‘I was shocked at all this. My whole world was being turned on its head, shaken, and then kicked into touch.
‘ “How is Colonel Lawrence taking this?” I finally asked.
‘ “Well might you ask that question. Ever since the Deraa incident he has become somewhat changed.”
‘ “The Deraa incident?”
‘ “Yes, he was doing an Alfred the Great among the Danes finding out the enemy’s strength and disposition when he got caught. He was then brutally beaten and physically abused. He’s not been quite the same since. HQ says that you are here to give Colonel Lawrence every support and keep him on the road to Damascus. I think he needs it or this whole theatre could crumble and the glorious conquest of Jerusalem will be merely a footnote in a neglected military history.”
‘ “Where is Lawrence now?”
‘ “We believe somewhere near Azrak. There’s a lot of snow about apparently so we won’t be seeing him for a few months, although we have reason to believe that he won a famous victory at Tafileh in January. We shall keep you informed.”
‘I felt that I was being fobbed off. There was a certain buzz about the place but I could not find anyone who would explain it to me. I sat on “Bull Pup’s” running board and watched the sunset.
‘As you know, Stamford, sunsets there are different from here. The sun becomes a great blood-orange sponge absorbing all the heat from the earth’s crust before there is one final blast of heat and it disappears in a few minutes over the horizon. Those few minutes are like something from another time, another planet far more vibrant than our modern world with its electric lights, trams, vagaries of fashion, and machines. It has the effect of making one contemplate one’s existence. Then the stars come out, so bright against the sable velvet of the desert sky. There are no fogs or smoking chimneys to obscure the view. No man-made progress to befuddle the senses. It is as though they are communing with the earth. They even look nearer. It makes you feel a true part in some great plan whose solution is written in the stars waiting to be deciphered like some celestial hieroglyph. I wonder if we shall ever find the solution to the cartouche?’
Watson again fell into thought. I waited a moment but decided to shake him from his musings before he went in too deeply.
‘What we need is a sort of Rosetta Stone to give us a clue.’
‘Indeed, young Stamford, true,’ he remarked, but he was still far away. Presently he returned. ‘Excuse me, Stamford, but I was just thinking how beautiful it all was — and is at this very moment as we sit here talking. It will be midnight or thereabouts now over there and over the deserts of Arabia Bedouin will be wrapped in their blankets in sand hollows fashioning dreams from what the stars are telling them. But what can we see from our window? Hardly a thing, only glare and congestion. Halley’s Comet could come up Piccadilly and no-one would notice. It is as though we have cut ourselves off from God and nature. What have we forfeited with our civilization?
‘However, that is only part of my story although one of the most important parts for me personally. That evening I chatted with C-----, H------, and a couple of the others about Lawrence. All agreed in the broad outlines, but it was in the details that differences started to appear, some like hairline cracks, others more pronounced. They were unanimous in saying that the success of the Arab revolt was largely owing to TE as they called him. He was the inspiration, the willpower, the conciliator, the sheer hard worker of the enterprise. Without him the Bedouin would have soon dissipated their energies in old blood feuds and blind alleys. He gave them direction and a dogged resolution when the going got tough.
‘It was when it came to Lawrence the man that the embarrassed silences started. “He seems to have won everybody over but himself,” was one opinion. All agreed that he was like a flawed diamond. Many of the facets were brilliant, the others simply glass windows to a deeper self. He was a mixture of academic, man of action, romantic, and perpetual schoolboy. What would I make of him? asked C ----, his eyes fixing me in a steady gaze.
‘What indeed? When was I going to meet him to be able to form an opinion? The snow was still pretty thick in the mountains but gone at GHQ.
‘The next day D----- called me to his office. “Sorry about this, but I took the liberty of getting back to General Allenby yesterday when someone said he recognized you as someone else. It’s all been cleared up now, I’m happy to say. We can’t be too careful you know. In that case, may I introduce you to Colonel Lawrence?”
