Lawrence In Arabia Part 14

"At last!" Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. "We immediately broached intimate subjects. He told me that since he was talking with a Jewish patriot, he would entrust me with very secret matters-some of which were not even known to the Foreign Office."

Sykes filled him in on his clandestine meeting with the British Zionist leaders at the London townhouse on February 7, as well as expounded on a new formula for Middle East peace he'd recently devised, a scheme that called for a grand alliance of the Jews, the Arabs, and the remnants of the Armenians. With such an alliance, Sykes confidently explained, the Arabs could be made compliant-they had to know that without Jewish and British support, their independence bid would fail-but would also gain the clout to defy the French. At the same time, such a pact would freeze out the grasping Italians, marginalize the Russians, create a pro-British buffer state in protection of Egypt and India, all while paying lip service to the anticolonial demands of Britain's newest ally, the United States. How the Arabophobic Aaronsohn responded to this dizzying graph-paper concoction-its complexity only surpa.s.sed by its absurdity-isn't known. Most likely, he simply listened in respectful silence; after all, he had pressing matters of his own to take up with Mark Sykes.

If other British officials had been too distracted to pay attention to the predicament of Jaffa's Jewish population, not so the War Cabinet's new a.s.sistant secretary. Instead, it appears Sykes instantly grasped the potential propaganda bonanza Aaronsohn's news provided, a way to propel those still noncommittal elements of international Jewry toward the Zionist-British cause. He quickly dispatched Aaronsohn to work up a memo on the Jaffa situation, and to meet with him again the next morning.

In writing on the plight of the Armenians five months earlier, Aaronsohn had paid grudging respect to Djemal Pasha, pointing out that despite his personality flaws and failures as an administrator, the Syrian governor had been resolute in trying to stop the Armenian ma.s.sacres and in alleviating the suffering of the survivors. The agronomist had also at times benefited from Djemal's changeable and oddly courteous nature, his personal appeals to him winning the release of Absalom Feinberg after his arrest as a potential spy, as well as the modification of an array of edicts injurious to Jewish settlers. As he sat down to write his account for Mark Sykes on the afternoon of April 27, however, Aaronsohn appreciated that here was a golden opportunity to advance the Zionist cause, and to fully capitalize on that opportunity meant creative license would have to be taken. The primary victim of that creativity was to be Djemal Pasha.

Reconvening with Mark Sykes at 9:15 the next morning, Aaronsohn handed over his memorandum on Jaffa. In quick order, Sykes fired off a top-secret cable to the Foreign Office asking them to get hold of Chaim Weizmann at the English Zionist Federation and deliver the following message: "Aaron Aaronsohn asks me to inform you that Televiv [the Jewish enclave of Jaffa] has been sacked. 10,000 Palestinian Jews are now without home or food. Whole yeshuv [settlement] is threatened with destruction. Jemal [Pasha] has publicly stated that Armenian policy will now be applied to Jews. Pray inform [Jewish] centers without naming Aaron Aaronsohn or source of information."

The first to heed the call was the Jewish Chronicle, Britain's preeminent Zionist newspaper. On May 4, under subheadlines ent.i.tled "Grave Reports-Terrible Outrages-Threats of Wholesale Ma.s.sacre," readers were informed, "It is with profound sorrow and concern that the Jewish Chronicle learns, from an absolutely reliable source, the very gravest news of the Jews in Palestine.... Tel Aviv, the beautiful Garden City suburb of Jaffa, has been sacked and lies a mere heap of ruins, while similar wanton destruction has in all probability taken place in other specifically Jewish parts of Palestine."

Taking up the fiction about statements made by the Syrian governor, the Chronicle continued, "But even worse is threatened. For the Turkish Governor, Djemal Pasha, has proclaimed his intention of the authorities [sic] to wipe out mercilessly the Jewish population of Palestine, his public statement being that the Armenian policy of ma.s.sacre is to be applied to the Jews. If this dire and dastardly threat is carried into effect, it will mean not alone that thousands of Jews ... will be put to the sword in cold blood, but that in addition the whole of the work of Palestinian re-settlement will be utterly destroyed."

Over the next few days, the grim news out of Palestine reverberated through Jewish communities in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, and drew anguished appeals to their governments that some kind of action be taken. In the case of the British Foreign Office leaders.h.i.+p, however, just what could be done was not at all clear. "I regret," one senior diplomat commented on the same day the Chronicle story appeared, "that no action by us seems in any way feasible."

But at least one British official saw in the Jaffa story the chance to take matters to an entirely new level, not just to sway international Jewish opinion but to bring pressure to bear on his own government. This was William Ormsby-Gore, the Conservative member of Parliament who had been so impressed by Aaron Aaronsohn during his time in Cairo at the Arab Bureau; in May 1917, Ormsby-Gore was back in London and working with Mark Sykes on the War Cabinet's Middle Eastern affairs desk. While Sykes had left Cairo for a brief trip to Arabia on April 30, thus falling out of easy communication, he found Ormsby-Gore's cable awaiting his return to Egypt on May 9.

"I think we ought to use pogroms in Palestine as propaganda," Ormsby-Gore wrote. "Any spicy tales of atrocity would be eagerly welcomed by the propaganda people here, and Aaron Aaronsohn could send some lurid stories to the Jewish papers."

Sykes received no argument from Aaronsohn. The two had another long meeting on May 11, at which, the scientist reported, they "discussed the question of American Jews and of the propaganda we could do there [sic] now in recruiting for the Palestine front. Sir Mark offered to forward any telegrams or letters which I might care to send."

