Lawrence In Arabia Part 13

Given the fast-approaching timetable for Murray's offensive in Palestine, just as welcomed was the detailed a.n.a.lysis of the region that Aaronsohn provided the British. A nineteen-page paper on the Palestinian economy auth.o.r.ed by William Ormsby-Gore in February drew heavily on the agronomist's earlier reports; Reginald Wingate was so impressed, he sent a copy on to the new foreign secretary in London, Arthur Balfour. Aaronsohn was also enlisted to make additions and corrections to The Military Handbook for South Syria, a primer British officers would carry with them as they advanced beyond Gaza. When that primer began circulating in mid-March, its breadth of information was quickly noted, as well as its source. As Aaronsohn wrote in his diary on March 20, a military acquaintance had "congratulated me on my contribution to the Handbook, saying that everybody was talking about it at headquarters. It must be so, as [his official liaison, William Edmonds] told me today they were receiving reports from everywhere saying how delighted everybody was with my work."

Naturally, Aaronsohn was also pursuing his own agenda in all this. Part of that agenda was very overt-certainly, he'd never hidden the fact that his overriding motive for joining with the British was out of concern for the future of the Jewish settlers in Palestine-but some of it was a good deal subtler. In The Military Handbook for South Syria, for example, Aaronsohn included a detailed description of most all the Jewish settlements in Palestine, along with their adjacent Arab villages. In the quick character sketches he provided of the leaders in these communities was an element of score-settling, his allies invariably described as "intelligent" and "trustworthy," his enemies as just the opposite. Thus Aaronsohn's chief Arab nemesis in Athlit was marked down as an "extortionate parasite" and "fanatical Moslem," while a Jewish banker in Tiberias with whom he'd crossed swords was skewered for his "Oriental standard of honesty." The effect was to both preemptively steer the British toward his Zionist allies and to lend the Jewish settlers in Palestine a prominence far beyond the tiny fraction of the population they actually composed. Perhaps most crucially, Aaronsohn painted a very rosy picture of the reception General Murray was likely to receive once he'd broken through at Gaza and advanced into the Palestine heartland. "The att.i.tude of the Jews all the world over towards the British regime is easy to be guessed," he wrote in late February. "Palestine under the British flag will draw steadily Jewish idealism, Jewish intelligence, Jewish capital and Jewish ma.s.ses."

The agronomist surely knew that very little of this a.s.sertion was necessarily true. Among international Jewry, Zionism remained a deeply divisive issue, and within Palestine the vast majority of Jews continued to be either loyal to the Ottoman regime or resolutely apolitical. That didn't matter; Aaronsohn's audience was British military and political leaders, and extremely rare is the war-planning staff that can resist a tale which has its own soldiers being greeted as liberating heroes.

So greatly had Aaronsohn's star risen that on March 26 he was granted a prize that had eluded him since arriving in Egypt: an audience with General Gilbert Clayton. This meeting went so well it was followed by a far lengthier one a week later. In the interim, General Murray had at last launched his Palestine offensive, and first reports told of a smas.h.i.+ng success-"a great victory over the Turks," Aaronsohn noted in his diary on March 29. On April 3, Clayton called the agronomist back to his office to hear his thoughts on how the British might drive home their advantage in the next stage of battle.

Aaron Aaronsohn was rarely bashful about sharing his opinions, and he wasn't that day with Gilbert Clayton. After a.s.serting that at no time in history had Jerusalem been captured from the south or west, he advocated that the British army continue a northern sweep along the coastal plain, and then hook back to fall upon the city from the north. In contrast to other armchair generals, of course, Aaronsohn could draw upon his encyclopedic knowledge of the land-its trails and terrain and water sources-to lend weight to his advocacy. As he noted in his diary that night, "General Clayton listened to me with much interest. I left him dreaming over the map after an invitation to come back and see him every time I had such good suggestions to make." In the same entry, the scientist allowed himself a moment of exultation. "I have succeeded in making the right party understand that it is useless to beat around the bush. Palestine is a ripe fruit. A good shakingup and it will fall in our hands."

Left unclear was just who this "our" might consist of: the Allies, the British, or the Zionists alone.

AT SUNSET ON March 28, Lawrence and his vanguard of rebel fighters climbed to the top of a rocky crag to peer over its edge. In the flat valley below, perhaps three miles away, lay Aba el Naam, a princ.i.p.al station and watering depot for the Hejaz Railway. In the failing light, Lawrence watched the Turkish army garrison-some four hundred soldiers, by best estimate-go through their evening drills.

