The Arab role in all this was to harass and disrupt communications and transport in the east so as to convince the Turks that their left at Deraa was under major attack. As Liddell Hart put it, ‘Lawrence wove a web of feints and fictions to persuade the Turkish command that Allenby’s attack was coming east towards Amman instead of north to Galilee.’ Lawrence, in his own words ‘the godless fraud inspiring an alien nationality’, was now feeling increasingly guilty about his role. He spent his thirtieth birthday agonising over his inadequacies. In the Sykes–Picot agreement of May 1916, Britain and France had already broadly divided up their spheres of influence in the Levant. Lawrence knew that this ‘old-style division of Turkey between England, France and Russia’ took no account of Arab nationalism; he had warned Feisal about it privately, but also convinced him that the only way out was ‘to help the British so much’ that they would be shamed into granting a decent peace. Lawrence says he ‘begged’ Feisal ‘not to trust in our promises, like his father, but in his own strong performance’. Nevertheless, Lawrence came to fear that he was duping ignorant people in a glorified swindle:
Yet I cannot put down my acquiescence in the Arab fraud to weakness of character or native hypocrisy: though of course I must have had some tendency, some aptitude for deceit, or I would not have deceived men so well, and persisted two years in bringing to success a deceit which others had framed and set afoot. I had had no concern with the Arab Revolt in the beginning. In the end I was responsible for its being an embarrassment to the inventors. Where exactly in the interim my guilt passed from accessory to principal, upon what headings I should be condemned, were not for me to say.
In September 1918, a mixed British and Arab force gathered at Azrak, east of Amman, under Lawrence and his immediate superior, Colonel Joyce. Joyce’s fighting force blended the new with the old, and communicated in English, French, Arabic and Hindustani. It comprised two aircraft, five Hijaz Armoured Car Company vehicles with their tenders, a couple of ten-pounder guns on Talbot cars, four French mountain guns, a score of Indian machine-gunners, and hundreds of Bedouin Arab horsemen and camel riders. They proceeded to attack the railway line north and south of Deraa, blowing up several kilometres by placing under the iron sleepers thirty-ounce gun-cotton charges which bent and warped the steel track into ‘tulips’ beyond repair.
To cut off all Palestine, as well as the Hijaz, by destroying the railroad from Damascus, Constantinople and Germany, Joyce’s men took Mezerib station, west of Deraa, illuminating their evening meal by burning the Turkish trains and petrol tankers. They snipped the telegraph wires, slowly, with ceremony. ‘It was pleasant to imagine Liman von Sanders’ fresh curse, in Nazareth, as each severed wire tanged back from the clippers.’ Lawrence blew up what he claimed was his seventy-ninth railway bridge at Nisib, lighting a thirty-second fuse on 800 pounds of gun cotton in one go. But not everything was going their way. They were under Turco-German attack from the air, and Lawrence had been bombed on camel-back, in a car, on foot. Now he wanted air support.
When an aeroplane brought news that Allenby’s advance was working well, Lawrence flew back in it. The gulf of the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea cut off direct communication between the Arab army in the east and Allenby’s forces in Palestine. But the aeroplane abolished geography, and Lawrence flew to Headquarters at Bir Salem, near Ramleh, to see his commander-in-chief.
In a cool, airy, whitewashed house, proofed against flies, Lawrence was shown Allenby’s plans for three Imperial thrusts over the Jordan: the New Zealanders to Amman, the Indians to Deraa, and the Australians to Kuneitra. All would converge on Damascus, with Lawrence’s Arabs assisting on the right flank. Lawrence explained his air problems, and Allenby summoned the RAF. Lawrence admired ‘the perfection of this man who could use infantry and cavalry, artillery and Air Force, Navy and armoured cars, deceptions and irregulars, each in its best fashion!’ They planned for a bomber, loaded with petrol and stores, and two Bristol fighters to be sent over to Lawrence.
The huge Handley-Page bomber, which could carry a ton of supplies, impressed Lawrence’s Arabs. ‘Indeed and at last they have sent us THE aeroplane, of which these things were foals.’ ‘These things’ were the few much smaller fighter biplanes which had occasionally assisted the Arab Revolt since November 1916, the first air support for a guerrilla force in history.
