In Scottish courts there used to be a verdict falling between “guilty” and “not guilty,” namely “not proven.” Lawrence’s story about Curzon bursting into tears seems to fit into that category perfectly.
The day after Lawrence’s appearance before the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet, he was involved in an even more controversial meeting at a much higher level. Allenby’s letter to Clive Wigram had produced a private audience with the king, who was in any case, given his interest in military affairs, curious to meet young Colonel Lawrence. Allenby had also recommended Lawrence for the immediate award of a knighthood, a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath (KCB), which was one step up in the senior of the two orders that Lawrence had already been awarded. Lawrence had already made it clear to the king’s military secretary that he did not wish to accept this honor, and that he merely wished to inform the king about the importance of Britain’s living up to the promises made to King Hussein, but whether this information was passed on accurately is uncertain. It seems unlikely that two men as realistic as General Allenby and Lord Stamfordham would have hidden from the king Lawrence’s unwillingness to receive any form of decoration—perhaps the most important part of Stamfordham’s job as a courtier was to ensure that the king was spared any kind of surprise or embarrassment, and Allenby was an ambitious man who would not have wished to offend his sovereign.
Once Lawrence arrived at Buckingham Palace, he learned that the king intended to hold a private investiture, and present him with the insignia of his CB and his DSO. It seems very likely that this was the king’s own idea, that he intended it as a thoughtful gesture toward a hero. Once he made up his mind to do it, neither Stamfordham nor the military secretary attempted to confront him over the matter—George V’s stubbornness and sharp temper were well known, and when he had made up his mind to do something he was not easy to divert. Thus Lawrence was ushered in to see the king and left to explain himself that he would not accept any decorations or honors, either old or new.
We have Lawrence’s account of what he said to the king, in a letter he sent to Robert Graves with corrections he wanted Graves to make in his biography: “He explained personally to his Sovereign that the part he had played in the Arab Revolt was, to his judgment, dishonourable to himself and to his country and government. He had by order fed the Arabs with false hopes and would be obliged if he were relieved of the obligation to accept honors for succeeding in his fraud. Lawrence now said respectfully as a subject, but firmly as an individual, that he intended to fight by straight means or crooked until the King’s ministers had conceded to the Arabs a fair settlement of their claims.”
“In spite of what has been published to the contrary,” Lawrence added to Graves, “there was no breach of good relations between subject and sovereign.” In later years, the king, who liked to improve a good story as much as Lawrence, would tell how Lawrence unpinned each decoration as soon as the king had pinned it on him, so that in the end the king was left foolishly holding a cardboard box filled with the decorations and their red leather presentation cases. In fact the king seems to have been more curious than offended. Lawrence explained, with his usual charm, that it was difficult to serve two masters—Emir Feisal and King George—and that “if a man has to serve two masters it was better to offend the more powerful.”
At first the king was under the impression that Lawrence was turning down the KCB because he expected something better, and offered him instead the Order of Merit, a much more distinguished honor—it has been described as “the most prestigious honor on earth"—in the personal gift of the sovereign, founded by King George V’s father and limited to a total of twenty-four members. (Past members have included Florence Nightingale, and subsequent ones Graham Greene, Nelson Mandela, and Lady Thatcher.) This was not an offer to be taken lightly, but Lawrence refused it, at which point the king sighed in resignation, and said, “Well, there’s one vacant; I suppose it will have to go to Foch.”
The interview was cozy rather than formal. It had begun with the king “warming his coat tails in front of the fire at Buckingham Palace, the Morning Post in his hands, and complaining: ‘This is a bad time for kings. Five new republics today.’ “ Lawrence may have consoled the king by saying that he had just made two kings, but this seems unlikely—Hussein had made himself a king without Lawrence’s help, and Feisal had not yet been made one.* Lawrence had brought with him as a present for the king the gold-inlayed Lee-Enfield rifle that Enver Pasha had presented to Feisal, and that Feisal later gave to Lawrence in the desert. The king, an enthusiastic and expert shot and gun fancier himself—apart from stamp collecting, guns were his favorite pastime—was delighted with the rifle, which remained in the royal collection of firearms for many years until it was presented to the Imperial War Museum, where it is now a prized exhibit.
Later, Lord Stamfordham, in a letter to Robert Graves from Balmoral Castle, the royal family’s summer residence in Scotland, confirmed most of Lawrence’s account of the interview, and since Stamfordham and Lawrence dined together amicably at one point afterward, it does not seem likely that George V was offended—Stamfordham would hardly have dined “amicably” with somebody who had offended his sovereign. The two people at court who were offended were the queen and the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII and then the duke of Windsor), both of whom resented what they interpreted as discourtesy to the king, a resentment that Edward expressed strongly all his life.
During the course of the conversation, Lawrence expressed the opinion that all the members of his majesty’s government were “crooks,” not an uncommon opinion so long as Lloyd George was prime minister. The king was “rather taken aback” but by no means shocked or offended—his own opinion of Lloyd George was no better than Lawrence’s. “Surely you wouldn’t call Lord Robert Cecil a crook?” he asked, however, and Lawrence had to agree with the king that Cecil was certainly an exception.
In his letter to Graves, Stamfordham also made an interesting point: Lawrence had explained to the king “in a few words” that “he had made certain promises to King Feisal, that these promises had not been fulfilled and, consequently, it was quite possible that he might find himself fighting against the British Forces, in which case it would be obviously impossible and wrong to be wearing British decorations.”
One might have thought that if anything was going to shock the king it would be Lawrence’s suggestion that a British officer wearing the king’s uniform might have to take up arms against his own country, with or without his decorations, but the king seems either to have taken that in his stride, or to have decided that it was merely self-dramatizing nonsense, as indeed it was.
All things considered, Lawrence’s talk with the king was not nearly as controversial as it has often been described, but it was nevertheless surely a tactical mistake on Lawrence’s part. First of all, while Lawrence was within his right to decline new honors, he could not “turn down” those he already had, something the king understood better than Lawrence. For that matter Lawrence could just as easily have accepted the decorations without a fuss, then neglected to wear them afterward, and it would have made no difference at all. More important, the story made its way around London quickly, and usually it took the form of Lawrence being rude to the king, though he had not in fact been rude. This perplexed or outraged many people who might otherwise have admired Lawrence, or been helpful to him in getting the Arabs what they wanted.
Churchill was among them, until Lawrence had an opportunity to explain to him in private what had really happened. In those days, at least, nobody ever benefited in the long run from having been thought rude to the royal family—as Churchill knew well, since his beloved father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had learned that lesson after offending King Edward VII.
Lawrence spent the next few days preparing a long paper on the Middle East for the war cabinet’s committee, in which he succeeded in presenting both his own views and those of Feisal as if they were the same. In f
act, Lawrence was prepared to accept a far higher degree of British involvement, direct and indirect, in Arabian affairs than either Feisal or his father would have wished; it was France (and direct French rule) Lawrence wanted to keep out of the Middle East, not Britain. He clung firmly to the heart of the matter—an independent Arab state in Syria, with Feisal as its ruler, under some kind of British supervision; a British-controlled Arab state in what is now Iraq; and “Jewish infiltration” in Palestine, “if it is behind a British as opposed to an international façade.” He was effectively recommending repudiation of the Sykes-Picot agreement, and firing two warning signals: one of them idealistic, “the cry of self determination” that the United States would be likely to approve; the other practical, the information that Feisal would be willing to accept increased Zionist immigration in Palestine only if it remained under British control, but not if Palestine was placed under international control as the Sykes-Picot agreement provided.
Lawrence delivered this document to the Eastern Committee on November 4, and went on to meet with Winston Churchill, then minister of munitions, who had presumably not yet heard about Lawrence’s meeting with the king. This was to be the beginning of one of the most significant of Lawrence’s postwar friendships with older and more powerful men. Churchill not only was impressed by the young colonel, but would go on to become Lawrence’s lifelong supporter. Perhaps nobody would describe better the effect Lawrence had on his contemporaries than Churchill at the forthcoming peace conference: “He wore his Arab robes, and the full magnificence of his countenance revealed itself. The gravity of his demeanor; the precision of his opinions; the range and quality of his conversations; all seemed enhanced to a remarkable degree by the splendid Arab head-dress and garb. From amid the flowing draperies his noble features, his perfectly chiseled lips and flashing eyes loaded with fire and comprehension shone forth. He looked like what he was, one of Nature’s greatest princes.”
If Lawrence could inspire Churchill—a hardened politician; a former soldier himself who had ridden with the Twenty-First Lancers in the last major cavalry charge of the British army at the Battle of Omdurman in 1893, Mauser automatic pistol in hand; and the grandson of a duke—to gush like a smitten schoolgirl, it is hardly surprising that lesser men were bowled over even before Lawrence’s legend took hold. Apart from Churchill, Lawrence made an instant and lifelong friend of Edward (“Eddie”) Marsh, Churchill’s devoted and brilliant private secretary. Through Marsh, Lawrence met many of the literary figures who became his friends over the years, including Siegfried Sassoon. For somebody who already had the reputation of being reclusive, Lawrence had a genius for friendship—he was a master of what would now be called networking, and an indefatigable correspondent.
On November 8, Lawrence took the step that would bring him onto the world stage as something of an independent power. He sent an “urgent message” to King Hussein in Mecca, informing Hussein that there would be “conversations about the Arabs” in two weeks’ time in Paris, and advising him to send his son Feisal as his representative. Much as Hussein disliked and mistrusted Lawrence, he must have realized immediately the value of sending Feisal, rather than one of Feisal’s older brothers, since Feisal and Lawrence were credited in the European and American press with the capture of Damascus. Certainly Hussein already realized that his claim to be “king of all the Arabs” and likewise his claim to the vast amount of territory promised to him by Sir Henry McMahon in 1915 were going to be a hard sell in Paris, let alone in Riyadh, where his rival ibn Saud, with the backing of the British government in India, was already moving to take control of the entire Arabian Peninsula.
