Lawrence In Arabia Part 12

For his part, Lawrence struggled mightily to put the very best gloss on matters, offering in his own report a number of unconvincing explanations to account for their delay in reaching Wejh. Lawrence's reflexively contrarian response to criticisms of the Arabs by his British comrades was nothing new. Back on the night of December 11, when Turkish forces had approached the outskirts of Yenbo, a British pilot had unsparingly described the panic that gripped Faisal's forces within the town. His account stood in marked contrast to Lawrence's own version of events. "The garrison was called out about 10 PM by means of criers sent round the streets," he reported. "The men all turned out without visible excitement, and proceeded to their posts round the town wall without making a noise, or firing a shot."

The easiest explanation for this divergence of accounts was that the pilot had actually been in Yenbo at the time, whereas Lawrence had not; earlier that same day, he had left Yenbo by s.h.i.+p, a detail left obscure in his report.

This variance in viewpoints also extended to the figure of Faisal ibn Hussein. In his December report, that same British pilot had reported that Faisal "is easily frightened and lives in constant dread of a Turkish advance, though he seems to conceal that fear from his army." Another British officer, Major Charles Vickery, caustically commented after observing Faisal's force in Wejh that "it is not known how far other Sherifial leaders interest themselves in the training of their troops, but certainly Sherif Faisal ignores it." Most appalling to British officers had been Faisal's decision to take up quarters on a British wars.h.i.+p in Yenbo harbor during those dark December days when a Turkish attack seemed imminent, leaving his men onsh.o.r.e to fend for themselves.

All of this, of course, stood at great odds to Lawrence's own a.n.a.lysis; as he'd said of Faisal even during the grim interlude in Nakhl Mubarak, "he is magnificent." It also revealed something quite remarkable: after just three months in the field, Lawrence was not only the chief booster of Faisal and the Arabs, but their most determined apologist.

Among those who noticed this was Faisal himself. Knowing that Lawrence was now scheduled to return to Cairo-and probably having seen enough of the hard-nosed Newcombe during the march up from Um Lejj to realize theirs would be a less congenial relations.h.i.+p-Faisal sent off a secret cable to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah on the same day that he reached Wejh. As Wilson relayed to Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, Faisal "is most anxious that Lawrence should not return to Cairo, as he has given such very great a.s.sistance."

Confronted by this direct request from Faisal, Clayton found it quite impossible to find a way to refuse. Within days, the paperwork was readied to make Lawrence's posting to the Hejaz permanent. At last, Lawrence was to be free: free of his desk at the Savoy Hotel, free, ultimately, to remake the war in Arabia to his own image.

Chapter 11.

A Mist of Deceits A man might clearly destroy himself, but it was repugnant that the innocence and the ideals of the Arabs should enlist in my sordid service for me to destroy. We needed to win the war, and their inspiration had proved the best tool out here. The effort should have been its own reward-might yet be for the deceived-but we, the masters, had promised them results in our false contract, and that was bargaining with life.

T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.

With the taking of Wejh, the setbacks and embarra.s.sments that had plagued the Arab rebel cause in recent months were being consigned to history. Lawrence made every effort to hasten the process of forgetfulness along.

After that town's capture in late January 1917, he was briefly brought back to Cairo in preparation for his return to Arabia on a permanent basis. In the Egyptian capital, he kept up a wearying pace. Along with catching up on his long-neglected reports and making additions to The Handbook of the Hejaz, a primer the Arab Bureau was compiling to help familiarize British officers being dispatched there, Lawrence shuttled between the offices of the British military leaders.h.i.+p to provide them with firsthand accounts of what was occurring across the Red Sea. With all, he presented a very optimistic view of where matters stood-he even managed to concoct plausible-sounding excuses for Faisal's late arrival to Wejh-and insisted there was a newfound fort.i.tude and enthusiasm for battle among the western Arabian tribes. His a.s.sessment stood in marked contrast to those of other British officers present at Wejh, but success has a way of choosing winners in such disagreements.

"The circle of Arab well-wishers was now strangely increased," Lawrence archly recalled. "In the army, our shares rose as we showed profits. [General] Lynden-Bell stood firmly our friend and swore that method was coming out of the Arab madness. Sir Archibald Murray realized with a sudden shock that more Turkish troops were fighting the Arabs than were fighting him, and began to remember how he had always favored the Arab revolt."

Perhaps none were so pleased as Lawrence's superior, General Gilbert Clayton. To be sure, Faisal's insistence that Lawrence stay on as his permanent liaison necessitated a bit of bureaucratic reconfiguring-Clayton needed to ensure that neither Cyril Wilson in Jeddah nor Stewart Newcombe, the recently arrived head of the British military mission, felt infringed upon-but these were trivial matters when set against the achievement: after all the distrust that had marked Arab-British relations over the previous two years, suspicions that had remained despite the ministrations of generals and senior diplomats, the chief Arab field commander now regarded a lowly British officer as his most indispensable advisor.

So hectic was Lawrence's pace in Cairo that he apparently took little notice of a visitor to the Arab Bureau offices on the morning of February 1, 1917. It had been just a few days since Aaron Aaronsohn learned of the death of his chief spying partner, Absalom Feinberg, in the Sinai desert, and he was now being treated with a kind of contrite respect within the British military intelligence apparatus; he'd come to the Savoy Hotel that morning to lend his advice to a British officer compiling a dossier on the Palestine political situation. While Lawrence made no record of their brief conversation, Aaronsohn was sufficiently struck by it to make note in his diary that night. "At the Arab Bureau there was a young 2nd lieutenant (Laurens)," he wrote, "an archaeologist-very well informed on Palestine questions-but rather conceited."

