Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Along with other Arabic- and Turkish-speaking officers, Lawrence was called upon to interview prisoners of war. These Arabs were taken after the February 1915 offensive against the canal or after subsequent small-scale raids across Sinai, or were brought back from Gallipoli. Many were Syrians, like the soldiers from the 129th Regiment, captured near the canal during a skirmish in March 1915, and later interviewed by Lawrence’s colleague, George Lloyd.18 Lawrence’s local knowledge and mastery of Syrian dialects qualified him for this task, and in mid-July 1915 he interrogated some Gallipoli prisoners, probably Syrians from the Aleppo V Corps, which had been deployed there the previous month.19 It was a duty which needed alertness and there were plenty of pitfalls for the unwary, which were outlined in a manual written at the end of 1916 based on previous experiences.20 Arab NCOs proved ‘the most intelligent and communicative prisoners’, but were easily fuddled by figures and were over-keen to tell their questioner what they imagined he wanted to hear. A ‘friendly manner and offer of a cigarette’ would break the ice and establish an early rapport. Lawrence, who never smoked, relied on his recondite knowledge of Syrian dialects to pinpoint where his prisoner once lived, and then chatted familiarly about local personalities and gossip. The technique always worked, he later told Robert Graves, for ‘they told me everything.’

  In twelve months, Lawrence had been a report–writer, editor, spymaster, interrogator and cartographer. Occasional gripes about drudgery apart, he relished his work and attacked it with energy and dedication. His letters to his family, who were very curious about what he did, show that he took a pride in his labours. They offered him an intellectual challenge which he was well prepared to overcome thanks to his training as a historian and archaeologist. Compton Mackenzie had noticed how the antiquarian mind was easily attuned to the painstaking tasks of sifting, weighing and putting together small pieces of evidence from widely differing sources. In his novel Extremes Meet, Henderson, an Oxford don and sometime archaeologist (loosely modelled on Hogarth), is called on to fit together torn scraps of paper stolen from a waste-paper basket in the German legation at Athens: ‘These fragments were always pieced together with marvellous patience by Henderson. They took for him the place of the Minoan potsherds he used to piece together just as patiently in the days before the war.’21

  Lawrence’s equivalent industry and attention to detail impressed his superiors. Early in August 1915, Newcombe recommended him as a reliable officer who could help Major Samsom sort out some administrative difficulties in Athens. These probably involved his rather unsatisfactory counter–espionage officer, Major Monréal, although at the time there were three visitors to Athens in whom Cairo was interested.22 Two Arabs, Riza Jeghem and Hamid Hamdi, were making suspicious visits to the Turkish Embassy, and Ali Samy Bey, a Cairene businessman who had once been chief photographer to the Sultan Abdul Hamid, was frequenting the French Embassy.23 Lawrence spent a few days with the Athens section and returned to Cairo with secret despatches on 14 August.

  There is nothing in Lawrence’s letters to his family which explains his visit, although he mentioned that he could see the Acropolis from his office window. Throughout this period, his letters home and to Hogarth are littered with indiscretions which suggest that Lawrence was utterly indifferent to the demands of security. He seems to have had no difficulty in evading military censorship, which was carried out in an adjoining office by a fellow intelligence officer. It was probably very easy for him since GHQ Cairo intelligence section was extraordinarily casual about secrecy. In February 1915, Maxwell issued a general reprimand about laxness in the censorship of correspondence but its effect seems to have been minimal. Over two years later officers in the Iraq intelligence section complained that their colleagues in Cairo were not keeping to themselves highly secret information about the decipherment of German wireless codes.

  ‘We cannot all go fighting,’ Lawrence wrote to his mother after hearing the news of his brother Frank’s death in May 1915. Maybe he felt a spasm of guilt about remaining behind a desk while others risked and lost their lives. He had hoped in April 1915 that he and Newcombe would be appointed as advisers to the Yemeni insurgent el Idrissi, but the plan came to nothing. At the same time several of his brother officers were being detached for active service with the intelligence section of the Gallipoli expedition. Lawrence seems not to have been disappointed by his omission. ‘I haven’t any training as a field officer,’ he told Hogarth, ‘and I don’t know that I want to go fighting up to Constantinople. It would be bad form, I think.’

