Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Lawrence translated during this exchange and passed on his notes to the Foreign Office. Quite clearly Faisal imagined himself the ally of Britain who might expect special consideration from the British government. Lawrence had gone further in his memorandum of 4 November and emphasised a moral obligation owed by Britain to the Arabs. ‘I hope,’ he argued, ‘that in dividing the common spoils we will not descend to commercial arguments of the exact participating contingents of British, French, Indian, Arab or Armenian troops.’ In other words, Faisal’s claim to Syria might seem an excessive return on his wartime investment of men and effort. If Faisal, encouraged by Lawrence, had any illusions on this score they were swept away by the magisterial remarks of Curzon in a letter of 9 October 1919. The Foreign Secretary reminded Faisal that ‘His Majesty’s Government cannot forget that infinitely the larger share of the burden of the defeat of Turkey was carried by the British Empire.’ Furthermore, he added, France had lost heavily in the struggle to defeat Germany, ‘which was the power behind Turkey’.11 Faisal had clearly learned nothing from what had been told him during his brief tour of the Western Front battlefields. Neither, it seemed, had Lawrence.

  The British government was not prepared to ditch France in order to show favour to Faisal, even though he and Lawrence believed otherwise. Nevertheless, the Syrian question was a distraction which could easily create a rift between Britain and France and so undermine their efforts to solve Europe’s problems. Yet Britain could not afford to wash its hands of Faisal and so provoke widespread unrest in Syria, which was still under British military administration. The answer was a form of compromise, devised on one level to satisfy Faisal and on another to postpone the resolution of Syria’s difficulties. On 25 March, Britain, France and the United States agreed to send a commission to Syria which would investigate local opinion, especially on the crucial question of which power would be most welcome as the region’s protector.

  Faisal regarded this decision as a triumph and he celebrated it by breaking a lifetime of orthodox Muslim abstinence and drinking champagne. Confident that he would be wholeheartedly supported by local opinion, he felt certain that the commission would recommend that either Britain or the United States should be awarded the mandate (the current word used instead of the colonialist-sounding ‘protectorate’) and that he would be installed as Syria’s ruler. A few days later he told Colonel House, President Wilson’s adviser, that his recent experiences had taught him that the only powers trustworthy enough to be given the mandate were Britain and the United States.

  Aware that the Crane—King commission might return with unfavourable findings, the French increased their efforts to reach a private agreement with Faisal. He, sure that all the Syrians would spurn France as a mandatory power, was uncompromising. On 13 April, two days before Faisal returned to Damascus, he had talks with Clemenceau in which the French President offered Syria independence ‘in a form of a federation of local communities corresponding to the traditions and wishes of their populations’, which would satisfy the Christian, Jewish and Druze minorities who feared Arab domination. Clemenceau also promised ‘material and moral assistance in the emancipation of Syria’.

  Lawrence was party to these negotiations and he urged Faisal to accept the French conditions. Lawrence instinctively disliked compromise, but he was by now aware that his government would never jeopardise its good relations with France in order to satisfy Faisal. This had been made plain by Lloyd George, who urged Faisal to accept Clemenceau’s terms, which were the best he could ever hope for. Lawrence also pleaded moderation, persuading Faisal to surrender control of his foreign policy to France. ‘On the advice of Lawrence’, Faisal orally promised Clemenceau that once in Syria he would do his utmost to persuade her people to accept a French mandate ruler in return for recognition as king. This was what Faisal told Clayton six weeks later in Damascus, adding that he never intended to keep his word. Someone’s memory was flawed since Lawrence told the Foreign Office that, despite what was being claimed by Clemenceau and the French press, Faisal had refused everything offered him including the Syrian throne.12

  From this tangle of misunderstanding and contradiction everyone concerned went away believing whatever suited them. At the centre of the confusion was Lawrence. He mischievously encouraged Faisal to reject whatever the French suggested; he also filled Faisal’s head with rash ideas of armed resistance. In a conversation with Allenby, Faisal recalled that Lawrence had passed on to him the advice of President Wilson, which had been: ‘if you want independence recruit soldiers and be strong.’ Allenby was appalled and commented that he would not have made such a foolish remark, which was, in effect, an appeal for the Arabs to adopt the spirit of 1776.13 Yet, if Faisal is to be believed, Lawrence also urged him to make a bargain with the French.

