After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘The European situation’, wrote Morris Jastrow, professor in the University of Pennsylvania in 1917, ‘would have assumed an entirely different colouring if England and Germany had not clashed in the East over the Bagdad railway, as happened immediately upon the announcement of the convention of 1902–3’.25 Even if we do not go so far as Jastrow in his claim that ‘the Bagdad railway will be found to be the largest single contributing factor in bringing on the war’,26 it would clearly be quite wrong to overlook its significance; wrong to see that, once Turkey had entered the war against Britain and on the side of Germany, Britain was fighting not just for France and the new-found Entente, but for its very imperial existence.

  The war in France and Belgium, which will concern us in the next chapter, surprised all who took part in it by the speed with which it turned into a murderous deadlock. Within three months of the declaration of war, trenches extended all along the Allied line. The casualties were catastrophic, and the prospect of a swift victory for either side was non-existent. In such circumstances, the political and military leaderships were terrified of moving any troops from the immovable, bloody and pointless battles of the Western Front for fear of allowing a German breakthrough. Lord Kitchener, veteran of Khartoum and Omdurman, sat in the cabinet as Secretary of State for War. He saw the force of arguments put forward by Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lloyd George that the war should be pursued on another front. Lloyd George favoured an attack on Austria with the aid of the Serbs, and an invasion of southeastern Turkey at Alexandretta. Fisher believed it would be possible to launch a joint operation against Turkey, using Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian forces to join a force of 75,000 British and 25,000 Indian troops. This was sheer fantasy. There simply were not 75,000 British troops to spare.

  Churchill, however, liked Fisher’s general ideas, perhaps because of all the cabinet, even including Kitchener, he had the keenest sense of Britain as an imperial or oriental power. Fisher himself quickly cooled, and by the time of the campaign itself he was adamantly opposed to it. But on 25 November 1914 Churchill proposed to the War Council that there should be a naval bombardment of Gallipoli, followed by a blockade of the Dardanelles, while Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli peninsula and made their way to Constantinople. There were no Dreadnoughts available for the task. Most of the Fleet was at Scapa Flow, waiting for the Germans to come out from Wilhelmshaven. Older battleships would have to be used in the Dardanelles, but, said Churchill, ‘the importance of the result would justify severe loss’.27

  The American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau Sr, who knew the parlous state of the Turkish economy and saw the Turkish war effort at a standstill, looked back at it all and said: ‘It seems so strange now – this conviction in the minds of everyone then – that the success of the Allied Fleets against the Dardanelles was inevitable, and that the capture of Constantinople was a matter of only a few days.’28

  The very words ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘Dardanelles’ still have the power to chill Australians, New Zealanders or British. The campaign is remembered as one of the great disasters of the First World War. Had it succeeded, however, it would almost certainly have led to the surrender of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire would have been in British hands. The command of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, which came much later and after great hardship and loss of blood, would have given to Britain confident control of the Near East and the Mediterranean and greatly weakened both the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans. A British victory at Gallipoli would certainly have shortened the war and saved many lives. In the short term, however, it was a calamity. Churchill was pursued by its memory for years. It appeared to have ruined his career, since he was removed as first lord of the Admiralty when the remaining troops were withdrawn from the peninsula, and as late as the general election of 1923 his public speeches would be interrupted with cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’29

  From the start, the campaign was bedevilled by indecision. At first the war cabinet approved the whole scheme. Then they persuaded themselves that the peninsula could be captured by a naval offensive alone. Sir John de Robeck, an undistinguished admiral, was in charge of the ships, some French, some British, which sailed into the Strait on 18 March 1915. After further indecision on the part of Kitchener it was decided that troops would be sent, but too late and too few.

  One French ship, the Bouvet, was sunk, and two British ships, Inflexible and Irresistible, mined and severely damaged. The admiral and his officers panicked. It never occurred to the Turks that the Allied ships would not resume their bombardments, which had, in spite of their own setbacks, been very effective. In fact the fleet withdrew from the Strait and lay at anchor around the outlying islands.

