After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars

  To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me

  When we came.43

  Selim Ahmed was destined to die, not as a warrior, but of dysentery in 1918, at the very place where he met Lawrence. It was in the course of loving him that Lawrence developed all his high Victorian fantasies about the Arabs. He disliked those who had become urbanized or Westernized, or whose reading of Darwin or Herbert Spencer had made them modify the simplicity of their religious fanaticism. He saw the Arabs, as English dreamers before him had done – C. M. Doughty, Richard Burton, Lady Hester Stanhope, A. W. Kinglake – as primitives, untainted with ‘doubt, our modern Crown of Thorns’. He was wrong about Doubt. It was the all-achieving Victorians who were mature enough to live with that. The self-destructive twentieth century craved scientific and dogmatic certainty, discarding Hegelian idealism in favour of a belief in physics; abandoning Liberalism in favour of Marxism or fascism. Religion, which most Victorian intellectuals questioned, enjoyed a vogue again in the early to mid-twentieth century so long as it expressed itself in certainties which Carlyle’s generation had deemed obsolete. So T. E. Lawrence was never more modern than when he looked to the Islamic Near East and saw there the certainties others would find in communism or Catholicism. For this reason he saw the Bedouin, the wandering desert Arabs, as the echt Arabs, and there was something paradoxical, not to say self-contradictory, about espousing the desire, supposedly on their behalf – in fact on behalf of the Herbert Spencer-reading modernizers – for an independent Arab nation-state with all the paraphernalia of foreign embassies, finance ministers, and administrators.

  Many read Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a fraudulent historical text, without realizing that it is intended to be read, as Malory, Homer or the Bible are intended to be read, as a mythological compendium whose stories interpret, as they describe, the world. As in the story of Samuel, seeking out the Lord’s anointed and being guided to Saul, later David, by the Lord Himself; or of Merlin discovering ‘the once and future King’ Arthur/Lawrence describes himself as one entrusted to find the true Arab Leader. When he meets Faisal, ‘I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek – the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Faisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown head-cloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord …’

  One of the reasons Seven Pillars has such an hypnotic effect on the reader is precisely its lack of realism. A prosaic reader will wish to protest that its whole political stance is based on a contradiction. It proclaims Arab freedom, but this freedom is something given to the Arabs by an English Deliverer as if it were his to give. It seems like a story of an Englishman becoming an Arab. It is really a story about Arabs willingly and devotedly rising up against their Turkish oppressors because they want to become – in some way – part of the British Empire. This is the fantasy subtext, politically. It is significant that in actual fact none of the Bedouin would fight the Turks without huge down-payments of gold sovereigns. Between August 1917 and January 1918 £320,000 in gold sovereigns was handed over to tribal sheikhs by Lawrence in return for attacks on the Hejaz railway and adherence to Faisal. In reality, they were mercenaries. In Seven Pillars all this is suppressed.44

  Prosaic literalists furthermore object to the flagrant historical distortions and lies. Lawrence conveniently forgets that the first Allied troops to enter Damascus were the Australian cavalry, and he makes no mention of the Indian lancers, and Allenby’s huge infantry divisions. In this version, the Syrian capital is taken by Lawrence and his Arabs on camels.

  Then there is the celebrated episode of Lawrence being captured by the Turks at Deraa, tortured, and sodomized by a Turkish officer named in the book Nahi. (‘He began to fawn on me, saying how white and fresh I was, how fine my hands and feet, and how he would let me off drills and duties, make me his orderly, even pay me wages, if I would love him.’45) Lawrence adds: ‘I bore it for a little, till he got too beastly; and then jerked my knee into him.’ The torture which follows, and the further sodomization, and the whipping, produced ‘a delicious warmth, probably sexual’.46

  The unreliability of the incident has been lengthily debated since the book was first published. Within days, hours even, of this ordeal, in which welts have supposedly appeared on his back, our hero is escaping, and riding hundreds of miles at high speed to Aqaba for more deeds of derring-do. The Deraa episode fulfils several functions in Lawrence’s narrative. First, it serves, or is surely meant to serve, as justification for the bloodbath inflicted by Lawrence on the Turks. There are scenes in the tenth and final book of obscene (his own word) bloodiness, and enjoyment of cruelty.