  All of the muddle and most of the recrimination generated by the Syrian question during the Peace Conference were the direct result of misunderstandings about what exactly had been said during negotiations. Everything hung on the translation and here Lawrence’s role was crucial. There were misgivings among Foreign Office officials about the tone and precision of his renderings from and into Arabic after Faisal had claimed that Allied recognition of Arab belligerent rights in October 1918 had distinguished between his own ‘Syrian’ army and his father’s, based in Hejaz. Young was asked to recollect what exactly had been said in Damascus and he replied that he was ‘under the impression that Lawrence’s translation (on that occasion) [my italics] could not have been interpreted to imply separate recognition’. 14 The French too had doubts about the accuracy of Lawrence’s translations and during the session on 6 February had their own Arabist listening and ready to pick up any chicanery. None was found and later another Arabist told Meinertzhagen that Lawrence had given a faithful version of Faisal’s words.

  Harry St John Philby considered Lawrence’s Arabic ‘rather poor stuff’ because of his accent, but otherwise he was fluent enough. Storrs’s servant-cum-spy Ruhi, who coached Lawrence in 1917, was struck by his mispronunciation of many words. Lawrence claimed that by the end of the war his vocabulary stood at 12,000 words but admitted that his grammar and syntax were shaky. Listening to Lawrence’s Arabic was ‘a perpetual adventure’ for Faisal: whether it was adequate for the sophistries and nuances of diplomatic exchanges is another matter. The confused outcome of the vital talks between Faisal and Clemenceau in April indicate that all involved, including Lawrence, departed with widely differing impressions of what had passed.

  Faisal remained convinced that France was his enemy; he confided to Lawrence that he drew up his will just before embarking on a French cruiser at Marseilles on 14 April. It had been intended that Lawrence accompany him back to Beirut, but the Foreign Office decided that it would be wiser and probably safer for him to remain in Paris. However, Lawrence may have briefed Faisal on how to handle Crane and King, the two Americans in charge of the Syrian commission. This alone explains why Faisal told them of his enlightened intention to establish an American college for women in Mecca. This and much more left the Americans with the wholesome impression that the Arab Prince was ‘a confirmed believer in the Anglo-Saxon race’.

  Not only did Faisal reveal himself to be a modern and liberal thinker, he orchestrated popular demonstrations and petitions and stage-managed the Syrian National Assembly (elected on the 1908 Turkish franchise) to give the impression that all Syrians wanted him as their king and either Britain or the United States as the mandatory power. This was in fact the conclusion reached by the commissioners at the end of August, although their findings no longer had any relevance. External events had overtaken Faisal and Syria, and the United States was on the verge of withdrawing from international affairs into isolation.

  January to April 1919 had been months of intense activity and strain for Lawrence in an unfamiliar world. They were marked by a personal tragedy when his father died suddenly on 7 April. Thomas Lawrence had suffered from bronchial disorders for several years and finall
y fell victim to the Spanish ’flu epidemic which was sweeping Western Europe. Since the death of his cousin in 1914 he had been, in secret, Sir Thomas Chapman Bt, the last of his line. His son had been alerted to his illness by a telegram from Robert Lawrence and had flown to England, but he arrived too late.

  Lawrence stoically withheld the news of his father’s death from Meinertzhagen, with whom he was sharing lodgings at the Continental Hotel. The robust warrior–ornithologist had become Lawrence’s companion and father confessor during the conference and in his diary kept a record of their intimate conversations. During April, Lawrence confided that he was tormented by fears that what he was writing would be exposed as mendacious and he admitted to feeling shame about his illegitimacy. These extemporaneous confessions have been challenged by several biographers who suspected that Meinertzhagen may have later adjusted entries in his diaries to highlight either his importance or his percipience. Nevertheless the weight of evidence indicates that, while he could be careless with dates, the substance of his anecdotes is beyond question.

