith government in December 1916. With its “Western” focus, the Asquith regime had always been wary of diplomatic schemes that might inflame relations with the ever-sensitive French, but that was a lesser concern with the new “Eastern”-tilting administration of David Lloyd George and his foreign minister, Arthur Balfour. Anxious for a breakthrough in the war somewhere—anywhere—they had brought a new emphasis to Eastern operations, and if success there meant stepping on French toes, it was a small price to pay.
Sykes had benefited from another important change in the new government. A chief complaint against the Asquith administration had been its lack of clear and constant direction in the war, and in response Lloyd George had created a so-called War Cabinet, a cabal of just five senior statesmen with sweeping powers to oversee most all aspects of the British military effort. Surely a sign of the new administration’s appetite for creative solutions had been the promotion of Mark Sykes to the position of assistant secretary to the War Cabinet, placed in charge of Middle Eastern affairs.
Just as crucial had been Sykes’s discussions with Aaron Aaronsohn in October and November. Following those conversations, and reanimated to the potential of using Zionism as a pro-British vehicle in Palestine, Sykes had quietly held a series of meetings with British Zionist leaders through the early winter of 1917. These discussions had culminated in an extraordinary conference with a group of leading British “Jewish gentlemen” at a London townhouse on the morning of February 7, 1917; what made this gathering extraordinary was Sykes’s opening announcement that he was there without the knowledge of either the Foreign Office or the War Cabinet, and therefore their discussions had to remain secret. Among the eight men in attendance were Lord Walter Rothschild, former home secretary Herbert Samuel, and a man soon to figure very prominently in Sykes’s Palestine schemes, the incoming president of the English Zionist Federation, Chaim Weizmann.
A forty-three-year-old émigré from czarist Russia, the dynamic, goateed Weizmann was an erstwhile chemistry lecturer at the University of Manchester who over the previous decade had emerged as one of the most articulate and persuasive voices of British Zionism. A prominent figure at international Zionist conferences, he was also intent on converting rhetoric to action; in 1908, he had helped create the Palestine Land Development Company, chartered to buy up agricultural land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. What had most brought Weizmann to the attention of British officials, however, was his work in chemistry. Shortly before his meeting with Sykes, he had developed a revolutionary process to create synthetic acetone, a key component in explosives, and in making his discovery available to the British munitions industry he had won the government’s undying gratitude. (This surely negated any taint that might have attached to his also being the older brother of Minna Weizmann, the erstwhile lover of Curt Prüfer, who had been arrested as a German spy in Egypt in 1915.) Serendipitously, during his tenure at Manchester, Weizmann had also won the sympathies of his local member of Parliament to the Zionist cause; that MP was Arthur Balfour, the new British foreign secretary.
At that February 7 gathering, the British Jewish leaders had emphatically stated precisely what Mark Sykes hoped to hear: that there was simply no way the international Zionist movement in general, nor the Zionist settlers in Palestine in particular, would accept a joint Entente administration in Palestine. To the contrary, all demanded sole British control of the region, or, as one of the attendees put it, “a Jewish State in Palestine under the British Crown.” In response, Sykes announced his readiness to present the Zionist viewpoint to the War Cabinet. He also suggested that the assembled dignitaries begin lobbying their religious brethren elsewhere to that goal, even “offering to make War Office telegraph facilities available to them so they could communicate secretly with leading Zionists in Paris, Petrograd, Rome and Washington D.C.”
At the same time, the politician from Hull couldn’t quite part with his penchants for blithe optimism and the dissembling statement. As far as Arab sensibilities were concerned, Sykes opined at the February 7 meeting, he could see no objection on their part to increased Jewish settlement in Palestine—an interesting assertion considering that, even at this late date, no Arab was aware the Entente powers had any designs on Palestine at all. (He obviously could not have known Lawrence was just then telling Faisal about the Sykes-Picot accord.) His suspicions undoubtedly aroused by Sykes’s queries on the desirability of a joint administration, Lord Rothschild had then bluntly asked what promises had been made to the French in the region. To this, Sykes made the astonishing reply that “the French have no particular position in Palestine and are not entitled to anything there.” These were just two more faulty assertions—the first perhaps an exercise in wishful thinking, the second an outright lie—to join all the others Mark Sykes had promulgated in recent months, an ever-growing corpus of half-truths and conflicting schemes that even he would soon begin having difficulty keeping straight.
In the meantime, he was clever enough to realize that all was very fluid, that a precipitating event or a changed set of circumstances on the ground might upend everything once again, rendering some of his entanglements moot and giving rise to new opportunities to achieve his goals—as variable as those goals might be. What’s more, as he sailed to Egypt that April, Sykes was about to be reunited with a man who understood the need for bold action: Aaron Aaronsohn.
