Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Direct allegations are equally hard to substantiate as they are to disprove. A regular Arab officer, Subhi al-Umari, who served with Lawrence, accused him of homosexual acts with Dahoum at Karkamis, but this might have been a repetition of old local gossip inspired by their indiscretions. Robin Maugham, stationed at Bovington camp four years after Lawrence’s death, heard an NCO describe how he had whipped Lawrence and then buggered him in what must have been a repeat performance of the ordeal at Dera.42 Certainly rumours of clandestine liaisons with servicemen were circulating at the time.

  Richard Aldington heard from Somerset Maugham in November 1958 that Lawrence’s motorbike accident had been suicide prompted by the knowledge that a warrant had been issued for his arrest to answer charges of indecency with servicemen at Cloud’s Hill. No action had been taken against Lawrence while he had been in the RAF and he had mistakenly believed that his celebrity would continue to provide him with immunity from prosecution. Shortly before his death, he had been visited by a plain-clothes police inspector who had warned him what might be in store if he did not leave the country immediately.43

  A version of this tale, allegedly originating from Scotland Yard, was heard by Cyril Connolly and it once enjoyed some currency in county circles in Dorset.44 However, no documentary evidence to support the original complaint and the official response to it has surfaced among Home Office papers or in Dorset. This is not surprising given the extremely sensitive nature of the charge and the fact that it was never brought to court. Moreover, for such a warrant to be issued a request would have to have been made to the Home Secretary, Sir Herbert Samuel, a former Commissioner in Palestine with whom Lawrence had worked in 1922. The warrant itself would have had to have been issued by Lawrence’s friend, Lord Trenchard, then Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police.

  Speculation about Lawrence’s sexuality was inevitable after his confession of what he alleged had passed at Dera. His obsession with the incident, his urge to advertise it, his ambivalence towards women, contempt for his own body and spasms of self-loathing are symptoms shown by many victims of homosexual rape. And yet the weight of circumstantial evidence, coupled with the entries in the gunners’ war diary, strongly indicate that Lawrence was never in Dera on the night of 20-21 November 1917 and so was never raped there. It is possible that his vivid, minutely observed versions of what happened were homoerotic fantasy. All the ingredients are there: the fair-skinned, virginal youth and his tough captors; and the masterful and persuasive Bey; the whipping and the final, not altogether unpleasurable submission.

  All this may have been in Robert Graves’s mind when he once remarked that Lawrence indulged in ‘diabolical fantasies’.45 Graves was also aware of Lawrence’s post-war masochistic addiction, although he did not assume from it that he was a homosexual. Meinertzhagen, a well-built six footer, remembered horseplay with Lawrence during their stay at the Majestic Hotel in Paris in 1919. He grasped Lawrence and walloped his bottom, which provoked Lawrence to comment afterwards ‘that he could easily understand a woman submitting to rape once a strong man hugged her’. Did this also mean that he could appreciate how a man might feel if approached in the same way and with the same intention by another?

  A man’s sexuality should remain his own concern, save when he chooses to advertise it, or else when its fulfilment is unlawful or flies in the face of common morality. In writing about homosexuality in sympathetic manner in the Seven Pillars, Lawrence certainly broke the last canon and raised some hackles. In relating what had happened to him at Dera, he announced something about his own sexuality, but he did so by the fabrication of an event which involved actual people, although he prudently changed the name of Hajim Bey in the published edition of the Seven Pillars. He need not have bothered, for everyone took what he wrote at face value and when the matter eventually came under scrutiny the Turkish colonel was dead.

  If, as seems extremely likely, Lawrence was not violated by this officer in Dera, it may be that he had had a similar experience elsewhere at another time, and involving other assailants. Lawrence certainly had homosexual friends such as Leonard Green and Vyvyan Richards at Oxford, Flecker in Syria, and possibly Storrs in Cairo. At least one, admittedly not very sympathetic brother officer who had had the opportunity to observe him closely thought he was a homosexual. Lawrence was also, from 1922 onwards, willing to arrange and pay for formalised humiliation and beatings at the hands of army and air force rankers, which was undertaken regularly and provided him with sexual satisfaction. Unlike others, perhaps the majority of those with his tastes, Lawrence never sought punishment from a woman.

