A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  The liberation of what he called “the most famous city in the world” was what the Prime Minister had wanted for Christmas; with it, he later wrote, Christendom had been able “to regain possession of its sacred shrines.”10 The capture of Baghdad and Jerusalem had produced a tremendous psychological effect, he claimed, but also a material one. “The calling of the Turkish bluff was not only the beginning of the cracking-up of that military impostership which the incompetence of our war direction had permitted to intimidate us for years; it was itself a real contribution to ultimate victory.”11

  After the capture of Jerusalem, Feisal’s Arab forces, under various Arab and British officers, showed their worth. Campaigning in Transjordan, the raiding parties continued their hit-and-run attacks, while the regulars, trained by Joyce and transported by his colleague Hubert Young, disproved the contention—frequently advanced by British intelligence officers in the past—that they could not stand up to the Turkish army. A significant role was planned for them in the next phase of the campaign by Allenby, who intended them to spread disorder among the Turks on his right flank.

  Allenby was now in a position to march on Damascus, and then on Constantinople to deliver the knock-out blow to the Ottoman Empire, but just at that moment his hand was stayed. The Germans were preparing an offensive against western Europe, made possible by Russia’s surrender, which allowed Ludendorff to bring back Germany’s armies from the eastern front. Suddenly Allenby was obliged to send back to Europe almost all of his British troops. On the first day of spring 1918, German troops launched a surprise attack that smashed through Allied lines in northern France and threatened to win the war before American reinforcements could arrive. It was not until the summer that the fury of Ludendorff’s offensive was spent. Meanwhile Allenby remained in Palestine, rebuilding his forces for the future.

  From Christmas until summer’s end, as Allenby awaited a chance to resume his offensive, political battle lines were forming within the British government and the Allied camp as to the ultimate disposition of the lands composing the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile Enver Pasha was starting on a sort of Ludendorff offensive of his own in the north, designed to capture the Turkish-speaking lands of the Czarist Empire—Azerbaijan and Turkestan—and perhaps then to descend on Persia, Afghanistan, and India to destroy Britain’s eastern empire while all of her British troops were away in Europe.

  In retrospect, Enver’s offensive, like Ludendorff’s, looks like having been a last desperate throw of the dice. But at the time the Ottoman Empire’s capabilities and intentions were less easy to assess; and the Ottoman offensive brought vast areas of the northern Middle East, hitherto uncontested in the war, into the spotlight of world war and politics.

  While Enver was attacking north and east, Allenby was at last able to resume his attack on Enver’s forces in the west.

  36

  THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  I

  Between Christmas of 1917 and the summer of 1918, Allenby laid the foundation for resuming his campaign against the Turks. In January and February he restored and extended Jerusalem’s railway connections to the coast, so as to relieve his army’s dependence upon pack animals and ruined roads. He raided enemy forces to keep them off balance. Meanwhile he trained his raw Indian troops for the coming campaign.

  Damascus was the next objective on his line of march. Even more than Baghdad and Jerusalem, it was an important city for all historical ages. Believed to be the oldest continuously inhabited urban center in the world, its origins were lost in the mists of time. Damascus was a flourishing oasis town before there were Jews or Arabs, Moslems or Christians, Englishmen or Germans. The capture of Damascus would symbolically complete not merely the British occupation of the Arabic-speaking Ottoman Empire, but also assure Britain’s place in the line of legitimate succession from the ancient world conquerors who had sealed their triumphs by achieving mastery of the oases of Syria.

  Britain claimed to be something other than a traditional conqueror, for she was acting on behalf of an array of associated powers and causes. Allenby was an Allied commander, and his armies were prepared to advance under many flags. Among their banners was one designed by Sir Mark Sykes for Hussein and the Arab cause. Its colors—black, white, green, and red—were meant to symbolize the past glory of Moslem Arab empires and to suggest that Hussein was their contemporary champion. Hussein’s only modification of the design was to change the hue of the red.1 Sykes had ordered flags to be made up by the British military supply offices in Egypt, and then had them delivered to the Hejaz forces.

