Lawrence In Arabia Part 3

Through 1912 and most of 1913, Prfer struggled on, but he found it impossible to escape the cloak of ignominy that had been cast over him. With the Egyptian secret police now watching his every move, even his adventurist activities as Oriental secretary were greatly curtailed. It was for this-and perhaps also a simple desire to try something completely new with his life-that he finally tendered his resignation and went off to join Richard von Below. What he went away with was an abiding hatred for the British, the "natural enemy" of Germany, now also the people who had destroyed his career.

On a broader level, though, the controversy that surrounded Prfer over the library directors.h.i.+p neatly ill.u.s.trated a particularly ominous feature of the early 1910s. While it already strained credulity that Lord Kitchener, the uncrowned sovereign of twelve million people in one of Britain's most important va.s.sal states, had been compelled to personally engage in that controversy, how had it ever escalated to the point where the British foreign secretary and his closest advisors were enjoined? Did these men really have nothing better to do with their time than compose and debate lengthy memoranda over the job placement of a low-level German emba.s.sy official in Cairo?

In the answer to that question lies one of the keys to how World War I happened. By the early 1910s, with all the European powers perpetually jockeying for advantage, all of them constantly manufacturing crises in hopes of winning some small claim against their rivals, a unique kind of "fog of war" was setting in, one composed of a thousand petty slights and disputes and misunderstandings. It wasn't just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers-and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings-of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?

THE GULF OF Aqaba is a narrow, hundred-mile-long inlet of the Red Sea that separates the craggy desert mountains of Arabia to one side from a similar set of mountains on the Sinai Peninsula to the other. At the northernmost end of the Aqaba inlet is the Jordanian town of the same name.

In 1914, Aqaba was nothing more than a tiny fis.h.i.+ng village, its thousand or so inhabitants settled into a collection of crude huts sprinkled about the sh.o.r.eline. Yet it was Aqaba, more than any other spot in the roughly four thousand square miles that he and his Royal Engineers were mapping, that obsessed Captain Stewart Newcombe.

In trying to antic.i.p.ate the path an invasion force might take from Ottoman Palestine to reach the Suez Ca.n.a.l, certainly the most logical route was across the very top of the Sinai Peninsula, close to the Mediterranean. This was an established land crossing going back millennia, and its water sources, if meager, had been tapped and welled for just as long. Inland, the harsh Zin Desert seemed to afford few real possibilities, an a.s.sessment gradually being confirmed by Newcombe's men. By early February 1914, they had surveyed much of the border region's interior, and while finding a few Bedouin trails and wells, had uncovered nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size.

But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the Sinai-Palestine demarcation line, represented a wild card. With its outlet on the Red Sea, troops could be ferried into the village and then marched west. For well over a decade, persistent rumors had the Turks secretly building a railroad spur linking Aqaba to the Arabian interior, complementing the mountain trail already in existence. Rumors aside, it was known that at least two "roads" originated somewhere in the Quweira mountains above Aqaba, trails long used by local Bedouin to launch raids into the Sinai. Taken all together, it meant the Turks might have the potential of launching an invasion force across the Sinai from the very southern end of the buffer zone, even while British attention was focused at the more obvious northern end.

Understandably, then, Stewart Newcombe viewed getting into Aqaba as the most crucial aspect of his entire mission to Zin. In mid-February 1914, he turned his attention to how he might do it and who should accompany him.

History is often the tale of small moments-chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence-that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a b.u.t.terfly's wings that triggers a hurricane. Such was the case with Captain Newcombe's choosing a companion for the journey to Aqaba.

Theoretically, he could have pulled any one of the Royal Engineers off his five surveying parties, but as much as their technical expertise might come in handy, he was expecting a cold reception in the village, and the sight of two British officers rolling in would be unlikely to improve it. He also could have chosen Leonard Woolley, whose somewhat fusty manner would lend credence to this being a foray of purely scientific interest. But instead he chose Lawrence. One reason was that he genuinely enjoyed his company, but another was Lawrence's peculiar skill at polite belligerence that Newcombe had observed in a variety of forms since the early days of the expedition, a skill likely to be called upon in Aqaba.

Joined by Dahoum, Newcombe and Lawrence showed up in Aqaba in mid-February, and, just as Newcombe had expected, their welcome was a decidedly icy one. The munic.i.p.al governor, professing to have no knowledge of their project, immediately forbade them from doing any mapping or photographing or archaeological work in the region. But just as Newcombe had also expected, these strictures only spurred Lawrence to greater initiative. "I photographed what I could," Lawrence would recount in a letter to a friend, Edward Leeds, "I archaeologised everywhere."

Of special interest to Lawrence-and this interest may have mainly derived from the opportunity to flagrantly disregard the governor's orders-were the ruins of a fortress on a small island just a few hundred yards off the Aqaba sh.o.r.e. He secretly arranged for a boatman to take him to the island, only to have the man promptly arrested by the governor's police. Undeterred, Lawrence crafted a crude inflatable raft and, together with Dahoum, paddled out to the island.

It was an easy enough pa.s.sage going out, but rather a different story on the return. With both the current and wind against them, it took Lawrence and Dahoum hours to make the sh.o.r.e, at which point the local police, long since alerted, took them into custody. The furious governor placed the pair under armed escort for their journey out of Aqaba. Unfortunately for the men detailed to this mission, the unwanted entourage simply provided Lawrence with an amusing new challenge.

"I learnt that their orders were not to let me out of their sight," he wrote his family a week later from a town fifty miles to the north, "and I took them two days afoot over such hills and wadis as did [them in]. I have been camped here for two days, and they are still struggling in from all over the compa.s.s."

