Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  As for the Arab armed forces, their contribution to the Allied war effort had been useful but marginal. At moments of crisis they had been rescued by British air- and sea-power and were constantly kept alive by injections of British gold, weaponry, ammunition and the loan of Allied specialist units. With this assistance, regular and irregular Beduin forces accomplished what was asked of them. They pinned down Turkish forces along the Damascus-to-Medina line and disrupted the already ramshackle Turkish railway services. At the closing stages of the campaign, a battalion of Arab regulars and several thousand Beduin created a diversion around Dera and hampered the evacuation of Turco-German forces. Their performance on the battlefield varied enormously, although Allied officers, with the exception of Lawrence, soon learned to place little faith in the Beduin, who were primarily concerned with their wages and what they could steal.

  This summary, or something very like it, would have been history’s verdict on the Arab campaign had Lawrence died in 1918 or slipped back unobtrusively to his former life as an archaeologist.

  II

  The Making of the Legend, 1918—1935

  The legend of Lawrence of Arabia was a confection of historical truth, rumour and invention put together between 1918 and 1935. It did not materialise by chance. At each stage in its evolution it was a deliberate creation in which Lawrence himself was closely involved, although never in control. He was able to feed information to his biographers, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, and he censored what they wrote, but, much to his irritation, his efforts to bridle the press failed.

  At first, Lawrence’s motive for telling his story had been selfless. ‘He wanted no publicity for himself, all he desired was that the Arab cause should be understood’ was the journalist Evelyn Wrench’s immediate reaction after his first meeting with Lawrence at the end of 1918. This must have seemed strange, since Wrench had already been told by his friend Lord Winterton that Lawrence would ‘in future be regarded as one of the great figures of the war’.1 Once it was clear that this prophecy would be fulfilled, Lawrence took a keen interest in his own reputation and was anxious that his accomplishments should be properly recorded and understood. He read closely all reviews of books by or about himself.

  At the same time, he was still a slave of his old urge to dress up or add counterfeit details to any story in which he was the central figure. This wantonness with the truth made life awkward for Robert Graves and Liddell Hart when they plied him for information. ‘Tangles seem a characteristic and inevitable part of anything connected with our subject,’ Graves complained to Liddell Hart and wondered whether Lawrence’s Irish genes had given him ‘a vein of unseriousness which easily becomes treachery’.2 Several years before he became Lawrence’s biographer, Liddell Hart had heard his false boast that he had been the sole begetter of the 1915 Alexandretta invasion project and this, together with the suspicion that Lawrence’s reputation was overblown, made him cautious of other claims.3 Graves had been misled into writing that Lawrence had first gone to Jiddah in 1916 as a free agent whereas he had been sent there under specific orders, and later he heard from Lawrence that he had been less than honest in his account of the fall of Damascus.4

  In the post-war years Lawrence was still in full possession of that facility of imagination which made him concoct extravagant stories about himself. In 1929 he told Francis Yeats-Brown, the literary editor of the Spectator, that before the war he had been a secret agent, had infiltrated the Turkish High Command and during the Balkan Wars had served briefly as Enver Pasha’s ADC.5 A fellow aircraftman heard how, during the war, Lawrence without any instruction had flown and landed an aircraft for a £20 wager.6 Neither anecdote found its way into any biography, but their circulation as gossip added substance to the public stereotype of Lawrence the enigmatic man of derring-do.

  In 1918, when the foundations of the Lawrence legend were laid, he had wanted no more than to awaken the British public and government to the sacrifices made by the Arabs and so secure for them the political rewards which he believed were their rightful due. In short, he was the Arabs’ public relations man, and he made good headway. Lawrence was co-opted to the Cabinet’s Eastern Committee as an Arab expert and he used the introductions given him by Winterton to canvass politicians, newspaper owners and editors. He soon gained the co-operation of the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson. Putting his case to Dawson in November, Lawrence emphasised that throughout the war the Arabs had behaved honourably, they had fought without the assurance of an alliance, had spurned the blandishments of other powers and had fought hard; now they wanted political freedom.