The agronomist from Athlit was a very different type of Zionist from those Sykes had quietly plotted with in London. Those men were sober-minded and cautious, their approach gentlemanly, whereas Aaronsohn was brash and impatient, a man hardened by his having actually lived the Zionist “dream” in Palestine. In comparison with some of those London confreres, he also had a much grander vision of what should happen in Palestine: not just an expanded Jewish presence under British protection, but an eventual outright Jewish state, one that would extend from the shores of the Mediterranean to east of the Jordan River and nearly to the gates of Damascus. Aaron Aaronsohn was a radical, but as Mark Sykes well knew, it was often the radical who catalyzed change.
What he couldn’t have guessed just then was that he and Aaronsohn were about to be handed a bountiful gift from someone on the opposite side of the battlefield, Djemal Pasha.
TO THE ANNOYANCE of defense-minded military commanders throughout history, civilians have a tendency to stay put in their homes until an enemy invading force is just over the horizon. Then, once the arrows or bullets or missiles begin to fly, these civilians bundle up their families and as many possessions as time allows and take to the roads in whatever conveyance is available to them. Predictably, the most common result of this rushed exodus is severe traffic congestion—and often complete paralysis—on all paths leading away from the battlefront, making it extremely difficult for the defending force to bring reinforcements to the scene. To guard against this, armies have routinely forced civilians out of a likely battle zone well ahead of time—and at bayonet point if required. Due to the stasis of the battle lines, such forced evacuations had rarely been necessary on the Western Front through the first two and a half years of World War I, but they had been a common feature in the east, and most especially on the Ottoman Front.
It was a policy that came quite easily to the Ottomans, and for reasons that went beyond simple military expediency. Many times over the centuries, the sultans in Constantinople, mindful of both their comparative military weakness and the polyglot nature of their empire, had adopted a kind of scorched-earth policy in the face of external threat, uprooting entire populations that might tacitly or overtly collaborate with invaders. Time permitting, also removed from an invader’s path were livestock, farm equipment, and food stores, most anything that might provide the enemy sustenance, and that which couldn’t be taken away was burned, smashed, or poisoned.
For all their reformist ideas in other spheres, the Young Turks had seen little reason to revisit this tradition when they came to power in 1908; more likely, they’d simply been overwhelmed by the pace of events. During the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, entire civilian populations were forcibly ejected by most all the combatant armies, less for reasons of military convenience than in pursuit of a policy that a century later would become known as ethnic cleansing. That massive if largely forgotten human tragedy—hundreds of thousands of Turks, Bulgars, Macedonians, and Greeks were permanently expelled from their ancestral homes—set the precedent for the far more brutal and deadly expulsion of Anatolia’s Armenian population beginning in the spring of 1915. Despite that ghastly recent example and his own efforts to ameliorate it, when Djemal Pasha found his own Syrian realm under threat in early 1917, it was to the policy of expulsion that he turned.
At first there was nothing controversial about it. In late February, with the British invaders massing below Gaza and clearly about to strike, he had ordered the evacuation of that town’s population, perhaps twenty thousand civilians in all. It was a move the Syrian governor had every reason to congratulate himself on; when the British attack came in late March, the cleared roads to the north and east of Gaza had allowed the Turks to rush in reinforcements and carry the day.
In that battle’s aftermath, Djemal and his German commanders studied the map of the larger southern Palestine region; surely the British were going to try again, and just as surely they would be more artful than to attack over the same ground twice. In trying to anticipate where that next strike might come, Djemal’s concerns centered on the coastal town of Jaffa, some forty miles to the north.
Throughout March, rumors reaching Djemal’s headquarters had held that the British might bypass the Turkish trenches in Gaza by making an amphibious landing to the north. Not only did the smooth beaches and gentle surf of Jaffa provide a nearly ideal site for such a landing, but so did the town’s mixed population; among its forty thousand residents were some ten thousand Jews and perhaps four thousand Christians, minorities that were becoming increasingly disenchanted under Ottoman rule. While those initial concerns had been mooted by the failed British frontal assault at Gaza on March 26, they came rushing back in its aftermath, so much so that on March 28, Djemal ordered Jaffa’s evacuation. After initially giving residents less than a week to organize their departures, Djemal relented to protests by Jewish leaders—Passover, one of the most sacred of Jewish holidays, was about to begin—and extended the deadline another eight days.
Despite the Ottoman government’s proclivity for sunny proclamations at such times—there was usually much talk of extra trains being laid on to transport the uprooted to safety, of the pleasant temporary quarters being readied to ensure the refugees’ continuing comfort—these evacuations were invariably messy, wretched affairs. For the criminally minded, they provided an opportunity to loot the homes of their departed neighbors, or to waylay exhausted and overburdened travelers on the road. Given the corruption endemic to all levels of Ottoman government, they also tended to be highly selective; those blessed with the right connections or the funds to bribe the right officials might be allowed to stay behind or only move to a town’s outskirts, while others were being herded days or even weeks away. Perhaps inevitably, these abuses were likely to be most prevalent in a “mixed” town like Jaffa, a chance for the ethnic and religious animosities that always lurked below the surface of Ottoman society to be given full play.