Perhaps one reason Lawrence forgot about his first encounter with Aaronsohn-they would meet again, and to far greater consequence-was that just two days later a chain of events began that would fundamentally transform his mission in the Middle East. It started on the morning of February 3, with a visit to the Savoy Hotel by his nemesis, Colonel edouard Bremond.

CUNNING AND RESOURCEFULNESS are characteristics that generally well serve a military officer. If judged by those traits alone, edouard Bremond should not have been a mere colonel in the French armed forces, but a field marshal.

As he'd shown repeatedly during his time in Arabia, if Bremond found one approach to a desired goal blocked, he immediately set out in search of another. And if that first goal was made unattainable or redundant, he simply recalibrated his sights to something else. What made this agility even more impressive was that, as both political and military point man for French policy in Arabia, edouard Bremond was juggling two largely contradictory agendas at once: to ensure that France enjoyed equal standing with her ally, Great Britain, in all matters related to the war effort there, but also to try to limit that war effort from within.

His long and ultimately fruitless campaign to put an Allied force ash.o.r.e in Rabegh had been only the most overt of these efforts. During the same period, he had been urging on Hussein the establishment of a French-Ottoman bank in Jeddah, an inst.i.tution that might lend financial credits to the Hejaz government at very attractive rates. British officers examining Bremond's bank proposal had quickly judged it to be an economic trap-with no means to pay back the loans, the Hussein regime would soon become beholden to its French creditors-and scuttled the plan. Then there was the colonel's perennial lobbying to have French officers attached as advisors to the various Arab rebel formations; while he achieved some success with Abdullah and Ali-a half dozen French specialists had been dispatched to their camps in December-he'd had little with Faisal, who remained deeply wary of Gallic intentions.

With the advance on Wejh, Bremond had seen a new opportunity. Once that Red Sea port was captured from the Turks, the entire focus of the Arabian conflict would s.h.i.+ft north some two hundred miles. That would render the Turkish threat to Jeddah and Mecca essentially moot-and with it any argument for an Allied force in Rabegh-but it would offer up an even more enticing target: the Turks' last princ.i.p.al outpost on the Red Sea, the small port of Aqaba.

Observed on a map, Aqaba's extraordinary strategic importance was plain to anyone. Situated at the end of a hundred-mile long ribbon of water that forms the southeastern boundary of the Sinai Peninsula, the port was ideally situated to serve both as a staging ground for attacks into the population centers of southern Palestine, a mere hundred miles to the north, and for launching raids on the Hejaz Railway, the lifeline of the Turkish garrison in Medina, just sixty miles to the east. In fact, Bremond had broached the idea of an a.s.sault on Aqaba with his British military counterparts shortly after his arrival in Cairo in the summer of 1916. The notion had found considerable favor among the British, but with the Arab Revolt still struggling very far to the south at that time, had been deemed premature.

By late January 1917, it was premature no more. Not only did the Arabs now control the Red Sea coast as far north as Wejh, but General Murray's ponderous advance across the Sinai Peninsula in prelude to his Palestine offensive was nearly complete. Lying in the gap between these two forces was Aqaba. Its control by the Allies would secure Murray's right flank, ensuring that no Turkish counteroffensive could be launched from that direction, and it would bring the Arab rebels much closer to their British army suppliers in Egypt.

Of course, the plan might also finally bring about the fulfillment of Bremond's not-so-secret agenda: keeping the Arab Revolt bottled up in the Hejaz. Far away from the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, King Hussein (he had declared himself such in late October) could hardly object to a sizable British and French presence in Aqaba. And with that presence, the princ.i.p.al Allies could dictate to their Arab junior partners just where they might go and what they might do; any Arab dissent on that point and the pipeline of Allied weapons and gold upon which they depended could simply be cut off. Better yet, all of this could be accomplished under the guise of helping the rebel cause by moving their forward base to a place where they could more easily carry out their railway attacks.

In mid-January, even before Wejh had been taken, Bremond began discussing this idea with his superiors in Paris, and found enthusiastic support. While Paris would pursue the matter at the departmental level in London, the French liaison in Cairo and Bremond in Jeddah were commanded to lobby for the Aqaba scheme among the regional British leaders.h.i.+p. Bremond knew just where to turn. In addition to touting the plan to British officers in the Hejaz, he put it before his most reliable ally in the Cairo power structure, Reginald Wingate, newly ensconced as British high commissioner to Egypt. Wingate liked the idea so much that he immediately took it to General Archibald Murray.

By the usual standards of British politeness and understatement, Murray's response was withering. "In reply to your letter referring to Bremond's proposal," he wrote Wingate on January 22, "my opinion, from the purely military point of view, is that the [previous] objections to landing a force at Rabegh apply with equal if not greater force to a landing at Aqaba." Therein followed Murray's usual litany of fears about mission creep, before he turned to demolis.h.i.+ng Wingate's contention that control of Aqaba would enable the Allies to strike inland at the Hejaz Railway. "The country in the neighborhood of Aqaba is extremely rough and rocky," the general explained, and any push inland would be over a terrain only certain rare breeds of camels could traverse. "To sum up, therefore," Murray wrote, "the French proposal to land troops at Aqaba offers, from a military point of view, so few advantages and such serious disadvantages, that I can only suppose that it has been put forward without due consideration and I do not propose to entertain it."