  Why Lawrence chose this time to make these revelations and to this man, with whom previously he had only a passing acquaintance, is hard to explain. It is also difficult to understand why he chose to lay bare his sense of guilt about his birth and the supposed falsehoods he had written in a book which was not destined for general circulation. He had other, more immediate worries: his father’s death; his ambiguous and far from honourable role as the servant both of his country and of a foreign prince; the knowledge that Faisal’s cause was making little headway and the likelihood that his Arab brothers-in-arms were about to be denied their rewards. Lawrence was facing possible failure and this may have triggered penitential confessions about his wider unworthiness. Yet his disclosure of his shortcomings fell short of an admission that he had failed the Arabs; instead, he transferred his sense of guilt to other areas.

  He also found time for schoolboy pranks. Looking down the stairwell of the Astoria Hotel, he and Meinertzhagen noticed Lloyd George, Balfour and Hardinge huddled in conversation. Lawrence fetched two packets of Bronco lavatory paper and showered the sheets on to the great men. Then he and Meinertzhagen scurried back to their offices. Later Meinertzhagen overheard Hardinge comment, with a pomposity which must have delighted Lawrence, ‘There is nothing funny about toilet paper.’ Maybe this jape was another of Lawrence’s ways of reminding the world that he was still his own man who, while he moved familiarly among the great and powerful, did not belong to them. On other occasions he disregarded patrician forms of conduct. Vansittart considered him a banner-bearer for a novel and regrettable trend in manners after overhearing a dinnerparty exchange. ‘I’m afraid my conversation doesn’t interest you much,’ a lady remarked to Lawrence. ‘It doesn’t interest me at all’ was his answer. In spite of such tartness (a feature of his conversation noticed by Isherwood), Lawrence was greatly in demand for social occasions during the conference. There was a strong hint of the exotic about him and the Arab delegation, and rumours of his desert adventures ensured him considerable social attention.

  Quite suddenly and inexplicably, on 3 May, he left Paris and hitched a lift to Cairo in a Handley Page 0/400 bomber. (This departure may have provoked Hardinge’s later remarks about his perverse habit of coming and going as he wished.) The bomber was one of fifty-one which were flown to Egypt between March and October 1919, first to assist in the suppression of an anti-British insurrection and later to overawe the disaffected Egyptians. During the journey, Lawrence told one pilot that he was making the trip to collect his gear from Cairo, but the officer was unconvinced. ‘Everything was supposed to be very hush-hush,’ he remembered, but ‘Knowing Lawrence and talking to him, it was fairly obvious this was not the real reason.’

  The real reason was connected with recent events in Hejaz which had concerned Lawrence and the British government since the end of December. The kingdom was coming under increasing pressure from Ibn Saud and his Wahabbi zealots. Members of a Muslim fundamentalist brotherhood whom Lawrence had once likened to Cromwell’s Roundheads (the Knights Templar might have been a more apposite comparison), the Wahabbis were fanatic warriors dedicated to Islamic regeneration. Armed with rifles supplied to Ibn Saud by his patrons in the India Office, the Wahabbis were more than a match for Hejazi troops, a fact they proved at the battle near the Khurma oasis in August 1918.

  At the end of December 1918, Lawrence told the Foreign Office that he could eliminate the Wahabbis with tanks, probably at the prompting of Faisal, who was keen to get these weapons and armoured cars for the Hejazi army. At first, the War Office rejected the suggestion, but on 4 February 1919 relented and permitted forty Hejazi infantrymen to undertake a tank-training course in Egypt.15 Lawrence was confident that he would be summoned to take charge of operations against the Wahabbi and, in March, casually asked Yale if he would like to come to the Nejh and watch the campaign against Ibn Saud. A month later, Lawrence was recommending the use of Indian Muslim troops to evict the Wahabbis from Mecca if they seized the city.16

  Quite rightly, Lawrence assumed that Britain would intervene to prop up its client in the Hejaz. The moment came in May after the defeat of the Hejazi army at Tubarah and, on 6 June, when it was clear that Mecca was imperilled, Allenby formally ordered Lawrence to take charge of its defence. Six Mark VI tanks had already been placed in readiness, in accordance with his earlier suggestion, and he was warned not to use them too far from their operational base or a railhead.17

  Lawrence briefly touched on the incident in an article in the Daily Express of 28 May 1920 in which he censured the War Office for its slowness in making the tanks available to Hussain. Admitting that his advice had been sought over how best to secure peace between Hussain and Ibn Saud, Lawrence was silent about his own participation in the expected war, although it was clear at the time that the War Office intended him to supervise the hurriedly formed Hejazi tank corps. There was, much to Lawrence’s pleasure, a droll element in this affair. Ibn Saud was the India Office’s man while Hussain danced to a Foreign Office tune and so, for a few weeks, there was the bizarre possibility of a war between two foreign princes sponsored by two British departments of state and entirely paid for by British taxpayers.

  Unforeseen circumstances prevented Lawrence from joining in another desert war. After leaving Pisa, his aircraft struck a tree when its pilot, Lieutenant Prince, unwisely attempted to land on Centocelle airfield near Rome as night was falling. He was killed in the crash and his co-pilot was fatally injured. Lawrence, with a broken collar-bone and fractured ribs, gamely helped other wounded crewmen from the wreckage. He was taken to hospital where he was visited by King Victor Emmanuel and the British Ambassador, Sir James Rennell. Rennell’s son Francis, a friend and fellow intelligence officer in Egypt, invited Lawrence to convalesce in the Embassy.

  After a few days and not yet recovered, Lawrence continued his journey which was dogged by further mischances. Uncertain weather forecasts and a sequence of mechanical hitches forced the bomber flight to follow a serpentine route with stopovers at Taranto, Valona, Albania, Athens and Sollum on the Libyan coast. The delays gave Lawrence the unexpected chance to look over antiquities in Athens and explore the Aegean islands. On Crete he encountered Harry St John Philby, who since 1916 had been the Indian government’s representative to Ibn Saud. For three years he had kept Ibn Saud a benevolent neutral and procured him a trickle of modern firearms with which to wage war against the pro-Turkish Ibn Rashid. Philby was as fiercely partisan for Ibn Saud as Lawrence was for the Hashemites. When they met, Philby was on his way by plane to Cairo, the first stage of his mission to Riyadh where he was under orders to dissuade Ibn Saud from further forays into Hejaz. Philby and Lawrence got on well, although each was pugnacious, dogmatic and, for different reasons, at odds with their government’s Middle Eastern policies. They travelled together for the final leg of their journey to Heliopolis aerodrome.

  When they arrived in Cairo in the middle of June, they
found they were no longer needed. Ibn Saud had pulled his forces out of Hejaz as he feared the loss of his £60,000 annuity from Delhi, and had turned his attention towards the conquest of Nejd and, with it, the final overthrow of Ibn Rashid. The crisis over, Lawrence stayed with the Allenbys, where he and Philby enlivened dinner with furious exchanges over the merits of their rival Arab protégés, much to the discomfort of Lady Allenby, who sat between them.

  Lawrence lingered in Cairo for several days and sifted through his old reports in Arab Bureau files in search of material for his book. He paused on 28 June to write Stirling, now Deputy Chief Political Officer in Damascus, a report which exposed the treachery of Abdul al Qadir and of his Pan-Islamist brother, Muhammad Said. Intended as evidence for Said’s arrest, which would have suited Faisal, the letter included Lawrence’s first revelation of the Dera incident. On 17 July when he was back in Paris, he said more about this to Meinertzhagen.

  In Paris, Lawrence continued his routine work on Arab business. On 15 June he advised Faisal to postpone his return for six weeks, since there would be no discussion of Arab affairs until the beginning of September. With the future of Syria in limbo, Lawrence decided to take unofficial leave and return to Oxford, where he could give his full attention to his book. He was also keen to reactivate plans for his printing press and, as an aspirant author, seek out the society and guidance of distinguished men of letters. His way had already been smoothed by Geoffrey Dawson, whose influence had secured him a six-year fellowship of All Souls College.