Nevertheless, there was initially nothing about the evacuation of Jaffa to suggest it would be anything more than one of those little forgotten footnotes of war, another point of misery for a civilian population long grown accustomed to it. But in issuing his edict, Djemal Pasha unwittingly set in motion one of the most consequential disinformation campaigns of World War I. The first link in that chain of events occurred on the night of April 17, when a twenty-seven-year-old woman was helped aboard a British spy ship trolling off the coast of Palestine.
IT WAS A poignant reunion. Aaron Aaronsohn hadn’t seen his younger sister Sarah in nearly a year, but there she was in Port Said, pale and weak but alive, having just come off the Managem from Athlit. Rushing her to his rooms at the Continental Hotel in central Cairo, Aaronsohn summoned a doctor, who diagnosed anemia and proffered iron tablets. Despite her exhausted state, Aaronsohn then began pumping his sister for news from Palestine.
To say that Sarah Aaronsohn was an independent spirit would have been a gross understatement. As a young woman growing up in Zichron Yaakov, she had fairly scandalized its more conservative residents with her insistence on riding horseback and participating in hunts in the surrounding foothills with the men. Like her male siblings, she was extremely well educated, had traveled—in her case, throughout central Europe—and possessed of a worldly sophistication quite out of keeping with a woman coming of age in the hardscrabble Jewish colonies in Palestine. Even if she had bowed to tradition by quickly marrying after the engagement of her younger sister, Rivka, to Absalom Feinberg—it was considered close to scandalous for an older sister not to marry first—she’d been modern enough to walk out on her unhappy marriage in Constantinople and not look back.
Perhaps most shocking for a woman in the early 1900s, Sarah Aaronsohn had made no attempt to hide either her intelligence or her natural leadership skills. While these qualities spurred resentment in some, others were totally enamored, and over the years the attractive Aaronsohn sister had gathered about her an ardent coterie of male suitors. She was not shy about trading on that attraction for her own higher purposes. Upon the death of Absalom Feinberg in the Sinai desert in January 1917, Sarah had assumed leadership of the NILI spy ring in Palestine, and among the operatives scattered across the region, a network she had helped expand to nearly two dozen, were several men clearly in love with her.
That element aside, Sarah Aaronsohn seemed uniquely suited to the perilous role into which she’d been thrust and, judging by the results, performed it more ably than either of NILI’s original leaders—her temperamental brother; the impetuous Feinberg—might have done. As a woman, she was largely immune from the suspicions that attached to Palestine’s westernized Jews in the eyes of Ottoman officials, and she had used that immunity to make extended reconnaissance trips through the countryside, just an innocent “lady’s outing” should she ever be stopped. Once contact with the British had been established, she turned Athlit into her command post, sorting the bits of intelligence coming in from all over Palestine and ensuring it was organized in time for the next scheduled delivery to the spy ship offshore. One measure of her steeliness was her ability to keep the death of Absalom Feinberg, the man with whom she had shared a chaste love, a secret from the rest of the NILI ring. So as to maintain organizational morale, she held to the fiction concocted by her brother in Cairo that Feinberg had gone off to Europe to train as an Entente pilot.
Now, in mid-April 1917, Sarah Aaronsohn had come to Egypt with a disturbing story to tell. Three weeks earlier, she told her brother, Djemal Pasha had ordered Jaffa’s evacuation. While this edict applied to the entire population of the town, it was hardly a surprise that the burden had fallen especially heavy on its Jewish residents; with transport scarce, they were forced to leave most of their possessions behind, while simultaneously suffering abuse and depredations by their long-resentful Muslim neighbors. According to Sarah, at least two Jewish men had been lynched on the Jaffa outskirts.
For Aaron Aaronsohn, the news was deeply alarming. Mindful as he was of the fate of the Armenians, the Jaffa expulsions suggested that something similar might now befall the Jews. He immediately set out to alert his associates in British intelligence of the potential humanitarian crisis looming in southern Palestine.
His timing couldn’t have been worse. On the very day of Sarah Aaronsohn’s arrival in Cairo, April 19, Archibald Murray had thrown his army against the Turkish trenches at Gaza a second time. Proving Djemal Pasha wrong, Murray chose to attack over precisely the same ground as in the first assault, although opting for an even more artless, human-wave approach. Just about the only British refinements since the First Battle of Gaza were the use of tanks and poison gas against the enemy, but even these couldn’t alter the outcome; in the six thousand casualties the British suffered at the hands of the vastly outnumbered but victorious Turks was a debacle so sweeping as to be apparent to all.
Few could have been more dumbfounded than Aaron Aaronsohn. Back on March 12, prior to Murray’s first attack, British planners had sought out his counsel based on his intimate knowledge of the topography of southern Palestine. The agronomist had been aghast that the British proposed to make their main thrust through an area south of the town known as Wadi Ghazzal, a stretch of flat ground broken by meandering streams, which then rose up to a gridwork of nearly impenetrable cactus-fenced animal pens. “I said I considered the ground very much to our disadvantage,” Aaronsohn had written at the time, “and would give a great chance to the Turkish snipers. Wadis there are numerous and difficult to cross.” Despite this admonition, in both Gaza assaults the British had made for the streams and cactus fences of Wadi Ghazzal like homing pigeons.