  Much is made of Lawrence’s masochism, perhaps his sado-masochism. Modern biography perhaps tells us too much. We know that in later life, when he retired from the glare of publicity to try to live as an aircraftman under an assumed name – John Hume Ross – he got men to cane him until he achieved orgasm. Actual physical contact with human beings repelled him.

  These are the private quirks of the man. He was famous, so he was a marked man. Our generation, unused to corporal punishment except as a form of sexual diversion, sees Lawrence’s obsession with the whip, and with pain, as one of the features which malee him odd. No doubt the side of his nature which enjoyed baiting and annoying Colonel Blimps relished placing a scene of invented homosexual rape in a book which was obviously going to become one of the major bestsellers about the war. But another of the bestsellers, Ernest Raymond’s Gallipoli novel Tell England, penned by a happily married man who became a father and grandfather, is if anything even more obsessed by corporal punishment inflicted on boys than anything written by Lawrence. The second half of Raymond’s book tells of three young men at Gallipoli. The first half is a loving reconstruction of their ‘gay schooldays’. When it was published in 1922 Tell England was family reading. Respectable middle-class women enjoyed it. Today it seems to be directed to the specialist readership of pederastic flagellants. (‘I bent over, resting my hands on my knees. Radley was a cricketer with a big reputation for cutting and driving; and three drives, right in the middle of the cane, convinced me what a first-class hitter he was … Then he put his cane away and issued his little ration of gentleness – “You’re two plucky boys”, he said.’)

  Reading Tell England, and other school stories of the period in which whippings, canings, thrashings and biffings are the regular manner in which masters or senior boys show their affection for, and dominance of, little boys, undoubtedly provides an insight into the First World War ethos. Why, and how, else can we begin to imagine why so many adolescent boys went, at first not merely with willingness, but with rapture, to their miserable deaths?

  Seven Pillars and the subsequent legendary reputation of T. E. Lawrence in the postwar years leaves a deeper legacy The book has been rightly described47 as a Modernist appraisal of the First World War which has more in common with Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s Waste Land than with conventional military history. By its carefully stage-managed effects, however, it is not simply making an aesthetic but a political statement. It leaves the Arab world in turmoil. Its warfare is accomplished but its political leadership is in dispute. After the blood comes the excrement. In the penultimate chapter an Australian doctor confronts Lawrence with the realities in the Turkish hospital in Damascus, with dead bodies outstretched on a stone floor in pools of ‘liquid muck’. In this hell-hole there are still very many alive. We are left with the overpowering feeling that this metaphor for the Middle East, a place where political discourse ends in confused shouts, and with the wounded lying in diarrhoea, needs the cleansing power of a great leader. One of the most eloquent moments comes in chapter CXX when Lawrence hears and transcribes the Call to Prayer – ‘The clamour hushed, as everyone seemed to obey the call to prayer on th
is their first night of perfect freedom. While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause, showed me my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since only for me, of all the hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase meaningless.’ The necessary rhetoric comes full circle. The lonely scholar asks General Allenby for permission to leave the Arabian Nights tale he has conjured for us. ‘In the end he agreed; and then at once I knew how much I was sorry.’

  But the rhetoric is eloquent with what it does not say. It calls aloud with its silence for a leadership in the Arab world as clear and firm as that call to prayer. Who, alone in its hundreds of pages, has shown himself able to cleanse the ordure of the Augean stable, to provide the leadership so desperately needed? They need not just the puppet-king whom Destiny had shown to the author. They need too a modern prophet, a mage – they need the one who is walking sorrowfully away.

  Seven Pillars of Wisdom is then not simply a book of reminiscences about the war, it is also a prophecy of what was to come, when not only the Arabs but the peoples of Europe would look for prophets. Not only Arabs but Germans, Italians, perhaps, (who knew?) the English themselves would hear the incantations from some political muezzin and, discarding the old, worn-out methods, find release in collective servitude to a Leader.

  10

  Barbarous Kings

  Well over 9 million young men were killed in the First World War – 1,380,000 Frenchmen, 1,935,000 Germans, 1,700,000 Russian and 942,135 from the British Empire.

  War, one war after another,

  Men start ‘em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost.

  So wrote Ezra Pound in his Cantos in typically robust manner. Pound is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, but as a political analyst he, no less than the politicians and the historians, is shocked into incomprehension by the sheer insanity of what they called the Great War.

  When Blücher’s Prussian army of 116,000 men invaded Belgium in the summer of 1815 and encamped at Namur, they were regarded by the British as their comrades in arms. Those British regiments who, for the next hundred years and more, celebrated 18 June as Waterloo Day could be forgiven for playing down the Prussian contribution to the Duke of Wellington’s victory over the French. After all, Wellington was the last British military leader of genius in history. All serious students of the battle, however, would agree with the duke that his victory had been ‘a damned close-run thing’, and that he would not have achieved it without German help.

  When, again, the Germans invaded northern France in 1870 and achieved a devastating victory over the moribund empire of Napoleon III, British public opinion was broadly in their favour, if less shrilly so than the queen, who likened the siege of Paris to the downfall of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Yet within a century of Waterloo, the British army in Belgium and France was entrenched in the bloodiest war in history, fighting the Germans. The strangeness of this will always haunt an intelligent observer. When all the explanations have been tried, there remains an element of mystery about how such a destructive war, so damaging to all participants, can have engaged Europe for so long.

  Some of the explanations for how Britain could have believed it was in her interest to go to war were explored in the last chapter. It was feared that a powerful Germany, with a navy almost as large as the British, and control of a railway which stretched from Berlin to Baghdad, could, if it chose, threaten Britain’s imperial hegemony. It could threaten India. Even if it had no direct plans to take over India, it could make contact between Britain and India difficult, it could interrupt trade. Great powers always suffer from collective paranoia. Whether or not such fears were justified, they could not but arise as German strength grew, and as the militaristic Junkers who appeared to control foreign policy used their loud voices to drown out the moderates. This goes some way towards explaining why the British diplomats, when the crisis came, were prepared to go to war with such comparative recklessness.

  There were other factors, which affected all the European powers. One was the comparative ease with which the Prussians had beaten the French in 1870. That was the only serious war on the European mainland since Waterloo. Although it was a bloody one, and followed by the torments of the Siege, and then the Commune of Paris, it was, by comparison with the wars of the Napoleonic era, short. All sides, as they went to war in the summer of 1914, believed that like the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, it would be over in months.

  As far as Britain was concerned, there was almost no one in public life, in a position of real administrative authority, except Winston Churchill and Kitchener, who had any direct experience of warfare. Churchill had been at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 when a combination of British artillery machine-gun and rifle fire killed or wounded over 16,000 spear-carrying Sudanese in four and a half hours. One of those who witnessed this bloodbath was Douglas Haig, who would command the British Expeditionary Force in France between 1915 and 1918.1

  Apart from small wars, such as Kitchener’s massacre of the Sudanese, the British had not been noted for their military prowess in the days of their greatest political and economic prosperity. During the whole reign of Queen Victoria they had fought the Crimean War against the Russians – a pointless war which merely advertised to the world the levels of administrative and military incompetence in the British army – and the Boer War in which the British only just managed to beat an entirely amateur army of Bible-bashing farmers. Churchill had also been a witness to this war – as a journalist, prisoner of war, and as a cheerfully self-publicizing escapee and combatant. His older civilian colleagues in the cabinet – and above all Asquith, the Liberal prime minister – were disastrously ignorant of the art of war or its possible consequences. Alan Clark called his unforgettable indictment of the British generals The Donkeys because of the exchange in Falkenhayn’s Memoirs – Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions. Hoffman: True, but don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys. Clark described the first year of the war as ‘the story of the destruction of an army – the old professional army of the United Kingdom that always won the last battle, whose regiments had fought at Quebec, Corunna, in the Indies, were trained in musketry at Hythe, drilled on the parched earth of Chuddapore, and were machine-gunned, gassed and finally buried in 1915’.2

