Lawrence In Arabia Part 4

But if he was now in the military, however haphazardly, Lawrence's work at the War Office was bringing him no closer to the arena of action. Since he fell below the minimum height standard of the British army, he needed a situation where his expertise might outweigh his physical shortcomings, and the only possible scenario meeting that criterion was, once again, if Turkey came into the war.

This seemed more unlikely than ever. With the war settling into paralysis-on the Western Front both sides were now frantically throwing up trenchworks-where was the incentive for anyone else to wade into the mora.s.s? "Turkey seems at last to have made up its mind to lie down and be at peace with all the world," Lawrence lamented to Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, on October 19. "I'm sorry, because I wanted to root them out of Syria, and now their blight will be more enduring than ever."

But just two weeks later, his fears were put to rest. On November 2, with Enver Pasha's faction having finally won out, Turkey came into the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

For Lawrence, more good news soon followed. In the wake of Turkey's declaration, Stewart Newcombe was recalled from the French theater to head up a new military intelligence unit in Cairo, the city slated as headquarters for Britain's war effort in the Near Eastern theater. It was to be a very small unit, just a handful of men with extensive knowledge of the region, and Newcombe immediately tapped both Lawrence and Leonard Woolley to join it.

"Now it's Cairo," Lawrence wrote Winifred Fontana again in early December, clearly in a much-improved mood. "All goes well except among the Turks."

IT WAS A land denuded. Although Aaron Aaronsohn had been prepared for the onslaught of the requisition squads following the Ottomans' entry into the war, their depredations went beyond even his worst imaginings. Across Syria, crops, farm vehicles, and draft animals were seized and hauled away in the name of wartime exigency, their hapless owners indemnified with hastily scribbled receipts that all knew would never be redeemed. And just as the agronomist had feared, the pillaging appeared particularly uninhibited in the Jewish colonies. At Zichron Yaakov, according to biographer Ronald Florence, "Aaron Aaronsohn watched Turkish soldiers systematically take clothing (including women's lingerie and baby clothes), carts, wagons, water buffaloes, agricultural implements, tools, firearms, medical instruments (including those for obstetrics), microscopes, and the fence posts and barbed wire needed to protect the fields." Eventually, most of Zichron's irrigation piping would go as well, leaving its fields and orchards to wilt from lack of water. Aaronsohn was only able to avoid a similar despoiling of the agricultural research station at Athlit through the determined intercession of local Ottoman officials and the posting of armed guards.

The agronomist might have resigned himself to the idea that these plunderings were part of the inevitable sacrifices to be made in wartime if they actually served the war effort; instead, they were gutting Syria from within, doing the enemy's work for them. In his travels over the coming months, he would see great stacks of confiscated wheat rotting in government storage yards, an uncovered mound of three thousand sacks of sugar in the city of Nablus left to dissolve in the winter rains, "to the delight of the street boys." To repair a bridge in Beersheva, Aaronsohn later reported, engineers had put in a request for twenty-four barrels of cement. Instead, the zealous requisition squads had gathered up four hundred barrels, all of which "were destroyed by rain before being used, with the result that the bridge remained without repairs."

While it could be argued that the Jewish colonies suffered disproportionately in these seizures simply because they had more and better materiel to take, the actions of the Constantinople regime certainly added to their misfortunes. Within days of Turkey joining Germany and Austria-Hungary in the conflict, the caliph, the supreme religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, issued a fatwa that this was now a holy war, that in protection of the faith it was the sacred duty of every Muslim to join the jihad against Islam's foreign, Christian enemies. Although this call to jihad lost some of its l.u.s.ter among those who noticed that the Ottomans had just joined an alliance with two Christian and imperial powers, it did have the intended effect of inflaming the Muslim ma.s.ses; in towns and cities across the empire, young Muslim men took to the streets and military induction centers to declare their willingness to fight and die for the cause. Of course, this fatwa had the simultaneous effect of alarming the empire's Christian and Jewish populations, compelling the governor of Syria to issue a hasty explanation that the jihad only applied to its foreign enemies.

If that clarification mollified many in the Christian community, which comprised nearly 30 percent of the empire's inhabitants, its calming effect was far more limited in the Jewish community. Part of their continuing fear surely derived from their small numbers-"small" having an unfortunate tendency to translate as "vulnerable" in wartime-but it also stemmed from the contentious position the Jewish colonists occupied in the social fabric of Palestine.

Some of those problems the colonists had brought on themselves. In Zichron Yaakov, as in most other "first-wave" Jewish settlements, the emigres had gradually built their way to prosperity through adopting Palestine's long-established fellaheen system, employing landless or tenant Arab peasants to perform much of the manual labor. By contrast, many of the socialist-minded Russian emigres of the second aliyah denounced this arrangement as exploitive and feudalistic; in pursuit of creating "the new Jewish man," they propounded, all work should be done by Jews themselves. For the unfortunate fellaheen, it wasn't hard to see the downside to both these approaches, one perpetuating the plantation system that had kept their families impoverished and disenfranchised for generations, the other denying them employment ostensibly for their own good-or, as Aaron Aaronsohn would caustically put it, "generously forbidding them to work at all."

Exacerbating the friction was that in the eyes of many of their Muslim Arab neighbors, the Jews were a dhimmi, or inferior people. Even for those Palestinians whose lives were unaffected by the Jewish influx, perhaps actually improved by it, the image of Jews living better than themselves-to say nothing of the further level of privilege many enjoyed courtesy of the Capitulations-added another layer of bitterness. Beginning with the first aliyah, there had been sporadic attacks on Jewish colonies by local villagers, and the occasional murder of a colonist caught out alone on the road.