  When de Robeck began his bombardment of Gallipoli the peninsula was scarcely populated, and with persistence he could have taken it easily. By the time the 75,000 troops under the command of Sir Ian Hamilton arrived from Egypt, to land on 25 April – the British at Cape Helles, the Australians and the New Zealanders, the French on the opposite shore at Kum Kale – the fleet was in chaos. Far from bombarding the Turks while the soldiers disembarked, the ships were occupied in attempts to get the troops ashore. There were some catastrophic mistakes, with ships pulling alongside sheer rock faces which men could not possibly scale. Heroic fighting on both sides continued in the peninsula until December. Against appalling odds, the Australians fought in the Anzac beachhead. They had been dumped by the navy on a tiny stretch of sand. Animals, guns, ammunition, stores were wedged in an area 1,000 yards long and 30 yards wide.30 Fifteen thousand troops were crowded into this area. Staggering up the cliffs, the men dug themselves in, remaining there, many of them for heroic months, living in holes, eating scraps and fighting the vigorous assaults of the brilliant Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal – destined to be known not only as the ‘Saviour of Gallipoli’ but also as the father of his new nation, Ataturk.

  All the battles were terrible, especially perhaps the last big one, the failed attempt to capture Ismail Ogha Hill in August. Churchill wrote: ‘On this dark battlefield of fog and flame Brigadier-General Lord Longford, Brigadier-General Kenna, VC, Colonel Sir John Milbanke, VC, and other paladins fell.’31

  The total casualties for the entire eight and a half months of the Gallipoli campaign are hard to assess. Official Turkish figures are of 86,692 deaths and 164,617 wounded or sick. Most historians think this is an underestimate. British and Dominion casualties vary from 198,340 to 215,000. Including French, there were probably 265,000 Allied casualties, with some 46,000 killed in action or dying of disease.32

  These are terrible casualties, but they are smaller than those on the Western Front. Had Sir Ian Hamilton’s request been granted by the War Office and he had been sent 50,000 more reinforcements, he might well have won. As it was, a much weakened Turkey was now free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt, and the war in the Near East dragged on with infinitely more loss of life.

  The aim, and atmosphere, of the campaign are captured vividly in Ernest Raymond’s 1922 bestseller Tell England. The young men of the Cheshires have a pep talk from their colonel – ‘He reminded us that the Dardanelles Straits were the Hellespont of the Ancient World, and the neighbouring Aegean Sea the most mystic of the “wine-dark seas of Greece”, he retold stories of Jason and the Argonauts; of “Burning Sappho” in Lesbos; of Achilles in Scyros; of Poseidon sitting upon Samothrace to watch the fight of Troy.’ But the colonel also told them: ‘See this greater idea. For 500 years the Turk, by occupying Constantinople, has blocked the old Royal Road to India and the East … He oppresses and destroys the Arab world, which should be the natural junction of the great trunk railways that, tomorrow, shall join Asia, Africa, and Europe in one splendid spider’s web.’ The British Empire is seen as the link between the gods and heroes of Greek myth and the commercial advantages of a trunk railway. There are plenty of ‘Grecian’ movements in Raymond’s novel, as when the padre, leanin
g over a ship’s rail and looking at the troops, murmurs: ‘Don’t you love these big handsome boys, who will not come to church.’33

  The golden 27-year-old Rupert Brooke was part of the army which set out for Gallipoli. Sir Ian Hamilton offered him a staff job in Egypt but he refused. He wanted to be at the landing on the peninsula with his men. Hamilton noted in his diary that ‘he looked extraordinarily handsome, quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet’. He used the description when he spoke at Brooke’s memorial service in the chapel of his old school, Rugby.34

  To part of that only world that counts, the Prime Minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith, Brooke wrote:

  Do you think [the Turks]’ll make a sortie and meet us on the plains of Troy? It seems to me strategically so possible. Shall we have a Hospital Base (and won’t you manage it?) at Lesbos? Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15 in guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine dark and unvintageable …? Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh, God!