  This is a stirring paragraph; and no one can doubt that the incompetence of Sir John French, the first commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and that of his successor Haig, resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. It is not entirely to exonerate the generals, however, to add that they were being asked, on occasion, to achieve impossible aims; asked by politicians who had lost control of the situation.

  The director of Military Operations was, like so many twentieth-century British generals, an Ulsterman, though he grew up in the south of Ireland: Major-General Sir Henry Wilson. It was in the Irish conflict, and not the World War, that he was doomed to die. He had seen service in India and in the Boer War, but most of his career had been as a staff officer, working at the War Office and as commandant of the Staff College. When he became director of Military Operations in 1910, Wilson travelled frequently to France, Russia and Germany, and kept the British politicians briefed about the likely outcome of military engagements. As early as September 1910 he was telephoning Winston Churchill at the Café Royal, where he was dining with the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and getting them round to his house, spreading out maps, and speaking of what would happen if Germany invaded France.3 Wilson’s predictions, and those of his fellow army officers, and their French and Russian colleagues, were reasonably accurate. Rather as in the 1930s, Churchill was much readier than his colleagues to pay attention to military intelligence from the Continent. The questions which occupied Wilson’s mind did not concern the possibility of war – he regarded it as an inevitability. They were how the British would be equipped to meet war when it came. About the navy, he had no doubts – no one did. The questions which exercised Wilson’s mind were whether the British could
muster enough troops to put together a convincing expeditionary force without either introducing compulsory conscription or bringing in the, perhaps unwilling, Dominions. The second and much graver fear expressed in his diaries concerned the low quality of the politicians. At the end of May 1911, he attended a meeting of the Imperial Conference on Defence. The premier of New Zealand, Sir Joseph Ward, said that unless they pursued a common policy, agreeable to New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and Australia, the Empire would disintegrate.

  ‘It is difficult to imagine Asquith taking a strong straight line,’ wrote Wilson, ‘and yet if someone does not catch hold of us, I think the Empire will go before long … The task of welding this Empire into one is the most difficult that any man was ever called upon to perform. Obvious, therefore, that we must get a great man such as Pitt, Bismarck, etc. I confess I see no sign of such a man in this country.’4

  Three years later, when he attended the first War Council at Number 10 Downing Street, with the likes of Lord Kitchener, Churchill, Prince Louis of Battenberg and Sir Douglas Haig – as well of course as the prime minister, Asquith, and the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey – Wilson tersely noted, ‘an historic meeting of men, mostly entirely ignorant of their subject’.5

  The First World War was truly a world war, involving Russia, Japan, Africa, the East Near and Far, and ultimately the United States of America. Its central theatre, however, was Europe and its central issues were – Who controlled which bits of Europe? Whose national independence threatened whose hegemony? Questions of cause and effect can be discussed endlessly. By the end of the war, Russia had had a communist revolution and murdered its emperor; the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires no longer existed; Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and gone to live in Holland; the Middle East was notionally controlled by the French and the British; the Jews looked for a homeland, unfortunately in the same territory where Arabs sought to establish their own independent kingdom(s); Ireland was moving towards independence and/or civil war; British women received the parliamentary franchise and had a far greater measure of work opportunity; socialism, having conquered Russia, was seen as a viable political option in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Britain. By the end of the war, America – not one of the old European powers and not Britain with her Empire but America – was seen not merely as the essential ingredient in the Allied victory over Germany, but also as the natural broker of the Peace. The world had made that crucial step towards becoming our world, the world we know today, in which America would one day become the supreme power, politically. (Already American industrial output had reached double Britain’s.)