It was reported that the Turks made frequent nighttime patrols around the perimeters of their railway garrisons to compensate for their sense of isolation. This was unpleasant news to Lawrence; his vanguard consisted of a mere thirty men, and they needed to rest after their three-day journey from Wadi Ais. A solution came to him. At nightfall, several men were dispatched to sneak close to the station and fire a few random shots in its direction. As Lawrence recounted, "The enemy, thinking it a prelude to attack, stood- to in their trenches all night, while we were comfortably sleeping."

It was a sleep Lawrence probably required more than his companions, for he was still recovering from the dysentery and fever that had held him in its grip for weeks. He also needed to have both his wits and strength about him for the a.s.sault he was planning on Aba el Naam.

After the ghastly events in Wadi Kitan, he had forced himself on, increasingly ill, until finally they made Abdullah's camp at Wadi Ais on the morning of March 15. There, after a brief conference with Abdullah in which he explained the need to immediately move against the railway, Lawrence excused himself to take a brief rest. Instead, he lay in his tent, racked with malaria, for the next ten days.

Adding to Lawrence's torment during those long days had been his knowledge of what was happening-or rather, not happening-during his incapacitation. Given Abdullah's reputation for indolence, Lawrence had figured all along that if any determined action were to be taken against the railroad, he would need to lead it himself-and this calculation proved prescient. In the infrequent moments when he was able to rally enough to venture outside his tent, Lawrence observed that Abdullah's camp had retained its climate of frivolity and relaxation just as before, that nothing like a military mobilization was taking place.

What's more, it became clear that Lawrence wasn't particularly welcome in Wadi Ais. Among Abdullah's inner coterie was a barely concealed distrust, even an animosity, toward the visiting British officer that their chief did little to dispel. For his part, Lawrence's once rather favorable opinion of Abdullah, tepid though it had been, steadily hardened into a contemptuous dislike: "His casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims," he wrote, "his friendliness became caprice, his good humor [a] love of pleasure.... Even his simplicity appeared false upon experience, and inherited religious prejudice was allowed rule over the keenness of his mind because it was less trouble to him than uncharted thought."

On March 25, at last sufficiently recovered from his illness to function, Lawrence strode into Abdullah's tent to announce he would lead an attack against the railway himself. That announcement was warmly received, for Abdullah "graciously permitted anything not calling directly upon his own energies." By approaching some of the sheikhs in Wadi Ais whom Lawrence perceived as actual warriors, he quickly won commitments for a tribally mixed a.s.sault party of some eight hundred men to fall upon the isolated train depot at Aba el Naam. The next morning, he set off ahead with his small vanguard to a.s.sess the site and work up a battle plan.

All during the day of March 29, Lawrence and his advance team moved into attack positions in the hills around the station, while closely watching the Turkish soldiers go about their routine: forming up for roll call, falling out for meals, performing desultory drills, still oblivious to the trap being set for them. Best yet, from Lawrence's perspective, was the train that chugged into view that morning and came to a halt at Aba el Naam; destroying a Turkish train would be a great bonus to the operation, and he fervently hoped it did not push off again before the main a.s.sault party arrived.

That force began to drift in that evening, but to Lawrence's dismay, it was not the eight hundred fighters he had been promised, but more on the order of three hundred. It forced him to quickly recalibrate what might be accomplished in the morning.

Throughout that night, Lawrence made his preparations. Small groups of fighters were dispatched to secrete themselves in the heights surrounding the station; once the a.s.sault got under way, the Turks would find themselves caught in an amphitheater of gunfire. One demolition team was sent to place a mine on the railway north of Aba el Naam, while he personally placed the one to the south, the first time he would put Herbert Garland's mine-laying tutorials to the personal test. It was also here where he set his sole machine gun, in a concealed gully a mere four hundred yards from the track. With Medina forty miles to the south, Lawrence figured this would be the direction the Turkish garrison would take in retreat-or conversely, the direction from which any reinforcements might come-and the machine gun with its three-man crew would turn the open ground into a slaughter yard. So exhaustive and time-consuming were his preparations that when finally the attack was launched shortly before dawn, Lawrence had to be shaken out of a fitful slumber to observe it.

It started very well. The Arabs' two mountain guns, or pack howitzers, had been tucked into hillside crevices with commanding views of the depot, and they opened up with devastating effect. Within moments, two of the station's stone buildings had taken direct hits, the depot's water tank had been punctured, and a train wagon parked on a siding set aflame. Simultaneously, the Turks scrambling for their trenches were discovering there was little protection to be found; with bullets coming in from three sides, they were just as likely to be shot in the back as in the front.

