Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Lawrence’s duties introduced him to men with similar passions. A glimpse of him off-duty is revealed by the vain, fastidious and talkative Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary to Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner, with whom he soon struck up a close friendship, based at first on shared literary tastes. ‘I would come upon him in my flat, reading Latin or Greek,’ remembered Storrs, who added that whenever Lawrence borrowed books they were always returned, a very rare virtue. Conversation would follow in which Lawrence would propose the merits of Homer against Dante or Aristophanes against Theocritus. Relaxation was simple. ‘He loved music, harmony rather than counterpoint, and sat back against the cushions with his eyes half–closed, enduring even that meandering stream of musical consciousness which I have dignified by the name of improvisation.’ These were intimate indulgences, for when Storrs formally entertained guests whom Lawrence believed were ‘smart’, he kept well away. Storrs was a valuable friend in other ways. An ambitious official, he was a behind–the–scenes intriguer, determined to set the stamp of his own ideas on British policy, and, like his colleague Clayton, he enjoyed the confidence of Kitchener, whom he had once briefly served.

  Lawrence did not drink, so he was not a habitué of Shepheard’s, but he did treat himself to coffee and chocolates in Groppi’s tea garden, which he later recommended to Robert Graves. He now had more money than he had ever had before; his salary was £400 a year, from which ten shillings (fifty pence) was deducted daily to cover his room and meals at the Savoy. By September 1915, he had saved over £60, which he offered to his father to help meet the costs of his younger brother Arnold’s schooling.

  As in Oxford, Lawrence strived to keep himself a man apart. Not only did he openly avoid the expatriate clubbishness and pastimes of his brother officers, he was indifferent to military formalities. Ten years after the war, he told Robert Graves that his dishevelment was a public declaration of his independence. To wear a khaki uniform was to accept a label, a thing hateful to Lawrence, who wished always to be his own man. His hair was always too long and resisted grooming, his uniform was crumpled and, on the few times he remembered to wear it, his Sam Browne belt was loosely buckled. He never wore the correct shoes. Once Deedes asked General Murray, ‘What did you think of Lawrence?’ ‘I was disappointed,’ was the reply, ‘he did not come in dancing shoes.’ His reputation as the most unkempt officer in Egypt had run before him. Just before Christmas 1917, when he was the guest of Sir Reginald and Lady Wingate at the Residency in Alexandria, he went about happily in a subaltern’s tunic with ‘badges somewhere between a Lieutenant and a Captain, and no decorations and no belt’.6 He did, however, remember a year later to tell the editors of Who’s Who that he had been awarded the Companionship of the Bath and the Croix de Guerre with oak leaves.

  This contrived nonchalance mattered less than has been imagined and its impact was muted. In the first place General Maxwell was not bothered about smartness, which was one of the reasons why Murray confidentially told General Robertson that ‘Maxwell is not a soldier.’7 Neither, in a conventional sense, were Lawrence and the other wayward amateurs on Maxwell’s staff, at least two of whom cared nothing for their appearance. Aubrey Herbert’s canary-yellow uniform had been made by his wife from curtain material and was worn with a dented topee and Turkish slippers. His Cairo lodgings, borrowed from Lord Howard de Walden, had what Deedes called ‘a very untidy picnicky look’ about them which seemed somehow right for their occupant, who, in January 1916, ‘looked madder and more untidy than ever’.8 Storrs was amused by Philip Graves’s inability to control his wardrobe.

  In spite of his claim that his carelessness about dress was a gesture against military conformity, Lawrence’s scruffiness probably owed as much to his natural carelessness in such matters, the insouciance of Maxwell and the aristocratic déshabille of Herbert, whom he admired. Lawrence’s Bohemianism may have raised a few eyebrows and distended some spleens, especially of the older professional officers. It was, however, endured as the sort of behaviour expected from the kind of civilian who would find his way into such a rum department as intelligence.

