William Tyler
War in the Middle East 1914-1918

William Tyler - War in the Middle East: 1914-1918

- And welcome to everyone who’s joined me today. Shots rang out on the 29th of June, 1914, in the Austrian Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. It was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie. The consequences were far-reaching as the ripples from this event crossed continents as the world erupted in flame for four bloody years. 1914 to 1918, the First World War. Ironically, Franz Ferdinand was in Bosnia to undertake the salute of the forces of the Empire, which had been engaged in war games that summer. Now it’s not a game. Now it’s for real. And my story for today is the history of that war within the Middle East, the Ottoman Middle East. Let me say that the political history of that war, as it pertains to the present, the Sykes-Picot Treaty, the Balfour Declaration, and so on, I will deal within a fortnight’s time, when I look at the settlement of the Middle East. Today I’m looking primarily at war in the Middle East between 1914 and 1918. As war broke out in Western Europe in that August of 1914 between the democratic Allies, France and Britain, against the kaiser’s Germany, there were two warships being built in British shipyards destined for our ally, the Turks, the Ottoman Empire. But on the 3rd of August, as we prepared to go to war, Winston Churchill, who was the first ward of the admiralty, had them seized and placed within the Royal Navy. A little while later, two German cruisers in the Eastern Mediterranean were chased by a Royal Naval squadron of Britain and were forced into refuge in the port of Constantinople. Technically at the beginning, the very beginning of the war, the Ottoman Empire was neutral. It had prior to the war been allied to France and Britain, not formally, but informally.

Although that had been put under strain in the last seven or eight years or so, because of the arrangement between Britain and France to ally with the csarist Russia, and Russia was always the enemy of the Ottoman Empire. When these two German cruisers entered the harbour at Constantinople, the Ottomans took them into their own navy. Not seized them in terms of a act of war, but with an arrangement, paid for them, paid the Germans for them, and they entered the Ottoman Navy. Alarm bells were ringing in Paris and London and St. Petersburg. What are they doing? Well, it was pretty obvious the following month, September 1914, when the Ottoman Navy sailed into the Black Sea and attacked Russian ports along the Black Sea coastline. It’s clear that a war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia would also be a war between the Ottoman Empire and Britain and France, and the Ottoman Empire duly declared war on the two Western Allies on the 5th of November, 1914. So what you might have expected to have been a European war, has drawn in, by the first week of November, 1914, the Eastern power of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire at first, after the attack by the Ottoman Navy on Black Sea ports of Russia, sent an army into the Caucasus, into the Russian Caucasus, where they promptly were defeated by the Russians and lost three quarters of their men, a humiliating defeat. One of the, from a Ottoman point of view, one of the annoying parts of this defeat was the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire had declared for Russia, hoping in that way, as war came, to escape the Ottoman Empire.

This was to have dire consequences for the Armenians later in the war, as I’ll talk about later on in this talk. Now, so far I barely mentioned Germany, but in truth Germany, the kaiser’s Germany, from the 1880s onwards had long courted Ottoman support. Not only by providing infrastructure for the empire in the Middle East, in particular railways, but militarily, in training the Ottoman Army and providing it with modern weapons. Many of them from the German firm Krupp, Krupp guns. The kaiser twice visited Constantinople and Jerusalem, firstly in 1889, and then secondly, and more importantly, in 1898. The kaiser was an odd ball, to put it mildly. He called for a Holy War in 1914. What we are familiar with today as a jihad. He claimed, quite insanely, that his Royal House of Hohenzollern was descended from the prophet Mohammed, and he saw himself as the protector of Islam. Well, it’s very difficult to work out the kaiser. He isn’t a balanced individual. But one of the things that is clear is that the kaiser wanted a German Empire that would crush that of Britain and indeed that of France. A Weltpolitik, a world policy. And by courting the Ottoman Empire, he hoped that alliances with the Ottoman Empire would allow him to do precisely that. And Britain was very concerned in 1914. Why? Well, because now allied to Germany and at war with Britain, if a jihad was to occur in the Arabic Middle East of the Ottoman Empire, then two things dear to the British would be under potential attack. The first are the oil wells in the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, and so on, and the worst case scenario of all, it placed India at risk from a German-allied-to-an-Arab attack, a German-allied-to-an-Ottoman attack. But the Germans are playing this whole business of jihad, of a Muslim attack, and the Arabs are right behind that.

In order to counter this, the British in India sent an expeditionary force of 25,000 men, consisting of Britons, Indians, and the majority I think were Indians, and Australians by sea, and they were sent to Iraq. We all familiar with all those names, like Basra. Well, they landed in Iraq and the objective was to take Baghdad, the capital. But they got as far as the city of Kut, K-U-T. About two thirds of the way from the coast of Basra to Baghdad in the centre. And at Kut, they advanced slightly towards, in distance, a slight distance towards Baghdad, before they were defeated and were forced to take refuge back in the city of Kut, from German-led Ottoman forces. They were besieged in Kut for a staggering five months under their general, General Townshend. The five months of siege ended ignominiously on the 29th of April, 1916. Field Marshall von der Goltz, in charge of the Ottoman Army, accepted the surrender of Townshend’s force. 13,000 Allied troops were taken prisoner, of whom 5,000 subsequently died either from disease, or being butchered on the way to prisoner of war camps in Turkey, by their Ottoman guards. Townshend himself went by train, courtesy built by the Germans, to the Bosphorus, where he saw out the rest of the war in a palace on the Bosphorus. When he came home to Britain at the end of the war, he was awarded various gongs to the horror of the troops, because they blamed him for the deaths of their fellows, either in battle or subsequently as POWs. Neil Faulkner, in what I consider an absolutely outstanding book, called “Lawrence of Arabia’s War.”