Of more immediate concern to Aaronsohn, with the latest Gaza disaster dominating the concerns of British Cairo, it was impossible to get anyone to pay attention to what might be happening to the Jewish population of Jaffa. Over the course of that next week, the scientist desperately approached most any British official he could think of, but got nowhere. Then his luck suddenly changed. It did so on April 27, when he was finally able to obtain an audience with Mark Sykes.
Since their arrival in Cairo five days earlier, most of Sykes’s and Picot’s time had been taken up in conferences with the “delegation” of Syrian exiles that Sykes had preselected to represent Arab interests in the region. Much of the urgency of these talks had dissipated with the grim news out of Gaza, but after several days of negotiations, Sykes felt confident that he’d managed to bridge the vast gulf between France’s imperial designs in Syria and Britain’s pledge to Syrian independence. A great aid in this bridging process was the fact that the three Syrian delegates were totally unaware a gulf existed.
“Main difficulty,” Sykes explained in a cable to the director of military intelligence back in London, “was to manoeuvre the delegates, without showing them a map or letting them know that there was an actual geographical or detailed agreement [already in place], into asking for what we are ready to give them.”
With the “Syrian Question” thus nicely resolving itself, at least temporarily, Sykes was able to carve out time for other things. High on that list was meeting with Aaron Aaronsohn, who had been beseeching Sykes’s retinue for an appointment for days. Their reunion took place in a conference room of the Savoy Hotel on the morning of April 27.
“At last!” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. “We immediately broached intimate subjects. He told me that since he was talking with a Jewish patriot, he would entrust me with very secret matters—some of which were not even known to the Foreign Office.”
Sykes filled him in on his clandestine meeting with the British Zionist leaders at the London townhouse on February 7, as well as expounded on a new formula for Middle East peace he’d recently devised, a scheme that called for a grand alliance of the Jews, the Arabs, and the remnants of the Armenians. With such an alliance, Sykes confidently explained, the Arabs could be made compliant—they had to know that without Jewish and British support, their independence bid would fail—but would also gain the clout to defy the French. At the same time, such a pact would freeze out the grasping Italians, marginalize the Russians, create a pro-British buffer state in protection of Egypt and India, all while paying lip service to the anticolonial demands of Britain’s newest ally, the United States. How the Arabophobic Aaronsohn responded to this dizzying graph-paper concoction—its complexity only surpassed by its absurdity—isn’t known. Most likely, he simply listened in respectful silence; after all, he had pressing matters of his own to take up with Mark Sykes.
If other British officials had been too distracted to pay attention to the predicament of Jaffa’s Jewish population, not so the War Cabinet’s new assistant secretary. Instead, it appears Sykes instantly grasped the potential propaganda bonanza Aaronsohn’s news provided, a way to propel those still noncommittal elements of international Jewry toward the Zionist-British cause. He quickly dispatched Aaronsohn to work up a memo on the Jaffa situation, and to meet with him again the next morning.
In writing on the plight of the Armenians five months earlier, Aaronsohn had paid grudging respect to Djemal Pasha, pointing out that despite his personality flaws and failures as an administrator, the Syrian governor had been resolute in trying to stop the Armenian massacres and in alleviating the suffering of the survivors. The agronomist had also at times benefited from Djemal’s changeable and oddly courteous nature, his personal appeals to him winning the release of Absalom Feinberg after his arrest as a potential spy, as well as the modification of an array of edicts injurious to Jewish settlers. As he sat down to write his account for Mark Sykes on the afternoon of April 27, however, Aaronsohn appreciated that here was a golden opportunity to advance the Zionist cause, and to fully capitalize on that opportunity meant creative license would have to be taken. The primary victim of that creativity was to be Djemal Pasha.
Reconvening with Mark Sykes at 9:15 the next morning, Aaronsohn handed over his memorandum on Jaffa. In quick order, Sykes fired off a top-secret cable to the Foreign Office asking them to get hold of Chaim Weizmann at the English Zionist Federation and deliver the following message: “Aaron Aaronsohn asks me to inform you that Televiv [the Jewish enclave of Jaffa] has been sacked. 10,000 Palestinian Jews are now without home or food. Whole yeshuv [settlement] is threatened with destruction. Jemal [Pasha] has publicly stated that Armenian policy will now be applied to Jews. Pray inform [Jewish] centers without naming Aaron Aaronsohn or source of information.”
The first to heed the call was the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s preeminent Zionist newspaper. On May 4, under subheadlines entitled “Grave Reports—Terrible Outrages—Threats of Wholesale Massacre,” readers were informed, “It is with profound sorrow and concern that the Jewish Chronicle learns, from an absolutely reliable source, the very gravest news of the Jews in Palestine.… Tel Aviv, the beautiful Garden City suburb of Jaffa, has been sacked and lies a mere heap of ruins, while similar wanton destruction has in all probability taken place in other specifically Jewish parts of Palestine.”