  After the war, Lawrence did try to invest this period of mundane but useful office work with some glamour. He told Robert Graves that he had undertaken a mission into the Western Desert to seek information about the crews of the Tora and Morine, who had been taken prisoner by the Sanussi after their ships had been sunk by U-boats off the Libyan coast in November 1915. GHQ intelligence native spies were closely involved in the search for the seamen, but the War Diary of the Western Desert Force makes no mention of Lawrence.24 Exact information about the prisoners’ whereabouts was obtained from an ex–Turkish soldier Osman Abdul, who had been taken prisoner at Rhodes by the Italians in 1912 and subsequently found himself fighting alongside the Sanussi.25 His revelations enabled Captain Royle, formerly of the Egyptian coastguard, to organise a spectacular rescue dash which was carried out in March 1916 by the Duke of Westminster’s squadron of Rolls–Royce armoured cars. If Lawrence was involved at all, it must have been indirectly through the supervision of native agents from Cairo.

  Lawrence also told Robert Graves that in February 1916 he had forwarded vital information about Arab officers in the Erzurum garrison who were ready to defect and hand over their positions to the Russian besiegers. This was at a time when GHQ Cairo was cultivating dissident Arab officers in the hope that they could be employed to enkindle mutinies among Arab units in the Turkish army. Telegrams which confirm this amazing coup are lacking and there is nothing in the flow of messages from Major Marsh at Tiflis to suggest that the Russians had any help from Arab renegades. The whole affair is, however, extremely close to the climax of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which British agents deliver information about gaps in the Turkish defences to the Russian staff. In fact, General Yudenich’s decisive assault passed through an undefended section of the Turkish line and there was a precipitate abandonment of one outpost, Coban–dede, at the end of the siege. Nevertheless the final Turkish collapse on 16 February was clearly the result of intense cold, hunger, demoralisation and the pressure of the Russian attack rather than Arab treachery.

  As with the stories of his escapades in Syria, Lawrence may either have exaggerated his peripheral role or else have embellished the truth to a point where it became unrecognisable. Given the abundance of official records, it is strange that there are no indications of Lawrence’s part in these two incidents beyond his own word.

  Lawrence’s mention of communication with Petrograd is a reminder that throughout 1915 and half of 1916 he was well placed to see how war was waged from the top. Through the decipherment of telegrams and the reading of confidential files, memoranda and minutes he gained an overview of the war. He understood the general considerations which were the basis of Allied strategy and the preoccupations and prejudices of the statesmen, diplomats and generals who decided policy. His natural alacrity of mind and historical training made it easy for him to grasp the drift of affairs on all fronts, although his overriding interest was always the Middle East. As a result of eavesdropping at Headquarters, he was able to convey what he had picked up to the discreet Hogarth and to his parents. One hopes that early in October 1915 they did not pass on to their friends and neighbours in Oxford their son’s news, hot from Headquarters, that ‘The Dardanelles expedition wasted a great chance’ and was now running into grave difficulties.

  In simple terms, all Lawrence’s labours were to one end, the defeat of Turkey. When he first reached his desk in Cairo, everyone was concerned with an expected
Turkish attack on the Suez Canal. Since the Ottoman government’s partial mobilisation in September 1914, Cairo had been receiving a steady flow of information which suggested that a large-scale invasion of Egypt was impending. ‘Reliable’ agents in Syria warned that German and Turkish commanders were confident that their attack would trigger a local rebellion with possible help from the Sanussi in Libya.26 Kitchener, the Secretary for War, ordered Maxwell to concentrate his 6,000-man garrison along the canal’s banks. It was absolutely vital to the Allied war effort that the canal stayed open since it was the conduit through which passed troopships filled with British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand reinforcements then desperately needed in France.