As a bonus, during this forced march Lawrence had stumbled across the two "great cross-roads" that the Bedouin raiding parties used for their forays into the Sinai.

All of this would prove profoundly useful to Lawrence. In just a little over three years' time, he would use the knowledge gained from his escapades in Aqaba to conquer that strategic village in a manner that no one else could conceive of, a feat of arms still considered one of the most daring military exploits of modern times.

UPON PARTING WAYS with J. C. Hill in Jerusalem in early January, William Yale and Rudolf McGovern set out for the Kornub ma.s.sif. Reaching it a few days after their humiliating encounter with Lawrence in Beersheva, they immediately had reason to recall a very basic law of chemical properties: namely, that it is not just oil mixed with water that gives off an iridescent sheen. In the right concentrations, a wide variety of minerals can, including iron, and it was precisely this-stagnant water rich in iron tailings-that Hill had observed through his binoculars from thirty miles away.

Crestfallen but determined to make the most of their arduous trip, Yale and McGovern spent several days collecting rock samples and drilling boreholes. From this, they determined there was oil in Kornub-McGovern was fairly certain of that-but whether it existed in anything near commercially viable quant.i.ties seemed unlikely. The two then returned to Jerusalem, there to relay the sobering news to Socony headquarters.

Curiously, and for reasons Yale and McGovern couldn't begin to fathom at the time, 26 Broadway didn't seem to share their sense of disappointment. The two were told to lie low in Jerusalem, which they did until mid-March, and were then dispatched for more fruitless exploration of the last of the three prospective concessionary zones, in the hill region of Thrace just to the west of Constantinople. Tucked away in the backwaters of the Ottoman Empire, Yale remained unaware that news of the Kornub "strike" had triggered a complex diplomatic tug-of-war, one that was playing out across four continents and involving amba.s.sadors, ministers of state, and some half dozen international corporations.

When the British had pinpointed the location of Socony's interests in Palestine, courtesy of Lawrence's interrogation of Yale outside Beersheva, alarm had spread throughout the government. With access to oil now considered a matter of national security in light of the Royal Navy's ongoing oil-conversion program, taking control of any new fields was not merely an economic concern but a political one. There followed a complicated series of maneuvers in which the British authorities tried to sabotage the Kornub deal and arrange for a British oil company to obtain the concessions. In this cause they relied on information from one of the Palestinian concession holders, Suleiman Na.s.sif, who deftly played each side against the other to his own benefit. It was at this juncture that McGovern's disheartening report on Kornub finally reached New York, but by then it was too late. Caught up in the spirit of compet.i.tion, Socony not only disregarded McGovern's findings but ultimately paid a far higher price for the Kornub concessions than intended.

None of this was known to Yale and McGovern until they returned to Constantinople from Thrace in late April. There they were met by their old boss, J. C. Hill, who informed them that, having just secured the Kornub concessions for a period of twenty-five years, Socony was now gearing up for a ma.s.sive exploration project in the region, one that would entail building roads, erecting worker camps in the desert, bringing in trucks and drilling equipment and heavy machinery. Furthermore, Socony was sending the three of them to Egypt, there to oversee the purchasing and to coordinate the delivery of all the materiel needed. That this was an area of expertise in which they had no knowledge was deemed unimportant; by the late spring of 2014, Yale, McGovern, and Hill were in Egypt contemplating a daunting stack of purchasing manuals in Socony's Alexandria office.

But in this new task, the three men could draw on a powerful guiding principle: they were Standard men, and above all else, William Yale was increasingly coming to realize, that meant taking charge, making decisions. Within a few days of sifting through those purchasing manuals, and without ever seeking the counsel of someone who might know what they were doing, they had ordered up some $250,000 worth of drilling equipment (about $30 million in today's equivalent) for the inauguration of Socony's new operation in the Kornub. That equipment, purchased from a variety of vendors throughout the United States, would take several months to arrive in Palestine-actual drilling was scheduled to begin on November 1-but in the meantime, an enormous amount of work was to be done.

The first step was to cut a road from Hebron down through the Judean foothills, and then across some twenty miles of virtually trackless desert to Kornub. This aspect of the project would prove immensely important in the near future. Yale was put in charge of this, and he contracted the best road builder in Palestine to do it. Even so, there were glitches. A near riot developed in Hebron when the road surveyors took to marking the walls of houses in their path with crosses in white paint, a symbol the devoutly Muslim residents interpreted as marking them for conversion to Christianity. On another occasion, Bedouin riflemen attacked one of the construction crews out in the foothills; the a.s.sault was finally repelled by Socony's own private militia.

But as Yale was well aware, the biggest hurdles awaited at either end of that road. All the drilling equipment being brought over from the United States would need to come in at the Mediterranean port of Jaffa-except there were no cranes in Jaffa capable of unloading such heavy machinery. Then there was the niggling little detail to be worked out at the other end of the line. One thing that makes a desert a desert is, of course, a lack of water, and while McGovern had managed to locate a few small wells in the Kornub area, the supply seemed barely sufficient for the twenty-man work crew that would be living there, let alone provide the huge amounts needed for the highly water-dependent drilling process. As with so many other parts of the project, however, this issue failed to set off alarm bells within Socony, and if a problem isn't acknowledged, does it really need a solution?

As work got under way, Yale was held by an ever-deepening sense of foreboding. "Secretly," he wrote, "I dreaded the mess, which seemed an inevitable outcome of the systemless way the Chief [J. C. Hill] handled matters."

