Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (64 page)

*
From 1922, when Shaw first met him, Lawrence floats eerily into and out of Shaw’s plays: not only as Saint Joan, but elsewhere: as Private Meek in Too True to Be Good,and even as Adolphus Cusins, Barbara’s fiance in Major Barbara. Cusins is a slight,unassuming Greek scholar who in the end decides to become an armaments king, and hisdescription again might also serve for Lawrence: he is afflicted with a frivolous sense of humor … a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character presents himself as and indeed actually is considerate,gentle, explanatory … capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.(New York: random house, 1952, 228.)

*
Even in the United Kingdom there was doubt. Asquith, the prime minister, noted in his diary on March 13, 1915, that “the only other partisan of this proposal [the Balfour Declaration] is Lloyd George who, i need not say, does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future.” (earl of oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections,1928.)

*
There are conflicting accounts of Lawrence’s camel borne field library, but Liddell hart, who got the information from Lawrence himself, reports that he carried with him Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the comedies of Aristophanes

*
This is the same place as Abu el Lissal. Transliterations of Arabic place names into English were, and remain, idiosyncratic.

*
A tender was an open car converted into the equivalent of what Americans call a pickup truck.

*
his position was not unique. Captain J. r. Shakespear played much the same role toward ibn Saud on behalf of the government of india. When Shakespear was killed in a desert skirmish, he was replaced by St. John Philby, the noted Arabist, ornithologist,and convert to islam, and father of the master spy and traitor Kim Philby.

*
Wavell meant, in modern terms, 12,000 cavalrymen, 57,000 infantrymen, and an artillery strength of 540 guns.

*
These were the standard “bangers” of the British army. Lawrence occasionally ate meat, when it was a question of being polite to his Arab hosts, or when there was nothing else to eat but camel meat. on at least one occasion he expressed pleasure at a piece of gazelle roasted over an open fire. his vegetarian bent was not dogmatic

*
The famous term describing non upper class usage that is, lower middle class and middle class usage that Nancy Mitford enshrined in the english language when she wrote “The english Aristocracy” for Encounter in 1954. Whatever else he was, Lawrence was an oxonian who spoke impeccable upper class english. The word “powwow”from a fellow officer would grate on his nerves as much as “serviette” for “napkin.”

*
in his memoir, The Fire of Life, General Barrow asserts he had no such conversation with Lawrence, and that since indian cavalry regiments on the Northwest Frontier always had a certain number of riding camels attached to them, he was as familiar with camels as Lawrence was. on the otherhand, Barrow may not have realized only a fewhours after the scene between them at Deraa that Lawrence was pulling hisleg.

*
To put this in perspective, the number of the brothers’ Algerian followers in and around Damascus may have been as high as 12,000 to 15,000 people (David Fromkin,A Peace to End All Peace, New York: holt, 1989, 336).

*
Abd el Kader would eventually be shot by sharifian police outside his home in Damascus on September 3, 1919 a classic instance of the clich “shot while attempting to escape.” Mohammed Said lived on to become a supporter of French rule in Syria.

CHAPTER NINE
In the Great World

… that younger successor of Mohammed, Colonel Lawrence, the twenty-eight-year-old conqueror of Damascus, with his boyish face and almost constant smile—the most winning figure … of the whole Peace Conference.

         —James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference

D
espite General Allenby’s abruptness, he and Lawrence had not lost their esteem for each other. Allenby may well have felt that Lawrence’s departure from Syria would make it easier for Feisal to get used to the inevitable, in the form of a French replacement, but if so he was wrong. Throughout the coming peace talks in Paris Lawrence would remain—to the fury of the French, and the occasional exasperation of the British Foreign Office—Feisal’s confidant, constant companion, interpreter, and adviser, the only European with whom Feisal could let his guard down. In Cairo, Lawrence gave Lady Allenby one of his most treasured mementos, the prayer rug from his first attack on a Turkish train. Allenby not only wrote to Clive Wigram,
*
assistant private secretary to King George V, asking him“to arrange for an audience with the King” for Lawrence, but at Lawrence’s request made him “a temporary, special and acting full colonel,” a rank that entitled Lawrence to take the fast train from Taranto to Paris instead of a slower troop train, and to have a sleeping berth on the journey. Allenby also wrote to the Foreign Office to say that Lawrence was on his way to London to present Feisal’s point of view on the subject of Syria.

Lawrence’s return therefore had a semiofficial gloss—far from coming home to shed his rank and be “demobilized,” in the military jargon of the day, Lawrence arrived with the crown and two stars of a colonel on his shoulders and a string of interviews arranged at the very highest level of government. Although Lawrence claimed to have felt like “a man dropping a heavy load,” there seems to have been no doubt in his mind, or Allenby’s, that he was returning to Britain to take up the Arab cause.

