Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Nothing of this sort could be expected from the deracinated, softliving town Arabs whose heads had been filled with corrupting ideas from the West. In his official reports and later in the Seven Pillars, Lawrence never missed a chance to vent his contempt for these Arabs, whom he had first learned to despise before the war. Again he revealed himself to be a child of his age. He shared the classic imperial attitude which made his countrymen admire such proud, independent warrior races as the Pathans and Sikhs of India or the Zulus of South Africa. Their courage, nobility and stark life commanded respect, and generations of Englishmen, including Lawrence, felt themselves highly honoured when they discovered that they had in turn won the respect and loyalty of such warriors. The townsman, with his smattering of learning and sophistication, was generally more critical and less tractable.

  The love affair between Lawrence and the Beduin was instantaneous. At Faisal’s camp in October 1916 he felt stirred by the ‘spirit of these romantics of the hills’. They were lean, hard men, ‘a toughlooking crowd ... physically thin but exquisitely made, moving with an oiled activity altogether delightful to watch.... They were wild spirits, shouting that the war might last ten years.’ Like the Crusading Knights Templar, these warriors disdained luxury and embraced a Spartan life; they would, Lawrence believed, submit themselves to the pursuit of his creed, which offered secular salvation.

  The Beduin fighting men aroused his historical imagination. Here in the twentieth century were armies of mounted warriors commanded by warlords who carried swords and rode into battle under colourful embroidered banners. Lawrence had found an army which might have been the host of Saladin as depicted in an illuminated manuscript. Its captains were figures of heroic proportions, speaking and acting like their mediaeval counterparts:

  There entered a tall, strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. This was Auda.... His hospitality was sweeping; except to very hungry souls, inconvenient. His generosity kept him always poor, despite the profits of a hundred raids. He had married twenty–eight times, he had been wounded thirteen times; whilst the battles he provoked had seen all his tribesmen hurt and most of his relations killed. He himself had slain seventy–five men, Arabs, with his own hand in battle.... Of the number of Turks he could give no account.

  Reading through this catalogue of prowess it is hard not to think of Chaucer’s knight–‘Thrice in the lists and always slew his man’. It was easy for Lawrence, the avid absorber of chivalric literature and values, to identify with such figures. He could even become, like them, a source of legend. During his cross–desert trek in May 1917, he heard from his companions how the deeds of two of his brother officers were passing into Beduin myth. ‘Arabs told me Newcombe would not sleep except head on rails, and that Hornby [another engineer officer] would worry the metals with his teeth when gun cotton failed. They were legends....’ Older legends still preoccupied Lawrence at this time for he continued to re-read his Odyssey and Morte d’Arthur on campaign. Perhaps he was already conscious that his own deeds of arms might become the seeds of legend, not only among the Arabs but in his own country.

  Lawrence’s familiarity with mediaeval concepts of war and warrior codes made him feel a close affinity with the Arabs. He had no qualms about looting, an Arab habit which angered many of his colleagues because it stopped the fighting man from pursuing his broken adversaries and engendered indiscipline. Once he admitted to plundering a Baluchi carpet from a wrecked train, and at other times he stood by while his men indulged themselves more lavishly. Intervention would not have squared with his philosophy, which insisted on unqualified acceptance of the traditional Arab ways of fighting. They did not conform to King’s Regulations or to the theories evolved by modern Western strategists but, with marginal adjustments, could be adapted for war against the Turks.

  Lawrence recited Arab poems and sang Arab songs as he rode with them, and he could hold his own in everyday camp gossip about tribal politics and family pedigrees.2 One junior officer who joined him at Aqaba in 1918 noticed that he chose Arab company, shunning his own countrymen. Yet Lawrence, in a letter of July 1918, was cautious about the extent of his understanding of the Arab mind: ‘I can understand it enough to look at myself and other foreigners from their direction,’ but an impassable gulf existed between him and the Arabs. ‘I know I am a stranger to them, and always will be.’

