The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Christopher Sykes Simon

light of his mother’s situation. She was at her lowest ebb. Her friends had all dropped her. She could not approach her brothers, who were all respectably married with families, while her younger sister Venetia, married to an American millionaire, Arthur James, and one of Society’s leading hostesses, considered that she had disgraced herself beyond measure and would have nothing to do with her. She had been turned out of the house in Grosvenor Street and, to cap it all, in December 1898 she suffered the death of her beloved brother-in-law, Christopher, who had been one of the few people to stand by her through all her troubles. Mark decided that before he left on his next journey, he would make one more effort to persuade his father and his lawyers to reach a final settlement with Jessie. ‘Dear Cousin Henry,’ he wrote to Cholmondeley, ‘… would you try & get a meeting arranged between yourself, my father, Gardener [sic] and I at Gardner’s [sic] office, this is the last chance of a settlement, & worth trying, my mother is really broken and would accept any reasonable terms. I hope I can trust you to arrange this meeting as after that I should feel quite unresponsible for any further disgraces & that I had done all possible to stop it …’16

      Confident that he had set the wheels in motion to try and help his mother, he prepared to set out for Syria. On the eve of his departure he went to mass in Cambridge to take one last look at Edith, an event which reinforced his feelings for her. ‘If you knew the agony of mind I went through,’ he wrote to her on his return, ‘… when I saw you leave the church and I went away without a word, if you knew how I felt that day, how I shook as if with an ague, with dry mouth and trembling steps, how I watched you go away further and further, and by quickening my steps I could have caught you up and didn’t for fear that you might have some small inkling what was in my mind before I chose you should, because I thought to myself, perhaps I am only in love …’17

      Mark left for Syria on 14 December, intending to return to the Haurân in the hope of making more discoveries, but things did not work out quite the way he had hoped. The country was divided into three districts, or Wilayets: Aleppo in the north, Beirut in the west and south, and Damascus, which embraced the whole country east of the river Jordan. Each of these was governed by a Wâli, and was in turn divided into districts which themselves were governed by more officials. No progress could be made by the traveller without a series of permissions, the issue of which was by no means certain, often leading to days or even weeks of delays. For some reason, ‘difficulties arose’ and Mark was refused a permit by Nazim Pasha, the Wâli of Damascus, to visit the Haurân. Instead, he decided to travel to Baghdad by way of Aleppo.

      The party left Damascus on 17 January. ‘I took with me,’ wrote Mark, ‘a dragoman, a cook, a waiter, four muleteers, and a groom; seven Syrian mules … two good country horses for myself and one each for the cook and the waiter; a Persian pony for the dragoman; and last, though not least, a Kurdish sheepdog that answered to the name of Barud, i.e Gunpowder, and not only attended the pitching and striking of the camp but after nightfall undertook the entire responsibility of guarding it.’18 Of the attendants, including Michael Sala, the cook, and Jacob Arab, the waiter, by far the most important was the dragoman, a Cypriot Christian called Isá Kubrusli, whose job was to act as interpreter and guide. A striking-looking man with piercing eyes, he had worked as a dragoman for forty years, in which time he had served a number of important Englishmen, notably Sir Charles Wilson on his expedition to locate Mount Sinai in 1865, and Frederick Thesiger in the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867–8, ‘Thirty years ago,’ Mark wrote, ‘a dragoman was a person of importance; a man similar in character to the confidential courier who in the last century accompanied young noblemen on the Grand Tour. But he has degenerated and for the most part is now simply a bear leader, to hoards [sic] of English and Americans who invade Syria during the touring season.’19

      Isá, who worked for the Jerusalem office of Thomas Cook, had a very poor opinion of most of his clients. Unlike the rich and cultured gentlemen he had encountered in the old days, who wore beards, could ride and shoot beautifully, and were liberal with ‘baksheesh’, ‘Now everything very different,’ he used to say. ‘Many very fat and wear rubbish clotheses; many very old men; many very meselable; some ride like monkeys; and some I see afraid from the horses. Den noder kind of Henglish he not believe notin; he laugh for everything and everybody; he call us poor meselable black; he say everything is nonsense and was no God and notin …’20

      In the first week of their journey, the weather deteriorated by the day, with constant rain and hail storms, and eventually turning to snow, which got heavier and heavier until ‘the weather was too cold for camping, so I telegraphed to Damascus for a carriage to take me to Aleppo’. Eventually an ‘antique monstrosity’ arrived, drawn by four horses abreast. It was ‘enormously broad, with a rumble for baggage behind’ and ‘had the appearance of a decayed bandbox on a brewer’s dray; and, as I found to my cost, was extraordinarily uncomfortable’.21 Their first stop was at the village of Hasieh, ‘the most desolate and filthy little village that it has ever been my luck to visit’. The guest house consisted ‘of a large heap of offal with four rooms leading off it: the first and best was occupied by the cow; the second which was not quite so clean, was given to me; in the other two most of the villagers were gathered together to watch my cook preparing what he called “roast whale and potted hyæna”, that is roast veal and potted ham’.22

      It was a miracle that they ever reached Aleppo, considering that, in the early hours of one morning, the troublesome coachman made an attempt to sabotage the journey by deliberately overturning the coach. ‘The carriage fell on its side with a fearful thud,’ recalled Mark, ‘which was accompanied by a howl of terror from both the dragoman and the cook. The ensuing scene was not without a humorous side. The carriage opened and spat out a curious assortment of men and things on the scrub of the Syrian desert, and it was only when the cook, the bath, the medicine chest and the dragoman had been lifted off me that I was able to survey the scene of the accident. Its appearance reminded me exactly of those admirable pictures drawn in Christmas numbers of illustrated papers of Gretna Green elopements coming to grief in a ditch; luckily however no lady was present, for the language made use of, whether in Arabic or in English, was neither that of the Koran nor Sunday-at-Home.’ When they did finally reach their destination, he found it ‘not altogether a pleasant town’. The natives had a penchant for throwing stones at the hats of foreigners, and often had faces disfigured by ‘Delhi Boils’, which gave them ‘a most sinister expression’. Almost everyone he met, he wrote, who was not a native, ‘seemed to be trying to get away from the place, without success’.23

      Six days in Aleppo was quite enough. The party then struck out for Baghdad. Not a day went by without Mark being either amused or frustrated by the character of local people. ‘Their ideas of time and space are nil,’ he noted. ‘If you ask how far away a certain village is, you may be told “one hour”, be the real distance anything from five minutes to twelve hours; or, when you are beginning to feel tired, everyone you ask during the space of a couple of hours may tell you that you are only “seven hours” from your destination. This is really … most annoying.’ At Meskeneh he got his first view of the Euphrates, which did not greatly impress him. ‘Its water is so muddy,’ he noted, ‘that it is impossible to see through a wine-glass filled with it.’24

      Meskeneh was the first of a series of military outposts, manned by police or mounted infantry, which lined the high road from Aleppo to Baghdad. They were intended to help keep order in the valley, and to prevent the Anezeh Arabs from crossing the Euphrates, and it was at one of these that Mark now spent each night. When he finally reached the first bridge across the river at Falúja, the final stop before Baghdad, he was amused by what he found there. ‘There is a telegraph wire which crosses the river but there is no telegraph office; the only official in the place is the collector of tolls who dozes most of the day on the bridge; there are no troops;