The Arab guerrillas had done their duty to Allenby, and with increased Arab attacks and bombings, the Turkish Fourth Army was slowly collapsing; the Arabs had earned their gold sovereigns and could stand down and go back to their flocks and herds. But Lawrence wanted to push on, to Damascus.
I was very jealous for the Arab honour, in whose service I would go forward at all costs. They had joined the war to win freedom, and the recovery of their old capital by force of their own arms was the sign they would best understand.
In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence tells how the Arabs waded through blood to reach Damascus, which they were the first to enter, and where they successfully restored order from 1 October 1918. Wavell says this was ‘not the whole truth’, but it was a central tenet of the Arab propaganda myth that Lawrence needed to create.
Allenby, the commander-in-chief, ‘gigantic and red and merry’, turned up in his grey Rolls-Royce at the Victoria Hotel, Damascus. According to Lawrence, he approved ‘in ten words’ all Lawrence had done, confirmed his appointments, and took over the hospital and the railway. Then Feisal, ‘large-eyed, colourless and worn’, arrived by special train from Deraa, smiling through the tears which the welcome of his people squeezed from him. Allenby and Feisal met for the first time:
They were a striking contrast – the burly confident Englishman, accustomed to command and to dominate by sheer force of personality, and the slight ascetic Arab with his princely bearing, to whom the arts of the politician were more natural than the vigour of a soldier. Both were men of fine quality, and appreciated and trusted each other.
Wavell, Allenby: A Study in Greatness
But then Allenby started imposing the terms of the Sykes–Picot agreement about French and British spheres of influence. Feisal must deal with a French liaison officer, and not attempt any control of Lebanon, even though Feisal’s country Syria needed a Mediterranean port. The French dislike of the Hashimites began to emerge. Feisal, arguing for self-rule, denied knowledge of any Anglo-French deal and Lawrence – who had, in fact, betrayed the existence of the Sykes–Picot agreement to him – claimed ignorance of it too. What the Arabs should have earned by their own courage and endurance in the campaign was now trumped by imperial realpolitik. Lawrence backed away in disgust from the great deception he had been part of, inducing people to fight for what would never be given. Wavell described Lawrence as ‘overstrained in mind and body’. He asked Allenby’s permission to go, and left Damascus on 4 October 1918. The last word in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is ‘sorry’.
T. E. Lawrence has had many detractors, but also powerful friends. Chief among his admirers was Winston Churchill, who refers to Colonel Lawrence’s ‘astonishing personality’ in The World Crisis, and wrote an essay for the anthology T. E. Lawrence by his Friends: ‘I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time … one of Nature’s greatest princes.’ Churchill also singled Lawrence out for admiration akin to hero worship in Great Contemporaries.
Churchill’s own first experience of real war had been seeing ‘the Spaniards out-guerrilla-ed in their turn’ by the rebels in Cuba in 1895. He read Seven Pillars of Wisdom as the story of one individual directing ‘audacious, desperate, romantic assaults’ against a narrow steel railway track running through blistering deserts, the Achilles tendon which if severed would bring down Turkey, then Germany. Churchill identified with Lawrence as ‘someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action’. Churchill’s later encouragement of the Special Operations Executive, of guerrilla and partisan armies, of commandos and Special Forces and their raidin
g tactics – ‘butcher and bolt’ – owed an enormous amount to the example of Colonel Lawrence.
In the spring of 1921, Winston Churchill took over the Colonial Office. The Middle East ‘presented a most melancholy and alarming picture’ of turmoil and turbulence. There was rebellion in Iraq, Egypt was in ferment, there was tension between Arabs and Jews in Palestine and disgruntled desert chiefs were rousing the Bedouin beyond the Jordan. Churchill formed a new department to deal with the area and invited T. E. Lawrence to join. He proved an admirable civil servant.
