Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

Nevertheless, McMahon was unable to concede all that the Sharif asked, since the French, with whom his government were about to enter an agreement over the fate of Syria, already considered the western portion of the country to be rightfully theirs. In his next letter he agreed to Hussain’s proposals with certain exceptions, including the districts west of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus which he claimed – almost certainly with Lawrence’s prompting – were not ‘purely Arab’. These areas – the Syrian littoral and its hinterland, which formed parts of the Ottoman Sanjaq of Lebanon and Vilayet of Beirut – were claimed by Britain’s French allies and had been earmarked as regions of possible French interest in a report made by Lawrence himself earlier that year. Hussain replied that he could not accept that these districts were not wholly Arab, and once again the negotiations faltered over French demands. It was, Lawrence commented, not the Turks but the French who were the real enemy in Syria.

The nights grew cooler in Cairo, but there appeared no light at the end of the tunnel. At the same time, it was becoming horribly clear that the Gallipoli operation had failed: ‘I don’t like the look of things up there,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and the worst is, it was such an easy business till we blundered.’ ²⁷He was brightened temporarily when Hogarth arrived, still looking for a job, but after his friend went off to Athens he became feverish with malaria for the first time in a year. ‘Official inertia’ had set in once more, and Lawrence confessed that he had ‘the nausea of it’. ²⁸Though his days were full, they were monotonously similar. Newcombe was posted to Gallipoli and replaced by Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of Kitchener’s, who had once been Governor of Sinai. Parker was highly regarded by the Bedu, who knew him as Barkal– the absence of a title such as ‘Bey’ or ‘Pasha’ denoting their affection. He had a reputation for being a tireless camel-rider and an indefatigable walker, who would track sand-grouse through impossible country as nimbly as an ibex. Lawrence, who may have found himself slightly jealous of Parker’s reputation, thought him knowledgeable about Sinai, and very little else, and threatened to ‘murder’ him one day. His despondency increased when, at the end of October, he received the news that Will, an observer in the Royal Flying Corps, had been shot down and lost on the Western Front: ‘I’m rather low,’ he wrote Edward Leeds, ‘because first one, and now another of my brothers has been killed …they were both younger than I am and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo… I wish one might have an end sometime.’ ²⁹All winter the negotiations with Hussain staggered on interminably, while the situation at Gallipoli went from bad to worse. Finally, in January 1916, the shattered remains of Medforce was evacuated from the Dardanelles. This was a dangerous moment for the British Empire. Not only had she been humiliated by ‘the bloody Turks’ before the eyes of the world, but thousands of Ottoman troops were now free to launch an invasion of Egypt with renewed brio. Already the Arabs were wavering, and the inconclusive bargaining between McMahon and Sharif Hussain had only exacerbated the situation. Both the Sharif and the Syrian Nationalists were suspicious of European encroachment in the East, and now it was beginning to look as if the Allies were less than a match – in military terms even – for the Ottoman Turks. In the Libyan Desert an Islamic Fundamentalist group, the Senussi brotherhood, were gathering silently, awaiting only the opportunity to strike at Egypt from the west. On the frontiers of the Sudan there was trouble from the pro-Turkish Sultan, ‘Ali Dinar. If the Arabs in Syria and the Hejaz joined the Turks instead of rebelling against them, British ambitions in the Middle East might well be lost.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1916, Sharif Hussain made a supreme gesture of his faith in British ‘decency’, and informed McMahon that he would waive a full discussion of the frontier until after the hostilities. It was a courageous but politically fatal act, which would later lead to accusations that he had ‘sold out’ to the Allies. Near the end of his life, he would tell historian George Antonius that his experience of British straightness in international affairs had impressed him deeply as a young man, and he had developed a ‘solid belief in English standards of honourable dealing’. Having received McMahon’s promise on the fundamental question of the area of Arab independence, he was willing to let secondary considerations ride for the time being, trusting implicitly that the British government’s word was its bond. ³⁰His faith was sadly misplaced. A few weeks after McMahon had concluded his agreement with the Hashemites in February 1916, the British government signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France and Russia, cynically carving up the Middle East between them in the event of a victory to the Triple Entente. By then, however, the General Staff in Cairo were already deeply distracted by another disaster in the making. In Mesopotamia, the 6th Indian Division under Major-General Sir Charles Townshend lay stranded and starving on a loop in the Tigris river at the village of Kut, where the British Empire faced the most humiliating surrender in the entire history of its arms.

It might almost have been a scene from the glorious annals of Pax Britannica– of redcoats, jammed Gatling guns and broken squares and the desert running with blood. Certainly, Townshend had been remembering the valiant days of his defence of Chitral, when he had told his men: ‘It is our duty to our Empire, to our beloved King and Country to stand here and hold the Turkish advance… we will make this a defence to be remembered in history as a glorious one.’ But Imperial glory was in short ration by that spring. Indeed, it was the ineptitude of Townshend himself and two other British commanders which had led to the impasse in the first place. His Division had originally been ordered only to protect the British oil refinery at Abadan and to prevent any threat to British shipping in the Gulf. In the event, goaded on by his superiors, Generals Beauchamp Duff in India and Sir John Nixon in Basra, Sir Charles had found himself euphorically chasing Turkish battalions up the Tigris. The enemy units had simply melted away, until, at Ctesiphon, he had met his nemesis in the form of 20,000 well-trained and determined Osmanli veterans. The Division had sustained 4,000 casualties before being forced to retire. If Townshend had then withdrawn tactically all the way back to the British HQ in Basra, the bulk of his men might still have been saved. Incredibly, he had chosen instead to make a ‘heroic’ stand at Kut, where he had immediately been surrounded by the Turks.

For five months they held out against the 20,000 troops who daily bombarded the town, sniping at any soldier unwise enough to show himself, and lobbing bombs from an old howitzer which the Tommies, with characteristic gallows-humour, christened ‘Fanny’. Three times a relief column of the British Tigris Corps from Basra tried to smash its way through the Turkish blockade, and three times the Turks threw it back with appalling losses. Almost daily, aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps droned over the grid of streets in a vain attempt to drop supplies of flour and sugar, most of which either splashed into the Tigris or fell to the Turks. By April even the dogs and cats had been eaten, and the troops were being issued with opium pills to relieve the effects of hunger. The men, lethargic, dispirited and famished, had begun to give up hope.