  The British-designed, British-produced flag of Arab nationalism signaled a critical issue as Allenby’s armies prepared to march on Damascus: the extent to which the particular British officials who mattered most in shaping Middle Eastern policy were sincere or cynical in their espousal of the various causes to which they had supposedly been converted along the way. Sir Mark Sykes, who before 1914 had admired the Turks as a ruling people, had become converted during the war to the cause of liberating the subject peoples from Ottoman tyranny. An outspoken anti-Semite, he had come to express his concern for the Jews, as did Meinertzhagen, also an avowed anti-Semite. Colonial officials such as Storrs and Clayton, who had always maintained that Arabic-speaking natives were incapable of self-government, appeared to support Sykes as he hailed the renaissance of Arab independence. Not all of these conversions were genuine.

  At one end of the spectrum was Sykes, who believed in honoring the pledges of which, in large part, he was the author. At the other end were operational officers who deplored the pledges, and at times deprecated the causes in whose names they had been made. At the beginning of 1918 Sykes, in London, moved into a Foreign Office position in charge of the politics of the Ottoman theater of war. Those in charge of the politics of the Ottoman theater of war in the field—Clayton in Palestine, Wingate in Egypt, and the Government of India in Baghdad—were skeptical of the politics of idealism that Sykes had come to espouse, though they did not tell him so openly. Beneath the surface civility of British government interchanges in 1918 there ran a hidden line on which the Foreign Office and officers in the field pulled in opposite directions. Baghdad, Jerusalem, and, beyond Allied lines, Damascus, awaited word of their eventual fate, unaware that a tug of war within the British bureaucracy might decide it.

  II

  Brigadier General Gilbert Clayton served as chief political officer to General Allenby, but remained the political alter ego of Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High Commissioner in Cairo. He thus occupied a commanding position in determining the politics of both Egypt and the Sudan, as well as those of the army of occupation in Palestine. Clayton was a career army officer whose professional caution often kept him from expressing his views freely when they contradicted those of his superiors. He therefore expressed his views candidly to Wingate, with whom he agreed, but guardedly to Sykes, with whom he did not.

  Clayton and Storrs envisaged an Arab kingdom or confederation guided by the British in a Middle East in which there was no room for France (except perhaps in Lebanon). Clayton denied that he was anti-French; it was not, he explained, as though he wanted to exclude the French from Syria. It was the fault of the French themselves: they were detested by the Syrians and, if given a chance to rule Syria, would bungle it. Clayton said he would not connive at bringing about that result; it was simply that he was predicting it. “You need not be afraid of any Fashoda-ism on my part,” he wrote to Sykes on 20 August 1917.2 It was rather that he feared Britain would be blamed for France’s failure, and told Sykes that the important thing was to establish a record showing that it was not Britain’s fault.

  Though denying anti-French bias, he did admit having reservations about Britain’s other Middle Eastern allies. Even by the standards of the time, Clayton and his colleague, Wingate, were strongly disposed to be anti-Jewish. Wingate had blamed Jews for inciting the outbreak of the Ottoman war. In 1916 Clayton reported to Wingate that Jews were behind the movemen
t to make peace with the Ottoman Empire as well.*

  But when the issue of a compromise peace with Turkey again came to the fore in 1917, Clayton argued that Britain had no moral right to negotiate because “We are committed to the support of Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Armenians” and therefore had to press forward to complete victory.4 At the same time, he opposed entering into just such commitments, including the commitment to Zionism. As the Balfour Declaration was being drafted, he wrote to Sykes that it would be best to keep Aaron Aaronsohn and the Jews “in play” without making any statement of British intentions.5 Politics, he wrote, tended to distract Jews and Arabs from the war effort. By nature cautious, he saw no need in any event to make pledges in advance.

  A month after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, Clayton wrote to Sykes suggesting that it might have been a mistake.

  I am not fully aware of the weight which Zionists carry, especially in America and Russia, and of the consequent necessity of giving them everything for which they may ask, but I must point out that, by pushing them as hard as we appear to be doing, we are risking the possibility of Arab unity becoming something like an accomplished fact and being ranged against us.6

  Nonetheless, Clayton was not pro-Arab, in the sense of favoring Arab independence. On the contrary, early in 1917 he and Wingate proposed to abolish even the nominal independence of Egypt and to move toward outright annexation—a judgment which the Foreign Office successfully opposed. Writing to Sykes at the time, in support of his own proposal and against the officials in London who had blocked it, Clayton claimed that

  It is strong and I know dead against their policy, but, mark my words, I know I am right. All this claptrap about Sultans & self government for Egypt is rot. They are not nearly ready for it and if you have a Palace, every ounce of power and self government which you think you are giving to the People will go straight into the hands of the Sultan & his minister to be used against you. Beautiful theories are all very nice, but hard facts remain.7

  Although Clayton had been the first to make much of the Arab secret societies, even before the outbreak of the Ottoman war, he consistently ignored what they told him: they did not want to be ruled by Christians or Europeans—not even the British. A reminder of. this came in early 1918 in the diplomatic pouch from Madrid, where the British ambassador had seen Aziz al-Masri, the secret society leader, and reported receiving a proposal from him to organize the overthrow of the Enver-Talaat government in Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire would then be reorganized along federal lines, offering local autonomy to Arabs and others, and reconciling the reorganized empire with the Allied Powers.8 Al-Masri had often said much the same thing to Clayton in Cairo at the beginning of the war, but it did not seem to register on Clayton that it meant that those for whom al-Masri spoke, though willing to be ruled by the Turkish Porte, refused to be ruled by the British Residency. What Clayton was proposing—a British protectorate for the Arab Middle East—was what al-Masri indicated he would never accept.

  Thus Clayton, the officer who advised Allenby about the policies to be pursued in occupied Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria, though he claimed he was not an enemy of the French, and insisted he was a friend of both the Zionists and the Arabs, in practice opposed the ambitions of all three.

  III

  Sir Mark Sykes was a novice in government—in 1917 he had held executive office for only two years—and was a mercurial personality who remained subject to sudden enthusiasms. As remarked earlier, he was quick to take up a cause or to put it down. But though inconsistent, he was not dishonest: he did not dissemble. Having converted from anti-Arab, anti-Jew, anti-Armenian to pro-Arab, proJew, pro-Armenian, he knew no way but one to keep faith with his new friends—with a whole heart.

  Sykes, who believed in keeping the promises he had made to Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and Frenchmen, continued to labor in 1917–18 to keep his disparate coalition together. Chaim Weizmann described his outstanding qualities by writing that “He was not very consistent or logical in his thinking, but he was generous and warm-hearted.”9 Because of his role in helping to fulfill Jewish national aspirations, it was appropriate that the door to Sykes’s office was known to the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow as “the Door of Hope.”10 But within his own government there were those who objected to this generosity to foreigners. Indeed Sykes’s principal problem was to secure the support of his own colleagues, who were puzzled by his views—puzzled, because it seems not to have occurred to them that he was, by their standards, naive.

  Part of Sykes’s problem was that he did not know which of his colleagues were in favor of what; he did not understand that some of them kept their motives and plans hidden. In confidential conferences and correspondence with trusted British government colleagues, he felt that he could express his views openly and fully, and wrongly assumed that they felt the same way. Civil servants and career army officers like Clayton were cautious by profession and, unlike Sykes, were disposed not to show their hands. Sykes was a House of Commons man; it was his trade to make speeches. By profession he spoke up; while, by profession, men like Clayton kept their own counsel.

  Returning to London in the summer of 1917, Sykes discovered that pro-Ottoman members of the Foreign Office, in combination with the former American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, had attempted in his absence to negotiate a separate peace with Turkey—an attempt aborted by the prompt opposition of Chaim Weizmann, among others. Sykes wrote to Clayton that “On my arrival I found that the Foreign Office had been carefully destroying everything I had done in the past 2 years. Stimulating anti-Entente feelings [i.e., anti-French feelings] and pushing separate negotiations with Turkey ideas. Indeed I just arrived in the nick of time. Luckily Zionism held good…” He was right about Zionism, but wrong about the Foreign Office, which was not anti-French; the anti-French organization was Clayton’s Arab Bureau, which Sykes himself had created.

