Enemy on the Euphrates (12 page)

We are thus favourably placed, in the event of the complete breakdown of the scheme, for securing our political and commercial interests and indeed there seems to be no valid reason why the division of Turkey into these Ayalets need necessarily preclude an understanding among the Allies as to the areas in which each of them claims to have special interests.
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Indeed, as if to already anticipate this eventuality, the map attached to the report showing the geographical extension of each of the five ayalets was already marked with a red line drawn around the ayalets of Iraq and Palestine (including most of the present state of Jordan), delineating what was described as the ‘British Sphere of Enterprise’.

In reality, given that the five ayalets could employ foreign advisors ‘without reference to the Imperial Government’, the ‘British Sphere of Enterprise’ might well be expected to be even larger. Britain might gain influence in
all
of the ayalets without interference from the Turks, Germans, Russians or French. In short, ‘devolution’ was a solution very close to the old idea of ‘friendly native states’ so dear to the hearts of both Sykes and Kitchener.

However, by the time the De Bunsen Committee presented its report to the prime minister listing the various alternative methods for sharing
out the eastern possessions of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, the Sick Man himself was unexpectedly beginning to show signs of recovering from his earlier indisposition. On one point Sykes had always been relentlessly emphatic in both his written and spoken commentaries on the Ottoman Empire. Commenting on the behaviour of Turkish troops who had been sent to fight in the Yemen before the war, he observed:

The Turk as a soldier shows a heroism that no other race can boast: willingness to face any danger is nothing compared with that stubborn sense of duty which makes a man ready to endure eight years of misery in a climate of hell, unpaid, unclothed, ill-fed. Continually at war, with no hope of reward, no bounties, no banquets or encouragement. We who pride ourselves on our army having borne the South African campaign with endurance and fortitude must reverence and respect the Turks who bear ten thousand times more, and consider it as nothing but their ordinary duty.
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However, for some reason, Sykes’s appreciation of the Turkish fighting man had not filtered down to Kitchener, Churchill and the British High Command currently embarking on a major escalation of their campaign in the Dardanelles: an amphibious attack on the Gallipoli peninsula. The conventional wisdom to which they subscribed was summed up by one British staff officer: ‘It will be grim work to begin with, but we have good fighters ready to tackle it, and an enemy who has never shown himself as good a fighter as the white man.’
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Not only did this expression of racial arrogance display a remarkable ignorance of Ottoman history but it also completely ignored the fact that Britain was no longer fighting an army of spear-wielding ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ but a resourceful enemy equipped with all the accoutrements of modern technological warfare: breech-loading rifles, machine guns, artillery, both heavy and light, and even aircraft.

Nevertheless, on 25 April 1915, General Sir Ian Hamilton launched a major amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. Under his command he had 74,800 men in five divisions. The plan was to occupy the southern part of the narrow peninsula and then sweep across to the
Dardanelles taking the Turkish forts and gun emplacements in the rear. Eliminating the forts would allow Admiral de Roebeck’s minesweepers to clear the way for the Fleet unimpeded by fire from the shore batteries and then the Fleet would be able to pass through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara, from where it would sail on to bombard and capture Istanbul.

The plan was deeply flawed at all levels. There was no unified command: the army and navy operated separately. The army commander, General Ian Hamilton, personally a brave and experienced soldier, was unable or unwilling to stamp his own authority on his subordinates, leaving them to make tactical decisions which he often knew were mistaken; in fact some of the field officers under his command were clearly incompetent while those lower down the chain of command frequently received orders which were unclear or self-contradictory. Supplies of every kind were inadequate and in particular there was a serious weakness in field artillery. There was virtually no intelligence or accurate maps to clarify the sort of terrain over which the army would have to fight and which turned out to be a nightmare patchwork of steep escarpments, winding gullies and ravines, small scrub-covered plateaus and sharp-edged ridges. Above all, there was no advantage of surprise. The Turks had been forewarned by the original naval attack and had been able to assemble 80,000 men spread around the peninsula. Given that the standard military maxim of the day was that an amphibious force attacking an enemy entrenched on their own shoreline needed at least a superiority in numbers of 4 to 1 to have any hope of success, the fact that the British troops and Ottoman forces were approximately equal in numbers made the enterprise virtually doomed from the start.

Perhaps, if the first assault had been carried out with more vigour at those landing points where Ottoman resistance was relatively light, it might have been possible to achieve the initial objectives of the attack – the high ground overlooking the Dardanelles – before the Turks had a chance to regroup and concentrate their scattered forces; but this didn’t happen. Instead, the inexperience and disorganisation of many of the units, once they had landed, allowed the Turks time to bring up reserves
and mount ferocious counter-attacks which penned the invaders into two small enclaves, one at Cape Helles and the other at Ari Burnu, where Mustafa Kemal, commander of the Ottoman 19th Division, had hurled his men, two-thirds of them – the 72nd and 77th Regiments – Arab troops from Syria, against the invaders, very nearly throwing them back into the sea.
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As a result of the bravery of both Turkish and Arab Ottoman troops and their own tactical failures, the British were forced to dig in and establish defensible perimeters at the beachheads. Thereafter, the campaign inevitably became just as bogged down and attritional as the war on the Western Front.

While the carnage at Gallipoli mounted day by day, Sykes was dispatched by the War Office to visit British commanders, diplomats and imperial officials throughout the eastern theatre of war to acquaint them with the general outline of the De Bunsen Committee’s report and obtain their reaction to its conclusions – a mission which proved largely unrewarding. Equally unsuccessful was the continuation of his mission to India where the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was not impressed by the committee’s ‘devolutionary’ proposal for Asiatic Turkey and opined that ‘Sykes did not seem to be able to grasp the fact that there are parts of Turkey unfit for representative institutions.’
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During his long return sea journey from India Sykes turned his ever-wandering attention to Iraq, concerning which he composed a lengthy memorandum on the political and military situation. However, in the second part of that memorandum entitled ‘Indian Muslims and the War’, his thoughts returned to the subject which had long been the main preoccupation of both himself and his chief, Kitchener – the ever-present danger of jihad. It was fear of militant Islam which had underpinned his belief that Britain should cultivate those elements of the religion he construed as ‘moderate’ and susceptible of being won over to the Allied side; and now, having witnessed signs of anti-British nationalism among the Muslims of India during his recent visit, he merged his visceral dislike of ‘westernised orientals’ with a conceptualisation of the two main tendencies which he believed he had detected in contemporary Islam.

On the one hand there were the intellectual nationalists, devious, half-educated manipulators who were seeking to mobilise the ignorant Muslim masses against Britain and her Allies; and on the other hand there were the traditionalist, ‘clerical’ and ‘conservative’ forces whose sincerely held religious concepts were not incompatible with, nor necessarily hostile to, the romantic Tory imperialism he himself espoused. These conservative Muslims were precisely the sort of men who might be trusted to lead the ‘friendly native states’ which he and Kitchener were advocating; and in the person of the Sharif of Mecca he believed they had found such a promising figure. As for those scheming intellectual Muslim nationalists, Sykes believed they were very much like the leaders of the Turkish CUP. Their objective was to

engross all political power in the hands of a clique of journalists, pleaders and functionaries, to oust the clerical element, but to retain its power to excite an ignorant mob to massacre or rebellion when necessary … An ‘intellectual’ with an imitation European training, with envy of the European surging in his heart … sees in Islam a political engine whereby immense masses of men can be moved to riot and disorder … The Muslim ‘intellectual’ uses the clothes of Europe and has lost his belief in his creed, but the hatred of Christendom and lust for the domination of Islam as a supreme political power remains.
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Supremely confident of his penetrating understanding of the ‘oriental mind’, Sykes therefore advocated a policy of ‘educating’ the contemporary Muslim upper classes in their own traditions and religious precepts in order to steer them away from those pernicious Muslim ‘intellectuals’ whose ‘ill-assimilated European education’ was polluting the noble cultural heritage of their forebears. And he concluded, characteristically, ‘As a rule it will be found that conservatism or orthodoxy is on our side and modernism and ignorant fanaticism is against us.’

