Unaware of the approaching tidal wave of publicity, Lawrence himself had been on his way to Cairo to collect his war diaries when the Handley-Page bomber he was in crashed on landing at Rome. The pilot had committed the grievous (and elementary) error of landing with the wind, rather than against it. Unsure whether he could stop before the end of the runway, he attempted to take off again for another try. The wing clipped a tree and the aircraft crashed, killing the pilot and copilot. Lawrence and two air force mechanics survived, though Lawrence fractured either a collarbone or a shoulder blade—the British air attaché reported first the one, then the other. He was kept in a hospital for a few days, then moved to the British embassy. The ambassador, Lord Rennell (one of whose sons would marry Nancy Mitford and appear gloriously caricatured in several of Evelyn Waugh’s novels as the scapegrace “Basil Seal”), tried but failed to keep Lawrence in Rome for a few weeks of recuperation. This attempt was, of course, a waste of time. A few days later Lawrence resumed his journey to Cairo in another Handley-Page bomber. The journey amply demonstrated the limitations of air travel in 1919, as well as the dashing, cheerful amateurishness of the infant Royal Air Force. The aircraft made emergency landings in Taranto, Valona (Albania), Athens, Crete, and Libya because of various mechanical and navigational failures. Lawrence did not reach Cairo until late in June. The crew members were awed by Lawrence’s sangfroid as they crossed the Mediterranean—a first for the Royal Air Force—and given the primitive navigational aids and undependable engines of the time, this awe was well deserved. Once they were out of sight of land, Lawrence slipped a note in the pilot’s hand: “Wouldn’t it be fun if we came down? I don’t think so!”
He managed to keep writing his manuscript even in flight—later he would claim that one chapter of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written while he was flying to Marseille, and that the rhythm of the prose was set by the beat of the Rolls-Royce engines. The frequent landings at primitive airfields put him out of touch with anybody who wanted to reach him, so it was not until he reached Crete that St. John Philby told him open warfare had broken out between ibn Saud and King Hussein. “Jack” Philby (who was, as noted earlier, the father of Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet double agent at the heart of MI6) played much the same role relative to ibn Saud that Lawrence played relative to Feisal, though for a longer time. Indeed Philby, who had attended Trinity College, Cambridge, with Jawaharlal Nehru and was a cousin of Field Marshal Montgomery, eventually converted to Islam and took an Arab woman as his second wife. He was also the man chiefly responsible for opening up Saudi Arabia to the American oil companies. It was a singular embarrassment to Philby that Britain was financing both sides of the war—the government of India was backing ibn Saud, while the British Foreign Office was backing Hussein. In fact the Foreign Office had been trying to reach Lawrence to ask him to mediate between Hussein and ibn Saud, but by the time he arrived in Cairo it was too late. Ibn Saud’s tribes, fanatical followers of the puritanical Wahhabi sect, had caught Hussein’s army (literally) sleeping, still in their tents, and had all but destroyed them.
Among Hussein’s mistakes was giving command of his army, such as it was, to his second son, Abdulla, a skillful diplomat but not much of a soldier. It is interesting to speculate how different the future of Arabia might have been had Feisal and Lawrence been in command of the sharifian forces—but the immediate effect was to increase the British sense of obligation toward Feisal. After all, the Hashemites would shortly become a royal family without a country or a capital, in part because the Indian government’s candidate for control of the peninsula had defeated London’s. Lawrence, when he learned about Abdulla’s defeat, did not appear to be all that surprised or upset. King Hussein had always seemed to him vain and obdurate, and Hussein had never tried hard to conceal his dislike of Lawrence; also, Abdulla had always seemed to Lawrence a reluctant, ineffective warrior. In any case Lawrence’s interest was in a modern Arab state in Syria and Lebanon, not a feudal state in the Hejaz, still less a Wahhabi state in Riyadh. Let ibn Saud rule over the vast, empty space of Arabia, so long as Feisal ruled in Damascus—this was Lawrence’s point of view. That wealth beyond any calculation lay buried beneath the sand had not yet occurred to anyone. Ibn Saud still kept the gold sovereigns he received from Delhi via Philby in an ironbound wooden chest closed with a big padlock, in his tent, guarded by one of his slaves. The notion that only twenty-six years later President Franklin D. Roosevelt would interrupt his journey home from Yalta solely to pay his respects to ibn Saud would have seemed far-fetched in 1919.
By the time Lawrence returned to Paris, the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry on Syria had already fizzled out. The French refused to join it, and announced in advance that they would pay no attention to its recommendations. In deference to the French, the British refused to join it, and as a consequence it consisted only of two Americans: Dr. H. C. King, a theologian and the president of Oberlin College; and C. R. Crane, “a prominent Democratic Party contributor.” Neither of them was particularly well suited to decide the fate of Syria. King and Crane spent ten hot, weary days in Damascus, and came to the conclusion that the Arabs “were not ready” for independence, but that French or British colonial rule would be morally unjust. On their return to Paris they recommended that the United States occupy Syria and guide it toward independence and democracy. By that time nobody was listening, least of all President Wilson.
Since there was nothing for Lawrence to do in Paris except go through the files of the British delegation reading unflattering comments about himself, toward the end of the summer he returned to Oxford, where his old mentor David Hogarth, and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, had arranged a research fellowship for him at All Souls College. This entitled him to a set of rooms and £200 a year while he worked on his book and returned to work on “the antiquities and ethnology, and the history (ancient and modern) of the Near East.” All Souls, a college that has no undergraduates, was and remains a kind of worldly sanctuary for Oxonians who have retired from public life to pursue their studies or write their memoirs. Election to a fellowship of the college is considered a great honor. With his usual efficiency and command of the Oxford establishment, Hogarth had provided Lawrence with a way to get on with his life and write his book.
In the meantime, the Foreign Office and the War Office disputed over which of them was responsible for Lawrence, and whether he was now a Foreign Office official dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel, or a lieutenant-colonel temporarily assigned to the Foreign Office as part of the British delegation to the Peace Conference, or possibly only an adviser to Prince Feisal. He was blamed by many for “our troubles with the French over Syria,” and one official, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, at the India Office, expressed the vehement hope “that Lawrence will never be employed in the Middle East again in any capacity.” Correspondence about whether Lawrence had been or should be “demobilized” went back and forth. An exasperated officer in the Department of Military Intelligence in Paris cabled to the War Office, “Colonel Lawrence has no Military status in Paris he is however a member of British delegation under foreign office [sic] section it is also believed he is a plenipotentiary from King of Hedjaz but has not yet presented his credentials his status in Army not known here but he continues to wear uniform with badges of rank varying from full Colonel to Major.” A handwritten note on yet another attempt to clear up the matter reads: “I have tried again and again to get the F.O. to say whether Col. Lawrence is their man or not,” and bounces the question on to Allenby. Finally, an abrupt letter from Egypt addressed to Major T. E. Lawrence, CB, DSO, clears the matter up once and for all: “I am directed to inform you that having ceased to be employed on the 31st July 1919, you will relinquish your commission and be granted the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, a notification of which will appear in an early gazette.” Much correspondence and many handwritten calculations ensue in Lawrence’s army file about the size of his “gratuity” on being demobilized, which seems to wo
rk out at £213. Some of the correspondence is marked “Submit to King,” which suggests that King George V was not so offended by Lawrence’s refusal to accept his decorations that he was indifferent to the way Lawrence was treated on being demobilized. As for Lawrence, it is uncertain to what degree he cared or even knew—he was in the habit of tearing up, returning, or ignoring letters addressed to him with his rank and decorations.
Lawrence, thanks to his friendship with Geoffrey Dawson, was able to get his point of view printed frequently in the Times, to the embarrassment of the Foreign Office and the anger of the French. Lawrence argued that the Sykes-Picot agreement needed to be revised in the light of present realities, that this revision should be done with the inclusion of the Arabs, and that the various pledges the British government had made to the Arabs should be spelled out in detail. In the meantime, Syria continued to be occupied by British troops; this gave the British government some leverage over the situation, since what the French wanted was to replace them with a French occupation force as soon as possible. Moreover, the French wanted it done with appropriate ceremony, in order to impress on the Syrians the fact that their well-being now depended on France. The Union Jack must be pulled down in Damascus and Beirut, with “God Save the King” played for the last time, with pipers, and with all the panoply of British military ceremony, followed by the raising of the French flag and the playing of the “Marseillaise.” To this, after much correspondence, Lloyd George eventually agreed, and by the end of the year, France would be firmly in control of Lebanon, and rather less firmly in control of Syria. Feisal, who, on Lawrence’s recommendation, had stayed in Damascus rather than returning to Paris to endure further humiliation at the hands of the French,* now journeyed to Britain, where he was told that he should make the best deal he could with France, and that the British government could take no further responsibility for events in Syria and Lebanon.
Feisal does not appear to have met with Lawrence while they were both in Britain, and Lawrence’s letter to Curzon offering to “use his influence with Feisal” was ignored.
*Wigram eventually became the first baron Wigram, GCB, GCVo, CSi, PC, private secretary to the sovereign from 1931 to 1936.
*Later the rt. hon. the Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Ch, PC, QC.
* She was then married to Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt., still a rising young politician and not yet the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists.
*Lawrence had what appears to have been a streak of what the French call l’esprit delescalier, that is coming up with the clever last word too late, when one is already on the staircase after having left the room, and then incorporating it into later accounts of the conversation
*it would include a remarkable number of intellectually brilliant figures, from President Wilson’s powerful adviser and eminence grise Colonel edward house to such future foreign policy heavyweights as John Foster Dulles and Walter Lippmann
*Although Lawrence’s plan may have been overgenerous to hussein and his sons, it nevertheless recognized the difference between northern and southern Mesopotamia,and would have resulted in an independent Kurdish state and solved at least one of the fundamental divisive issues that plague modern iraq.
*readers may find an echo of the kind of thinking expressed by members of the committee in scene iV of G. B. Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which the (english) chaplain exclaims to the (French) bishop of Beauvais, how can what an englishman believes be heresy? it is a contradiction in terms
*This is remarkable, since King George V, like his father, was a notorious stickler for correct dress, both military and civilian, and had an eagle eye for the slightest impropriety or flaw, as well as a very short fuse in this regard.
* This is certainly a slip of Lawrence’s fountain pen, since Feisal’s memorandum to Balfour was written on January 1.
*Lawrence was not the only one to float this idea with Wilson; another was Dr. howard S. Bliss, president of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut). But it was shrewd of Lawrence to suggest a plan that would appeal to the democratic ideals of Wilson and would be sure to infuriate the French and alarm the British. if the Syrians, after all, why not next the egyptians, or the inhabitants of Mesopotamia,or worse yet, from the British point of view the indians?
*The United States ambassador in Constantinople was henry J. Morgenthau, Franklin Delano roosevelt’s neighbor in hyde Park, New York, and eventually his secretary of the treasury. Morgenthau reported the massacres in full detail to the State Department, as well as the matter of fact admission of the turkish leaders that the liquidation of the Armenians was taking place
*For reasons best known to themselves the French regarded the late Major General Charles Gordon, CB, “Gordon Pasha,” who was killed by the Dervishes at Khartoum in 1885, as the ultimate anti French British imperialist hero adventurer
*Demand was so great that Lowell Thomas was forced to hire an “understudy” to give some of the lectures in his place. he chose for the job a gifted young speaker named Dale Carnegie, who would himself go on to world fame and fortune as the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and founder of the Dale Carnegie instit
*This may not have been the best advice. Feisal might have done better to return to Paris and negotiate with the French, rather than stay in Damascus, where he came more and more under the influence of Syrian nationalist hotheads preaching resistance to France
CHAPTER TEN
“Backing into the Limelight”: 1920-1922
Any soldier’s return home after a long war is bound to be traumatic, and Lawrence’s was no exception. It was perhaps no accident, but more in the nature of a Freudian slip, that his last major written work would be a translation of the Odyssey. Neither he nor Hogarth could have believed that he would settle cozily into life at All Souls, dining at the “high table” in evening dress and black academic gown, chatting with dons and other fellows in the Common Room over a glass of port, and pursuing the research he had dropped in 1914, on the antiquities of the Near East. Hogarth could slip seamlessly back into the life of a scholar, but Lawrence’s war years had been too tumultuous for that, and his devotion to scholarship, or at any rate to the academic life, had been only skin deep to begin with. The war had not taken him away unwillingly from what he loved, but instead offered him a much more intense and dramatic life, as well as a chance to play a significant role in grand events. He was not going back to a desk at the Ashmolean Museum, with a sigh of relief, to study potsherds, and as for archaeological research in the field, neither the British nor the French government would tolerate the presence of “Colonel Lawrence,” a magnet for Arab nationalism and discontent, digging among the ruins of Carchemish, or anywhere else in the Middle East.