Amid the chaos, the train that had come into Aba el Naam the day before began to move off, attempting an escape south. As Lawrence watched in satisfaction, it tripped the mine he'd set, producing a puff of sand and scattered steel-but then, nothing. For what must have seemed an eternity, he waited for the machine-gun team hidden in the gully to open up, but all remained silent. Instead, the Turkish train engineers were able to dismount in perfect safety, slowly joist the engine's damaged front wheels back on the track, then gather steam for a limping journey on to Medina.

Shortly after, Lawrence called off the a.s.sault. Turkish reinforcements would surely soon be on their way, and those soldiers below who had survived the initial melee were now protected by the cloak of thick black smoke that enveloped the station from the burning wagon. The only alternative to withdrawal, Lawrence reasoned, was a frontal a.s.sault against the Turkish trenches, an option likely to be as murderously futile at Aba el Naam as it had been on a thousand other battlefields.

Measured in terms of casualties-the way military men usually gauge such things-the engagement had been a great success. At the cost of a single fighter wounded, the Arabs had killed or wounded some seventy Turkish soldiers, taken another thirty prisoner, and undoubtedly disrupted traffic on the Hejaz Railway for some days to come. For Lawrence, though, it was a hollow victory, diminished by the knowledge of what might have been. If the machine-gun crew in the gulley had acted as planned, the hobbled train would have been shot to pieces rather than allowed to escape; as Lawrence soon learned, the crew had simply abandoned their position once the fighting around the depot started, either because they wanted to witness it or because they felt exposed being so far removed from the main rebel force. Similarly, if he'd had the eight hundred fighters promised back in Wadi Ais rather than the three hundred who had shown up, the outnumbered garrison in Aba el Naam could have been annihilated. Denied the unqualified victory he'd hoped for, Lawrence would only say about the battle that "we did not wholly fail."

Surely deepening his disappointment was what the experience said of the Arab Revolt going forward. In urging Faisal to make for Syria by concentrating his attacks inland, Lawrence had vaguely talked of overrunning the isolated Turkish garrisons along the railway as they went. But what were the real prospects of that happening given the example of Aba el Naam? If the Arabs couldn't sufficiently organize to defeat four hundred backline guardpost soldiers in a skirmish where they had commanded the heights and enjoyed complete surprise, what would happen when they were confronted by the several-thousand-man garrisons that awaited in the larger rail towns in southern Syria-let alone the ten thousand frontline troops who stood at their backs in Medina?

Yet, in a different way, the engagement at Aba el Naam proved something of a seminal event for Lawrence, as it lent proof to an idea-perhaps more accurately, a constellation of ideas-he had begun to formulate. By his own account, that process had started during those long days of illness spent lying in his tent at Wadi Ais.

At its core was the question of what the Arab rebels were truly capable of in the face of the Turkish army. Virtually to a man, the British advisors sent to the Hejaz since the beginning of the revolt were derisive of the Arabs' fighting abilities. Indeed, Lawrence had shared something of that opinion with his observation that a single company of entrenched Turkish soldiers could put the entire rebel army to flight.

The problem with this view, Lawrence was coming to realize, was not just that it held the Arabs to European standards of warfare-standards totally unsuited to the Arabian terrain-but that it rather blinded those advisors to see the tremendous advantage that terrain might offer. In a word, s.p.a.ce. Some j257,000 square miles of open s.p.a.ce.

"And how would the Turks defend all that?" Lawrence asked. "No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? ... Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked."

If alien to many in the hidebound British military structure of the day, none of this was truly revolutionary, but rather the cla.s.sic strategy-by-default of weaker military forces throughout history. After all, if one is outmanned or outgunned, charging straight at the enemy only ensures getting to the cemetery or surrender table that much quicker. What was unique was how Lawrence saw its application to the Arabian war.

Ever since his arrival, the overriding goal of both the Arab rebels and their British advisors had been capturing Medina, the event that would rid Arabia of four centuries of Turkish rule and allow the theater of operations to move north. The current campaign to prevent the Turks' withdrawal from Medina had thrown a new complication into the mix, but the end goal hadn't changed; for Briton and Arab alike, seeing the Ottoman flag come down from Islam's second holiest city was the prize that would open the road to others. What Lawrence now saw was that Medina should not be taken, either by force or by surrender: "The Turk was harmless there. In prison in Egypt he would cost us food and guards. We wanted him to stay at Medina, and every other distant place, in the largest numbers."