Perhaps mindful of his own growing reputation for exaggeration, Sykes had the foresight to send Aaronsohn's new and expanded missive out under the signature of High Commissioner Reginald Wingate. "During Pa.s.sover," Wingate's cable to London that same day read, "the entire Jewish population of Jaffa expelled towards north. Homes, property ransacked, population in flight robbed with connivance of Turkish Authorities. Jews resisting [were] pillaged, hanged. Thousands wandering helplessly on roads, starving." And now there was a frightening new development in the telling, an extending of the evacuations to the much larger Jewish population in Jerusalem. "Ma.s.ses of young Jerusalem Jews deported, northward, destination unknown. Forcible evacuation of [Jerusalem Jewish] colony imminent."

Under Wingate's signature, circulation of this cable wasn't limited to the Foreign Office leaders.h.i.+p; instead, it landed on the desks of the king, the prime minister, and the entire War Cabinet. At the same time, Aaronsohn gave Sykes a list of some fifty Zionist leaders throughout the world to be immediately notified. Now the Jaffa story went the 1917 version of viral. "Cruelties to Jews Deported in Jaffa," screamed a headline in the New York Times, "Djemal Pasha Blamed," while the American government, so recently enlisted to the war effort, joined an international chorus in denouncing this latest outrage by the Constantinople regime. Nowhere was that chorus louder than in Great Britain.

The Turks and their German allies might be forgiven for being slow to respond to this onslaught of condemnation; after all, the Jaffa evacuation had occurred in early April, and it was now mid-May. After initially refusing to dignify the charges with a response, Djemal Pasha finally flatly denied the accusations, pointing out that the entire population of Jaffa had been evacuated, not just its Jews, and that the process-unpleasant though it undoubtedly was for those affected-had been completed in an orderly and peaceful fas.h.i.+on; in fact, the governor had granted Jaffa's Jewish population special considerations during the operation denied others. As for the claims of Jews being "deported" from Jerusalem, the Syrian governor countered, there had been no evacuations there at all. These a.s.sertions were seconded by the regimes in Constantinople and Berlin, and even by a collection of Jewish leaders in Palestine, including Jerusalem's chief rabbi.

But it was too little too late. In the minds of much of the international public, the "pogrom" in Jaffa was already an established fact, the latest Central Powers atrocity to join the "rape of Belgium" and the ma.s.sacres of the Armenians. It also alerted the Zionists and their British government allies to the tremendous tool they'd been handed. Coming so closely after the fall of the hated czar and the admission of the United States into the war, the Jaffa story helped accelerate a tectonic s.h.i.+ft taking place among international Jewry, the growing conviction that their future lay with the Entente.

Of more immediate impact, it played to the argument of the more radical Zionists that any accommodation or compromise with Turkey was no longer possible. In early June, with the Jaffa story still raging, Aaron Aaronsohn penned cables to some of the most prominent leaders in the American Jewish community, men who continued to be cautious about wholeheartedly embracing the Zionist cause and who in some cases still imagined the future of Jewish settlement in Palestine as best served by Ottoman rule. To lend further authority to Aaronsohn's message-among its recipients was a sitting Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, as well as a future one, Felix Frankfurter-Mark Sykes arranged for the cables to be routed through the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton for delivery. Typical was the cable received by Judge Mayer Sulzberger in Philadelphia: "Turkish atrocities on Jewish populations in Palestine reported on reliable information," Aaronsohn wrote. "It is high time to abandon our previous forgiving att.i.tude towards Turks.... Now that Turks have committed those crimes, Jewish att.i.tude and American public opinion must undergo complete change. Only efficient way to quick release of Jewish populations from Turkish clutches is to attack latter thoroughly in the field and everywhere.... We must present a united front, and concentrate Jewish influence on wresting Palestine from Turkish hands."

In that same month of June, a rather different version of the Jaffa story began to emerge. In response to Entente appeals, Spain, Sweden, and the Vatican, all neutral ent.i.ties in the conflict, sent envoys to investigate what had happened there. Both the Spanish and Vatican envoys quickly concluded that the reports of Jewish ma.s.sacres and persecutions were without foundation, while their Swedish counterpart went even further. "In many ways," he wrote, "the Jewish community of Jaffa had fared far better-and certainly no worse-than the resident Moslem population in the evacuation." Shortly afterward, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem also reported that the accounts of violence against the Jaffa Jews were "grossly exaggerated." Even Aaron Aaronsohn was ultimately forced to concede that the two Jewish men allegedly "lynched" in Jaffa had actually been arrested on charges of looting, and evidently not hung after all.

It didn't matter, of course. In war, truth is whatever people can be led to believe, and Djemal Pasha had just handed his enemies a "truth" that would change Middle Eastern history. The fiction of what happened in Jaffa in 1917-a fiction repeated as fact by most historians writing on the period since-would now become the ur-myth for the contention that the Jewish community in Palestine could never be safe under Muslim rule, that to survive it needed a state of its own.

ON APRIL 21, a British navy patrol boat put in to Wejh harbor with a cargo of intense interest to Captain T. E. Lawrence: eleven Turkish prisoners of war. Until the previous morning, the men had been part of the Turkish garrison defending Aqaba.

Acting on rumors that a German minelaying operation was under way in the vicinity of Aqaba, three British patrol boats had closed on the port just before dawn on April 20 and put ash.o.r.e a landing party, catching the tiny garrison off guard. The brief ensuing gun battle left two Turkish soldiers dead, eleven captured, and the rest-some fifty or sixty by best estimate-taken to the hills. Since six of the prisoners were Syrian draftees and expressed a desire to join with the rebel forces of Faisal ibn Hussein, one of the British patrol boats had brought them down to Wejh for questioning.

Over the course of that day, Lawrence interrogated each of the Syrians in turn. From them he learned that while the Aqaba garrison fluctuated in size, it rarely consisted of more than one hundred soldiers. Of even greater import considering the scheme he was hatching, the total number of Turkish soldiers billeted in the blockhouses along the sixty-mile Wadi Itm trail between Aqaba and Maan was at most just two hundred more. It meant that Lawrence's plan just might work; if he could raise an Arab force at the eastern terminus of that trail and launch a lightning advance over the mountains, he could sweep the isolated Turkish garrisons before him and fall on Aqaba practically unopposed.

But just because Lawrence saw the opportunity before him, it didn't necessarily follow that anyone else in the British military would. Still in effect was Gilbert Clayton's March 8 directive that the Arabs not move on Aqaba. Instead, all attention was to remain focused on attacking the Hejaz Railway to block the Turkish garrison's withdrawal from Medina (it would still be some weeks before the British realized the Turks had no intention of leaving Medina), an imperative that allowed for no side adventures.

Of course, the best way to avoid having one's ideas shot down is to never explicitly voice them. Rather than take his proposal up with Clayton directly, Lawrence chose to engage the two other British officers then based in Wejh in a generalized discourse about the insights into guerrilla warfare he had gained during his convalescence in Wadi Ais. In particular, he would later claim, he expounded on the foolishness of trying to take Medina from the Turks, and the unfeasibility of trying to organize the Arabs into a blocking force on the Hejaz Railway. Instead, he suggested, they needed to spread the Turks thin by expanding the war front as much as possible. Among other things, that meant going north with "a highly mobile, highly equipped striking force of the smallest size, and use it successively at distributed points of the Turkish line."

To Lawrence's listeners in Wejh, both career military men, it may have all sounded intriguing, but also like little more than a distraction to the mission at hand. This was a reaction that Lawrence was rather counting on. "Everyone was too busy with his own work to give me specific authority to launch out on mine," he would recount. "All I gained was a hearing, and a qualified admission that my counter-offensive [idea] might be a useful diversion."

It's hard to imagine how his fellow officers might have lent Lawrence "specific authority" for his scheme, since it's clear from their own field reports that he never indicated that this diversionary force might make for Aqaba. Lawrence adopted an even more oblique manner in his approach to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah, informing his superior that Auda Abu Tayi would soon be taking a raiding party toward Maan, and that Lawrence was considering accompanying the party to ensure their actions complemented Britain's current military objectives. Wilson concurred, reporting to Clayton on May 1 that "Auda is to travel north, probably accompanied by Lawrence, with their first aim to disrupt the railway around Maan." Omitted was any mention of what their second aim might be.

In Seven Pillars, a book rife with self-justifications, Lawrence would offer a truly breathtaking one to explain his decision to strike out on his own: "The element I would withdraw from the railway scheme was only my single self and, in the circ.u.mstances, this amount was negligible, since I felt so strongly against it that my help there would have been half-hearted. So I decided to go my own way, with or without orders."

In other words, as Lawrence no longer saw the point in trying to shut down the railway, it was really best for all concerned that he go find something else to do. Small wonder why so many of his military superiors found the Oxford scholar infuriating.

Underlying this, though, was an even grander psychological rationalization for the action Lawrence was contemplating. In his mind, upholding the promises made to the Arabs truly would serve Great Britain's long-term interests, not just as a point of honor but as a way to minimize the influence of other European powers-allies today, perhaps, but surely compet.i.tors again tomorrow-throughout the region. A vital first step in this campaign was to allow the Arabs to take their revolution into Syria, and thus steal that land away from France. The core problem, in Lawrence's estimation, was that Great Britain had yet to grasp what was best for her, and he simply didn't have time to explain.

BEFORE SETTING OUT for Aqaba, Lawrence was to have one more fateful meeting in Wejh. It came on the morning of May 7, when a British destroyer briefly put into the harbor. On board was Mark Sykes.

The two had first met during Sykes's fact-finding mission to Egypt in 1915, and despite their vast differences in personality-Sykes gregarious and charming, Lawrence taciturn and painfully shy-had reportedly gotten along quite well. That didn't last long. As with most everyone else in the Cairo military intelligence office, Lawrence's opinion of the diplomat had rapidly soured once details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement became known to them in the spring of 1916. Certainly, Sykes's continuing fondness for firing off fatuous memos proposing neat solutions to the region's problems-proposals often in direct opposition to those he had advocated weeks or even days earlier-had done nothing to rehabilitate his image in Lawrence's eyes in the year since. In his view, Sykes fairly epitomized that vexing feature of Edwardian England, the aristocratic gadfly, a man who could gain a hearing for his reckless ideas by virtue of his pedigree and the breezy confidence with which he voiced them.

In their meeting on May 7, however, Lawrence was to discover something else about the man; for want of a more decorous term, Mark Sykes was also a liar.

Indeed, that the two were meeting in Wejh at all that day was a by-product of Sykes having been caught out in his latest round of trickery. The diplomat was just returning from an audience with King Hussein, an encounter Sykes had wished to avoid but which had been forced on him by the resident agent in Jeddah, Colonel Cyril Wilson.

For all his stiff-necked priggishness, the swagger-stick-toting Wilson had gradually emerged as the voice of conscience for British policy in the Middle East. In the long debate of late 1916 over whether a British brigade should be deployed in the Hejaz, Wilson had initially been among its fiercest advocates, and had been tasked by his superior, Reginald Wingate, to compel King Hussein to that view. Over the course of numerous meetings with Hussein, however, it had gradually occurred to the resident agent that perhaps the old man in Mecca knew his subjects and the politics of western Arabia better than the Allied advisors newly arrived to the scene. Ultimately, when Wingate had once again ordered his underling to lean on Hussein over the matter, Wilson, heretofore regarded as something of a Wingate yes-man, had essentially refused to do so and been instrumental in seeing the proposal finally shelved.

