Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (43 page)

These were deep waters and confirm the fact that Lawrence was not only being treated as a wunderkind by his superiors in Cairo and in London, but also being encouraged (or at any rate allowed) to expand his reach in every direction. His role in the multifaceted and confusing intelligence world in Egypt remained anomalous, however, even after March 1916, when Clayton and Hogarth simplified the competing intelligence departments in Egypt. The Arab Bureau was housed in a few rooms in the Savoy Hotel, and its mission was to study and develop British policy toward Arabia, a rather vague directive that allowed Hogarth to move and influence events throughout the Arab world, from Basra, where he sent Gertrude Bell to represent him, to Syria and, of course, Mecca, where Sharif Hussein was still promising a revolt and demanding money and weapons. Although Lawrence was unable to transfer himself from the uncongenial task of providing intelligence reports for the headquarters of the two separate British armies as well as the Egyptian army, and would not join the Arab Bureau until October 1916, he could hardly fail to benefit from Hogarth’s presence; and he added to his already substantial list of tasks that of liaison between the various military intelligence departments and the fledging Arab Bureau, most of whose members were civilians, including two members of Parliament: Aubrey Herbert and George Lloyd, both friends of Sykes. The Arab Bureau was thus intended from the outset to be a fairly high-powered organization, with many back-channel connections to the War Office and the war cabinet. It would have considerably more clout than the military intelligence departments in Cairo and Ismailia. Its aim, as Sykes, Clayton, and Hogarth conceived it, was both to encourage the Arab Revolt, and to outmaneuver Paris and Delhi in determining British policy and postwar ambitions in Arabia. The first point was of great importance, since the British now had a substantial number of troops in Egypt who were contributing nothing significant to the war effort, and whom Sir William Robertson, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, DSO, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the French would rather have seen fighting Germans on the western front than sitting idly around Cairo and Ismailia.

General Maxwell’s attempts to break through the Turkish lines and take Gaza had resulted in failure, and the British had suffered three timesthe casualties of the enemy—further proof, if any were needed, of the dogged powers of resistance of Turkish troops under the command of the brilliant German General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein,
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whose masterly planning of the entrenchments and artillery around Gaza made it virtually impregnable. Kress had ingeniously combined trenches, machine gun nests, barbed wire, and large preexisting areas of native cactus into a formidable defense system. In addition, the presence of two British armies in Egypt made the French particularly unhappy, since they were deeply suspicious of British intentions in the Middle East, and feared that their ally would try to do them out of Syria by conquering it with British forces, kept in Egypt for just this purpose.

It was not just the Arab Bureau that was created in March 1916: events now began to move rapidly in the Middle East. On instructions from the Foreign Office, the £50,000 in gold coins that Sharif Hussein had been demanding as a down payment for the Arab Revolt was paid at last, and at the same time a large stockpile of rifles and ammunition was begun at Port Sudan, to be shipped across the Red Sea to Jidda as soon as the revolt broke out. The British Force in Egypt and the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (the latter survivors of the disaster at Gallipoli) were at last united into one army, henceforth called the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) and placed under the command of General Murray. Prodded by Kitchener, Murray decided it was wasteful to man a British defense line the length of the Suez Canal; he moved his forces forward to El Arish and began to build up a serious network of desert roads,
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a narrow-gauge railway for supplies, and a water pipeline across the desert, without all of which he correctly believed no attack on Gaza could possibly succeed.

Lawrence had not been forgotten in all these great changes. Both in Paris and in London, there were signs of the unusual respect in which this comparatively junior young officer—he was then twenty-seven—was held by those at the center of events. By one of the strange coincidences that often mark Lawrence’s life, on March 18 he was awarded—much to his surprise and dismay, given his determination “to biff the French out of Syria"—the French Légion d’Honneur, and almost simultaneously he was picked, with Kitchener’s approval, for not one but two delicate and secret tasks in Mesopotamia.

The first task was to assess and report back on the possibility of an Arab uprising there, a project that appealed to everybody in Cairo but was stubbornly resisted by the Indian government. Even though Lawrence carried with him a letter from Sir Henry McMahon to Sir Percy Z. Cox, the chief political officer in Basra, the very last thing Cox and the viceroy wanted to do was to light the flame of Arab nationalism in a part of the Ottoman Empire they hoped to secure for India. Although Kitchener himself was in favor of it, the idea of sending prominent Arab nationalist officers who either had been captured or had deserted from the Turkish army from Cairo to Basra, to link up with Arab nationalist figures there, was fiercely resisted in Delhi. Lawrence’s role was to seek out these figures, most of whom were known to Gertrude Bell, and report back to Cairo on their potential, as well as to give Cairo a clearer picture in general of how intelligence was being gathered in Mesopotamia. Needless to say, this dual role—that of a critical outsider and a snooper—did not make Lawrence popular in Basra; nor did the fact that he was also supposed to tell the Royal Flying Corps and the Indian army intelligence staff in Basra that their method of using serial aerial photography to produce maps—another subject on which he had made himself an expert—was all wrong. At the best of times, Lawrence’s manner of dealing with those who disagreed with him was likely—and often calculated—to provoke resentment, and in Basra he seems to have been at his worst, perhaps because officers in the Indian army were sticklers for pukka sahib dress and behavior, perhaps too because they were inclined to treat Arabs as they would Indian “natives,” with a mixture of racial superiority and brutality that shocked and offended Lawrence.

Lawrence’s second task was more delicate still, and even more bound to create local resentment, since it involved the consequences of an embarrassing defeat. In 1915 an Anglo-Indian army under the command of Major-General Charles Townshend, KCB, had moved north from Basra with the intention of taking Baghdad, and came very close to doing so after a significant victory over the Turks at Ctesiphon, less than thirty miles away. At that point, however, the exhaustion of Townshend’s troops, the precarious length of his line of communication to Basra, and the astonishing ability of the Turks to revive after a defeat forced Townshend back until he reached the small town of Kut al-Amara on the Tigris River, just over 200 miles from Basra, where the Turks very quickly managed to surround and besiege him.

Opinions differ as to whether Townshend might have captured Baghdad if he had pushed on boldly after his victory at Ctesiphon, or whether, once he started to retreat, he should have paused in Kut, but once he was there he was stuck. Since he could no longer feed the horses, he sent his cavalry south, and proceeded to fortify the town. His original force of 30,000 men was by then already reduced to less than half of that by death, wounds, and sickness—the area around Kut was a hellhole of humidity and heat, made even more intolerable by clouds of stinging black flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. By December 7, a week after their arrival, they were surrounded by Turkish troops under the effective command of the formidable Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, an elderly but skilled German general (and a respected military historian), and the Turkish general Khalil Pasha, a nephew of the Ottoman minister of war Enver Pasha. They made three attacks on Kut in December, but eventually decided to dig siege works around the town and block the river to prevent supplies from reaching Townshend. From January through April 1916 the British made four gallant attempts to relieve Kut, all of which were driven back, costing nearly 30,000 British and Indian casualties, while the Turks lost less than 10,000. One of the Turkish casualties was Field Marshal von der Goltz, who died of typhoid fever and was replaced by the Turkish commander of Mesopotamia, Khalil Pasha. In wretched, crowded, unsanitary conditions, with poor sanitation, every kind of disease raging, and no healthy drinking water, the British force was diminishing rapidly, and by April 22 it was clear that there was no option left except unconditional surrender. As for Townshend himself, he was beginning to lose either his nerve or his hold on reality.

Surrendering an Anglo-Indian army to the Turks was thought to be an unacceptable humiliation, particularly by the government of India, which feared the loss in native eyes of British prestige. The situation was made worse because the majority of Townshend’s unfortunate troops were Indian and there were no illusions about what would become of the garrison once they were force-marched into Turkish prisoner-of-war camps. Townshend, in a fit of desperation, proposed that he be authorized to offer the Turkish commander £1 million in gold and the surrender of his forty guns in exchange for letting him and his troops “go free on parole.” Surprisingly, though this suggestion infuriated Sir Percy Cox and British senior officers in Basra and Delhi, it found favor with Kitchener, who feared the loss of British prestige throughout Asia if Townshend surrendered. Townshend, as it turned out, perhaps through wishful thinking, had overrated the willingness of Khalil Pasha to negotiate; and what Kitchener had in mind was a two-pronged approach, which involved stirring up Arab desertion and resistance within the Turkish army to put more pressure on the Ottoman government to offer reasonable terms. Since neither Cox nor anybody else in Basra wanted anything to do with either part of the scheme, somebody else was needed to carry it out.

