The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (86 page)

The Greek attitude towards the landing of troops in Salonica was ambiguous and uncertain. The Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, secretly welcomed the plan, though for form’s sake he registered a formal protest. King Constantine, on the other hand–who had succeeded his father George two years before and was married to the Kaiser’s sister–was violently opposed, on the grounds that until the Bulgarian army actually crossed the frontier, the presence of foreign troops on Greek soil would be a violation of Greek neutrality. As for the Greeks themselves, they were overwhelmingly on the side of the King. They had no desire for an Allied presence, feeling that they were being forced against their will into the war. The result was what came to be known as the National Schism, and Venizelos was forced to resign.

It is always a mistake for constitutional monarchs to meddle in foreign policy; this time it was calamitous. The King now opened secret talks with the Germans, and on 23 May 1916, on his orders, the Greek army surrendered the frontier castle of Roupel, allowing German and Bulgarian troops to overrun eastern Macedonia. Kavalla too was ordered to surrender, its Greek garrison being carted off to Germany as prisoners of war. ‘Where,’ shouted Venizelos in parliament, ‘where at least are your thirty pieces of silver?’ It was not perhaps the most diplomatic preface to a last appeal to the King to join the Allies before it was too late. Predictably, Constantine turned a deaf ear.

For the expeditionary force, the situation was becoming more and more impossible. From the day of its arrival it had found itself extremely unwelcome, being obliged to camp several miles outside the city while the consuls of the enemy remained at liberty within. That winter the Serbs had been driven back to the Adriatic and Serbia had been occupied. What, the Allies asked themselves, were they meant to be doing? It was then that the French commander in Salonica, General Maurice Serrail, had taken the law into his own hands, putting all the enemy consuls and agents under arrest and imprisoning them in the castle while simultaneously taking possession of another fortress guarding the entrance to the bay. Now the gloves were off: the Allied powers officially demanded the demobilisation of the Greek army, the dissolution of parliament and the dismissal of the government. In September 1916 Venizelos slipped away to his native Crete, where he raised a revolt against the King. He then returned to Greece and established a provisional government in Thessalonica, which the Allies recognised a month later.

In December the British and French, their demands still unfulfilled, landed troops at Piraeus in an attempt to force the King to surrender his armaments and munitions. This, however, proved a mistake: the Greeks fought back and the royal palace was bombarded by the French fleet. Venizelos, understandably but quite unjustifiably, was blamed, and on 26 December was solemnly excommunicated by the Archbishop of Athens. The Allies then put southern Greece under a blockade and in June 1917 demanded the abdication of the King–the French reinforcing the demand by landing troops at Corinth. Constantine refused to abdicate, but left with his eldest son for Switzerland.

Now, overnight, the whole situation changed. Constantine was succeeded in Athens–now starving owing to the continuing blockade and virtually under French occupation–by his second son, Alexander. A few days later Venizelos returned from Salonica with his government, received a warm welcome and became the new King’s Prime Minister–celebrating his reappointment with a nine-hour speech to parliament. Now it was the royalists who suffered; indeed they were purged–government, civil service, army, even the Church. Greek society was torn in two, and was to remain so for at least a generation. At last, and not a moment too soon, Greece entered the war on the Allied side. Her army, conscripted and largely untrained, fought magnificently in Macedonia. With the British they invaded and defeated Bulgaria; with the French and Serbs, they drove the Germans out of Serbia. As a final triumph, Greek troops entered Constantinople for the first time since 1453. For Eleftherios Venizelos, it was his finest hour.

The initial excitement and subsequent despair over Gallipoli completely overshadowed yet another theatre of war: that of the Middle East. This too formed part of the Ottoman Empire, and saw the Turkish army under constant pressure from the Allies, both in Mesopotamia and in Palestine.

The Palestinian campaign was, once again, an attempt to boost the morale of an increasingly war-weary Britain: to give its people something to think about other than the continuing holocaust in the trenches of Flanders, while at the same time landing a telling blow on the enemy at his weakest point. Its principal instigator, however, was not Winston Churchill–still out of the government thanks to the Gallipoli debacle–but the Prime Minister, Asquith’s successor David Lloyd George. His objective could be summarised in just three words, ‘Jerusalem before Christmas’, and the man he chose to achieve it was General Sir Edmund Allenby. Allenby was not universally popular in the army, where his immense height, commanding presence, furious temper and frequently hectoring manner had earned him the nickname of the Bull;
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in fact, his aggression concealed a genuine passion for nature and a deep love of music, literature and philosophy.
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A soldier through and through, he had been desolated when ordered to leave the trenches for Palestine; he little knew that the unwelcome transfer was to make his name and fame, securing him a field marshal’s baton, a viscountcy and the gift from a grateful nation of £50,000.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force (as it was called) was manned largely by Australians. It existed primarily to protect the Suez Canal–but it was also expected to fight the Turks. The Canal was safe enough; against the Turks, however, though superior both in numbers and equipment to the ramshackle army facing it beyond the Sinai Peninsula, the EEF had achieved remarkably little. ‘In Palestine and Mesopotamia,’ Lloyd George had written, ‘nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.’ The spring of 1917 showed no sign of improvement. There had been two half-hearted attempts to take Gaza; both had ended in defeat. Allenby’s first task, therefore, when he arrived in Cairo on 28 June, was to breathe new life into this sadly demoralised army–and within a few weeks he had done so. His predecessor, General Archibald Murray, had preferred to maintain his headquarters at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo; Allenby moved it forward to a sweltering, fly-blown camp of tents and huts just behind the front line at Gaza and immediately embarked on a round of all the advanced units, establishing direct personal contact with his officers and men. It was the height of summer, the noonday temperature often hit 120 degrees, sandstorms were frequent and asphyxiating–but nothing seemed to stop the enormous general in full uniform, sitting bolt upright in an old Ford truck beside a diminutive Australian driver in vest and shorts, bouncing over the desert, investigating defence works and water supplies, barking out orders and quick to express his dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms. Wherever he went, morale soared.