  An attack on the canal was imminent, but it was not the major offensive which Cairo dreaded. Enver Pasha had decided to direct the bulk of the Ottoman armies eastwards against Russia, where they suffered severe reverses in January 1915. Maxwell and his staff were not only ignorant of the broad thrust of Turkish strategy, they were unclear as to how many soldiers were earmarked for the invasion of Egypt and had no idea about the timetable of the attack. Only a chance aircraft sighting of Colonel Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein’s columns crossing Sinai alerted Maxwell that the attack was under way. Forewarned, the Anglo–Indian detachments defending the canal easily threw back the undermanned invasion force, which withdrew into southern Palestine in February 1915. As they trudged back, Arab conscripts blamed ‘infidel’ (that is, German) leadership for their setback. ‘The Turks are off for the time being,’ Lawrence told his family, but like everyone else in Cairo he knew they would be back. It was up to him and his colleagues to find out from their minute examination of reports of troop movements, transport facilities and the availability of grain supplies when and with how many men.

  The defensive strategy imposed on Maxwell passed the initiative to the Turks. This was repugnant to him and to all professional officers of his generation. They had served their apprenticeships in arms fighting ‘Orientals’ (a category which embraced the Turks) in India, Egypt and the Sudan. Their experience and the wisdom handed down from an older generation of imperial soldiers convinced them that aggressive audacity always got the best results. Boldness in the offensive established moral authority, which was the basic ingredient of prestige, that mystical abstraction which every general and proconsul knew made it possible for Britain to rule unchallenged over wide areas of Africa and Asia.

  This philosophy had two determined advocates in the Cabinet, Kitchener and Churchill. Swayed by these adherents of the prestige school of strategy, their colleagues rubber–stamped a display of awesome imperial temerity, the forcing of the Straits. Constantinople was the goal and, when it fell, the whole Muslim world would realise that Allied power was invincible and that of Turkey a sham. Furthermore an overpowering blow against Turkey offered a way out of the seemingly fruitless embroilment of masses of men in France where, in spite of both sides suffering heavy casualties, the German army doggedly held its ground. Throughout the war, politicians and generals remained mesmerised by Turkey, an apparently weak prop to Germany which, if knocked away, would bring down her ally. By April 1915, Lawrence had been converted to the view that the Ottoman empire would fall apart easily. ‘Poor old Turkey is only hanging together,’ he wrote to Hogarth. ‘Everything about her is very very sick, and almost I think it will be good to make an end of her, although it will be very inconvenient to ourselves.’

  As he wrote, his new friend Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner, was under orders to get a khaki uniform from his tailor to be worn when he took up a new post in the military administration of Constantinople. Yet Lawrence, while expecting Turkey’s swift disintegration, had misgivings about the Gallipoli expeditionary force which was mustering in Egypt. On 20 April, he told Hogarth that the army which was soon to land on the Gallipoli peninsula was ‘beastly ill-prepared, with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do’.

  His later letters, composed with the knowledge of what passed in and out of Headquarters, were a barometer of the fortunes of the Gallipoli campaign. On 27 July he thought that the ‘Dardanelles show’ would shortly end, but a month later he realised that it had been bungled after early advantages had been thrown away. Just over a month later, on 23 November 1915, his apprehension was justified when the War Cabinet agreed to call off the operation and withdraw all forces from Gallipoli. Having failed to gain a decisive victory in the East, the government turned its attentions and new reserves of men from ‘Kitchener’s army’ of volunteers towards the West and a major offensive against the German lines in northern France. The Middle Eastern theatre reverted to a sideshow, with British forces sitting and waiting on the Suez Canal while Lawrence and his brother officers in Cairo endeavoured to find out the Turks’ intentions.

  II

  Men and Ideas

  Lawrence found life in Cairo congenial. He made himself a circle of stimulating friends and deliberately steered clear of the stilted social life of the city’s British community. He urged Robert Graves to do the same. ‘Englishmen in these small colonies abroad are snobbish to a degree: the smallness of their colony makes them smaller.’1 What he had in mind was the rigid pecking order of the civil and military communities and their clubs. He happily admitted that he had entered these only twice during his ‘magnificent’ years in Cairo. Luckily, he was able to find refreshment from a small body of companions who were his intellectual equals and shared his literary tastes.