Taking up the fiction about statements made by the Syrian governor, the Chronicle continued, “But even worse is threatened. For the Turkish Governor, Djemal Pasha, has proclaimed his intention of the authorities [sic] to wipe out mercilessly the Jewish population of Palestine, his public statement being that the Armenian policy of massacre is to be applied to the Jews. If this dire and dastardly threat is carried into effect, it will mean not alone that thousands of Jews … will be put to the sword in cold blood, but that in addition the whole of the work of Palestinian re-settlement will be utterly destroyed.”
Over the next few days, the grim news out of Palestine reverberated through Jewish communities in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, and drew anguished appeals to their governments that some kind of action be taken. In the case of the British Foreign Office leadership, however, just what could be done was not at all clear. “I regret,” one senior diplomat commented on the same day the Chronicle story appeared, “that no action by us seems in any way feasible.”
But at least one British official saw in the Jaffa story the chance to take matters to an entirely new level, not just to sway international Jewish opinion but to bring pressure to bear on his own government. This was William Ormsby-Gore, the Conservative member of Parliament who had been so impressed by Aaron Aaronsohn during his time in Cairo at the Arab Bureau; in May 1917, Ormsby-Gore was back in London and working with Mark Sykes on the War Cabinet’s Middle Eastern affairs desk. While Sykes had left Cairo for a brief trip to Arabia on April 30, thus falling out of easy communication, he found Ormsby-Gore’s cable awaiting his return to Egypt on May 9.
“I think we ought to use pogroms in Palestine as propaganda,” Ormsby-Gore wrote. “Any spicy tales of atrocity would be eagerly welcomed by the propaganda people here, and Aaron Aaronsohn could send some lurid stories to the Jewish papers.”
Sykes received no argument from Aaronsohn. The two had another long meeting on May 11, at which, the scientist reported, they “discussed the question of American Jews and of the propaganda we could do there [sic] now in recruiting for the Palestine front. Sir Mark offered to forward any telegrams or letters which I might care to send.”
Perhaps mindful of his own growing reputation for exaggeration, Sykes had the foresight to send Aaronsohn’s new and expanded missive out under the signature of High Commissioner Reginald Wingate. “During Passover,” Wingate’s cable to London that same day read, “the entire Jewish population of Jaffa expelled towards north. Homes, property ransacked, population in flight robbed with connivance of Turkish Authorities. Jews resisting [were] pillaged, hanged. Thousands wandering helplessly on roads, starving.” And now there was a frightening new development in the telling, an extending of the evacuations to the much larger Jewish population in Jerusalem. “Masses of young Jerusalem Jews deported, northward, destination unknown. Forcible evacuation of [Jerusalem Jewish] colony imminent.”
Under Wingate’s signature, circulation of this cable wasn’t limited to the Foreign Office leadership; instead, it landed on the desks of the king, the prime minister, and the entire War Cabinet. At the same time, Aaronsohn gave Sykes a list of some fifty Zionist leaders throughout the world to be immediately notified. Now the Jaffa story went the 1917 version of viral. “Cruelties to Jews Deported in Jaffa,” screamed a headline in the New York Times, “Djemal Pasha Blamed,” while the American government, so recently enlisted to the war effort, joined an international chorus in denouncing this latest outrage by the Constantinople regime. Nowhere was that chorus louder than in Great Britain.
The Turks and their German allies might be forgiven for being slow to respond to this onslaught of condemnation; after all, the Jaffa evacuation had occurred in early April, and it was now mid-May. After initially refusing to dignify the charges with a response, Djemal Pasha finally flatly denied the accusations, pointing out that the entire population of Jaffa had been evacuated, not just its Jews, and that the process—unpleasant though it undoubtedly was for those affected—had been completed in an orderly and peaceful fashion; in fact, the governor had granted Jaffa’s Jewish population special considerations during the operation denied others. As for the claims of Jews being “deported” from Jerusalem, the Syrian governor countered, there had been no evacuations there at all. These assertions were seconded by the regimes in Constantinople and Berlin, and even by a collection of Jewish leaders in Palestine, including Jerusalem’s chief rabbi.
But it was too little too late. In the minds of much of the international public, the “pogrom” in Jaffa was already an established fact, the latest Central Powers atrocity to join the “rape of Belgium” and the massacres of the Armenians. It also alerted the Zionists and their British government allies to the tremendous tool they’d been handed. Coming so closely after the fall of the hated czar and the admission of the United States into the war, the Jaffa story helped accelerate a tectonic shift taking place among international Jewry, the growing conviction that their future lay with the Entente.
