A Peace to End all Peace (21 page)

IV

Clayton, who was strongly disposed to oppose French claims to the interior of Syria (on a line that runs from Aleppo to Damascus through Homs and Hama), reported that al-Faruqi said Hussein would never allow France to have Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Damascus. Whether Clayton was quoting, misquoting, or paraphrasing what al-Faruqi actually told him may never be known. Clayton recognized that France could not be excluded from the coast of Syria-Lebanon, where Christians under French patronage resided; and again he reported that al-Faruqi fell in with his views, and seemed willing, in Hussein’s name, to surrender Arab claims in that area. Al-Faruqi informed Hussein that he had been asked to make such a concession—and had refused.

Based on Clayton’s reports, the High Commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, in a cable to the Foreign Office quoted al-Faruqi as saying that the Emir of Mecca would not insist on maintaining his original demand that his western frontier should extend to the sea, but that he would oppose “by force of arms” any French attempt to occupy the districts of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Damascus.
¹⁰
McMahon and Clayton wanted authorization to accept these terms.

But the geographical references made by McMahon were hazy. Was reference made, for example, to the city of Damascus, the environs of Damascus, or the province of Damascus? Did “districts” mean
wilayahs
(environs) or
vilayets
(provinces)? Was it al-Faruqi who spoke of districts, or was it McMahon or Clayton? By districts, did the British mean towns?

The significance of the Aleppo-Homs-Hama-Damascus demand has been bitterly debated ever since. For decades afterward partisans of an Arab Palestine argued that if these four geographical terms were properly understood, British Cairo had promised that Palestine would be Arab; while partisans of a Jewish Palestine argued the reverse. In a sense the debate was pointless; as will be seen, when the time came to make pledges, McMahon deliberately used phrases so devious as to commit himself to nothing at all.

If Clayton was the author of the Aleppo-Homs-Hama-Damascus geographical definition, he was probably thinking of Syria and Lebanon and of how to split off the interior of the country from the French-influenced coast. The seacoast represented one of the two north-south lines of civilization in Syria; the four towns represented the other. Situated between mountain and unrelieved desert, they defined the long narrow corridor which was the agriculturally cultivated region of inland Syria. On the map of Syria in the then-current (1910) edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama are shown as the only towns of inland Syria; so they were the towns an Englishman might specify if he sought to define the territory of inland Syria. Granted, the towns are dissimilar, so that leading historians
^*
have thought it illogical to group them together; but to a reader of the
Encyclopaedia
the logic of grouping them together would be evident.

The towns had another important feature in common: they constituted the railroad line. The French-built line of the Société Ottomane du Chemin de Fer Damas-Hama et Prolongements, which was opened in 1895, connected Aleppo in the north of Syria to Damascus in the south.
¹¹
Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama were its four stops. At Damascus one made the connection with the Hejaz railroad, which ran south to Medina, connecting Syria with Hussein’s domain. Surely this would have appeared to be of immense significance at the time; and if al-Faruqi, not Clayton, was the one who first mentioned the four towns by name, surely it was this that he had in mind.

In an era in which railroads were considered to be of prime military and political importance, any soldier or politician representing Hussein in a territorial negotiation would presumably have insisted on gaining control of the railroad stations: not merely of Damascus, as the metropolis of the south, and of Aleppo, as the metropolis of the north, but also of the two railroad towns that connected them: Homs and Hama.

Recent experience dictated the demand. The Young Turks (before the war intervened) had planned to dominate the Hejaz by control of the railroad line running from Damascus down to the main cities of the Hejaz. It was only to be expected that if Hussein were on the winning side of the war he would pursue the mirror opposite of their strategy: he would dominate inland Syria by control of its railroad line.