  The greatest source of serendipity in Cairo was Lawrence’s colleagues in intelligence. They were an effervescent crowd whom he described in a sequence of pen portraits written for his parents in February 1915. George Lloyd was ‘Welsh, but sorry for it; small, dark, very amusing ... quite pleasant, but exceedingly noisy’, and Aubrey Herbert ‘is a joke, but a very nice one’. This happy picture was completed by General Maxwell, who delighted Lawrence:

  He is a very queer person: almost weirdly good-natured, very cheerful, with a mysterious gift of prophesying what will happen, and a marvellous carelessness about what might happen. There couldn’t be a better person to command in Egypt. He takes the whole job as a splendid joke.2

  A year later, in January 1916, Lawrence was pleased with the arrival of Captain Wyndham Deedes (‘Deedez Bey’), a man of sturdy independence who had once told Churchill to his face that the Gallipoli expedition would fail. ‘A very excellent man,’ Lawrence told his parents, ‘I like him best of the bunch.’ There were also old friends in Cairo: Newcombe, Woolley, who from January 1915 was based in Port Said as liaison officer with the French navy, and Hogarth, an occasional bird of passage who dropped in to discuss intelligence matters with Lawrence as part of his unofficial roving commission on behalf of the Admiralty.

  Lawrence did not stray beyond his knot of old and new friends for there was nothing in Cairo’s wartime society to beckon him. The city’s pre-war social life went on as before. When General Murray arrived there in January 1916 to take up his command on the canal front, he was shocked to discover that the city was ‘at peace not war’.3 So it must have seemed to an officer straight from London: the winter season was in full swing, adorned by fashionable ladies, including Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had rescued the penniless Lawrence on Maan station, and some officers had brought out their wives. Colonel Leachman, a priggish officer fresh from the Iraq front, was offended by the abundance of ‘MPs and sprigs of the nobility’ whom he encountered ‘waging war from Shepheard’s Hotel’. No doubt he had come across Lawrence’s colleagues, Aubrey Herbert and George Lloyd, both MPs who regularly haunted Shepheard’s bar, and the Marquess of Carisbrooke and Lord Hartington, two officers on Maxwell’s staff. ‘More like a carnival’ was Deedes’s description of Shepheard’s in January 1916. It was even too much for Maxwell, who officially rebuked those responsible for ‘the very undesirable state of affairs now existing in Cairo when crowds of idlers in military uniforms throng the streets from morning to night’.
Many were back from Gallipoli and they were soon sent packing to the Western Front by Murray. The relaxed atmosphere persisted; a year later Hogarth was taken aback when he discovered officers accompanied by ladies without wedding rings staying for weekends at his hotel near the Pyramids.4

  Further diversion was provided by the harum–scarum Australian contingent. One staff officer described them as ‘a most lawless, turbulent and undisciplined crowd who really break out and commit fearful atrocities’ in Cairo. These included a riot in February 1915 when the brothels of the Wassa district of the city were wrecked, much to the amusement of some staff officers, who called the affray ‘the battle of Warsaw’, a joking reference to a recent engagement on the Eastern Front. The refractoriness of the Australians made Murray apoplectic and he was glad to send many off to France where General Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, felt certain ‘the Germans will soon put them in order.’5 Lawrence was unmoved by the wild scenes in Cairo, which he never mentioned in his letters; maybe he had a secret sympathy with the Australians’ collective rejection of military discipline or else he thought his mother would be distressed by reports of debauchery. Much later, in September 1918, he noticed that alone of Allied troops, they were always friendly towards the Arabs, cheerily calling each Arab soldier ‘Mecca’.

  The round of dances, race-going, card-playing, drinking, flirtation and seduction was shunned by Lawrence. His relaxation remained what it had always been, intellectual. He wrote home for new books (‘The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia or The Moallakat: translated by Lady Anne Blunt, and put into English verse by Wilfred Scawen Blunt: published at the Chiswick Press 5/- in 1904 probably’) and was reassured by the old. ‘All the relief I get [is] in The Greek Anthology, Heredia, [William] Morris and a few others!’ he told his brother Will in July 1915.