But the colonists hadn't accepted this situation pa.s.sively. In the early 1900s, several Jewish paramilitary forces, most notably the Gideonites and Bar Giora, were formed on settlements particularly hard hit by marauders, and they began contracting their protection services out to other colonies. It didn't take a clairvoyant to see where this would lead; before long, the Gideonites and Bar Giora were conducting punitive raids against Arab villages they deemed as hostile or responsible for prior attacks, ensuring new rounds of retaliatory attacks by the Arabs.

Taken together, then, by the autumn of 1914 the Jewish colonists in Palestine understandably felt nervous. Between the jihad fatwa and the requisition seizures and the revoking of the Capitulations, the most pressing question was just how much the local Ottoman officials-many not partial to the Jews at the best of times-would come to their aid if matters turned truly nasty.

In Zichron Yaakov, an answer to this question soon began to form, and it was not a comforting one. Aaron Aaronsohn's younger brother Alex had been caught up in the army's conscription sweeps of September, and when he finally managed to finagle a medical release and return home two months later it was with disturbing news: after the call to jihad, Alex and all the other Jews and Christians in his conscription unit had been stripped of their weapons and consigned to labor battalions. Then, in late November, came a new edict demanding that privately owned firearms be handed in to the authorities, resulting in another army requisition squad descending on Zichron Yaakov. When the residents professed to have no weapons-they had taken the precaution of burying them in a nearby field-the Turkish commander grabbed up four men, including the luckless Alex Aaronsohn, and hauled them off to Nablus to be beaten until they remembered otherwise. It wasn't until the same commander allegedly threatened to turn his attentions to the young women of Zichron that the weapons were finally surrendered, and Alex and the others released.

For many of the Jewish emigres across Palestine, it was all beginning to feel like a prelude to the pogroms they thought they had left behind in Europe, especially when in early December the Young Turk who governed Palestine, Djemal Pasha, announced that the citizens of "belligerent nations" must either take Ottoman citizenship or face deportation. This naturally most directly affected the Russian Jewish minority, and within days, some eight hundred Russian Jews were rounded up in Jaffa for expulsion. The docks of that city were soon crowded with other Jews trying to get out on any ship that would take them, and to any safe haven that might accept them.

A number of Zichron Yaakov residents joined in this exodus, but the Aaronsohn family was not among them. Even though the family patriarch, sixty-six-year-old Ephraim, was still alive, it was really his eldest son who now decided important matters in the family, and for Aaron Aaronsohn there was no decision to be made. Palestine was their home. Moreover, it was the site of all his scientific work, and of the dream that sustained him. "I am always watched," he wrote one of his American benefactors in mid-January, "and well-intentioned friends are strongly advising me to leave the country as soon as I have the opportunity. But I have no intention to run away-yet." Still, Aaronsohn's faith in the state had been deeply shaken. "As a staunch supporter of the Turks from olden days, I feel sorry and ashamed for all I have heard and seen in these last weeks."

ON THE MORNING of December 15, 1914, a French steamer six days out of Ma.r.s.eilles approached the low, hazy horizon of northern Egypt. Among those on board was T. E. Lawrence, come to take up his new position with the military intelligence unit of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo. Accompanying him was the man who would be his immediate supervisor in that post, Captain Stewart Newcombe.

Cairo in 1914 was a city of less than one million, a place of wide boulevards and beautiful parks, of elegant riverfront promenades along the Nile. At that time, the Great Pyramids of Giza were some ten miles beyond the city's reach, their hard-stone crowns visible from the rooftop of most any tall building downtown.

But even more than its physical appearance, what made 1914 Cairo such a beguiling place was its status as one of the world's greatest crossroads, its layer upon layer of history going back over a millennium. The Old City remained a labyrinthine maze of alleyways and tiny shops, old palaces and mosques tucked into its back streets, and even if the occupying British had managed to erect a European veneer here and there in their thirty years of rule, the Egyptian capital remained a deeply exotic and mysterious place, unknowable in the way of all truly grand cities.

This was certainly part of what had entranced Lawrence upon his first visit to Cairo three years earlier. But if the city was physically little changed from 1911, in other ways 1914 Cairo was virtually unrecognizable. Since the outbreak of war in Europe, it had become a transit point for hundreds of thousands of territorial troops from India, Australia, and New Zealand pa.s.sing through the Suez Ca.n.a.l on their way to the Western Front. As happens with R&R stops in most every war, these soldiers had quickly turned much of Cairo into a vast red-light district, places where most anything and anyone could be purchased for the right price.

That situation, scandalous to conservative Cairenes, had only grown worse in the days since Turkey joined the war. With a Turkish a.s.sault on the Suez Ca.n.a.l now all but certain-indeed, the governor of Syria, Djemal Pasha, had publicly vowed as much at the end of November-tens of thousands of British and territorial troops were now being held back in Egypt to meet the threat. This was rapidly turning Cairo into a military encampment in its own right, its downtown streets awash with strutting officers and columns of marching foot soldiers. If the Cairenes had never been thrilled about the presence of their British imperial overseers at the best of times-and they hadn't-they regarded them now with a seething and growing antipathy.

To provide office s.p.a.ce and lodging for the officers tasked to manage this burgeoning military force, the British quickly took over most of the city's finer hotels. One of these was the Savoy, an eclectic blend of British Victorian and Indian Moghul architectures near the east bank of the Nile. Upon their arrival, the staff of Stewart Newcombe's new military intelligence unit set up shop in three large rooms on an upper floor of the Savoy, while taking bedrooms at the Grand Continental Hotel immediately adjacent.