Wilson had had a far more visceral reaction upon learning of Sykes's scheme to avoid Hussein in favor of his sham negotiations with the Syrian "delegates" in Cairo. In late March he had sent a long and anguished letter to Clayton enumerating both the problems inevitably to come from this act of deception and the benefits to be derived by being honest with Hussein. "We now have a chance, which is not likely to occur again, of winning the grat.i.tude of millions of Moslems of the [British] Empire," he wrote. "For Heaven's sake, let us be straight with the old man; I am convinced it will pay us in the end."

While that appeal had been in vain, it seemed the good colonel in Jeddah was quite capable of backroom maneuvers of his own. At his next meeting with Hussein, he urged the king to formally request a meeting with Mark Sykes. When Wilson forwarded that request to Reginald Wingate, another man who, despite his interventionist impulses, held to the British tradition of fair play, it quickly became an invitation Sykes couldn't refuse. On April 30, with his and Picot's conferences with the Syrian "delegates" in Cairo concluded, Sykes had boarded the British destroyer in Port Suez and set off for Jeddah.

Even for a supremely self-confident man, it must have been a stressful voyage. It was one thing to bamboozle a few preselected functionaries in Cairo with no knowledge of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence; it would surely be quite another to fool one of its actual authors. But then, Sykes had other cards to play. Chief among them was his ability to control the flow of information. Just as he had arranged to have a first meeting with the Syrians in Cairo without Picot present, so now he would be meeting alone with Hussein. As a result, should any future dispute arise over what had or had not been discussed, it would be the word of a highly respected British envoy against that of a mercurial desert chieftain long known for forgetfulness and willful misinterpretation.

It might have all worked out just fine-at least for the time being, which was all Mark Sykes could reasonably hope for-if he hadn't decided to stop off in Wejh en route to confer with Faisal. By chance, Lawrence was away on a brief reconnaissance trip when Sykes called on May 2, but he got a full report from Faisal on what had transpired upon his return to Wejh two days later. By then, Sykes was already on his way to Jeddah and his meeting with King Hussein.

Judging by the report he sent to Reginald Wingate on the evening of May 5, Sykes's foray into shuttle diplomacy could scarcely have gone better: "On 2nd May, I saw Sherif Faisal at Wejh and explained to him the principle of the Anglo-French agreement in regard to an Arab confederation; after much argument he accepted the principle and seemed satisfied." That success had presaged one even more remarkable, for that very afternoon Sykes had met with King Hussein. "In accordance with my instructions, I explained the principle of the [Anglo-French] agreement as regards an Arab confederation or State.... I impressed upon the King the importance of Franco-Arab friends.h.i.+p and I at least got him to admit that it was essential to Arab development in Syria, but this after a very lengthy argument."

A close reader of that May 5 report might have been disquieted by the peculiar symmetry of these two meetings-forthrightness by Sykes in outlining French-British designs in the region, followed by Arab argument, followed ultimately by Arab acceptance-while the truly cynical might have concluded that, with his emphasis on the quarreling involved, Sykes was already laying in his defense should there be future disagreement with Faisal and Hussein over what had been said or agreed to. In the interim, though, the trip was a triumph of diplomacy, a crucial first step toward resolving the nettlesome issues that stood between Britain and France and their Arab allies.

"Please tell Monsieur Picot," Sykes ended his May 5 cable to Wingate, "that I am satisfied with my interview with Faisal and the King, as they both now stand at the same point as was reached at our last joint meeting with the 3 Syrian delegates in Cairo."

What Mark Sykes didn't know, of course, was that in Faisal ibn Hussein he had been speaking with a man quite aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement-courtesy of T. E. Lawrence-and in no way did Sykes's vague and generalized discussion of that pact on May 2 match up with what the Arab leader already knew. Nevertheless, whether hewing to the Arab negotiating tradition of not tipping one's hand until absolutely necessary, or worried that Lawrence would be exposed as his source, Faisal had not confronted the diplomat over his obfuscations at the time.

Not that he was in any better position to do so when Sykes stopped back by on May 7. Faisal's knowledge of the true framework of Sykes-Picot, as opposed to the b.a.s.t.a.r.dized version Sykes had chosen to tell him, was the great and dangerous secret that he and Lawrence shared, and to reveal it now could only invite disaster: for Faisal, estrangement and perhaps abandonment by his British benefactors; for Lawrence, immediate transfer and probable court-martial.

On the other hand, Lawrence did have sanctioned knowledge of Sykes-Picot, which meant he on his own could confront Sykes over the sanitized version told to Faisal-and, presumably, to Hussein. All indications are that Lawrence provoked just such a confrontation. Neither man was to make record of their meeting in Wejh, but it appears to have been a highly contentious one. From that day on, Lawrence's att.i.tude toward Sykes would be hostile. For his part, Sykes would miss few chances to try to denigrate or marginalize Lawrence in any way he could.

On a more personal level, it seems that encounter with Sykes in Wejh came to simultaneously haunt Lawrence and to provide a certain kind of relief. He stood vindicated in not trusting in the honor of his government, and in imparting to Faisal its secret plan to betray the Arab cause. To whatever degree his conscience had been bothered by that decision, in the slippery schemes of Mark Sykes it was now cleansed.

At the same time, he appreciated that in his countryman was a particularly formidable rival. By comparison, edouard Bremond was easy, his various schemes made predictable by his singular pursuit of French hegemony. Mark Sykes, by contrast, was a man ruled by whim, who didn't feel bound by-perhaps at times didn't even remember-the myriad promises that tripped so easily from his lips. He was able to stay ahead of it all by a talent for deceit, but since he was in a position of power, pulling the levers from Jeddah to London and all points in between, at the end of the day there would probably be no final appeal to British ideals of honor or justice, all would be sacrificed to convenience. The only recourse for the Arabs, then, was to try to change the facts on the ground, to strike a blow that might upend the plans of the dealmakers.

It was with such thoughts that, two days later, Lawrence set out on the long and dangerous trek toward Aqaba. For what would soon become one of the most audacious and celebrated military exploits of World War I, his accompanying "army" consisted of fewer than forty-five Arab warriors.

Chapter 13.

Aqaba Never doubt Great Britain's word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear.

KING HUSSEIN TO HIS SON FAISAL, MAY 1917.

His Sherifial Majesty [King Hussein] evidently suffers from the defects of character and ignorance of system common to Oriental potentates.... The task of guiding an Oriental ruler or government in the way they should go is no light one-as I know to my cost-and you have my fullest sympathy. It must be heartbreaking work at times.

REGINALD WINGATE TO CYRIL WILSON, JULY 20, 1917.

It was a moment when the awful burden of leaders.h.i.+p fell upon Lawrence as if a great weight, reminiscent of what had occurred in Wadi Kitan two months earlier. Then, the mantle of authority had required him to execute a man. Now it required him to try to save one, but quite possibly to lose his own life in the effort.

It was midmorning on May 24, his party's fifth day in El Houl. Arabic for "the Terror," El Houl is a vast trackless and waterless expanse in northern Arabia empty of even the smallest signs of life, and Lawrence had dreaded that leg of their journey to Syria ever since leaving Wejh. Reality had been worse than the imagining. Within hours of entering El Houl, the forty-five-man caravan had been buffeted by a ferocious headwind, "a half-gale," in Lawrence's estimation, "so dry that our shriveled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped." The wind, and the burning, blinding sand it kicked up, continued almost without pause for the next four days.

To endure in such situations, humans tend to retreat into a kind of closed-off mental state, their entire focus honed to simply trying to reach the end. Such was the case with Lawrence and Auda's party in El Houl, so much so that on the morning of May 24, no one seemed to take note of the riderless camel padding alongside the others. Perhaps they a.s.sumed she was one of the baggage camels that traditionally lagged behind, or that her rider had switched to another camel and was to be found elsewhere along their extended line. Most likely, in their semihibernative states they simply couldn't be roused to care. When finally Lawrence investigated the mysterious camel, he discovered it was the mount of Gasim.

"A fanged and yellow-faced outlaw," Gasim was a native of the Syrian city of Maan, and Lawrence had brought him along on the trek in hopes that he might make contact with other Arab nationalists in his hometown. Of course, this also made Gasim an outsider among the traveling Howeitat and Ageyl tribesmen and, in the harsh code of the desert, just as friendless in a crisis as the condemned Hamed had been at Wadi Kitan. As Lawrence recounted, Gasim's status now "s.h.i.+fted the difficulty to my shoulders."

Perhaps indicative of the stress El Houl had put on his own reasoning skills, Lawrence made a most foolhardy decision, not only to go back alone in search of Gasim, but not even to tell the others he was doing so. Within a very short distance, he discovered, all trace of their path had vanished, the camels' tracks in the sand swept away by the scouring wind, and then the caravan itself receded until it was lost in the murk. To somehow find Gasim and then return to the caravan, Lawrence could only rely on the compa.s.s readings he'd periodically noted in his diary and trust he hadn't erred.

It was fifteen days since they had set out. In Bedouin tradition, a number of tribal chiefs, including Faisal, had accompanied them the first few miles out of Wejh by way of farewell, and then the forty-five or so travelers had headed off into the northeastern darkness, the last anyone in the Hejaz would hear of them for over two months.

They traveled light. Along with a few rifles and 20,000 gold sovereigns-to be disbursed among Syrian tribal leaders they hoped to win to the rebel cause-each man carried in his saddlebags some forty-five pounds of flour. That and water would be their staples until they reached their initial staging ground, the Wadi Sirhan depression on the Syrian frontier, in an estimated three weeks' time.

Despite being struck by a new round of fever and boils, Lawrence would recall the first days of that journey in almost idyllic terms, the beginning of a great adventure. It was also during this time that there occurred one of the more intriguing side stories to his time in Arabia, the account of how he came to obtain his two camp orderlies, given the names Daud and Farraj in Seven Pillars (their actual names were Ali and Othman).

It occurred during a day of idleness when, as Lawrence rested his weary boil-covered body in the shadow of a rock escarpment, a young boy rushed up beseeching his help. Having fled from a nearby Ageyl encampment, Daud offered that his best friend, Farraj, was about to be severely beaten by the camp commander for accidentally burning down a tent; a word from Lawrence, the boy suggested, might stay the punishment. That theory was discredited when Lawrence took the matter up with the pa.s.sing Ageyl camp commander, Saad, a few moments later. Explaining that the two boys were constantly getting into trouble and that an example had to be made, Saad instead offered a Solomon-like solution in deference to Lawrence's appeal: Daud could halve his friend's punishment by submitting to the other half himself. "Daud leaped at the chance," Lawrence wrote, "kissed my hand and Saad's and ran off up the valley."

In Seven Pillars, Lawrence would strongly suggest that the Farraj-Daud relations.h.i.+p was a s.e.xual one, describing it as "an instance of the eastern boy-and-boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable." In the process, Lawrence was to add to speculations-still a point of heated debate in some circles nearly a century later-about his own s.e.xuality. Much of that speculation stems from his description of the "two bent figures, with pain in their eyes, but crooked smiles upon their lips," who showed up at his camp the next morning and begged to be taken on as his servants: "These were Daud the hasty and his love-fellow, Farraj, a beautiful, soft-framed, girlish creature, with innocent smooth face and swimming eyes." After first trying to turn the boys away, explaining he had no need of servants, Lawrence finally relented, "mainly because they looked so young and clean." From that day on, the mischievous antics of Daud and Farraj would provide lighthearted relief to Lawrence's travels.