  This was a highly partial gloss on the truth, but Lawrence’s three articles in The Times of 26, 27 and 28 November 1918 were vivid but factual. Described as reports from ‘a Correspondent who was in close touch with the Arabs throughout their campaign’, the pieces concentrate on the hardships faced by the Arabs and how they were overcome. They outline Arab guerrilla tactics, the help given by the Royal Navy, the taking of Aqaba and various individual skirmishes. Lawrence remained silent about his own and other British officers’ activities with the Arabs.

  What Lawrence wrote had the attraction of novelty. Here, for the first time, was the thrilling story of an unknown war on a remote front in which colourfully dressed warriors charged on camels and blew up railway engines. This was indeed news. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force censors had blue-pencilled war correspondents’ copy which referred to the work done by Allied officers with the Arabs and overall coverage of their activities had been limited to occasional official bulletins. During September and October 1918 Massey had contributed a few lines about the Arab army in his despatches from Syria. Only on 17 October, when The Times printed Lawrence’s anonymous summary under the headline ‘The Arab March to Damascus’, did the British public learn any details about the part played in the war by the forces of this hitherto obscure ally.

  Even if such stories had been available earlier, their impact would have been very slight. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1918 every British newspaper was dominated by stories of the great victories on the Western Front. Names such as Le Cateau and Saint Quentin filled the headlines, and reports from Syria took second, often third place in column inches, squeezed out by accounts of Allied successes in Italy and the Balkans. Here and there a scattered handful of short paragraphs and official photographs advertised the existence of an Arab army. On 13 June the Illustrated London News printed a stock-in-trade war artist’s drawing of Arab soldiers, dressed in shorts and qalifehs, storming a Turkish gun battery urged on by a British officer in sun helmet who wields a riding crop. Palms indicate an Oriental landscape and underneath a caption announces, ‘The Arab forces have accounted for 40,000 Turkish troops.’ Over the next five months this magazine and its rival, The Sphere, included the occasional photograph of Arab soldiers.

  So as the war came to an end, the British public knew little about the Arabs. They, their war and the part played by Lawrence were an exotic story waiting to be told.

  By this time, Lawrence had returned to London, and official circles were ringing with gossip about the intriguing figure who was being called ‘the Hejaz General’. He came sharply and suddenly into focus on 30 October when rumours began to spread about his extraordinary behaviour during a private audience with George V As he was. about to be invested with his CB and DSO, Lawrence spurned both honours with the excuse that he could not honourably accept such decorations because of the government’s refusal to keep faith with the Arabs. The King was discountenanced by this outburst, although he did accept Lawrence’s own .303 rifle as a gift. It had a strange history: an Essex Regiment weapon, it was captured at Gallipoli, was then engraved and gold-mounted by Enver Pasha, who gave it to Faisal, who in turn passed it to Lawrence. (This handsome gun is now displayed in the Imperial War Museum.) There were soon reports that Lawrence had been so graceless as to tell the King that he might even fight alongside the Arabs against British troops if official policy were not
changed. Such impertinence shocked, but those who tut-tutted may later have been puzzled to see that this brazen fellow still claimed his French honours in the 1919 edition of Who’s Who. All in all, Lawrence had made a gesture which did nothing to promote the Arab cause and earned him much censure. Its insensitivity was surpassed when he used the ribbon of his Croix de Guerre as a collar for Hogarth’s dog.

  Lawrence reappeared at Buckingham Palace on 12 December with Faisal, the man on whose behalf he had made his protest, for a short audience with George V As was standard procedure with potentates from backward countries, Faisal was given a glimpse of the wealth and power of Britain. With Lawrence in tow as his interpreter, he was welcomed as a guest aboard a battleship in the Forth and then was shown something of British industrial sinew during a four-day tour of Glasgow and Clydeside. Reporting the visit of the party in ‘picturesque Arabian costume’, the Glasgow Herald noted that Lawrence held ‘the rank of amir’. At a civic dinner, Glasgow’s Lord Provost admitted that like most of his countrymen he had ‘had little idea that amongst our Allies there was the brave king of Hejaz and the brave Arabs’. A year later such ignorance would have been rare and by then it would have been Lawrence, not an Arabian prince, whom the Glaswegians would have flocked to see.