In March 1921, at the Hotel Semiramis in Cairo, Colonial Secretary Churchill gathered the top British civil and military administrators of the region (nicknaming them ‘the forty thieves’) all together for a ten-day conference. Churchill and Lawrence then effectively redrew the map. They split the British-controlled territory west of Iraq in two, along the line of the river Jordan. The 23 per cent of the land west of Jordan, already under a Jewish High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, was to become the ‘national home for the Jewish people’ promised in the Balfour Declaration. The 77 per cent of the dry territory east of the river, now named Trans-Jordan or Transjordania, was for the Arabs, and was to be ruled by Sharif Hussein’s son, the Hashimite Emir Abdulla. His brother Feisal, who had been ejected from Damascus by the French in July 1920, now received his consolation prize, the Kingdom of Iraq, a place he had never visited.
Lawrence was pleased to seem a kingmaker in Jordan and Iraq and to reward the Hashimite Sherifians, but Churchill was anxious to save some of the ‘ruinous expense’ of imperial over-reach: garrisoning Mesopotamia or Iraq with 40,000 troops and suppressing the insurgency there in 1920 had cost Britain £33 million. He wanted to maintain the security of the new country on the cheap by withdrawing the soldiers and just using the RAF, then being nurtured on a shoestring by Hugh Trenchard.
When Churchill was in his previous job, Secretary of State for War and Air, he had told the House of Commons on 15 December 1919: ‘The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire’, and the quiet success of a swift air campaign in Somaliland, in January/February 1920, convinced him that ‘air control’ was the way of the future. Half a dozen RAF planes, supporting 500 Camel Corps and a battalion of Kings African Rifles on the ground, apparently managed to smash an Islamist rebellion by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, known as ‘the Mad Mullah of Somaliland’, in three weeks, and impose a peace that lasted for the next twenty years. It all cost only £77,000, so the Air Ministry made the claim that colonial policing by aeroplane, independent air action involving a little judicious bombing or mustard gassing of rebellious tribes, was the most economical use of the iron fist under the velvet camouflage of independence. After Feisal was crowned King of Iraq on 23 August 1921 he was protected from his enemies by eight RAF squadrons as well as some armoured cars and gunboats. By 1923 they had paid their way by saving Mosul and its oilfields both from Turkish invaders and Arab rebels.
Another fan of T. E. Lawrence was the foremost military critic in Britain between the wars, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, who wrote a biographical study of him, ‘T. E. Lawrence’: in Arabia and After, published in 1934. Liddell Hart’s famous ‘indirect approach’, his 1920s rethinking of infantry tactics and strategy to avoid the butchery he saw as a company commander at the Somme, drew to an extent on Lawrence who, Liddell Hart said, ‘fore-shadowed what I believe will be the trend of the future – a super-guerrilla kind of warfare’.
Lawrence aroused love and hatred in equal measures. David Cannadine dismisses Lawrence as a ‘homosexual egomaniac’. Sir John Keegan sees the encouraging of guerrillas by developed nations, in which Lawrence played a pivotal role, as the tragic irresponsibility which unleashed modern terrorism. Yet John Buchan said in his autobiography ‘I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world’ and called Lawrence ‘the only man of genius I have ever known’.
John Buchan and Lawrence first met in 1920, although Buchan had heard about Lawrence from mutual friends like D. G. Hogarth and Aubrey Herbert. They had much in common: both were small, energetic, tougher than they looked, classically trained, with similar tastes in literature and the same benign vision of the future of the British Empire (a voluntary association without racial prejudice). They also shared a lifelong interest in unconventional warfare. ‘The science of war had always been one of my hobbies,’ Buchan wrote.
Buchan changed Lawrence’s life when, as director of information in 1917, he sent the American journalist and film-maker Lowell Thomas out east to cover Allenby’s campaign. There he was introduced to Lawrence by Ronald Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem, with the words, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia.’ The cinematic travelogue and lecture that Thomas put together after the war, ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’, packed out the Royal Opera House, the Albert Hall, the Philharmonic Hall and the Queen’s Hall in London from August 1919, and then toured the world for four years, culminating in a book, With Lawrence in Arabia, which launched the Lawrence legend and made him a kind of matinee idol.
