As he motored from Tiberias to Damascus Allenby had time to hear from Chauvel of what Lawrence had been doing during the past three days. He immediately decided that Faisal needed to be put in his place. ‘Triumphal entry be damned! I cannot wait till three as I have to go back to Tiberias tonight. You must send a car for him at once. He can go out again for his triumphal entry.’ Faisal did as he was told and arrived at the Victoria Hotel where Allenby, Chauvel and their staffs were waiting. Lawrence was present and acted as interpreter in what Allenby told his wife was a ‘long and satisfactory’ exchange. The upshot of the meeting was that the ex-Turkish officer and Arab nationalist, Ali Riza Rikabi, appointed by Chauvel would remain as governor of Damascus. He would be nominally under Faisal and take advice from a French officer. This regime and its equivalent Arab administration between Maan and Damascus would ultimately be under Allenby’s control. Lebanon, and with it Syria’s outlet to the sea, would be wholly under French control.
The temper of the meeting was recalled by Chauvel some years after. Faisal heard how, as Hussain’s representative, he could rule Syria with French political assistance and financial backing, but would have no power in Palestine or the Lebanon which would be under British and French governance respectively. Faisal argued that Lawrence had told him nothing of this, having been led to believe ‘that the Arabs were to have the whole of Syria, including Lebanon but excluding Palestine’.47 Cross-examined by Allenby, Lawrence claimed to have known nothing about the French protectorate over Syria or their rights to the Lebanon. Lawrence was so emphatic that on 6 October a bewildered Allenby informed the War Office that ‘[the] Arab leaders have never been officially notified of the terms of the Anglo-French agreement’.48 This was not to say that Faisal was not aware of what that agreement contained, even if its contents had never been officially relayed to him. It may have been that Lawrence, injecting a powerful element of wishful thinking into his interpretation of government policy, had convinced himself that the original terms of the Sykes—Picot agreement were no longer valid. In this, he may well have been encouraged by his allies within the Arab Bureau.49 Moreover, as his behaviour during the past fortnight strongly suggested, he was close to utter exhaustion and suffering from battle fatigue.
Allenby brought Lawrence back to harsh political reality. The only protest open to him was to defy Allenby and refuse to serve alongside a French officer. He also asked for overdue leave to England. ‘Yes, I think you had,’ was Allenby’s curt response. Here, Chauvel may have allowed some of his own animus towards Lawrence to creep into his memoir. In a conversation with an Arab diplomat in May 1919, Lawrence recalled his departure for Damascus. He had told Allenby that ‘if there was no alternative to applying the agreement, there remains no place for him in Syria. Allenby insisted that he must stay, but in the end agreed to let him go to England to see his family for one month’.50
This was probably a relief to Allenby whose respect for and affection towards Lawrence had been severely strained. The general must have known from his subordinates that during the past week Lawrence’s attachment to the Arab cause had made him neglect his duty as a British officer and had brought him dangerously close to open insubordination. Those around him were justified in wondering whether Lawrence was no longer certain which side he was on. His successor, Lieutenant-Colonel Kinahan Cornwallis, did. Osmond Walrond detected a safe pair of hands and with some satisfaction praised Allenby’s choice to Milner: ‘Faisal is a weak character but as long as he has an Englishman at his elbow he won’t go far wrong’ for Cornwallis was ‘an Englishman before everything’.51
Lawrence’s lapse from ‘Englishness’ had been detected by Faisal, who later told the diplomat Philip Kerr that Lawrence:
was of a broad mind, acts as circumstances and emergencies dictate, never bound himself with European rules and methods. He found himself in a new environment, among people not accustomed to certain systems and procedures and he adapted himself, assisted by his intellect. Many other Europeans were not son.52
But if the Lawrence of the desert had ‘gone native’, and there was much about his behaviour during the Damascus campaign which indicated this, he soon recovered his national identity. Faisal’s experience of Lawrence at the Versailles conference during the spring of 1919 convinced him that the man he once thought ‘more Arab than the Arabs’ was, in the words of another Arab delegate, ‘English before everything’.53
Yet to reassume his Englishness, Lawrence left Damascus for Cairo on the first leg of his journey home. There, on 8 October, he wrote an article for The Times in which he outlined the achievements of the Arab army over the past six weeks. This included an account that it had been first into Damascus and had rescued the city from anarchy. Legend was already taking over from history.