Although others I put on my blog, this is a much more detailed account than simply of Lawrence. Now I am slightly biassed, because Neil Faulkner I employed as a part-time tutor when I was principal at City Lit. Neil was an extraordinary guy, extremely clever, an archaeologist, the only Marxist archaeologist I’ve ever met. And who turned out, when he began to write, to write magnificently, easy to read, beautifully written. And sadly, he died young and it’s a great shame. But we do have this wonderful book by Neil Faulkner on my blog, “Lawrence of Arabia’s War.” And Neil writes this, “It was the worst mass surrender.” That’s at Kut, of Townshend’s army. “It was the worst mass surrender in the long history of the British Army. It ratcheted official worries about jihad to a new level. The official report published in June, 1917 was damning.” Quote, “‘I regret to have to say,’ said the report’s author Lord Curzon, formerly Viceroy of India, and now a member of the War Cabinet in London, ‘I regret to have to say,’ wrote Curzon, ‘that a more shocking exposure of official blundering and incompetence.’” Mainly lying at Townshend’s door, I have to add. “Has not in my opinion,” said Curzon, “been made at any rate since the Crimean War.” Remember the Charge of the Light Brigade we mentioned last week. Neil goes on to write, “Imperial hubris had been partly to blame. Townshend had proceeded without due planning and preparation, in the conviction that their enemy was contemptible.” The British had a very racist attitude towards a Turk. They regarded them as inferior people. Johnny Turk was the phrase in the First World War. How could Johnny Turk stand up against Britain? Well, they got it fully on the nose at Kut in this appalling surrender.

The disaster at Kut came fast upon an even greater ally defeat at the hands of the Ottomans, in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915/16. Remember, the Gallipoli Peninsula lies on the European side of the Bosphorus. The Allies’ objective in this theatre was to open a sea route to southern Russia, so that… The northern route to Russia, well, you couldn’t go through the Baltic ‘cause Germany is there and commands the Baltic. If you go the northern route, which was deployed in World War II, the conditions were frightful in the Arctic. The only sensible way is to go to the south, to Crimea, in fact, which was Russian. This is the route that my family’s part in making the boots for the Russian Army, were meant to go, and indeed did go. But this is what Gordon Kerr writes of this campaign at Gallipoli. “The brutal Gallipoli campaign was fought in the Gallipoli Peninsula between the 25th of April, 1915, and the 9th of January, 1916. The Dardanelles Strait provided a sea route to the Russian Empire and secure it, the Allies launched a naval attack and an amphibious troop landing.” They launched a naval attack at the Dardanelles. That failed. It was a combined French/British fleet. It was disastrous. In the middle of the battle the British admiral, who was in charge, had to be withdrawn because he went. He had a complete breakdown and was withdrawn. “The objective,” says Kerr, “was the capture of the Ottoman capital Constantinople, but,” as I’ve just said, “the naval attack failed, and after eight months of vicious fighting, famously involving the Anzac forces of Australia and New Zealand, with more than half a million casualties, the Ottoman forces recorded one of the war’s greatest victories. It represented a defining moment in Turkish history, the last gasp battle for the survival of the empire.”

Now you remember, those of you who were able to join me last Wednesday, that we dismissed the idea, well, partly dismissed the idea of a continuous decline from the 18th century to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. And we said that there were moments at which the Ottoman Empire looked again strong. And I’ve just given you two examples from the war that it eventually lost. Its victory at Kut, and its victory at the Dardanelles. It was the last major success of the Ottomans in war, and the first major success of the successor country to the Ottomans, that is the Republic of Turkey. And there was one man who straddled both stories. The hero of the hour at the Dardanelles, Mustafa Kemal, whom we better know as Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, an officer in the Ottoman Empire, who’d fought in the Balkan Wars, fought at Gallipoli, was a great hero of the Ottomans, and yet in Ottoman defeat, he created the modern state of Turkey. In Richard Stoneman’s book on Turkey I read this, “It was at Gallipoli that Mustafa Kemal established his reputation as Turkish leading general. As the British and Anzac troops poured ashore, Kemal issued his most famous order. 'I’m not ordering you to attack, I’m ordering you to die. I cannot believe,’ he said, ‘that there is anyone in the troop’s high command who would not rather die than suffer again the disgrace that fell on us in the Balkans.’” He means the Balkan Wars.

Stoneman says, “This heroic, further coupled with the era of the Anzacs in landing on the wrong beach, which crammed them in a small space and made advance almost impossible, ensured the slaughter of the invading troops and the complete success to Kemal’s division. In the aftermath, Kemal was promoted to colonel and in August he was made commander of all the troops in the Anafarta Hills, where he began, where he again succeeded in checking the combined British and Anzac forces, after the British landing at Suvla Bay. In the fighting, Kemal was hit by a piece of shrapnel. It had struck him over the heart, but his life was saved by a pocket watch, which was smashed. It seemed to him like an omen.” Gallipoli still, all these years on, sends a shiver down the spine of Brits, Australians and New Zealanders. For the statistics were truly horrible. The British Empire, Britain and Indian troops, lost over 31,000 men killed, another nearly 80,000 wounded and 10,000 prisoners of war are missing. The Australians lost 9,000 killed and 18,000 wounded, and the New Zealanders 3,500 killed and 4,000 wounded. In total, the Allies lost 56,700 killed, and the Ottomans lost 56,600. It was dreadful. It was dreadful. And now cruise companies run trips to Gallipoli. I don’t think they do now while the Ukrainian war is going on, but I guess some of you may have been to Gallipoli. Lord Kitchener, the war minister himself finally went to Gallipoli. The man who’d ordered it to Gallipoli, ordered the army to Gallipoli, he, when he went himself and he came ashore, he took a look round and said, “My goodness, if I’d realised it was as bad as this, I wouldn’t have sent you in at all.”

Well, thanks a bunch. But his decision cost nearly 57,000 Allied lives. It’s amazing. When the general in charge was appointed in the War Office in London and told to go down to Portsmouth and join a boat to take him to Gallipoli, to the Gallipolian Peninsula, man called Sir Ian Hamilton, he asked, not unreasonably, in the War Office if he could have a map, and they said, “Oh, sorry, old boy, we don’t have any maps. Why don’t you trot into the map shop?” A shop called Stanfords, which is still there in the middle of London near Covent Garden. “Why don’t you slip into Stanfords, old boy, and pick up a Baedeker?” A tourist book and maps, and that’s all he had. And yet, before the war, a British cultural attache, in fact, an intelligence officer, had bicycled during his summer holiday all round the Gallipoli Peninsula and sent detailed maps back to the Foreign Office. Those maps have never been seen since. Clearly, when the actual disaster happened, someone in the Foreign Office said, “I say, William, didn’t you have maps before?” “Oh, yes, I forgot all about them! Well, we better destroy them.” Because they’d never been, we know they were drawn, we know they were sent to London, but they have never surfaced. It’s a terrible, terrible story. Those of you who are listening, and I think there may be some Australians and New Zealanders listening, this was an important moment in history for them, because this is the moment that both Australia and New Zealand begin to think of themselves as, well, to give themselves a national identity, not as merely agents of the Empire, but as New Zealanders and Australians.

As in a different situation on the Western Front, the Canadians at Vimy Ridge are also to understand the concept of being a Canadian with Canadian nationality. Neil Faulkner writes of the Australians in this way with some detail. It’s worth just reading this, I think. “The spirit of Anzac has become an Australian national legend. Australia had existed as an independent nation for only 13 years when the First World War broke out, and its army had been little more than a volunteer militia until as late as 1911. Universal military training had then been introduced, but the army still comprised barely 2,000 regulars and 20,000 trained militiamen three years later, a tiny force in a population of seven million. Yet when the Australian prime minister announced that ‘When the Empire is at war, so also is Australia,’ there was a surge of volunteers to join the Australian Imperial Force, formed for overseas service on the 15th of August, 1914. More than 52,000 had been enrolled by December and some 330,000 Australians would join up before the war’s end.” The next sentence is horrendous. “Of these, 2/3 will become casualties and one in five would be killed.” 2/3 were casualties of the 330,000. And one in five Australians was killed. Not only of course in Gallipoli, on the Western Front as well. This was a terrible war, a dreadful war, a war that no one had ever conceived really, before. There’s no gallantry in that sense in this war. It’s brutal. It’s technological.

Now at the beginning of the story today, I mentioned that the Ottoman Empire went to war with the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, and the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire voted with their feet for Russia. Armenia today is an independent country, achieving its independence in 1991 at the collapse of the USSR. It’s to the east, to the extreme east of Turkey, and to its east is Azerbaijan, and to its north is Georgia. So it’s still in a very volatile part of the world. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and indeed Turkey, if you like. Constantinople, the government of the sultan, decided that the Armenians could not be left as a fifth column. They had to be dealt with and the decision amounted to genocide, the Armenian genocide. And even in 2024, the Turkish government of today does not acknowledge that there was a genocide. Although, I think pretty well every country outside of Turkey sees it as genocide. In Richard Stoneman’s book, he writes of the genocide in this way. “Officially, the Armenians were to be deported on mass to places where they could not interfere with the progress of the war.” In other words, that they could not be a fifth column for the Russians. “In practise, however, the Ottomans rounded them up village by village, beginning in November, 1914, and forced them to walk mostly in the direction of Syria where holding camps awaited them. Enormous numbers died on the march of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, exposure, and even the brutality of the Turks. At the same time, an alleged uprising in Armenia was put down and massacres took place.

In June, 1915, enormous convoys of Armenians undertook the journey to Mesopotamia. The men were killed as they left, the remainder, perhaps 10,000 or more, marched on, pushed at bayonet point. Those who reached concentration camps in Mesopotamia, were,” Mesopotamia, Iraq, Mesopotamia, “were, as eye witnesses described them, no more than living skeletons. Some were crowded into underground caves where they were crushed, or in some cases doused with petrol and burnt to death. By the end of 1916, the genocide was over, though it was renewed with somewhat less intensity after the war ended.” Ethnic cleansing, genocide. It was a dreadful incident and an incident that… Because of Turkey’s unwillingness to accept this is a difficulty. It’s a difficulty for Turkey joining the EU, even though it wasn’t a difficulty for Turkey joining NATO. This is an eyewitness account as described in Neil Faulkner’s book. And this is a Venezuelan of all people, a Venezuelan mercenary serving in the Ottoman Army. And he wrote this of the Armenians on this walk to prisoner of, well, I can’t call them prisoner of war camps, but camps. “Their sunken cheeks and cavernous eyes bore the stamp of death. Among the women, almost all of whom were young, were some mothers with children, or rather childish skeletons, in their arms. One of them was mad. She knelt beside the half petrified cadaver of a newborn babe. Another woman had fallen to the ground, rigid and lifeless. Her two little girls believing her asleep, sobbed convulsively as they tried in vain to awaken her.

By her side, dying in a scarlet pool of blood, was yet another, beautiful and very young, the victim of a soldier of the escort. The velvety eyes of the dying girl, who bore every evidence of refinement, mirrored an immense and indescribable agony.” And that phrase applies to the Armenians in general. An immense and un-describable. The agony continued. The American ambassador in Constantinople, because America isn’t in the war at this stage, was getting reports from American missionaries and diplomats across the Ottoman Empire about the Armenians. And he wrote, “From thousands of Armenian citizen villages, these despairing caravans now set forth. They filled all the roads leading southward. Everywhere, as they moved on, they raised a huge dust and abandoned debris; chairs, blankets, bed clothes, household utensils, and other impedimenta marked the process of their walk.” It was truly, truly dreadful. A German male nurse with the Ottoman Army. “At the sides of the camp a row of holes in the ground covered in rags had been prepared for them. Girls and boys of all ages were sitting in these holes, heads together, abandoned and reduced to animals, starved without food or bread, deprived of the most basic human aid, packed tightly, one against the other and trembling from the night cold, holding pieces of still smouldering wood to try to keep warm.” Neil Faulkner concludes by saying, “No one is sure how many died. The murderers kept no records. Journalists at the time estimated between 600,000 and a million Armenians were killed in 1915, and more died later, perhaps another 200,000 in the summer of 1916, when many survivors of the death marches were murdered in the camps, and yet more in fresh pogroms in 1920 and 1922.

It is possible that the final death toll in the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1922 was 1 ½ million people.” War is always dreadful. Things happen which just beggar the imagination. And the Ottomans, whom the British and indeed the French and Western Europeans in general regarded in a disdainful way as barbarians, with the Armenian’s genocide, lived up to their reputation. Let me turn the page now. We’ve looked. I’ll do a quick recap. The Ottoman Empire might well have allied itself with Britain and France, if it had not been for the fact that Britain and France were allied to csarist Russia, the great enemy over the centuries, because it wanted to take Constantinople. A, because it was the seat of Orthodox Christianity. And secondly, because it was a route through to the Eastern Mediterranean. But also they took Germany’s cause, because Germany had been a suitor of the Ottoman Empire from the 1880s, with the kaiser being, in particular, pro-Islamic. There were rumours at the time, and there’s been arguments since, that he actually embraced Islam, if not then, then after his exile in Holland. I think that’s pushing it. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that he was, he was motivated by seeing himself, rather like Napoleon had seen himself as entering British India on the back of an elephant, like Alexander, the kaiser saw himself as the great, his own words, protector of Islam. Really replacing the caliph or sultan in Constantinople. Many in the German High Command were not happy with this approach, but by 1914 it had been well-established and when the opportunity came, the Ottomans seized it in order to be able, they hoped, to keep Russia out.

But it wasn’t Russia that they needed to fear. After all, Russia is out of the war by the time it ends in 1918, because of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and when Lenin and Trotsky took Russia out of the war. The whole story of the modern Middle East would’ve been very different had the czarist Russia survived the war and been at the table that divvied up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war. Instead of which, as we know, it is the British and the French, subsequently the Americans, who played a major role in 20th-century and indeed 21st-century Middle East. Now, I promise I will tell you the story of Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and all the rest of it in a fortnight’s time when we look at how that was divvied up. But there’s one character, British and very eccentrically British, archetypically eccentrically British, that I need to introduce to our story. And that is the extraordinary Englishman T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, a genius, a madman. You can describe Lawrence in many ways. He was a one-off, unbalanced, definitely, in my view. Read books. The latest book is by the traveller Ranulph Fiennes, called “Lawrence of Arabia.” This is a rather personal book, but the best book, as I keep saying, is Neil Faulkner’s book. But also read the account of the war that Lawrence himself wrote, the very famous “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” To my father’s generation, born at the end of the first war, or shortly afterwards, the book, which came out in the 1930s, was an absolute must-read. Everyone seemed to have copies of T.E. Lawrence. Indeed, in a poll of the greatest Englishman of the 20th century, not so long ago, Lawrence appeared number six.

It’s strange. Maybe it owes… His subsequent status as this great hero is really underlined by his friendship with the American journalist, Thomas Lowell. And it was Thomas Lowell who, in a series of lectures, gave, with pictures, gave Lawrence’s story the momentum that it needed. And I guess that many of you who are around my age, listening this evening, will only think of Lawrence, not Lawrence as he really looked, but Lawrence as Peter O'Toole made him look in that fantastic film, “Lawrence of Arabia.” Now, there’s been a lot of criticism, both of the film and indeed of the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” on the grounds that both stray from the facts. Even though Lawrence is writing about himself, people say, “Well, he adjusted the truth.” What is interesting is that Neil Faulkner, and I actually spoke to him about this before he passed away, Neil believed that that was untrue. Neil followed the route that is outlined in the “Seven Pillars” as an archaeologist, and he dug and he looked, and he is of the opinion that it is an as accurate an account as you can get. So opinions about Lawrence are always going to differ. There’s arguments about his sexuality, not that I think that is important in any way, actually. And I don’t know why we were obsessed by that, but at one time we were. Some of you may have remembered a film or the book, oh, sorry, the play, “Ross,” R-O double S, a name that Lawrence adopted after the war to seek anonymity.

He was, as I say, an archaeologist. He was also, at the beginning of the war, working in intelligence for the British in Cairo. The British headquarters in the Middle East. The war in the Middle East provided him with a chance to shine. A chance that he would never have got, if there had been no war. He would have disappeared as a, well, possibly as a bureaucrat, which he became after the war for a short period with Churchill. But I suspect that at some point he would’ve taken his own life. He was suicidally prone. In the novel by the English novelist, later governor general of Canada, John Buchan, “Greenmantle,” “Greenmantle” tells the story of the German interference in the Middle East, and the hero of “Greenmantle” is Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay and Richard Hannay is being briefed to go to the Middle East. And Richard Hannay is really in part Lawrence. Now those of you, the majority of you who are Jewish, you realise that Buchan is, has been and correctly accused of being anti-Semitic. Bear in mind that he was an upper class Englishman, or in his case Scotsman, and as it were flippant, anti-Semitism was rife. And you must judge for yourselves, whether that means you can’t read any of his books, or whether you simply accept that he was a man of his time and however wrong he was. But in “Greenmantle,” I wanted to read you this.

And this is Hannay being briefed or indeed being ordered to go to the Middle East. And it begins with that Kipling quotation about the Far East, the Great Game. “It is a Great Game and you, Hannay, are the man for it, no doubt. But there are others who can play it, for soldiering today asks for the average rather than the exception in human nature. It is like a big machine where the parts are standardised. You are fighting, not because you are short of a job, but because you want to help England. How if you could help her better than by commanding a battalion, or a brigade or, if it comes to that, a division? How if there is a thing which you alone can do? Not some embusque business in an office, but a thing compared to which your fight at Loos,” that was on the Western Front in 1915, “your fight at Loos was a Sunday-school picnic. You are not afraid of danger? Well, in this job you would not be fighting with an army around you, but alone.” Well, Lawrence wasn’t alone. He had an army. But that gives you an idea of the sort of person that Lawrence was, brought to life in the character of Richard Hannay, by John Buchan. As I said, the last sentence, “You are on your own,” is absolutely untrue of Lawrence. He fought with an army around him, an Arab Army, led by Faisal, the son of the emir of Mecca, Hussein. The Arab Army had its own vested interests in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

It wanted to restore an Arab kingdom. Not Jordan, Iraq or Lebanon, an Arab kingdom across the Middle East minus Persia. It wanted to create the, it put the clock back to an Arab empire in the Middle East, and Hussein’s family, as the guardians of Mecca and Medina, in what is now Saudi Arabia, saw themselves as the leader of that. And it was his son, the father was older, it was the son, Faisal, who created this army. And technically Lawrence was assigned to it as a liaison officer between the British and the Arab Army. Why did the British want the Arab Army? It wanted it because it knew it would help in the fight to defeat the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. And you could say that was a point where problems already begin. This is what Ranulph Fiennes writes. He writes this. “Lawrence had spent the last two years freely giving his opinions on the status of the Arab Revolt. Now he had to prove he wasn’t all mouth, just as the Turkish forces were gearing up for an almighty assault to knock the Arabs out of the war once and for all.” He argued against being appointed, but he was appointed nonetheless. And the story is one we are all familiar with, this extraordinary heroic figure in white robes on the back of a camel, not just a liaison officer, but actually on many occasions taking sole command, and on others ensuring that his views were heard. Lawrence had been born in 1888 as a bastard in a very Victorian sort of bastardy situation. His father was an aristocrat who had an affair with the governess, and Lawrence was the product of that affair.

I said before, he was in the Middle East as an archaeologist, and when war came, he volunteered and was in an intelligence role in Egypt. His greatest military achievement was arguably the capture of Damascus, the capital of Syria, in October, 1918, towards the end of the war. After the war, he retired to private life until enlisting in the RAF, under the name Ross, as an ordinary aircraft man, where then he finished his great work, the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” He died in a motorcycle accident in 1938, of which there are many, many theories, and conspiracy theories at that. He was 46. Did he take his own life? Well, he may well have done. Or was it simply an accident? It may well have been. Was he assassinated? Almost certainly not. I will return to Lawrence’s story again in two weeks time, when we look at his championship of the Arab National cause. Remember, the Arabs had created this army before the arrival of Lawrence, with the objective of creating an Arab state with Hussein in charge. And the defeat in other way of doing it, in order to achieve that, the defeat of the Ottomans. But at the Arab seizure of Damascus, this was a political action and this political action was initiated by Lawrence. Now this is vitally important to the later story and indeed the story of the Middle East today. And Ranulph Fiennes writes, “From the direction of Damascus, Lawrence suddenly heard a series of shattering explosions. It was the Germans blowing up their ammunition dumps and stores. Along with the Turks, they were fleeing Damascus, knowing that British forces were on their doorstep.” Now, and that’s not the Arab Army, that’s not Lawrence, it’s General Allenby advancing towards Constantinople from his base in Cairo.

“Well, this also represented a problem. It was clear that the Arab Army would not get into the city before the British. Lawrence therefore formulated an alternative plan. So long as they installed an Arab government in Damascus before the British troops arrived, this might be enough to stake their claim. Lawrence therefore decided to send in the horse cavalry to alert Faisal supporters in Damascus to take control of the administrative affairs of the city, raise an Arab flag and proclaim Faisal king of the Arabs.” In other words, Lawrence knows that Allenby will reach Damascus before Faisal and the main army. He sends cavalry in to Damascus, as the Germans and the Ottomans flee, in order to tell the Arabs within Damascus to proclaim Faisal as king of the Arabs. Not only Syria. Of all of the Middle East, bar Persia, so that when Allenby arrived, he faces a fait accompli. “Lawrence soon followed himself, jumping into his Rolls-Royce, he drove to a ridge that looked out over the city of Damascus. All of a sudden, a horseman galloped towards him, and upon seeing Lawrence, he announced, ‘Good news, sir, Damascus salutes you!’” So Lawrence had acted very politically to ensure that the Arabs, whom he, perhaps the word isn’t too strong to say adored, would get their wish for an Arab kingdom led by Hussein and Faisal. He judged Hussein was a broken reed, and it was best to announce Faisal as king of the Arabs, which Faisal would’ve done anyhow. So Faisal is announced king of the Arabs. So when Allenby arrives with the British Army in Damascus, oh my goodness, he finds Lawrence there. Not only does he find Lawrence there, but he finds that Faisal has been announced as king of the Arabs. That is not British or French political policy. This policy has been made on the hoop by Lawrence alone.

Then one final little bit from Fiennes’s book. “The following morning General Allenby arrived and complicated things. Lawrence was unsure how Allenby would react to him having imposed an Arab government in Damascus. Yet when Lawrence met with him at the Victoria Hotel, Allenby didn’t reprimand him, he merely ratified the decision. By now, he was already eager to push on with the next stage of his offensive and to take Aleppo and Beirut on route to Constantinople.” He, that is Allenby, met Faisal and they were shown a document which Lawrence says he couldn’t understand in the Arabic or in the English version. Faisal, although he didn’t know it, was being sold down the river by the British. And that’s one of the stories for two weeks time in the settlement of the Middle East. And finally, I’m turning to Allenby, older by 20-odd years than Lawrence, born in 1861. He was put in charge of the British Egyptian expeditionary force in 1917 and ordered to advance through the Middle East on Constantinople. From October to December, 1917, he captured Beersheba, Jaffa, and finally Jerusalem. From Jerusalem he advanced northwards again, heading towards Constantinople, and on route meets in Damascus, Lawrence. Though the war was ended before Allenby could reach Constantinople, on the 30th of October, 1918. The Ottomans agreed a truce, the war was over. Later Allenby is to serve as the British high commissioner in Egypt through to 1925, dying in 1936. It wasn’t the capture of Constantinople, which never occurred.

There was an occupation by Allied forces. But it was really the capture of Jerusalem by Allenby that made the headlines in Britain and elsewhere. When he took Jerusalem, Allenby imposed martial law and he sent a statement. “To the inhabitants of Jerusalem the blessed, and the people dwelling in its vicinity; The defeat inflicted upon the Turks by the troops under my command has resulted in the occupation of your city by my forces. I therefore here now proclaim it to be under martial law, under which form of administration it will remain so long as military considerations make necessary. However, lest any of you be alarmed by reason of your experience at the hands of the enemy who has retired, I hereby inform you that it is my desire that every person pursue his lawful business without fear or interruption. Furthermore, since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of the three great religions of mankind, and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers and pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people of these three religions for many centuries, therefore, do I make it known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faith they are sacred.” Allenby refused, he said, to enter Jerusalem on horseback because Christ has entered on foot. But more likely because the kaiser, in 1898, had entered on horseback with fanfare. Allenby walked into Jerusalem through the Jaffa gate.

He wrote, “I entered the city officially at noon on the 11th of December with a few of my staff, the commanders of the French and Italian attachments, the heads of the political missions and the military attaches of France, Italy, and America. The procession was all afoot. And at Jaffa gate, I was received by the guards representing England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, India, France, and Italy. The population received me well.” I said the capture of Jerusalem was a major PR event, particularly in Britain. They compared Allamy, Allenby to Richard I, Richard Coeur de Lion. But Richard Coeur de Lion had failed to capture Jerusalem, whereas Allenby had. There were cartoons in the British press of Richard I looking down from heaven on Allenby and on Jerusalem and saying, “The last crusade, my dream comes true.” Allenby refused to allow his own press officers to use the term crusade or crusaders, which was now being, as it were, right across, blown right across the British media. Why? Because the Ottomans and the Germans had proclaimed a jihad. He did not want to proclaim a crusade. He himself said, “The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance. There was no religious impulse in this campaign.” Well, he was a religious man himself. But what he’s trying to say is we don’t want to get involved in this jihad/crusading argument, which of course is exactly what the Americans got involved in in the Iraqi, in the Iraq War with Saddam Hussein. There’s one quotation from the reports of Allenby, which I would, it’s very short.

“The citizens of Jerusalem were at first welcoming because they were glad the Ottomans were gone, and they wanted a good relationship with the British.” Then the important sentence. “They were also cautious, as they did not want the British to stay.” “They were also cautious as they did not want the British to stay.” And the peace that followed, the Ottoman, we’ll use the word surrender, because that’s in effect what it was. The peace that followed was not a peace. Peace has alluded the Middle East ever since the First World War. A period now of 160 years. And we’re still counting the years towards peace. And it’s the politics that have bedevilled the region ever since. And my final quotation comes from the introduction written by Lawrence himself to the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” “It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war, promises would be dead paper. And I had been an honest advisor of the Arabs. And had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff. But I salved myself with the hope that by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory, I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured, if not dominant, that expediency would counsel to the great powers a fair settlement of their claims.” It’s not going to be like that. It’s not going to be like that. Promises to the Arabs are simply going to be torn up. There’s going to be no Arab state. He said, “I risked this fraud.” That is not telling the truth to the Arabs. “On my conviction that Arab help was necessary for our cheap and speedy victory,” the British, “victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than we lose.” “Better we break our word than we lose.”

This is the beginning of all the problems that have bedevilled the Middle East right the way through to 2024. When we look at the settlement in a fortnight’s time, we shall have to ask, could it have been done better? The answer has to be surely, yes, it could have been. In between now and then, next week’s lecture is about English Arabists and English Zionists. Another little break because we need to find out what was going on, as it were, politically and philosophically and intellectually about Arabism and Zionism amongst non-Arabs and non-Jews in Britain, because that had an important part to play in the final settlement of the Middle East after the First World War. Thanks very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. I really like talking about this period. It’s so fascinating and I’ve only scratched the surface. Please, if anyone really wants to read a book, Neil’s book, Neil Faulkner’s book is massive. It’s a huge book, but well worth reading in bits. Now I’m sure there’s lots of people with questions. There are.

Q&A and Comments:

Myrna, thank you. And good morning to you. Here it’s good evening, but good morning to you.

Sheila. “We visited the Naval Museum in Istanbul. They have a huge display of the flags and other things celebrating their victory at Gallipoli. Worth going to that museum, because it is also an exhibition of boats the sultan used to sail up and down the Bosphorus, fantastic.” I love, Sheila, naval museums. They’re always wonderful. If you’ve not been to the Naval Museum in Barcelona and you’re in Spain, do go.

Q: David, “Were there peace feelers between France and England, and the Ottoman Empire once Russia pulled out of the war, if France.”

A; No, no. “If France and England became enemies of the Ottoman Empire because they were Allies of the Russians?” No, because we could not allow the Arabs to control the oil or indeed to control routes to India. No, we are going for it, we are going through to the death in 1918. In fact, when Allenby stopped, when the truce was signed at a place called Mudros, and when Allenby’s army stopped, he received a telegram from London saying, would he please advance to a particular city? And he said, “Well, I can’t advance. We’ve signed a truce, I’ve got to stay here.” And they said, “You are to advance.” And the reason being that France was further ahead and was in control of some oil fields and the British couldn’t allow that. And so Allenby advanced to make sure the oil fields were British.

Q: Mackle says, “Winston Churchill’s reputation suffered for years after the British lost to defeat in Gallipoli.” It did. “Was it Anzac where the beach planners ignored the presence of high?”

A: Yes, yes, yes. Where high cliffs, right on the beach where a landing should never have been considered. Somebody will remind me of the title of the brilliant. I think it, no, it’s simply called “Gallipoli.” A brilliant Australian film about Gallipoli. It’s one of the best films of the First World War. It’s well worth, it’s fictional, but the way it portrays Gallipoli is fantastic. If you have never seen it, you really should. I’m not going to go into Churchill and Gallipoli. It’s sort of off, it’s off the main path I’m following. But just to say there was perfectly logical explanations why Churchill was right, he didn’t want to, Gallipoli wasn’t his failure. The failure was the British and French Navys’ incompetence at breaching the Straits at the Bosphorus, and taking Constantinople. Churchill was right, it could have been done, but Gallipoli was a military decision, which was a disaster. “Was the disaster at Gallipoli one reason that later so much preparation went into the D-Day landings.” Well, certainly it was in the minds of many. That’s true. “It is very unfortunate, till today, the Israeli governments never acknowledge Armenian genocide as such.” That I didn’t know.

“Perhaps the Turks should acknowledge it first.” Well, if, yeah. Well, I assure you, it is a genocide. It’s accepted as such by the UN, it’s accepted by Britain, it’s accepted by the States, by France and so on. “All war is.”

Carol. “All war is horrible and waste of young soldiers, destruction of future. Here in Israel in practise, we’ve been at war or similarly for 75 years and still counting. By the way, I have Australian friends who lost her, I have an Australian friend who lost their uncle at Gallipoli, and she went to pay homage there several times. It was sacred to their memory.” Yeah, Gallipoli is really important to Australians and not just those who lost family, but the whole identity of Australian nationhood.

“Oh, well, no, not all countries recognise the Armenian genocide as genocide, UK government.” Well, everyone in the UK recognises it’s genocide. “In ‘88, at the first Remembering the Future, for the Future Conference, sponsored by Robert Maxwell, held at Oxford in that summer, first large scale academic conference held, I was a recorder for sessions on the third day. There were police everywhere. Lots of security, one would’ve thought possible.” I’m sorry, I can’t really read that, Sheila. I’m not sure what some of the words, they’ve come out wrong on my screen. No, I’m not going to talk, Shirley, about Churchill and Gallipoli. That’s another story. It isn’t relevant to the Middle Eastern story. What is relevant is Churchill’s role after 1918 in the settlement of the Middle East, and I will talk about that. But Gallipoli isn’t in the Middle East. I had to mention it because of the success of the Ottomans and in particular of the rise of Kemal Ataturk. So I’m going to leave Gallipoli. That’s a whole different ball game to talk about.