UPON HIS RETURN to Syria from his Zin adventure in early March, Lawrence found a letter waiting for him from David Hogarth. It contained wonderful news. Impressed by word of the previous season's discoveries, the British philanthropist who was the primary sponsor of the Carchemish project had finally set aside enough funds to keep the excavations going for an extended period-two more years at least, and possibly for as long as it took for the site to be thoroughly explored. With this cheerful news, Lawrence planned to quickly finish the Wilderness of Zin report for the Palestine Exploration Fund during his upcoming break in England, and then hurry back to Carchemish for an early beginning to the next digging season.

For his return to England, Lawrence planned to first detour to Baghdad and then pa.s.s down the Tigris River to the Indian Ocean, figuring the much longer sea voyage this would entail would give him more time to work on the Zin report. Instead, just as that season's dig was closing down in early June, a letter from Stewart Newcombe changed his plan.

Newcombe, his work in southern Palestine finished, had visited Carchemish in May en route to England. But of course Carchemish was not really en route to anywhere, and Newcombe's true motive for the detour had been to continue overland to Constantinople in order to spy on the progress being made by the Turks and Germans on the Baghdad Railway-and in particular on their tunneling projects in the Taurus and Ama.n.u.s Mountains. He had succeeded in making the journey, but had been so closely watched as to be unable to study the tunneling work in any detail. In his June letter, Newcombe asked if Lawrence and Woolley might follow the same path on their return to England and glean what they could. Rather taking to their new roles as military intelligence sleuths, the archaeologists readily agreed.

That journey proved to be another extraordinarily fortuitous happenstance, but one that would ultimately play out very differently from Lawrence's trip to Aqaba. In the Taurus and Ama.n.u.s Mountains he would identify a crucial-and potentially devastating-Achilles' heel of the Ottoman Empire, one that, despite his most strenuous efforts during the coming war, would never be exploited.

BACK IN HIS garden cottage at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford, Lawrence sat down to write a long letter to a friend, James Elroy Flecker, on the last Monday of June 1914. The bulk of the letter was taken up with a picaresque description of a melee that had occurred between the German railway engineers and their workers in Jerablus in May. But what is most interesting about the letter is what it doesn't mention. On the day that Lawrence wrote it-Monday, June 29-the front page of almost every newspaper in Britain told of the previous day's a.s.sa.s.sination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife, in the streets of Sarajevo by Serbian revolutionaries.

The news out of Sarajevo seemed to make just as little impression on Curt Prfer and William Yale. His long Nile cruise with Richard von Below over, by the end of June 1914, Prfer was living in Munich, eking out a modest living giving public lectures on Oriental languages; in his diary, he made no mention of the Balkan a.s.sa.s.sinations. As for William Yale, hard at work on the road project below Hebron, it appears he didn't even hear of them until some weeks later.

All of which was actually quite understandable; the public had become thoroughly inured to the endless saber-rattling of the European imperial powers, the "crises" that seemed to boil up and fall away every few months, and there was no reason to think this one would play out any differently. But Sarajevo was the crisis that counted, because those who wanted war made it count. A very slow-burning fuse had been lit, one that would take over a month to burn through, but when it did, in the first days of August 1914, it would trigger a continent-wide war that would ultimately carry everyone down into the abyss together.

In his letter to Flecker on June 29, Lawrence wrote that he expected to be in England for another two or three weeks, and "thereafter Eastward" to Carchemish. But Lawrence's days as an archaeologist were over.

Chapter 4.

To the Last Million Sir: I have the honor to report that conditions are going from bad to worse here.

U.S. CONSUL GENERAL IN BEIRUT, STANLEY HOLLIS, TO SECRETARY OF STATE, NOVEMBER 9, 1914.

On the afternoon of August 7, 1914, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Britain's newly appointed secretary of state for war, was called to his first cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and other senior ministers.

Kitchener's selection for the War Office had come about almost by chance. On a brief visit back to England from his post as British agent to Egypt, he was just boarding a s.h.i.+p to leave when war was declared. Asquith, figuring that appointing Britain's most famous military hero to lead that effort might have a salutary effect on public morale, had skipped over a long line of prospective candidates in giving the position to Kitchener.

At the time, boosting public morale seemed among the least of the prime minister's concerns. In Britain, as elsewhere across Europe, war euphoria had gripped the populace, with great crowds gathering in public squares to cheer the news. Most predictions were that this war would be a very quick one, and in villages and cities across the continent, reserve soldiers, anxious to escape the drudgery of factory and farm, despaired at not being called up before this grand adventure pa.s.sed them by. The situation was slightly different in Britain, one of the few European nations without mandatory conscription, but within days of the war declaration the British government was already contemplating a halt in recruitment, adjudging that it already had more volunteers signed up than it could ever possibly need.

But in that summer of 1914, most everyone was overlooking a crucial detail: that the weapons of war had changed so radically over the previous forty years as to render the established notions of its conduct obsolete. It was rather simple stuff, easy to miss-the machine gun; the long-range artillery sh.e.l.l; barbed wire-but because of this oversight, Europe was about to tumble into an altogether different conflict from what most imagined.

One reason Europe's imperial powers missed the warning signs was that these new instruments of war had previously been employed almost exclusively against those who didn't have them-specifically, those non-Europeans who attempted to resist their imperial reach. In such situations, the new weapons had allowed for a lopsided slaughter not seen since the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and more than any other single factor had accounted for the dramatic expansion of Europe's colonial empires into Asia and Africa in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

It is perversely appropriate, then, that among the few people who did appreciate this new face of war and the problems it would pose was the man who had officiated over more of these one-sided battlefield slaughters than probably anyone else alive: Lord Kitchener. At the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener had trained his Maxim machine guns on hors.e.m.e.n charging with spears; at a cost of forty-seven British army dead, he had killed ten thousand of the enemy in a single morning. But what would happen when the other side had Maxims too? Kitchener had a pretty good idea. At that cabinet meeting on August 7, where some other ministers imagined a conflict lasting months or even weeks, the newly appointed war secretary predicted years. "It will not end," he told his colleagues, "until we have plumbed our manpower to the last million."

