A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East

by James Barr

In France a small but thick-skinned group of imperialists, the Comité de l’Asie Française, began to put pressure on Delcassé to lay claim to Syria and Palestine. Many of the Comité’s supporters were diplomats working at the French foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, who were concerned that the French government had not announced any formal ‘war aims’. ‘We may be certain that the others will not take the trouble to mark out our place for us,’ the Comité argued in March 1915. ‘Anyone who appears insufficiently determined to sit down risks seeing his chair removed.’30 This was a familiar argument from the Comité, which had traditionally relied heavily on the French public’s Anglophobia to rouse support for its own agenda. Imperial expansion, it had always argued, denied the rapacious British gains at French expense. The wartime alliance with Britain now made such a line awkward, and so the Comité’s secretary-general, an aristocratic diplomat named Robert de Caix, reached for the history books to make his case. He argued that France had a ‘hereditary’ right to Syria and Palestine because it was ‘the land of the Crusades . . . where Western activity has been so French-dominated since the beginning of the Middle Ages that all the Europeans who live there are still called “Franks”’.31 Disregarding the minor detail that the word ‘Frank’ was now used pejoratively to mean ‘foreigner’ by the Arabs, who had expelled the last of the crusaders six centuries before, de Caix brushed off...

While serving as France’s consul in the booming port of Beirut immediately before the First World War he had received letters from educated and ambitious young Arab army officers, lawyers and journalists who wanted France to help them achieve their goal of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs had even held a congress to discuss this aim in Paris in 1913, but the French government was unwilling to help them because of its financial stake in the Ottomans’ endurance, and Georges-Picot could only file the hopeful approaches carefully away. In June 1914, Georges-Picot was sent an Arab leaflet demanding complete independence for Syria that convinced him that his government’s policy had to change. Believing that the flyer had ‘more chance than in the past of waking an echo in the souls of its readers’, he warned his masters that, if they did not help the Arabs, others – by whom he meant the British – would.5 His government, however, did nothing. In desperation, when it looked likely that France and the Ottomans were about to go to war that autumn, he secretly arranged for the Greek government to supply Christians in the Lebanon with fifteen thousand rifles and two million rounds of ammunition. When war broke out, he was obliged to leave. Georges-Picot wrongly expected that France would rapidly invade to assist the Lebanese uprising that he hoped the arms and ammunition would start. On this assumption, rather than burn the letters he had been sent by Arab correspondents, ...

Allenby’s pledge that he would uphold religious freedom in the city was read out, and afterwards there was a buffet lunch for Allied officers. There, as predicted, Georges-Picot raised the matter of the future government of the city. ‘Tomorrow, my dear General, I will take the necessary steps to set up civil government in this town,’ the French diplomat announced. According to Lawrence he was met with silence. ‘Salad and chicken mayonnaise and foie gras sandwiches hung in our mouths unmunched,’ Lawrence remembered, ‘while we turned our round eyes on Allenby and waited.’ Allenby went red. ‘In the military zone the only authority is that of the Commander-in-Chief, myself.’ ‘But Sir Grey, Sir Edward Grey —’ ‘Sir Edward Grey referred to the civil government which will be established when I judge that the military situation permits,’ snapped Allenby, cutting Georges-Picot dead in his tracks.

The story of how Gouraud had lost his arm was legendary. While leading French forces at Gallipoli four years earlier, he had been badly injured by an exploding Turkish shell, and one of his wounds became infected. ‘It’s a sure sign of gangrene, General: you’ll have to agree to us amputating it, or you could die this evening,’ he was told in the field hospital. ‘What an odd request,’ Gouraud answered, managing a smile. ‘I know no one who wants to die this evening. You neither, I don’t doubt.’

Britain’s experts on the Middle East met in Cairo on 13 March, and were instantly dubbed the ‘forty thieves’, to Churchill’s great amusement. There were senior British military officers, Churchill’s London-based advisers, and the officials from the region including Gertrude Bell and Sir Percy Cox. But it was the British agent in Somaliland, Sir Geoffrey Archer, who stole the show when he arrived with two young lions. Allenby – now Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt – hosted a party at the start, and described the moment when the lions spotted one of his own pets across the Residency garden. ‘They broke loose,’ he wrote, ‘and went full gallop for my Marabou stork. He fled for his life. They nearly got him; but Archer and his black servant raced after them and just stopped them in time. They are bound for London Zoo.’

In 1915 Etienne Flandin, the lawyer who had argued for French rule of Syria, had wisely warned his countrymen not to treat the Syrians as primitive, and predicted that they would need to ‘demonstrate regularity in administration, incorruptibility and impartiality in justice and probity in financial matters’ to win their support.7 However, six years on, in practice French rule in Syria and Lebanon appeared increasingly arbitrary, confessional, exploitative and corrupt. After Gouraud had seized Damascus in 1920, his secretary de Caix bluntly set out the options open to the general. France could either ‘build a Syrian nation which does not yet exist . . . by smoothing out the deep rifts which still divide it’, he suggested, or ‘cultivate and maintain all the phenomena, requiring our arbitration, that these divisions give [us]. I must say that only the second option interests me.’8 Gouraud agreed. In August 1920 he hived off Lebanon in a bid to curry favour with the significant Christian population there, and carved up Syria into four separate provinces that divided Damascus and Aleppo and recognised the minority Alawite and Druze sects.

In his mid-fifties, Tegart had recently retired as commissioner of police in Calcutta, to widespread praise. Originally from Londonderry, he had been sent to the Indian city after it was beset by a series of politically motivated assassinations on the assumption that his Irishness endowed him with some special insight into the terrorist’s mind. In fact, Tegart had turned the situation around by a mixture of instinct, imperturbability, luck and a readiness to break the rules. Although tall and muscular, with dark-blue eyes and a Celt’s reddish skin, he proved remarkably adept at disguise, passing himself off as a Sikh taxi driver, a Kabuli or a Pashtun, in night-time intelligence-gathering missions. Despite the threat to his own life from bomb-throwers, by day he drove around the city in an open car; his dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, skulked behind him in the hood. Tegart’s devil-may-care attitude inspired his colleagues, who became convinced that ‘somehow or other he could not fail’, a feeling reinforced by his survival of several unsuccessful attempts on his life – and another close shave that was self-inflicted.23 Having for a while used a small iron bomb as a paperweight, believing it was inert, one day as a joke he had hurled it at a map across his office. ‘Instantly,’ according to a contemporary, ‘there was a shattering explosion, part of the wall blew out, dust and debris littered the room, and members of the staff came running in convinced that yet another assa...

When the Australians crossed the border the first Frenchman they met, at the police post on the frontier, was still in bed. On the right, the British reached the town of Dara by lunchtime on the first day of their advance. Just as they had hoped, the Druzes quickly offered their support and the French officer in charge of the dusty railway junction equally quickly defected. The Frenchman explained how, when he had been trying to escape northwards and the front wheel of his car had parted company from its axle, the choice had been very simple. ‘We became Free French at once!’

Sometime afterwards a British officer, John Hackett, who had been wounded in the advance towards Damascus, met a Vichy officer he knew who had been hurt in the same encounter. As they dissected the engagement over lunch at the Hôtel St Georges in Beirut, the Frenchman claimed that his side had been the better of the two. ‘Well, Jacques, in the end we did win, we did win,’ replied Hackett. ‘Yes,’ his counterpart grimaced, ‘and that is the least satisfactory aspect of the whole squalid episode.’

Truman afterwards admitted that he had been subjected to a ‘constant barrage’ from ‘a few of the extreme Zionist leaders’ who ‘were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly’.19 But he denied that he had succumbed to this unprecedented pressure and refuted allegations that his country had put pressure on other states before the vote. ‘I have never approved of the practice of the strong imposing their will on the weak, whether among men or among nations. We had aided Greece. We had in fact fathered the independence of the Philippines. But that did not make satellites of these nations or compel them to vote with us on the partitioning of Palestine or any other matter.’ The pressure that his ambassador, Baruch, put on Parodi, however, contradicts that pious claim. Either Truman was lying, or he was not fully in control of his administration. Interestingly, he did not mention France in his denial.

It was Stirling’s counterpart in neighbouring Israel, a well-known Times reporter named Louis Heren, who drew attention to the source of the rumours that his colleague had played a part in Zaim’s removal. The man who later coined that axiom of dogged journalism, ‘Always ask yourself why these lying bastards are lying to you’, Heren pointed out that it was not the Syrians but the French news agency Agence France Presse that had first alleged that Stirling was a spy, reviving the claims made by the French general Fernand Oliva-Roget after the failed French coup in Damascus in June 1945.8 In Heren’s view the shooting of Stirling related to this old feud. It was, he said, part of a ‘rather stupid and unnecessary and certainly dangerous unofficial struggle being waged between certain Frenchmen and Englishmen in these parts’.9 And he suggested that ‘the Colonel knows more about the reason for the attempt than he cares to admit’, a diplomatic way of suggesting that Stirling was rather more than a newspaper reporter.

Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews in Palestine and France’s favouritism of the Christians in the Lebanon were policies designed to strengthen their respective positions in the region by eliciting gratitude from both minorities. The appreciation they generated by doing so was short-lived, but they deeply antagonised the predominantly Muslim Arab population of both countries, and the wider region, with irreversible effects. As Britain and France became increasingly unpopular, they were forced into oscillating alliances that only polarised Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim further. The mandatories’ abrupt changes of policy under pressure, and their refusal to institute meaningful, representative government, made it clear to those they ruled that violence worked. Until the Second World War the British reluctantly accepted the presence of the French as what their ambassador to Cairo, Lord Killearn, termed ‘an unnecessary evil which we must just make the best of’.26 While a further war with Germany looked possible, then likely, and finally inevitable, Britain’s relations with metropolitan France were more important. ‘The plain fact was that the presence of the French in the Levant States was a perpetual irritant which upset British policy in the Middle East,’ Killearn acknowledged, ‘but I had always realised that we here ought to conform and adapt our local policy to the needs of our higher interests in regard to metropolitan France which was our neighbour just across the chann...