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their rents. The government of India made matters worse by introducing legislation to increase its arbitrary powers. In March and April, the big cities saw huge demonstrations and public meetings. On April 6 Gandhi called for a general strike across India. Although he urged his followers to refrain from violence, there were sporadic outbreaks of looting and rioting. The worst trouble came in the Punjab where, on April 13, at Amritsar, a panicking British officer ordered his troops to fire point-blank into a large crowd. The Amritsar Massacre, as it came to be known, galvanized even moderate Indian opinion against the British. The British, especially those in India, started to panic. Was there, a local English-language newspaper asked, “some malevolent and highly dangerous organization which is at work below the surface?” Were the disturbances caused by Bolsheviks? Infiltrators from Egypt? Or perhaps a worldwide Muslim conspiracy? Perhaps it was more than coincidence that a war had just broken out with Muslim Afghanistan and that Ibn Saud’s forces, largely drawn from a puritanical Islamic movement, were sweeping across the Arabian peninsula.56

Their Egyptian and Indian troubles shook British confidence and brought home yet again the limits of British power. Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, had tried repeatedly to make his government aware of this; as he wrote to a friend in April 1919, “My whole energies are now bent to getting our troops out of Europe and Russia and concentrating all our strength in our coming storm centres, viz. England, Ireland, Egypt and India. There you are, my dear.” Even if they pulled troops back from areas such as the Caucasus and Persia, the military were not sure that they could deal with the “storm centres.” Britain’s armies were melting away. In the Middle East alone, Allenby was demobilizing an average of 20,000 men a month during the spring of 1919.57

The troubles also brought home the costs. “Do please realize,” Churchill—now colonial secretary—wrote to his private secretary in the Colonial Office on November 12, 1921, “that everything that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense.” As Curzon reported gloomily to Balfour after a particularly inconclusive cabinet discussion in the summer of 1919: “This fact did emerge; the burden of maintaining an English and an Indian Army of 320,000 men in various parts of the Turkish Empire and in Egypt, or of 225,000 men excluding Egypt, with its overwhelming cost, is one that can no longer be sustained.” Lloyd George, who had seen no urgent need to make the peace settlement for the Ottoman empire, finally started to pay attention. In August 1919, just before he went on holiday, Balfour provided him with an admirably lucid summary of the problems although, typically, he offered no solutions: “The unhappy truth . . . is that France, England and America have got themselves into a position over the Syrian problem so inextricably confused that no really neat and satisfactory issue is now possible for any of them.” Lloyd George was also becoming uncomfortably aware of the depth of French anger.

To complicate matters further, Feisal had been displaying an unwelcome independence since his return to Syria in May. In one of his first speeches in Damascus, he told his Arab audience, “It now remains for you to choose to be either slaves or masters of your own destiny.” He was rumored to be talking to Egyptian nationalists about a common front against the British and to Turkish ones about a possible reunion with Turkey. His agents were spreading propaganda into Mesopotamia. In a conversation with Allenby, Feisal claimed that Woodrow Wilson had told him to follow the example of the American Revolution: “If you want independence recruit soldiers and be strong.” If Feisal did decide to lead an uprising, the British military authorities in Syria warned Lloyd George, they could not contain it.58

In September, Lloyd George, who moved quickly once he had made up his mind, decided that Britain would pull its troops out of Syria