Redrawing the Middle East

Sir Mark Sykes, Imperialism and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

Michael D. Berdine

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was one of the defining moments in the history of the modern Middle East. Yet its co-creator, Sir Mark Sykes, had far more involvement in British Middle East strategy during World War I than the Agreement for which he is now most remembered. Between 1915 and 1916, Sykes was Lord Kitchener's agent at home and abroad, operating out of the War Office until the war secretary's death at sea in 1916. Following that, from 1916 to 1919 he worked at the Imperial War Cabinet, the War Cabinet Secretariat and, finally, as an advisor
to the Foreign Office. The full extent of Sykes's work and influence has previously not been told. Moreover, the general impression given of him is at variance with the facts. Sykes led the negotiations with the Zionist leadership in the formulation of the Balfour Declaration, which he helped to write, and promoted their cause to achieve what he sought for a pro-British post-war Middle East peace settlement, although he was not himself a Zionist. Likewise, despite claims he championed the Arab cause, there is little proof of this other than general rhetoric mainly for public consumption. On the contrary, there is much evidence he routinely exhibited a complete lack of empathy with the Arabs. In this book, Michael Berdine examines the life of this impulsive and headstrong young British aristocrat who helped formulate many of Britain's policies in the Middle East that are responsible for much of the instability that has affected the region ever since.

CHAPTER 1

THE “MIDDLE EAST EXPERT”

He was clearly marked out for service in the East. He became an invaluable factor in all that intricate and remarkable policy which split the Arab from the Turk, divided the Moslem world at a most critical juncture, and eventually furnished important forces on the desert flank of Allenby's armies.

Winston Churchill¹

On 27 November 1911, the new MP for Central Hull, Mark Sykes, made his maiden speech in the House. It was later observed that he touched “in a brilliant manner … on every national danger from Tunis to Travancore. As for Turkey, whatever was the British policy, it had alienated the Young Turks. Should the importance of this be lost on his listeners, he warned that the recent war in Tripoli between the Turks and Italians for control of that Ottoman province could prompt “a spark” among Indian and Arab Muslims elsewhere.² Deploring the government’s lack of support for the Turks, which had led to the loss of influence in Istanbul, Sykes “gave historical examples of the British being vulnerable in the East when war came elsewhere, citing the way the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War were linked.” He “concluded by repeating his general position: if war came in the West, the British must send troops to the East.”³ With that, the heir to the baronetcy of Sledmere in East Riding, Yorkshire took his seat.

His words were timely and well received, following as they did on Foreign Secretary Lord Grey's report to the House “on Germany, the Moroccan crisis, and the balance of power in Europe.” This was after a lengthy debate “in which Liberal and Labour members reiterated their distrust of the Foreign Office.” As was customary, the speaker, following a member who had given a maiden speech, would congratulate him. In Sykes's case, no less a member than Prime Minister Asquith followed him and praised Sykes, “for ‘as promising and successful a maiden speech as almost any I have listened to in my long experience.’”⁴

Throwing himself energetically into his parliamentary duties and Tory-related activities, Sykes joined the important Conservative clubs, including the Carlton Club, the 1900 Club, the Beefsteak and Prince's. He also spent much of the rest of 1911 addressing meetings around the country and involving himself in party fundraising and promotion. By the end of the year, Sykes had given speeches at thirty-one meetings. “He had also attended 27 social events, spent 50 days in Westminster, taken part in 88 divisions, asked 16 questions and made one speech.”⁵

In 1912, his mother died and the following year his father died. Now the Sixth Baronet of Sledmere, Sir Mark Sykes was fully involved in a busy political career as well as managing the 30,000-acre estate, one of the largest in the north of England, which he had inherited from his father. In late September 1913, six months after his father's death, he took time from his busy schedule to travel to the Ottoman Empire. It was a place of fond memories from the many times he had travelled there both with his parents and alone with his father.⁶

This time Sykes sought to mix business with pleasure, as this trip was to assess the effects of the recent Balkan Wars on Turkey. These two successive military conflicts in 1912 and 1913, the second of which ended in August 1913 with the signing of a peace treaty between the Ottomans and Bulgaria, had deprived the Ottoman Empire of almost all of its remaining European territory. He had referred to the seriousness of this in a speech on 12 August, as a matter that “in time would come to trouble the War Office”:

The break-up of the Ottoman Empire in Asia must bring the powers of Europe directly confronting one another in a country where there are no frontiers because the mountains are parallel to the littoral, and because there being only three rivers, one moving in a circle and the others running side by side over a level plain, it is very difficult for any power to find a frontier.⁷

Very soon Sir Mark Sykes would find himself having to resolve this very matter.

He wrote of his trip to Constantinople and through Anatolia, Kurdistan⁸ and the Arab Ottoman lands in detail in The Caliph's Last Heritage, his third and last book on the Ottoman Empire, which was to be published in 1915. This was an area he knew well from his travels over the years and one he had written about previously. Now Sykes dramatically described how it had changed since the deposition of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1909:⁹ “What a strange mood [Constantinople] is in to-day – after five years of progress, of folly, of squalid intrigue, of violent negotiations, of senseless destruction, of ignominy, of instability, of wars and devastating fires.”

He had been back to the city four times since 1908, when the Young Turks established themselves as the new rulers of the Ottoman Empire:

Outwardly, the change is trivial. The streets are cleaner, the roads smoother, the dogs have gone … There are fewer turbaned heads, fewer horses, fewer soldiers; more officers, more newspapers, more ruins. Gone is the palace, the retainers, the swarms of eunuchs, the gay equipages of the ex-Sultan's favourites.

Moreover:

[T]here is at the root of things a deep change … The fall of Abdul Hamid has been the fall, not of a despot or tyrant, but of a people and an idea. The Sultan meant something to his subjects, his people something to him. Good or ill, he represented not only a system but life, a scheme of things, an idea, a tradition, a faith, a species of continuity.

A wistful nostalgia permeates the entire chapter. His depiction of Abdul Hamid's reign as rule by “ill – in blood, confusion and terror,” one in which the sultan “stood for the old order, and fought for it craftily but childishly, bravely but narrowly, pertinaciously but despairingly” showed this. “One able, frail, sickly, uneducated old man could not bear the weight. He willingly surrendered to the spirit of the age. With him fell things good and evil, as they must on a Day of Judgment.”¹⁰

Sykes's resentment at the loss of the old and familiar was almost palpable. “In the place of theocracy,” he wrote:

[i]mperial prestige and tradition, came atheism, Jacobinism, materialism and licence. With the old order went the palace, its spies and intrigues, its terrorism and secrecy; with the new order came secret societies, lodges, oaths of brotherhood, assassinations, courts-martial, and strange, obscure policies.

For Sykes:

In an hour, Constantinople changed; Islam, as understood by the theologians, as preached in the mosques, as the moral support of the people, as the inspiration of the army, died in a moment; the Caliphate, the clergy, the Koran, ceased to hold or inspire.”¹¹

Contrasting the old with the new, Sykes noted that, in appearances, “the new Turkey was progressive,” but in fact, “a mock Parliament made mock laws; mock ministries and mock ministers rose and fell; a mock counter-revolution served as a pretext for shattering even a semblance of authority, and set up a mock Sultan.” As a result of all these and other changes, its territories “of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Eastern Roumania were lost, then Tripoli was snatched away, then the unnatural Balkan Confederation was made possible, and Turkey-in-Europe was lost.”¹²

He saved his strongest criticism for the new Turkish soldier. Far from the once fearsome “Terrible Turk” of the past, his German-trained modern counterpart was not “the bold, sullen type of Abdul Hamid's day.” That was a time when “the men were fanatical, truculent and rude; they terrorized the people, insulted European women and made life unpleasant; there was something of the pampered Pretorian guard about them, of the overbearing janissary, and yet there was something more.” He believed the missing element in the modern Turkish soldier was

the innate idea that military service was the holy duty of a Moslem, that the years with the colours were sanctified in the sight of God, that each man was to die for the faith and the Caliph. Now, the khaki-clad, bewildered levies who slouch about with puzzled pathetic faces have no such idea.¹³