The choice of Aubrey Herbert—Sir Mark Sykes’s friend, a fellow member of Parliament, and a member of the Arab Bureau in Cairo—was a natural one. Herbert was a Turcophile, spoke Turkish, and knew most of the Turkish leaders personally; also, he was urbane, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, the ideal person to offer Khalil Pasha what was, in effect, a £1 million bribe. Lawrence was chosen to accompany Herbert because he spoke Arabic. His chief role was to make contact with Arab nationalist officers in the Turkish army who might join with Arab nationalist figures in Basra and Baghdad to start a revolt—or at least shake Khalil’s confidence in his Arab troops. Since this was exactly what Lawrence had done when he provided Grand Duke Nicholas with the names of dissident Arab officers before the Russian attack on Erzurum, it was no doubt hoped that he could perform the same trick twice. The original idea had been to send a senior Arab officer on parole in Cairo to cross the lines and open negotiations with Khalil Pasha, but Cox firmly squashed this, with the result that it was left to Lawrence to make his way up the Tigris on a steamer, a journey of six days, followed soon afterward by Herbert. Lawrence arrived to undergo a difficult interview with the commander of the relief forces, General Sir Percy Lake, KCB, KCMG, and then almost immediately succumbed to a fever, probably a recurrence of his malaria, made worse by the marshy, humid, sweltering air.

During Lawrence’s illness, the last attempt to relieve Kut failed, as did an attempt on April 24 to breach the Turkish blockade of the Tigris with a river steamer loaded with supplies. By this time, Townshend had opened negotiations with Khalil Pasha for the surrender of his force. He had been hoping that General Lake would do the negotiating for him—the idea of offering Khalil £1 million in gold to let Townshend’s forces go was a hot potato, which neither general wanted to touch; but in the end it was left to Townshend, who, in Aubrey Herbert’s words, “fears he is going to be blamed whatever happens,” a fear which was fully justified. Although Khalil was “extremely nice,” as Townshend put it, he proved to be a difficult, wily, and cautious negotiator, so Townshend, perhaps hoping, if nothing else, to spread the blame, requested a safe-conduct for three British officers—Colonel W. H. Beach (the head of Indian army intelligence in Basra); Captain Aubrey Herbert, MP; and Captain T. E. Lawrence—to join him in Kut as his “delegates” in the negotiations. By April 28 Townshend had offered Khalil £1 million, and Khalil had courteously declined it, under orders from his uncle Enver Pasha in Constantinople, who saw here an opportunity for a propaganda coup even more rewarding than the money. Townshend then sought permission to raise the offerto £2 million. On April 29, having failed to materially improve any of Khalil’s terms, Townshend destroyed his guns (thereby losing his last bargaining chip) and finally surrendered. By that time Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence were already on their way upstream for their meeting with Khalil, which was now pointless. As it turned out, Herbert’s command of Turkish and Lawrence’s command of Arabic proved unnecessary, since the conversation took place in French, but it produced no results, even when Colonel Beach raised the offer to £3 million.
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Lawrence described the colonel in a letter home as “about 32 or 33, very keen & energetic but not clever or intelligent I thought.” Lawrence complained that when he arrived back he would “be nailed within that office at Cairo,” again, and asked his parents to have a new pair of brown shoes made for him, and to send his copy of Aristophanes—a sign that he was still unaware of how much his life was about to change.

Lawrence was sickened by conditions around Kut—it combined all the horrors of trench warfare on the western front with humid, intense heat, unburied bodies, and dense clouds of biting insects—and by the sheer futility of what he was doing there. Townshend’s troops were force-marched across the desert to indescribably brutal prisoner-of-war camps, preyed on by raiding Arabs along the way. Nearly three-quarters of the British troops and half of the Indian troops would be worked or starved to death in captivity, whereas Townshend himself was held in luxurious quarters in a villa on the island of Malki.