A Peace to End all Peace (11 page)

In the Sudan campaign, undertaken in the face of misgivings within both the Foreign Office and Lord Cromer’s Egyptian administration, Kitchener had greatly expanded the area of Britain’s control of the Arabic-speaking world. It may have been during the Sudan campaign that Kitchener first began to dream of carving out a great new imperial domain for Britain in the Middle East, in which he would serve as her viceroy.

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, British officials were aware that the Khedive—the native prince from behind whose throne Britain ruled Egypt—was ambitious to expand his authority. Although in theory he was the Ottoman Sultan’s viceroy in Egypt, there were persistent rumors that he considered the possibility of taking the Sultan’s place as temporal and spiritual lord—Sultan and Caliph—of the Arabic-speaking provinces of the empire, thereby splitting the empire in half. A variant was the rumor that he planned to annex the Moslem Holy Places in Arabia and establish a caliph there under his protection.
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The British and Egyptian officers attached to him would understand that the achievement of any such plan would bring greatly enlarged authority to themselves.

At the time—the end of the nineteenth century—the Great Power principally opposed to the expansion of British Egypt was France, which had aligned herself with Russia. As viewed from Britain’s outposts bordering the Mediterranean, the alliance seemed to be directed against Britain. But Russia was far away; and in Egypt and the Sudan, France was the enemy whose threatening presence was felt close at hand. Rivalry with France for position and influence in the Arabic-speaking world: that was the policy in the service of which Kitchener’s officers had been reared.

Larger combinations and considerations in world politics were beyond the range of the typical officer in British Cairo, an enclave that possessed (wrote one of Kitchener’s aides) “all the narrowness and provincialism of an English garrison town…”
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The local community of British officials and their families was tight and homogeneous. Its life centered around the Sporting Club, the Turf Club, and the balls given at a leading hotel six nights out of seven.

It was from this provincial garrison community—its views on Arab policy hitherto ignored by the makers of British world policy—that Lord Kitchener emerged.

III

The outbreak of the war against the Ottoman Empire made it necessary to clarify the nature of Britain’s presence in Egypt and Cyprus, for both were nominally still part of the Sultan’s empire. The Cabinet was in favor of annexing both countries and, indeed, according to what officials in Cairo were told, had already made the decision. Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary (which is to say, the staff specialist in Eastern affairs) to Lord Kitchener in Cairo, protested that, in the case of Egypt, such a decision violated forty years of promises by British governments that the British occupation was merely temporary. The Agency (that is, the office of the British Agent in Egypt, Lord Kitchener) advocated a protectorate status for Egypt, with at least token reference to eventual independence—a case argued effectively by Milne Cheetham (acting chief of the Agency in Kitchener’s absence). The Cabinet abandoned its own views in deference to those of the Agency, and thus showed the direction of things to come.

The Cabinet, in this instance, allowed Kitchener’s Agency to establish the prototype of the form of rule that the field marshal and his staff eventually wanted Britain to exercise throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It was not to be direct rule, such as was practiced in parts of India. In Kitchener’s Egypt a hereditary prince and native Cabinet ministers and governors went through the motions of governing. They promulgated under their own name decisions recommended to them by the British advisers attached to their respective offices; that was the form of protectorate government favored by the Kitchener group. In the artful words of Ronald Storrs: “We deprecated the Imperative, preferring the Subjunctive, even the wistful, Optative mood.”
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The Egyptian decision was the forerunner of others in which Storrs and other members of Kitchener’s entourage made policy decisions for the Middle East under cover of the reclusive field marshal’s authority. When the views of the government about the East came into conflict with those of Lord Kitchener, it was the latter that were likely to prevail. Decisions that normally would have been made by the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Viceroy of India, or the Cabinet were instead made by relatively junior officials who represented Kitchener and purported to represent his views. Only the field marshal’s unique prestige made this possible.

On one telegram from Cairo, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, minuted “Does Lord Kitchener agree? If so, I will approve.”
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He could have written the same inscription on them all. Kitchener was scrupulous in clearing foreign-policy decisions with Grey, but Grey deferred to him, and approved even those proposals of the War Minister with which he disagreed.

One reason that Members of Parliament and the Cabinet left eastern questions so much to Kitchener and his entourage was that they themselves knew little about them. To a government official in the 1980s, accustomed to bulging reference libraries, to worldwide press coverage, and to the overwhelming supply of detailed information about foreign countries gathered by the major governments, British ignorance of the Middle East during the 1914 war would be unimaginable. Shortly after Britain found herself at war with the Porte, Sir Mark Sykes, one of the few M.P.s who had traveled in the East, complained that in the English language there was not so much as one authentic history of the Ottoman Empire.
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Of the histories then current, none was based on original research, and all were based on a German work that left off in the year 1744, and were therefore long out of date.
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As late as 1917, when British armies were poised to invade northward toward Syria, British Intelligence, asked by the army to provide a guide to conditions there, reported that there was no book in any European language that provided a survey of the social and political conditions of the area.
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The British government lacked even the most elementary type of information—including maps—of the empire with which it was at war. In 1913–14, one of Kitchener’s intelligence officers had secretly surveyed and mapped a wilderness area close to British Egypt’s Sinai frontier; it was one of a mere handful of surveys gathered by British Intelligence.
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For the most part, British officers conducting operations in Ottoman territory in the first years of the war were operating in the dark. One of the many reasons for the failure of Britain’s invasion of Turkey in 1915 was that the British invasion force was supplied with only one map of the peninsula it was to attack—and that map, it turned out, was inaccurate. When it came to the Middle East, the politicians, like the soldiers, were aware that they were moving in areas that were literally uncharted.

But the Cabinet ministers who deferred to Kitchener in Middle Eastern matters were unaware of how little was really understood about the Middle East either by the War Minister or by the aides in Cairo and Khartoum on whom he relied for advice and information.

I

Avoiding not merely women (as he had always done) but the outside world as a whole, the War Minister lived in a masculine preserve with his personal Military Secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald FitzGerald, as his almost sole and constant companion. FitzGerald corresponded and conversed on Kitchener’s behalf; when people said they had written to or heard from Kitchener, they meant that they had written to or heard from FitzGerald.

Kitchener had always relied heavily on his staff. Now that he had moved into the center of power in London, not only FitzGerald, but also the staff remaining in Egypt and the Sudan moved toward the center of power with him. Thus Lord Kitchener imposed his design on policy not merely by shaping a new approach toward the Middle East, but also by delegating power to chosen officers in the field who would guide and execute that policy. Instead of being ignored or neglected, as they felt they had been in the past, British officials in Egypt and the Sudan were given a chance to make their weight felt.

Kitchener’s old lieutenants in the Arabic-speaking world rose with him to pre-eminence in Eastern policy-making. What was conspicuous at the end of 1914 was that Kitchener had stamped his personal brand on the government’s policies, but what turned out to be of more lasting importance was that he had chosen the people who were to inform and to advise the British government about the Middle East throughout the war—and afterward. By tranferring authority to them, Kitchener moved much of the evaluation of information and the making of policy from the capital city of a world empire, where officials—even though not specifically knowledgeable about Middle Eastern affairs—tended toward a broad and cosmopolitan view of matters, to the colonial capitals of Egypt and the Sudan, where the prejudices of old hands went unchallenged and unchecked. The British enclaves in Cairo and Khartoum were the environment to which the War Minister longed to return and from which spiritually he had never departed.

The War Minister’s weakness, according to one observer, was that “He is more or less a foreigner” in England.
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To him, London was more alien than Cairo or Calcutta. The field marshal was profoundly ill at ease with unfamiliar faces. Instead of relying on the War Office and the Foreign Office in London for information and advice about the Middle East, he continued to fall back on his staff in Egypt. When he was appointed War Minister, he asked Ronald Storrs, his Oriental Secretary, to stay on in London with him. Storrs pointed out that governmental regulations would not allow it but, when Storrs returned to Egypt, Kitchener continued to be inspired by his suggestions. Storrs, the son of an Anglican clergyman, was an intellectually elegant graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge, then in his mid-thirties. Although he had no more than an undergraduate education in Eastern languages and literature, service as Oriental Secretary of the Agency in Cairo for more than a decade had established him as a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. His lowly rank—after the outbreak of war, he finally obtained diplomatic standing, though only as a second secretary—gave no indication of his high position in the field marshal’s esteem.

