The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (50 page)

Herbert joined the House of Commons as Conservative member for South Somerset in 1911, but he was no party man. He sent a telegram of support to the foundation meeting of Dusé Mohamed Ali’s League of Justice. During the war he gave money to an impecunious member of the league, one Charles Rosher, who happened to be the subject of British government surveillance (which is how we know of Herbert’s generosity). The Conservative Party hierarchy did not know what to make of him; he had no desire to climb or to ingratiate himself; he seemed to them almost indifferent. Desmond MacCarthy judged that he was “the kind of man
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whom professional politicians do not fear because the hearts of such are clearly not ‘in the game’; or rather because they only fight for what they immensely care for and while the impulse is hot within them.”

When the war began, Herbert contrived, despite his near blindness, to join the Irish Guards “by the simple
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method of buying himself a second lieutenant’s uniform and falling in as the regiment boarded ship for France.” This sounds more like family legend than truth, but however he obtained the uniform, he took part in Britain’s first engagement with the Germans, at Mons, and fell wounded. The Germans took him prisoner. In a characteristic passage, Herbert wrote of his experience: “It is only fair
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to say that both on the battlefield and subsequently we were all shown courtesy and great kindness by the Germans, from all ranks to all ranks; and from Prussians and Bavarians alike.” When the French counterattacked, they freed him. Soon he was back in London, in hospital, recuperating. He
appears to have been the first British MP to take part in combat during World War I; almost certainly he was the first to take a bullet.

Once he recovered, the government sent him to a part of the world he knew well, Cairo, to work for army intelligence. Serendipitously he traveled out to Egypt with another intelligence officer, his friend George Lloyd, aboard the ship
India
. “Oh Mark,”
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he wrote to Sykes upon arrival, “here is a beginning. I left England in an historic gale. The Ship rolled 37 degrees. She could only roll 44. We went down to the sea that was near as a lion behind his bars.” In Cairo he settled in with the others at Shepherd’s Hotel. He recorded his impressions of fellow intelligence officers in his diary. Of T. E. Lawrence, who arrived the day after he did, he observed shrewdly: “an odd gnome,
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half cad, with a touch of genius.” The two men became fast friends.

Herbert took part in the Cairo discussions about how to deal with then-sharif
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Hussein. He read the McMahon-Hussein letters. He wanted Britain to support the Arab Revolt. He knew, too, about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which he opposed, even though his friend was its joint author. He wrote to Sykes, not specifically about the treaty with France but about British war aims: “We have not gone
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out for loot but to protect small people.” Britain, he was clear, should not annex new territory in Syria, and he regretted that the French intended to annex it for themselves. Already he was thinking that Britain should negotiate a separate peace with the Ottomans and was wondering whether the authorities in Egypt, should they make contact, had authority to carry on discussions with Turkish representatives. On June 22, 1915, he wrote from Cairo to another friend, Robert Cecil, newly installed in the Foreign Office: “Suppose we are able to advance, and by, say, 1st August, find ourselves in the position that the Turkish Government … believes to be formidable, and a Turk comes in from my friend Talaat (or it may be from the Liberals), and says ‘We will let you through [the Dardanelles] on such-and-such terms,’ does G.H.Q. here know what terms we are prepared to accept and has it got the power of negotiating?” At this stage, the answer to his percipient query was negative: “If … at any time any proposal for surrender by the Turks were to reach us, we should have to submit it to the Russians before accepting it, and it is therefore impossible to give to anyone out there a free hand, as you desire.”

At the end of 1915 Herbert returned to London, in part to push for reorganization of the Cairo intelligence bureau into the Arab Bureau, as Mark Sykes, Gilbert Clayton, and others on the spot wanted. But he did not forget the possibility of a separate peace with Turkey. In February 1916 he
lunched with Maurice Hankey, secretary of the War Council, who told him “2 things were in
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the air: a separate peace with Turkey on the one hand, [and] on the other a speeding up of our attack on Turkey to help the Russians at Erzerum.” British pursuit of the second option led to the ill-fated campaign at Gallipoli. Britain declined to pursue the first, Herbert records Hankey as saying, “on the ground that … the attempt would only cause friction with Russia.” Herbert argued the point, keeping Robert Cecil’s strictures in mind. He wanted a British soldier (himself?) to tell the Russians: “We all want to finish the war, and the quickest way is to get rid of unnecessary enemies. Begin with the Turks … Make your own terms with the Turks, or let us make terms but only such as are completely satisfactory to you.” He would “put the case very friendly but bluffly.” Hankey did not bite.

During the next year Herbert served his country in various capacities: on a secret mission to Albania; as a liaison officer at Gallipoli; and in Mesopotamia, where he and Lawrence were sent to bribe the Turkish troops besieging Kut to let the British go (they would not). On one of his trips, passing through Paris, he met with Rechid Bey, the man who approached Grant Duff in Berne in January 1915. At the Hotel du Louvre, after having “passed down corridors
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that smelt like the parrot house at the Zoo,” the two men found a quiet spot to talk. Regretfully Herbert “told him that I thought there was nothing to be done at the present moment. That the sound of battle drowned everything else … those who loved his countrymen best were thinking of their own country now, and mourning their own relations, and … no one would dream of taking any risk of alienating an ally [Russia] on the chance of getting Turkey out at this moment.”

Eighteen months later things had changed. Millions had perished. Russia, now led by Kerensky, no longer claimed Constantinople or any other territory. Britain no longer thought it could force a passage through the Dardanelles. Herbert judged that the time to push for a separate peace with Turkey was finally ripe. And when he broached the possibility this time, the authorities did not turn their backs; quite the opposite.

So far was Aubrey Herbert from being a conventional Tory that by spring 1917 he had begun to think not merely that Britain should sign a separate peace with Turkey but that she should negotiate an end to the war altogether. Otherwise, he predicted to George Lloyd, “we shall simply
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pass from a European war to European Revolution. You have two civilizations fighting each other, each exhausting their resources … I do not know that
the last lap of victory will make very much difference.” Had he known Harry Sacher and Leon Simon, he would have agreed with them that the future lay with the opponents of war and imperialism. He sympathized to a degree with such figures; at any rate he thought it only realistic to accommodate them, and he did not hesitate to say so. When he bumped into a businessman he knew at the Travelers’ Club “going profiteering to Liverpool,” he said to him: “‘Time’s up for you
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rich men. If I were you I should be trembling in my shoes, and I should do something very spectacular in the way of charity to save my neck.’” The man turned pale and asked what kind of charity. “I said: ‘Something respectable, like orphans.’” A few months later he was equally indiscreet in Paris with the British ambassador, who called him a “dangerous pacifist
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Turcophile lunatic in khaki.”

Herbert thought that whatever its architects had planned, the war spelled the end of traditional imperialism and territorial carve-ups. Britain would now seriously consider a separate peace with Turkey, he judged, not merely because the Russians had repudiated annexations, and because Allied generals had given up hope of forcing the Dardanelles, and because people in general had wearied of the war, but also because British leaders were abandoning their imperialist ambitions, including those enunciated in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Interestingly, his friend Sykes’s mind was traveling down a similar path with regard to imperialism, although not with regard to the separate peace.

Meanwhile the mind of the government likewise was exploring these paths. With regard to the separate peace, neither Pickthall nor Pilling nor Morgenthau had been the person it required. Aubrey Herbert, however, was neither a dreamy novelist, nor a disreputable businessman, nor an indiscreet American former ambassador. He was a Conservative MP, the son of an earl, with extensive experience of the Ottoman Empire. “Yesterday, I had the last of a long series of conversations with R[obert] C[ecil] about getting the Turks out of the war,” he recorded in his diary on June 3, 1917. “I sketched a plan, which he agreed.” Three days later he wrote: “My departure practically agreed to by the Foreign Office,” and two days after that: “I saw Lord Hardinge …, and settled the details of my journey to Switzerland.” (Again, at almost exactly the same time as it was preparing to dispatch Herbert, the Foreign Office was reassuring Chaim Weizmann and James Malcolm that it would not consider a separate peace with Turkey.)

Herbert would not leave for weeks yet; he still had to convince the biggest guns. On July 4
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he met with the foreign secretary himself. At Balfour’s request he prepared a memorandum explaining what Britain had to gain from a separate peace with Turkey: “We should free troops
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in Egypt,
Salonika and Mesopotamia … We should avoid a position in Mesopotamia that may become dangerous in the autumn. We should be concentrating instead of dissipating our forces … the position of Bulgaria would become precarious and the desire for peace in Vienna would be increased.” Oddly, he did not touch upon what the government considered to be “the strongest point
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of all in favor of a separate peace with Turkey, namely that it means the complete defeat of Germany’s Near Eastern and Middle Eastern aspirations, and would undoubtedly cause the gravest unease and possible disturbance in Germany.”

For that reason in addition to the others, then, Balfour and most of his colleagues were inclined to smile upon Herbert’s offer to meet Turkish emissaries in Switzerland (regardless of what they might say simultaneously to Zionists and Armenians). They had another reason too. During May, June,
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and July 1917 they kept receiving reports that important Ottoman figures likewise were thinking about peace. These reports culminated in a cable from Rumbold in Switzerland, who had learned from Dr. Parodi that on June 27 prominent Turks in that country had formed an Ottoman League of Peace and Liberation, whose aim was to overthrow the CUP and to negotiate peace with Britain. They had chosen Rechid Bey as
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their president and Kemal Midhat Bey, a former Albanian minister of public works, to be their secretary. Soon thereafter important Turks began arriving in Zurich. “I am taking steps,”
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Rumbold assured London, “to try and find out if possible [the] results of any meeting these persons hold, as I am informed on good authority that their presence in this country indicates probable peace proposal from Turkey.”

“Taking steps” meant asking Dr. Parodi to look further into the matter. The British agent did so, and within the week Rumbold was reporting that the Turks had met in Zurich on July 9 or 10. One of their leaders, Fethy Bey, formerly the Ottoman minister in Sofia, wanted to meet Dr. Parodi in person, and moreover, “a member of the Committee
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of Union and Progress who is in opposition to … Enver Pasha is coming to Switzerland, and the friends of the person in question have sounded Dr. Parodi as to whether this Turkish delegate could meet some prominent Englishman in this country.”

The visible outlines of a crucial nexus now grew clear to the men in London. An important Ottoman wished to meet an important Briton in Switzerland to broach the separate peace; an important Briton, Aubrey Herbert, wished to meet an important Ottoman for the very same reason. On July 14 Herbert left for Switzerland. He spent twenty-four hours in the French capital and then entrained to Berne, where he consulted with Rumbold
and Parodi among others, finally stopping at Geneva, where, on the evening of July 17, he took a room at the Hôtel de la Cloche. We turn now to Herbert’s diary:

Into this safe house, Herbert records, walked “my friend.” He does not identify him in the diary. In the memorandum he prepared afterward he wrote only: “He comes from one
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of the best and most honourable families of his country; in looks he is like a typical Englishman of the public school class and he talks perfect English.”

This gentleman began their conversation: “How are you, Aubrey Herbert? I hope your wound is better. You must have had a filthy time with the Germans.” Herbert made his position clear: He was in Switzerland for his health, he had no authorization to discuss anything in particular, and the opinions he expressed would be his alone. His friend made like protestations. They got down to business.