Read Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Online
Authors: Michael Korda
Much bloodshed and strife might have been spared had Storrs and McMahon drafted the note of October 24 more precisely, but they were working under pressure from London. The Gallipoli expedition had all too clearly failed, the Turkish army was still within reach of the Suez Canal, and the invasion of Mesopotamia was going more slowly than expected, while on the western front losses were soaring for no gain in ground, and on the eastern front the Russian army was already showing signs of an impending collapse. If there is a chance that the Arabs can be drawn into the war, promise them whatever they want: this was essentially the message from London. After the war was won, such promises could always be renegotiated, or fine-tuned.
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The exchange of messages between the sharif and McMahon continued at a leisurely pace until January 1, 1916, with no major changes in the position of either side. Neither party was content with the agreement that had been reached: the Arabs were unsatisfied because they wanted Syria above all, with its seacoast, as well as Palestine and Mesopotamia; the British were unsatisfied because this protracted negotiation had so far produced only Hussein’s refusal to endorse the jihad, and because lurking behind McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence like a guilty secret in a marriage was the fact that it had not yet been communicated to the French. This was how things stood on May 24, 1916, when the Arab Revolt finally began.
Attempts to reach an amicable accord between Britain and France
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over sharing the Arab-populated areas of the Ottoman Empire once Turkey was defeated had been going on since 1914, despite the fact that the Turks seemed by late 1915 to be winning their war, and despite whatever agreements were being made by the British separately with Arab nationalists and Sharif Hussein. The views of the British and French on the future of the Middle East were so divergent, and their distrust of each other’s ambitions in the area was so strong, that Kitchener and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey eventually shifted the whole issue to a committee headed by an experienced diplomat and civil servant, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, no doubt in the hope that the matter could be shelved until a victory of some sort was won against the Turks. Though neither Kitchener nor Grey said it, they might well have echoed Talleyrand’s famous instruction to his staff on taking charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Surtout, messieurs, pas trop de zèle. Unfortunately, this was to underestimate French interest in the subject, as well as the zeal of one committee member, Sir Mark Sykes.
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Tall, wealthy, charming, handsome, well connected, ambitious, a member of Parliament, a baronet, and a successful author, Sykes was the perfect example of a supremely energetic and self-confident man placed where a cautious, slow-moving one would have been a better choice.
The sixth baronet, Sykes was both “a Yorkshire grandee,” who inherited a great house and 30,000 acres (as well as the fortune to support them), and a sophisticated world traveler from an early age. His mother was a Cavendish-Bentinck, one of a great and influential family at the head of which was the duke of Portland, and which by many strands was related to the royal family. Effervescent, imaginative, impulsive, and generous, Sykes was, among other things, a gifted caricaturist, whose cartoons of the great and famous are often hilarious, but never malicious or unkind. He was one of that rarest of creatures, an upper-class Englishman who was at home everywhere, and almost completely without racial or religious prejudice. He had a particular affinity for Turkey—he wrote two travel guides to Turkey, and a history of the Ottoman Empire—and also visited Mexico, Canada, the United States, Egypt, and India, and served in the Boer War, where he may first have attracted Kitchener’s attention. From the moment he took his seat in the House of Commons, he was recognized as a young man who could “fill the House,” a witty and provocative speechmaker clearly destined for a political future full of glittering prizes. He once held Ronald Storrs in thrall in Cairo by speaking into Storrs’s office Dictaphone “a twenty-minute Parliamentary Debate … with the matter as well as the manner of such different speakers as Lloyd George, F. E. Smith, John Redmond or Sir Edward Carson rendered with startling accuracy,” as well as a parody of a Drury Lane melodrama, complete with music and sound effects.
Everybody liked and admired Sykes; he was the life of the party wherever he went. Indeed his only defect, like that of his friend Winston Churchill, was that while he enjoyed a good argument he always came away from one under the impression that he had won it and that he had converted the other person to his point of view. Kitchener sent Sykes, now a lieutenant-colonel of the Green Howards, out to the Middle East in the summer of 1915 on what would today be called a fact-finding tour. Hecharmed everyone he met, even the French, since he was “a devout Roman Catholic and a Francophile,” and spoke perfect French. He traveled on to India, via Aden, where he had less success with Lord Hardinge, the viceroy. The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The government of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopotamia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads.
Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly committed supporter of Zionism;
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he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon’s correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France’s colonial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, “a combination of green, red, black and white.” (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.
It should not be supposed, however, that Sykes was a British Pangloss, who believed Tout est pour le mieux, dans les meilleurs des mondes possibles. Sykes had a good, if shallow, understanding of what was happening in the Middle East, but not of the complexity of interests involved. Lawrence, who liked him, would nevertheless describe him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom as “a bundle of prejudices, intuitions and half-sciences,” and it was certainly true that Sykes was someone who leaped to the conclusion that he had understood a problem before the other person had even finished explaining it. He was, however, no fool; he brought back from his long journey, among other ideas, the perfectly correct conclusion that it was fatal to British interests in Arabia to have intelligence on that area split between so many competing departments. In Egypt, military intelligence reported to General Maxwell, the commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and civilian intelligence reported to Storrs and McMahon. In Basra, military intelligence reported to the commander in chief of the Indian army in Delhi, and civilian intelligence to the viceroy in Delhi. In addition, Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar, had his own intelligence service in Khartoum. Sykes had the sensible idea of uniting all these services into a single “Arabian Bureau,” in Cairo, of which he hoped to be named the chief.
In this Sykes was to be disappointed—the Arab Bureau, when it was formed, would come under Clayton, would have as its chief Lawrence’s old mentor Hogarth, and would include both Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, while Sykes was sidelined for the moment to deal with the numerous complaints and problems of the French on behalf of the war cabinet, though he would remain a constant presence, in person or by cable, in Middle Eastern affairs. Of Sykes it may truly be said, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, “There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it, but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong…. His watchword is always duty, and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.”
Sykes’s return to London coincided most unfortunately with the decline in prestige of his patron, Kitchener. Among the civilian membersof the war cabinet, the failure at Gallipoli and the stalemate on the western front were beginning to erode faith in Kitchener’s infallibility. His reputation and his popularity with the general public made it impossible to get rid of him, but in the war cabinet he found himself increasingly isolated, and in the position of “the god that failed.” Kitchener responded by increasing the length of his periods of silence, with the result that it was Sykes himself who was given the opportunity to present “every aspect of the Arab question” to the War Committee of the cabinet. He did this brilliantly—nobody was better at putting on a “bravura” performance than Sykes, unless it was Lawrence. In the eyes of many, Sykes became almost overnight the expert on the Arab question in London—after all, he had been in the Middle East and had met everyone concerned—despite the fact that many of his ideas were eccentric or failed to represent the experience of those on the spot, like Clayton, Hogarth, and Lawrence. A happy, wealthy, and contented man—he had among other things a large family of his own—Sykes was almost constitutionally unequipped to convey the stubborn refusal to compromise, the fierce dogmatism, or the ancient and ineradicable hatreds of the Middle East to an audience of British political figures. In Sykes’s tour d’horizon the lion would lie down with the lamb: the views of Cairo, Khartoum, and Delhi would be reconciled; the ambitions of the French and the sharif of Mecca would both be met; and Britain would gain oil from Mesopotamia and control over Palestine to protect the Suez Canal.
Not surprisingly Sykes seemed to everybody just the right man to straighten things out with the French, so less than a week after his report to the War Committee, he was invited to attend a meeting of the “Nicolson Committee,” a group of Foreign Office civil servants under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Nicolson,
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which had been attempting to thrash out the details of what the French actually wanted, or at least might be persuaded to accept. Sykes’s presence, his charm, his sense of humor, and his knowledge of the Middle East, it was hoped, might reduce the acrimony
To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comité de l’Afrique Française, and his brother the treasurer of the Comité de l’Asie Française, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France’s mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enormous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France’s deep historical connections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Crusades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of “France of the Middle East” were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French culture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that “Syria” included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Lebanon was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews? Had not the French built, during the next few centuries, the magnificent castles that Lawrence had been at such pains to study and photograph in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine? The past spoke for itself, so far as the French were concerned—the French had led the way, and had paid for this land in blood and gold! Were their rights to be contested now by Arab nomads and sheepherders, or by the British, who had not arrived in force in this part of the world until the late nineteenth century?
Few people could have been found less well equipped to resist such arguments than Sir Mark Sykes, who had a genuine love for France, and whose strong point in any case was imagination and a concern for what we would now call the big picture. He did not, alas, have a head for details, or any willingness to argue about the meaning of every word in a text, let alone insignificant geographic features on a map. These, however, were Picot’s strengths. He was tireless and well-informed; his mind was made up; and he had been sent to the negotiating table with strict, precise instructions from his government with which he was in wholehearted agreement—unlike Sykes, whose mission was merely to smooth things over with the French, and, if possible, slow them down.