All Souls was a refuge of sorts from the outside world, but it was no great distance from there to Polstead Road, where Lawrence’s mother continued to try to dominate his life. For five years Lawrence had been spared his mother’s intense interest and, as he saw it, her unreasonable emotional demands, as well as the hothouse atmosphere of life in the Lawrence household. Sarah Lawrence had not only very high and unforgiving standards of behavior, but an elephant’s memory for slights, or occasions when her will had been flouted. It would be easy to suppose that Lawrence exaggerated his mother’s controlling personality, but those of his friends who met her, including Charlotte Shaw and Lady Astor—the former married to one of the more difficult personalities of late nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century Britain, and the latter no shrinking violet herself—seem to have been terrified of this tiny, and by then elderly, woman. Evidently, Sarah Lawrence always said exactly what was on her mind, without any attempt to sugarcoat it. By the early autumn of 1919 she had accumulated enough tragedy in her life to expect some emotional support from her second son, who was, of course, either unwilling or unable to provide it. Polstead Road cannot have been a place Lawrence wanted to visit, but now he was only a few minutes’ bicycle ride away, and witho
ut the tempering influence of his father.
Without Thomas Lawrence present, his widow was free to explore many of the animosities and old complaints that Ned had been spared over the years. An example was her fierce quarrel with Janet Laurie, who had fallen in love with Ned’s taller and more handsome brother Will. When the war broke out, it seems that Will, who clearly intended to marry Janet despite his mother’s opposition, wrote to ask Janet if she thought he should come home and join up, and she, after much hesitation, wrote back and told him that “it might trouble him later if he did not.” This was true, given Will’s honorable nature, but once he had been listed as missing, and then declared dead, his mother either heard about or read Janet’s letter (more likely, the latter), and blamed Janet for his death. There was a terrible “row,” and the two women did not speak again until 1932. To do Sarah justice, as a devout Christian she finally sought Janet’s forgiveness, and received it, but in 1919 Sarah’s bitterness over Will’s death was still raw.
Hearing in detail about such issues was exactly why Lawrence had left home in the first place. He was the least judgmental of men, and besides, he was still fond of Janet and would have been reluctant to take his mother’s side or even to hear it. Also, his own attitude toward the death of two of his younger brothers was modeled on Roman fortitude. When Frank was killed, Lawrence had written to his mother urging her to “bear a brave face to the world about Frank….[His] last letter is a very fine one & leaves no regret behind it….1 didn’t say good-bye to Frank because he would rather I didn’t, & I knew there was little chance of seeing him again; in which case we were better without a parting.” This was stoic, but not exactly sympathetic or consoling. Lawrence would doubtless have felt the same about Will.
Lawrence’s depression may be gauged by his mother’s recollection that he sometimes sat for hours at home, staring into space; he did the same at All Souls, to the consternation of the other fellows. At times he broke out of his depression to play undergraduate pranks, or so the poet Robert Graves, a returning officer turned undergraduate, remembered. According to Graves, Lawrence climbed a tower at All Souls to hang the Hejaz flag from its peak, kidnapped a deer from the Magdalen College deer park, and rang the station bell he had captured from Tell Shahm from his window at night. These incidents would not have been out of the ordinary for an undergraduate, but Lawrence was at the time a thirty-one-year-old retired officer, and All Souls was not a place that looked with fond amusement on high jinks by its fellows. The pranks may be seen, not so much as cheerful rebellion against authority, but more likely as an attempt to revert to the happier, easier undergraduate state of mind that Lawrence had known at Oxford from 1907 to 1910. But that world had vanished forever. Oxford in 1919 was a place where the undergraduates were for the most part ex-officers, many of them old before their time. In every college dons were busy putting up a plaque with a long list of those who had been killed from 1914 to 1918. It was as if a whole generation had simply disappeared. Lawrence did not fit in at All Souls any more easily than he did at home.
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Page 55