Allenby’s first task had been to gain a clear idea of the forces at his command; his next was to draw up a plan of campaign. This required substantial reinforcements: two further divisions to supplement the seven already in Palestine. To plead his case with the War Office he sent to London a young liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future field marshal of the Second World War and subsequently Viceroy of India). It was largely thanks to Wavell’s persuasive powers and already growing reputation that he got what he wanted, together with extra artillery and further units of the Royal Flying Corps; soon afterwards, it was Wavell who explained Allenby’s plan to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the War Cabinet. Briefly, this consisted of a main thrust to the plentiful wells at Beersheba, some thirty miles inland from Gaza, to be protected by a feint attack on Gaza itself. As always, Allenby’s preparations were thorough: 30,000 camels were assembled to carry water to the advance troops; new roads were built and new maps prepared, far more accurate–thanks to recent aerial reconnaissance–than their predecessors, which had been prepared by ‘H. H. Kitchener, Lt.’ in the 1870s. Meanwhile, he read everything on the area that he could get his hands on, from Herodotus and Strabo to histories of the Crusades and the latest papers of the Royal Geographical Society.

It was during this period of preparation, in the late summer of 1917, that Allenby met for the first time the one British officer whose fame in the area was to surpass even his own: the twenty-nine-year-old Captain T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence, second of the five illegitimate sons of an Anglo-Irish baronet, had had his first experience of the Arab world in 1908, when he had toured Syria and Lebanon recording their still little-known Crusader castles. Later, as an archaeologist, he had worked on the British Museum’s excavations at Carchemish in Syria until the outbreak of war, when he had found himself in Cairo as a subaltern in the military intelligence department of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. There he might well have remained, but for the Arab Revolt.

This had begun on 10 June 1916, when Sherif Hussein of Mecca and the Hejaz had led an uprising against the Turks. Three months later, however, the insurgents had run out of steam. They had failed, after repeated efforts, to dislodge the Turks from Medina and their morale was flagging. Lawrence had met the leaders, and had been particularly impressed by Hussein’s second son Feisal, with whom he had evolved a plan to capture Aqaba, the principal Ottoman port at the northern end of the Red Sea. Two British naval expeditions there had failed; Lawrence believed, however, that Aqaba could be taken from the land. At the beginning of July, after nearly a month’s march across some 800 miles of desert and with a scratch force of local Arabs largely recruited en route, he took the surrender of the Turkish garrison. His name was made.

One would like to have been present on the day Lawrence, distinctly undersized and–as always by now–in full Arab fig, strode into the office of the huge and immaculately uniformed Allenby. Many a commanding officer would have dismissed him with orders to come back when he had got out of his fancy dress; Allenby simply glared–but listened, while Lawrence explained how he would spread the revolt northwards via Aqaba against Damascus, making constant attacks on the single-track Hejaz railway which was virtually the only link between there and Medina. His manner–vanity combined with arrogance–may have been insufferable, but his arguments were persuasive. The General promoted him on the spot, making him–and Feisal’s force–responsible directly to himself and promising him all the help he could give.

Certainly, this was the way for Allenby to achieve his primary purpose, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; it was also, as he well knew, a guarantee of trouble in the future. In the spring of the previous year Britain had entered into an agreement with France and Russia, whereby French pretensions with regard to Syria might be reconciled with British pledges and promises to the Arabs. Russia had earmarked Constantinople, with a few miles of hinterland on both sides of the Bosphorus, together with a good deal of eastern Anatolia running to the Caucasus; France laid claim to most of Syria and the Lebanon, much of southern Anatolia and the Mosul district of Iraq; Britain’s share consisted of the rest of modern Iraq–including both Baghdad and Basra–and a strip of Palestine which included the ports of Haifa and Acre. If Lawrence’s plan for a northward thrust were successful, it was unlikely–to say the least–that the victorious Arab armies would countenance such an arrangement. But there would be time enough to deal with problems such as these.

The main advance against Gaza and Beersheba was launched towards the end of October 1917. Despite heavy fortification of the line by the German commander General Kress von Kressenstein, Beersheba fell on the last day of the month, Gaza a week later. Allenby, determined to maintain the momentum, spared neither himself nor his troops, to whom he allowed no rest; in some regiments the horses were watered only once in seventy-two hours as they pressed on relentlessly to the north, stretching the lines of communication and supply to the utmost limit. Jaffa fell on 16 November, and the exhausted, thirsty army assembled in the Judaean hills for the final attack on Jerusalem. Allenby’s determination that there should be no fighting in the Holy City itself involved a long and complicated encircling manoeuvre. To make matters worse the weather had at last broken, the thermometer plunging; the horses were either sinking to the fetlocks in mud or slithering hopelessly over the slippery rocks. Yet the advance continued, and in the first week of December the Turkish governor informed Damascus of the evacuation of the city before personally smashing his telegraph equipment with a hammer. The city itself surrendered on 9 December, and two days later Allenby made his official entry into Jerusalem. With him was Colonel Wavell and Major Lawrence, in a borrowed army uniform. Nineteen years before, Kaiser Wilhelm had ridden in on his charger; Allenby, it was everywhere noted, entered on foot. After 730 years, Jerusalem had passed once again into Christian hands, but on his orders no official flag was flown. He merely issued a short proclamation. It ended as follows: