Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Dressed to kill,” he said, and he meant exactly that. Lawrence noted my tiny shiver. “Thompson’s not overstating the situation, but he’s done his work well,” the colonel said then, inclining his head toward the big man. Thompson crossed massive arms over a broad chest and glowered at the compliment. “Russell Pasha has vetted the driving, signaling, and coupling crews,” Lawrence continued. “We’re sending a pilot train ahead, and there are police details deployed wherever the trains must slow enough to be boarded by unauthorized personnel.”

  “Unauthorized personnel,” Thompson muttered. “Assassins, you mean.” He looked at me pleadingly. “That riot near the pyramids was nothing to what we can expect in Palestine, miss. If you insist on coming, I can’t be responsible.”

  “I shall be,” said Lawrence. And with that he produced one of his glorious beaming smiles, which were so benign and reassuring it seemed silly to have any qualms at all. When he beckoned, I followed, and the attention of the poor harassed detective was immediately redirected toward some other crisis. Leading me through knots of British officials, Lawrence said, “Thompson’s paid to worry, but I have matters in hand.”

  Was that remark bravado? Genuine confidence? A drive to display mastery amid all these diplomats and generals, after weeks of blandishment and coaxing? Though Lawrence gave no sign of it, I suspected that he felt a secret thrill of satisfaction as imposing men in Savile suits and tailored uniforms took note of his approach and, murmuring, gave way. They were on his ground now, dependent on his judgment of the situation. Their lives were in the hands of that small Englishman in outlandish Arab dress. He knew it. So did they.

  Inside the train, we headed for a compartment at the trailing end of the third carriage. “If we detonate a mine,” Lawrence said with cheery schoolboy relish, “it’ll take out the engine and coal tender, but you’ll be fine down here. Most likely.”

  He was grinning, and I took it as a joke, but it drew goggle-eyed stares from two men Lawrence called “Mutt and Jeff” once we’d squeezed past them. Indeed, they were as mismatched physically as those comic characters—or as Lawrence and Thompson were, for that matter. The tall one, with his long bony limbs and ginger hair, looked like a metal farm implement left to rust in a field. His companion was pink and round, and during the hours of our acquaintance, I don’t believe he ever stopped eating for more than a few minutes. Their uniforms seemed to have been borrowed from someone’s clothesline, but they were officers of the Palestinian Police, Lawrence told me, assigned by Sir Herbert Samuel to help guard Churchill. Even to me, the two of them, fully armed, did not seem a good match for an Arab beggar. No wonder Thompson was worried.

  We arrived at the Churchills’ compartment, and Lawrence slid the door open. Winston looked up from sheaves of paper. Clementine, in a chic gray cloche with a black grosgrain ribbon, laid her book down on her lap. Neither seemed surprised to see me in Lawrence’s company. Winston happily inquired about Rosie. Clementine invited me in and introduced me to the uniformed gentleman sitting across from them.

  “Lord Trenchard,” I said, offering my hand to the chief of the Royal Air Force, who would soon be counted upon to bomb the new Iraq into existence. “I’ve been hearing your name all week.”

  This person acknowledged my existence with a look of puzzlement followed by a funereal smile that consisted of a slight tightening of his cheek muscles. Not a word escaped the man Thompson had called a “good match for the Sphinx,” but he did move slightly away from the window, which I gathered was his way of offering me a seat.

  Lawrence left. Clementine, fanning herself quietly, went back to her novel. Winston, merely by adjusting his spectacles, seemed to create a perfectly businesslike office of his surroundings. There was an additional ten minutes of frantic official preparation outside. Finally, with a jolt and a squeal of steam, the locomotive began to drag us through and away from Cairo.

  The Israelites fleeing Pharaoh required forty years for that which our train accomplished in a matter of hours. This difference in travel time, I believe, is partly responsible for the distinct dismay so many travelers have felt upon crossing into the Holy Land from Egypt. If one had spent weary decades wandering through sterile wadis and scalding plains of baking sand and gravel, then the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea might have seemed an oasis of milk and honey by comparison. But to the modern traveler, especially one accustomed to the rain-swollen streams and the rolling, fertile farmland of Ohio? Palestine was a dreadful letdown.

  “It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land,” wrote Mr. Mark Twain—the real one, not Madame Sophie’s gentleman friend back in Cleveland. Its valleys were unsightly, with feeble vegetation. Outlines were harsh with no lavender shadow of clouds, no dreamy blue mist to soften the perspective. The lumpish naked hills, Twain reported, appeared to have committed some terrible sin for which they had been stoned to death.

  Fifty-some years later, I saw nothing to amend that dismal assessment. Not even Winston could discern a scene worth painting, and we were there in spring, when the countryside was said to be at its best.

  For thirty centuries, “Cut down all the trees!” was every general’s order at the beginning of every siege. Most recently, the British armed forces had cleared half the region’s groves to deny Turks and bandits any cover from which to attack. Before them, the Crusaders had destroyed the land to save it for Christendom. Before them, when Pompey came to take Palestine for Rome, he leveled the forests. Josephus tells us that Titus axed every remaining tree within ten miles of Jerusalem a few decades later. And if any survived the armies, there were the locusts to denude them and goats that climbed into the topmost branches to crop their leaves.

  The barrenness of the land was partly why Karl believed the Jewish “Back to Israel” movement was a foreordained failure. “There is no soil or water there,” he’d told me at breakfast that morning. “No coal, or iron. No oil or wood for fuel. Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Agriculture is all but impossible, manufacturing impractical, business unfeasible. My people value education almost above God, but what can an educated man do in Palestine? Farm rocks and dodge bullets?”

  The Repeatedly Promised Land is what Karl called Palestine, and he was not referring to the pledges of Yahweh. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British Crown promised the formation of an Israelite national home in Palestine, on what authority one could only wonder. In Karl’s opinion, “It was propaganda, merely. The British knew how many German Jews were fighting for our nation and they hoped to sap our loyalty.” Only a year or so earlier, the secret Sykes-Picot agreement had guaranteed the French a goodly share in the region, even as Colonel Lawrence was promising the Arabs independence in return for their alliance with the British during the war against Turkey and Germany.

  In an effort to untangle this knotted skein, the British considered establishing a New Zion in one of their African colonies. Uganda was a healthy, fertile, and beautiful land, and the Jewish leader Herzl was inclined to accept the offer. The idea was dropped for a variety of reasons. “You see, when the Great War began, only Germany manufactured acetone, which is needed to make TNT,” Karl told me. “There was an immigrant Russian living in England when the war broke out—a chemist named Weizmann—and he developed a way to make acetone from horse chestnuts. His claim for the invention was disputed. The Crown eventually granted a patent to an Englishman, but in return for not pressing his suit Weizmann asked that his service to Great Britain be rewarded with a homeland for his people in Palestine.”

  Now the League of Nations had given Palestine to Great Britain as a protectorate to be dealt with as His Majesty’s Government thought expedient. “Russian Zionists call it ‘a land without people for a people without land,’” Karl said, “but nearly a million people live there, Agnes. A tenth are Jews, and half again as many Christians, but three-quarters are Arab, and they will never give that wasteland up. It may be awful but it is theirs, and they value it above their children. They proved to Turke
y that they would kill or die for it, and now that Lawrence has encouraged Arab nationalism?” Karl shrugged. “They will feel the presence of British colonialists and Zionist settlers as needles in their living flesh. The irony is that Palestine is such a desolation, and yet so many have desired to possess it.”

  Looking out the window of the train, I couldn’t imagine why.

  Until you see Palestine, Karl told me, you cannot truly understand the many passages of Scripture, Old and New, in which the commonness, cheapness, and troublesomeness of stones are drawn upon for metaphor. To dash one’s foot against a stone is a tiresome vexation; to cast seed on stony ground, an exercise in futility. To gather stones out of a vineyard is to engage in a never-ending task. To ask for bread and receive a stone is to be heartlessly disdained. “King Solomon made silver to be as stones in Jerusalem” gives an excellent notion of that king’s storied wealth.

  “The Arabs, too, have a legend that explains the stones of Palestine,” Karl said. “When Allah made the world, he put all the stones that were to be used across the entire earth into two bags and gave them to an angel to distribute over the land. While the angel was flying above Palestine, one bag broke.”

  And nowhere were those stones more in evidence than in Gaza.

  Near the seacoast, the town was one of the largest in Palestine, which wasn’t saying a great deal. Fifteen water wells rendered the location habitable in what is otherwise a desert. Those wells have made it a prize along the route of every invader from Tutmoses III to Allenby. In its newest cemetery, three thousand British graves bore witness to its importance in the Great War.

  Of course, no city is at its best near its railroad tracks, but Gaza truly was the most complete municipal horror I ever looked upon. From behind dusty glass we saw fly-ridden and filthy children standing along the right of way and between mud-brick hovels, all of which were in a state of utter dilapidation. I remember thinking that the biblical Samson might be counted fortunate to have been rendered eyeless during his time in Gaza. There was nothing beautiful, nothing gentle, nothing delightful in that terrible place. There was nothing thriving, nothing unstinted excepting only stones and fury. Those, Gaza had in howling abundance.

  The children’s pebbles bounced harmlessly off the windows, and it seemed that this attack might be nothing worse than schoolboy horseplay. In a matter of seconds, however, the boys were lost in a huge mass of grown men running alongside the train. A sudden tempest of rocks rained against the side of the car. Window after window splintered. The stench of manure, the odor of unwashed male bodies, and the stink of coal smoke poured in, sharing the air with the stones.

  Next to me, Lord Trenchard conveyed icy disapproval by compressing his thin lips into a tighter line. Chewing on a spent cigar, Winston laid aside his pen. Clementine stopped reading. “Not again,” she sighed, looking more annoyed than interested as she picked a piece of glass from her skirt and flicked it outside.

  “I blame Shanklin,” Winston rumbled cheerfully. “There’s a riot every time she takes me somewhere.”

  Sergeant Thompson appeared, slid back the compartment door, and motioned us away from the windows. A moment later, he made way for Mutt and Jeff. These were the two Palestinian police officers Thompson was counting on to recognize Arab ringleaders, and he deferred to them now.

  Mutt bashed out the remaining window glass with his elbow. Jeff leaned forward with something in his hand. I shrank away, expecting him to fire on the mob. To our astonishment, he held not a pistol but a camera! He was taking photographs—God knows why, unless it was to build a case against the assassin he expected to succeed in killing Churchill.

  Snarling, with his own pistol drawn, Thompson reached past Mutt and hauled Jeff out of the compartment with his free hand, all the while threatening to throw both policemen to the (French) wolves and take a (French) photograph of their (French) bodies to send to their (French) widows.

  Lawrence arrived a moment later. In the corridor just beyond our compartment, he and Thompson discussed the situation in low voices, the sergeant tense, the colonel unperturbed.

  “You can’t be serious!” Thompson cried suddenly. “I’m not letting him off the train in this hellhole!”

  “It’s all arranged,” Lawrence said mildly.

  “You’re demented! Look at those people!”

  We had slowed to a stop in a sort of public square with the station platform on one side and a large mosque opposite. Lawrence braced himself against the doorjamb and leaned across us to peer through what was left of the carriage window, as if gauging Thompson’s assessment of the mob against his own.

  The train was surrounded now, and the plaza was crammed to the edges with furious chanting men, all of whom seemed intent on murdering the odious “Shershill,” given the least opportunity.

  “I think we’ll be all right,” Lawrence said peaceably. “We’re going to that big hall next to the mosque. Winston will speak. I will translate. The ladies can listen at the back, but—”

  “You aren’t thinking of taking the women through that,” Thompson objected, astonished.

  “They’ll be quite safe with me,” Lawrence said, and gave the sergeant no opportunity to argue. “Thompson, you will come with us as far as the door, but stay outside. Stand before it until we come out again. Stand without moving, understood?”

  Thompson was bug-eyed with disbelief, but outranked. “Where do you want Mutt and Jeff?” he asked, jerking his chin toward the pair standing in the aisle. Both seemed quite shaken, and honestly? I’m not sure who frightened them more: the mob or Sergeant Thompson.

  “They’re Sir Herbert’s worry,” Lawrence said dismissively.

  “You don’t feel the need of them?” Thompson persisted. “They’re a couple of extra guns.”

  “They’re a couple of extra jokers” was the muttered response. “We’ll lose them in the crowd, on the way.” When Thompson looked aghast, Lawrence added cheerily, “Don’t worry about those two—they’ll survive.”

  “It’s not those two I’m worried about,” Thompson called, but Lawrence was already striding down the aisle toward the door at the far end of the car.

  I must preface what I tell you next, for in the years that followed the Cairo Conference a considerable controversy developed about T. E. Lawrence and his part in the desert revolt. The war book he mentioned to me on our way to the pyramids was eventually published and received polar reviews. Seven Pillars of Wisdom was hailed as a literary masterpiece and denounced as a pack of lies. Lawrence himself was lionized and vilified, his exploits in the desert often confirmed and frequently denied.

  I shall not pretend that I am unbiased. After spending time in his company, I grew quite fond of him. In the years afterward, we sometimes corresponded and I followed his career from afar. I did not like to hear stories that were meant to undermine his reputation, but I do try to be fair-minded, and I read many of the biographies.

  Chief among Lawrence’s detractors was Mr. Richard Aldington, who published a peculiarly venomous book twenty years after Lawrence died and two years before I did. The book was first released in France under the title Lawrence l’Imposteur, which gives you the flavor of its contents; its title in English was not so bluntly libelous, but Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry was no less hostile.

  I myself enjoyed Mr. Aldington’s novel about the Great War. The Death of a Hero is ironic, sarcastic, ferocious, and funny—very modern, actually, and quite entertaining. Seven Pillars, by contrast, is a brilliant but difficult book; when its author wished to conceal himself, its prose could be as monstrous and opaque as Moby-Dick’s.

  Nonetheless, neither Death of a Hero nor its author ever achieved the status bestowed upon Lawrence and his work, and Lowell Thomas’s public lectures were just salt in Mr. Aldington’s literary wound. They glorified war and mortal combat in ways no bitter veteran of the Western Front could tolerate, and on behalf of his dead comrades—gassed, machine-gunned, blown to mincemeat in the trenches—Mr. Aldingt
on must have resented the attention paid to Lawrence’s more photogenic but relatively minor desert campaign. Just as galling: in the years after the Great War, Lawrence fled from his fame—a fact that must have greatly annoyed poor Mr. Aldington, who would have enjoyed it more. Worse yet: after his death in 1935, Lawrence was treated as a secular saint. The world heaped on him the honor that it continued to withhold from a rival Lawrence never knew he had. Perhaps that was when Mr. Aldington resolved to cast as much doubt as he could on every exploit and accomplishment and talent attributed to the man who bested him, even from the grave.

  Then again, I suppose it’s possible that everything Aldington wrote about Lawrence was true. I certainly cannot judge the accuracy of the wartime memories upon which Lawrence built his seven-pillared worthy house, but I can tell you this much: I can tell what we saw that day in Gaza.

  We moved toward the trailing end of the railroad carriage, and as we approached the vestibule, the noise swelled: two thousand men shouting, chanting, screaming. Never had I witnessed emotion as violent as that which greeted the arrival of Winston Churchill and Sir Herbert Samuel in Gaza. Those two persons were the very embodiment of colonialism and Zionism: His Britannic Majesty’s secretary for the colonies and the British high commissioner for Palestine, who was himself a Jew. As Karl had anticipated, their mere presence in Gaza was “like a needle in the living flesh” of the men who made up that roaring sea of waving fists.

  Without a word, Lawrence stepped from the shadow of the carriage into the sunlight that poured down between the cars. Having made himself visible, he lifted one hand slowly. A loose white sleeve fell back from a thin-boned, sinewy wrist. Like the pope of Rome, he raised the first and second fingers above the other two, as though in blessing.

  And there was…silence.

  In an instant, faces distorted by hate and fury were transformed: by startlement, by joy, by adulation. A moment later the crowd erupted, transported by the simple sight of him. Imagine winning the World Series at a home game. Imagine the grand finale of a Fourth of July fireworks display, or an ovation at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth. Thousands chanted his name. “Aurens! Aurens! Aurens!” Some wept.