Initially the unit consisted of just five men, and was more likely to be taken for some kind of Oxbridge peer-review panel than a group dedicated to the black arts of intelligence and counterespionage. Along with the two Oxford-educated archaeologists, Lawrence and Woolley, were two young aristocrats, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert, both sitting members of Parliament. Soon after arriving in Cairo, Lawrence wrote to his old friend Edward Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum to describe their various functions: "Woolley looks after personnel, is sweet to callers in many tongues, and keeps lists of persons useful or objectionable. One [George] Lloyd, who is an M.P. of sorts and otherwise not bad, looks after Mesopotamia, and Aubrey Herbert, who is a quaint person, looks after Turkish politics. Between them in their spare time they locate the Turkish army, which is a job calling for magnifiers." As for his own duties, Lawrence wrote, "I am bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen wiper."

In truth, Lawrence was far more than that. Because he had briefly worked in the Geographical Section of the London War Office, he was put in charge of the unit's mapping room. As all braced for the coming Suez attack, this was an a.s.signment that kept him working from early morning to late at night.

If he was finally a bit closer to the action, one thing that hadn't changed was Lawrence's gift for irritating his military superiors. Within weeks of his arrival a number of senior officers began grumbling about the slight young man in the Savoy mapping room, both his cheeky manner and unkempt appearance. But Lawrence's talent for annoying was not limited to his appearance and speech; he was also a very skilled writer. As the intelligence unit's acknowledged "Syria hand," in early 1915 he set to work on a long report describing the topography, culture, and ethnic divisions of that broad swath of the Ottoman Empire. Not for Lawrence the tentative, modifier-laden language that, then as now, tended to lard such background reports; instead, in "Syria: The Raw Material" he laid out his opinion of its various cities and peoples in refreshingly blunt-at times comically arrogant-prose. Typical was his withering appraisal of Jerusalem: "Jerusalem is a dirty town which all Semitic religions have made holy.... In it the united forces of the past are so strong that the city fails to have a present; its people, with the rarest exceptions, are characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors pa.s.sing through."

The remarkable utility of that first sentence-its ability in a mere twelve words to denigrate one of the world's most fabled cities, three major religions, and to offend the Christian sensibilities of every high-ranking British diplomat or general who might read it-was surely the source of considerable pride to Lawrence.

WILLIAM YALE INDULGED in portentous language as he described the mood aboard the refugee-packed freighter that carried him from Beirut to Alexandria in mid-November 1914. Having just escaped the dreadful wartime pall that had descended over Ottoman Palestine, he wrote that "to everyone on board ship, Egypt was a place of refuge where there was nothing to fear. It never occurred to me then that a different kind of terror would soon engulf the land of the Pharaohs."

Rather than pillaging soldiers or religion-crazed vigilantes, however, the terror to which Yale referred took the form of tens of thousands of transiting Australian soldiers who, having been released after weeks spent on board crammed transport ships from their homeland, were rapidly transforming ancient Cairo into a raucous whiskey-soaked bordello. Even his experience with the boisterous American roustabouts in Jerusalem couldn't prepare Yale, ever the puritanical Yankee at heart, for the scenes he saw constantly playing out in the city's streets: the fights, the pawings of pa.s.sing women, the soldiers blacked out in gutters from drink. In his estimation, such outrageous carryings-on could only tarnish British prestige in the eyes of the locals, "for the Egyptians, like many others in the Near East, looked upon the British as a coldly superior race. These hot-blooded, l.u.s.ty, undisciplined Australians of 1914 ... were a revelation."

From his perch in Jerusalem, Yale had been eyewitness to the Ottoman Empire's long, slow tumble into the war. On November 3, as word of the Turkish war declaration spread, crowds of Muslim men had begun gathering in the Old City, their numbers constantly swelled by others pouring in from the outlying villages. That evening, Yale and other Western expatriates watched from an upper balcony of the Grand New Hotel as an unending stream of young men pa.s.sed through the Old City's Jaffa Gate on their way to Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem's holiest Muslim shrine, beating their chests and chanting their readiness to die for the faith.

"[It] sent shivers up and down our spines," he would recall. "Consciously or unconsciously, we sensed in every fiber of our being, that these men were stirred with that same religious fervor with which, some 800 years before on this self-same street, their ancestors had matched forces with our Crusading forebears."

It had also helped convince Yale and his supervisor, A. G. Dana, that it was time to get out. Three days later they were at Jaffa harbor negotiating their way on board a refugee-laden freighter. By a circuitous route aboard other overladen ships, they finally reached Egypt, and the new terror of carousing Australian soldiers, on November 17.

Their arrival was noted by an alert British intelligence officer. On the Alexandria dock, Yale was escorted to an office to be debriefed on all he had seen or heard in Palestine in recent days. To his questioner's pleasant surprise, it seemed the American oilman had been very observant during his flight from Syria, and was able to provide estimates of Turkish troop strengths in a number of towns and cities in southern Palestine. He also confirmed that German officers were everywhere in the region and that along with truck convoys of war materiel and battalions of marching Turkish soldiers, the Germans appeared to be heading south.

In Cairo, Yale was forced to wait while his bosses back at 26 Broadway decided what to do with him and the other Socony employees scattered across the Middle East. From the standpoint of Standard's Kornub project, the Ottoman entry into the war only made a bad situation worse. With the British and French navies now imposing a blockade of their new enemy's coastline-and in the Ottoman era this meant the entire eastern Mediterranean sh.o.r.eline, from Palestine to the southeastern corner of Europe-there certainly would be no early opportunity to develop that concession. The fundamental question facing Socony, then, was whether to retreat from the Middle East for the time being and bring their people home, or to keep them in place in hopes of some hard-to-foresee improvement in the near future.

Yale was still waiting for the answer when, one day in late December, there came a knock on the door of his room at the National Hotel. He didn't immediately recognize his visitor-the man was young and in a British army uniform, two characteristics that described much of Cairo just then-but there was something in the gaze of his piercing blue eyes that stirred a memory.

"h.e.l.lo, Yale," the visitor said with an amused, lopsided grin. "You don't remember me, do you? I'm Lawrence of British Intelligence. We met at Beersheva last January."

Yale remembered then, and no doubt also remembered the delight with which the c.o.c.ky young archaeologist had set out to demolish his "playboy" cover story.

As quickly became evident, this meeting, too, was to be an interrogation of sorts. Even before entering the war, Constantinople had been moving troops down into Palestine in obvious preparation for an attack on the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and that pace was now accelerating. Lawrence, having himself arrived in Egypt just days earlier, had thought to scan the registry logs of incoming foreigners and had come upon Yale's name. He now wanted to learn everything there was to know about the road that Standard Oil had been building below Hebron: its precise route, its composition and drainage, whether it could be used by the Turks to bring heavy weaponry south.

"When he secured all the information I had," Yale recalled, "he began talking about the situation in Palestine. I soon discovered that, although I had just arrived from there, this officer knew far more than I did. It was then that I began to learn of the efficiency of the British Intelligence Service and to understand something of the ability of young Lawrence."

That evening, Lawrence wrote up his findings for his superiors at military intelligence. It made for rather unpleasant reading. While the Hebron-Beersheva road was not finished, Socony had completed work on the most difficult stretch, the descent through the Judean hills to the edge of the desert. Perhaps drawing on his engineering experience at the Panama Ca.n.a.l, William Yale had made sure the road was cut with a gradual enough gradient to allow for heavy-truck traffic-one so gradual, in fact, that the roadbed could easily be converted to a railroad. Until then, British war planners had a.s.sumed that any significant Turkish-German advance toward the Suez from southern Palestine would be largely confined to the established narrow pathway close to the Mediterranean sh.o.r.eline. With their Hebron road, Standard Oil and William Yale had inadvertently provided the Turks with the capability of expanding their field of operations by some thirty miles.

ON THE MORNING of November 21, 1914, less than three weeks after Turkey entered World War I, Ahmed Djemal Pasha, one of the "Three Pashas" triumvirate that now ruled the Ottoman Empire, left Constantinople to take up his new dual positions as commander of the Fourth Army and governor of Syria. His true authority was far greater than the t.i.tles suggested: supreme military and political ruler of all Ottoman lands south of Anatolia and west of Iraq, an area that comprised over half of the empire's remaining total landma.s.s. As befitting that authority, his first order of business was to lead the Turkish army to the Suez Ca.n.a.l and strike at the heart of British Egypt.

Over the next three years, Djemal Pasha would come to thoroughly dominate life in Syria, his actions credited with causing much of what was to come. In his dual capacities as a military and political leader, he would also come into regular contact with-and at varying times employ the services of-three very different men: Aaron Aaronsohn, Curt Prfer, and William Yale.

In some respects, the short, powerfully built Djemal seemed an unlikely choice for such a position. Born in 1872 to a low-level Ottoman officer, he had sought a career in the military as a matter of course, and risen unremarkably through the ranks before throwing his lot in with the reformist-minded conspirators of the Committee of Union and Progress in the early 1900s. A fairly obscure figure until the 1913 coup that enabled the CUP to rule by fiat, Ahmed Djemal was then appointed military governor of Constantinople. Less than a year later, with the emergence of the so-called Three Pashas triumvirate, the forty-two-year-old officer became one of the three public faces of the shadowy committee that controlled the empire.

Undoubtedly one reason for Djemal's elevation was his personal magnetism. As Henry Morgenthau, the American amba.s.sador to Turkey, would recall, "Whenever he shook your hand, gripping you with a vise-like grasp and looking at you with those roving, penetrating eyes, the man's personal force became impressive." This does not imply that Morgenthau at all cared for Djemal, instead seeing in his charisma a malevolent force best rendered in overheated, racialist-tinged prose. "His eyes were black and piercing, their sharpness, the rapidity and keenness with which they darted from one object to another, taking in apparently everything with a few lightning-like glances, signalized cunning, remorselessness, and selfishness to an extreme degree. Even his laugh, which disclosed all his white teeth, was unpleasant and animal-like."

A more nuanced view was offered by another American who had extensive dealings with Djemal during the war. Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, would recall observing the governor at an afternoon tea party in wartime Beirut, a social event to which even the expatriate citizens of Turkey's foes had been invited. Djemal was "gay, debonair, interested, wandering about with his hands in his pockets, or lounging on the arm of a big chair, the other arm of which was occupied by a charming European lady." Noting the governor's love of children and overt displays of affection toward his wife-"unusual among Orientals"-Bliss saw in Djemal a man caught between an overwhelming vanity and a core kindness, "a character teeming with conflicting elements: cruelty and clemency, firmness and caprice, ideality [sic] and hedonism, self-seeking and patriotism."

These conflicting personality traits mirrored Djemal's political views. Indeed, he seemed to embody the internal contradictions that lay at the heart of the Young Turk movement, caught as it was between West and East, modernity and tradition, between awed admiration of the European powers and bitter resentment. A devout Muslim who embraced the jihadist credo of pan-Islam, Djemal had also been one of the most vocal Young Turk leaders in advocating that the empire's ethnic and religious minorities be given full civil rights. An aesthete who loved European music and literature, and who enjoyed nothing more than practicing his French in the expatriate salons of Constantinople, he also exhorted his countrymen to purge their nation of corrupting Western influence. Dreaming of a Turkish and Islamic renaissance that would return the Ottoman Empire to its ancient splendor, he was at heart a technocrat, intent on pulling his nation into modernity through the building of roads and railways and schools.

"He had the ambition of creating a Syria which he could exhibit with pride to an admiring Europe," Bliss wrote. "I think it would not be unfair to call him a personal patriot. He was inordinately vain. He wanted a reformed Turkey, but he wanted pre-eminently to be known as the Chief Reformer."