  Yet sloppy dress was an outward sign of the tension which existed between officers like Lawrence and some, but not all, of his superiors. When he wrote to Lloyd in June 1915 with the blunt comment, ‘We think the staff above the rank of captain are shits,’ Lawrence spoke for other tyros in Cairo who were impatient with hidebound superiors with closed minds. (Incidentally, unlike his brother Frank, Lawrence seems not at this time to have had an aversion to everyday mess language.)9 Deedes concurred and confided to Compton Mackenzie his ‘despair of the brains of professional soldiers’. Mackenzie also spoke to a civilian official in Cairo who could not understand the ‘primitive society’ of professional officers with its irrational ‘taboos and totems’.10

  By and large, pre-1914 army officers were not noted or promoted for their intellects and they lived in an exclusive world governed by arcane codes of conduct which were beyond the comprehension of civilians. Cleverness too openly displayed was ungentlemanly and therefore to be avoided. The outbreak of war had forced these officers into close working contact with unashamedly bright and sometimes outspoken young men like Lawrence for whom their conventions seemed pointless and their habits of mind obtuse. What was unforgivable to the likes of Lawrence was the dullness of so many of the old guard. ‘I am nearly dead with boredom at his eternal Anglo-Indian talk about himself, his pay allowance, his grievances, and his colleagues,’ complained the normally eventempered Hogarth after some enforced hours in the company of one professional officer.11 The real problem, which emerged as the war progressed, was not tedious military small-talk, but the unwillingness of professional men at arms to see things in the same way as Lawrence and his fellow amateurs.

  There were clever men in Lawrence’s circle in Cairo whose conversation was urbane and scholarly. They included men from that caste which considered itself destined through birth, upbringing and education to serve and govern Britain and its empire. Lawrence had encountered them before at Oxford and had shied away. Writing to his friend Mrs Reider in September 1912 he said how glad he was she would not be sending her son to a public school–‘I don’t like the type they produce.’ Nearly all his brother officers in Cairo were public school men and, after mixing intimately with them, Lawrence revised his judgement. He soon found that several were men of literary discernment and intellectual liveliness. He came to appreciate the company of cultured, gifted men of patrician birth and bearing, and they were fascinated by him. His affability, his unorthodox but lively mind combined with his out–of–hand rejection of convention aroused their interest and, in time, affection. Two, Aubrey Herbert and George Lloyd, whom he first met in Cairo in December 1914, he counted as among his best-loved friends.

  Herbert was amazingly eccentric. Seven years older than Lawrence, the son of an earl, and Unionist MP for South Somerset, Herbert had travelled widely in the Far and Near East before the war. Wounded in France, he transferred to Cairo’s intelligence section in December 1914. Soon after, he was serving as a liaison officer on board warships patrolling the Syrian coast and later he was transferred to the staff at Gallipoli. In March 1916 he was assigned to Admiral Sir Rosslyn (‘Rosie’) Wemyss, the new commander of the East Indies station, as army liaison officer. The Admiral found him ‘extremely intelligent, very agreeable’ and useful since he possessed ‘just that touch with the F.O., etc. which may be invaluable to me a little later on’.12 Herbert’s exotic past and reputation made him the model for Sandy Clanroyden in Buchan’s Greenmantle.

  When they first met, Herbert was already what Lawrence would become, a figure about whom amazing tales were told. It was not easy to reconcile the short-sighted, untidy and shambling reality with the man who, during a Gallipoli truce, had taken command of a Turkish company and in their own tongue ordered them back to their trenches. Something about Herbert drew Lawrence to him. After the war he placed him alongside Hogarth as a profound
influence on his life, although he never revealed the exact nature of this influence. Each man disdained social ‘form’ and cultivated individuality, an easier task for the aristocrat than for Lawrence, a man from the middle classes, who preferred to live within the boundaries of social convention.

  Some clue to Herbert’s appeal may lie in Lawrence’s obsession with chivalric legends. His life had been crowded with picaresque adventures which bordered on the fantastic, just like those experienced by the heroes of medieval epics. Furthermore, Herbert came from a family which had won glory for itself on the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. He had upheld the warrior tradition and, for all his physical incongruity, displayed coolness and cavalier bravado in the face of the enemy. For Lawrence, this likeable aristocrat may have appeared a living embodiment of the ancient warrior virtues he had read about. Still untested under fire, he may well have hoped that he could live up to his example and prove himself as honourably as his friend.