  Lawrence, the national hero and public celebrity, was the creation of Lowell Thomas, an American who had been successively a newspaperman, Professor of Oratory at a Chicago law school and a lecturer in English at Princeton. He had an eye for a good news story, an instinct for what the public wanted, and he was ambitious. Just after America entered the war in April 1917, he was sent to Europe, on the instructions of the United States government and with cash backing from a group of Chicago businessmen, to bring back news stories which would stimulate enthusiasm for the war. There was nothing heartening to be found on the Western Front, quite the contrary, so John Buchan, Director of the new Department of Information, guided Lowell Thomas towards the Middle East where Allenby was about to capture Jerusalem.

  Here, as Buchan rightly guessed, Lowell Thomas found just what he had been looking for, a story with direct emotional appeal for Americans. There were three potent ingredients: a modern ‘crusade’ for the liberation of the Holy Land; the emancipation of its Arab, Jewish and Armenian communities; and human interest in the form of Lawrence, whom Lowell Thomas called ‘Britain’s modern Coeur de Lion’. Religious and political idealism were nicely interwoven. Before the war, there had been extensive American missionary activity in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine and the region attracted a steady flow of American Christian pilgrims. Once the war was under way, Americans (many of them Armenian and Jewish immigrants) were deeply concerned about the plight of the non-Muslim communities in the region and became involved in famine relief work there. A war waged to emancipate Middle Eastern races had wider implications. Its aims accorded with the humane and liberal spirit of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which emphasised post-war freedom and self-determination for races under the domination of the old multinational empires.

  All these themes merged in Lawrence, the new Richard Lionheart. Lowell Thomas heard all about his deeds in Cairo and Aqaba, and in Jerusalem Storrs introduced him to the ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’. Lawrence’s story inspired, reassured, and above all appealed to the romantic imagination. Furthermore, Lowell Thomas had on hand the means to give his story the immediacy and vividness which American and British audiences relished–Harry Chase, a film-cameraman and photographer.

  It was appropriate that Lawrence, a twentieth-century hero, first secured fame through a film, although he appeared briefly in the background among various Allied officers in the official propaganda newsreel Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem, which was released in March 1918. Chase’s footage on the Arab campaign was later shown in cinemas in Britain, the United States, India, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. In July 1918, Wingate asked the Foreign Office for a print to be sent to Cairo, where, he imagined, its screening would help win over local opinion to the Allies.7 Chase’s newsreel sequences formed part of Lowell Thomas’s two-hour presentation on the Palestine and Arabian campaigns which opened at New York’s Century Theatre in March 1919. The lecture and film (accompanied by a symphony orchestra) was a great success, and a British impresario, Percy Burton, backed its transfer to London, where it opened on 14 August at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden under the title ‘With Allenby in Palestine’. This was quickly altered to ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’, which was a truer reflection of the subject matter. Originally scheduled to run for a fortnight, the programme was a sell-out and was transferred to the Royal Albert Hall, where it ran for six months. Lowell Thomas believed that in London alone at least a million people watched his presentation.

  What they saw was a dramatic extravaganza. The Covent Garden production utilised a set left over from the moonlight-on-the-Nile scene from the opera Joseph and his Brethren and the show opened with a performance of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Then Mrs Thomas sang her own setting of the muezzin’s call to prayer. On this characteristically bogus Oriental note, her husband entered and began his monologue.

  At this moment, somewhere in London, hiding from a host of feminine admirers, book publishers, autograph fiends and every species of hero-worshipper, is a young man whose name will go down in history beside those of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clive, Charles Gordon, and all the other famous heroes of Great Britain’s glorious past.