‘I stood up in surprise at D-----’s words. They were so sudden and unexpected. “A bit of snow does not stop an Oxford man getting through,” said D----- signalling the door. I swivelled around and saw framed in the doorway a short, slight figure, barefoot, clad in white Arab robes. He seemed embarrassed to come forward. D----- left us. When he had, the figure stepped forward more resolutely and held out a surprisingly gnarled hand for me to shake. There was strength as well as reticence in the handshake. “Dr Watson, I presume?” he said smiling.
‘ “Forgive me,” he continued. “I am the cause of you being shuttled from one person to another because I recognized you as Dr Watson, not as the name and rank that you are masquerading under. London is so secretive these days. There are no revolutionaries here, doctor, except ourselves of course.”
‘We both laughed and sat down. “Then there is no need to deceive you as to my mission, Colonel Lawrence?”
‘ “Indeed not. If London has sent you to keep an eye on me you may reassure them that I will carry out their deceptions for them to the best of my abilities, but I shall always champion the Arab cause.”
‘This man was obviously no fool and his rapid perceptions were just like Holmes’s. I remarked so to him and he laughed a curious high-pitched laugh and said, “A compliment indeed. I thought you might think of me more as a Wiggins[2] than as a Holmes.” We both laughed. The ice had been broken. He then decided that there was only one thing for it and that was that I should stay close to him for the rest of the campaign — ‘ “Bull Pup’ will be very useful,” ’ he assured me.
‘When I look back on that first meeting I cannot but reflect on how that first handshake seemed to sum up TE as far as I could judge. Strength and reticence. It had seemed as though he was hiding in his robes, his body shrinking from contact with the cloth and his face sheltering beneath the shade of the headdress. Yet it would have been impossible for him to hide, clad as he was in such contrast to our desert uniforms and the Arab’s many colours. That first impression of a walking contradiction never left me, but as he stood there his brilliant eyes sparkling I felt that I was in the company of an exceptional presence only equalled in my experience by the great detective of Baker Street.
‘The next few months saw us in action in many places blowing up bridges, and “planting tulips” as we called the gun cotton charges that we employed to disfigure the railway lines. I saw action by car and by camel. The movement of the camel I found very difficult to master and felt something akin to sea-sickness. “Bull Pup” certainly did his bit, usually as a support car. We even had a race on a flat piece of land and got up to sixty-seven miles an hour. Not bad with three-and-a-half tons of armour cladding on board, I thought. I enjoyed it all immensely. It was a soldier’s life. Yet still I kept my watching brief on my subject. Curiously he seemed to welcome it as if he felt that he could not always trust himself to do his English duty and needed someone to keep an eye on him. He certainly led his Arabs with great gusto — almost too much gusto at times. He cut a splendid figure in his white robes leading his personal bodyguard of fierce fighters. The English military called them his cut-throats. TE retaliated by saying that at least they cut only the throats he ordered cut.
‘I felt the years roll back from me as the mood of the hour took over myself too. It was as though I was making up for the time I had lost in my earlier campaign so soon cut short by that Jezai bullet.
‘July and August saw an intensity of activity. These months were taken up in preparation
for the final push to Damascus and the final overthrow of the Ottoman Empire.
‘ “The road to Damascus, doctor,” TE once remarked to me. “Will we find enlightenment or disillusionment? Either way is suffering as Saul knew.”
‘ “But Paul was his resurrection, TE,” I replied.
‘He smiled and galloped way ahead. After some mirage?
‘One of our encounters with the Turkish cavalry had seen our three armoured cars destroy nearly sixty horses. Despite the jubilation around me I felt deeply saddened by the death of these beautiful Arab horses. Slaughtered by modern grey machinery, albeit Rolls-Royces, their deaths seemed to symbolize the death of the old order of which I was part.
‘TE continued his constant travelling which I found very wearing. His abilities and energies astonished me and I feared that he would suffer the sort of reaction Holmes did after a glut of work before the final battle for Damascus. I travelled to the haunted old fortress of Azrak, to the port of Akaba which had been won so gloriously by TE, high-walled Itm, the other worldly Rumm and many other places besides. Sometimes I went by camel, sometimes in a Rolls-Royce armoured car, even by aeroplane for my one and only time. An experience that I was glad to have — but an occupation that I would gladly leave to others.