  I have never been quite so happy in my life, I think. Not quite so pervasively happy … I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition to Constantinople.

  In the event, Brooke was destined to die of septicaemia, after a gnat in Port Said bit him on the lip. He died on a French hospital ship, and was buried on Achilles’ island, Skyros.

  Almost before he died Brooke had become an Immortal of almost Olympian stature in the eyes of a whole generation. There was a lot of bad poetry written during the First World War. Perhaps the best poetry to emerge, written either during or after it, was work by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, David Jones and W. B. Yeats. But among the bad poetry was some good-bad poetry, and the best of this was probably Rupert Brooke’s, even if, at this juncture of time, it is impossible to recapture an atmosphere in which ‘The Soldier’ or ‘Grantchester’ could be unironically admired. Yet as Brooke was dying in the Mediterranean, Dean Inge, a highly intelligent man and a pacifist, was intoning to a huge congregation in St Paul’s Cathedral that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.35

  ‘Once in a generation,’ Sir Ian Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them … Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now become a strait jacket.’36

  Such was the extraordinary mood, and played out against the Mediterranean and the Near East, public schoolboys reared on Homer and Herodotus and the Bible could see themselves in a heroic mould.

  Colonel T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) was the key figure who helped coordinate the Arab revolt in 1917–18 against the Turks. By the time this had got under way, and the Arabs, with their guerrilla raids, terrorist attacks on railways, camel rides and rifle-shots had provided crucial help to the conventional army of General Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, the war in Europe was all but over. By the time Turkey signed the Armistice on 30 October 1918, German armies were retreating across France and their generals had already decided to seek terms with the Allies. A Turkish defeat in the Dardanelles in 1915 might, arguably, have very much hastened the end of the war. The Turkish defeat in 1918 felt like a cleaning-up operation.

  The part played by ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was itself marginal. He later said that his campaign was a sideshow attached to a sideshow.37 This was certainly true, if Lawrence’s campaigns are viewed solely as part of the diplomatic and military history of the times. Indeed as the man who emerged, after the First World War was over, as the most eloquent champion of the Arab cause, Lawrence could very well have viewed 1918 not as ‘a triumph’ – his subtitle for his own account of the campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom – but as its opposite.

  The fighting continued in Palestine until 1 October 1918, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon. But a decisive moment was reached when, after a spectacularly brilliant campaign, Allenby captured Palestine from the Turks and entered Jerusalem at midday on 11 December 1917. In English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Greek, a proclamation was read expressing a desire for reconciliation and respect for the city’s ancient shrines. The period of the British Mandate in Palestine had effectively begun. Yet only a month before, the Balfour Declaration had, by its support for a future Jewish homeland, effectively stymied any hope for an Arab hegemony in Palestine. So disastrous did Allenby consider it that he tried to censor news or distribution of the Balfour Declaration in Palestine itself.38 Copies, however, were distributed by the Turks, whipping up fears of mass Jewish immigration into the area when the war ended. This was hardly the ‘triumph’ of Lawrence or his Arab friends’ dreams.

  When Lawrence and his Arabs helped Allenby’s conventional forces to take Damascus in October 1918, there was once again bad news. It remains unclear to this day whether Lawrence knew the plans of the European powers all along or whether he was taken as much by surprise as his friend Faisal. But, once Damascus had been occupied by an army consisting of British, Egyptian, Australian, French and New Zealand units as well as Indian lancers, Lawrence had to break it to Faisal that there was no hope of an independent Arab state, with Faisal at its head, taking in the territories occupied by Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. The European politicians had already carved up the area and Faisal was offered the chance to administer Syria under a French mandate. No ‘triumph’ there either.39

  Out of the ‘sideshow attached to a sideshow’, however, T. E. Lawrence concocted an heroic legend, one of the most enduring to come out of the First World War. Seven Pillars of Wisdom was originally the title of a book he planned to write as a young Oxford student on his first visit to the Middle East as an aspirant archaeologist in 1911. He referred to it as ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom or my monumental book on the Crusades’.40 He was then aged twenty-two years. Ten years later he had become a warrior as famous as his own Crusader hero Richard the Lion-Heart. It is probably the sheer unlikeliness of Lawrence as a great national hero which helped to equip him for the role. He was in some ways much less of an ‘establishment’ figure than Sir Roger Casement, who ended on the hangman’s rope. One can readily imagine that had Fate thrown either man a slightly different die, their roles could have been reversed.