Of more immediate impact, it played to the argument of the more radical Zionists that any accommodation or compromise with Turkey was no longer possible. In early June, with the Jaffa story still raging, Aaron Aaronsohn penned cables to some of the most prominent leaders in the American Jewish community, men who continued to be cautious about wholeheartedly embracing the Zionist cause and who in some cases still imagined the future of Jewish settlement in Palestine as best served by Ottoman rule. To lend further authority to Aaronsohn’s message—among its recipients was a sitting Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, as well as a future one, Felix Frankfurter—Mark Sykes arranged for the cables to be routed through the British embassy in Washington for delivery. Typical was the cable received by Judge Mayer Sulzberger in Philadelphia:
“Turkish atrocities on Jewish populations in Palestine reported on reliable information,” Aaronsohn wrote. “It is high time to abandon our previous forgiving attitude towards Turks.… Now that Turks have committed those crimes, Jewish attitude and American public opinion must undergo complete change. Only efficient way to quick release of Jewish populations from Turkish clutches is to attack latter thoroughly in the field and everywhere.… We must present a united front, and concentrate Jewish influence on wresting Palestine from Turkish hands.”
In that same month of June, a rather different version of the Jaffa story began to emerge. In response to Entente appeals, Spain, Sweden, and the Vatican, all neutral entities in the conflict, sent envoys to investigate what had happened there. Both the Spanish and Vatican envoys quickly concluded that the reports of Jewish massacres and persecutions were without foundation, while their Swedish counterpart went even further. “In many ways,” he wrote, “the Jewish community of Jaffa had fared far better—and certainly no worse—than the resident Moslem population in the evacuation.” Shortly afterward, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem also reported that the accounts of violence against the Jaffa Jews were “grossly exaggerated.” Even Aaron Aaronsohn was ultimately forced to concede that the two Jewish men allegedly “lynched” in Jaffa had actually been arrested on charges of looting, and evidently not hung after all.
It didn’t matter, of course. In war, truth is whatever people can be led to believe, and Djemal Pasha had just handed his enemies a “truth” that would change Middle Eastern history. The fiction of what happened in Jaffa in 1917—a fiction repeated as fact by most historians writing on the period since—would now become the ur-myth for the contention that the Jewish community in Palestine could never be safe under Muslim rule, that to survive it needed a state of its own.
ON APRIL 21, a British navy patrol boat put in to Wejh harbor with a cargo of intense interest to Captain T. E. Lawrence: eleven Turkish prisoners of war. Until the previous morning, the men had been part of the Turkish garrison defending Aqaba.
Acting on rumors that a German minelaying operation was under way in the vicinity of Aqaba, three British patrol boats had closed on the port just before dawn on April 20 and put ashore a landing party, catching the tiny garrison off guard. The brief ensuing gun battle left two Turkish soldiers dead, eleven captured, and the rest—some fifty or sixty by best estimate—taken to the hills. Since six of the prisoners were Syrian draftees and expressed a desire to join with the rebel forces of Faisal ibn Hussein, one of the British patrol boats had brought them down to Wejh for questioning.
Over the course of that day, Lawrence interrogated each of the Syrians in turn. From them he learned that while the Aqaba garrison fluctuated in size, it rarely consisted of more than one hundred soldiers. Of even greater import considering the scheme he was hatching, the total number of Turkish soldiers billeted in the blockhouses along the sixty-mile Wadi Itm trail between Aqaba and Maan was at most just two hundred more. It meant that Lawrence’s plan just might work; if he could raise an Arab force at the eastern terminus of that trail and launch a lightning advance over the mountains, he could sweep the isolated Turkish garrisons before him and fall on Aqaba practically unopposed.
But just because Lawrence saw the opportunity before him, it didn’t necessarily follow that anyone else in the British military would. Still in effect was Gilbert Clayton’s March 8 directive that the Arabs not move on Aqaba. Instead, all attention was to remain focused on attacking the Hejaz Railway to block the Turkish garrison’s withdrawal from Medina (it would still be some weeks before the British realized the Turks had no intention of leaving Medina), an imperative that allowed for no side adventures.
Of course, the best way to avoid having one’s ideas shot down is to never explicitly voice them. Rather than take his proposal up with Clayton directly, Lawrence chose to engage the two other British officers then based in Wejh in a generalized discourse about the insights into guerrilla warfare he had gained during his convalescence in Wadi Ais. In particular, he would later claim, he expounded on the foolishness of trying to take Medina from the Turks, and the unfeasibility of trying to organize the Arabs into a blocking force on the Hejaz Railway. Instead, he suggested, they needed to spread the Turks thin by expanding the war front as much as possible. Among other things, that meant going north with “a highly mobile, highly equipped striking force of the smallest size, and use it successively at distributed points of the Turkish line.”
To Lawrence’s listeners in Wejh, both career military men, it may have all sounded intriguing, but also like little more than a distraction to the mission at hand. This was a reaction that Lawrence was rather counting on. “Everyone was too busy with his own work to give me specific authority to launch out on mine,” he would recount. “All I gained was a hearing, and a qualified admission that my counter-offensive [idea] might be a useful diversion.”