PART FIVE
THE LEGEND OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
I
Achievement
Lawrence’s life after 1918, what he wrote and did, and his special place in the public consciousness of Britain and America were all the direct result of his wartime career. He arrived in Britain in October 1918 determined to get justice for Faisal and the Arabs. His publicity campaign stimulated immense public interest which concentrated on him and his deeds rather than on the rights and wrongs of the Arab cause. Within a year, he was an international celebrity, which he remained until his death. To the man in the street he was ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (the title used by his fellow officers in Cairo as early as December 1917), ‘the Uncrowned King of Arabia’, or ‘the Mystery Man of Europe and Asia’.1 The world never wearied of stories about him and newspapermen satisfied its need with a heady mixture of sensation, half-truth and fantasy.
Truth is, proverbially, the first casualty of war: in Lawrence’s case it was a victim of peace. Before looking at the genesis of the legend, it is worthwhile to pause and summarise just what Lawrence and the Arabs had achieved during their two years in the field, not least because the exact details of their campaigns were soon buried under an avalanche of hyperbole and invention.
The Arab Revolt had secured its primary objective. A civil war had been provoked between the Turks and the Arabs that had weakened both the Ottoman empire and its Pan-Islamic propaganda offensive. This point was pressed home by Lawrence in a report on current Syrian politics composed for the Arab Bureau in February 1918, was mentioned in passing in the Seven Pillars and was taken up by Hogarth when he defended the Bureau’s policies before an audience of the Central Asia Society in 1927.2 This view was endorsed by Indian officials, who were grateful for a device which many believed had reduced tension among Muslims and averted civil disorders. Judged as a purely wartime measure, the Arab movement had been successful, since it had temporarily neutered jihadic militancy. Still, Turco-German appeals for Pan-Islamic solidarity did not cease the moment Hussain rebelled. In the spring of 1918 Enver Pasha was beating the jihadic drum as ‘the Army of Asia’ began its advance towards the Caspian. He was sure that its victories would stir up religious passions, which they did, at the expense of the Armenians of eastern Turkey and the Caucasus, and that Muslims in Turkestan would join in a projected invasion of India. His expectations in this region were shared by nervous British and Indian intelligence officers, who feared that a recrudescence of fanaticism would sap the loyalty of Muslim sepoys and create new waves of unrest in India. They were not mistaken; Pan-Islamic uprisings erupted across the North-West Frontier in 1919 and flickered on for three years.
Even after Turkey’s surrender at the end of October 1918, there were many in the Middle East who thought that there was plenty of latent jihadic passion waiting for the right catalyst to transform it into action. In September 1918 a spy reported to a British intelligence officer in Adana a conversation he had had with a Turkish official who told him that ‘special Indians, who were here before the war, have been sent back to India to encourage the Muslims there to rise against the unbelievers.’ He added, ‘We have also sent agents to Persia, Arabia and the Caucasus.’3 Four
months before, there had been disturbing rumours that Enver Pasha was promoting a jihad in Afghanistan.4 The Arab Revolt had already passed into history and Muslims, bewildered by Allied plans for the abolition of the caliphate and the annexation of Turkey, were again striving for strength through religious unity. Lawrence’s assertion made in February 1918 that the Arab Revolt had ‘drawn the teeth of the Caliphate for a generation and killed the jihad’ was premature and optimistic.
So too were his hopes that the Hejaz rebellion would signal a sequence of mutinies and mass desertion by Arabs in the Turkish service. Arabs in Turkish uniforms fought their kinsmen along the Hejaz railway and in Syria. When Medina surrendered in February 1919 many Syrians and Arabs were taken prisoner. Hitherto loyal to their sultan, many of these men accepted the judgement of history and chose to join Hussain’s army and were no doubt soon engaged in a war against another Arab, his local rival Ibn Saud. Arab nationalism never evolved in the way which Lawrence had hoped. His and Britain’s Arab nationalists were Hashemite partisans whose dynastic loyalties cut them off from those who did not see Arab nationhood being achieved by essentially conservative princes whose power rested on the tribal sheiks of the desert and whose political thought was shaped by antique custom. There were dissenters who were unhappy with the Hashemite connection with Britain. One Syrian sheik, Salah Abdullah, spoke for them when he told a British officer in June 1918 that, since Faisal was hand in glove with Britain, ‘he had no wish to be ruled by an independent Sharifian government.’5 In Syria the Druze, Christians, Jews and Shiite Muslims, who made up a third of the population, were likewise extremely uneasy about the replacement of a Turkish with a Hashemite government and voiced their fears to the Crane—King Commission sent out by the Versailles Conference in the summer of 1919. The commissioners also discovered that the new Arab government relied upon former Turkish officials who kept up their corrupt practices.6
By his own admission, Lawrence had strained himself to breaking point to get the Arabs to work with a common resolve. His efforts were widely appreciated. ‘We have good reason to be thankful to Colonel Lawrence,’ Massey wrote in 1919. ‘His is one of the most romantic careers of the whole war, and by his staunch advocacy of British friendship for the Arabs, he kept our allies in Arabia actively championing our cause.’7 It had been a Herculean, often Sisyphean task: the raw material was poor, Faisal wobbled, tribal sheiks and their followers squabbled, brawled and sometimes ran away. Somehow the Beduin and regular units held together and sustained an intermittent harassment of their adversaries. The Northern Arab Army’s will to fight owed much to Lawrence’s persistence, persuasiveness and forbearance. By contrast the Southern Army under Abdullah remained inert. It was, Kirkbride considered, ‘useless for any military purpose’, a judgement amply supported by its lacklustre performance during the siege of Medina.
Tribal harmony had been vital and Lawrence had always found it hard to secure. It did not outlast the war and, within months of the armistice, feuds had been reopened. During the spring and summer of 1919, the military administration in Syria was plagued by a revival of internecine warfare among the Beduin. A raiding party 1,000 strong mustered in the Hawran, tribal warfare broke out in western Jordan and there were fears that non-Muslim minorities in this region would be persecuted.8 Interestingly, in January 1920 Beduin threatened army engineers, commanded by Newcombe, as they were surveying the Hejaz line which, it was hoped, could be repaired and reopened.9 In short, there was a return to the endemic disorder of Ottoman days, which may have suited many sheiks who had customarily supplemented their revenues by brigandage.
In terms of winning the world war, Lawrence later admitted that his campaign was a sideshow attached to a sideshow. This was a modification of his wartime opinion that the defeat of Turkey would be a blow from which Germany could not recover. Turkey asked for and was granted an armistice on 30 October at the moment when German armies were retreating across Belgium and their generals had already decided to seek terms from the Allies. At the same time the Allied High Command was making calculations which assumed that Germany might continue to fight on in 1919. These were not seriously affected by the news that Turkish forces in Syria and Iraq had been decisively beaten.
As to the campaign in Palestine and Syria, one fact is central. Final victory was gained by Allenby’s Allied army in a series of battles during the second part of September 1918 sometimes called ‘Armageddon’. These successes were the culmination of a process of piecemeal conquest which had started in Sinai back in 1916 and included the taking of Jerusalem in November 1917. At each stage the enemy’s forces were engaged in pitched battles where Allied forces bore the brunt of the fighting. When Damascus fell, Allenby had at his disposal 458,000 men, of whom 176,000 were British, 93,000 Indian, 23,000 Australian, New Zealanders and South Africans and 152,000 Egyptian labourers. Against them were Turco-German units, depleted by the demands of the Caucasus front, which totalled just over 100,000. Most were underfed, ill-clothed and warweary. Not only did Allenby’s army outnumber von Sandars’s by four to one; the Allies enjoyed overwhelming air superiority. Air-power clinched victory; between 21 and 23 September retreating columns endured ferocious harassment from the air which was so terrible in its effect that many pilots were sickened and a few refused to fly further missions. This strafing and bombing, combined with the close cavalry pursuit, made it impossible for the Turco-German forces either to regroup or to resist.
Readers of Lawrence’s account of the Syrian campaign and of the biographies of Graves and Liddell Hart could be excused ignorance of these vital details since they are pushed into the background by each writer. Those who take their history from the cinema will be completely taken aback since the film Lawrence of Arabia excludes any mention of non-Arab forces from its narrative.
Arab eyewitnesses were in no doubt as to how and by whom the Turks had been overcome. ‘They could have done it without us!’ was the comment of Nuri es Said as he watched the endless flow of British cavalrymen ride into Damascus. What, if anything, did the Arab armies achieve? First, it was better, as Robertson had wisely remarked in 1916, that they were allies rather than opponents who danced to a German tune. Progress on the Iraq front had been hindered by Arab hostility which forced commanders to divert troops to guard lines of communication or serve in punitive columns. In Palestine and Syria the British suffered no such distractions. As von Sandars enviously noted, they ‘were fighting under conditions as though in their own country, while the Turks in defence of their own country had to fight amongst a population directly hostile’.10
A second and more important benefit of the Arab alliance was that it forced the Turkish High Command to maintain an over-large garrison along the Hejaz railway once it came under Arab attack. According to the figures in the British Official History, the Medina garrison was 12,000 (in fact over 16,000 surrendered) and a further 10,000 were deployed along the track from Tabuk to Maan. Intelligence assessments compiled during the winter of 1917/18 added a further 34,000 stationed between Dera and Maan. So the Arabs were tying down upwards of 30,000 men, a quarter of local Turkish strength. The War Office, Allenby and Lawrence assumed that, if these men had not been sitting in barracks or blockhouses, they would have been used on the Syrian front where their intervention in the 1917–18 campaigns would have upset Allenby’s chances of success. For this reason Allenby gave Lawrence his whole-hearted support.
What neither man realised was that, in Constantinople, Enver refused to consider redeploying his railway garrisons on the Syrian front. Political arguments overrode military considerations. Possession of Medina, one of the three holy cities of Islam, gave credibility to Turkey’s claim to lead the Muslim world. Furthermore, Enver and the Committee of Union and Progress appreciated that a toehold in Arabia could be used to advantage when a final peace settlement was negotiated. For these reasons, Enver was determined to hang on to Medina and defend the lifeline which linked it to the Ottoman heartlands. Even if he had changed his
mind, there is nothing to suggest that those troops released would have been automatically transferred to Syria and Palestine. During 1916 and 1917 surplus Turkish troops were loaned for service in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front and, from the winter of 1917/18, all spare men were being drafted to the Caucasus, much to von Sandars’s dismay. There were some strategists for whom Arabia was a burden of which Turkey could be well rid. ‘Too much was made of the Hejaz and the Yemen,’ Ali Said Pasha, Commander-in-Chief in the Yemen, told his British opposite number in Aden. ‘Not a single Turkish soldier should hazard his life in these areas,’ he added, for ‘they brought no financial return to Turkey and were a continual source of religious unrest.’11 Paradoxically, Lawrence’s Arabs were tying down Turkish troops in a region which some senior Turkish officers considered worthless.
Measured by political and military yardsticks and stripped of subsequent romantic ornament, the Arab Revolt was a propaganda coup for Britain which upset Turco-German plans for Pan-Islamic subversion in India and the Sudan. In the long term the movement fulfilled Lord Hardinge’s prophecy that it would become a Frankenstein’s monster which would torment its begetters. This certainly happened since there was a fundamental divergence of interests between Britain and France, both acquisitive powers, and a national movement which aimed at the creation of independent Arab states, even universal Arab unity. Until 1918 the supranational Ottoman empire had stood in the way of this goal. Once it fell apart, Britain, France and much later Israel and the United States would successively take its place as the focus for Arab nationalist passions.
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