Lawrence was exhausted, thin almost to emaciation, weighing no more than eighty pounds, as opposed to his usual 112. This is borne out both by Lawrence’s older brother Bob, who was shocked by his appearance when he arrived home, and by James McBey’s startling portrait of him, painted in Damascus, in which his face is as thin and sharp as a dagger, and his eyes are enormous and profoundly sad. It is the face of a man worn out by danger, stress, responsibility, and disappointment. The faintly ironic smile on his lips seems to suggest that he already suspects nothing he fought for is likely to happen. The confusion, chaos, jealousies, and violence in Damascus may already have convinced him that there was not going to be a noble ending to his adventures.

On the ship from Port Said to Taranto, Italy, Lawrence persuaded his fellow passenger and former fellow soldier, Lord Winterton, a member of Parliament, to write on his behalf requesting interviews with Lord Robert Cecil (the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs
*
) and A. J. Balfour (the foreign secretary). Lawrence also interrupted his journey in Rome for a talk with Georges-Picot about the French position in Syria. During the course of this discussion Picot made it very clear, if there had been any doubt in Lawrence’s mind, that France remained determined to have Lebanon and Syria, and rule them from Paris in much the same way as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There was a place for Prince Feisal as the head of a government approved by France, and under the tutelage of a French governor-general and a French military commander, but he should have no illusions about creating an independent sovereign state.

Tragedy: Lawrence, exhausted, emaciated, and shorn of illusions. Damascus, 1918.

There occurred on this journey an incident that puzzled Lawrence’s biographers while he was still alive and provided material for them long after his death. Either at Taranto, between the ship and the train, or at Marseille, where the train presumably stopped before going on to Paris, Lawrence saw a British major dressing down a private for failing to salute, and humiliating the private by making him salute over and over again. Lawrence intervened, and when the major asked him what business it was of his, he removed his uniform mackintosh, which had no epaulets and hence no badges of rank; revealed the crown and two stars of a full colonel on his shoulders; pointed out that the major had failed to salute
him
; and made the major do so several times. Lowell Thomas’s version of this incident differs radically from Liddell Hart’s: according to Thomas, Lawrence asks the railway transport officer (RTO) at the Marseille station, a lieutenant-colonel (“a huge fellow, with a fierce moustache”), what time his train leaves, is snubbed, and then takes off his raincoat to show that he outranks the pompous RTO. In Robert Graves’s biography, Lawrence sees “a major … bullying two privates … for not saluting him,” and neglects to return their salute until Lawrence appears and makes him do so. Whichever one of these stories is true, they all illustrate the same point, which is Lawrence’s dislike of conventional discipline and of officers’ abusing their power over “other ranks.”

One point that the indefatigable Jeremy Wilson has clearly demonstrated in his exhaustive authorized biography is that there is always a germ of truth in every story Lawrence told about himself, though over the years Lawrence sometimes improved and embellished such stories. Taranto seems much more likely as the place where this occurred, first of all because there were more British troops at Taranto, but also because it had been only a matter of days then since General Chauvel’s inopportune complaint in Damascus about the Arabs’ failing to salute British officers, so the subject of saluting may still have been very much on Lawrence’s mind. This was also the first time in more than two years that Lawrence was dressed in a British uniform and found himself among British officers and men. In the desert, he had neither saluted nor encouraged British personnel below his rank to salute him. Now he was back in the army. He was returning to a world where rank mattered and class distinctions were absolute, a world very different from the rough simplicity of desert warfare.

He arrived home “on or about October 24th,” but spent only a few days with his family in Oxford before getting down to the business of securing Syria for Feisal and the Arabs. Only four days later, thanks to Winterton’s letter of introduction, he had a long interview with Lord Robert Cecil, perhaps the most eminent, respectable, and idealistic figure in Lloyd George’s government. Cecil was a son of the marquess of Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister who had dominated late Victorian politics; the Cecil family traced its tradition of public service back to 1571, when Queen Elizabeth I made William Cecil her lord treasurer. Robert Cecil was an Old Etonian, an Oxonian, a distinguished and successful lawyer, an architect of the League of Nations, and a firm believer in Esperanto as a universal common language. He would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, among many other honors. The fact that he was willing to see Lawrence on such short notice is a tribute not only to Lord Winterton’s reputation, but to Lawrence’s growing fame as a hero. Of course he was not yet the celebrity he would become when Lowell Thomas had established him in the public mind as “Lawrence of Arabia,” but his service in the desert was already sufficiently well known to open doors that would surely have remained closed to anyone else. Cecil’s notes on the meeting—in which he shrewdly comments that Lawrence always refers to Feisal and the Arabs as “we"—make it clear that Lawrence’s ideas on the future of the Middle East were both intelligent and far-reaching, and were viewed with sympathy by one of the most influential figures in what would later come to be called “the establishment.” The next day, Lawrence had an equally long and persuasive discussion with Lieutenant-General Sir George Macdonogh, GBE, KCB, KCMG, adjutant-general of the British army, and creator of MI7, an intelligence unit intended to sabotage German morale. Macdonogh, who was very well informed about the Middle East, afterward circulated to the war cabinet a long and admiring report on his discussion with Lawrence, the gist of which was that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be dropped, Syria should be “under the control” of Feisal, Feisal’s half brother Zeid should rule northern Mesopotamia, and Feisal’s brother Abdulla should rule southern Mesopotamia—in short, Lawrence converted Macdonogh.

Perhaps as a result of the “Macdonogh memorandum,” Lawrence was invited to address the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet on October 29, only five days after he had arrived back in Britain. Deducting two days for the time he had spent with his family in Oxford, Lawrence had reached the highest level of the British government in seventy-two hours. Judging from Macdonogh’s memorandum, he did so first by the lucidity and intelligence of his ideas, and second because what he had to say was viewed with intense sympathy. The British government believed, like Lawrence, that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be discarded; that Arabs and Zionists should cooperate in Palestine under the protection of a British administration; that Mesopotamia should be an Arab “protectorate,” ruled from Cairo, not from Delhi; and that Arab ambitions (and British promises) in Syria should be respected. If Lawrence was not quite preaching to the converted, he was at any rate preaching to those who were prepared to convert. On the other hand, since there were still few signs that the war was about to end suddenly—in twenty-three days, in fact—the general feeling was that there was still plenty of time to bring the French around to this point of view. The British also believed that Woodrow Wilson would certainly denounce the Sykes-Picot agreement as a perfect example of secret diplomacy, which he wanted to end once and for all. Lawrence, who had after all stopped in Rome to talk directly to Picot, had a good idea of just how intransigent the French were likely to be; but perhaps sensibly, he does not seem to have raised this with either Cecil or Macdonogh.

In any event, Lawrence’s appearance at the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet is almost as much of a puzzle for biographers as the story about the saluting incident at Taranto or Marseille. He himself once said that he “was more a legion than a man,” a reference to the man from Gadara whose name was “Legion” because he was possessed by so many demons. Lawrence found no difficulty in presenting different versions of himself to people throughout his lifetime, hence the often wildly conflicting reactions to him.

The meeting was chaired by the Rt. Hon. the Earl Curzon, KG, GSCI, GCIE, PC, former viceroy of India, leader of the House of Lords, one of the most widely traveled men ever to sit in a British cabinet, and perhaps one of the most formidable and hardworking political figures of his time. A graduate of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he was in some respects everything that Lawrence was not: his career at Oxford had been glittering, both academically and socially; he was renowned for his arrogance and inflexibility (caused in part by the fact that a riding injury in his youth obliged him to wear a steel corset that inflicted on him unceasing, lifelong pain, and made his posture seem unnaturally stiff and straight). His attitude toward life was grandly aristocratic, so that he sometimes seemed more appropriate to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century.

As Lawrence later told the story, he sat before the committee while Curzon made a long speech, outlining and praising Lawrence’s feats—a speech that for some reason Lawrence “chafed at.” Lawrence may, as he later complained, have found this speech patronizing, particularly since he knew most of the members of the committee, but it is more likely that Curzon’s grandiloquent manner simply rubbed him the wrong way. In any case, once Curzon finished, he asked if Lawrence wished to say anything, and Lawrence answered: “Yes, let’s get to business. You people don’t understand yet the hole you have put us all into.”

Lawrence, writing to Robert Graves in 1927, added: “Curzon burst promptly into tears, great drops running down his cheeks, to an accompaniment of slow sobs. It was horribly like a mediaeval miracle, a lachryma Christi, happening to a Buddha. Lord Robert Cecil, hardened to such scenes, presumably, interposed roughly, ‘Now old man, none of that.’ Curzon dried up instanter.” Lawrence then warned Graves, “I doubt if I’d publish it, if you do, don’t put it on my authority. Say a late member of the F.O. [Foreign Office] Staff told you.”

There are many questions about this account, some of which are obvious. First, why would Curzon ask if there was anything Lawrence wished to say, since Lawrence’s whole reason for being there was to speak to the committee? Second, it is hard to imagine Lord Robert Cecil, the most gentlemanly of men, speaking to anyone “roughly.” The spectacle of Curzon sobbing at a meeting of a committee of the war cabinet would certainly have startled the other members, and in fact, after Graves’s biography of Lawrence was published, Cecil wrote to Curzon’s daughter, Lady Cynthia Mosley,
*
denying that the incident had ever happened: “I feel quite certain that your father never burst into tears, and I am even more certain that I have never addressed him in the way described under any circumstances.” As for Curzon’s speech about Lawrence, Cecil wrote: “Colonel Lawrence listened with the most marked attention, and spoke to me afterwards in the highest appreciation of your father’s attitude.”