Along with testiness, another feature of Archibald Murray's leaders.h.i.+p style was a tendency to needlessly compartmentalize information. As he well knew when writing to Wingate, the chief impediment to an eastern advance from Aqaba was not simply "rough and rocky" terrain but that terrain's near impa.s.sability. A few months earlier he had detailed a junior officer in the Arab Bureau office to a.n.a.lyze a series of aerial reconnaissance photos taken of the Aqaba region. In his report, that officer had pointed out that the port was nestled in the very shadows of a ma.s.sive range of rugged mountains that rose steadily for thirty miles inland before descending over an equally inhospitable landscape to the interior desert where the Hejaz Railway lay. The only way through that wall of rock was a narrow gorge known as the Wadi Itm, along which the Turks had built a network of fortified blockhouses and trenchworks, leaving any military force foolhardy enough to attempt a crossing exposed to constant ambush and sniper fire. The issue, then, was not taking Aqaba-that was the easy part-but in ever being able to move off its beach. A heedless move here was to invite a miniature replay of the Gallipoli debacle-or a full-scale reprise, depending on how determined military commanders became to compound their initial error.

Inexplicably, however, Murray chose not to share this salient information with Wingate, nor evidently with the growing chorus of other British officers advocating an Aqaba landing. In the absence of that information, Murray's scornful reply to the proposal appeared to be just another manifestation of his timidity and bad temper. That was certainly the view Colonel Bremond came away with upon hearing the news through the diplomatic filter of Reginald Wingate.

"You can confidentially inform Bremond," Wingate cabled his underlings in Jeddah on January 24, "that we have already given fullest consideration here to [the] proposal to land troops at Aqaba, but in view of our present military commitments in Sinai and elsewhere it must be discarded. We fully recognize the advantages of this scheme, but the troops and transport necessary to undertake a successful expedition against the railway [from Aqaba] are not available."

To edouard Bremond, a man who'd previously been able to play Wingate to great effect, all this apparently sounded less like an emphatic "no" than a coquettish "maybe." Days later, the French colonel boarded a naval frigate in Jeddah harbor for the run up the coast to Wejh to put his proposal directly to the one man whose desires just might override Murray's: Faisal ibn Hussein.

The two men met on the afternoon of January 30, with the more fluent Arabic-speaking Stewart Newcombe acting as interpreter. Bremond informed Faisal that he was on his way to Egypt to inspect his men at Port Suez, before continuing on to Cairo. There, he intended to lobby the British high command to send a brigade to seize Aqaba, a force to be complemented by two French-Senegalese battalions that were sitting idle in the French port of Djibouti, at the southern mouth of the Red Sea.

Although Faisal had also set his sights on Aqaba, he refused to endorse Bremond's plan; as Newcombe would report, "Faisal afterwards told me that he would like British troops to help him, but did not want any help from the French or to have anything to do with them." On the heels of that meeting in Wejh, Bremond immediately proceeded to Port Suez and then to Cairo, where he sought out a most unlikely listener. "[Bremond] called to felicitate me on the capture of Wejh," Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, "saying that it confirmed his belief in my military talent and encouraged him to expect my help in an extension of our success." That "extension," of course, was the colonel's scheme for an Allied landing at Aqaba.

Whatever possessed Bremond to tip his hand to Lawrence? The simplest explanation-that he saw the Aqaba plan as so beneficial to all concerned that even the obstreperous Lawrence might embrace it-is also the least likely. By now, Bremond was fully aware of Lawrence's abiding distrust both of him and of French intentions in the Middle East, a distrust so deep that he was likely to oppose any French proposal on the basis of its origin alone. Indeed, by Lawrence's own account, he instantly heard in Bremond's Aqaba plan an echo of his hidden motive in the Rabegh scheme, a way for the Allies to a.s.sume de facto control over the Arab Revolt and keep it out of Syria.

But what Bremond surely didn't appreciate was that the man sitting across from him that morning at the Savoy probably knew the Aqaba region as well as any European alive. Not only had Lawrence negotiated that landscape during his 1914 Wilderness of Zin expedition, but it was he who had studied the Aqaba aerial maps at the behest of General Murray, to deeply pessimistic results. Bremond may have envisioned Aqaba being a grand cul-de-sac for the Arabs, but in Lawrence's estimation, it would be for any British and French troops sent there, too.

When Lawrence tried to explain this to Bremond, however, the Frenchman remained utterly sanguine. In fact, he let drop that once his lobbying efforts in Cairo were done, he intended to return to Wejh to prod Faisal further on the matter.

There may have rested the colonel's true motive in seeking Lawrence out that morning. The little Oxford upstart had been the most eloquent-and, as bad luck would have it, influential-of Bremond's British opponents during the Rabegh episode, and the Frenchman surely didn't want Lawrence on hand in Cairo to pour water on any pro-Aqaba fires he might light among the British high command. By further letting slip that he would soon return to Wejh for another meeting with Faisal, Bremond may have been hoping that Lawrence would immediately make haste for Arabia, thereby removing himself from the arena where decisions were actually made.

If this was Bremond's goal, it worked perfectly. "Now I had not warned Faisal that Bremond was a crook," Lawrence recounted. "Newcombe was there [in Wejh], with his friendly desire to get moves on.... It seemed best for me to hurry down and put my side on their guard against the [Aqaba] notion."

Within hours of his meeting with Bremond, Lawrence left Cairo for Port Suez, there to board the first s.h.i.+p for Wejh.

IT WAS A small but telling sign of the changes that war had brought. In June 1915, when William Yale had taken his first carriage ride to the Mount of Olives to meet Djemal Pasha, the horses had trotted up the steep cobblestoned road with ease. Now, in February 1917, that same journey was torturously slow, the emaciated horses in their harnesses so weakened from two years of food shortages that it appeared they might die in the effort. "It seemed we would never reach the German Hospice," Yale recalled. The oilman persevered, though, for it was absolutely vital that he reach the Syrian governor.

By that winter of 1917, Yale could feel the walls closing in on him in Jerusalem. Part of it had to do with his nationality. Over the past two and a half years of war, the grudging respect with which the United States had initially been regarded by nearly all the combatants, its annoying stance of neutrality offset by its efforts at peacemaking, had steadily eroded to something approaching disgust. In Britain and France, it took the form of a despair that the American government might ever recognize how its own welfare dictated that it side with the "democracies" against the "dictators.h.i.+ps." In the Central Power nations, it took the form of a growing bitterness at an American foreign policy that, for all Woodrow Wilson's pious talk of being a neutral arbitrator, clearly favored the Entente. And for all concerned was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of "free trade," the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.

By early 1917, however, with Woodrow Wilson's reelection campaign safely behind him, there were growing signs that the status quo might soon end, with the United States entering the war on the side of the Entente. Should that happen, those Americans still residing in Central Power nations could expect to come in for some unpleasant treatment, and probably none more so than William Yale. With his bare-knuckled approach to commerce-bribery, threats, and blackmail had been his stock-in-trade-the oilman had made a lot of enemies during his time in Palestine, business rivals and aggrieved local government officials who might quite enjoy seeing the long-protected American "neutral" recla.s.sified as a "belligerent" and hauled off to an internment camp.

Yet as the menacing signs had built that winter, a personal sense of duty had prevented Yale from asking the Standard Oil office in Constantinople for permission to leave Jerusalem. Instead, he and his trusty bodyguard, Mustapha Kharpoutli, made contingency plans to try a dash for British Egypt should the Americans come into the war, even as both knew the odds of success in such an enterprise were virtually nil.

Then, on February 1, Germany had announced a resumption of its unrestricted U-boat campaign against all merchant vessels supplying its European enemies, a move that would inevitably target American s.h.i.+ps and seemed almost designed to provoke an American war declaration. That didn't immediately materialize, but just days later, after Wilson took the interim step of breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany, Yale received the cable he'd been desperately awaiting: the Standard office in Constantinople ordered him to leave Palestine and make his way to the Ottoman capital. In great relief, the American swiftly packed up his office papers and personal belongings, eleven suitcases and footlockers in all, in preparation for the long train ride north.

It was then that Yale discovered he was caught in something of a riddle. As with everyone else in wartime Syria, he needed a travel permit, or vesika, in order to leave Jerusalem. Since he was a foreigner, however, his permit had to be personally authorized by Djemal Pasha, and Djemal now rarely left Damascus. For agonizing days, Yale tried to think of some way out of this conundrum, until finally he received a tip that Djemal was coming to Jerusalem on a brief fact-finding mission. It was this that spurred his anxious trip up the Mount of Olives that February morning.

But even as he waited in the main hallway of the German Hospice for the chance to b.u.t.tonhole the Syrian governor, William Yale found his trademark self-confidence deserting him. "America was on the verge of war with Germany," he recalled, "and there was nothing I could do to be of use to Djemal Pasha. To make matters worse, I had [earlier] been accused of being a member of a revolutionary Arab group. Certainly I could not expect Djemal Pasha to feel kindly towards me."

Perhaps another factor weighing on Yale was the singularly unproductive role he had performed at the behest of his employers while in Jerusalem. Despite being given concession over a vast swath of Judea by Djemal Pasha, Standard Oil had failed to produce a single drop of Palestinian oil for the Turkish military machine.

As Yale waited in the hospice foyer, Djemal at last emerged from a far doorway and, surrounded by a coterie of high-ranking German and Turkish military officers, strode briskly down the corridor toward him. But the oilman froze, didn't even try to get the governor's attention as he swept past. Appalled by his own timidity, Yale simply stared after the receding entourage until someone called to him, "Mr. Yale, what on earth are you doing here?"

Turning, Yale saw that his questioner was a man named Zaki Bey, the former military governor of Jerusalem. A courtly and cultured figure, in the early days of the war, Zaki Bey had endeavored to s.h.i.+eld Jerusalem's foreign community from the harsher edicts of both the Constantinople regime-he had reportedly warned the Greek Orthodox patriarch to hide his church's valuables ahead of a government seizure warrant-and the resident German intelligence corps. For his conciliatory actions, Zaki Bey had ultimately been forced from office by the Germans, but had somehow remained a member in good standing of Djemal Pasha's inner circle. Just as important, given the circ.u.mstances of the moment, Zaki Bey was a member in good standing of William Yale's biweekly bridge club. After hearing of the American's predicament, the former governor tore off the last page of a government doc.u.ment, hastily scribbled out a travel authorization on the back, and sped down the corridor in pursuit of Djemal. Shortly afterward, he returned, the signed vesika in hand.

"As the horses jogged wearily down the Mount of Olives," Yale wrote, "I hummed with joy. After two long years of exile during which time I had seen the increasing misery of war entangle those about me, I now held in my hand a paper which would start me on my way home."

Of course, what the future held once he reached that home was an open question. If the Americans did finally enter the war, Standard Oil's operation in the Middle East would be shut down for a long time to come. Thus idled, Yale would probably be let go or shunted back to the lowly work he'd performed in the American oilfields. In contemplating this uncertainty, the oilman apparently decided that whatever debt of grat.i.tude he might owe to Djemal Pasha for allowing his escape from Palestine, it was a debt best kept to acceptable limits. During the long train ride back to Constantinople, a grinding, stop-and-start ordeal of nearly three weeks, Yale took very careful note of all that he observed out its windows: German and Turkish troop movements, the status of railway construction projects, the location of military encampments and ammunition storehouses. Depending on what the future brought, that information might be of great use to someone-and it might also be very useful to William Yale.

LAWRENCE'S WORST FEARS had been misplaced, as he discovered when he reached Wejh on February 6 and rushed into hurried conference with Faisal. It was certainly true that the Arab leader was keen to move on Aqaba, but he was just as keen that the French play no role in it; if anything, his meeting with Colonel Bremond a week earlier had served to only deepen Faisal's distrust of the Frenchman.