The proper strategy going forward, in Lawrence's new estimation, was to keep the Turks settled into Medina almost indefinitely. To do that, it didn't mean shutting down the Hejaz Railway altogether, as the British were hoping to do, but rather allowing that supply line to operate at just enough capacity to keep the Turkish garrison on life support. Sustained enough to survive, but too weak to withdraw or go on the offensive, that garrison would then essentially become prisoners-even better than prisoners because the burden of sustaining them would continue to fall on the enemy.

This concept didn't apply only to Medina. Once that garrison was rendered impotent, Lawrence foresaw, the Arabs could take their rebellion into Syria and pursue the same strategy there: ceding the larger garrison towns to the Turks while they roamed the countryside striking at soft spots of their choosing, constantly disrupting the enemy supply lines until the Turkish presence was limited to an atoll of armed islands amid an Arab-liberated sea.

Once this idea of the Arab force "drifting about like a gas" came to him, it was probably inevitable that Lawrence's thoughts turned to that place on the map that had been a gnawing concern for over two months: Aqaba.

The tricky thing about Aqaba from the Arab perspective was that while it presented a trap should they go into it as junior partners of the British and French, the port was still vital for them if they hoped to push into Syria. If somehow the mountain range that lay between Aqaba and the Hejaz Railway could be wrested from the Turks, the Arabs would then enjoy a mere sixty-mile-long supply line for their operations in southern Syria, rather than the three-hundred-mile line from Wejh. But how to clear those mountains, and how to do it without being beholden to the British and French?

In pondering this dilemma earlier, Lawrence had settled on a rather obvious and conventional solution, pointing out that as the Arab forces moved north along the rail line, clearing the towns of Turks as they went, the Turkish garrison in the side spur of Aqaba would eventually be cut off; an Arab side force could then be sent over the mountains from the inland side to capture it. Now, however, with the "drifting like gas" concept to mind, he began formulating a far more audacious scheme. Taking Aqaba didn't have to wait until the Turks' inland garrison towns were taken, nor did it have to wait until the Arabs advanced north en ma.s.se. Instead, Lawrence believed that a very small and mobile force of Arab fighters might pa.s.s undetected all the way to the vicinity of Maan, the inland terminus of the road to Aqaba, and there conduct a series of seemingly random diversionary raids. With the Turks put on high alert by these attacks-which meant standing to in their defensive positions-and unsure where they might come next, the Arab force could then cross the mountains and fall on Aqaba from the landward side before anyone in the Turkish military leaders.h.i.+p had time to react.

It was with these ideas in mind-still embryonic, certainly the staggering logistical issues involved not yet worked out-that Lawrence returned to Abdullah's camp from his railway raiding forays in early April. There he found a plaintive note from Faisal awaiting him.

"I was very sorry to hear that you were ill," Faisal wrote in awkward French. "I hope that you are already better and that you would like to come back to us in a short time, as soon as possible. Your presence with me is very indispensable, in view of urgency of questions and the pace of affairs." He closed in a somewhat whiny tone. "It was not at all your promise to stay there so long. So I hope that you will return here as soon as you receive this letter."

As quickly as he could manage, Lawrence set out for Wejh.

Chapter 12.

An Audacious Scheme 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 pa.s.sage 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sault 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 communique. 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 communiques, 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 a.s.sessment 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sault. 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 ash.o.r.e-raising the specter of Syria being stolen away in a French fait accompli. Faisal's apprehensions had been further stoked by a visit from edouard Bremond 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 Bremond, 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 Bremond 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage 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 Francois 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-p.r.o.nged 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 grat.i.tude 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, Francois 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 princ.i.p.al 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 const.i.tuencies-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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 appet.i.te for creative solutions had been the promotion of Mark Sykes to the position of a.s.sistant 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 emigre 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 grat.i.tude. (This surely negated any taint that might have attached to his also being the older brother of Minna Weizmann, the erstwhile lover of Curt Prfer, 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 a.s.sembled 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sertion 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 astonis.h.i.+ng reply that "the French have no particular position in Palestine and are not ent.i.tled to anything there." These were just two more faulty a.s.sertions-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 circ.u.mstances 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 sh.o.r.es 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 191213, 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 ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 bypa.s.s 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 a.s.sault at Gaza on March 26, they came rus.h.i.+ng 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-Pa.s.sover, 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 s.h.i.+p 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. Rus.h.i.+ng 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumed leaders.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p offsh.o.r.e. 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.s.sault, 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 a.s.saults 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.