Churchill's Wizards (13 page)

The night that saw the raising of the first British observation post tree was Tuesday, 12 March 1916. Corporal Bryant bedded in the foundation of the tree over the dugout the week before. It was a steel plate, with a raised collar and boltholes around the oval opening in the middle. In the evening, fifteen men left the factory in a truck containing the tree and the lifting tackle, and Solomon and Walter Russell went by car. The truck went into Ypres, picked up the guide from a sandbagged bunker in the square and drove out past the ‘DIAMANT' sign spelled in lighter bricks on the long red wall of a ruined jeweller's shop.

At a place called ‘White Hart' they unloaded the tree into its cradle and the men carrying it got underneath. Other forces were moving into the Salient on their own business: a battalion in tin hats and gas capes, medieval in the moonlight. The tree-men crossed Bridge 4, went a hundred yards along the road beside Coney Street and turned into their own route. Fresh men were waiting to relieve the carriers. A flare went up and everyone froze till the swinging blue light burned itself out. German machine guns rattled in the distance. The British soldiers crossed streams on planks and struggled up the clayey canal bank with the heavy burden. At the top they tipped the cradle over and levered the weighty eight-and-a-half-foot tree upright. Solomon got into the dugout with his torch to illuminate the foundation collar's holes as the
men turned the tree to align them. Greased bolts slid through into tightening nuts. Mud and grass were plastered over the plate and up the base of the tree as a man squeezed up inside (the oval measured only twenty-two inches by eighteen inches) to check the observation loopholes and their bulletproof shutters. Solomon thought it an excellent reproduction: from a few paces away you could not tell the tree was not real. Back at the barn in Poperinghe, the sappers celebrated with hot food and beer. The later official history, though, was rather sour about the first tree: ‘In practice it proved of little use; it was too small to admit any but a most determined and enthusiastic man, and was too far off for good observation – faults due to inexperience.'

Solomon J. Solomon's oil painting of the event,
Our First O.P. Tree
, was shown at Burlington House in the
Art of Camouflage
exhibition that he organised in October 1919. It still hangs in the Imperial War Museum. In dim bluish moonlight, Russell and Solomon, in caps and greatcoats, look on from the right as the pollard ‘tree' is tilted into place. Another Imperial War Museum painting from 1919,
Erecting a
Camouflage Tree
by Leon Underwood, shows ten men, half with their shirts off but their steel helmets on, labouring to fit a curve of bark to a shiny drum under the guidance of an anxious sergeant with a wrench. This is a daylight scene. You can see the brown.303 rifle lying next to the hammer, and the muscles in their white backs.

On 22 March 1916, Guirand de Scévola hosted a dinner for the British
camoufleurs
at the little hotel in Wimereux. The Frenchmen sang songs, made witty speeches and stayed up late. It was a bittersweet occasion for Solomon, because that day he ceded command of the British camouflage section, now authorised by the War Office as Special Works Park, RE, and officially integrated into the BEF, to Major F. J. C. Wyatt, RE. The unit had a nominal establishment of ten officers and eighty-two other ranks, which was increased on 1 July 1916 to fifteen officers and 157 ORs.

The heavy metalwork for OPs and the industrial production of nets and canvases, some involving Chinese labour, remained at the parent factory at Wimereux. There were two forward Special Works Parks, as the camouflage units were called: Aire covered the northern and Amiens the southern half of the British line. Major J. P. Rhodes was in charge at Aire from 8 November 1916, and it was his idea to start
employing hundreds of French women in the net factories. There were labour problems, but Walter Russell proved to be good at soothing woes. At Amiens, Captain Paget was in charge, working with the French, until December 1916. There metal lathes and woodturning machinery were available in the workshops where L. D. Symington put his hands to good use. He developed the camouflaged Symien sniper suit for the SOS schools (nearly 4,800 of them were manufactured), and made the prototypes of some 3,000 dummy papier-mâché heads. The portable observation post was another speciality (armoured or unarmoured): a cowl of chicken wire covered in plaster of Paris with a slot of fine copper-wire mesh to see through, all of which could be camouflaged to fit any parapet. At Amiens they also made 12,000 cut-out dummy ‘Chinese attack' figures that could be snapped upright by electrically exploded detonators to look and sound like British troops advancing and to divert attention away from real attacks. Symington also designed a new kind of machine-gun post that was completely camouflaged from both aerial photography and direct observation. An armoured box fitted into the terrain had a simple lever inside that raised the elaborately camouflaged roof just enough to open a narrow aperture through which a machine gun, set back far enough to show no muzzle flash, could fire unseen. The Canadians used this design with great success in the fighting around Monchy-le-Preux, near Arras.

