A Peace to End all Peace (41 page)

V

In Baghdad and Basra, not much more than lip service was paid to the pro-Arab independence policies proclaimed by Sykes and the Foreign Office. Sir Percy Cox was obliged to leave on a lengthy tour and eventually to return to Persia; in his absence, his deputy, Captain Arnold T. Wilson, acted in his place and then succeeded him as civil commissioner. Wilson, an officer in the Indian Army, believed neither in independence for the provinces he governed nor in a role for King Hussein of the far-off Hejaz in their affairs.

The most famous author of books about Arab lands of her day, Gertrude Bell, had come up to Baghdad with the Army of the Tigris and served as Wilson’s assistant. She at first employed her great prestige and extensive network of family and social friendships to back up his policy. Not much of a political thinker, she was given to enthusiasms and, at the time, was enthusiastic about Wilson’s views. In February 1918 she wrote to her old friend Charles Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, that “amazing strides have been made towards ordered government…There’s no important element against us…The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased. What they dread is any half measure…” She concluded that no one in Baghdad or Basra could conceive of an independent Arab government.
³⁶

This was a far cry from the proclamation drafted by Sir Mark Sykes on the liberation of Baghdad, calling for a renaissance of the Arab nation, such as was proposed by the Emir of Mecca in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, and hinting that Hussein would become the leader of the Arab nation.

Elsewhere, too, Sykes’s alliance politics were modified as British officials moved away from their wartime enthusiasm for the ruler of Mecca. While Sykes continued to champion Hussein’s cause, British officials noted the deterioration of the King’s position
vis-à-vis
his rival, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, lord of the Arabian district of Nejd, whom India had backed all along. Sykes had received a hint of this deterioration when he visited the Hejaz in the spring of 1917; Hussein had been surprisingly conciliatory in agreeing to cooperate with Britain in Mesopotamia and even with France in Syria, adding “but we do ask that Great Britain will help us with Ibn Saud.”
^37
*

In January 1918 King Hussein told an Arab Bureau officer, Major Kinahan Cornwallis, that he was thinking of proclaiming himself Caliph. Three years earlier this had been Lord Kitchener’s plan, prompted by memoranda from Clayton and Storrs, and had been championed by the officers who later formed the Arab Bureau (see Chapter 22).

By January 1918, however, the Arab Bureau, which now held Hussein in low esteem, had come around to the opposite view. Cornwallis, attempting to discourage Hussein, pointed out to him that serious problems would arise if he attempted to assume the caliphate. On receipt of Cornwallis’s news, the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, sent off a dispatch to the Foreign Office saying that he hoped for an opportunity of “checking premature or ill-considered action” by Hussein.
⁴⁰
This was the same General Wingate who on 17 November 1915 had induced an Arab religious leader to tell Hussein that he was “the right man to take over his rightful heritage and verify the hopes of his people—the Mohammedans and Arabs to recover their stolen Khalifate” and calling upon the Hashemite leader to establish “the Hashemite Arabian Khalifate.”
⁴¹

Kitchener’s followers found it inconvenient to remember that once they and their chief had encouraged Hussein to claim the caliphate; erasing it from their minds, they would later ignore it in their books and edit it out of official documents. In memoirs published three decades later, Sir Ronald Storrs deleted the caliphate section from Kitchener’s historic cable in 1914 to Hussein. T. E. Lawrence wrote that Kitchener and his followers had believed in Arab nationalism from the beginning—when in fact they did not believe in it at all. They believed instead in the potency of the caliphate; that Hussein could capture it for them; and that in the East nationalism was nothing while religion was everything.
^*

Indeed, in 1918 politics and the desire to rewrite history both dictated a shift in emphasis: Feisal, not Hussein, began to emerge as Cairo’s preferred Arab leader, for Feisal showed a disposition, lacking in his father, to accept British counsel and guidance.

By the autumn of 1918, the armies commanded by Hussein’s sons were reckoned by British sources to total only a few thousand trained troops. In public the British claimed that vast numbers of Arabs had flocked to the standard of the Hejazi princes; in private they had a different story to tell. Secret British government documents filed in 1919 admit that “The followings quoted during the war were grossly exaggerated.”
⁴²
A report from the British Agency in Jeddah in 1919 pictured King Hussein as militarily inconsequential: his following was estimated at only 1,000 regulars, 2,500 irregulars, and possibly several thousand more from Bedouin tribes, and their fighting qualities were rated as “poor.” According to the report, King Hussein “indulged in wild dreams of conquest,” but the withdrawal of British support would leave him “at the mercy of Ibn Saud and the rising wave of W
AHHABISM
.”
⁴³

An Arab Bureau report on the Hejaz revolt in 1918 stated that “The real importance of this revolt has only made itself felt in the course of the last few months and it is spreading from day to day. At the same time it must be said that 90% of the Sherif’s troops are nothing more than robbers…” According to the report, Arabs rose up against the Turks only when British forces had already arrived, so that “In a word, the extent of the Sherif’s revolt depends entirely on the ability of the British to advance.”
⁴⁴
Colonel Meinertzhagen, the head of Allenby’s intelligence, wrote that “It is safe to say that Lawrence’s Desert Campaign had not the slightest effect on the main theatre west of Jordan.”
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But others disagreed. Sykes, continuing to stand by the alliance with Hussein and believing that Feisal and his brothers were making a significant contribution to the war effort, argued that in Arabia and elsewhere, by 1918 the Hejaz revolt was occupying the attention of 38,000 Ottoman troops.
⁴⁶
The memoirs of the enemy commander, Liman von Sanders, show that in 1918 when his armies turned to flee, they found themselves painfully harassed by Arab Bedouins.
⁴⁷
The tone of Gilbert Clayton’s memoranda show that he believed Feisal and Lawrence were accomplishing important objectives on Allenby’s right flank. Other evidence, too, suggests that the Arab forces in Transjordan succeeded in spreading disorder in Turkish-held areas.

Mired in politics then and ever since, the question of how much Feisal contributed to the Allied success remains unresolved; at the time it raised the question of whether Britain should back Hussein and Feisal against indigenous Syrian Arab leadership, and whether Britain should support Feisal against Hussein.

Within the Sherifian camp there were strains, as Feisal, physically cut off from the Hejaz and his family, moved into the British orbit. In cables that the British military authorities secretly intercepted and read, Hussein complained that “they have turned my son against me to live under
other countries
, who is rebellions & dishonest to his Father [original emphasis].”
⁴⁸
He complained that “Living under the orders of a disobedient son and a traitor has burdened my shoulder with this misery.” He threatened that “If Feisal still persists in destroying his good fortune his nation and his honour” it would be necessary to appoint a war council in his place.
⁴⁹
Meanwhile, according to Arab Bureau reports from Cairo, Syrian spokesmen indicated that they would be willing to accept Feisal as their constitutional monarch, but only in his own right, and not if he acted as deputy or representative of Hussein.
⁵⁰

VI

Although British leaders from 1914 onward had professed faith in the leadership of Hussein within the Arab world, in 1917 and 1918 they felt driven to reassess the validity of that belief.

As Britain moved to complete her conquest of the Arabic-speaking world of the Middle East, British officials began to worry about the local opposition that they might encounter. Clayton’s endeavors, beginning in 1914, to arrive at an understanding with separatist leaders from Baghdad and Damascus had foundered on their objection to being ruled by non-Moslems. Now that Damascus was on Britain’s line of march the question was how Damascenes could be won over to the Allied cause and to the Allied scheme for the future of the Middle East. That Feisal had agreed to the Allied program might carry no weight with them.

In the summer of 1918 William Ormsby-Gore told the Zionist Political Committee in London that “The Syrian ‘Intelligentzia’ lawyers and traders constituted the most difficult and thorny problem of the Near East. They had no civilisation of their own, and they had absorbed all the vices of the Levant.”
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Sir Mark Sykes seems to have started worrying about the Syrian problem the year before in the context of pledges he intended Britain to keep to her allies—and her allies to keep to her. His concern was that Syrians might not accept the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the terms outlined by Sir Henry McMahon to the Sherif Hussein. In 1917 he asked the Arab Bureau to set up a meeting for him with Syrian Arabs leaders in Cairo, apparently in order to arrive at an agreement with them that would be consistent with the secret accords with France and with the Hejaz—accords whose existence, however, he could not reveal to them. He claimed he had succeeded; in his own hand he noted that “The main difficulty was to manoeuvre the delegates into asking for what we were prepared to give them, without letting them know that any precise geographical agreement had been come to.”
⁵²
The “precise geographical agreement” must have meant the Damascus-Homs-Hama-Aleppo line that was to be the westward frontier of Arab independence in Syria under the agreement with al-Faruqi in 1915 and with France in 1916.

But reports arrived from various quarters that the Ottoman government might be planning to pre-empt Arab nationalism by granting autonomy to Syria immediately. That would leave Britain in the awkward position of sponsoring the claims of King Hussein as against an indigenous Arabic leadership in Damascus that threatened to be far more popular in the Syrian provinces.

Toward the end of 1917 Sykes cabled Clayton: “I am anxious about Arab movement. Letters indicate difficulty of combining Meccan Patriarchalism with Syrian Urban intelligensia.” Quick as always to invent a new expedient, Sykes proposed to create an Arab executive committee to promote unity. Clayton must have said it could not be done, for Sykes responded: “Agree as to difficulty but military success should make this easier.” Sykes said that Picot should be persuaded to reassure the Syrians that France was in favor of their eventual independence. The same arguments were to be used on Picot on behalf of the Arabs that had been used on him on behalf of Zionism: that it was better to give up something in the far-off Middle East than to risk losing the war, and with it a chance to regain Alsace and Lorraine—provinces closer to home.
⁵³

Sykes was arguing that Britain could honor all pledges, and accommodate the Syrians as well, if only reasonable concessions were made all around. Clayton, as always, pictured Britain’s wartime commitments as embarrassments to be shed, and replied to Sykes that “There is no doubt a very real fear amongst Syrians of finding themselves under a Government in which patriarchalism of Mecca is predominant. They realize that reactionary principles from which Sherif of Mecca cannot break loose are incompatible with progress on modern lines.” Proposing to move away from the alliance with Hussein, he said that Feisal as an individual might be acceptable as head of a Syrian confederation, but only with a spiritual, not a political, role for his father. No such plan, however, and no committee or announcement or propaganda would be of any effect, Clayton continued, if the basic problem were not addressed. And that problem, he hinted (though he did not put it in these words), was posed by the pledges Sykes had made to the French and to the Zionists. As against the probable Turkish maneuver of setting up an autonomous Syrian government, nothing would be of any avail, he argued, because of the general fear in the Arabic-speaking world that Britain planned to turn Syria over to France. This was compounded, he claimed, by the public pledge just made to Zionism. The only solution was to obtain from France a clear public announcement denying that she intended to annex any part of Syria.
⁵⁴

Another approach was urged by Osmond Walrond, a former member of Lord Milner’s staff who knew Egypt from before the war and who had come out to serve in the Arab Bureau in Cairo. As Walrond saw it, Britain was neglecting the Arab secret societies, and accordingly he set out to cultivate their support. Walrond wrote to Clayton in the summer of 1918 to describe his conversations with members of these societies. He said that he had asked them to elect a small committee to represent them so that he could deal with them. They had elected a committee of seven members.
⁵⁵
Apparently Walrond’s intention was to repeat Sykes’s maneuver of the year before with another group of Cairo Arabs suspicious of Hussein: arrange for them to accept a statement of Britain’s plans for the Middle East so that they, like Hussein, would be tied into acceptance of those plans.

In mid-1918 Sir Mark Sykes accordingly addressed a declaration of British intentions to Walrond’s committee of seven Syrians in answer to questions ostensibly raised by them. It was an official declaration, approved by Sykes’s superiors at the Foreign Office, but did not break new ground. Like so much that came from the pen of Sir Mark Sykes, it restated the same intentions for the postwar Middle East but in different words. Outside the Arabian peninsula, the Arab world was to fall under varying degrees of European influence or control. In effect, Sykes’s Declaration to the Seven—later to be a subject of much controversy—recognized complete Arab independence only within the Arabian peninsula, for it offered such recognition only to areas that had been independent before the war or that had been liberated by the Arabs by themselves as of the date of the declaration.