It should be noted that Lawrence, with the skill of a natural “insider,” was already well informed about the negotiations between Britain and France. On November 9, the Foreign Office released an Anglo-French declaration that embodied some of his suggestions, though couched in such vague and optimistic prose that it seemed to envisage both “native governments” and colonial rule. The British were in a difficult position. McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence of 1915 directly contradicted the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as well as the Balfour Declaration of 1917), and while these conflicting promises to the Arabs, the French, and the Jews could be swept under the rug so long as the war continued, victory would instantly bring the British face-to-face with the unwelcome reality of having promised more in the Middle East than they or anyone else could deliver.
On November 8, only a day after Lawrence’s message to King Hussein, the subject of the Middle East was suddenly overshadowed by the surrender of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On November 9 the kaiser abdicated. And on November 11, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” Germany itself asked for an armistice.
Those in charge of Britain’s foreign and colonial affairs were suddenly faced with a range of issues more serious and pressing than the Middle East. What was to be the future of Germany? What was to replace the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was already beginning to crumble into a number of small, mutually hostile would-be states? Who was to receive the German colonies in Africa, and on what terms? Could a viable European peace be constructed without the participation of the Russians, now controlled by a Bolshevik regime that repudiated all treaties and preached universal revolution? Clamorous advocates for new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were already appearing, maps and draft constitutions in hand; in the Balkans the Romanians were already demanding almost a third of Hungary as their reward for joining the Allies; the Serbs, on whose behalf the war had begun, were greedy to seize as much territory as possible and create a multinational Yugoslavia; and Zionists were pressing for the rapid implementation of the Balfour Declaration.
More important than all these problems was the fact that the president of the United States was planning to join in the peace talks himself, bringing with him a host of unwelcome ideas, including a “general association of nations.” The New World was embarking on an effort to remake and reform the Old. “Even the Good Lord contented himself with only ten,” Clemenceau grumbled, when he read Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points with the skeptical eye of an old-fashioned French nationalist who already knew what he wanted: Alsace; Lorraine; the Rhineland; formidable, crippling reparations; client states in the east to hold Germany in check; and, of course, last but not least, Syria, Lebanon, Mosul with its oil, and a share in the Holy Land.
At the same time, the prospect of President Wilson’s participation in the peace talks, together with a formidable American delegation,* made his majesty’s government more inclined to collaborate with the French. Only by standing together, arm in arm, bras dessus, bras dessous, could the two principal European powers hope to resist what they both saw as Woodrow Wilson’s starry-eyed idealism and naïveté.
In the meantime, reports and advice on the Middle East continued to pour in to the Eastern Committee. Both Clayton and Hogarth sent long, detailed recommendations, basically echoing Lawrence’s views. They were quickly countered by an equally long memorandum from Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, outlining the views of the government of India. These amounted to a sharp reminder that what really mattered was the oil deposits of Mesopotamia, rather than the Syrian Desert, and a warning that it was not worth jeopardizing British interests in Mesopotamia for the sake of nebulous promises that may have been made to Hussein and his sons. Hirtzel expressed polite scorn for Lawrence, whose contempt for the Indian government and the Indian army on his brief visit to Baghdad in 1916 during the siege of Kut had not been forgotten or forgiven: “Without in the least wishing to deprecate [Lawrence’s] achievements and his undoubted genius, it must be said about him that he does not at all represent—and would not, I think, claim to represent—the local views of Northern Mesopotamia and Iraq; of the latter, indeed, he has practically no first-hand knowledge at all.”
Hirtzel also warned strongly against Lawrence’s proposal to place one of Hussein’s sons on a throne in Baghdad as king of Ira
q, and another on a throne in Mosul to rule over the Kurds,* and suggested that if Britain raised objections to France’s ruling over Lebanon and Syria, the French would hardly be likely to accept British rule over Iraq.
Even the joy of victory did not prevent Stéphen-Jean-Marie Pichon, the French foreign minister, from administering a sharp rap on the knuckles to the British Foreign Office, reminding them that so far as France was concerned, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still in force and that France expected to receive everything it had been promised. Pichon reminded the British Foreign Office of France’s “historic duty towards the peoples of Syria,” just in case the members of the Eastern Committee had forgotten, or might have plans to denounce the Sykes-Picot agreement to President Wilson as exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that the Fourteen Points were intended to prevent.
Much as the British might deprecate the exaggerated territorial claims of King Hussein, or the ambitions of Syrian nationalists, when it came to the Middle East there was more sympathy for the Arabs in London—partly because of Lawrence—than for the French. Lawrence’s capacity for communicating enthusiasm was now concentrated on the task of getting Feisal to the Peace Conference, despite strong French opposition.
European diplomacy: A diminutive Lawrence tries to restrain Feisal from being tempted by France at the Peace Conference. Cartoon by Sir Mark Sykes.
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