To try to achieve that, Djemal would rely on the skills he had honed in his fitful rise through the treacherous political currents of the CUP, the ability to turn in the blink of an eye from graciousness to ferocity, an adroitness with both the peace offering and the dagger. As those who lived in the lands encompa.s.sed by his new southern posting were soon to discover, Djemal Pasha could be wonderfully solicitous in trying to keep potential enemies on his side, but if flattery and sinecures and promises didn't appear to do the trick, he was perfectly willing to go with the old standbys of exile and execution.

As his train pulled out of Constantinople's Haidar Pasha station, the challenges of reforming Syria were soon to be put in stark relief-the initial hurdle Djemal faced was just getting there. The first part of that long journey went smoothly enough, a pleasant two-day train ride through central Anatolia, but the troubles started when they reached the depot town of Mustafa Bey, at the northern edge of the Gulf of Alexandretta. There, embarra.s.sed officials informed Djemal that the onward track to the city of Alexandretta (modern-day Iskenderun) had recently washed out in a number of places. The pasha switched to an automobile, but only briefly; after mere yards on the main "highway" to Alexandretta, the car was mired up to its wheel wells in mud. A four-hour horseback ride finally brought Djemal to the seaside town of Dort Yol. There, a tiny two-man tramcar was found that, certain optimists believed, might be light enough to navigate the damaged coastal rail line and finally deliver the pasha and his chief of staff to Alexandretta, ten miles farther along.

"Never shall I forget this journey by trolley on the slippery track," Djemal wrote. "More than once we went in danger of our lives as in pouring rain we pa.s.sed along the coast, which was watched by enemy ships.... We reached Alexandretta after a journey during which the trolley pa.s.sed over rails which, in some places, hung suspended over a void for fifteen to twenty metres, and in others were under water."

But more bad news awaited the pasha. The road onward to Aleppo, the only link between Alexandretta and the interior of northern Syria, was now impa.s.sable-although "impa.s.sable" was perhaps an understatement. Repairs had been started on the road some time earlier, but had progressed no further than removing all its crowning stones. Those stones now lay in high stacks along either side, leaving the road to form, in Djemal's words, "a perfect ca.n.a.l." As he would exclaim in his memoir, "And here is the only road which keeps my army in touch with the home country!"

By the time Djemal finally reached his headquarters in Damascus on December 6, more than two weeks after his departure from Constantinople, he'd come to a fairly obvious conclusion: the Suez attack should be postponed until some of the very basic issues of supply lines and infrastructure were dealt with. He made the mistake, though, of sharing this thought with the young German intelligence officer who had been awaiting his arrival in Damascus and had been a.s.signed to serve as Djemal's liaison to the German high command: Major Curt Prfer.

To Prfer, there could be no question of delaying the Suez offensive. As he wrote to Max Oppenheim after learning of Djemal's hesitation, support for the jihad among the Syrians was tepid to begin with, and in the event of a postponement, "undoubtedly the carefully manufactured enthusiasm would disappear and the old indifference, if not hostility, takes its place." What's more, such a delay would provoke "the total discouragement of the Egyptians, who are cowards anyway."

It was a rather curious stance for Prfer to take, since most of his letter to Oppenheim consisted of reasons why an attack on the ca.n.a.l was almost sure to fail, his contention that "the means are not sufficient to the task." But Prfer may have had a darker motive in urging it forward. In Constantinople, he had been eyewitness to the protracted struggle to bring Turkey into the war, and as he surely knew from intelligence reports reaching him in Damascus, there were still those in the CUP leadership maneuvering to back out of the German alliance and sue for peace with the Entente. An a.s.sault on the Suez would end all that. From that point on, Turkey would be joined at the hip to Germany, and it would win or die along with it.

Shortly afterward, Djemal received a terse cable from Constantinople: the Suez attack was to go forward without delay.

Chapter 5.

A Despicable Mess So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.

T. E. LAWRENCE TO HIS FAMILY, FEBRUARY 1915.

Soon after taking up his post at the Savoy Hotel, Lawrence commandeered the largest wall in the office and covered it with a ma.s.sive sectioned map of the Ottoman world. In his idle moments, he would stand against the opposite wall and gaze upon it for as long as time permitted, taking in all its vastness.

By January 1915, he was awaiting the Turkish attack on the Suez Ca.n.a.l with a certain impatience. One reason was that he had little doubt of its outcome. To reach the ca.n.a.l, the Turks first had to cross 120 miles of the inhospitable Sinai Peninsula. From his knowledge of that expanse, and especially of its limited water sources, Lawrence was convinced the attacking force would, by necessity, be quite small-surely not the 100,000 soldiers some alarmists in the British military hierarchy were suggesting-and thus easily repelled.

But the chief reason for his impatience was that he was already contemplating the next chapter in the Near East war, the one to come once the Turkish a.s.sault had been turned back. It would then be time for the British to go on the offensive, and gazing upon his maps at the Savoy, Lawrence was seeking out those places where an invading force might strike at the Ottoman Empire to most devastating effect.

One truly odd feature of that map had undoubtedly long since occurred to him: despite its enormous size and tenuous political cohesion, from the standpoint of geography that empire was astoundingly well protected.

The political and spiritual core of the Ottoman world was of course the ancient city of Constantinople, along with the mountainous region of Anatolia, the ancestral heartland of the Turks, that lay to its east. This concentration inevitably conjured a tantalizing prospect to British war planners, the chance to "decapitate" their enemy: if that city and that region could be seized, there was little doubt that all else would quickly collapse.

