A Peace to End all Peace (17 page)

IV

The Asquith government’s move to plan the breakup of the Ottoman Empire was prompted by the Russian demand for Constantinople. Lord Kitchener had anticipated that demand at the outset of the war. Months before Asquith appointed the interdepartmental committee chaired by the diplomat Sir Maurice de Bunsen to outline Britain’s aims in the postwar Middle East, Kitchener had initiated informal inquiries of his own along these lines, which his lieutenants pursued before, during, and after the de Bunsen proceedings.

Kitchener turned to his former staff in Cairo to elaborate the details of his plans for the postwar Middle East, with special reference to the possibility that Russia and France might resume their traditional hostility to Britain in that part of the world.

Apparently Oswald FitzGerald, Kitchener’s aide, wrote to Storrs asking for comments on the role of Palestine after the war with respect to a probable French and/or Russian position further north. It was one of the first times that Zionism—the movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine—entered into British wartime speculations. Storrs replied at the end of 1914:

After considering the alternatives, Storrs concluded that the most attractive approach would be to annex and incorporate Palestine into Egypt. He ended by saying, “Please remember me to the Chief. Egyptians are hoping that he will continue to direct their fate from afar.”
¹⁶

Storrs wrote again at the beginning of March 1915, proposing that after the war Kitchener should return to a new “North African or Near Eastern Vice-Royalty including Egypt and the Sudan and across the way from Aden to Alexandretta.”
¹⁷
This, he suggested, would offer Kitchener an attractive alternative to becoming Viceroy of India. In effect he was proposing that most of the Arabic-speaking world should be organized into a confederation that would be a British protectorate ruled by Kitchener from Cairo.
¹⁸

As he developed a Middle Eastern policy for Britain, the War Minister based it on the Storrs proposal. On 11 November 1914, Kitchener wrote to Sir Edward Grey that the French should be persuaded to forego their traditional interest in Syria, and should in exchange be given more of North Africa after the war; while Syria should be nominally independent under a British protectorate and should be joined to Arabia under the spiritual leadership of an Arab caliph. (This was the matter about which Kitchener had corresponded with Hussein of Mecca months before.)

Kitchener later suggested to Grey that negotiations might be opened with Arabic-speaking leaders without telling the French government; but Lord Crewe, the Secretary of State for India, told Grey that such a course of proceedings would not be “feasible.”
¹⁹
In any event, Kitchener, Storrs, and Sir Mark Sykes, the Tory M.P. who joined the Kitchener entourage in 1915, all wrongly believed that the French could be persuaded to abandon their interest in Syria (except for the Christian areas of Mount Lebanon, where their presence might prove to be, according to Storrs, “inevitable”).
²⁰

As to the Arabic-speaking peoples, it long had been an article of faith among the British officials who dealt with oriental affairs that they were incapable of genuine independence. Gertrude Bell, the most famous of prewar British travelers in Arabian lands, repeated what was regarded as obvious when she wrote that “the Arabs can’t govern themselves.”
²¹
As used by British officials among themselves during the war, “independence” for Arabic-speaking areas merely meant independence from the Ottoman Empire, and indicated that such areas would move instead into the orbit of some European power.
²²

Throughout the next two years, Kitchener and his colleagues continued to press their scheme. On 26 August 1915, the field marshal’s colleague, Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan, wrote the Governor-General of India that “I conceive it to be not impossible that in the dim future a federation of semi-independent Arab States might exist under European guidance and support, linked together by racial and linguistic grounds, owing spiritual allegiance to a single Arab Primate, and looking to Great Britain as its patron and protector.”
²³

Taking the lead in pushing for an Arab caliphate, Wingate corresponded with Kitchener’s candidate for the position—Hussein, the ruler of Mecca and Medina—through an Arab religious leader in the Sudan, Sir Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani. Captain G. S. Symes, Wingate’s private secretary, produced a detailed memorandum outlining the pan-Arab scheme of which the caliphate would be part; and Storrs submitted another memorandum supporting the Arab caliphate on 2 May 1915. Gilbert Clayton, the Cairo Intelligence chief, supporting the plan for Britain to take Syria and for the caliphate to be brought to Arabia, made it seem that many voices were urging the scheme, when in fact it was only a single faction speaking, though with several voices.
²⁴

In London, Lord Kitchener explained to his colleagues—including the representative of India, which had been alarmed by his correspondence with Hussein months before—why the moving of the caliphate was central to his strategy for the postwar world. At a meeting of the War Committee of the Cabinet on 19 March 1915, Lord Crewe said that two different views were taken in the India Office about the future of the Ottoman Empire. The Political Department wanted to sacrifice Turkey to Arabia, while the Military Department wanted to make Turkey as strong as possible as a barrier against a potential Russian threat. Minutes of the meeting record that.

The Foreign Office deemed it unwise to interfere in Moslem religious affairs; the India Office went further and called it dangerous. But the Foreign Office would not, and the India Office could not, overrule the judgment of Herbert Kitchener. He was more than the head of the War Office, more than a Cabinet minister, more than an old hand at African and Asian affairs, more than the empire’s greatest soldier. He was a living legend west and east of Suez. He was Kitchener of Khartoum; and in the sunset of his career, the tall old soldier cast a long shadow over the future of the Middle East.
^*

The de Bunsen committee—the interdepartmental group that Asquith created to advise the Cabinet as to what Britain ought to want in the Middle East—was appointed on 8 April 1915, and produced its report on 30 June 1915. The committee was composed of one representative each from the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the India Office, and other relevant departments. Kitchener’s War Office was represented on the committee by General Sir Charles Calwell, Director-General of Military Operations. In addition, Kitchener placed Sir Mark Sykes on the committee as his personal (as distinct from his departmental) representative; and through Sykes, the War Minister dominated the committee’s proceedings. Thereafter Sykes remained the London bureaucrat charged with responsibility for Middle Eastern affairs throughout the war.

Sykes, a wealthy, 36-year-old Roman Catholic Tory baronet, had been elected to the House of Commons in 1911. During and after his undergraduate years at Cambridge, he had traveled widely in Asiatic Turkey and had published accounts of his journeys. This had made him one of the Conservative Party’s experts on Ottoman affairs, but as Ottoman affairs had not played any significant role in British politics between 1911 and 1914, and as his party was out of office, Sykes was not well known either to the public or to his fellow politicians.

Sykes was the product of a curious background. He was the only child of an unhappy marriage: his warm-hearted but wanton mother and his harsh elderly father lived apart. At the age of three, when his mother converted to Roman Catholicism, he became a Catholic, too. When he was seven his father took him on a trip to the East. His religion and his travels in the East remained lifelong passions.

His education was fitful. He was moved from school to school and there were times when he was not at school at all. He spent two years at Jesus College, Cambridge, but did not stay to take his degree. He was restless. The vast estates that he inherited and his horse-breeding stables did not keep him at home. He roamed the East, and spent four years attached to the embassy in Constantinople. He was welcomed everywhere for his talents. He was a caricaturist and a mime, in both cases of almost professional quality. He was amusing and made friends easily. He held opinions strongly, but changed them rapidly.

When the war came, Sykes made an effort to find a job that would make use of his Middle Eastern expertise. In the summer of 1914 he wrote a letter to Winston Churchill asking for a job “on the spot” working against Turkey, offering to “raise native scallywag corps, win over notables, or any other oddment.” He wrote that “I know you won’t think me self-seeking if I say all the knowledge I have of local tendencies and possibilities, are at your disposal…”
¹
but Churchill either did not have a position for him or did not offer it.

Sykes fell into Kitchener’s orbit as a result of meeting Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald FitzGerald, the field marshal’s close friend and personal military secretary. FitzGerald arranged for Sykes to be brought into the War Office early in 1915, where he served under Calwell preparing information booklets for troops in the Mediterranean area. While there, he made an especial friend of G. M. W. Macdonogh, a fellow Roman Catholic who had attended the same public school; as Director of Military Intelligence, Macdonogh proved a valuable ally in advancing Sykes’s career.

Shortly after his arrival at the War Office, Sykes was given his de Bunsen assignment. Kitchener required a young politician who knew the Middle East, and young Sir Mark Sykes was one of the handful of Members of Parliament who knew the area. As a Tory, he shared many of Kitchener’s sentiments and prejudices. In every sense they were members of the same club.
^*

Yet, at the time of his appointment, he barely knew Kitchener; and was never to know him much better. Sykes was directed to call FitzGerald every evening to give a full report of the de Bunsen committee’s discussions. FitzGerald would later tell him what Kitchener wanted him to say or do at the meetings that followed. His few attempts at actually seeing the reclusive national legend evidently proved unsatisfactory; Sykes later commented that “The less I saw of him, the easier it was to do what he required…”
²

From the outset, though, the other members assumed that he spoke with the full weight of Lord Kitchener’s authority. The relatively inexperienced M.P. controlled the interdepartmental committee. He was outspoken and opinionated. He was the only member of the committee who had been to most parts of the Ottoman Empire; he alone could speak from first-hand knowledge. Then, too, he was a politician. He made the other key member of the committee, Maurice Hankey, into a friend and personal supporter. Hankey, also in his thirties, was Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and Secretary to the War Council of the Cabinet, and was to become the first holder of the office of Secretary of the British Cabinet. Controlling the agenda, and writing the minutes of what was said and decided at meetings, Hankey was on the road to becoming the most valuable and important man in the bureaucracy, and his support proved invaluable to Sykes.

In the de Bunsen proceedings, it was Sykes who outlined the alternatives that were available to Britain. He explored the relative advantages of several different kinds of territorial settlement: annexation of the Ottoman territories by the Allied Powers; dividing the territories into spheres of influence instead of annexing them outright; leaving the Ottoman Empire in place, but rendering its government submissive; or decentralizing the administration of the empire into semi-autonomous units. (Eventually the committee recommended trying the last choice first, as being the easiest.)

In order to discuss these matters, the committee had to decide what names to give to the various areas into which they might want to divide the Ottoman Empire. It is indicative of the spirit in which they approached their task that they saw no need to follow the lines of existing political subdivisions of the empire, the
vilayets
(or provinces), and felt free to remake the face of the Middle East as they saw fit. In any event, the tendency of the committee members, like that of the British governing class in general, was to be guided in such matters by the Greek and Latin classics they had studied at public school: they employed the vague Greek terms used by Hellenistic geographers two thousand years earlier. The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia to the north of Arabia thus collectively were referred to as “Mesopotamia” in the east and “Syria” in the west, though the areas to be included in each were unclear. The southern part of Syria was called “Palestine,” a corruption of “Philistia,” the coastal strip occupied by the Philistines more than a thousand years before Christ; and while no country had ever called itself Palestine, it was a geographic term current in the Christian western world to describe the Holy Land.

The committee, led by Mark Sykes, proposed the creation of five largely autonomous provinces in the decentralized Ottoman Empire which they envisaged. They were to be Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Anatolia, and Jazirah-Iraq (the northern and southern parts of Mesopotamia). As the committee saw it, British influence or control would be desirable in a wide swath across the Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. A British railroad was to be constructed from a Mediterranean port to Mesopotamia, to provide the overland road to the East. Kitchener continued to insist on Alexandretta as the port, but Sykes demanded that it be Haifa, and FitzGerald, mediating between the two, let Sykes have his way.

In all other respects Sykes hewed close to the Kitchener line, though with slight modifications of his own. Like Kitchener, he advocated moving the caliphate to the south to put it out of the reach of Russia’s influence; but he added that it also would put it out of reach of financial control by France, for he assumed that Ottoman finances would be largely controlled by the French in view of the large French investment in the Ottoman public debt.
³

The overall approach, however, was Kitchener’s. Sykes, who had been a conspicuous member of the pro-Turkish bloc in Parliament, abandoned his conviction that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire ought to be maintained. To his intimate friend and fellow pro-Turkish M.P., Aubrey Herbert, he wrote on April Fool’s Day:

After more of the same, Sykes closed with a note: