Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

by Michael Korda

  As a condition of accepting the throne of Iraq—and British guidance and protection for some time from behind it—Feisal needed a quid pro quo for Abdulla—hence the amount of time Lawrence spent in Amman. Abdulla’s move there “with 30 officers and 200 Bedouins” had alarmed the French, and he and Lawrence spent some time calming down the tribes, who were eager to make raids into Syria; they also had to calm the Syrian political figures who had fled from Damascus to Amman as France tightened its grasp on the country. Lawrence wrote to his mother that “living with Abdulla in his camp … was rather like the life in war time, with hundreds of Bedouin coming & going, & a general atmosphere of newness in the air. However the difference was that now everybody is trying to be peaceful.” Unfortunately this was not how the French reacted to the threat of tribal disorder to their south.

  Lawrence and Abdulla had always had a wary relationship, ever since their meeting in Jidda in 1916, and Abdulla had been particularly “suspicious of his influence among the tribes.” In his memoirs, written long after Lawrence’s death, and only a year before he himself was assassinated by a Palestinian extremist in Jerusalem, Abdulla wrote, “He was certainly a strange character…. Lawrence appeared to only require people who had no views of their own, that he might impress his personal ideas upon them.” But Abdulla acknowledged Lawrence’s genius and “valuable services,” and believed, as General Wingate did, that Lawrence’s most courageous feat was not the taking of Aqaba but his “adventurous reconnaissance” behind enemy lines to Damascus in 1917 to meet with the military commander of Damascus, for which Wingate had recommended him for “the immediate award” of the Victoria Cross.

  Even without his robes and headdress Lawrence continued to have a mesmerizing effect on the Bedouin. Churchill’s bodyguard, Inspector W. H. Thompson of Scotland Yard, a policeman not given to flights of fantasy, described Lawrence’s effect on a crowd of initially hostile Arabs: “ Lawrence was the man. No Pope of Rome ever had more command before his own worshippers ….Colonel Lawrence raised his hand slowly, the first and second fingers raised above the other two for silence and for blessing. He could have owned the earth. He did own it.Every man froze in respect, in a kind of New Testament adoration of shepherds for a master…. We passed through these murderous-looking men and they parted way for us without a struggle. Many touched Lawrence as he moved forward among them. Far off, drums were beating, and a horse neighed. A muezzin’s cry fell sadly among us from a single minaret in the mosque …. Lawrence was so greatly loved and respected that he could have established his own empire from Alexandretta to the Indus. He knew this too.” In fact, Lawrence had long since renounced any such ambitions, if he ever had them; but the reactions of the tribes to his presence in Amman as they cried out “Urens, Urens, Urens,” and fired off fusillades of shots in his honor, was enough to persuade Abdulla to take him seriously and to listen carefully to his proposals for a mini-state in Trans-Jordan, and for restraining the tribes from making raids into Syria, which would produce a violent reaction from the French.

  Lawrence reassured Churchill, “I know Abdullah: you won’t have a shot fired,” and he was right. Abdulla was a better diplomat than a warrior, “shrewd and indolent,” and by slow stages he persuaded the British to offer him the “temporary” governorship over Trans-Jordan, which he then elevated to a principality and finally to a kingdom, with an army—the famous “Arab Legion,” led and trained by the British—to back him up.Lawrence was enthusiastic about Abdulla’s ruling over Trans-Jordan, and would spend some time there as the “chief political officer for Trans-Jordania.” He was one of the political architects, if not the chief political architect, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Already in 1921 there were considerable misgivings about Lawrence’s solution to the problem of how to reward Abdulla for giving up any claim he had to the Iraqi throne in favor of his brother Feisal. The Balfour Declaration had prudently not attempted to define the exact frontiers of Palestine, but both historically and biblically it had always included the area to the east of the Jordan, as well as the west bank. Approximately three-quarters of the territory to which the Zionists aspired was now a separate country, under the rule of an emir and sharif of Mecca, with Jewish settlement forbidden there—an area moreover which potentially could have sufficient water and could be ideal for settlement and modern farming, but which would remain a sandy wasteland. The reaction of Lawrence’s fellow political adviser Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was apoplectic and immediate, and echoed the feelings of the Zionist leadership: “The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe, the worst offender being Shuckburgh who is head of the Middle East Department. Hubert Young and little Lawrence do their best to conceal their dislike and mistrust of Jews but both support the official pro-Arab policy of Whitehall and frown on the equally official policy based on the Balfour Declaration; the latter is the only policy I recognize. I exploded on hearing Churchill had severed the Transjordan from Palestine….Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced him….This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine.” Meinertzhagen described himself as “foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation,” not necessarily a figure of speech where Meinertzhagen was concerned, but his protests were mild compared with those of the Zionists themselves, in Palestine and in the United States. The Israelis’ belief that Jordan is, or ought to be, the Palestinian state, and that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were always intended to be part of the Jewish state, thus goes back to 1921, and the creation of Trans-Jordan. If Lawrence had been unaware of that before the eight days he spent with Abdulla,calming the tribes and persuading Abdulla to accept the “governorship” of Trans-Jordan, he certainly became aware of it the moment he reached Jerusalem.