II

By the end of 1914, it was clear that the war was not coming to a quick conclusion, that the field marshal would not be able to return to Cairo for some time, and that therefore a new British proconsul had to be selected for Egypt. Kitchener, in order to keep the position in Cairo vacant for his return, personally selected Sir Henry McMahon to serve as his replacement (under the new title of High Commissioner, rather than Agent); McMahon was a colorless official from India, on the verge of retirement.

Despite McMahon’s appointment, Ronald Storrs and his colleagues in Egypt and the Sudan continued to look upon the War Minister as their real chief. Sir John Maxwell, commanding general of the British forces in Egypt, reported directly to Kitchener at the War Office rather than to, or through, the new High Commissioner.

The senior figure in the War Minister’s following in the Middle East was Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, who had succeeded Kitchener as sirdar of the Egyptian army and Governor-General of the Sudan. Wingate’s entire career had been one of military service in the East, principally in Military Intelligence. He passed for a master of Arabic. Of his role in Kitchener’s Khartoum campaign, the journalist George Steevens wrote that “Whatever there was to know, Colonel Wingate surely knew it, for he makes it his business to know everything…As for that mysterious child of lies, the Arab, Colonel Wingate can converse with him for hours, and at the end know not only how much truth he has told, but exactly what truth he has suppressed…Nothing is hid from Colonel Wingate.”
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Wingate governed the Sudan from Khartoum, a sun-scorched capital city of some 70,000 inhabitants that had been completely rebuilt to the specifications of Lord Kitchener. By steamer and railroad, it was 1,345 miles away from Cairo, and Wingate felt cut off and neglected. On 18 February 1915, he sent a letter marked
Very Private
to his Agent in the Egyptian capital that cried out with his sense of hurt:

In fact Wingate could not bear to keep silent, and only twelve days later he wrote that he had changed his mind and had decided “that we ought not to keep entirely to ourselves information & views which may be helpful” to those responsible for making policy.
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Wingate’s Agent in Cairo—the official representative in Egypt of the Sudan government—was Gilbert Clayton, who had also served under Lord Kitchener in the Sudan campaign. After receiving his commission in the Royal Artillery in 1895, Clayton went out to Egypt and had been stationed there or in the Sudan ever since. From 1908 to 1913 he served as Private Secretary to Wingate. From 1913 onward he served as Sudan Agent in Cairo and, at the same time, as Director of Intelligence of the Egyptian army. Clayton moved into a central position in making Britain’s Arab policy on 31 October 1914, when, by decision of the Commanding General in Egypt, Sir John Maxwell, who reported directly to Kitchener, he became head of all intelligence services in Cairo—of the British civil authority and the British army, as well as the Egyptian army. Thus London heard only one version of intelligence data from Egypt—Clayton’s—instead of three. A former army captain, Clayton rapidly moved up the ranks during the war and by the end of it was a general.

In this fatherly way, Clayton served as mentor to the adventurous young archaeologists and orientalists who flocked to Cairo to serve in the intelligence services during the war. He must have had outstanding human qualities, for his young men, though diverse in other regards, all liked and respected him. They saw him as shrewd, sober, sensible, and steady. He was about ten years older than most of them and, whether or not they took it, they listened to his advice. For them he was the incarnation of the old hand.

III

Although the Foreign Office and the India Office often disputed the views or proposals that Wingate and Clayton espoused, nobody during the war questioned their professional ability or their expert knowledge based on long experience in the Middle East. It was not until years after the war had ended that David Lloyd George, using information that became available from the German side, made a case for the proposition that they were dangerously incompetent.

According to Lloyd George, the British authorities in Cairo were blind to what was happening behind enemy lines. In particular, he wrote, there was a point in 1916 when the Ottoman Empire was too exhausted to continue fighting. If the British forces in Egypt had launched an attack on Sinai and Palestine then—or even in 1915—little effort would have been needed, according to Lloyd George, to “have crumpled…up” the Turks, which in turn would have allowed Britain to move through the Balkans to defeat Germany.
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The opportunity was missed, according to him, because the intelligence services either did not know, or failed to report, what was going on inside the Ottoman Empire. As a result, he claimed, the British government failed to win the war during the years when the war still could have been won on British terms.

A more easily proved failing of Cairo Intelligence was that it was unaware of the extent to which the Egyptian government had been infiltrated by enemy agents. It was not until that expert on Ottoman affairs, Wyndham Deedes, went to work in Cairo in 1916, and discovered that the Egyptian police forces were honeycombed with spies, that the Turkish network was smashed.