‘We survived the flight and lived to fight another day, blowing up bridges and railway lines in an effort to cut Turkish communications and fool them into believing that the main push was to be in the east whereas Allenby was preparing his main strike force for the western coast.
‘When we reached Bair and started watering our camels, a long job at the best of times, but here the wells were deeper and so consequently the job took longer, I casually remarked to TE that it was Napoleon’s birthday — one of the very few dates I could ever remember, history not being my strong suit, particularly chronology. To my surprise TE turned to me and replied, “Yes I know; it’s mine too, I’m thirty today.” He had a faraway look in his eye and I knew that he was in a very retrospective mood.
‘ “Shall we talk?” I asked him.
‘ “Later, perhaps, doctor,” he replied distractedly.
‘He spent most of the day in solitude, thinking. There was a squabble over camels which TE soon sorted out and we broke camp to meet up with the Camel Corps that evening. As fate would have it they missed the rendezvous and so TE and I were able to sit and watch the sunset with its brilliant, elemental ball of fire that gave one last blast of heat and light before leaving the wind-sculpted sand in silent stillness.
‘ “I don’t want to see such a sunset at the moment,” murmured TE. “I want the mist and cloud that covers England. Here the elements make for black and white, there the grey mists and clouds make for compromise. It has crossed my mind that the greatest single factor to influence history is climate. Thus the British see only shades of grey and so are ripe for conciliation and compromise, whereas the Arab has fire and temper.”
‘It was best to let TE think aloud; it was as though after so long speaking in Arabic that he could now articulate his thoughts in his own native tongue and the exercise was therapeutic.
‘ “The Balfour Declaration seems to be an interesting attempt at the giving of justice to a maligned race by an imperial power in recognition of the sins of another. I am sure that letting Jews into Palestine could be a good thing. The Bedouin and other Arabs love their desert and their empty places; it is from such voids that they gain their strength, but to the Jew the town is all. They should complement each other — if they can forget being theological and be logical instead.”
‘ “But who can predict the future? Has this war solved the world’s problems? Does any war? Why did we go to war? I can’t really remember now.”
‘ “There is an Arab saying, doctor, to the effect that each man believes his ticks to be gazelles that can leap and soar, thus fulfilling their dreams. My ticks became gazelles at Akaba, and as we entered Jerusalem. They are firmly ticks again now and those that are not dead are eating into my carrion flesh like predators.
‘ “I have been in this part of the world on and off for the best part of seven years. It is too long this speaking in foreign tongues fighting another man’s war.
‘ “Do you remember that flight from Guiveira? It was your first and only flight I believe, doctor. Did you know that I longed for the plane to crash so that I might be freed from my dishonoured life and my deceptions to this noble people? You’re shivering, doctor, what is it?”
‘ “Nothing,” I replied. “At least I hope not.”
‘ “You wish to come into Damascus with us? Shall we enter in ‘Bull Pup?’ ”
‘ “No, my mission is over. You must take my Rolls and the ‘Blue Mist’. I do not deserve to be there. If you feel dishonoured by the work you have done in deceiving these Bedouin who are far nobler than I and many Englishmen believed before they met them, then you can imagine how I have felt these last few months having been sent to spy on you and ensure that you keep up the lie. If you had not seen through it all so immediately that day in D-----’s office, it would have been intolerable for me. Instead I feel that I have made a friend. I have been lucky, yet I fear that it will be many sunsets under moody English skies before your hurts are righted.”
‘TE seemed most affected by my words and sat cross-legged in silence. I noticed his toes kneading the still warm sand and his gaze intently studying the process. At length he spoke. “I now understand why Mr Sherlock Holmes so valued your company. You have the ability to listen and to give strength.”
‘ “Holmes did not put it quite that way,” I corrected him.
‘ “No matter, doctor, we all know what is meant.”
‘ “You will be lionised in London. Will you accept the decorations of your king and the adulation of an empire?”
‘ “Don’t ask me such a question. I cannot bear crowds, I detest being touched, and you know my views on receiving rewards for my mendacious work here.”
‘We sat in silence. The stars were shining and the earth smelled sweet. A tragic tenor aria welled up in my ears and caught the melancholy of the moment with cruel finality.
‘ “Just one question, doctor. Why were you known as Dr Ross to all the other fellows?”
‘ “Surely you realize the need for secrecy, TE.”
‘ “I beg your pardon, I am not expressing myself clearly. Why Ross?”
‘ “I’ll tell you when we meet again in London when all this is over.”
‘TE smiled and repeated the word “Ross” as though to remember it. He seemed content with some small crumb of comfort that I had given him. It was the last time that we spoke. The next day he was off on his road to Damascus and my job was done.
‘Once again I was struck down by that curse of Empire, enteric fever, on my return journey. I only recovered enough to go out of my rooms here yesterday. I had thought of seeing my literary agent to sort out my book of Holmes’s cases, but there was one person that I was burning to see before him — Mycroft Holmes. It was he who had appealed to my sense of patriotism and duty, who had suavely praised my abilities to handle TE, who had turned me into a traitor to conscience.
‘I found him reading the late editions of the newspapers in one of the Diogenes Club’s main rooms. As you may know, Stamford, no member is allowed to take any notice of any other one and talking is so frowned upon that three offences render the talker liable to expulsion. I was not a member and in no mood to observe such rules even if I had been. I forced my way past the porters and told Mycroft in no uncertain terms that I wished to see him — now! There was silent uproar among the other members and I felt hands on my arms and shoulders restraining me. Mycroft casually waved them aside and took me into the deserted committee room. As usual he was already fully cognizant of the reasons for my ill-humour.
‘ “You believe that I deluded you, doctor, when last we spoke in this room? Indeed I believe that I did in some way but only to achieve a greater end, the defeat of Britain’s enemies.”
‘I was bursting with anger but Mycroft’s soft voice seemed to soothe away the heat I felt.
‘ “You must think we Holmeses a poor set of brothers. We have now both deceived you. Sherlock at the Reichenbach Falls, and me in the committee room of the Diogenes Club. I can only plead as my brother did that too full a briefing might have led you to indiscretion.”
‘He stood before me head slightly bowed, his watery grey eyes peering at me damping down the fire that was still scorching me.
‘ “You knew about the Sykes-Picot Plan . . .”
‘ “Of course,” he interrupted, “I drafted most of it.”
‘ “And Mr Balfour’s Declaration?”
‘ “Yes, I had a hand in that, I confess.”
‘ “Were you not aware of the position in which you were placing Colonel Lawrence?”
‘ “I knew that some of his ideals would be slightly compromised by the more pressing affairs of war on a global scale. One man’s delicate sensitivities were more than outweighed by the needs of His Majesty’s Government and the peace of the world.”
‘ “Then why not replace Lawrence instead of forcing him to live a lie which to him was like a living death?”
‘ “My dear doctor, you of course know the answer to that yourself, from your own observations in the desert. The Arabs would not have followed any other man by then. It was Lawrence or nothing, which in turn could have changed the war in Syria with the direst consequences for the British war effort. By keeping Colonel Lawrence on the road to Damascus you saved thousands of British lives. There are families who owe the safe return of their breadwinners to your efforts. You are an unsung hero, Dr Watson.”
‘ “Yet I feel a heel,” I hotly returned. “I will not be deflected by your praise from saying what I have come here to say to you, Mycroft.”
‘Mycroft simply shrugged and made himself comfortable in a large armchair. I remained standing fuelled by my righteous indignation.
‘ “Mycroft, you do not seem to understand the torture to which you have subjected Colonel Lawrence. It may be simply too great a sensitivity to you but to him it is everything. Granted that he knew about many of the so-called secret agreements, it still compromised him on a man-to-man basis with the Arabs.”
Watson's Last Case Page 3