At the same time, Lawrence was perhaps secretly grateful to Bremond for having raised the Aqaba issue, for it had alerted him to the great struggle inevitably to come over that town's fate. In fact, that struggle was already under way, and the French colonel's gambit was but one small part of it.

Wejh was now the forward base camp of the Arab Revolt, and almost every day new tribal delegations were coming in to meet with Faisal and sign on to the revolutionary cause. Most of these tribes were from the desert and mountain expanses to the east and north, the revolutionary frontier opened by Wejh's capture, and these new recruits naturally wanted to take action in their own backyard. That meant rolling up the Red Sea coast toward Aqaba. Simultaneously, Faisal was coming under intense pressure from his Arab military advisors-primarily Syrian officers who had been captured or had deserted the Ottoman cause-to carry the fight farther north into their homeland. Both the shortest and easiest path to do so lay through Aqaba.

To these clamorings could be added those of the British officers now operating in the Hejaz, beginning with the head of the military mission, Stewart Newcombe. For the British field officers, Aqaba's seizure would mean a much shorter communication and supply line to Egypt, as well as control of the entire northern Arabian coastline. Even Gilbert Clayton back in Cairo urged in a January memo that the brigade once slated for Rabegh be put ash.o.r.e at Aqaba. In the face of this chorus, Lawrence surely realized that his protestations on the town's physical obstacles would ultimately be drowned out. Indeed, if the examples of Kut and Gallipoli and a score of battlefields on the Western Front were any guide, the very impracticality of an Aqaba landing would draw British war planners to it like moths to the flame.

Lawrence's contrarian view was unlikely to be much better received by the Arabs. As with all revolutionary movements, the animating force behind the Arab Revolt was pa.s.sion, and that was a sentiment fueled by daring and boldness, quite ant.i.thetical to pleadings for caution or restraint. Besides, if Aqaba were excluded, the Arabs' only other viable path into Syria was the inland route along the Hejaz Railway, a perilous option so long as the Turkish garrison in Medina stood at their backs. That option also meant relying on a very long and tenuous supply line to the coast, a line that would become more tenuous the farther north the Arabs pushed-although this concern possibly lay more in the theoretical realm than the practical; given the Arabs' current rate of progress in the inland theater of operations, it might not be the current generation of fighters that reached Damascus, but their grandchildren.

For all these reasons, Lawrence could strenuously counsel Faisal against going to Aqaba, could even expound on the trap he believed edouard Bremond was setting for him there, but it was unlikely to serve as anything more than a temporary brake. But due to his unique position in the British intelligence apparatus-privy to the innermost strategic and political planning being done in Cairo, but also operating in the field where those plans were to be implemented-Lawrence perceived something else as well.

In 1917, the European powers still held to the imperial mind-set that one's claim to primacy in a place was directly linked to the expenditure of blood and treasure in taking it, that legitimacy was established by quite literally planting one's flag in the soil. This ultimately was why the French, with precious few troops to spare for operations in the Middle East, had scuttled the British plans to go ash.o.r.e in the Gulf of Alexandretta in 1915, why they remained so uneasy about Murray's upcoming offensive into Palestine, and why, conversely, they wanted every available French soldier in the region to partake in any storming of Aqaba. It was only their physical presence, so they believed, that ensured their imperial claims would be honored.

This was not a peculiarly Gallic outlook, but one that very much infected the British as well. In all the talk of taking Aqaba, what most everyone envisioned, including Faisal, was basically a replay of the Wejh operation: an amphibious landing of Arab troops aboard British vessels, an advance against the Turkish garrison heavily supported by British naval guns, a new influx of British supplies and materiel once the town had fallen. Except Aqaba, in contrast to Wejh, was a town of enormous strategic importance to the British, and one that lay far outside the Islamic "holy land" zone that had caused them to tread so gingerly in the environs of Mecca. Having expended British blood and treasure to seize it, the British military planners' temptation to claim Aqaba as their own-and simultaneously to relegate the Arabs to a subservient role-would prove all but irresistible. When that happened, the Arabs would be caught by the throat. For the first time, the two princ.i.p.al Entente allies, Britain and France, would have a sizable joint military force in the Middle East, and if forced to choose between French and Arab wishes, there could be little question which side British leaders in Cairo-or if not Cairo, London-would come down on. The most likely result would be the marooning of the Arabs in Aqaba, either explicitly or tacitly blocked from continuing north.

In short, then, edouard Bremond was the least of Faisal's problems. As the Rabegh episode had shown, Lawrence could handily outmaneuver Bremond by playing the anti-French card when Gallic interests clashed with those of the British, but it would be a very different game in a situation where British and French interests dovetailed. In essence, Faisal was well primed to spot French perfidy, but what about British perfidy?

As for why Lawrence might perceive all of this while others didn't, and why he was so ready to doubt the fidelity of his own government, the answer was simple: the Sykes-Picot Agreement. So long as that pact stood, British betrayal of the Arab cause in deference to its French ally was virtually preordained, most all the pledges contained in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence to be nullified. Indeed, because of that pact, the British government might have their own strong motive for putting the Arabs in a box at Aqaba; by denying them the opportunity to actively partic.i.p.ate in the liberation of Syria and other Arab lands, the British could then renege on their promises to the Arabs with a much clearer conscience.

But in trying to explain all this to Faisal-to impress upon him the need to turn away from the trap in Aqaba and make for Syria by the inland route; to not trust in the French, but not in the British either-Lawrence had only one potential instrument at his disposal: once again, Sykes-Picot.

In the British army of 1917-as indeed, in any wartime army at any point in history-the divulging of a secret treaty to a third party was considered a consummate act of treason, one sure to win the offender a long prison sentence if not an appointment with a firing squad. Yet at some point during those early days of February in Wejh, Lawrence took Faisal aside and did precisely that, revealing to him both the existence and the salient details of Sykes-Picot.

That Lawrence appreciated the enormity of what he had done is clear from the subsequent efforts he made to cover his tracks. In his own writings, as well as in queries put to him by various biographers, he remained resolutely vague about when he first learned of Sykes-Picot and how much he knew of its specifics, implying that he hadn't been in a position to actually tell Faisal very much. In fact, Sykes-Picot is not at all a complex doc.u.ment-it runs a mere three pages-and Lawrence almost certainly had a complete familiarity with it no later than June 1916, when it was circulated through the intelligence offices in Cairo. Similarly, in Seven Pillars he fas.h.i.+oned a false chronology whereby his hasty return to Wejh after meeting with Bremond in Cairo was born of the need to warn Faisal of the Frenchman's plan-"[Bremond] ended his talk ominously by saying that, anyhow, he was going down to put the [Aqaba] scheme to Faisal in Wejh"-an a.s.sertion that only worked by failing to mention that Bremond had already put the scheme to Faisal four days earlier. Lawrence's purpose for this omission, presumably, was to establish the idea, if it ever did come to light that he had divulged Sykes-Picot to Faisal at this juncture, that he had only done so to sabotage the conniving French. For British readers and officials alike in postwar Britain, this anti-French twist would make for a far more pleasing explanation than the alternative, his action less a treasonous offense than a perfectly understandable, even admirable, one.

It was all a construct that Lawrence's biographers-at least those in the lionizing camp-have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence's life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to a.s.sist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew?

Surely part of it was rooted in a peculiarly British sense of honor. To probably a greater degree than in any of the other warring nations in Europe, the British ruling cla.s.s in 1917 still fiercely held to the notion that their word was their bond. Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. Lawrence may have felt this more viscerally by virtue of being where the fighting and dying was taking place, but he was hardly alone in his disgust.

Another part of it may have stemmed from the rekindling of boyhood fantasies. As Lawrence would write, "I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us." Here in Arabia was suddenly the chance to be the knight-errant of his childhood readings, the liberator of an enslaved and broken people, and with this came a sense of purpose far stronger than any appeal to petty nationalism or to an empire that every day was further proving its unworthiness and obsolescence.

Whatever the combination of motives-and Lawrence may not have fully grasped them himself-the effect of his revelation to Faisal was both immediate and dramatic. The Arab leader now understood that despite their promises, the British were not going to simply cede Syria; if the Arabs wanted it, they would have to fight for it. Within days of Lawrence's return to Wejh, other British officers were noting with puzzlement how Faisal had suddenly cooled on the idea of an Aqaba operation; instead, his sole focus was on carrying his rebellion to points farther north, into the Syrian heartland itself.

It was the same news edouard Bremond heard on his next visit to Wejh on February 18. With Lawrence sitting in, Faisal informed the French colonel that he was now firmly opposed to an Aqaba landing, and instead intended to redouble his efforts inland. He once again turned down Bremond's offer of French advisors, explaining that he had no need for them, and even offered an arch apology for the ever-broadening scale of his military plans; he would happily concentrate his efforts on Medina, he told Bremond, if only he had the same French artillery "to reply to the guns which the French had supplied to the Turks." Outflanked once again, Lawrence gleefully noted, Bremond had little choice but "to retire from the battle in good order."

In subsequent weeks, the various British officers stationed in Wejh continually tried to rein in Faisal's suddenly lofty plans, to get him to focus on the immediate matters at hand. To little avail. As one of those officers, Major Pierce Joyce, would write on April 1, "I am still of the opinion that Sherif Faisal's whole attention is directed towards the North.... I have endeavored to confine Faisal to local ambitions and military operations, but from somewhere he has developed very wide ideas."

As for where Faisal might have developed those ideas, senior British officers remained baffled. Certainly, they didn't suspect Captain Lawrence. In an early March report to Cairo, Cyril Wilson's deputy in Jeddah singled Lawrence out for praise, calling him of "inestimable value."

FOR DJEMAL PASHA, the options were narrowing. Since the beginning of the year, the signs that the British would soon launch their long-awaited offensive in southern Palestine had grown increasingly obvious. By February, Turkish units had steadily ceded ground all the way to the outskirts of the town of Gaza, and still the British were closing; German aerial spotters reported a veritable sea of tent encampments and supply depots strung along the new, British-laid railway clear back to El Arish, forty miles away. While estimates of the British attack force varied, the one certainty was that it vastly outnumbered the some twenty thousand Turkish defenders standing to meet it.

It was a disparity that Djemal despaired of closing, for everywhere across the empire, the Ottoman army was stretched to the breaking point: actively engaged on two fronts in Europe, squared off against the Russians in eastern Anatolia, and now falling back before a second British Indian invasion force in Iraq. Even if any troops could be spared from these other fronts-and the reality was, they couldn't-it seemed all but impossible that they might reach Palestine in time to meet the British attack. With no other choice, then, Djemal had reluctantly turned his gaze to the ten thousand troops still holding Medina.

Any thought of abandoning that Arabian city was an extraordinarily painful one, which is probably why the governor had put it off until the eleventh hour. Not only did Medina anchor the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway, but Turkish control was absolute, never seriously threatened by the disorganized and outgunned Arab rebels who sporadically sniped about its edges; as such, it stood as a bulwark against the schemes of Emir Hussein to spread his revolt north. To give up Medina, Islam's second holiest city, would also be to hand the rebels and their British paymasters a tremendous psychological victory, the mantle of religious primacy in the eyes of the greater Muslim world.