  This was Lawrence.

  Then followed what Lowell Thomas called ‘the most romantic story of the war’, illustrated by slides and film and with music provided by the band of the Welsh Guards. The playbills described the production as ‘America’s Tribute to British Valour’. In fact it was something more. When Burton had brought the production to London he had the encouragement and blessing of the English Speaking Union, of which Lowell Thomas was a member and whose committee included Churchill, Curzon and the newspaper proprietor, Lord Northcliffe. The Union was part of a broader movement which in the early twentieth century aimed to draw Britain and the United States more closely together. The cement with which such organisations hoped to bind the so-called Anglo-Saxon nations was a compound of their shared racial background, language, culture and history. With widespread support in newspaper, business and political circles, bodies such as the English Speaking Union hoped to achieve more than merely reminding Britons and Americans of their inheritance: they also sought to foster a common sense of future destiny.

  Lowell Thomas’s show was part of this process and was designed to boost Anglo-American understanding. Lawrence was deliberately presented as both an old-style hero and a representative of the new, benevolent imperialism. His life and deeds were used to dispel the traditional American misgivings about Britain as a greedy and oppressive imperial power. Lawrence was not a conqueror, but a liberator who led the Arabs towards a better future, Or, in Lowell Thomas’s words, ‘the wild sons of Ishmael regarded the quiet, fair-haired leader as a sort of supernatural being who had been sent from heaven to deliver them from oppression.’ Through Lawrence, American audiences understood enlightened imperialism. In 1919 the United States was being urged by Britain to take up the challenge of this new imperialism as a mandatory power with responsibility for the government of former Ottoman provinces. At the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence himself pressed the United States to accept the mandates for Constantinople and Armenia.8

  While Lowell Thomas may have set his listeners thinking about how Lawrence’s vision might be fulfilled politically, his underlying purpose was to entertain with an adventure story of guerrilla warfare set against an exotic background. If his subsequent articles in The Strand Magazine and his With Lawrence in Arabia are anything to go by, his style was vivid and cinematographic. One enthralling incident follows another and everything is larger than life, including of course Lawrence.

  London audiences were clearly captivated by the story and its hero. For those who watched and l
istened, the war was still an overpowering and often nightmarish memory. Peace had been signed at Versailles at the end of June 1919 and, on 11 November 1920, the dead were symbolically laid to rest as the Unknown Warrior was lowered into his grave at Westminster Abbey. There was a duty to remember and, at the same time, to push to the back of the mind recollections of mass suffering and death. There was also a need to get back to what the Americans called ‘normalcy’. A contemporary advertisement for Kensitas cigarettes caught the mood nicely. A returned officer and his wife are smoking and relaxing. ‘You’ve seen it through! You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to think about it.’

  Yet books about the war were pouring from the presses. Releases for November 1919 included The Story of our Submarines, Green Balls: The Adventures of a Night Bomber and How I Filmed the War. There was a marked public interest in hearing hitherto untold stories, especially when they concerned the more unusual or glamorous aspects of the war. For this reason, men and women flocked to listen to what was advertised as ‘the Strange Story of Colonel Lawrence, the leader of the Arab Army’ and clearly found it enthralling.

  Lowell Thomas’s showmanship first produced the Lawrence legend and rendered its hero in the likeness of a superman. What was remarkable was the staying power of the story and the depth and intensity of public interest. This was kept alive by contemporary biographies, by Lawrence’s own version of his exploits, Revolt in the Desert, which appeared in 1927, and by intermittent newspaper stories. In the widest sense, Lawrence had become a form of public property, a celebrity whose ideas and behaviour were thought to be of concern to newspaper readers. On one level he joined a select band of aviators, explorers, socialites and film stars whose features appeared in the popular press and about whom journalists wrote, usually with a blind disregard for truth. Even Robert Graves felt forced to include a brief section in his biography which included Lawrence’s views on children and animals, just the sort of trivia which the popular press relished, as presumably its readers did as well.