  The mainsprings of Lawrence’s complex and peculiar sexuality must remain obscure, although enough is known to suggest a strong homosexual masochism. Its manifestation during the last thirteen or so years of his life meant that he was living dangerously close to scandal. More was at risk than his private reputation; exposure would have bruised those establishment figures closely associated with him and, given his status as a national hero, would have tarnished British prestige. It is easy to imagine how the French press would have treated the revelation that Lawrence was addicted to what was jeeringly called ‘le vice anglais’.

  IV

  Betrayal

  Real traumas awaited Lawrence when he returned to Aqaba at the end of November 1917. During the four weeks when he had been behind enemy lines, the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish national home in post-war Palestine. Soon after, Lenin and Trotsky published full details of secret Allied agreements on the partition of the Ottoman empire from papers found in the Russian Foreign Ministry. Both were bonuses for Turco-German propagandists at a time when the Ottoman government was opening a diplomatic offensive designed to entice the Arabs away from Britain and France. Immediately, the terms of the Sykes—Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration were publicly announced in Lebanon and Syria, where they confirmed many Arabs’ misgivings about the Allies’ motives. Faisal too heard the revelations, which so disturbed him that he became susceptible to Turkish blandishments.

  Lawrence was also troubled, but for other reasons. Since his first involvement in the Arab movement he had felt uneasy about discrepancies between the terms of the Sykes–Picot agreement and what Hussain believed would be his reward at the end of the war. In a suppressed paragraph in his letter to The Times of 8 September 1919, Lawrence admitted that he had encouraged the Arabs because he had believed that the British government would honour its wartime pledges to them. Now that it seemed that the government would break these promises which, he alleged, he had been ‘authorised’ to make in its name, he regretted his part in what had been perjury. He shifted his ground slightly in the Seven Pillars, where he claimed that the Arabs considered him ‘a free agent of the British government’ and naturally asked for and got his endorsement of what they imagined it was offering them. In both instances the form of words is deceptive: promises were never made to all the Arabs, at least not before June 1918; they were made to one Arab, Hussain. This is by the way: more important is the fact that Lawrence never possessed the diplomatic power to enter into any engagements with the Arabs.

  This matter of authority was understood by Faisal, if not by Lawrence. Nowhere, throughout his extended negotiations with British, French and American officials in 1919, did he refer to any pledge made by Lawrence. Nevertheless, he did from time to time ask Lawrence for explanations of the intended post-war settlement. For instance, in September 1917, Lawrence complained to Clayton that it was difficult to instruct Faisal ‘to leave B area, or a blue area, alone if the Turkish army is using it as a military base against him’.1 It was impossible, when such matters arose, for Lawrence to feign ignorance and so he lied. In the letter written to The Times in September 1919, he presented himself as an innocent forced by the circumstances of war to be the agent of deceitful men. He passed on their lies to the trusting Arabs, whose faith in his integrity was absolute. This private guilt, based upon his sec
ret knowledge that he was betraying the trust of his brothers-in-arms, was a thread which Lawrence later wove into the Seven Pillars.

  Yet when confronted by Allenby and Faisal in Damascus on 3 October 1918, Lawrence denied any knowledge of the provisions of the Sykes—Picot agreement, which gave France full control over the Lebanon and a protectorate in Syria. Moreover, the bewildered Faisal claimed that until a few moments before the meeting he had been under the impression that both provinces were earmarked for the Arabs. This was a charade. Lawrence knew the terms of Sykes-Picot and had shown them to Faisal, who had probably been given them already by his Turkish contacts early in 1918.

  Lawrence and Faisal lied to Allenby and Lawrence has been sparing with the truth in the suppressed section of the letter and in the Seven Pillars. One explanation for the scene in Damascus, for Lawrence’s elaborations and for his sense of guilt is that he deliberately doctored the information he gave Faisal and other Arabs who quizzed him about the future of the Middle East. He imagined that truthful answers would have disheartened his listeners to the point where their fighting spirit could easily have evaporated. At the same time his exaggeration of Arab post-war rewards raised their expectations to a point where it would be dangerous for Britain and France to disappoint them. France, the proposed inheritor of Syria, would obviously be hurt more than Britain, which would have suited Lawrence. Moreover he was determined, whatever the cost, to get his own way. ‘He can be ruthless,’ Hogarth wrote in 1920, ‘caring little what eggs he breaks to make his omelettes and ignoring responsibility either for the shells or for the digestion of the mess.’

  French observers suspected that Lawrence was encouraging Faisal’s Syrian ambitions, and the Amir’s behaviour during 1918–19 indicates that he believed he was entitled to that province. In moral terms, Lawrence exonerated himself by repeatedly arguing that he was dissembling on behalf of the government. Obviously as Britain’s paymaster he had to make bargains with would-be adherents of Faisal who were still Ottoman subjects and anxious to know what would befall them after the war. On one occasion, the Rwallah Amir Nuri Shalaan presented Lawrence with ‘a file of documents and asked which British pledge was to be believed’. Flummoxed, Lawrence replied that the latest in date could be trusted. Lawrence did not read them so we do not know what they were, or, if he did, he never mentioned it in the Seven Pillars.

  What mattered in this context was Lawrence’s sense of self-esteem. To his readers he was the servant of a national movement, uniting and guiding the Arabs towards historic fulfilment, not a recruiting officer who struck bargains and doled out cash. Yet at the same time as he tapped the springs of national sentiment, Lawrence had to convince the Arabs that he represented a fair-dealing nation whose rulers kept their word. The fact that they did not caused him deep grief. All this assumes that the Arabs were guileless and incapable of recognising that Lawrence was not a properly accredited representative of Great Britain and that what he had to say carried as much weight as the words of McMahon, Sykes or Hogarth. But their letters and pledges, not Lawrence’s, were cited time and time again by Arabs after the war. Furthermore only the most artless Arab would have ignored the Quranic injunction:

  And as for the unbelievers,

  Their works are a mirage in the desert.

  The thirsty man thinks it water

  Till, coming to it, he finds nothing.

  No one, including Lawrence, was clear as to exactly what the Arabs expected after victory. During interviews with Sykes and Picot in May 1917 and Hogarth in January 1918, Hussain showed an exasperating but effective ability to misunderstand what was told him on the delicate matter of post-war boundaries. His Cairo agent, al Faruqi, added to the confusion, since he was ‘apt to put into the mouth of Sir Henry [McMahon] things said to him by more junior people’–perhaps Lawrence?2 Meeting Hussain at the end of July 1917, Lawrence was told that Picot had assured the King that France would never claim suzerainty over Syria and would quickly evacuate the province, which was not what the Frenchman had intended to say.3 Yet in June 1918 Sykes assured Wingate that ‘The King has frequently been given [the] outline and detail of the agreement ... both by myself, Monsieur Picot, Colonel Brémond, and Commander Hogarth.’4 None could have had an easy time. ‘I have been sent to try and persuade the Old Man of Mecca to do things he does not want to do,’ Hogarth wrote to his wife on 10 January 1918. It was ‘uphill work for all his benignity and hand patting endearments’, since Hussain was the ‘most obstinate———old diplomat on earth’.5 All his cunning was needed, since from the beginning Hussain had placed an unrealistically high price on his assistance to the Allied cause, which he saw as a vehicle for his inflated dynastic ambitions in Arabia, Palestine and Syria.

  Certainly Hussain and his sons had good reason to ignore or pretend to misunderstand Anglo-French arrangements for the future of the Middle East. They appreciated that the final form of the post-war settlement would be dictated by the course of the war. So did Lawrence, which is why he clung to the hope that the Arabs would be allowed to keep what they conquered by their own efforts, a consideration which lay behind his scheme for a spasm of pro-Faisal coups in Syria in November 1917. This was pure ingenuousness since ‘their own efforts’ was an empty form of words, given the extent of Allied financial and military backing for the Arabs.