  Churchill’s daring initiatives were not all that disturbed the inhabitants of Palestine, who now suddenly found themselves living in a much smaller country than either the Jews or the Arabs had expected. Although Palestine was still occupied by the British army, and Lawrence’s old friend Ronald Storrs had been rushed into khaki to serve as Jerusalem’s military governor, a civilian high commissioner had been appointed in 1920, and the choice had fallen on Sir Herbert Samuel, the former home secretary, who was a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Even before his appointment was final, Arabs responded with “consternation, despondency, and exasperation,” feelings shared for once with the Christian population of Palestine—Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Protestant—as well as with the Orthodox Jews, who believed that any attempt to encourage Jewish immigration was impious until and unless God arranged it. Samuel arrived at Jaffa, in a white diplomatic uniform, and was greeted by a seventeen-gun salute. Then he was taken to a reception in Jerusalem, where the chief military administrator he was replacing handed him “a typewritten receipt for ‘one Palestine taken over in good condition,’ which Sir Herbert duly signed.”* Below his signature, however, he cautiously wrote, “E.&O.E.,” letters which, on commercial documents, stand for “Errors and Omissions Excepted.” Samuel was happily unaware that even the unflappable and unmilitary Storrs was holding “a loaded and cocked Browning pistol in his left hand” as they sat together in the back of the open car on the way to the reception. Storrs was well informed of the Arabs’ hostility toward Samuel, though in the event, Samuel was notably evenhanded and fair. Although he too was strongly opposed to the creation of Trans-Jordan, he got along well with Lawrence, who took him on a sightseeing trip to Petra. At one point, as Churchill, Samuel, and Lawrence stood surrounded by a crowd of chanting, shouting Arabs, Churchill took off his hat to thank them for their prolonged cheers. “What are they saying?” he asked Lawrence. “Death to the Jews,” Lawrence explained quietly.

  Samuel did his best to control the fear and anger that were already beginning to mar the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in the Holy Land. He had wisely persuaded the king to issue a friendly message to the Christian, Arab, and Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, in English, Arabic, an
d Hebrew, which Samuel had printed on parchment in gold ink and distributed to the notables of every community. He was unfailingly courteous, sensible, and good-natured, in marked contrast to his Turkish predecessors, and immediately began to reform everything he saw. He set up a reliable police force; created an honest court system (perhaps the most visible sign throughout the empire of British institutions being successfully transplanted); and encouraged the building of roads, modern sanitation, and schools for the Arab communities (the first thing that Jewish communities invariably built was a school)—all of which the Turks had neglected shamelessly. Streets signs and road signs were written out scrupulously in English, Arabic, and Hebrew; British officials were encouraged to learn Hebrew and Arabic; and new trilingual postage stamps were designed, much to the pleasure of King George V (an avid stamp collector). Lawrence made it his business to establish a good working relationship between the high commissioner and Abdulla, which Abdulla cemented by presenting Samuel with a “beautiful bay Arab mare” from his own stable—he was famous throughout the Middle East for his stud of thoroughbred Arab horses. Despite all this, however, Jewish immigration and Jewish land purchases continued to provoke unrest in the Arab population, and undermined the Arabs’ respect for British rule.

  Kennington, who had been traveling through the Middle East making sketches and paintings, turned up to find his client filled with mixed emotions now that he was back in the desert. Like Inspector Thompson, he was amazed at the affection the Bedouin felt for Lawrence; visiting Abdulla’s camp, he described the tribes riding in to greet Lawrence: “Their cries became a roar, Aurens—Aurens—Aurens—Aurens! It seemed to me that each had a need to touch him. It was half an hour before he was talking to less than a dozen at once. Re-creating the picture, I see him as detached as ever, but with great charm and very gracious. I thought he got warmth and pleasure from their love, but now know his pain also, for they longed for him to take them again into Damascus, this time to drive out the French. Easily self-controlled, he returned a percentage of the pats, touches and gripping of hands, giving nods, smiles, and sudden wit to chosen friends. He was apart, but they did not know it. They loved him, and gave him all their heart.”

  Kennington’s comment was shrewd and correct. For Lawrence the pain was real and intense—he was “apart,” a man in a European suit, unarmed, no longer a part of the Bedouin’s world. The two years he had spent in the desert, leading them and fighting alongside them, with all the accompanying deprivations, cruelties, and horrors, was an Eden to which he could never return, a comradeship far more intense than anything civilian life could provide. Other soldiers, perhaps most, found a replacement for the bonds of war in domestic happiness, marriage, family, and children, but none of these was a possibility for Lawrence, who took as his motto “the Greek epitaph of despair”: “Here lie I of Tarsus, never having married, and I would that my father had not.”

  In April, Lawrence met with Feisal in Egypt, to go over Feisal’s conditions for accepting the throne of Iraq, which was to be offered to him after a carefully rigged election. His chief rival for power in Iraq, Sayyid Talib, the political boss of Basra—whose choice for the throne was the Naqib of Baghdad, an elderly and widely respected Sunni religious figure—was invited to tea by Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer. With a typically British manifestation of old-fashioned politeness combined with brutal realpolitik Sayyid Talib was arrested after tea and deported to exile in Ceylon, leaving Feisal as the only viable candidate for an office many Iraqis considered unnecessary. Not everyone in the Middle East shared the British faith in monarchy as a universally appropriate political solution.

  During the last three weeks of April and the first week of May, Lawrence flew back and forth between Feisal in Egypt and Abdulla in TransJordan, tactfully easing both brothers into accepting their new roles, and overcoming their objections to what they feared might be perceived as British puppet monarchies. