A Peace to End all Peace (42 page)

Sykes could go no further in assuaging Arab suspicions of French intentions in Syria and Lebanon without securing France’s cooperation in issuing a joint pledge. In the autumn of 1918 the French government was finally persuaded to join the British Foreign Office in issuing a new statement of Allied intentions designed to allay Arab fears—and American suspicions. The Anglo-French declaration of 8 November 1918 was broadly phrased to suggest full support for the creation of indigenous governments in the Middle East; but it was designed to mislead, for, on French insistence, it did not refer specifically to Arab “independence.”
⁵⁶
French officials seemed as unlikely as their British counterparts to follow the idealistic path that Sir Mark Sykes—with an eye toward accommodating the views of Wilson and the Americans—had marked out for them.

I

As the summer of 1918 drew to a close, Sir Edmund Allenby gave the order to advance on Syria, and foresaw that Liman von Sanders would expect him to repeat the strategy he had employed in southern Palestine. In the Jerusalem campaign, Allenby had feinted at the coast but lunged eastward to deliver his attack in the interior. In attacking northern Palestine, he therefore did exactly the reverse: he feinted inland, while launching his main attack along the coast. His purpose was to achieve overwhelming local numerical superiority along the coast so as to break through the Turkish lines at the most favorable point for his Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) cavalry.

Although he held an overall two-to-one advantage in effectives (69,000 against 36,000, according to his estimates), he boldly left much of his roughly 65-mile-long line undefended in order to concentrate the maximum number of troops on the coast; he relied on control of the air and on brilliantly effective intelligence operations to keep the enemy away from the gaps in his own defensive line.

By night the bulk of Allenby’s forces silently moved west to concentrate in the olive and citrus groves of the lightly defended coastal plain, where they were camouflaged and remained undetected. By day small units marched east, and then returned to march east over and over again, raising great clouds of dust which persuaded the Turks that a vast army was on the march to attack inland. In the east, too, small British units threw up what appeared to be large camps, stabled with what appeared to be horses. East of the Jordan, British agents allowed it to be discovered that they were bargaining for large quantities of forage.

Deceived, Liman von Sanders concentrated his forces inland in eastern Palestine, and when the attack came his armies were caught off balance. So effective was Allenby’s offensive that it was not until days after it had begun that the Ottoman commanders came to appreciate the real situation.

At 4:30 in the morning of 19 September 1918 nearly 400 British cannon suddenly opened fire on the surprised and outnumbered (45,000 against 8,000) Ottoman defenders of the coastal plain. Fifteen minutes later the infantry attack commenced. British, French, and Indian troops pushed the overwhelmed defenders aside, as the cavalry poured through the gaping hole in the Ottoman lines to win the battle of Megiddo—the “Armageddon” of the Bible.

At dawn, special bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force attacked telephone and telegraph exchanges behind enemy lines, effectively cutting off all communications. Other R.A.F. warplanes guarded the skies over enemy airports, keeping German reconnaissance planes on the ground. Liman and his field commanders were cut off from information and from one another.

As Ottoman units reeled backward, they found their lines of retreat blocked by British units which had raced before and behind them to secure control of the key roads. The ANZAC cavalry galloped northward for thirty miles along the coastal plain, but then cut inland, threatening to cut off the Ottoman line of retreat toward Damascus. British military aircraft bombed and strafed the retreating Turks. Meanwhile the few units Allenby had deployed in the east finally attacked inland. In the predawn darkness of 23 September battalions of the Jewish Legion seized control of the crucial Umm esh Shert ford across the Jordan river. The Second Australian Light Horse Brigade went across it, and by evening the Ottoman forces east of the river found themselves enveloped in a giant pincer.

At Ma’an, in the south of Transjordan, above Aqaba, the Turkish garrison which had been beseiged by Feisal’s forces ever since their arrival from Aqaba the year before, held out until Australian cavalry arrived to accept their surrender and protect them against the massacre threatened by the Arab besiegers. Further north, Feisal’s Camel Corps disrupted the railroad lines upon which the main Turkish forces depended.

On 25 September Allenby ordered an advance on Damascus, while the remnant of the Ottoman forces broke and fled.
¹
The occupation of the principal towns of the Syrian provinces was imminent; decisions about occupation policy were made rapidly. There is still controversy as to who made them and why.

II

In the summer Allenby had told London that, subject to his own supreme military authority, he would accept French advisers to deal with civil administration in areas of special interest to France, so long as London would tell him what areas these were and whether they were still defined by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
²
Although the Cabinet and its Eastern Committee strongly favored discarding the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Foreign Office reaffirmed the agreement by directing Allenby to follow its territorial outlines. Leo Amery, of the War Cabinet secretariat, bitterly blamed the political chiefs of the Foreign Office—Balfour and Cecil—for this.
³
Amery’s colleague, Sir Mark Sykes, however, was the Foreign Office official directly responsible for policy in Syria and, presumably, the person who made or recommended the decision in the first instance.

On 25 September the War Office instructed Wingate in Cairo and Allenby at headquarters that if Syria were to fall within the sphere of any European power, that power was to be France.
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The terms of that instruction left open the possibility that it might not fall within the sphere of a European power—that Feisal might achieve his independence. However, Allenby was instructed to employ French officers for all areas of civil (as distinct from military) administration. According to the War Office cables, if Allenby were to take Damascus, “it would be desirable that in conformity with Anglo-French agreement of 1916 he should if possible work through an Arab administration by means of a French liaison.”
⁵

Flags were to indicate the designated areas of temporary administration. The hoisting of Hussein’s flag over Damascus and other important Syrian cities once they were captured was authorized, and indeed ordered, by the Foreign Office.
⁶
The flag was the black, white, green, and red one that Sykes had designed (see page 315) and it served two political purposes: it boosted Hussein’s claim to leadership in Arab Syria,
^*
and it reminded France that inland Syria was designated for at least nominal Arab independence.

At a conference in the Palestinian town of Jenin on 25 September, Allenby approved the plans of Australian General Harry Chauvel—who was in charge of the operation—for the advance on Damascus. Chauvel, according to his later notes, raised the issue of occupation policy. Damascus, he said, was a city of 300,000 people; it was too big to be handed over to a military governor and a mere handful of assistants. Allenby replied that Chauvel should retain the Ottoman governor and administration, and supply them with whatever extra military police they might need to keep order. Chauvel asked about rumors that the Arab movement was to have the government of Syria, but Allenby replied that any decision would have to wait until he came to Damascus himself. He added that, “if Feisal gives you any trouble, deal with him through Lawrence who will be your liaison officer.”
⁸

There was a flurry of cables between London, Paris, and the Middle East. Although Allenby had told Chauvel to keep the
Turkish
administration in Damascus in place for the time being, the Foreign Office told the French government that Allenby would deal with a provisional
Arab
administration in Damascus—in line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement—through a French liaison officer.
⁹
In turn, the French government agreed that the Allies should recognize the Arabs as a belligerent power—in other words, as an ally.
¹⁰
These communications between Britain and France show that the Foreign Office expected Allenby to replace the Turkish administration in Damascus with an Arab one sooner or later; but that it believed the Sykes-Picot arrangements would not come into play until then.

Armed with these agreements, the Foreign Office got the War Office to send Allenby new and important instructions, developing policy themes that had been hinted at before. The Syrian lands that Allenby was in process of occupying were to be treated as “allied territory enjoying the status of an independent state” rather than as occupied enemy territory. It was in this connection that the Foreign Office issued its much-discussed directive that “It would be desirable to mark the recognition and establishment of native Arab rule by some conspicuous or formal act such as the hoisting and saluting of the Arab flag at important centres.”
¹¹

Sykes (if that is who it was) went on in the cable to outline a characteristically ingenious scheme. The existing agreement with France was that wherever in the Syrian provinces Britain established a military administration, France was entitled to have her officers exercise all civilian administration on behalf of the Allies. In the telegram of 1 October, Allenby was instructed to limit his area of military administration to the bare minimum, limiting the French role correspondingly. The Foreign Office also told him to reduce British military administration in Transjordan as well, so that the French could not say that Britain’s action in inland Syria was part of a plot to reduce France’s role there—which of course it was.