  His experiences at Karkamis probably gave him a deeper knowledge of Arab patterns of thought and behaviour than was possessed by other British officers. For all the sweeping racial presumptions revealed at the beginning of the Seven Pillars, Lawrence was more sensitive to the habits and manners of his hosts than most of his countrymen, who measured Arab achievement, or more usually its absence, in European terms. Unlike such men, accustomed to treating the empire’s subject races in the manner of the drill-sergeant or the schoolmaster, he was prepared to take cognisance of Arab sensibilities and forgo the normal assumption that the European always knew best. This philosophy was at the heart of his twenty-sevenpoint guide to relations with the Arabs, which he based on his own experience and compiled for circulation among British staff during 1917.3

  Three points were emphasised by Lawrence. To see the world through Arab eyes, the noviciate must first shed his European ways of thinking and then he might penetrate the Arab mind. This process required circumspection, since Arabs set great store by first impressions. In practical terms, the British officer had to understand the arcane mysteries of the Arab command structure and realise that the Arab warrior’s reactions to battle were utterly different from those of the disciplined British soldier. ‘If the objective is a good one (booty) they will attack like fiends,’ but ‘strange events cause panic’, a euphemism for the precipitate routs that commonly ended engagements against determined Turkish forces.

  Lawrence also stressed the need to work entirely inside the existing Arab social and political structure. ‘Magnify and develop the growing conception of the Sharifs as the natural aristocracy,’ he urged. The Arab Revolt was always an aristocratic movement, a revolution from the top in which all initiative and command flowed downwards. The sharifs were the tribal elite whose members claimed authority based upon descent from Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. They were identified by their distinctive rich robes. A sharif expected deference and thrived on flattery. ‘Strengthen his prestige at your expense before others when you can,’ Lawrence advised. Even when the sharif’s plans were faulty, he must not be corrected but, instead, guided gently towards the right path. ‘Keep a tight grip’ over his mind but so subtly that neither he nor those about him ever realised the extent of his indebtedness. This had obviously been Lawrence’s approach with Faisal and it had worked, turning Lawrence into a courtier whose invisible influence dominated his prince. It was a form of political control which a mediaeval scholar would have understood more readily than a pro–consul or general.

  ‘Guide, philosopher and friend’ was how Major Hubert Young summed up Lawrence’s position at Faisal’s court during 1918. During the winter of 1916–17 Lawrence had used the methods he was to outline for others to break down Faisal’s reserve and establish a close harmony with him. In January he told Newcombe that the Prince was ‘an absolute ripper’ and, more soberly, informed his family that ‘He is charming towards me, and we get on perfectly together.’ Most importantly, Lawrence provided Faisal with the moral resolution which he usually lacked. ‘Faisal is very jumpy and difficult,’ observed George Lloyd in October 1917, ‘but so long as Lawrence is here all goes well.’4

  In a bleak, often opaque chapter of introspection towards the end of the Seven Pillars entitled ‘Myself’, Lawrence characterised his relationship with Faisal in terms of the strong and the feeble.

  Feisal was a brave, weak, ignorant spirit, trying to do work for which only a genius, a prophet or a great criminal, was fitted. I served him out of pity, a motive which degraded us both.

  These remarks were part of a stream of thoughts which passed thro
ugh Lawrence’s mind on 15 August 1918, his thirtieth birthday. An urge for self–abasement underlay much of this reverie, which may have had its source in private passions unconnected with the performance of his public duties. Nevertheless, Lawrence later confessed to Liddell Hart that he had been forced to deceive his superiors by false advertisements of Faisal’s bravery and resolve.

  An independent account of Faisal as a commander, written by an Egyptian officer who had served with him during 1916, revealed an inept muddler.

  Faisal has no notion whatever of military tactics, and being afraid to rely on anyone else, as does his father and brothers, he loses much of the money and ammunition entrusted to him, as well as the energy of his followers, by continued movements which are often unnecessary and by his inability to take advantage of the enemy.5

  The most vital of Lawrence’s duties was to protect Faisal from his own follies without, according to his own code, ever letting the Prince know that he had committed or was about to commit them.