It was John Buchan who suggested to Liddell Hart that he put Lawrence’s essay ‘The Evolution of a Revolt’ into the Encyclopaedia Britannica as its entry ‘Guerrilla’. John Buchan (according to his son William’s Memoir) delighted in Lawrence’s rare and secretive visits to his Oxfordshire home, and incorporated Lawrence into later incarnations of his fictional hero Sandy Arbuthnot. In Buchan’s 1929 novel The Courts of the Morning (which reworks Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo), Sandy Arbuthnot leads a horseback guerrilla uprising in a mineral-rich South American republic called Olifa, and blows up a railway, just as Lawrence did. For the increasingly desk-bound Buchan, Lawrence represented a last link to the world of adventure.
9
A Dazzle of Zebras
Back in England, at the end of 1916, long-haired, white-moustached David Lloyd George had stepped up to lead what he later called ‘the bloodstained stagger to Victory’, the long last phase of the war in which camouflage, deception and propaganda played a vital role. On 6 December 1916 King George V asked David Lloyd George to become Prime Minister, and the ‘Welsh wizard’ set about forming a national government, drawing his administration from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties, with a war cabinet reduced to five. In the same month, Solomon J. Solomon set up a camouflage school in Hyde Park.
Lloyd George had more drive and initiative and a greater sense of urgency than his predecessor Asquith. A cartoon of him in Punch, entitled ‘The New Conductor’, showed the new premier as a vigorous figure in evening dress, baton upraised for the 1917 overture. It was a mammoth task. The country was two years into a military effort that was draining the exchequer (the war cost £5.7 million a day) and straining national resources. The land battles slaughtered soldiers and the air raids scared the citizens of London, but it was the war at sea that was doing the most economic damage as U-boats attacked the cargo ships that supplied the British Isles. By the end of 1916, Britain had lost a fifth of its merchant fleet.
The Admiralty seemed paralysed in the face of the submarines, telling the Government in November 1916: ‘No conclusive answer has as yet been found to this form of warfare … We must for the present be content with palliation.’ The only defences against submarines were underwater steel nets and not very reliable mines; U-boats could only be attacked when on the surface, by ramming or shooting. The new weapons that would eventually make a difference – hydrophones for detection and depth charges for destruction – took time to research and develop.
Churchill had feared from the beginning that enemy submarines could destroy British sea power and win the war. German U-boat attacks had diminished after the bad publicity they gained by sinking the Lusitania in 1915, and the Kaiser had curbed the renewal of torpedoings. But in 1917, with deadlock in the trenches and blockaded Germany reduced to a diet of potatoes, his Imperial Majesty was desperate: ‘I order the unrestricted submarine campaign to begin on 1st Februa
ry with the utmost energy.’
Ironically, the power of the U-boat weapon would actually ensure that Germany lost the war. The isolationist United States of America only entered the fray after Imperial Germany began its strategy of indiscriminate submarine attacks on all ships, neutral or Allied, military or merchant, hospital or passenger, within huge zones of blockade. Two days after the Kaiser announced unrestricted submarine warfare, the USA cut off diplomatic relations with Germany. But this was not enough. Britain needed American manpower and industrial muscle actively on its side in the war. German submarines tipped US opinion in favour of the Allies, but a piece of deception clinched it.
The famous coup by the British Naval Intelligence Department that helped bring America into the war was not strictly naval, but diplomatic. The director of naval intelligence was still Admiral Reginald Hall, that ‘demonic Mr Punch in uniform’ as Barbara Tuchman described him. Hall controlled Room 40, Old Building (OB40) at the Admiralty, the heart of British signals intelligence. Here were employed 800 wireless operators and around 80 cryptographers and clerks, who intercepted some 15,000 German secret communications in WW1. John Buchan’s 1927 short story ‘The Loathly Opposite’ describes wartime cipher work done by a unit of disparate amateurs very like those of OB40.
‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,’ said US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson piously in 1929 when he closed down Herbert O. Yardley’s cipher bureau. The British – and Reginald Hall in particular – were less scrupulous about enemy communications in wartime. On 17 January 1917, OB40 illicitly intercepted, on American territory, a diplomatic cable message from the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to Von Eckhardt, the German Minister in Mexico. Two of OB40’s cryptographers, Nigel de Gray and the Reverend William Montgomery (a scholarly expert on St Augustine of Hippo) cracked the code and were astonished by what they read. Zimmermann’s cable said that if the USA came into the war on the Allied side, then Germany would propose an alliance with revolutionary Mexico and help the Mexicans reconquer lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
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