Except that any possible path to doing so presented enormous obstacles. With both of Turkey's European neighbors, Greece and Bulgaria, still neutral in the war, there was little maneuvering room to try an overland approach on Constantinople from the west. In theory, Britain's Russian allies could attempt an eastern advance from their position at the far end of Anatolia, but already being bled white by the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Russians were likely to exhaust their available manpower and materiel before getting very far in the mountainous terrain. As for a southern approach, that meant either a ground force trudging up through the Anatolian heartland where local resistance would be fierce-and, again, the mountains-or a naval flotilla running the gauntlet of Turkish forts lining the three-mile-wide Dardanelles strait. There was simply no easy way.

But the alternative, to start at some point on the Ottoman Empire's periphery, looked even worse. British Indian forces had seized the oilfields of southern Iraq in the first days of the war, but an overland march from there meant a seven-hundred-mile slog through river swamplands and desert before the Anatolian frontier was even reached. Likewise, an advance from Egypt meant first crossing the desolate Sinai Peninsula, then crashing up against Turkish forces ma.s.sed in the narrow chokepoint of southern Palestine.

But amid this whole great expanse, there did exist one exquisitely vulnerable point in the Ottoman Empire's wall of natural defenses. It was the Gulf of Alexandretta, at that spot in northwest Syria where the long north-south coastline of the eastern Mediterranean sh.o.r.e b.u.mps up against the far more rugged coastline of Anatolia. Not only was Alexandretta possessed of the best deep natural harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, a critical a.s.set for amphibious operations, but the relatively flat landscape just to its east afforded ample room for ground troops to maneuver for a push farther inland.

But these were military considerations, ones that a number of senior British officers in Egypt had cottoned to even before Lawrence's arrival. What Lawrence uniquely saw, both from his familiarity with the region-Jerablus lay just one hundred miles east of Alexandretta-and his firsthand view of Ottoman society, was the political.

One of the great hidden dangers for any empire going to war is that within its borders are often large communities of people who want absolutely nothing to do with it. And the longer a war and its deprivations continue, the more resentful these communities become, and the more susceptible to the promises and propaganda of one's enemies. Most of the dueling empires of Europe were grappling with this internal danger as their war stretched on, but whatever problems the Europeans faced in this regard-and in some cases they were considerable-paled to insignificance next to those facing the Young Turks in Constantinople. Quite simply, given the extremely polyglot nature of their realm, most any course of action they might take that would win the support of one segment of the population was all but guaranteed to alienate another. This quandary had been ill.u.s.trated by the mixed results of the call to jihad in November. While that call had momentarily excited the Muslim youth, it had terrified the empire's non-Muslim populations. At the same time, many conservative Muslim Arabs, already mistrustful of the Young Turks' perceived favoritism toward ethnic Turks, viewed it as a cynical attempt by an increasingly secular regime to play the religion card.

But if the Ottoman Empire was a mosaic, it was also one of distinct patterns, where various "colors" predominated or diminished across its expanse. And if one studied this mosaic from a slight remove, there was one spot on this great expanse where many of these patterns came to a confluence, creating a kind of ethnic and religious ground zero: Alexandretta.

Already, for reasons of distance and the relatively scant resources being allotted to it, Lawrence was convinced that a conventional war against Turkey wouldn't work. Instead, the British needed to pursue a so-called irregular strategy. That meant taking advantage of the internal fissures of their enemy's society, forging alliances with its malcontents. The Alexandretta Basin was the demarcation line between the Turkish world of Anatolia to the north and the great Arab world to the south-and as Lawrence well knew from his years at Jerablus, the Arabs of northern Syria had grown to deeply resent their Turkish overseers. Alexandretta also stood at the edge of the heartland of the Armenians, a people who had suffered periodic ma.s.sacres at the hands of their Turkish neighbors; surely no people had more reason to rebel against Constantinople than they. In Lawrence's view, quite aside from its purely military advantages, a British landing at Alexandretta was almost certain to spark uprisings of both Syrians and Armenians against the Turks, uprisings that would naturally complement the British effort.

But Lawrence also had firsthand information that made the idea even more enticing. The princ.i.p.al highway linking Anatolia to the south pa.s.sed through the Alexandretta Basin, and as Lawrence knew from his time in the region, that highway was in terrible condition. In addition, the Hejaz Railway that linked Constantinople to its Arab realms pa.s.sed through the basin-or, to put it more accurately, partially linked, because what Lawrence also knew, courtesy of his journey through the region six months earlier at the behest of Stewart Newcombe, was that two crucial spans of that railway in the Taurus and Ama.n.u.s Mountains north of Alexandretta were nowhere near completion. This meant that the Turks would have no way of responding quickly if an invasion force took control of the basin, and in the slowness of their response, all points to the south, cut off from resupply or reinforcement, might quickly fall. With just a comparative handful of soldiers in Alexandretta, then-Lawrence estimated a mere two or three thousand would be needed-the British had the potential of not only splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, but of taking one-third of its population and over half of its land area out of the war in one fell swoop.

Lawrence wasn't alone in identifying Alexandretta's extraordinary vulnerability; the Turks were keenly aware of it too-so keenly, in fact, that it had already caused them to submit to one of the more humiliating episodes of World War I.

On December 20, 1914, a lone British warship, HMS Doris, had appeared off Alexandretta and, in a brazen game of bluff, issued an ultimatum to the local Turkish commander: release all foreign prisoners in the town, as well as surrender all ammunition and railway rolling stock, or face bombardment. In desperation, for they had no guns to resist such an attack, the Turks had threatened to kill one British prisoner for every one of their citizens killed in the bombardment. That threat, in blatant violation of the Geneva and Hague war conventions, had sparked outrage within the diplomatic community and been quickly countermanded by the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople. Instead, a bizarre compromise was reached: in return for the British not sh.e.l.ling the town, the Turks agreed to destroy the two train engines that were sitting in Alexandretta station. Except, the embarra.s.sed Turks were soon forced to admit, they had neither the explosives nor the expertise to uphold their end of the deal, so on the morning of December 22, a demolitions expert from the Doris was given safe pa.s.sage to come ash.o.r.e and blow the trains up. Understandably, the British government's attention to the Doris affair largely centered on the death-threat aspect, but to Lawrence the incident laid bare just how panicked the Turks were of what could be done to them in Alexandretta.

Although a mere second lieutenant relegated to collating maps, by virtue of his attachment to the military intelligence unit Lawrence was in the unique position of having his ideas disseminated to the highest levels of the British war-planning structure. It is surely no coincidence that while an Alexandretta landing had been discussed before, the scheme took on new urgency shortly after his arrival in Cairo. Judging by its telltale idiosyncratic approach to grammar, Lawrence was almost certainly the author of a crucial January 5, 1915, military intelligence memorandum on the subject: "We have been informed from two good sources that the Germans in command in Syria dread nothing so much as a landing by us in the north of Syria-they say themselves that this would be followed by a general defection of their Arab troops. There is no doubt that this fear is well founded, and that a general Arab revolt, directed by the Pan-Arab military league, would be the immediate result of our occupation of Alexandretta."

The lobbying had an effect. On January 15, 1915, just one month after his arrival in Cairo, Lawrence sent an update to his old mentor in Oxford, David Hogarth. Because the letter had to clear military censors, he adopted a deliberately vague tone: "Our particular job goes well. We all pulled together hard for a month to twist 'them' from what we thought was a wrong line they were taking-and we seem to have succeeded completely, so that we today have got all we want for the moment, and therefore feel absolutely bored."

The "them" he alluded to were senior British war planners in Cairo and London, while the "job" was an amphibious landing at Alexandretta. The only holdup now, it seemed to Lawrence, was for the long-awaited Turkish a.s.sault on the Suez Ca.n.a.l to be put safely in the past.

SO GREAT WAS his men's morale that for a brief time even Djemal Pasha was stirred by the thought that it just might work out after all. "Everyone was absolutely convinced that certainly the Ca.n.a.l would be crossed," he recalled, "that we should dig ourselves in securely on the further bank, and that the Egyptian patriots would then rise and attack the English in the rear."

One source of this soaring optimism within the ranks of the Ottoman Fourth Army at the end of January 1915 was the extraordinary fort.i.tude they had shown in crossing the Sinai, a shining example of what was possible when Turkish doggedness was joined to German organization. Making that 120-mile crossing had been months in the planning and involved almost superhuman logistical arrangements. Overseen by German officers, engineering units had fanned out across the desert beforehand, tapping wells for the oncoming troops, building rainwater reservoirs, and laying in depots of ammunition. Great teams of oxen had hauled the disa.s.sembled pontoon bridges needed to ford the Suez Ca.n.a.l, as well as the army's heavy artillery, while some twelve thousand camels had been gathered up from as far away as central Arabia to ferry supplies. In early January, the army of thirteen thousand men set out along three different paths through the desert, and despite the deprivations of that march-each man's daily food ration consisted of just a half pound of biscuits and a handful of olives-by the end of the month the attack force was encamped just a few miles east of the ca.n.a.l, ready to strike. Certainly the British in Egypt knew an attack was imminent-their spotter planes had photographed and occasionally shot at some of the Turkish formations-but they seemed to have no idea how large the force might be or where along the hundred-mile length of the ca.n.a.l it would come. It was this that had put Djemal's troops in such good spirits.

"I used to talk to the troops every night about the victory in store," he wrote, "and what a glorious victory it would be. I wanted to keep the sacred flame alive in the whole force.... If, by some unantic.i.p.ated stroke of good fortune, this enterprise ... had brought us success, we should naturally have regarded it as a good omen for the final liberation of Islam and the Ottoman Empire."

One man who little shared in these high hopes was Major Curt Prfer. Along with a small contingent of other German junior officers, he had endured the hard rigors of that desert crossing, and attributed all its success to the meticulous planning of the chief German military advisor to Djemal, a lieutenant colonel with the colorful name of Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein. Still, planning had its limits, and even if Prfer wasn't a professional soldier-just like T. E. Lawrence, he had received his officer's commission with no actual military training-he appreciated that the changed face of modern war almost surely meant problems for the coming offensive. In particular, in the age of aerial reconnaissance, then just in its infancy, the British undoubtedly had a far better idea of their enemy's strength and intentions than the Turks imagined.

This was confirmed to Prfer by his own reconnaissance missions to the ca.n.a.l. The plan of attack called for the Turkish army's flanks to make diversionary feints at the north and south ends of the waterway, while the main force of some sixty-five hundred men stormed across near its midpoint, just above the Great Bitter Lake. When Prfer joined a forward scouting party that crept close to the ca.n.a.l on the morning of January 25, he observed just two British dredgers and a handful of small lighter boats in the lake. Three days later, however, the British presence had grown to several transport ships and two cruisers, a number that expanded to some twenty ships by January 30. In the meantime, Prfer had experienced a close call when a British warplane dropped two bombs on the main headquarters encampment.

"I confess that the hammering of the bombs, the powerful explosions and the black billowing smoke, frightened me," he noted in his diary, "although I did my best to hide it. In the camp, everyone ran pell-mell."

To Prfer, it all pointed to a coming disaster. "The enemy cruisers in the lake control the situation," he wrote upon returning from the January 30 scouting mission. "We will be destroyed before we have actually come into the vicinity of the channel." That night, he ate his "hangman's meal," asparagus and French toast.

The a.s.sault finally came in the early-morning hours of February 3, 1915. Taking advantage of a brief sandstorm that screened their actions from view, Turkish engineers hastily a.s.sembled their ten pontoon bridges at the water's edge as the foot soldiers ma.s.sed behind, ready to charge across. At a crucial moment, however, a British searchlight picked up the activity; in a barrage of rifle and artillery fire, seven of the pontoon bridges were quickly destroyed. That may have been a blessing in disguise for the Fourth Army, for it limited the slaughter. As it was, the approximately six hundred Turkish soldiers who had managed to reach the far sh.o.r.e before their escape routes were cut off were all either soon killed or compelled to surrender.