  Lawrence was proud of the fact that his father, Thomas Robert Chapman, was a gentleman, the son of an Irish baronet. But Chapman left his lawful wife for the nanny, Sarah Junner, a tormented Presbyterian puritan, and they lived together as man and wife with the assumed name of Lawrence, with their five children. Ned, the future Lawrence of Arabia, was their second. By the time he was eight they had settled in one of the newly built villas in Polstead Road, North Oxford. That was in 1896. Not much more than a decade later the future leader of the Labour party, Hugh Gaitskell, was a pupil at the Dragon School in Oxford. His parents disliked him playing with a child named John Betjeman, since Betjeman, whose father was in trade, had friends in Polstead Road. This was not a smart address. T. E. Lawrence’s father might have been born as a gentleman but by the time he and his common-law wife had settled in Oxford he could not afford to educate his sons as gentlemen. T.E. went to the Oxford High School where his contemporaries were the sons of tradesmen. He went on to the small, and largely Welsh, college of Jesus.

  You could not grow up in late Victorian or Edwardian England without the ridiculous business of class marking and dogging you. Lawrence’s illegitimacy and his having been brought up in lower-middle-class circumstances go a long way to explaining the satisfaction he derived, once he confronted the officer class, in upsetting it, teasing it, shocking it. When he encountered Colonel Cyril Wilson at Jiddah in 1917, Wilson cabled his commanding officer in Cairo, Colonel, later Brigadier General, Bertie Clayton:

  Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard at that … I look on him as a bumptious young ass who spoils
his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs &c. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, H.M.’s ships and everything else. He put every single person’s back up I’ve met from the Admiral [Wemyss] down to the most junior fellow on the Red Sea.41

  Seven Pillars is, among other things, an extended catalogue of instances in which its author had the pleasure of setting off comparable wretchedness in stuffy personages. Indeed, he derived almost as much pleasure from igniting pompous rage in British colonels as he did in discharging dynamite along the Hejaz railway.

  He had not gone to the Middle East as a soldier. The fighting men who had accompanied him on his early journeys had been inside his head: the Crusaders, certainly, but also the heroes of Malory and Homer. The two books which accompanied him on his campaigns with the Arabs were the Odyssey, which he was destined to translate, and Morte d’Arthur.42

  Lawrence studied history at university, his favoured period being 918 to 1273, and his special subject the Crusades. ‘Your matter is passable, but you write in the style of a two-penny-halfpenny newspaper,’ said one of his tutors, R. L. Poole of Magdalen College. In spite of his readable prose manner, Lawrence was awarded a First Class degree. Dr David Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and, like Poole, a fellow of Magdalen, became Lawrence’s patron, sending him off to do fieldwork in Syria and Lebanon. Lawrence sketched, photographed and measured Crusader castles. At Hogarth’s request, he also visited Jerablus on the Upper Euphrates, seat of the Hittite city of Carchemish, to buy Hittite clay cartouches. Until the outbreak of the First World War this place was to become his second home. As an archaeologist he toured the Middle East extensively, getting to know Sinai, Syria and Palestine, perfecting his Arabic, and forming his view of ‘Arabia’ not so much as a political entity as an imaginative concept.

  It was during his first digging season at Carchemish that he developed close ties with Selim Ahmed, an Arab boy whom he nicknamed Dahoum, the dark one – a joke about the boy’s light skin. The Seven Pillars is dedicated to S.A.