Churchill's Wizards (16 page)

According to Meinertzhagen, his haversack ruse had completely wrong-footed the enemy, and the German General Kress von Kressenstein was subsequently relieved of his command. We are told that Allenby later wrote on Meinertzhagen's confidential report: ‘This officer has been largely responsible for my successes in Palestine.' But Dick Meinertzhagen made sure the official historian knew all about his exploits, and the source of Allenby's assessment is Meinertzhagen's own edited diaries. No man was a greater burnisher of his own reputation.

In Palestine, Allenby's forces pushed on fifty miles in ten days, took the Mediterranean port of Jaffa where the Royal Navy could land supplies, then turned east into the Judean hills toward the great prize of Jerusalem. On 8 December 1917, the Turkish forces abandoned the Holy City. The mayor of Jerusalem came out in a frock coat and fez, carrying a white flag and the keys to the city, which he offered, in a moment of bathos, first to some army cooks from London, then a sergeant, then some gunnery officers, then a brigadier, until, at last, a general could be found.

So Allenby gave Lloyd George and the British people the gift they had asked him for in time for Christmas 1917. This Allied victory was both symbolic and historic: for the first time since 1244, the Christians wrested the Holy City back from the Muslims. But their plan to share it with the Jews sent shock waves through the region that still make the world tremble to this day. Lloyd George had seen that the support of international, and especially US, Jewry for the Allies was invaluable and that the Zionist movement could be used (in John Marlowe's phrase) ‘as a wooden horse of Troy to introduce British control into Palestine'. He had discussed it all with his Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour.

Arthur Balfour's bland letter of 2 November 1917 to the Zionist federation, by way of Lord Rothschild, contained a single sentence, the famous ‘Balfour Declaration', which has caused much grief. Its slippery
surface is why Palestine has been dubbed ‘The Twice-promised Land':

At midday on 11 December 1917, six weeks to the day after his attack on Beersheba, General Allenby made his official and symbolic entry to Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate, on foot. (By contrast, in 1898, the German Kaiser had arrogantly ridden in on horseback. The Catholic spin-doctor Mark Sykes hoped that the faithful of the local three great religions would appreciate this British gesture of humility towards their Holy City.) Allenby censored all references to the recent Balfour Declaration as potentially inflammatory to Arab feelings. The Press Bureau of the Department of Information (which of course was run by John Buchan) issued a D-Notice to the media on 15 November:

British propagandists had already spread the word that the name ‘Allenby' was a version of the Arabic
al-Nabi
meaning ‘The Prophet', and the Haram-esh-Sherif or Temple area of the city known in the Islamic world as Al-Quds was conspicuously put under the guard of Indian Muslim soldiers from the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.

Other soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, New Zealand, French and Italian, were drawn up at the Jaffa Gate. It was a cold but sunny morning. General Allenby appeared flanked by the French and Italian commanders and followed by twenty of his principal staff officers and the commander of XX Corps, Sir Philip Chetwode. Among them, walking next to Colonel A. P. Wavell, was Major T. E. Lawrence, joking about his borrowed British uniform. Three weeks before, he had endured what Ronald Storrs called
‘hideous man-handling' (homosexual rape and flogging) by Turkish soldiery after being captured near Deraa. At the Citadel, the proclamation of martial law was read out in seven languages to ‘the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Blessed and the people dwelling in its vicinity'. The declaration said that ‘every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected'. Then Allenby met the city's notables and religious leaders, before the military reformed their procession and went back out through the gate to where they had left their horses. This simple but impressive ceremony at the Jaffa Gate was for Lawrence ‘the supreme moment of the war'.

But politics continued as ever. That afternoon, Lloyd George announced the news of the capture of Jerusalem to a cheering House of Commons; the War Cabinet was soon urging the occupation of all Palestine. The appalling battle for the ridge at Passchendaele had ended the month before with a gain of five miles of bloodsoaked mud at the cost of more than 250,000 Anzac, British and Canadian casualties. Allenby's defeats of Turkey in the Middle East, ‘knocking out the props' as it was called, were seen as an escape from the horrendous stalemate on the Western Front. The ‘Easterner' faction got a great boost.

Early in 1918, T. E. Lawrence was given a new role – helping the Arab Northern Army, led by Feisal, but under Allenby's command – to harry the left of the Turkish Fourth Army as they retreated northwards. Lawrence was under increasing nervous strain after his brief capture by the Turks at Deraa, when ‘the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost', as he put it. Now he accused himself of ‘accessory deceitfulness' and ‘rankling fraudulence' towards the Arabs in his ‘pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech'. He wanted to be free of it. In fact he wanted to be tinkering with Rolls-Royce armoured cars among men of his own sort. But Allenby needed him to help take Damascus and if possible Aleppo.

Allenby gave Lawrence more money, 2,000 camels, armoured cars and aircraft to push forward attacks by Feisal's army against the Amman–Deraa–Damascus sector of the Turkish line, in order to make them reinforce east of the river Jordan. The final phase of the Palestine campaign in September 1918 called for more British trickery. This time they feinted right, up the Jordan valley from Jericho, but really broke through on the left, straight up the coastal plain from Jaffa. Lawrence records, in chapter XCVIII of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
:

The deception was wholly successful: three whole divisions moved west to the coast by night, hiding in orange groves by day, without being seen. Soldiers doubled up in the tents, daylight movement was prohibited, and horses could only be watered at fixed hours when the RAF was up in full force to deter enemy spotter planes. Dummy cavalry horses were left behind in the Jordan valley, made of wood and canvas, stuffed with straw. Mules pulled wattle hurdles to raise dust at the time these ‘horses' were meant to be trotting to water. An Indian havildar or sergeant deserted and told the Turks the true facts, that a great attack was coming up the coast, but the new German commander Liman von Sanders dismissed him as a plant – another haversack ruse – because any evidence to confirm what he said had been skilfully hidden.

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:

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.

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: