Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  ‘And where will you spend the night?’ Barrow inquired.

  ‘In Damascus!’ Lawrence answered, and rode away.30

  Soon, he and Stirling in Blue Mist had caught up with the Hashemite cavalry under Nasir and the Rwalla under Nuri ash-Sha’alan. The Rwalla had never ceased their harassment of the larger Turkish column, which their attrition had now reduced to half its original strength. Auda was in the country beyond, gathering the local Bedu for an ambush. Lawrence asked them to hold the Turks for an hour. Nasir selected a lonely farmstead on a distant ridge, and posted Nuri and his Rwalla there to slow down the enemy, while Lawrence and Stirling drove back to the British lines to get the Middlesex Yeomanry and horse artillery to attack the Turkish rear. With the Arabs in front and the British behind them, the Turkish column began to break up and, abandoning their guns and transport, fled in straggling groups into the hills to the east, where Auda’s hyenas were waiting: ‘In the night of his last battle,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘the old man killed and killed, plundered and captured, till dawn showed him the end. There passed the Fourth Army, our stumbling block for two years.’31

  Lawrence and Stirling slept by the Rolls-Royce on a ridge above Damascus. It was a cold, windless night, and Stirling recalled seeing flashes of light from the direction of the hills, where Auda’s men were cutting up the remnants of the Turks. Damascus, the final prize, was hidden in darkness below them, but in the early hours of the morning they were woken up by a series of explosions from inside. ‘Good God!’ Lawrence said. ‘They are burning the town!’ They discovered later that the German troops had destroyed their ammunition dumps before pulling out. Lawrence told Stirling that he had already sent thousands of Rwalla horse into Damascus ahead of the British forces, in search of ‘Ali Ridha ar-Rikabi, the Governor of the town, whom Lawrence had met on his perilous journey north, more than a year previously. The Rwalla carried instructions from Sharif Nasir that ‘Ali Ridha or his assistant Shukri al-Ayyubi should form a government at once in the name of the Hashemites. Actually, the work had already been done: although ‘Ali Ridha was no longer in Damascus, Shukri had been supported by Lawrence’s old enemies, the brothers Abd al-Qadir and Mohammad as-Sa’id, whose Algerian bodyguard had hoisted the Hashemite flag before the last Turks had even left the town.

  In the morning – 30 October – Lawrence and Stirling managed to escape some over-zealous Bengal Lancers who ‘captured’ them, and entered Damascus in Blue Mist just after sun-up, to be greeted by a galloping horseman who held out to them a bunch of yellow dates: ‘Good news: Damascus salutes you,’ he said.32 According to Lawrence, the streets along the Barada were packed with thousands of chanting people – women threw flowers and splashed scent, men hurled their hats in the air, roaring: ‘Feisal! Nasir! Shukri! Urens!’ ‘There were dervishes dancing in front of the [car],’ Stirling recalled, ‘fierce Bedu in their flowing robes, their horses mad with excitement at the noise and shouting of the townsfolk who were hysterical in their joy – as we drove through the streets with their overhanging houses the women … leaned out from their windows crying, laughing, sobbing with joy and excitement.’33 Later, though, in a letter to Stirling, Lawrence remembered quite a different scene: ‘my memory of the entry into Damascus was of quietness and emptiness of street,’ he wrote, ‘and of myself crying like a baby with eventual thankfulness in the Blue Mist by your side. It seemed to me that the frenzy of welcome came later.’34 Stirling remembered that Lawrence had not been happy: ‘His mind was too complex,’ he wrote, ‘to permit of satisfaction for an achievement successfully carried out… his moment of triumph was embittered by his knowledge that the government wouldn’t keep their promises to the Arabs.’35 They arrived at the Town Hall, which was tightly packed with people, and Lawrence pushed his way through to find Auda Abu Tayyi in the centre of it all wrestling savagely with the Druse leader, Sultan al-‘Atrash. It took Lawrence, Za’al, Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and two others to drag him off and prevent him from murdering the Druse before their eyes. Nasir, the senior Hashemite, was not present, and Lawrence learned that he was with ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother. He went off looking for them in Blue Mist, only to meet up with General Chauvel entering the town at the head of the British troops. Lawrence impressed upon him that the Arabs were in possession of Damascus, and urged him, unsuccessfully, to emulate Barrow’s action at Dara’a and salute the Hashemite flag as a gesture of good will. Lawrence returned to the Town Hall and summoned ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother, who marched into his presence with their bodyguard. Lawrence had Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s Rwalla around him, and Nuri as-Sa’id’s regulars mustered in the square outside. He told the Algerians that as Feisal’s representative he was abolishing the government they had formed the previous day and named Shukri al-Ayyubi as Acting Military Governor with Nuri as-Sa’id as Commander of Troops. ‘Abd al-Qadir leapt up and drew his dagger intending to kill Lawrence, cursing him as a Christian and an Englishman, but in a flash Auda threw his weight on him and wrestled the blade from his grasp. Nuri ash-Sha’alan announced quietly that Lawrence had the support of the Rwalla. As the Algerians swept out in high dudgeon, someone suggested that they should be taken out and shot. Lawrence was inclined to agree, but desisted. By the next day they were brewing unrest again, however, and had gained some support from the Druses who had not fought at all in the Revolt, and who had been refused any reward by Lawrence. Now itching to shoot them, Lawrence sent a section of regulars to arrest the brothers: Mohammad as-Sa’id was taken: ‘Abd al-Qadir escaped. Lawrence had the Druses expelled, and established himself, until the arrival of Feisal, as the effective Governor of the city.

  There was much work to be done: the police to be appointed, the water supply to be attended to, electrical power to be restored, sanitation to be established, starving people to be fed. In fact, within a few days Lawrence had set running a system which endured for the next two years. An Australian doctor asked him to attend to the Turkish barracks, which was now a makeshift hospital without a single medical orderly, and packed with dead and dying men. Lawrence realized that it had been forgotten, went to inspect it himself, and was appalled. The floor was littered with dozens of bloated, putrefying corpses, lying in stinking pools of blood and excrement. Many of them were only freshly dead, and most had been gnawed by rats. Hearing a faint sighing, Lawrence lifted his robe and walked through the bodies to find a ward full of dying men who implored him for mercy. Quickly he commandeered some Turkish prisoners, who went about burying the dead in a common grave in the nearby garden. That night he started out of sleep, sweating and trembling with the memory of the dead bodies, and the following day he returned to the hospital to find things a little better: one room had been cleaned and disinfected ready to house the most serious cases, and there were medical orderlies present. Suddenly he was confronted by a British major of the Medical Corps, who asked if he was in charge. ‘In a way, I suppose I am,’ Lawrence replied.

  ‘Scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous,’ the Major said. ‘You ought to be shot!’

  Lawrence cackled with laughter, wondering what the officer would have thought had he been present the previous day. The Major muttered, ‘Bloody brute,’ smacked Lawrence across the face, and stalked off. All the fear, loathing and hypocrisy that Lawrence had borne for two years seemed to be expressed in those words ‘Bloody brute’ – ‘in my heart I felt he was right,’ he wrote, ‘and that everyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so stained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world could make him feel clean.’36

  Lawrence returned to the Victoria Hotel to find that Allenby had arrived. He was closely followed by Feisal, who had ridden into the city at the gallop to a tumultuous welcome. It was at the hotel that the Sharif and the General met for the first time, with Lawrence as their interpreter – precisely the role he had created and envisaged for himself over the past eighteen months. Allenby explained to Feisal that he was to have control of Syria, with the ex
ception of Palestine and the Lebanon, but only under the guidance of the French. He informed him that he would continue to work with Lawrence as liaison, but that he would shortly be given a French liaison officer in addition. Feisal objected in no uncertain terms: he would not accept a French liaison officer, would not accept French guidance, and did not recognize French authority in the Lebanon. He also said that Allenby’s liaison officer – Lawrence – had informed him that the Arabs were to have all of Syria apart from Palestine. Allenby, astonished, inquired whether Lawrence had oudined to the Sharif the French claim to the Lebanon. Lawrence replied untruthfully that he had not. Allenby concluded that since Feisal was a Lieutenant-General under his command, he must obey orders at least for the time being.

  Feisal departed as abruptly as he had come, but now in little mood for jubilation. As soon as he was gone, Lawrence told his chief that he could not work with a French liaison officer, and asked for leave to return to England. His war was over and he could do more for the Arabs behind the scenes at home. He was dog-tired, but like many men who had fought and longed for the war’s end, he found in it the ultimate anticlimax. The misery he had suffered over two years was either forgotten or had already become enshrined in legend. Now his mind was blank. An Arab army had entered Damascus, and after five centuries the conquest of Selim the Grim had been avenged. If it had not been for European ambitions, Lawrence believed, then the Arabs might have gone on to take Anatolia, Baghdad and even the Yemen, and established a new Arab empire in the East. But European greed had brought the movement to a halt in its finest hour, and Lawrence’s illusions had been shattered: … my dreams puffed out like candles,’ he wrote, ‘in the strong wind of success.’37

  PART THREE

  THE MAGICIAN 1918-1935

  20. Colonel Lawrence Still Goes On; Only I Have Stepped Out of the Way

  The Peace Conference and the Colonial Office 1918 – 22

  Lawrence arrived back in England a full colonel with a D S O, a C B, and a recommendation from Allenby himself that he be granted a knighthood. Only a few days after his arrival he was invited to Buckingham Palace for a private investiture by King George V, but to the consternation of everyone present politely refused both his knighthood and his medals to the King personally. He told His Majesty that the British government were about to let the Arabs down over the Sykes–Picot treaty: that he had pledged his word to Feisal that he would support him come what may, and that he might be obliged to fight Britain’s French allies for the Hashemite cause in Syria. Curiously, though, the man who refused to become a British knight also told the King that he was an ‘Emir’ (Prince) among the Arabs – a tide which he is nowhere recorded as having been granted officially. And while he refused his British medals, he accepted the Croix de Guerre from the French: the very nation whom he told George V he regarded as being his enemies. These inconsistencies suggest that there was, as usual, a darker level to Lawrence’s actions: after all, knighthoods and DSOs were almost ten-a-penny among those who had fought in the Arab campaign (though Croix de Guerre were more exotic). As Lawrence had told Hubert Young (who would himself later be knighted) in 1918, ‘there is plenty of honour and glory to be picked up without any great difficulty’.1 Like the woman who wore ordinary clothes at the opera while everyone else wore evening-dress, Lawrence automatically became distinct, not through his acquisition of honours but by his conspicuous rejection of them. Even his admirer Liddell Hart was shrewd enough to observe that for Lawrence ‘self-deprecation, like his rejection of distinction, was a kind of vanity – his wisdom led him to see the absurdity of acclamation, then found himself liking it, then despised himself for liking it’.2 The rejection of honours by the war’s most famous hero, the man whom, by 1919, the press were already calling ‘the most interesting Briton alive’,3 of course, immediately devalued such distinctions. Not surprisingly, many who had fought four hard years, some of them in conditions far more appalling than those Lawrence had seen, who had survived terrible hardships, perhaps performed great feats of personal bravery, and justifiably felt themselves deserving of recognition, were incensed by his apparent mockery.

  Lawrence’s commitment to the Hashemites was, however, also very real. He was determined to vindicate the promises he had made to Feisal during the war, and to rescue his own sense of honour. Within days of arriving back he was bombarding War Office and Foreign Office officials with his views, and on 29 October – the day on which he met the King – he also appeared in front of the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet. The meeting opened with a eulogy by Lord Curzon, acting Foreign Secretary, on Lawrence’s achievements, upon which Lawrence ungraciously blurted out: ‘Let’s get to business. You people don’t understand the hole you have put us all into!’ – causing the volatile Curzon to burst into tears. Lawrence’s views were uncompromising, but they did not encompass the single Arab state Hussain had demanded from McMahon in 1916. Mesopotamia, he said, should be divided into two, with Sharif Zayd in Baghdad, presiding over the northern part, and Sharif ‘Abdallah, in Basra, supervising the southern. Feisal, in Damascus, should rule the whole of Syria, with the exception of the Lebanon, which should go to the French, and the Alexandretta district, which should be jointly run by the Allies. In Palestine, the Arabs would accept Jewish immigration as outlined in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, but would resist any attempt to establish a Jewish state there. A single British authority, based in Egypt, should watch over the fledgling Arab states, which would effectively cut out Anglo-Indian interference. Lawrence already knew that British hands were tied by Sykes-Picot: Mosul, in Mesopotamia, had been allocated to the French, while Palestine had been assigned to international administration. If Britain opposed French aspirations both in Palestine and Mesopotamia, which she coveted for her own sphere of influence, she would find it most difficult to oppose French claims in Syria too.

  The armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, and the Peace Conference began at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris in January the following year. Here, Lawrence drew great attention to himself by his flamboyant adoption of Arab headdress, his fluent Arabic and his obvious devotion to Feisal. Acting as Feisal’s interpreter, he laid out the Hashemite proposals on 6 February. The French had been determined from the beginning that there would be no concessions over Syria, and demanded that both littoral and inland Syria should be governed by a single authority. These demands were supported by a vigorous campaign in the French press. Lawrence and Feisal had two strong cards, however: first the backing of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, who proposed a policy of self-determination for Syria, and second, General Allenby’s army, which was still actually deployed in the country, and which the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, refused to withdraw until the conference had made a decision. No such decision was ever reached, however. President Wilson stood by his belief that an inquiry should be set up to ascertain the will of the people, and in June the King-Crane commission arrived in Palestine. The commissioners probed deeply and made extensive inquiries, and in August reported to Wilson in Washington in favour of a temporary system of Mandates, proposing the United States as mandatory power for Syria, Great Britain for Iraq, and excluding France entirely on the grounds that a French Mandate in Syria would lead to war with the Arabs. The commissioners also recommended abandoning the idea of creating in Palestine a Jewish Commonwealth, which they believed could not be established without force. The King–Crane report was a remarkable and prophetic document, but predictably it was ignored by France and Britain. By the time it was released, Wilson himself was ill, and without his impetus the European Allies simply decided to make a settlement of their own. In September Lloyd George informed French Prime Minister Clemenceau that he was pulling British troops out of Syria and Cilicia on 1 November. The British garrisons in Cilicia – west of the line drawn by Sykes-Picot – would be replaced by French troops, while those in Syria proper would be replaced by an Arab force. British troops would, however, remain in Palestine and Mesopotamia. At first Law
rence regarded this as a victory, and he wrote personally to Lloyd George, thanking him for the decision: ‘… you have kept all our promises,’ he wrote, ‘… and my relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great.’4 He returned to England and on 1 September, with as little ceremony as had attended his commission in the army in 1914, he demobilized himself from it forthwith.

  Lawrence’s gratitude was premature. Even if he did not grasp that Britain’s withdrawal would leave Syria wide open to French aggression, Feisal certainly did. In September the Sharif arrived in London and complained bitterly that the Arabs were now at the mercy of the French in the Lebanon. The British cabinet advised him coldly that he must negotiate with France alone, however, effectively washing their hands of the Arabs. Lawrence, whose machinations at the Peace Conference had made him persona non grata in France, was no longer in a position to help his friend, and fell into deep depression. The consequences were unhappy ones for Feisal. He was obliged to come to a provisional understanding with Clemenceau, but on returning to Syria in January 1920 was promptly accused of ‘selling out’ by the Nationalists, and obliged to abandon it. In March 1920, the General Syrian Congress proclaimed him king of an independent Syria which theoretically included the Lebanon, northern Mesopotamia and Palestine. This angered both the French, who were already in control of the Lebanon, and the British, who were seeking control of the other two regions. Only a month later, an Allied conference at San Remo decided that Britain should have a mandate for influence in Mesopotamia and Palestine, while the French should be the mandatory power in all of Syria. The Arabs saw, finally, that they had been abused and cheated by Britain and France, and from that moment lost faith in the European powers. The upshot was inevitable: using the excuse of attacks on French personnel and property, French forces moved into Syria in July 1920, swatted aside a force of 2,000 regulars and irregulars which prepared to defend Damascus, and drove Feisal into exile. The Nationalists were suppressed as fiercely as they had been under the Turks; the press was muzzled; French was substituted for Arabic in law courts and schools. The situation which both Lawrence and Feisal had most dreaded during the hard years of fighting had ultimately come to pass.