Wingate, who had read the cables, wrote to Allenby that “it will be very interesting to see how the Sherifian Flag and the French liaison is taken by all and sundry.”
¹²
In effect, the Foreign Office had instructed Allenby to carry out the formal requirements of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, while (as advocated by Mark Sykes) revising the spirit of the agreement. This was a solution satisfactory neither to the French, who wanted more, nor to Feisal or the Arab Bureau, who wanted France to have nothing at all.

As required by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, France was to be given direct control of the coastline. Inland Syria was to be independent—not independent in name only, as envisaged by the agreement—but substantively independent; but France would have her official liaison officer, as required, and later would presumably have her official adviser at Feisal’s court. Syria’s ruler, as indicated in the McMahon correspondence, would be a Hashemite. The hoisting of Sykes’s flag over Damascus and the towns of Homs, Hama, and Aleppo thus would symbolize the weaving together of all the strands of British Middle Eastern policy along the lines that Sykes had always advocated. He had said all along that he had shaped Britain’s commitments to be consistent with one another, and that all would fit within the formal framework of the agreement that he had devised.

Meanwhile on 29 September it was decided at General Allenby’s field headquarters that Feisal’s Arabs should be the only Allied troops to enter and occupy Damascus—presumably to forestall resistance by a possibly hostile Moslem metropolis to a Christian occupation.
^*
Feisal was three days away, so in the meantime the ANZAC cavalry units pursuing the fleeing Turks were instructed to ride around, rather than through, Damascus.

But in the confusion of advance and retreat, the actors in the drama of Damascus’s liberation did not follow the script that Allenby and Clayton had written for them. The Ottoman government did not remain in the city; it fled with the retreating Turkish army at about noon on 30 September, leaving disorder behind. Local Arab notables, the Emir Abd el Kader and his brother Said, descendants of the Algerian warrior who had fought the French a century before and had been subsidized to live in exile, moved at some point into some sort of control of the city. The Abd el Kader brothers, whom Lawrence regarded as personal enemies and, perhaps, as supporters of Hussein and Islam rather than of Feisal and nationalism,
^**
claimed to have raised the Hejaz flag on the afternoon of 30 September in the name of Hussein. Thus when the Arab flag was finally hoisted, it had nothing to do with the Foreign Office’s plan; Damascene Arabs did it on their own.

At first light on the morning of 1 October, an Australian cavalry brigade that had been ordered to cut the Ottoman retreat along the Homs road north of Damascus, decided to go through Damascus to reach the Homs road, and entered the city; whereupon Said Abd el Kader, surrounded by notables, officially welcomed them. Thus the honor of being the first Allied troops to enter Damascus fell to the Australians, contrary to plan.

An hour later General Chauvel and his staff joined Major-General Sir George Barrow, the local divisional commander, a few miles south of the city. Lawrence was supposed to be staying with Barrow, and Chauvel wanted to see him in order to start making arrangements for preserving the existing civil administration of the city. To his chagrin, Chauvel discovered that Lawrence had slipped away early in the morning, without permission and without informing anyone, to follow the Fifth Cavalry Division into Damascus. Chauvel borrowed a car and drove into Damascus himself to find out what was happening.

By now the Allenby-Clayton plan for Feisal to liberate the city was in tatters. Feisal was still days away, while the British and Australians were in Damascus, either trying to move through the streets or hoping to find out what was going on. Chauvel, who had been ordered not to lead his men into the city, now followed them in instead.

T. E. Lawrence, Chauvel’s A.W.O.L. staff liaison officer, had taken his favorite battered old Rolls-Royce armored car that morning and—with a fellow British officer, W. E. Stirling, and Nuri el-Sa’id, an ex-Ottoman officer who was a chief Feisal loyalist—had driven to the city and found that some of Feisal’s tribal allies, who had arrived earlier, had accepted the Abd el Kaders as Damascus’s governors. Executing a swift
coup d’état
, Nuri ordered the Abd el Kaders to withdraw and appointed his own pro-Feisal candidate as governor. Then an irate General Chauvel arrived, demanding explanations.