An early sign of the inadequacy of Cairo’s intelligence apparatus that ought to have sent up a warning signal, but did not, appeared in the autumn of 1914, about a month before the Ottoman war began, when the local British army commander, General Maxwell, wrote from Egypt to Lord Kitchener that “It is very difficult to put a true value on all the reports from Constantinople, Asia Minor and Syria…I can get no information direct as the Turks guard the frontier very closely—our agents cannot get through—those we had on the other side have been bagged.” He added a disquieting note about the intelligence imbalance: “The East is full of German spies and they get fairly good information.”
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At least Maxwell was aware that he did not know what was going on in Constantinople. Wingate and Clayton fell into the trap of believing that they did. They accepted Gerald FitzMaurice’s mistaken theory that the Ottoman government was in the hands of a group of pro-German Jews. At the end of 1914 General Wingate blamed the war on “a syndicate of Jews, financiers, and low-born intriguers” in Constantinople.
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He and his colleagues compounded the error by linking it to misleading information about the state of Moslem opinion. Just after the war began, Storrs sent Maxwell a report of remarks made by a Syrian informant about public opinion behind enemy lines. According to the informant, the inhabitants of Syria were filled with hatred of the Ottoman government because they believed it would support Zionism. “These Zionists are closely connected with Berlin and Constantinople and are the most important factor in the policy of Palestine,” the informant stated.
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The false rumor that Berlin and Constantinople were about to back Zionism echoed back and forth through the years, and later in the war misled the British Cabinet into believing that it had to issue a pro-Zionist Declaration immediately.

Storrs wrote to Kitchener (which is to say, to his personal military secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald FitzGerald) at the end of the year. He commented on plans for the postwar Middle East, and claimed that Moslems would oppose a Jewish Palestine because they blamed Jews for the war. “Again would not Islam be extremely indignant at the idea of handing over our conquests to a people which has taken no part as a nation in the war, and a section of which has undoubtedly helped to thrust the Turks over the precipice.”
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In fact, as Foreign Office and Arab Bureau reports later were to show, Moslem opinion, even in non-Turkish areas, generally supported the Ottoman Empire and its alliance with Germany. Storrs was wrong, too, in supposing that Moslems were opposed to a Jewish Palestine because of the war; Moslem opposition to a Jewish Palestine had arisen long before the war, in the wake of Zionist colonization at the end of the nineteenth century.

A characteristic flaw in the information-gathering conducted by Clayton and Storrs was that they frequently accepted information supplied by a single informant without testing and checking it. Instead they seemingly relied on the sort of intuitive ability that Steevens had ascribed to Wingate: the gift of being able to divine the extent to which any native is telling the truth. John Buchan, who later became wartime Director of Information in London, wrote in the second chapter of his adventure novel
Greenmantle
that “the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we’re all a thousand percent better than anybody else.” Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs acted as though they understood the natives of the Ottoman Empire as well as did the Scots hero of Buchan’s novel. As it transpired, their ability to understand the natives was quite limited.

In evaluating reports that there was dissatisfaction with Ottoman rule in some sections of the empire, British Cairo particularly misunderstood one of the salient characteristics of the Moslem Middle East: to the extent that it was politically conscious, it was not willing to be ruled by non-Moslems. Behind enemy lines there were Moslems who were dissatisfied with the Young Turk government, but they proposed to replace it with a different Turkish government, or at any rate a different Islamic government. They regarded rule by a Christian European power, such as Britain, as intolerable.

Storrs apparently believed that he could get around that by pretending that it was Egyptian rule that would be substituted for Turkish rule. He proposed to create what would appear to be a new Egyptian empire to replace the Ottoman Empire in the Arabic-speaking Middle East; it was behind that façade that Lord Kitchener would rule as Britain’s viceroy. Storrs derived particular satisfaction from reports that Ottoman rule had become unpopular in Syria; he believed that he could offer the Syrians a popular alternative. Accurate reports, received with some frequency, indicated that—other than the Maronites, a Christian sect with ties to the French—most Syrians who held political views objected to the prospect of being ruled in the postwar world by France, and since Storrs and his colleagues took it for granted that the Arabic-speaking peoples could not govern themselves, the only possibility left was the one advocated by Storrs: the incorporation of Syria into British Egypt.