  David Hogarth, director of the Arab Bureau, had been in London in 1917 just before Sykes returned; and had lobbied against the Sykes-Picot Agreement, against a French role in the Middle East, and in favor of a British protectorate over a Hussein-led Arab confederation. In private Gilbert Clayton’s views were almost identical to those expressed by the more candid Hogarth, but Sykes was unaware of that. Sykes wrote to Clayton that “Hogarth arrived and played hell by writing an anti-French and anti Agreement memorandum. Pouring cold water on the Arab movement and going in for…a British Mecca.” Sykes gleefully reported: “He got trounced…”

  Repeating that “The main thing is never to yield to Fashoda-ism French or British,” Sykes announced that he and Picot (referred to as P) were going to force both the French and British governments to be honest with one another and honest with the Arabs: “…there is only one possible policy, the Entente first and last, and the Arab nation the child of the Entente.” The Arabs, too, had to be taken in hand and made to see that they should not try to split the Anglo-French Entente. “Get your Englishmen to stand up to the Arabs on this and never let them accept flattery of the ‘you very good man him very bad man’ kind. I am going to slam into Paris to make the French play up to the Arab cause as their only hope. Colonialism is madness and I believe P and I can prove it to them.”11 Sykes did not seem to suspect that Picot himself remained a colonialist, who saw Britain as his country’s rival in the Middle East, nor did he suspect that Clayton hoped to keep France out of the region altogether.

  Clayton proved to be quite unwilling even to work with Picot and protested against carrying out an agreement—reached with the French during the Asquith government—whereby a joint Anglo-French administration would be introduced into the territories in the Middle East occupied during the war. Picot, acting as the French representative at Allenby’s headquarters, asserted that Sir Edward Grey had promised it to him; but Clayton wrote to Sykes that “If this is so, I have heard nothing of it, and I cannot protest too strongly against any such unworkable and mischievous arrangement.”12 In
any event, General Allenby exercised his authority to postpone consideration of such matters until the military situation was deemed suitable by him, which, in effect, cancelled that particular agreement for the time being.

  With respect to Arabs, Jews, and Armenians, Clayton expressed his views to Sykes more guardedly. In the week following the publication of the Balfour Declaration, an exuberant Sykes sent a cypher cable to an unenthusiastic Clayton informing him that the Zionist movement was prepared to work on behalf of Arabs and Armenians and that he, Sykes, was in process of forming a joint committee to unify the three groups.13 Chaim Weizmann would represent the Zionists; James Malcolm, the Armenians; and a Syrian Christian and an Arab Moslem would jointly represent the Arabs. It was important that more Arabs should join, added Sykes, for it would help Arabs everywhere.

  A few weeks later Sykes cabled Clayton again, reporting that he had prevailed on the Zionist leadership to adopt a strong pro-Arab line.14 He asked Clayton to tell the Syrian Arab groups in Cairo that if the Turks and Germans captured Zionist support, it would be bad for them as well as everyone else whose hopes rode with the Allies. He thus implied that the Balfour Declaration was issued in the Arab as well as in the British interest. Shortly after cabling Clayton, Sykes sent a message to Picot, telling him that Arab interests were being amply safeguarded and that Jews in Palestine would pay scrupulous attention to Arab rights.15 Sykes also sent a letter to Clayton telling him that the Zionist and Armenian leaders were in complete accord and that it was important that Arab leaders should also join “the combine.”16

  Pouring cold water, Clayton in reply cabled that “in spite of all arguments Mecca dislikes Jews and Armenians and wishes to have nothing to do with them, while Arabs of Syria and Palestine fear repetition of the story of Jacob and Esau. In any case an Arab-Jewish-Armenian combination is so foreign to any previous experience and to existing sentiment that we must proceed with great caution.”17 He added that it would not be feasible to send an Arab delegation to London to join the committee, as Sykes had asked, because the Arabs were too divided.