Whether or not they formulated al-Faruqi’s Aleppo-to-Damascus demands, Clayton and his friends were afraid that other British officials might not understand the importance of meeting them. Referring to Sir Milne Cheetham, his superior at the Residency who had been acting head until McMahon arrived, Ronald Storrs wrote to FitzGerald/Kitchener at Christmas imploring them to give priority to the Arab negotiation and adding “Excuse my worrying you with these difficulties, but if you knew the difficulty Clayton and I had all last autumn in getting Sir Milne to make any proposal about, or take any interest in, the Arab question, you would understand our anxiety.”
¹²

Clayton’s luck was that Sir Mark Sykes—as mentioned earlier—had stopped in Cairo again on his way back from India to London in November 1915. Having told Sykes the al-Faruqi story, Clayton and his colleagues infected Sykes with their belief in the electrifying possibility that the Arab half of the Ottoman Empire might come over to the Allied side of the war. This was the amazing news that greeted Sykes on his arrival, and that necessarily altered all calculations.

That the Arabic-speaking world could be a major factor in the war came as especial news to Sykes. His view of politics in the area had been that arrangements were made between the rival foreign Great Powers; the interests and aspirations of native populations had not entered in any significant way into his calculations. He had always admired the Turkish-speaking ruling class but had not thought much of the subject populations of the Ottoman Empire in Asia. His undergraduate descriptions of them had been an exercise in pejorative vocabulary.

Of town Arabs, he had written that they were “cowardly,” “insolent yet dispicable [
sic
],” “vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit.” Bedouin Arabs were “rapacious, greedy…animals.”
¹³
Yet these were to be Britain’s key allies in the Middle Eastern fighting, according to the new information supplied by Clayton. Sykes, who had a reputation for picking up opinions and arguments without taking the time to think them through, now showed that he could discard them with equal ease. He became a sudden convert to the cause of the native peoples of the Middle East.

From school days onward, Sykes had harbored an abiding and almost obsessive fear of Jews, whose web of dangerous international intrigue he discerned in many an obscure corner. Yet there was another group about which his feelings had been even more violent. “Even Jews have their good points,” he had written, “but Armenians have none.”
¹⁴
Now Sykes met with Armenian leaders in Cairo, and enthusiastically proposed the creation of an Armenian army, to be recruited from prisoners-of-war and Armenians in the United States, to invade Turkey. He gave it as his opinion that he could have the army in being in about eight weeks.
¹⁵

Newly enthusiastic about Middle Easterners, Sykes was entirely won over to Clayton’s view that Arab armies could supply the key to victory. Clayton primed him to return to London prepared to argue Cairo’s new thesis that Hussein could be more important than the French in bringing the war in the East to a swift conclusion.

Clayton also coached Aubrey Herbert, an M.P. serving in Cairo Intelligence, who was returning to London, and who undertook to see Lord Kitchener and the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to explain matters to them. Herbert, with Clayton’s help, drafted a strong memorandum urging the French to give up their claim to Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, so that the towns could be ceded to Hussein.

V

With much that was new to report and to advocate, Sykes returned to a warm welcome in London in December 1915. It was then that he proposed creating an Arab Bureau and took the first steps leading to its establishment (see Chapter 22).

No other man had met with every important British officer from the Balkans and Egypt to India. Maurice Hankey arranged an audience for him with King George. Hankey also arranged for Sykes to go before the inner War Committee of the Cabinet, of which he was Secretary.

The principal message that Sykes brought back to the Cabinet was that the Arabs—whom he had previously disregarded as a factor in the war—were now of prime importance to the Allies; and that it was vitally and urgently important to reach agreement with Hussein.

Although Cairo and Sykes seemed unaware of the fact, in London it was recognized that Britain would have to pay a price—and a high one—to obtain France’s consent to the making of promises to Hussein; she would have to make major concessions to the French in return for the privilege of being allowed to make concessions to the Arabs. Kitchener and Grey were willing to pay the price. Others were not.

It was the view of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, that no promises should be made to the Arabs because they were “a people who are at this moment fighting against us as hard as they can.”
¹⁶
The new Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, was also opposed to doing so; but Kitchener, backing Sykes, Clayton, and Storrs, vehemently insisted on authorizing Cairo to respond immediately and to reach agreement with Hussein; and Kitchener’s views carried the day. Authorized and directed to do so by London, Sir Henry McMahon then resumed the correspondence with Mecca—the famous McMahon letters, the meaning of which has been debated so much and so long by partisans of Arab and Jewish causes in Palestine.
^*

In the interim, Hussein had written McMahon a second letter. In it he accused McMahon of “lukewarmth and hesitancy” because of his reluctance to discuss frontiers and boundaries. Had they been merely his own claims (the Emir continued) such a discussion indeed could have been postponed until the end of the war. But they were not his own claims. They did not even represent his own suggestions. They were demands that had been formulated by others: by “our people.”
¹⁷
Cairo Residency officials now knew that this meant the mysterious secret society conspirators whom they imagined had a mass following in the Arab world.

On 24 October 1915 McMahon replied in a quite different spirit to Hussein. Instructed by Lord Kitchener to make the necessary pledges, he reluctantly agreed to enter into a discussion of specific territories and frontiers; but as he evidently was unwilling to assume personal responsibility for making definite commitments, he used language evasively. On the one hand, he agreed that after the war the Arabs should have their independence; but, on the other, he indicated that European advisers and officials would be needed to establish the administration of Arab countries, and insisted that these advisers and officials should be exclusively British. In other words, any “independent” Arab kingdom in the postwar Middle East would have to be a British protectorate.

What territories should be included in the British-protected independent Arab kingdom? McMahon replied by dividing the lands claimed by Hussein into four areas and explaining that Britain could not bind herself to support Hussein’s claims in any one of them.

McMahon began by remarking that Hussein must give up claim to territory west of the districts of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama. Al-Faruqi already had agreed (or at least McMahon thought he had) that Hussein would concede this point. McMahon later wrote that he intended to say that the territories Hussein and the Arabs were not to have were coastal Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, with an eastern frontier that might be drawn somewhere in what is now Jordan. His language can be read that way, but on a more natural reading he was referring only to Syria-Lebanon here, not Palestine.

In the eastern portion of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, the Mesopotamian provinces of Basra and Baghdad, McMahon observed that the established position and interests of Britain were such that she would have to establish “special administrative arrangements” with respect to them; whether such arrangements would leave any room for an assertion of Arab sovereignty—and if so when and to what extent—was left unsaid.

In the western portion—Syria and Palestine—Britain could extend assurances to Hussein only in those territories “in which she can act without detriment to the interests of her ally France.” Since France at the time claimed those territories in their entirety (indeed Sykes discussed France’s claim to Palestine with al-Faruqi in November 1915) it followed that Britain could not pledge support for Arab claims with respect to them either—not even to Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama.

That left only Arabia, which at the time was divided among a number of leaders, of whom Hussein was one. Britain at the time enjoyed treaty relationships with other Arabian chiefs, including Hussein’s rival, Ibn Saud. In his letter, McMahon pointed out that he could not promise anything to Hussein that would prejudice Britain’s relationships with other Arab chiefs. By process of elimination, therefore, Britain did not bind herself to support Hussein’s claims anywhere at all.

According to a summary later published in the secret
Arab Bulletin
(no. 5, 18 June 1916), for Britain’s military, political, and intelligence leaders, the upshot of the correspondence was that His Majesty’s Government had indicated a willingness to promote independence in Arabic-speaking Asia but had refused to commit itself with respect to the forms of government that would be installed in the area or with respect to precise boundaries.

McMahon, an experienced bureaucrat, had seen the need to be completely noncommittal. The negotiations between Sykes and the French about the future of the Middle East—to be described presently—had not yet taken place, and nobody in the British government knew with any certainty what would have to be conceded to France or, afterwards, to Russia. McMahon was under orders from Kitchener not to lose the alliance with Hussein; but the High Commissioner must have feared that he would be made the scapegoat if he did go ahead to meet Hussein’s demands, and later it was discovered that those demands clashed with other conflicting commitments Britain might be called upon to make.