On the other hand, the Turkish troops in Medina were some of the finest to be found in the Ottoman Empire, and led by one of its ablest generals, Fakhri Pasha; their presence on the Palestine front could make the difference between victory and defeat. And so, under the urging of Enver Pasha and the German military high command in Constantinople, in late February Djemal sent down word that Medina was to be given up, its garrison to begin the long trek back up the Hejaz Railway to Syria and hurried into the trenchlines in Gaza.

That order drew an immediate and ferocious response from a man named Ali Haidar. In the wake of Hussein's revolt the previous summer, Constantinople had handpicked Haidar as the new "legitimate" mufti of Mecca and bundled him south to a.s.sume his position of supreme religious authority. Haidar had ventured no farther than Medina, of course, but there he had established a kind of "puppet papacy" in rivalry to Hussein's regime in Mecca. If rejected by most Hejazi Arabs, Haidar's claim to being the true guardian of Islam's holiest shrines had given sufficient pause to the international Muslim community to blunt Hussein's appeal. All that would be lost if Medina was abandoned. "The news horrified me," Haidar wrote in his memoir. "Hastily I sent a strongly-worded telegram to Djemal in which I said the very idea of deserting the Holy Tomb was utterly shameful, and that it should be protected to the last man, if necessary."

The mufti clearly knew his audience, for just days after issuing his Medina withdrawal order, Djemal abruptly rescinded it; the city would stay in Turkish hands, and the outnumbered troops bracing for the British attack in Palestine would have to manage as best they could on their own.

But in one of those odd little wrinkles of history, the brief and quickly resolved Turkish debate over the future of Medina was about to have far-reaching consequences. That's because British military cryptographers intercepted and decoded Djemal Pasha's cable ordering the garrison's withdrawal, but failed to intercept his subsequent cancellation order. As a result, the Arab rebels and their British advisors would devote their energies of the next several months responding to an event that wasn't going to happen. It was also in these circ.u.mstances that T. E. Lawrence would eventually have his greatest epiphany about the Arab Revolt and how it should be fought.

AS INSTRUCTED, LAWRENCE was waiting at the dock when the Nur el Bahr, an Egyptian patrol boat, put into Wejh on the morning of March 8. There he took delivery from a British army courier of two rather extraordinary doc.u.ments.

The first was a transcript of Djemal Pasha's cable ordering the abandonment of Medina. As soon as could be organized, Djemal had instructed, the Turkish garrison was to begin moving up the Hejaz Railway, taking all artillery and other war materiel with them, and to form a new defensive line in the Syrian city of Maan, five hundred miles to the north. From there, whatever troops could be spared were to be rushed to the redoubt of Gaza in southern Palestine.

The second was a directive from Gilbert Clayton in Cairo. With General Murray's Palestine offensive now just weeks away, it was vital that no reinforcements reach the Turkish defenders in Gaza, which meant every effort should be made to halt the Medina garrison's departure. With the technical support of their British advisors, the Arab rebels were to dramatically expand their attacks on the Hejaz Railway, rendering as much damage to it as possible, and to make a blocking stand against the withdrawing Turkish units if necessary. With his usual propensity for discretion, Clayton suggested that neither Faisal nor the other Arab commanders need be informed of the reason for this escalation.

That directive placed Lawrence in another difficult spot. On the one hand, focusing on the railway played very much into his personal effort to get Faisal to concentrate on inland operations and to turn away from the attractive trap of Aqaba. On the other, taking Medina had been a primary objective of the Arab Revolt from the outset, and an Ottoman withdrawal from that city would be nearly as great a psychological victory to the rebels as an Ottoman surrender. Now the Arabs were being asked not only to forgo the prize they had fought so long for but to commit men to battle to prevent its delivery.

This, of course, was the motive behind Clayton's call for secrecy, but it raised at least two morally troublesome issues. If the Arabs were persuaded to occupy a stretch of the railway between Medina and Maan as a blocking force without being told why, then they also wouldn't know that they stood squarely in the path of the redeploying Medina garrison-and there could be few illusions about the outcome of the lightly armed Arab tribesmen cras.h.i.+ng up against one of Turkey's best-equipped armies in the open desert. There was also the point that the Arabs were now being asked to fight-and, inevitably, to take casualties-in the Hejaz so as to lighten the burden and death toll of British troops in Gaza. Certainly, that came with the territory of members.h.i.+p in a military alliance, but just as certainly, in Lawrence's estimation, the British owed it to their Arab allies to tell them why.

Since he had technically committed treason just weeks earlier with his divulging of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, this edict was much easier for Lawrence to disobey. "In spite of General Clayton's orders," he wrote Cyril Wilson that evening, "I told [Faisal] something of the situation. It would have been impossible for me to have done anything myself on the necessary scale." As he would later recount in Seven Pillars, Faisal "rose, as ever, to a proposition of honour, and agreed instantly to do his best."

The immediate task was to get word of the new directive to Abdullah-with his followers ma.s.sed near the Hejaz Railway at Wadi Ais, it would be they who would carry or lose the day-but given the past la.s.situde of Hussein's second son, Lawrence was convinced that both delivering that critical message and seeing it carried out had to be done by a British officer. With Stewart Newcombe and the handful of other British officers who knew the Hejaz interior already out on scouting or demolition missions, that left him. In the same hurried note he scribbled out for Cyril Wilson that evening, Lawrence explained that his plans were quite ad hoc given how little time he had to prepare: "I think the weak point of the Turk [evacuation] plans lies in the trains of water and food. If we can cut the line on such a scale that they cannot repair it, or smash their locomotives, the force will come to a standstill.... If only we can hold them up for ten days. I'm afraid it will be touch and go. I am taking some Garland mines with me, if I can find instantaneous fuse, and if there is time, I will set them as near Medina as possible: it is partly for this reason that I am going up myself."

Under the cover of darkness on the night of March 10, Lawrence set out with an escort of just fourteen fighters for the grinding five-day trek to Abdullah's camp.

It was a brutal journey from the outset. Lawrence was already in the grip of a severe bout of dysentery, and by noon of the following day was also afflicted with boils that covered his back. It was all he could do to stay in his camel's saddle as the small party plodded through one of the more desolate landscapes to be found in western Arabia. By the next day, March 12, his condition had worsened still, the dysentery twice causing him to faint "when the more difficult parts of the climb had asked too much of my strength."

Preoccupied by his own torments, Lawrence apparently failed to notice the growing friction among his small entourage, which was drawn from a fragile a.s.sortment of previously feuding tribes. What had been good-natured ribbing between them at the journey's outset had steadily escalated to the exchange of insults and veiled threats, a simmering stew of tension. Matters came to a head that same evening.

Taking shelter for the night in a mountain close known as Wadi Kitan, Lawrence fell into exhausted rest among the rocks. That ended with the report of a gunshot echoing through the canyon. Roused by one of his escorts, Lawrence was led over the rocks to view the body of a member of the traveling party, an Ageyl tribesman named Salem, dead with a bullet through the temple. With the skin around the entry wound burnt, it was clear the killing had been done at close range, which meant by another member of the group. Very quickly, the finger of suspicion fell upon a Moroccan named Hamed. During an ad hoc trial, Hamed ultimately confessed, and Salem's Ageyl brethren demanded blood for blood.

Over the preceding months, Lawrence had watched in fascinated admiration as Faisal had acted as peacemaker in scores of tribal feuds, disputes running the gamut of questions over foraging rights to decades-old-even centuries-old-blood vendettas. It was a role Faisal would continue to fulfill throughout the war. "An account of profit and loss would be struck between the parties," Lawrence later recalled, "with Faisal modulating and interceding between them, and often paying the balance, or contributing towards it from his own funds, to hurry on the pact. During two years Faisal so labored daily, putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tiny pieces which made up Arabian society [that] there was no blood feud left active in any of the districts through which he had pa.s.sed."

What made the system work was a collective faith in the mediator's impartiality, but it was an arrangement that came with a harsh side: when necessary, the peacemaker also had to act as the dispenser of justice.

The horror of what lay before him in Wadi Kitan seemed to slowly dawn on Lawrence. If the Ageyl insisted on Hamed's death, then it had to be so; this was the law of the desert. But while his execution by Salem's Ageyl kinsmen might ensure short-term peace on the journey to Abdullah's camp, once word of it reached the larger rebel community it was sure to spark a blood vendetta between the Ageyl, a very important and numerous tribe, and the many Moroccans who had joined the revolt. The only real solution, then, was for an impartial third party to carry out Hamed's execution, and in Wadi Kitan that night there was only one person who was "a stranger and kinless." As Lawrence would recall in Seven Pillars, "I made [Hamed] enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain.... I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments' delay, which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest."

But the first bullet failed to kill the man. Instead, Hamed fell to the ground shrieking and thras.h.i.+ng, the blood spreading over his clothes in spurts. Lawrence fired again, but was so shaky he only struck Hamed's wrist. "He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body s.h.i.+vered a little."

It was the first man Lawrence had ever killed. Stumbling his way back up to his perch among the rocks, he immediately lay down and fell into exhausted sleep. By dawn, he was so ill that the others had to hoist him into his saddle to continue the journey.

AARON AARONSOHN HAD arrived-or at least he was sufficiently susceptible to kind words and respectful audiences to imagine so.

By the middle of March 1917, the man who had so long wandered the bureaucratic wilderness of Cairo was finally being recognized by the British intelligence community as one of their most important a.s.sets, the conduit for a fount of information beginning to come in from enemy-held Palestine. With tremendous satisfaction, the agronomist could note the steadily expanding number of British officers who had once given him short shrift, whether due to his temperament or his outsider status or his Jewishness-perhaps in some cases a combination of all three-but now sought his counsel, extending invitations for him to join their dinner table.

This breakthrough had begun in earnest in mid-February, when he had gone on board the spy s.h.i.+p Managem for yet another attempt to reach Athlit. This time, the weather had cooperated, and they had picked up one of Aaronsohn's confederates, a man named Liova Schneersohn. Best of all, the spy ring had been alerted to the British effort to make contact by the couriers left ash.o.r.e on previous runs, and Schneersohn brought on board with him a trove of recent intelligence reports in a waterproof satchel.

"We left at once," the agronomist noted in his diary of February 20, "happy."

With that run, the link to the Athlit spy ring was finally firmly established, and in the weeks and months ahead, couriers on board the British coastal runners would collect a steady supply of reports on conditions inside Palestine. The British could only be amazed at the wealth of intelligence they received-as well as rueful at not having availed themselves of the opportunity first presented a year and a half earlier. With the Jewish spy ring gradually expanded to some two dozen operatives throughout Palestine, and many of them holding prominent positions in the local government, the Athlit ring detailed everything from the location of Turkish military supply depots, to the precise number of railway troop cars pa.s.sing through the crucial junction town of Afuleh; in this last effort, they were helped by an enterprising agent who thought to open a refreshment stand alongside the train station. For their part, the Jewish conspirators finally gave their ring a code name, NILI, the Hebrew acronym for a pa.s.sage from the Book of Samuel, Nezah Israel Lo Ieshaker, or "the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or relent." That was all a bit too exotic for the British, who continued to officially refer to Aaronsohn's spy ring simply as "Organization A."