  One unforeseen event, the United States’ entry into the war in April 1917, raised Lawrence’s hopes, because he believed that the American government might be more receptive than the British to what he believed was the Arabs’ moral right to self-determination on their own terms. In March 1918 he appealed directly to American idealism through William Yale, the US Consul in Cairo.6 He told him that the Arabs had faith in American political honesty and openhandedness in international affairs. A declaration by the American government in favour of Arab national aspirations would be what Lawrence called the ‘trump card’ that would finally dispel suspicions about the now not so hidden motives of the imperial powers. History was moving in Lawrence’s direction. No longer embarrassed by the attachment of autocratic Russia, the alliance of Britain, France and the United States could honestly face the world as the champion of freedom and the national rights of such subject races as the Arabs to choose their own future. Like Lawrence, Sykes sensed the new mood. He invoked American democratic and libertarian ideals as an argument to try and force the stubborn Picot to forgo his country’s post-war colonial claims to Syria.7

  It seemed to Lawrence that gusts of Yankee plain-dealing and highmindedness could blow away the fog of distrust between the Arabs and their allies. The Arabs were not only apprehensive about the greed of the imperial powers: they felt that their weakness made them expendable. In the autumn of 1917 Lawrence got wind of the secret approaches being made to the British government by Talaat Bey, the new Turkish Grand Vizier, who was angling for a separate, negotiated peace. This was another episode in a long history of furtive diplomacy which stretched back to the spring of 1915. Then, Jamal Pasha, uncomfortably aware that the Syrians and Lebanese were poised to welcome an Allied invasion, secretly offered to manage a coup, take Syria out of the war and make himself Sultan in return for Allied backing and recognition. The French squashed this scheme, which had been taken seriously by the Foreign Office and the Russians, who had been offered the Straits if Jamal took Constantinople and deposed Mehmed V.8

  Talaat had more on offer: he proposed a coup against Enver, permission for RN submarines to enter the Straits and sink the Goeben and Breslau, and an immediate armistice which would pave the way for an Anglo-Ottoman accord in the Middle East. The Foreign Office thought something might come from dealing with Talaat since there was still a residual feeling that long-term imperial interests in the region were safest in the hands of a strong Turkey rather than a cluster of successor states. There was some support for this view in the War Office, but Robertson thought the Germans would step in once details of the plot had emerged. The Arab lobby was horrified. ‘We must honourably keep faith wit
h the Arabs,’ argued General Macdonogh, or face a violent Muslim backlash in India.9 Rumours of these hugger-mugger exchanges with Talaat reached Cairo in October 1917 and may have begun to circulate among the Arabs. A troubled Allenby cabled the Foreign Office for an explanation, arguing that ‘The question of continued help from the Arabs depends on their continued belief that we shall keep our promises not to conclude any peace which would leave Arab territories under Turkish domination.’10

  Lawrence admitted in the Seven Pillars that he had been informed of these secret manoeuvres by a friend in Cairo, probably a staff or Arab Bureau colleague, and he was despondent. Since there were those within the British government willing to contemplate seriously a rapprochement with Turkey, it was all the more imperative for the Arabs to press ahead into Syria, if necessary on their own. Lawrence’s alarm was understandable but ill-founded. The secret negotiations petered out, but they did give him a pretext to excuse the clandestine exchanges between Faisal and the Turkish government from November 1917 to July 1918.11

  Having failed to crush the Arab Revolt in Hejaz and faced with its possible spread into Syria, the Ottoman government was forced to find ways by which an accommodation could be reached with the Arab nationalists. Their new policy was revealed to a British secret agent in Berne, who heard in September 1917 that the exiled Khedive Abbas Hilmi and his followers were about to leave Switzerland for Damascus. In return for eventual restoration to the Egyptian throne, the Khedive would act as an intermediary between the Turkish government and Hussain. Appeals were to be made to Hussain’s sense of Islamic solidarity and he was to be offered terms for Arab self–government in Syria and Iraq.12 Overall direction of this programme of Turco-Arab reconciliation was in the hands of Jamal Pasha, who, since his crackdown on the Syrian nationalists, had introduced policies designed to convince local opinion that Turkey and not the Allies was the best patron for Arab nationalism. His appeals were reinforced by frequent references to Anglo–French ambitions for the area.