Naturally, these were words few wanted to hear, let alone pay heed to. And so as if imagining that nothing had really changed since the last great bout of European wars in Napoleonic times, the Scottish Highlanders gathered up their bagpipes and kilts, the French cuira.s.siers and Austrian lancers donned their armor breastplates and plumed helmets and, to the accompaniment of buglers and drums, marched gaily off to battle, not realizing until too late that their Europe was now to become an abattoir, a slaughtering pen into which, over the next four years, some ten million soldiers, along with an estimated six million civilians, would be hurried forward to their deaths.

One would need to return to the Dark Ages or the depredations of Genghis Khan to find a war as devastating. By point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe-colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars-and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 187071, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpa.s.s that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day's casualty rolls-with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world-and judge that the numbers "cannot be considered severe."

The effect of all this on the collective European psyche would be utterly profound. Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.

In the process, though, the European public would come to question some of the most basic a.s.sumptions about their societies. Among the things they would realize was that, stripped of all its high-minded justifications and rhetoric, at its core this war had many of the trappings of an extended family feud, a chance for Europe's kings and emperors-many of them related by blood-to act out old grievances and personal slights atop the heaped bodies of their loyal subjects. In turn, Europe's imperial structure had fostered a culture of decrepit military elites-aristocrats and aging war heroes and palace sycophants-whose sheer incompetence on the battlefield, as well as callousness toward those dying for them, was matched only by that of their rivals. Indeed, in looking at the conduct of the war and the almost preternatural idiocy displayed by all the competing powers, perhaps its most remarkable feature is that anyone finally won at all.

In the end, the European public would look back on their war celebrations of August 1914 as if from a different age entirely, a death dance performed by gullible primitives. It would also give rise to an exquisite irony. In this t.i.tanic struggle waged for empire-protecting it, expanding it, chipping away at others'-four of the six great imperial powers of Europe would disappear completely, while the two survivors, Britain and France, would be so shattered as to never fully recover. Into the breach would come two dueling totalitarian ideologies-communism and fascism-as well as a new imperial power-the United States-that, given the bad name its predecessors had attached to the label, would forever protest its innocence of being one.

But in August 1914 all this was in the future. For now, Europe was gripped by a kind of giddy relief that the years of posturing were over, that der Tag had finally arrived.

In this, the Lawrence family of Oxford was in no way immune. Within days of the war's declaration, Frank Lawrence, the second youngest and most military-minded of the five Lawrence boys, was given his commission as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Gloucester Battalion. In India, Will Lawrence swiftly made plans to return to England in order to enlist, while Bob, the eldest, signed on with the Royal Army Medical Corps. By month's end, that left just fourteen-year-old Arnold and twenty-six-year-old "Ned" at home.

For T. E. Lawrence, this home stay was imposed by forces beyond his control. Although the Ottoman Empire had not joined in the August rush to war, expectations in London were that it soon might-and probably on the side of the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If that came to pa.s.s, the mapping expedition of southern Palestine that Lawrence and Leonard Woolley had recently partic.i.p.ated in could be of great military importance. Under orders from Kitchener himself, the two young archaeologists were told to forgo any thought of enlisting until they had completed their report. So as others his age trooped off to boot camp that August, Lawrence shuttled between his Polstead Road cottage and the archives of the Ashmolean Museum, feverishly putting the final touches on The Wilderness of Zin.

If Lawrence was mindful of the report's significance, his comparative la.s.situde infected him with a growing sense of desperation. In early September, he and Woolley contacted Stewart Newcombe, their supervisor on the Palestine expedition and now a ranking officer in military intelligence, seeking his help in landing positions there. Newcombe advised patience. Should Turkey enter the war on Germany's side, he explained, their services as Near East experts would be urgently needed, and arranging their appointment would only be hampered if in the meantime they threw themselves into the maw of the military bureaucracy.

That advice didn't sit at all well with Lawrence. Surely adding to his gloom was that in those opening days the war did seem headed for the early conclusion that most predicted-except with the wrong side winning.

In provoking the conflict, German strategy had been predicated on an extremely bold, even reckless scheme. The plan was to only lightly defend its eastern frontier and cede ground against Russia's advancing armies, while launching a ma.s.sive offensive against the French and British armies to the west in hopes of knocking those countries out of the war before they could fully mobilize. With that front thus closed down, the Germans could then turn their full attention to the Russians.

By the beginning of September, it appeared as if the Germans might succeed beyond their wildest dreams. On the Western Front, their armies had swept through neutral Belgium and then turned south, scattering the disorganized French and British forces before them. They now stood on the banks of the Marne River, just thirty miles from Paris. The surprise had come on the Eastern Front, where rather than simply employing defensive stalling tactics as planned, a vastly outnumbered German army had leapt to the attack; it had already annihilated one blundering Russian invasion force, and was about to destroy another. "Home by Christmas" suddenly seemed a conservative slogan, and for the soldiers of the Triple Entente-Great Britain, France, and Russia-a haunting one.

But then in the second week of September the tide abruptly turned. In the engagement that would become known as the "miracle of the Marne," the British and French checked the German advance and began slowly to push them back through the French countryside. This war was not going to be the "short, cleansing thunderstorm" the German chancellor had so confidently predicted; instead, after six weeks of combat, as many as half a million men were already dead, and stalemate was setting in.