But already in these early days of the journey, the party faced a worrisome problem. Virtually all their camels, both the baggage and mounted ones, suffered from the virulent mange endemic to Wejh, and without even the rudimentary unguents to control it-b.u.t.ter was a traditional desert remedy-many were quickly going lame or mad from it. The epidemic may have contributed to the deaths of two of the baggage camels that, during a climb through a particularly narrow defile, lost their footing and plunged to the rocks below. None of this bode well as they came to the edge of El Houl.

"In all Faisal's stud of riding-camels," Lawrence noted, "there was not one healthy. In our little expedition every camel was weakening daily. [Auda's chief lieutenant] Nasir was full of anxiety lest many break down in the forced march before us and leave their riders stranded in the desert."

The torturous nature of the pa.s.sage across El Houl was reflected in the small pocket diary Lawrence carried. Instead of the voluminous notes he normally kept on his travels, the few short fragments he managed there grew steadily more disjointed, almost nonsensical. And then, on the fifth day, Gasim disappeared.

In deciding to turn back for the lost man, Lawrence surely knew that Gasim was probably already dead; for anyone caught out in El Houl without shelter or water at that time of year, life expectancy could be measured in terms of hours. He surely also knew that if he'd made the slightest miscalculation in his compa.s.s readings, he too would soon expire. Still, he persevered-and finally, he was lucky. After an hour and a half of riding, he spotted a small black object in the far distance, an object that, as he approached, took the form of a staggering and delirious Gasim. Hoisting the man onto the back of his own camel, Lawrence turned and raced to find the others.

In David Lean's epic film, the rescue of Gasim would be immortalized in a ten-minute scene, culminating in Lawrence finally rejoining his comrades to their relieved and raucous cheers, his n.o.ble act cementing his image as a true "son of the desert." The reality was quite different. By the code of this brutal landscape, Gasim had brought his death upon himself by having failed to secure his camel when he stopped to relieve himself, and, rather than praised, Lawrence was berated by some of his comrades for having risked his life for one clearly so worthless. Furthermore, the caravan commander now administered another beating to Daud and Farraj for letting Lawrence go back alone.

ON MAY 26, 1917, two days after Lawrence's rescue of Gasim, King George V and his War Cabinet received some gladdening news. It came in the form of a top-secret cable from Reginald Wingate in Cairo, a report on Mark Sykes's latest triumphant visit to Arabia.

Following on Sykes's earlier solo visit, he and his French diplomatic counterpart, Francois Georges-Picot, had recently met with King Hussein in Jeddah in hopes of thras.h.i.+ng out a settlement between the Arabs and the French over the future status of Syria. Since their desires were almost diametrically opposed-Hussein still insisting that postwar Syria be part of a greater independent Arab nation, the French just as insistent that it come under French control-there had been little expectation of success. The first day's session confirmed this prognosis. After a tense three-hour confrontation on May 19, Picot and Hussein had parted ways even more intransigent than before.

It came as a shock, therefore, when the following morning Hussein had his interpreter read aloud to the European envoys a bold proposal: the king was now ready to accept the same future French role in the "Moslem-Syrian littoral"-presumably meaning the coastal, Lebanon portion of Syria-as the British were to a.s.sume in the Iraqi province of Baghdad. Since a victorious British army had recently placed Baghdad under military occupation, and the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement called for keeping the province under direct British control indefinitely, this Baghdad-Lebanon equation of Hussein's had the effect of suddenly ceding to the French most everything they were asking for in Lebanon. As Sykes reported to Wingate with what could only have been gross understatement, "Monsieur Picot received this very well and relations became cordial."

It was a remarkable achievement. Against all odds, Sykes had managed to make a crucial first cut through the great Gordian knot created by Britain's conflicting pacts and promises in the Middle East.

Yet for those familiar with Sykes's modus operandi there was something about this breakthrough that should have given pause. In contrast to his usual prolixity on all manner of topics, his full report on the Jeddah meetings, the most important diplomatic discussions between the Allies and King Hussein to date, ran a mere four pages, with Hussein's startling Lebanon concession dealt with in a single sentence. Additionally, neither Sykes nor Picot had pressed Hussein to commit his offer to paper, nor had they managed to obtain a copy of the pledge the king's interpreter had read aloud. Even those senior officials in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs who had been fervently wis.h.i.+ng for just such a resolution quickly began to suspect there was something altogether too neat about the deal struck in Jeddah.

Those concerns took tangible form when Stewart Newcombe arrived in Cairo on May 27 and walked into Gilbert Clayton's office. Both he and Cyril Wilson had been present for at least some of the proceedings in Jeddah, and had written up their own accounts of what had taken place. Newcombe also brought the written account of Fuad al-Kutab, Hussein's interpreter and the man who had actually presented the proposal. While they differed in specifics, all three indicated it had actually been Mark Sykes, not Hussein, who had first come up with the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. More troubling, the king appeared to have come away with a radically different idea from the Allied envoys of what that formula meant.

The most exercised over the matter was Cyril Wilson. "Although Sykes and Picot were very pleased at this happy result," he wrote, "and the Sherif had made the [Lebanon-Baghdad] proposition himself, I did not feel happy in my own my mind, and it struck me as possible that the Sherif, one of the most courteous of men, absolutely loyal to me and with complete faith in Great Britain, was verbally agreeing to a thing which he never would agree to if he knew our interpretation of what the Iraq situation is to be."

In his distressed-and rather repet.i.tive-twelve-page letter to Clayton, Wilson detailed how he had repeatedly pressed Sykes to clarify exactly what Hussein intended by the offer, only to have his concerns brushed aside. Instead, Wilson reported, the entire affair had been marked by a breezy refusal on Sykes's part to get into particulars.

If less emotional, Newcombe's protest was in many ways more striking. His time in the Hejaz had been a difficult one, he had little faith in the Arab rebels as a viable fighting force, and yet the episode in Jeddah had left him perturbed. Central to his apprehensions was a conversation he'd had with Hussein's son Faisal, who had also been in Jeddah during the envoys' visit. In making his startling offer, Newcombe reported, "[Hussein] stated to Faisal very vehemently that he was perfectly willing to do this because Sir Mark Sykes, representing the British government, had told him to, and that as Sir Mark Sykes had advised him to leave everything in [his] hands, he felt glad to do so, having absolute trust in the British government."

From Newcombe's vantage point as a British officer, this a.s.surance by Sykes, conjoined to Hussein's obviously limited awareness of what he was agreeing to, meant the British government now had a moral obligation to see the Arab Revolt through to the end. "Otherwise we are hoodwinking the Sherif and his people, and playing a very false game in which [British] officers attached to the Sherif's army are inevitably committed, and which I know causes anxiety in several officers' minds in case we let them down."

For all their unease, however, Wilson and Newcombe were either too diplomatic to call Sykes out directly, or too credulous to piece the whole scheme together. In actual fact, what had occurred in Jeddah was not a potential misunderstanding, but an intricate and very cleverly executed deception on Mark Sykes's part.

The cornerstone for that deception had been laid three weeks earlier, during Sykes's first visit to Arabia. In his similarly spare report of that trip, Sykes a.s.serted that he had fully explained the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Hussein and Faisal, and won their grudging acceptance. While that wasn't at all Faisal's a.s.sessment of their meeting, the British envoy could be confident that British officialdom would surely take his word-a sitting member of Parliament and a baronet no less-over that of an erratic Arab tribal chieftain and his warrior son. Of course, there was at least one other person who knew that Sykes had lied about his candor during that first trip, and whom British officialdom just might listen to. This was T. E. Lawrence, but to Sykes's good fortune, Lawrence had now fallen from view, embarked on his northern trek, and he remained totally incommunicado during Sykes's crucial return visit to Jeddah with Picot.

It seems Sykes was inspired to his master deception by pondering the very issue that had made such a mess of the initial Picot-Hussein meeting on May 19: Picot's insistence that France enjoy the same role in coastal Syria as the British were to a.s.sume in Baghdad. At the time, Sykes had been deeply irritated by this linkage-he wanted to keep French and British desiderata in the Middle East quite separate-and he had left the discussions in a dispirited mood. However, once back on HMS Northbrook, the British wars.h.i.+p that had brought the envoys to Jeddah and upon which they were staying, an obvious solution to his dilemma apparently occurred to Sykes.

The reason Hussein was resisting the Lebanon-Baghdad linkage was simply because he didn't want any French presence anywhere, not because he somehow knew Baghdad was slated to fall under permanent British control. The only way Hussein could have known that was if Sykes had told him of that clause in Sykes-Picot, and Sykes most certainly had not.

Instead, the last word Hussein had on British intentions in Baghdad was the vague accord he had reached with High Commissioner Henry McMahon back in late 1915. In their back-and-forth correspondence, McMahon had argued that, in light of Britain's economic interests in Iraq, the provinces of Basra and Baghdad would require "special administrative arrangements" within the future Arab nation, implying some measure of British control. In response, Hussein had offered to leave those provinces under British administration "for a short time," provided that "a suitable sum [was] paid as compensation to the Arab kingdom for the period of occupation." From all this, Sykes surmised, Hussein still held to the belief that any British presence in Iraq was to be along the lines of a short-term leasing arrangement, but that those provinces' ultimate inclusion in the greater independent Arab nation was secure. Indeed, on several recent occasions, Hussein had enigmatically a.s.sured his closest confidants, including both Faisal and Fuad al-Kutab, that he had an ironclad British promise about Iraq's future "in his pocket," even as he refused to show them the actual letters from McMahon.

To Sykes, it opened up a tantalizing prospect. Between Hussein's ignorance of Sykes-Picot, and Picot's ignorance of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, it might be possible to forge an agreement in which both sides thought they were gaining the upper hand. The ultimate beauty there was that with both sides believing they'd essentially tricked the other, neither would want to risk scuttling the deal by getting into specifics. On that same afternoon of May 19, Sykes sent an urgent message ash.o.r.e from the Northbrook asking that Fuad al-Kutab visit him.

At that meeting, Sykes impressed on Fuad the need to limit Hussein's overtures on the following day to just two points. The first, little more than a goodwill gesture, was for Hussein to announce that he would withhold support from a group of Syrian exiles who were soon to embark on an international lobbying campaign for Arab independence. The second, and obviously vastly more important, was for Hussein to cede to the Lebanon-Baghdad formula. To the nonplussed al-Kutab, Sykes was rea.s.suring, repeatedly telling the advisor to leave the matter in his hands and he would see to everything.

Even so, Hussein was wary of agreeing to the plan. He finally relented, al-Kutab related, because "he knows that Sir Mark Sykes can fight for the Arabs better than he himself in political matters, and knows that Sir Mark Sykes speaks with the authority of the British government and will therefore be able to carry out his promises." Besides, Hussein reminded al-Kutab once more, he had "a letter from Sir Henry McMahon which promises all I wish. This I know is alright, as the British government will fulfill her word."

The following morning, Fuad delivered Hussein's proclamation as directed. That afternoon, as the Northbrook sailed out of Jeddah harbor, Georges-Picot could believe France had just been handed Lebanon, while King Hussein could believe he had just maneuvered France into accepting the future independence of all of Syria.

Even if not grasping the fraud that had been perpetrated, Wilson and Newcombe were sufficiently appalled by Sykes's cavalier approach to demand a full accounting in their letters to Clayton. Wilson urged that Sykes be compelled to put in writing what he believed had been agreed to in Jeddah, and that Hussein be told precisely what British intentions truly were. "If we are not going to see the Sherif through," Wilson wrote, "and we let him down badly after all his trust in us, the very 'enviable' post of Pilgrimage Officer at Jeddah will be vacant, because I certainly could not remain."

But when it came to political gamesmans.h.i.+p, the Arabs were not necessarily rubes themselves. With his secret knowledge of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, courtesy of Lawrence, Faisal was understandably aghast at what his father had agreed to, and quickly sought to turn the tables. On May 28, he issued a public proclamation to the Syrian people calling them to arms in the cause of Arab independence, while heaping praise on Great Britain for her aid in that mission. "Doubtless in doing so," Faisal wrote, "her sole object is to see in the world an independent Arab government, established and administered by the Arabs, without any modification of the boundaries of its country." The French came in for similar treatment. After thanking France for her past contributions in Syria, Faisal noted that "we are deeply grateful to her for having joined her Ally in recognizing our independence."

Far from an accord, then, the real result of Sykes's charade in Jeddah was a deepening of the gulf between Arab and Allied aspirations in the Middle East, a schism that was soon to have very ugly and lasting repercussions. In the interim, British policymakers reverted to the strategy they knew best: do nothing, see what comes next, and hope that it all works out in the end. When asked about Faisal's proclamation, so at odds with the agreement ostensibly reached days earlier, Sykes shrugged it off as a propaganda ploy meant for domestic Arab consumption. When Clayton finally got around to taking Wilson's and Newcombe's complaints to Sykes, it was with an escape clause built in. "I do not attach very great importance to this," he wrote of Hussein's apparent confusion, "as I think that events will be too strong for him and that, in the end, he will have to fall in line, or fall out."

One man who wouldn't let things drop was the dogged Cyril Wilson. In late June 1917, fully a month after he'd first sent his complaints to Cairo and received no satisfaction, he wrote to Reginald Wingate's deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Symes, urging that Sykes be made to write out a "short statement of fact" on exactly what had been agreed to at Jeddah. As Wilson pointedly noted, "there cannot be any harm in writing a fact [sic] which Sir Mark Sykes, I understand, states he clearly explained to the Sherif."

But paper trails had already caused enough problems in the Middle East, and Symes saw no reason to add to them. "The whole question is at present in a state of flux," he answered Wilson, "and depends entirely on various developments in the war. It is therefore quite impossible to lay down anything in the least definite, and all we can do is to keep the various factions in play so far as possible until the situation becomes more clear. It is a difficult position, I know, but there it is."

On a pathetic note, perhaps the stoutest defender of British honor in the wake of the Jeddah meetings was the man most victimized by them, King Hussein. Upon learning of the overture made on the decks of the Northbrook, Faisal got into a heated argument with his father, until Hussein finally cut him off with a rebuke: "These words are from a father to his son. Never doubt Great Britain's word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear."

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a refuge, but Lawrence saw it very differently: a place of torment and pestilence, a nightmarish landscape to be escaped as soon as possible.

Running in a northwest-to-southeast diagonal through the borderlands of Arabia and Syria (modern-day Jordan), the two-hundred-mile-long Wadi Sirhan is more properly a geological depression, a hundred-million-year-old narrow drainage valley for when this desolate corner of the world had abundant water. In 1917, the wadi was where Auda Abu Tayi arranged to have his Howeitat kinsmen a.s.semble to meet the tiny force he and Lawrence were bringing up from Wejh.

As Lawrence noted in Seven Pillars, with its ample water wells and relative lushness, Wadi Sirhan should have seemed a veritable paradise after their crossing of El Houl. Instead, at least two aspects made the place barely tolerable. The first was its poisonous snakes. There were horned vipers and puff adders and cobras, and they seemed to be everywhere-tucked beneath rocks, draped on bushes, coiled at water's edge-and as a man with an almost phobic fear of snakes, Lawrence never found a moment of true peace. Not that his fears were all that irrational; within days of arriving in Wadi Sirhan, three of the men who had made the pa.s.sage from Wejh were dead from snakebites, and four others nearly so. Neither did the local "remedy" inspire much confidence, consisting as it did of binding a victim's wound with snakeskin plaster and then reciting Koranic verses over him until he died.

Then there were the banquets. Wadi Sirhan const.i.tuted the lower reaches of the domain of Nuri Shalaan, one of the most powerful tribal chieftains of southern Syria, and Auda had immediately set off to meet with Shalaan and gain his permission for the rebels' presence there. This left Lawrence to stand as one of the chief guests of honor at the nightly feasts of rice and mutton put on by the gathered Howeitat clans. As any westerner who has been their guest might attest, Bedouin hospitality can be so overwhelming as to border on the oppressive, and so it quickly became for Lawrence. Each night, different impoverished families competed to play host to the travelers from Wejh, and in Lawrence's lavish description of these banquets, what starts out as colorfully folkloric gradually veers toward the grotesque, especially when he lingers on the image of swollen-bellied children gathered at the periphery of the feasts, anxiously awaiting their chance to swoop in and s.n.a.t.c.h up any leavings from the communal tray.