  Lawrence advised all who served alongside the Arabs to wear the qalifeh, which was already common practice before Lawrence first came to Hejaz. The Arabs regarded the usual British topee as a device which shaded the infidel from the eye of Allah. Full Arab costume was essential for those who needed to acquire the complete ‘trust and intimacy’ of the Beduin, but wearing it obliged a British officer to conform wholly to his hosts’ manners and customs. ‘You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre,’ Lawrence noted, ‘playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake.’

  Faisal had first suggested that Lawrence wore the robes of a sharif when he returned to Hejaz at the end of November 1916 and was vexed whenever he appeared in khaki.6 Lawrence in British uniform was a reminder that his clever, omniscient courtier was the representative of a foreign power with which he was in unequal alliance. Sharifian robes, as Lawrence knew, gave him an enormous authority over tribesmen, who immediately identified him as a man of wealth and importance, to be accorded respectful treatment. Lawrence also revelled in his new wardrobe and welcomed any opportunity to be photographed wearing it.

  His gear was always fancy dress, never a disguise. ‘No easterner could have taken me for an Arab,’ he told Liddell Hart, and only Indian lancers ‘and similar ignorant foreign soldiery’ in Egypt and Dera ever mistook Lawrence for an Arab. Leaving aside the question of whether the Turkish soldiers at Dera were ‘easterners’, Lawrence was correct. British troops, at first taken in by his clothes, soon changed their minds when they saw his reddish face, for like so many fair-skinned people Lawrence never tanned. Colonel Meinertzhagen was briefly duped when he first encountered Lawrence in December 1917 and wondered whether this ‘Arab boy, dressed in spotless white’, was possibly ‘somebody’s pleasure boy’.7

  What always distinguished Lawrence was his beardless face. Other British officers attached to the Arab armies went unshaven; water was scarce and the Arabs prized the beard as a token of manly virility. Lawrence only needed to shave every few days and was ‘always recognized as a British officer’ by the Arabs. Lawrence knew this and, like those of his colleagues who affected full Arab costume, took the precaution of packing ‘a soldier’s cap, shirt, and shorts’ in his saddlebag ready for an emergency change if it seemed likely that he would be taken prisoner.8 Captured as a spy in civilian dress, a British officer would face court martial and certain execution. The same standards applied to both sides: a disguised Turkish officer taken in the Sudan in 1914 was sentenced to death.

  The flamboyant, exhibitionist streak in Lawrence first seen at Karkamis endeared him to his Arab followers. He did not hector or preach to them in the way of some of his countrymen, which must have been surprising, even endearing. He was distinctly unEnglish, as Major Bray recalled in an account of a conference at al Wajh early in 1917 which he attended with Faisal, Lawrence and Colonel Gerard Leachman, a caricature pro-consul from Iraq.

  Lawrence in full Arab robes, richly embroidered, a gold dagger at his waist, speaking as softly as Faisal, carefully choosing his words and then lapsing into long silences. Leachman, clothed in fading khaki, inscrutable, with that puzzling smile of his lurking at the corners of his mouth, but straightforward and decisive in his speech. The contrast between the two Englishmen was patent: Lawrence acting the Arab and maintaining his prestige through the medium of his magnificent clothes. His servility to Faisal and his seeming unreality form a picture which still lingers in my mind. Leachman on the other hand was obviously and unashamedly the Englishman, and a masterful one.

  More than clothing separated the intelligent amateur who persuaded from the professional who commanded. As Lawrence remembered, Leachman ‘had an abiding contempt for everything native’, an outlook nurtured in India. His brutishness towards his servant was such an embarrassment that the Colonel had to be packed off back to his ship. Lawrence was appalled–‘any decent servant would have shot him.’ As it was, an Iraqi Arab assassinated Leachman four years later.9

  Leachman’s behaviour was a result of pure imperial arrogance, and other officers queried Lawrence’s insistence on a patient approach towards the Arabs on the ground that they were unworthy of such accommodation. Major Henry Garland, who jibbed at military protocol, was very much an officer in Lawrence’s mould. His breezy informality put the back up of a senior in Cairo, who reported that Garland had ‘no manners, never says “Sir”; but “righto!” dresses in breeches and gaiters, leans across his chair with his hands in his pockets and talks of all officers by their names’.10 In August 1917, Garland complained to Colonel Wilson about the hopelessness of instructing the Arabs along the lines prescribed by Lawrence.11 ‘The politic way of treating the Arabs is to praise all their war work, good or bad.’ This was impossible and intolerable since ‘It is not given to every British Officer to be able to sink his identity or see the Arab through rosy glasses, and those of us who cannot help draw attention to waste, neglect and disobedience must not expect to remain popular with the rank and file.’ This outburst was the culmination of several months of unhappy experiences in the field. Reporting after a raid on the Hejaz railway in February, Garland described himself as ‘helplessly in the hands of the Arabs’, who endlessly pestered him for baksheesh.12 Unlike Lawrence, he felt Arab clothing was restrictive and found it hard to turn a blind eye to pillaging. The Arabs’ insolence was unbearable and they exposed themselves and Garland to ‘unnecessary risks by their stupid conduct, such as singing and shouting within hearing of the enemy’.

  Major Charles Vickery, whom Lawrence wrote off as a medalhunter after a row at al Wajh, was shocked by the Arabs’ graft and laziness and in particular the ‘life of sloth and indulgence’ followed by their leaders.13 His and Garland’s experiences and reactions were not exceptional and gave backing to Lawrence’s own contention that service to an alien race was a ‘Yahoo’ existence. Others who fought alongside the Arabs during 1917 and 1918 were dismayed by their allies’ faint-heartedness and downright cowardice in battle which often endangered the lives of British, French, Egyptian and Indian personnel. Corporal Rolls of the Armoured Car Squadron and an admirer of Lawrence spoke for many when he wrote: ‘We hated the Arabs. Turkish prisoners, with their sense of order, with their European uniforms and their understanding of military discipline, are like dear friends to us compared to our Arab allies.’14

  His passion was understandable. In May 1918 a member of his unit, Lance-Corporal Lowe, had been murdered by Arabs near Aqaba.15 Lawrence glossed over the incident with the bland statement that he had been ‘accidentally killed doing amateur policework off his own bat’. Not long after, a sergeant was set upon and robbed by a gang of Arabs.16 Yet Lawrence continued to find virtue in such men when others could see only flaws.

  For all that he wrote of the trust and understanding which existed between them, Lawrence’s relationship with Faisal and the Arabs in general depended upon money. In February 1917, Garland had asked one Arab whether he was fighting for Hussain. ‘No,’
he replied, ‘not for the Sharif; for British–Gold.’17 The cynical Brémond observed that Lawrence, ‘a man who had the use of two hundred thousand pounds sterling and who could deliver two thousand harnessed camels’, would never lack Arab admirers. An outright enemy, Colonel Arnold Wilson, insisted that Lawrence could have achieved nothing without the gold sovereigns. They certainly gave him one of his Arab nicknames, Abu Khayyal, ‘the father of the horsemen’, that is St George, who appears on the obverse of the coin. The sovereigns Lawrence distributed in Syria were being called ‘the Cavalry of St George’ at the end of 1917, in much the same way as their equivalents, used as subsidies to Allies during the French Revolutionary wars, were called ‘Pitt’s Grenadiers’.18

  Lawrence wrote little about the economics of the Arab Revolt in the Seven Pillars and what he had to say was deliberately deceptive. At the onset of the uprising, Hussain ‘was cheerfully determined to wage war against them [the Turks], relying on justice to cover the cost’, which was untrue; he received a monthly subsidy of £125,000 paid from Foreign Office funds in sovereigns delivered from the Egyptian Treasury. Even the most cursory discussion of this matter could have drawn Lawrence’s readers to wonder whether the army of Beduin idealists might have included a few mercenaries, an understandable conclusion given their admitted passion for plunder.