For Lawrence, to be holed up in the leafy confines of Oxford at such a time, poring over a half-inch-to-the-mile map of an empty desert a thousand miles from the nearest battlefield, must have felt a terribly painful academic exercise. What's more, he surely reasoned, the reversal of fortunes in France meant his purgatory was likely to continue; if the Turks hadn't come into the war when it appeared Germany was running the table, why do so now when the Germans were retreating?

"I am writing a learned work on Moses and his wanderings," he acidly wrote to a friend in Lebanon on September 18. "I have a horrible fear that the Turks do not intend to go to war."

IF LAWRENCE HADN'T appreciated the warning signs in the runup to war, William Yale, overseeing the construction of the Standard Oil road in southern Palestine, missed them completely. In fact, just as a telegram delivered to an Oklahoma oilfield had presaged his being dispatched to the Near East, so a second telegram to his remote construction camp in the Palestinian desert nearly a year later informed him of the war's outbreak.

With all work on the road project brought to an immediate stop, Yale hurried back to Jerusalem that August. He found a city in tumult. Among the sizable expatriate community of Europeans and Americans, most families were already packing up for the journey home. Leaving ahead of them in answer to their governments' general mobilization calls were the French and German men of fighting age (the British wouldn't initiate a draft until early 1916).

"We went down to the railroad station to see them off," Yale remembered. "Like young collegians on their way to a football game they shouted, cheered, and sang. As the train for Jaffa pulled out of the yards, the Germans in one car sang enthusiastically Deutschland ber alles, while the Frenchmen in another car sang just as l.u.s.tily, La Ma.r.s.eillaise. The friends of yesterday were off on their great adventure."

In contrast to the frenzied activity around him, the American oilman suddenly found he had little to do. With the United States staying out of the war, Socony headquarters ordered Yale to remain in Palestine, figuring he could at least watch over the company's soon-to-arrive oil drilling equipment until they decided on their next move. But even this caretaker task was soon mooted. Invoking a state-of-emergency decree, the Ottoman government requisitioned the incoming fleet of Standard Oil trucks as soon as they were unloaded at the Jaffa docks. Shortly afterward, the British navy stopped the freighter bringing most of Socony's piping and drilling machinery to Palestine and diverted all of it to an impoundment lot in Egypt.

With the community of foreigners in Jerusalem now reduced to a handful, Yale pa.s.sed his time that late summer by playing tennis and canasta, and engaging in long, obsessive discussions with his fellow expatriates about what might come next in world events. A special focus of these discussions was trying to read the tea leaves of regional politics, sifting for clues as to whether or not the Young Turks in Constantinople would take their country into the fray. For a young man given to action, this imposed quietude was maddening, and Yale grew increasingly anxious for something to do.

But the old admonishment to be careful what you wish for soon found application when Yale was asked to play minder to a dozen unruly American oil workers. The men, most from Texas or Oklahoma, had been part of the intended work crew at the Kornub drilling site, and had been aboard the same freighter that the British diverted to Egypt. With time on their hands and money in their pockets, the oil workers proceeded to cut such a scandalous swath through the streets of Cairo-no mean feat in that libertine city-that the local Socony office had sent telegrams to headquarters urging that they be returned to the United States. Instead, 26 Broadway decided to forward the men to Yale, perhaps hoping that a stint in the Holy Land might serve to reacquaint them with their Christian virtues.

If so, that hope was misplaced. If anything, the opportunity to tread the land of Jesus seemed to spur the oilmen to even more outrageous public behavior. In observing this, as well as their office's rapidly dwindling cash reserves-the war in Europe had brought a temporary halt to international money transfers-Yale and his supervisor decided that a neat solution to both problems lay in withholding the men's pay and instead placing them on five-dollar-a-week allowances. Sensitive to the workers' disappointment with this arrangement, on allowance day Yale took to disbursing the money with one hand while holding a loaded six-shooter in the other.

But his troublesome charges also served a very useful function. In constant contact with Jerusalem's most unsavory residents, the oilmen were like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine, the first recipients of every dark rumor floating through the city-and with the spreading war in Europe, those rumors were turning exceedingly dark. It was precisely at tense times like these that the rich mosaic of the Ottoman world-a mosaic composed of a myriad of religious and tribal and ethnic groups-could quite easily become a grim counterimage of itself, a place where the various communities drew protectively inward, and where ancient feuds and suspicions and jealousies exploded into violence. Not surprisingly, this danger was greatest in the most "mixed" corners of the empire, and with its melange of Arab and Turk and Armenian, of Muslim and Jew and Christian, all living cheek by jowl, there was no more cosmopolitan city in the Near East than Jerusalem.

By the end of August, stories were floating in from the countryside of Muslim vigilante armies forming, of Jews and Armenians being attacked, and while most of these tales proved false, they fed the ever-thickening air of tension. In the Old City, shopkeepers were raising prices and h.o.a.rding their wares, ever more convinced that Constantinople would soon enter the war. What was still not at all clear, though, was which side it might join, and another fault line formed between those hoping for the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia and those desiring the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

On September 8, the sense of menace took more personal form for Yale and the other foreigners remaining in the city. Taking advantage of the chaos in Europe, the Young Turk government announced an end to the Capitulations, the humiliating concessions extracted by Western powers over the previous four centuries that largely exempted foreigners from Ottoman law. Yale noticed the effect immediately. Previously obsequious local officials became haughty, demanding. On Jerusalem's narrow sidewalks, residents no longer automatically stepped to the street at the approach of a Western "white man." On one occasion, when Yale and a couple of other foreign residents were visiting the Mount of Olives, a group of young boys pelted them with stones. To Yale, Jerusalem more and more felt like a pile of tinder in search of a match.

FOR OTHERS IN Palestine, the revoking of the Capitulations took on far more ominous import than a little stone-throwing. Left particularly vulnerable were the tens of thousands of Jewish emigres who had come into the region over the previous thirty years.