“Could deniers or anti-Israeli protestors. Continued. Deniers or anti-Israel protestors know all demonstration threats were people speaking on the Armenian genocide. There had been threats from Turkey. At that stage 98. I think USA did not recognise it. Here HMDT commemorate only murders and genocides from World War II.” Right, okay.

“Lowell Thomas, Lowell given name, Thomas family name.” Sorry, did I say it the wrong way round? I do apologise. I wondered, Alfred, at the time, I thought, “Hang on a minute. I think I’ve done that the wrong way round.” And I just went on. But you are ever, ever grateful to point out the right thing. He wrote a book, incidentally, and that’s worth reading too. It’s interesting as it’s the first sort of creation of a, well, one of the first creations of a media celebrity by a journalist is Lowell Thomas’s book about Lawrence.

Edna, “I wish they learned that in 1915 the Pontic Greeks in Turkey were also massacred.” Yeah, I’m going to come to the Greek, the Greco-Turkish War takes place after the end of 1918, and is part of the story in a fortnight’s time. Somebody says, “'Greenmantle’ was a setbook in my school in London. I reread it a few years ago. It is very dated.” Yes, is dated. Of course it is. But in terms of giving an insight into the, into the views at the time about the German threat, I think it still has a value. No, I read all of Buchan as a child and no, couldn’t read it today. But I think “Greenmantle has a historic interest, as you rightly say, it’s out of date, but being out of date, it becomes a historical source. The Arabs, they didn’t want to take over the Ottoman Empire, they wanted to take over all Arabs in the Middle East. Turks are not Arabs. I’m sure we all remember that.

Carol says, "By the way, Anzac troops were involved in the taking of Beersheba under Allenby, and that too is celebrated by Australia and New Zealand.”

Nicholas says. Hi, Nicholas. “My grandfather always claimed to be the first Jew in Jerusalem because he was the only one in the Royal Irish Fusiliers.” Oh, that’s fantastic. I think, Nicholas, you’ve told me that before, and I’m glad you’ve shared it with everybody else. There are always, Britain is always an odd story and has a wonderful story.

Sheila, “24 April, 2015, was the 100th anniversary of Armenian genocide. I attended a church service at St. Mary’s Church in High Road, South Woodford, organised by their curate, whose grandparents survived the genocide, went to Canada and grew up there, came here to study, became a priest, now a hospital chaplain.” Oh, Omar Sharif.

No, Richard, I haven’t done that. You can, I’m not going to enter the film either. For me, it’s always Peter O'Toole. I had a vice principal, when I was principal of the College of Adult in Manchester, donkeys years ago, who was very handsome, and one of the ladies, students rather fancied him, and she wanted to know where he was, and she asked me, she said, “I don’t know his name, but he always looks like,” and she said in a lovely Manchester accent, “he’s Omar Sharif, you know, he looks like Omar Sharif.” When I told him that his head grew about twice the size.

Yes, I am going to talk, Jacqueline, about Mustafa Kemal in two weeks time in the settlement after the First World War, because he is the person that created modern Turkey and not without difficulty and not without Britain. Watch my language, not without Britain nearly messing the whole thing up.

Olga, “When I visited a museum in Van in Turkey, it had objects proving that Armenia was the attacker.” I’m sure it did. It’s not true. “Monash, a Jewish colonel saved the Australians.” Monash was the arguably, and now all the Canadians will say no he wasn’t, but arguably Monash was in many historian’s eyes the greatest of the Allied generals. But he was not promoted by Lloyd George because he, not because he was a Jew, but because he was a colonial and the British Army wouldn’t accept a colonial leader. Interestingly enough, Lloyd George had no objection to his Jewishness. And indeed I think probably that would not have mattered, but he was a colonial with an Australian accent. Oh my dear, we couldn’t possibly. I haven’t got the population and demographic for Jerusalem in 1917. Sorry, I haven’t got that at hand. You could Google that and get it I think quite quickly. Yeah, Turkey is in NATO and borders Russia. The problem, yeah, Turkey is potentially a major problem in geopolitics.

That’s very interesting, Nick. “Turkey charges Canadians more for their entry visa when coming into the country because the Canadian government has publicly condemned the Armenian massacre.” How interesting.

Thomas, “Louis de Bernieres’ book, ‘Birds Without Wings’ is a wonderful portrayal of life in Turkey during the period you discussed.” Yes, it is. That is a good book. And perhaps I should have mentioned it. I apologise. I’m not sure what Lorna is saying. “I do, I’m leaving, LRS.” I don’t know what LRS means. Is that an, sorry, that’s, I’ve lost, I’m lost with that. Thank you everyone who’s contributed in questions, comments, and the rest. Remember, you don’t have to agree with what I say, but I hope that those of you who are really interested will see a film, will, you could even see “Lawrence of Arabia,” but if you haven’t seen “Gallipoli,” that’s the film to see. Read a book, if you haven’t. Read a novel, the Louis de Bernieres is of course a much more modern novel than “Greenmantle.” I use “Greenmantle” because it was relevant to what I wanted to say in my talk.

So thanks for listening. I’ll be with you next Monday and subsequent Mondays until the end of July. Same time, wherever you’re listening, it’s the same time for all of you. And for now, cheers. Goodbye.