But Solomon, who had liked doing reconnaissance and showing new artist officers the ropes, became miserable as he declined into a more advisory role, detached from the practical work. In April 1916 he was in effect sacked and went home on leave. He came back in May and managed to nobble Sir Douglas Haig, busy preparing for the massive Battle of the Somme, on a visit to a camouflage factory:

Solomon could not quite fathom this Delphic utterance.

In May 1916, both Churchill and Solomon were back in England. Churchill returned to his parliamentary duties on 7 May, though he did not get back into government for another year and Solomon was summoned to talk to Colonel Ernest Swinton RE at Armament Buildings. The two men got on; Swinton was an imaginative soldier, and
a fine draughtsman, who had once been the chief instructor in geometrical drawing at ‘the Shop', the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was also a good writer:
The Defence of Duffer's Drift
and
The
Green Curve
turn military problems into enjoyable fiction. Swinton was Kitchener's first official war correspondent, ‘Eyewitness', and had always been interested in new technology – man-lifting kites, railways, machine guns. Captain Liddell Hart, in his two-volume history of the Royal Tank Regiment and its predecessors,
The Tanks
, credits Swinton and Churchill with the invention of the tank. During the early days of the war, Swinton saw almost naked men walking towards enemy fronts bristling with barbed wire and machine guns, and this impressed on him the need for armoured protection. Solomon wrote:

The word ‘tank' was coined by Swinton to maintain secrecy by referring to the armoured vehicles as straightforward riveted metal containers. The Russian for ‘Handle With Care: Petrograd' was painted in large white Cyrillic letters on the side of a prototype Mark 1 tank, to deceive people that it was just a tank of oil for the Russian army.

Swinton took Solomon up to Thetford in Norfolk on 31 May to show him the secret battle-training area he had created on Lord Iveagh's pheasant-shooting estate for what was then called the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Solomon's job was to help hide these first hot, smelly, carbon-monoxide-poisonous tanks on their way to their objective. The artist thought that smokescreens or mist would accomplish this best, or perhaps silhouettes of perforated zinc. Mere paint was not really up to it.

Solomon went back to France in early June 1916 to find out where the tanks might be used and to study soil and vegetation colours. By the middle of June he was back in Norfolk, at the tank battle-training area. Every day he rode his pony to the new work: ‘I had to take off my tunic and put on overalls, just like an ordinary house painter.' Solomon painted the first tanks and their large canvas covers in Fauvist blotches of pink and grey and green and brown; tank officer Basil Henriques described the final effect as ‘a kind of jolly landscape in green against a pink sunset sky'.

Solomon was present on 21 July when the politicians, including Lloyd George, the Secretary of State for War, and Edwin Montagu, the Minister of Munitions, and the military top brass, led by the CIGS, Sir William Robertson, came up to the Elveden Explosives Area in Norfolk to watch two dozen thirty-ton rhomboid tanks driving over trenches, bashing down trees, knocking through walls and sandbag parapets protecting wooden ‘enemy' machine guns. As the tanks roared noisily over terrain once familiar to Boudicca's chariots, Solomon spotted and picked up a clutch of pheasant's eggs, smooth, brown and delicate.

The tanks first crawled into action on the Somme on 15 September 1916. After a massive artillery barrage, three dozen tanks pressed home an attack. Most broke down, got stuck or were too slow, but nine of them did some damage to the enemy. Between Flers-Courcelette and Gueudecourt, where the British tanks D-5, D-6, D-16 and D-17 caused panic, German soldiers ran away.

Philip Gibbs burst out laughing when he first saw the lumbering, smoking tanks, with their unsilenced engines roaring: ‘They were monstrously comical,' he wrote, ‘like toads of vast size emerging from the primeval slime in the twilight of the world's dawn.'

The First World War marked the rise of the geopolitical region known as ‘the Middle East'. The term was first coined in 1902 by the American theorist of naval strategy, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, to indicate the Arab and Persian area between the ‘Near East' of the Mediterranean Levant and the ‘Far East' of India and China. In WW1, Winston Churchill's broad strategic vision naturally made him an ‘Easterner' among the British policy makers, not a ‘Westerner' solely concerned with France and Belgium.

Another well-known ‘Easterner' was T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935) who became world-famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia', leading the Arab Revolt. Thomas Edward Lawrence (‘Ned' to his family) was a curious figure, described by Aubrey Herbert as ‘an odd gnome, half cad – with a touch of genius'. He still excites both vilification and hero-worship. He was not really ‘Lawrence' at all, but the illegitimate son of a baronet called Chapman who ran away with a governess who was herself born out of wedlock. The elusive ‘T. E.' kept making up stories and changing identity: ‘Ross' and ‘Shaw' were names he assumed later. The consummate actor who became ‘Lawrence of Arabia' was known for his camouflage of Arab robes, remarking once in a letter: ‘The leopard changes his spots for stripes, since the stripes are better protection in the local landscape.'

Among the ambiguities about Lawrence are his attitudes to time and technology. He looks backwards and forwards. An archaeologist and classical scholar, romance places him in an older way of life, among tents and camels in the desert. But the real T.E. Lawrence was fascinated by modernity. His cottage at Cloud's Hill had no electricity but it did have industrially canned food and the latest wind-up gramophone for recorded music. He loved printing presses, tinkering with Rolls-Royce engines and RAF speedboats. He rode a Biblical
camel but carried with him in the saddle a stripped-down ‘air-Lewis' light machine gun in a canvas bucket. Lawrence was killed in 1935 riding his seventh Brough Superior motorcycle, powered by oil.

Technological change is impelled by war. Winston Churchill helped to make WW1 the first war of the petroleum age. Although 1.5 million grass-eating bullocks, camels, donkeys, horses and mules laboured for the British from 1914 to 1918 (and some half a million animals perished), this was the first war in history when machines with internal combustion engines began to take the strain. The British Army started the war with fewer than 900 motor vehicles, but had over 120,000 by its end in November 1918. As First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911–15, Churchill revolutionised ‘bunkering' by changing the fossilised-sunlight diet of the Royal Navy's vessels from native coal to foreign oil. Virtually all the new Royal Navy warships built in 1912, 1913 and 1914 were oil-fuelled. To guarantee those Royal Navy oil supplies, the British government spent £5 million in 1912 to gain the controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) which first struck black gold in the Persian Gulf in 1908. Its refineries were at Abadan, close to Basra. This shrewd investment paid for the mighty British fleet in a decade, but it gave oil – and oil-rich regions – a strategic importance they had not previously enjoyed as Britain fought Ottoman Turkey first in Iraq, then Gallipoli, and then in the region's holy lands.

The genesis of Britain's WW1 foray into the Middle East lay in Ottoman Turkey's decision to join forces with Imperial Germany and to attack Russia on 31 October 1914. Germany wanted to stir up the Islamic world and when, on 14 November, the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Constantinople declared a jihad on the Triple Entente of Britain, France, Russia and their allies, this conflict became truly a world war.

The hundred-mile-long Suez Canal had been built in 1869 with French and Egyptian money, but Britain had bought its way to majority share-holding in 1875. Constitutionally, Egypt was still under the notional suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and was ruled by a Khedive or governor alongside an Egyptian prime minister, but it had been effectively under British administrative control since July 1882, when the Royal Navy shelled Alexandria and the British army defeated the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir.

Ottoman Turkey's new military alliance with Imperial Germany
directly threatened the Canal. So, on 18 November 1914, Egypt was formally annexed as a British Protectorate, with a British high commissioner; the Ottoman Khedive was deposed, and a new Sultan imposed. Britain's once ‘veiled protectorate' of Egypt now stood revealed in uniform, its garrisons reinforced by Imperial and Dominion troops, both Indian and Anzac, en route for the trenches of Europe and Asia Minor.

The Ottoman Turkish army tried to approach through the Sinai desert and seize the Suez Canal early in February 1915, but the attack was thwarted on the east bank. Their objective was to sever the Imperial lifeline of the canal. The German Field Marshal von der Goltz's mission in Baghdad was to clear the British and Russians out of modern-day Iraq and Iran, then invade India from Afghanistan. As Sir Walter Bullivant briefs Dick Hannay in
Greenmantle
:

Once the great game began again, the British thought that two could play at making mischief among the other fellow's natives. If the Turco-German alliance was going to foment Islamic discontent in the British Empire, then the British would cynically encourage Arab Nationalism inside the crumbling Ottoman Empire. An Arab, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, ruler of the Hijaz, the Red Sea coast province of the Arabian Peninsula, and great-grandfather of the current King of Jordan, now played the first significant hand.

When Turkey summoned the faithful in 1914 for a pan-Islamic jihad against Britain, France and Russia, Sharif Hussein declined to take part. Since the Hijaz was the holy land for Muslims and the birthplace of their faith, this mattered. Hussein was called
sharif
because he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, installed as the legitimate Amir of Mecca in 1908, thus began to prove an independent-minded presence inside the Ottoman Empire. An ‘honourable, shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious' man according to T. E. Lawrence, but a two-faced schemer according to his enemies, he was also a new kind of pan-Arabist. He was in touch with the Syrian secret societies of urban intellectuals and army officers, al-Ahd and al-Fatat, who were
beginning to think politically of nationalism, as well as with the old-style Bedouin chieftains of Arabia whose first loyalties were to family, clan and tribe. However, Hussein was based in the Hijaz, a hot desert region that could not feed itself and which drew most of its income from Islamic pilgrims on the Haj. If the maritime blockades of the Great War stopped the pilgrims coming, the Hijaz would have to become even more dependent on Ottoman Turkey. Sharif Hussein needed a powerful external ally, able to supply guns and money and keep the trade and travel routes open. Germany and Britain both fitted this bill, but Hussein's first approaches were to the British.

In April 1914, four months before the war started, Hussein's second son Abdulla came to make a private request of the British ruler of Egypt, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. He enquired whether, if the Hijaz Arabs ever rose up against their Turkish masters, the British might possibly assist with a few little machine guns. At this stage, however, Kitchener informed Abdulla that the British government's only interest in Arabia was the protection of British Indian pilgrims going on the Haj to Mecca. But all that changed when WW1 broke out.

In late September 1914 Kitchener sent a secret messenger to ask whether ‘the Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us'. On 31 October, Kitchener sent his salaams to Hussein's son Abdulla and also requested help against the Germans and Turks, in a telegram: ‘If Arab nation assist England in this war England will guarantee that no intervention takes place in Arabia and will give Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression.' Negotiations on what Britain might concede politically to gain Arab support continued in 1915 in a somewhat ambiguous correspondence between Hussein and the British high commissioner who had replaced Kitchener in Egypt, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon.

Sharif Hussein said he wanted a single independent state carved out of the Ottoman Empire, an Arab bloc that would embrace today's southern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Oman. The letters between McMahon and Sharif Hussein never quite agree on the vital topic of what territory was to be excluded from the plan. Prominent in the area of disagreement is the region of southern Syria between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean that the British called ‘Palestine'. High Commissioner McMahon knew northern India better than the Middle
East; he spoke no Arabic, just signing what his advisers put before him. His Oriental Secretary, Ronald Storrs, admitted his side of the correspondence was prepared by ‘a fair though not a profound Arabist' and checked by him in haste or not at all, and that Hussein's letters were in ‘obscure and tortuous prose … tainted with Turkish idioms and syntax'. It was not a recipe for clarity.

Not all the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula supported Hussein, the Hashimite Sharif of Mecca. At Riyadh to the east there was a rival dynasty, the House of Saud, whose descendants still rule Saudi Arabia. Their leader was the tall and fierce desert warrior, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who had military strength but lacked the moral power that the control of Mecca and Medina gave to his rival Sharif Hussein.

Ibn Saud, opposed to both the Hashimite Sharif and the Ottomans, could see the usefulness of an alliance with the British. But which British? Those in London, Cairo or Delhi? British Imperialism was never as wholly coherent as its enemies imagined. Arabia came within British India's sphere of influence, and in the end Sir Percy Cox of the Indian Political Service and his new agent Harry St John Philby (the Muslim convert father of the spy Kim Philby) spent the rest of 1915 concluding a deal with Ibn Saud. Regular supplies of guns and ammunition and a £5,000-a-month subsidy kept the Saudis onside with the British, neither attacking their allies nor helping their enemies, for the rest of WW1.

Another consideration was Mesopotamia, which we now call Iraq, of strategic interest in 1914 again because of proximity to India. From Bombay it was a short sea voyage west to Basra, the entrance to the Fertile Crescent, which the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, saw as a potential granary and a good place to resettle surplus Indians of the densely populated British Empire.

Hardinge was not in favour of supporting Arab revolts against their Turkish overlords because he did not want to upset Sunni Muslims in India, and he disliked native nationalists who had tried to kill him. He agreed to use Indian army troops to secure the Anglo-Persian oil installations at Abadan island on the Persian Gulf.

The ‘Mespot' campaign of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D' turned into D for Disaster. Lloyd George later excoriated it as ‘a gruesome story of tragedy and suffering resulting from incompetence and slovenly carelessness on the part of the responsible military
authorities'. Force ‘D' in Iraq did manage to secure the oil regions of Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab in the south, but then became overconfident and thought they could also take Baghdad, on the cheap. They had no planes, few heavy guns, inadequate river transport; few tents, mosquito nets, ambulances, medical supplies, blankets, clothing. The initial advances were checked at Ctesiphon in November 1915 by tougher Anatolian Turkish troops, under German direction.

The surviving Indian Expeditionary Force retreated to Kut-al-Amara where they were besieged for five months from December 1915; they sickened and were never relieved, though attempts to reach them cost 23,000 casualties. Inadequate air drops only prolonged their agony of hunger, dysentery, scurvy, cholera, malaria, heat, filth and flies.

Arabic-speaking Captain T. E. Lawrence was sent to what he called ‘blunderland' with Turkish-speaking Aubrey Herbert at the end of April 1916, on a mission to bribe the Turks up to £2,000,000 to let the British forces go. The attempt failed, and Lawrence was appalled at the wastage: ‘All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy,' he wrote later, when the British casualties mounted to over 92,000 in Mesopotamia. Of the 14,000 British and Indian soldiers who finally surrendered to the Turks at Kut, over a third died as prisoners of war in the Iraqi desert or as chain-gang labourers on the German railway that was destined to link Berlin to Basra, Prussia to the Persian Gulf.

T. E. Lawrence knew about the Middle East. In 1909, he wrote a BA thesis on the influence of the Crusades on castle-building in Europe which, together with four seasons' work on Hittite archaeology at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish, had taken him through large tracts of Turkish-administered Lebanon and Syria. His scholarly interests were used as camouflage for military intelligence work in the winter of 1913–14 when his supposedly archaeological exploration of ‘the Wilderness of Zin' saw the light of day as the
Military Report on
the Sinai Peninsula
, a survey commissioned by Lord Kitchener from the Royal Engineers. After the outbreak of war, Lawrence served with the General Staff Geographical Section (MO4b) Asia Sub-Section in London, and at the end of 1914, aged 26, he became the youngest member of the Department of Intelligence run by Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, whose mission was to keep an eye on the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence's varied intelligence duties in Egypt included making maps
from aerial reconnaissance photographs and continually updating the Turkish Order of Battle with evidence collated from agents' gossip, travellers' notes, prisoners of war, captured documents and photographs, newspapers and radio intercepts, which he contributed to the
Handbook on the Turkish Army
, edited by Philip Graves.