  Lawrence’s other patrician friend, George Lloyd, was a man of ideas rather than action. Lloyd, an Etonian and Cambridge rowing Blue, had been a businessman with strong Middle Eastern links and, from 1910, Conservative MP for West Staffordshire. Together Lloyd and Lawrence shared such routine intelligence duties as POW interviews and report-writing on Syria. Lloyd’s pre-war connections marked him out for higher duties. He served at Gallipoli (having already put himself to the test under fire by hurrying to the canal when the Turks attacked) and on missions to Russia and, in August 1915, to the Greek Prime Minister, Venizelos.13 Lawrence found the mercurial Lloyd a diverting and generous-hearted brother officer, and common intellectual interests cemented a friendship which lasted until Lawrence’s death. When Lawrence was on active service, Lloyd felt a brotherly concern for his welfare which revealed itself in his fears for his mental stability during the trying days of October 1917. Then, for a short time, Lloyd was Lawrence’s companion in the field.

  Lloyd was an imperialist, and a persuasive one. After hearing him, Compton Mackenzie realised that ‘Imperialism could touch a man’s soul as deeply as Religion’ and was almost converted. Another staff officer at Gallipoli, Colonel Guy Dawnay, found Lloyd a ‘most keen Imperialist (of the Jingo type rather, I think)’. Political conversations with Lloyd, Deedes and another Cairo intelligence officer, Major Doughty-Wylie (who was killed soon after), left Dawnay convinced that they were ‘mad keen’ on exploiting the war to extend Britain’s imperial power across the Middle East. The Foreign Office and Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, were contemptuously dismissed, and Dawnay, who was unmoved by this vision of imperial expansion, was branded a ‘dreadful little Englander’.14

  Lawrence may have been more open to Lloyd’s arguments than Dawnay. In December 1914, his own views on the future of the Middle East and the part Britain was destined to play there were unformed. He had much to learn from Lloyd, Clayton and Storrs, and they would find him an enthusiastic and receptive pupil.

  The first lesson which Lawrence learned was that, while the war was being waged to defeat Turkey, intelligence officers like himself had to look far ahead and lay the ground for a post-war settlement in the Middle East. A colleague, James Cockerell, who arrived in Cairo at the same time as Lawrence and died shortly after, sensed that his colleagues would not stay satisfied for long as mere servants who submitted dispassionate advice to their military masters.15 Their natural talents and the power of their private convictions would make them find ways in which they could impose their individual wills on the creation of policy. Moreover, as civilians with political and consular backgrounds, they would think in political rather than military terms and press for the concoction of strategies which would achieve political as well as military goals.

  Cockerell’s prognosis was correct. In February 1915, Lloyd wrote to his wife that his and his colleagues’ thoughts were concentrated on ‘what kind of result for the future we are going to fashion out of all this hurly-burly in Asia’. Buoyed up by a feeling that they were in a position to lay the foundations for a new order in the Middle East, Lawrence and his colleagues buried themselves enthusiastically in their work and soon lost touch with the outside world. Soldiers and public officials in Cairo viewed the war from a Middle Eastern perspective, an astigmatism which blighted Lawrence’s vision. ‘It seems to me that attention is so fixed on the Belgian front that our interests in the East are being sacrificed,’ he wrote to his parents in February 1915. ‘It will go against us very heavily some day.’ At the same time, Lloyd told his wife, ‘We soon become very self–centred in our Oriental backwater here,’ where only the ‘dimmest echoes’ of the Western front were heard.16

  Outsiders noticed and regretted the tunnel vision of the luminaries of Cairo. After dining with some, including Gertrude Bell, in December 1915, Guy Dawnay concluded that in what he called ‘Egyptian Hall (the home of mystery)’ they ‘set far too much importance on this part of the world as a factor in the main war’. Admiral Wemyss agreed. Conferences with Cairo’s civil and military experts convinced him that ‘like all specialists they are inclined to think only of their own specialization and ignore other factors.’17

  Empire-building was uppermost in the minds of the wellestablished ‘specialists’ in Cairo and they quickly passed on their preoccupations to their new staff. Officials like Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner in Egypt, Wingate in the Sudan, Storrs, Clayton and generals like Maxwell had dedicated their lives to the protection and extension of British territory and influence in the Middle East. Over all loomed the figure of Kitchener, now Secretary of State for War, who, as Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army in the 1890s and High Commissioner in Egypt between 1911 and 1914, was their patron and mentor. Master and pupils were of one mind. They accepted unquestioningly Britain’s imperial mission as an agent of civilisation and stability. The ultimate success of this mission and the safety of Britain’s land empire depended upon her survival as a maritime and global power. This, in turn, required a firm grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal and a tranquil Middle East. Until 1914 a benevolent Ottoman empire had imposed sufficient order across the Middle East to give the region stability and Egypt had been safeguarded by 4,000 British soldiers backed by the formidable Mediterranean fleet.

  In November 1914 the old system collapsed. Turkey was now a hostile power and the canal lay in a war zone under threat of Turkish attack. In spite of fears that Egypt might be invaded, there was a strong body of official opinion in Cairo which was convinced that Turkey’s war effort would soon fall into disarray and her empire disintegrate. Exaggerated hopes for the Gallipoli expedition added to the euphoria which infected Lawrence. Consequently those who employed him had been devising ways in which to fill the vacuum which would be created when the Ottoman empire fell apart. There was no coherent overall government policy for this eventuality, just a series of competing suggestions all drawn up by officials and soldiers anxious to extend Britain’s control over vital strategic areas.

  All concerned, including Lawrence, constantly referred to Britain’s ‘interests’, but there was no agreement about what these were or how they might best be served. Iraq, invaded early in November 1914 by an Anglo-Indian army, was seen by the India Office in London and the Viceregal government in Delhi as a future colony of India. A fortnight into the campaign, Colonel Arnold Wilson, soon to be a senior administrator in occupied Iraq, was building colonies in the air. ‘I should like to see it announced,’ he wrote, ‘that Mesopotamia [Iraq] was to be annexed to India as a colony for India and Indians, that the Government of India would administer it, and gradually bring under cultivation its vast unpopulated desert plains, peopling them with martial races from the Punjab.’18 This was welcomed in London, where one official saw the project as a way of diverting Indian immigrants away from such ‘white man’s colonies’ as Kenya and South Africa and it was supported in Cairo by George Lloyd.19 In time, Lawrence condemned the scheme, which, if enforced, would irrevocably turn Arab opinion away from Brita
in by confirming latent fears that her Middle Eastern ambitions were purely annexationalist.

  Cairo’s policies for the post-war Middle East rested primarily on the need to provide a secure, defensible frontier and buffer zone for the Suez Canal. A secondary requirement was provision for safe land communications from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf which was traditionally seen as India’s advance frontier. From the start, the achievement of these aims was complicated by the rival claims of Britain’s wartime allies, France and Russia, who cherished ambitions in this area which had to be taken into account, however unwillingly, by officials in Cairo.

  Obligations to France could not be ignored, although Lawrence and those of similar mind soon began looking for ways in which they could be by-passed. Before the war, Lawrence had been dismayed by the extent of French penetration in Syria and he was no doubt well aware that French loans and French mission schools were preparing the way for eventual occupation, as indeed they were. Once the war was underway, France and Russia lost no time in putting forward their claims to what the British Prime Minister, Asquith, called Turkey’s ‘carcass’. Negotiations continued during 1915 which resulted in the Sykes–Picot agreement in March and its amendments in October, which pledged France territory along the Syrian and Lebanese coastlines and political and economic hegemony over a wide hinterland which stretched across northern Iraq to beyond Mosul. Russia was promised control over the Straits. This collection of promises, which would soon loom large in Lawrence’s dealings with the Arabs, was supposedly secret. Whether or not as a consequence of Cairo’s relaxed attitudes towards security, rumours were current in the city in January 1915 that the French would be given Syria.20