Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [115]
Allenby pushed on. His most impressive victory came at the battle of Megiddo – Armageddon of the Book of Revelation.† Damascus and Aleppo fell to his forces. But it is the figure of T. E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – charging about the desert in flowing white robes at the head of a force of Arab irregulars, who is remembered in preference to the Bull. Lawrence’s escapades were militarily much less significant, but carried political plangency, promised propaganda dividends and – especially by contrast with the quagmire of the Western Front – had about them an aura of dashing romance. The ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’ fulfilled the sort of role in the public imagination that David Livingstone and Charles Gordon had once occupied – the courageous, half-cracked maverick unshakeably loyal to the empire.
But playing God in the Holy Land was a dangerous game, which the empire turned out to play badly. The British ruling class had a romantic affection for the desert Arabs* – their dignity, their hospitality, their ease in the unownable wilderness – and many sincerely wanted to advance the cause of unity and freedom from Turkish rule. But the British also had a war to fight. And on top of that there was the historical problem of the French, who had their own imperial ambitions in the region. It is very hard indeed to look at the public and private agreements made by the British and not to feel embarrassment, disappointment and anger. The fact that they were all made in the customary combination of serpentine syntax and sonorous moral certainty does not help.
To begin with, there were the promises made to the Arabs. Britain had been a trading presence in the area since the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and as the pre-eminent imperial power had special status. An Arab revolt against Turkish rule would open another front in the war. The task of securing their agreement to fight against the Turks was in the hands of the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, who might have known plenty about India (he had been born there, drawn borders there and been impresario for the royal visit there in 1911) but was out of his depth in Arabia. McMahon wrote to the leader of the Hashemite clan, the Sharif, or religious leader, of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, suggesting that an uprising would herald the arrival of that eternal will o’ the wisp, an Arab nation. Hussein claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad, and was not to be bought cheaply. In return for rising against the Ottoman Empire, he expected money, guns and the title ‘King of the Arabs’.† The first two commodities presented no problem to the British, and to appease Hussein’s vanity the British letters opened with eighty-two words of fawning honorifics, including describing this romantic yet ineffectual man as ‘him of the Exalted Presence and the Lofty Rank’ and ‘the Lodestar of the Faithful and the cynosure of all devout Believers’. Had the ‘King of the Arabs’ bothered with the details of the offer being made by the British, he might have wondered precisely what some of the small print about the promised Arab state meant, for example the condition that ‘the districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted’. But he did not hesitate.
And, anyway, the British were soon to make another, contradictory set of promises to their allies, the French. This deal was the work of Sir Mark Sykes. At the outbreak of the First World War, Sir Mark