Prfer had been given the quixotic task of leading forward a long wagon train hauling sandbags; the plan called for the sandbags to be used both to block the ca.n.a.l and to create a bridge to the far sh.o.r.e. Instead, he spent most of the day scrambling from one point of chaos on the front lines to the next as British naval sh.e.l.ls exploded all around.

By nightfall, Djemal and his senior German advisors concluded that the situation was hopeless, and a general retreat back across the Sinai desert began. To most everyone's surprise, the British made no attempt to pursue the fleeing army, enabling its withdrawal to be as orderly and disciplined as had been its advance.

Despite his own bleak a.s.sessment on the eve of battle, the setback on the ca.n.a.l seemed to cast Curt Prfer into despondency. Nursing a slight arm wound-he'd apparently been hit by shrapnel during the a.s.sault-he holed up in Hafir el Andscha, an oasis town at the eastern edge of the Sinai, to file dispatches to Max von Oppenheim and Hans von w.a.n.genheim, the German amba.s.sador to Turkey. He was blunt, even derisive, over the campaign's failure to trigger an Egyptian uprising.

"Despite all our agitation," he wrote Oppenheim, "despite the thousands of [jihadist] pamphlets, we did not have any deserters.... The Egyptians are even cowardly in desperation, and lack any genuine love of fatherland."

But his disappointment clearly had deeper roots. Ever since teaming up with Max von Oppenheim, the former Oriental scholar had fervently embraced the notion of a pan-Islamic jihad against Germany's imperial enemies. Not just the battle but the entire Sinai campaign gave the lie to that. From the very outset, tensions were evident between the Turkish and Arab components of the a.s.sault force, and these had only worsened with time. Many of the Arab units fled as soon as the shooting began, or never deployed in the first place, while some went over to the enemy. Prfer heaped particular scorn on the Bedouin nomad warriors, many of whom he had personally recruited to act as scouts and who similarly melted away on the decisive day. Indeed, just about the only unifying element detectable among this fractious lot was antipathy for their German advisors; even many Turkish officers had adopted a policy of "pa.s.sive resistance" to any direction offered by the Germans throughout the campaign.

"The holy war," Prfer informed his old mentor from Hafir el Andscha, "is a tragicomedy."

Djemal Pasha had a rather more upbeat a.s.sessment. While the a.s.sault obviously hadn't led to the Egyptian uprising he had hoped for, the action would cause the British to keep more troops in reserve in Egypt, making fewer available to fight elsewhere. Moreover, by his calling off the engagement when he did, his army was still largely intact. At the same time, as they made their respective ways back across the Sinai, Djemal and Prfer undoubtedly shared a mounting sense of unease. Given the t.i.t-for-tat nature of the war, a British retaliatory offensive would come soon. The only question was where, and from their own recent difficult journeys across Syria, both knew the likeliest spot: the Alexandretta Basin.

It wasn't just the broken railways and "ca.n.a.l" roads of that chokepoint that were cause for worry. In the nationwide scramble for reliable frontline troops, the Turks had been forced to leave the safeguarding of the Alexandretta region to two second-rate divisions composed almost exclusively of Syrian Arabs. Resentful of their Turkish overseers at the best of times-and these weren't the best of times in the Ottoman world-it was highly probable that these Arab units would quickly collapse at the first sign of an Allied landing, perhaps even switch sides.

In fact, Djemal Pasha's anxiety over Alexandretta had already led him to commit a singularly reckless act. Desperate to mask the city's abject vulnerability, it was he who had issued the threat to execute British prisoners back in December when HMS Doris stood offsh.o.r.e. Now, in the wake of Suez, the Syrian governor was sure the British would turn to Turkey's Achilles' heel once more, and this time there would be no negotiating, no way to stop them.

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to s.n.a.t.c.h defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one's own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray. In early 1915, the British military would navigate its way to a fiasco of such colossal proportions as to require all three of these factors to work in concert.

With the brushing back of the Turkish a.s.sault on the Suez on February 3, Lawrence and other members of the intelligence unit in Cairo a.s.sumed that plans for a landing at Alexandretta would immediately get under way. Instead, the war strategists in London had already begun focusing on a different spot on the Ottoman coastline: the Dardanelles strait below Constantinople.

One of the earth's more peculiar natural formations, the Dardanelles is a narrow, fjordlike waterway flanked by the Turkish Asian mainland on its eastern bank and the mountainous Gallipoli peninsula on its western. After a twisting thirty-mile-long course between the mountains, the gorge opens up at its northern confluence to the inland Sea of Marmara, at the far end of which lies Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. For obvious reasons, the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, letting onto the Mediterranean, has always been regarded as the maritime gateway to that city, and since ancient times every civilization that has controlled the region has maintained fortifications there. The Ottoman forts that dotted the high slopes above the strait in early 1915 had been erected on the ruins of Byzantine forts, which in turn had been built on the ruins of Greek and Roman ones.

"Forcing the Narrows" had been an alluring notion for British war planners ever since Turkey came into the war, and for none more so than the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. As he repeatedly pointed out to the British cabinet-often to the point of tiresomeness, as was his style-with a defenseless Constantinople lying just to the north of that strait, here lay the chance to swiftly decapitate their Turkish adversaries and take them out of the war. Further arguing for a Dardanelles breakthrough was an appeal for aid from Russia, hard pressed by German and Austro-Hungarian forces in the north. With Russia's northern ports either iced in or patrolled by marauding German U-boats, the only possible maritime route for such aid, Churchill argued, was from the south.