Sykes’s view about Jews was moving in a similar direction. His original anti-Semitism appears to have been primarily aimed at assimilated, ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews, a group of whom he described in a letter to his parents in 1900 as ‘these beasts’ and ‘Jews of the most repulsive type’.
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By now he was
also convinced that what he conceptualised as ‘Great Jewry’ was a threat to Britain’s war effort. However, after meeting a number of Zionist leaders he became strangely convinced that they represented a different, traditional and conservative, kind of Jew – an individual more akin to his notion of those ‘conservative Muslims’.
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With this in mind he began to support the Zionists’ campaign for a ‘National Home’ in Palestine in the belief that this would win ‘Great Jewry’ to the Allies’ side. Therefore it was Sykes – in consultation with an important Russian Zionist – who was the author of the first draft of what became known as the ‘Balfour Declaration’ promising just such a Jewish ‘National Home’ in Palestine and which would eventually be published in the press in November 1917.
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After leaving India, Sykes’s first stopover was Basra where he arrived on 19 September 1915. It was his intention to meet Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer, as part of his programme of discussions around the De Bunsen report, but on his arrival he discovered that Cox was ‘up country’ accompanying ‘Townshend’s Regatta’, the Anglo-Indian expeditionary force commanded by General Townshend which was now advancing further up the Tigris intending to capture the town of Kut al-‘Amara. So instead, Sykes was informed that Captain Arnold Wilson, Cox’s assistant responsible for the Basra vilayet, would be pleased to meet him.

The meeting was not a happy one. By now, the recently promoted Wilson had returned to full-time political duties and was living in a cramped office at Ashar, the old Turkish customs post on the banks of the Shatt al-‘Arab where the Ashar creek meets the Shatt and leads up to the old city of Basra. Although he was by now quite ill, suffering intermittently from malaria and a form of beriberi, his appetite for work remained undiminished. ‘AT’, as he was now commonly known, had recently acquired a great enthusiasm for paperwork, taking great pride in multiplying files, assembling card indexes and firing off telegrams at every opportunity. Sykes found him in full cry, dashing through an enormous pile of waiting papers and disposing of them one after another like a threshing machine.

Sykes could be tactless when he was expounding one of his many enthusiasms or prejudices and on this occasion he made it abundantly
clear to Wilson that in India he had acquired a dim view of that country’s administration and he took an equally dim view of the government of India’s predominance in Iraq. There was no understanding, Sykes insisted, that Iraq was an imperial concern, not just an Indian one, and therefore the views of London and Cairo must always be taken into account when deciding military and political policy in this particular theatre. Moreover, Sykes couldn’t understand why so little effort was being made to win the Iraqi Arabs round to actively supporting Britain. Surely the Civil Administration could be more active in the propaganda line, leaflets in Arabic, that sort of thing? And couldn’t they make greater efforts to win over local sheikhs, raise guerrilla bands to attack the Turkish flanks and so on?

In spite of his position of authority in the Civil Administration, Wilson was still only a relatively junior officer and he must have felt constrained to suffer this tactless onslaught from his aristocratic and distinguished official visitor. But he was later to comment with illconcealed bitterness that Sykes was ‘too short a time in Mesopotamia to gather more than fragmentary impressions’, and that ‘he had come with his mind made up and he set himself to discover the facts in favour of his preconceived notions, rather than to survey the local situation with an impartial eye.’ In particular, Sykes seemed overly concerned to do ‘justice for Arab ambitions and satisfy France’.

Arab ambitions and French satisfaction: the two concepts seemed hardly compatible; that was precisely what was beginning to trouble Sykes as he travelled back from India. Over the last few months he had begun to appreciate that the French also had ‘desiderata’ in the Middle East. Indeed, according to intelligence he was receiving it was clear that they had expectations of planting the tricolour at the eastern end of the Mediterranean to accompany their colonies in North Africa. But since Britain’s interests would be best served by a ‘devolved’ Ottoman Empire of ‘friendly native states’, these two national objectives were clearly contradictory. Perhaps there would, after all, have to be some kind of agreement on ‘zones of control’ with France, regardless of the De Bunsen Committee’s desire to avoid any such explicit commitment.