Most had come in two successive waves. The first, of which the Aaronsohn family had been a part, had been an exodus out of central and southeastern Europe in the 1880s. This was followed by a second aliyah (literally "ascent" in Hebrew) in the early 1900s, mainly composed of Russian Jews escaping a new round of czarist political persecution and state-sanctioned pogroms. Although culturally these groups were very different-most of the first-wave emigres tended to be religious and socially conservative, while many in the second were secular socialists-what they shared was that under the terms of the Capitulations many remained citizens of their birthplace.

That arrangement had historically worked to the benefit of both the emigres and the Western powers. With it, the Jews had recourse to the protection of their former homelands, just as those foreign governments were given legal pretext to meddle in Ottoman affairs under the guise of tending to their transplanted citizens. While this bizarre system gave rise to a number of paradoxes, surely none was more grotesque than the spectacle of czarist Russia stoutly defending the rights and well-being of its Jewish citizens in Palestine, while systematically brutalizing that same religious minority inside Russia. With the revoking of the Capitulations, all this was coming to an end. Additionally, if Turkey did finally join the war, at least one portion of this Jewish community was likely headed for an unpleasant future; with thousands of the first-wave emigres still holding Austro-Hungarian pa.s.sports, and thousands from the second holding Russian ones, one group or the other was going to end up being cla.s.sified as "belligerent nationals." As had already happened to countless innocent civilians across the breadth of Europe, the losers in this lottery could then be subject to deportation or internment.

In all this, most of the residents of Zichron Yaakov, including the Aaronsohn family, actually benefited from a different paradox. These Romanian Jews had come to Palestine after being effectively barred from citizens.h.i.+p in an independent Romania. By default, they thus remained citizens of Romania's preindependence master, namely the Ottoman Empire. Unlike other Jews in Palestine, then, Aaron Aaronsohn and other Zichron residents could look upon the revocation of the Capitulations with a measure of equanimity, perhaps even a touch of schadenfreude.

That sentiment was extremely short-lived, however, for the very next day, September 9, Constantinople announced a general mobilization of its armed forces. Under the curious rationale that this was necessary to "preserve Ottoman neutrality," the mobilization called for male citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to show up for military conscription. Worse, this edict extended to most all citizens-traditionally, Jews and a number of Christian sects had been exempt-and the regime was further rescinding the age-old system whereby the affluent could escape service by payment of a special bedel, or tax.

Aaron Aaronsohn was sufficiently acquainted with the Ottoman way of governance to know that this last clause meant nothing of the sort-it simply meant that obtaining an exemption now would entail paying more bribes to more officials-but the mobilization deeply worried the agronomist on a broader level. As recent events in Europe ill.u.s.trated, an army called up almost always meant an army going to war; once the machinery and bureaucracy of war had been set in motion and popular hysteria properly ginned up, there was simply no easy way to shut it all down again. Ever since the outbreak of the European conflict, Aaronsohn had heard a rash of conflicting rumors from his friends in the Ottoman military and political hierarchy over what Constantinople might do, and this cloudiness was exacerbated by the vague picture to be gleaned of what was occurring in Europe. In the face of such uncertainty, Aaronsohn, like most of the Jewish residents of Palestine, simply clung to the hope that reason might yet prevail and the war be avoided.

Interestingly, it appears his apprehensions had less to do with which side Turkey might join than with the act of joining itself. Part of this may have stemmed from a common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades-no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer-but it was also born of a particular feature of Ottoman war-making. In the event of conflict, both military and civilian authorities would suddenly have license to embark on a wholesale requisitioning spree-"pillaging" might be a more apt term-as they grabbed up whatever they deemed necessary for the war effort. While this campaign was sure to affect Arab and Jewish villages alike, it would naturally be more zealous in those modern or prosperous places that had more to offer-places like Zichron Yaakov and Athlit, for example. Already by mid-September 1914, the Aaronsohn family and their neighbors in Zichron began hiding away whatever they had of value, braced for the ruinous arrival of the requisition officer.

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 4, 1914, Curt Prfer was in a room of the Hotel Germania in Constantinople meeting with a burly, blond-haired German man in his thirties named Robert Mors. Until recently, Mors had been a policeman in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, and their main topic of conversation that afternoon was how they might destroy the British administration in Egypt through a campaign of bombings, a.s.sa.s.sinations, and Islamic insurrection. The two men even bandied about ideas on how best to blow up the Suez Ca.n.a.l.

Their meeting was remarkable on both a personal and political level. Just a month earlier, Prfer had been scratching out a modest living delivering lectures on Oriental languages in Munich; now he was a key operative in an intelligence mission so secretive that its existence was known to probably fewer than three dozen people in the world. That's because the ultimate purpose of this mission was to bring the still-neutral Ottoman Empire into the war, and among those with no inkling of Prfer's activities in Constantinople could be included virtually the entire Young Turk political leaders.h.i.+p. Credit for this peculiar set of circ.u.mstances belonged to Prfer's old mentor, Max von Oppenheim, and to one of the stranger diplomatic accords ever put to paper.

As the war clouds had thickened over Europe during that long summer of 1914, a clear majority of the thirty or so senior members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the junta that controlled the empire, wanted to stay clear of the coming European firestorm. A small faction, however, had energetically sought to form an alliance with the Triple Entente, while another, led by thirty-two-year-old war minister Enver Pasha, tried to do the same with the Central Powers. Enver won out. In a case of exquisitely poor timing, he had signed a mutual defense treaty with Germany on the afternoon of August 2, just hours before Germany declared war on Russia and the conflict began.

Except, as it turned out, Enver Pasha had conducted these negotiations without ever consulting most of his CUP colleagues; indeed, at the time of the accord's signing, only three or four of Enver's closest confederates were aware of it. Even more astounding, Enver continued to withhold this information from the rest of the Turkish government throughout the first weeks of the war. As the young war minister told his impatient German allies, he needed more time to lay the groundwork before dropping this little surprise on his ministerial colleagues. To that end, a precipitating event, something that might turn both the nation and the rest of the Young Turk leaders.h.i.+p away from the prevailing neutralist sentiment, could prove very handy.

Enver had come to the right people for, as neutral Belgium had recently learned, precipitating events was something of a German specialty. To help out his secret Turkish ally, Kaiser Wilhelm II could think of no better guide than Max von Oppenheim and his preachings on pan-Islamic revolt. If Islamic insurrection could be fostered in the various Muslim territories controlled by the British-and most especially in that land Britain had stolen from Constantinople, Egypt-surely it would be obvious to both the leaders.h.i.+p and populace of the Ottoman Empire that they needed to come into the war.

But if the ultimate goal was to bring Turkey in, at least some in the German high command that autumn saw an upside to it remaining neutral just a bit longer. So long as it did, the Ottoman Empire could serve as the ideal launch pad for German destabilization efforts, a kind of Trojan horse from which to carry out attacks on the surrounding British colonies with very little risk of repercussion. That neutrality could also serve as a convenient s.h.i.+eld while Germany laid the groundwork for the most important military operation to be conducted in the region, an a.s.sault on the Suez Ca.n.a.l. In mid-August, the kaiser signed a secret directive calling for the creation of the Nachrichtenstelle fr den Orient (Intelligence Bureau for the East), to be based in Constantinople and to serve as the central clearinghouse for Germany's subversion campaigns in the Near East. The director of that bureau was to be Max von Oppenheim. Among Oppenheim's first acts upon a.s.suming the post was to put out an offer of employment to his former protege, Curt Prfer.

Oppenheim's confidence in his apprentice was certainly deserved. No sooner had he checked into the Hotel Germania on the evening of September 3 than Prfer set to work. Early the next morning, he met with one of Enver Pasha's chief lieutenants, a young Turkish staff officer named Omar Fawzi Bey, and together they worked up a whole list of prospective projects to strike at British Egypt: hiring Bedouin tribesmen to attack isolated British garrisons along the Suez Ca.n.a.l; sneaking so-called komitadji units of underground fighters into the country to foment Islamic insurrection; launching a terror campaign of targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations and indiscriminate bombings. Even if he remained dubious of some of the more novel schemes put forward by Fawzi Bey and his confederates-one involved scuttling a cement-laden freighter at the narrowest point of the Suez Ca.n.a.l-Prfer appreciated the enthusiasm and creative thinking that went into them.

When not plotting with Fawzi Bey or Sheikh Shawish, an Egyptian firebrand hated and feared by the British, Prfer was in regular conference with the four or five other Nachrichtenstelle operatives who had already arrived in the Turkish capital. At these meetings, often also attended by the three or four German emba.s.sy officials clued to Oppenheim's scheme, ambitious plans were laid for sabotage and subversion campaigns throughout the Muslim world: in Egypt, in Russian Central Asia, in Afghanistan, even as far away as India.

It was at the conclusion of one such meeting on the afternoon of September 7 that Prfer was brought before the man who had made it all possible, Minister of War Enver Pasha. Small, extravagantly uniformed, and extraordinarily handsome-"the handsomest man in the Turkish army," the New York Times gushed-Enver had piercing dark eyes and a dramatic mustache, upturned and waxed in the Prussian style. That was not coincidence. As the military liaison to Germany in the early 1910s, he had quickly a.s.sumed the manner and style of its military elite, and now fancied himself more Prussian than the Prussians. Although Curt Prfer was never much given to psychoa.n.a.lysis, the few words he scribbled into his diary that night in describing the thirty-two-year-old Enver-by four months Prfer's junior-offer one of the more incisive portraits of the man who was to practically single-handedly destroy the Ottoman Empire: "A man of stone. A face immovable, well-formed, beautiful in the feminine sense. Groomed to the point of foppishness. Along with a streak of shocking hardness. 'We can be more cruel than the British.' The man wants something, but the something does not come."

But of all the meetings he attended and the schemes he heard in those first few days in Constantinople, Prfer was most intrigued by the unique situation facing Robert Mors, the cas.h.i.+ered Alexandria policeman. Mors had happened to be out of Egypt when the war began and, not surprisingly in light of his German citizens.h.i.+p, been summarily dismissed from his post by the British authorities. But in one of those quaint touches of "gentlemen's war" that still typified World War I in its early days, the British were granting Mors safe pa.s.sage back to Alexandria in order to collect his stranded family. To Prfer, this made Mors the ideal conduit for launching his subversion campaign. Given his status as a privileged European, Mors was also far more likely than a local to be able to secrete contraband articles among his personal possessions-and here Prfer was thinking of bomb-making components-and smuggle them into the country. To impress the former policeman on the importance of his mission, Prfer arranged an audience with Enver Pasha the day before Mors was to sail for Alexandria with bombing detonators hidden in his luggage. The Turkish war minister warmly thanked Mors for his service.

Even though the British quickly suspected some sort of pact had been struck between Enver and the German high command, they remained utterly in the dark as to the specifics. Their apprehensions grew, however, once Prfer and Oppenheim's other intelligence bureau operatives began showing up in Constantinople. "Even without [Turkey joining the] war," British amba.s.sador Louis Mallet cabled to London on September 15, "German machinations are so various here that I should not be surprised if they managed to engineer some scheme against the Ca.n.a.l, either by means of a so-called neutral s.h.i.+p from [the] Syrian coast, or by agents on land."

Against this were the constant a.s.surances the British amba.s.sador was given by Ottoman government officials. From the sultan and prime minister on down, Mallet heard the steady refrain that Turkey had no militarist intentions and only wished to stay out of the European conflict. While certainly some of these protesting senior officials were dissembling, others were not; incredibly, many still had no inkling of Enver's August 2 accord with Germany.

Mallet took his suspicions directly to Enver on October 5. Along with his other talents, however, Enver was a skilled liar. Not only did he deny any sinister intent behind the troop movements in Palestine but, according to Mallet, "laughed at [the] idea of individual Germans undertaking irresponsible enterprises against [the] Ca.n.a.l or elsewhere."

Except the Turkish war minister was about to get caught out. A few days prior to Mallet's meeting with Enver, Robert Mors had been arrested at Alexandria harbor with his bombing detonators. Facing possible execution under Egypt's martial law statutes, he soon told his interrogators all he knew of the German-Turkish plots against Egypt, as well as of his best-wishes audience with Enver Pasha on the eve of his voyage. Mors was especially expansive when it came to his relations.h.i.+p with Omar Fawzi Bey and Curt Prfer. For Prfer, the most d.a.m.ning part came when the foiled smuggler readily admitted that the detonators in his luggage had been intended for use with bombs being manufactured in Egypt. When asked how he knew that, Mors replied, "Because once I found Sheikh Shawish sitting with Dr. Prfer in the latter's room at the Hotel Germania. They were copying in Arabic a recipe for making bombs.... [It] contained directions, a list of the component chemicals, and a sketch of a bomb in the right-hand bottom corner."

The British in Cairo showed considerable forbearance in the Mors incident, presumably in hopes that the more moderate elements in the Constantinople regime might yet rein in the adventurist Enver and keep Turkey out of the war. At his hastily held court-martial, Mors was sentenced to life in prison, while all mention of his meeting with the Turkish war minister was withheld from the public record. Cairo authorities were less forgiving of the man who had once lived in their midst. For his central role in the Mors affair, Curt Prfer was to soon have a British bounty on his head.

THE OLD War Office Building at the corner of Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall in central London is an imposing neo-baroque structure, a five-story monolith of white Portland stone with thirty-foot-high cupolas at each of its corners. Inside, it has the feel of a particularly elegant gentlemen's club, with marble staircases linking its floors, great crystal chandeliers, and mosaic-tiled hallways. In the more select of its nearly one thousand rooms, the walls are oak-paneled with niches cut out for marble fireplaces. In autumn 1914, this building was headquarters to Great Britain's Imperial General Staff, those seniormost officers tasked with overseeing their nation's war effort. It was also to this building that T. E. Lawrence, at last done with his Wilderness of Zin report, was dispatched in mid-October to take up his new position as a civilian cartographer in the General Staff's Geographical Section.

By then, "Section" was rapidly becoming a misnomer, for within a week of Lawrence's arrival, the last of the office's military cartographers was s.h.i.+pped off to the battlefront in France, leaving just him and his immediate supervisor behind. Thus Lawrence quickly found himself doing the work of a half dozen men: organizing the various war-theater maps, adding new details as reports came in from the front, briefing senior commanders on those maps' salient features.

One might imagine that for a young man-Lawrence had just turned twenty-six-to be suddenly thrust into the very nerve center of his nation's military command, to be in daily conference with generals and admirals, would be a heady experience. But one would imagine wrong. To the contrary, Lawrence seemed to take a decidedly jaundiced view of his new surroundings, its denizens fresh grist for his mordant wit.

Part of his disdain may have stemmed from how much military culture resembled that of the English public school system of which he was a product: the endless bowing and sc.r.a.ping to authority; the rigidly defined hierarchical structure as denoted by the special ties worn by uppercla.s.smen and prefects in the schools, by the number of hash marks and pips on coatsleeves in the military; the special privileges bestowed or denied as a result. As Lawrence quipped to a friend shortly after arriving at the War Office, it appeared that the truly grand staircases of the building were reserved for the exclusive use of field marshals and "charwomen," or cleaning ladies.

His lack of awe probably also derived from the overall caliber of the building's occupants. With most active-service military officers now in France, the General Staff had been filled out with men brought up from the reserves or mustered out of retirement, and even to Lawrence's untrained eye it was clear many hadn't a clue of what they were supposed to be doing. As in any inst.i.tution, this sense of inadequacy was often masked by an aura of extreme self-importance: at the War Office, freshly minted colonels and generals were forever striding briskly down hallways, memos in hand, or calling urgent staff meetings, or sending one of the Boy Scout messenger boys up to the Geographical Section for the latest map of Battlefield X, to be supplied ten minutes ago.

One by-product of this climate of puffery, however, was that it led directly to Lawrence's being inducted into the military, the circ.u.mstances of which provided him with one of his favorite later anecdotes.

Shortly after starting at the General Staff, he was ushered into the august presence of General Henry Rawlinson. Rawlinson was about to leave London to take up command of British forces in Belgium, and Lawrence had been summoned to brief him on the newly updated Belgian field maps. Except, according to Lawrence, Rawlinson went apoplectic at the sight of his civilian dress, and bellowed, "I want to talk to an officer!" Since the Geographical Section now consisted of just two men, Lawrence was immediately bundled off to the Army and Navy Store, there to get himself fitted out as a second lieutenant, while the paperwork for his "commission" was hastily drawn up. The uniform wouldn't truly solve the problem, however; in the years ahead, Lawrence's disregard for military protocol, manifested both in a usually unkempt appearance and a relaxed manner that bordered on the insolent, would drive his superior officers to distraction time and again.