If this were not bad enough, the soldiers were ignorant peasants whose officers themselves “disregard all discipline, intrigue and quarrel among themselves, control their generals and assassinate their commanders-in-chief.” Speaking as a military officer himself, a disgusted Sykes further described them as “[h]ysterical, pedantic, idle and vicious,” asking rhetorically, “what could be expected from the leadership of such creatures, what influence could they expect to have on the men they are supposed to prepare for battle?” His harsh assessment of the modern Turkish military was that they were “a mere horde of helpless, leaderless villagers, misunderstood and misunderstanding, with no more enthusiasm or hope than a chain-gang.”¹⁴

In the years to come during World War I, Sykes and Whitehall would learn just how wrong this biased, prejudiced and shallow assessment of Turkey's new German-trained military was. Sykes's vivid imagination was in harmony with British assumptions. The romantic in him made him see things through the lens of his youthful memories, which contrasted sharply with his resentment of and disillusionment in the modern Turkey. He was not alone in this; a fact that would prove costly in the early years of the war – particularly in the Dardanelles and at Kut.

In spring 1914, Sykes gave two parliamentary speeches on Eastern affairs in which he dwelt on his hopes and fears for the Ottoman Empire. He told the members of the House that “he worried about Germany gaining control of the Turks. Great Britain must not allow this to happen, despite the present Government's unwillingness to initiate any measures to avoid it.” He had much to say about the German presence in Turkey, particularly its military influence.¹⁵

The 28 June 1914 assassination of Austria's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo caught most of the country and Europe by surprise, including Sykes. This was followed by the German invasion of Belgium six weeks later and Britain's declaration of war on 4 August. What was described at the time as the “war to end all wars,” a variation on the title of a booklet written and published in October 1914 by H.G. Wells, entitled The War that will End War,¹⁶ had begun. However, it did not end war in the twentieth century and what became World War I proved to be a major catastrophe. It was a “conflict that … mobilized 65 million troops, claimed 3 empires, 20 million military and civilian deaths, and 21 million wounded.”¹⁷ Although Sykes had preached for years about the need for military readiness of Britain's armed forces in the event of a coming war, when it did happen he was caught off-guard like everyone else.¹⁸

As soon as war was declared Sykes rushed to Yorkshire from Wales, where he had been training with other Territorial officers. A long-time serving officer in the Territorials (“Terriers”), he had been commissioned a lieutenant in 1897 in the Princess of Wales's Yorkshire Regiment, a voluntary militia Territorial battalion known as the Green Howards. In November 1899, he was called up with his regiment to go to South Africa to fight in the Boer War and after two years Captain Mark Sykes returned home to Sledmere on 16 May 1902.¹⁹ In 1911 he was promoted Lieutenant Colonel and appointed Colonel-Commanding of the 5th Yorkshire “Green Howards” Regiment.²⁰

Before he became engaged in readying his Terriers for war, Sykes went to France with his private secretary, now Sergeant Wilson, for a quick tour. Over a period of several days, the two men visited several French villages, as well as battlefields and eight supply centres. Sykes wanted to learn as much as he could from what he was able to see of the war. Everywhere the “smell of war was omnipresent: ‘the stink of dead things, [and] dead horses.’” Moreover, he “saw a good many wounded … and poor refugees trudging back in the wake of our advance … [women], children and weary old men.’”²¹

It was the condition of the “seriously wounded” that shocked him the most. Sykes wrote home of seeing “one officer ‘muttering at the point of death’; a soldier ‘without a face – just a red pad of lint’ being led by a couple of other wounded men.” He estimated there was only one doctor for about 500 wounded people in a “station which was filthy with dust and oil. There were no hospital trains or beds – just cattle cars filled with straw.” Once he was back home, Sykes and his wife sought to do something about the lack of medical facilities and care on the front. They paid for the Metropole Hotel in Hull to be converted into a military hospital, which they also used to store supplies. Responding to “an appeal from the French government and the Union of French Women to support hospitals in France,” Lady Sykes left for France in early October with several nuns to assist at a 150-bed hospital at a château twenty-five miles from the Front. By November

she set up a 35-bed hospital at a villa in Dunkirk to serve as an emergency stopping-place for seriously wounded soldiers. In co-operation with an effort begun by the Hospital Auxiliary of the French Red Cross, [Lady Sykes] brought 5 doctors and 25 nurses, as well as orderlies and drivers from the East Riding to her hospital at Villa Belle Plage.

In her appeals for support at home, Lady Sykes “explained that she and her husband were equi...