It’s hard to imagine how his fellow officers might have lent Lawrence “specific authority” for his scheme, since it’s clear from their own field reports that he never indicated that this diversionary force might make for Aqaba. Lawrence adopted an even more oblique manner in his approach to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah, informing his superior that Auda Abu Tayi would soon be taking a raiding party toward Maan, and that Lawrence was considering accompanying the party to ensure their actions complemented Britain’s current military objectives. Wilson concurred, reporting to Clayton on May 1 that “Auda is to travel north, probably accompanied by Lawrence, with their first aim to disrupt the railway around Maan.” Omitted was any mention of what their second aim might be.
In Seven Pillars, a book rife with self-justifications, Lawrence would offer a truly breathtaking one to explain his decision to strike out on his own: “The element I would withdraw from the railway scheme was only my single self and, in the circumstances, this amount was negligible, since I felt so strongly against it that my help there would have been half-hearted. So I decided to go my own way, with or without orders.”
In other words, as Lawrence no longer saw the point in trying to shut down the railway, it was really best for all concerned that he go find something else to do. Small wonder why so many of his military superiors found the Oxford scholar infuriating.
Underlying this, though, was an even grander psychological rationalization for the action Lawrence was contemplating. In his mind, upholding the promises made to the Arabs truly would serve Great Britain’s long-term interests, not just as a point of honor but as a way to minimize the influence of other European powers—allies today, perhaps, but surely competitors again tomorrow—throughout the region. A vital first step in this campaign was to allow the Arabs to take their revolution into Syria, and thus steal that land away from France. The core problem, in Lawrence’s estimation, was that Great Britain had yet to grasp what was best for her, and he simply didn’t have time to explain.
BEFORE SETTING OUT for Aqaba, Lawrence was to have one more fateful meeting in Wejh. It came on the morning of May 7, when a British destroyer briefly put into the harbor. On board was Mark Sykes.
The two had first met during Sykes’s fact-finding mission to Egypt in 1915, and despite their vast differences in personality—Sykes gregarious and charming, Lawrence taciturn and painfully shy—had reportedly gotten along quite well. That didn’t last long. As with most everyone else in the Cairo military intelligence office, Lawrence’s opinion of the diplomat had rapidly soured once details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement became known to them in the spring of 1916. Certainly, Sykes’s continuing fondness for firing off fatuous memos proposing neat solutions to the region’s problems—proposals often in direct opposition to those he had advocated weeks or even days earlier—had done nothing to rehabilitate his image in Lawrence’s eyes in the year since. In his view, Sykes fairly epitomized that vexing feature of Edwardian England, the aristocratic gadfly, a man who could gain a hearing for his reckless ideas by virtue of his pedigree and the breezy confidence with which he voiced them.
In their meeting on May 7, however, Lawrence was to discover something else about the man; for want of a more decorous term, Mark Sykes was also a liar.
Indeed, that the two were meeting in Wejh at all that day was a by-product of Sykes having been caught out in his latest round of trickery. The diplomat was just returning from an audience with King Hussein, an encounter Sykes had wished to avoid but which had been forced on him by the resident agent in Jeddah, Colonel Cyril Wilson.
For all his stiff-necked priggishness, the swagger-stick-toting Wilson had gradually emerged as the voice of conscience for British policy in the Middle East. In the long debate of late 1916 over whether a British brigade should be deployed in the Hejaz, Wilson had initially been among its fiercest advocates, and had been tasked by his superior, Reginald Wingate, to compel King Hussein to that view. Over the course of numerous meetings with Hussein, however, it had gradually occurred to the resident agent that perhaps the old man in Mecca knew his subjects and the politics of western Arabia better than the Allied advisors newly arrived to the scene. Ultimately, when Wingate had once again ordered his underling to lean on Hussein over the matter, Wilson, heretofore regarded as something of a Wingate yes-man, had essentially refused to do so and been instrumental in seeing the proposal finally shelved.
Wilson had had a far more visceral reaction upon learning of Sykes’s scheme to avoid Hussein in favor of his sham negotiations with the Syrian “delegates” in Cairo. In late March he had sent a long and anguished letter to Clayton enumerating both the problems inevitably to come from this act of deception and the benefits to be derived by being honest with Hussein. “We now have a chance, which is not likely to occur again, of winning the gratitude of millions of Moslems of the [British] Empire,” he wrote. “For Heaven’s sake, let us be straight with the old man; I am convinced it will pay us in the end.”
While that appeal had been in vain, it seemed the good colonel in Jeddah was quite capable of backroom maneuvers of his own. At his next meeting with Hussein, he urged the king to formally request a meeting with Mark Sykes. When Wilson forwarded that request to Reginald Wingate, another man who, despite his interventionist impulses, held to the British tradition of fair play, it quickly became an invitation Sykes couldn’t refuse. On April 30, with his and Picot’s conferences with the Syrian “delegates” in Cairo concluded, Sykes had boarded the British destroyer in Port Suez and set off for Jeddah.
Even for a supremely self-confident man, it must have been a stressful voyage. It was one thing to bamboozle a few preselected functionaries in Cairo with no knowledge of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence; it would surely be quite another to fool one of its actual authors. But then, Sykes had other cards to play. Chief among them was his ability to control the flow of information. Just as he had arranged to have a first meeting with the Syrians in Cairo without Picot present, so now he would be meeting alone with Hussein. As a result, should any future dispute arise over what had or had not been discussed, it would be the word of a highly respected British envoy against that of a mercurial desert chieftain long known for forgetfulness and willful misinterpretation.
It might have all worked out just fine—at least for the time being, which was all Mark Sykes could reasonably hope for—if he hadn’t decided to stop off in Wejh en route to confer with Faisal. By chance, Lawrence was away on a brief reconnaissance trip when Sykes called on May 2, but he got a full report from Faisal on what had transpired upon his return to Wejh two days later. By then, Sykes was already on his way to Jeddah and his meeting with King Hussein.
Judging by the report he sent to Reginald Wingate on the evening of May 5, Sykes’s foray into shuttle diplomacy could scarcely have gone better: “On 2nd May, I saw Sherif Faisal at Wejh and explained to him the principle of the Anglo-French agreement in regard to an Arab confederation; after much argument he accepted the principle and seemed satisfied.” That success had presaged one even more remarkable, for that very afternoon Sykes had met with King Hussein. “In accordance with my instructions, I explained the principle of the [Anglo-French] agreement as regards an Arab confederation or State.… I impressed upon the King the importance of Franco-Arab friendship and I at least got him to admit that it was essential to Arab development in Syria, but this after a very lengthy argument.”
A close reader of that May 5 report might have been disquieted by the peculiar symmetry of these two meetings—forthrightness by Sykes in outlining French-British designs in the region, followed by Arab argument, followed ultimately by Arab acceptance—while the truly cynical might have concluded that, with his emphasis on the quarreling involved, Sykes was already laying in his defense should there be future disagreement with Faisal and Hussein over what had been said or agreed to. In the interim, though, the trip was a triumph of diplomacy, a crucial first step toward resolving the nettlesome issues that stood between Britain and France and their Arab allies.
“Please tell Monsieur Picot,” Sykes ended his May 5 cable to Wingate, “that I am satisfied with my interview with Faisal and the King, as they both now stand at the same point as was reached at our last joint meeting with the 3 Syrian delegates in Cairo.”
What Mark Sykes didn’t know, of course, was that in Faisal ibn Hussein he had been speaking with a man quite aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement—courtesy of T. E. Lawrence—and in no way did Sykes’s vague and generalized discussion of that pact on May 2 match up with what the Arab leader already knew. Nevertheless, whether hewing to the Arab negotiating tradition of not tipping one’s hand until absolutely necessary, or worried that Lawrence would be exposed as his source, Faisal had not confronted the diplomat over his obfuscations at the time.
Not that he was in any better position to do so when Sykes stopped back by on May 7. Faisal’s knowledge of the true framework of Sykes-Picot, as opposed to the bastardized version Sykes had chosen to tell him, was the great and dangerous secret that he and Lawrence shared, and to reveal it now could only invite disaster: for Faisal, estrangement and perhaps abandonment by his British benefactors; for Lawrence, immediate transfer and probable court-martial.
On the other hand, Lawrence did have sanctioned knowledge of Sykes-Picot, which meant he on his own could confront Sykes over the sanitized version told to Faisal—and, presumably, to Hussein. All indications are that Lawrence provoked just such a confrontation. Neither man was to make record of their meeting in Wejh, but it appears to have been a highly contentious one. From that day on, Lawrence’s attitude toward Sykes would be hostile. For his part, Sykes would miss few chances to try to denigrate or marginalize Lawrence in any way he could.
On a more personal level, it seems that encounter with Sykes in Wejh came to simultaneously haunt Lawrence and to provide a certain kind of relief. He stood vindicated in not trusting in the honor of his government, and in imparting to Faisal its secret plan to betray the Arab cause. To whatever degree his conscience had been bothered by that decision, in the slippery schemes of Mark Sykes it was now cleansed.
At the same time, he appreciated that in his countryman was a particularly formidable rival. By comparison, Édouard Brémond was easy, his various schemes made predictable by his singular pursuit of French hegemony. Mark Sykes, by contrast, was a man ruled by whim, who didn’t feel bound by—perhaps at times didn’t even remember—the myriad promises that tripped so easily from his lips. He was able to stay ahead of it all by a talent for deceit, but since he was in a position of power, pulling the levers from Jeddah to London and all points in between, at the end of the day there would probably be no final appeal to British ideals of honor or justice, all would be sacrificed to convenience. The only recourse for the Arabs, then, was to try to change the facts on the ground, to strike a blow that might upend the plans of the dealmakers.
It was with such thoughts that, two days later, Lawrence set out on the long and dangerous trek toward Aqaba. For what would soon become one of the most audacious and celebrated military exploits of World War I, his accompanying “army” consisted of fewer than forty-five Arab warriors.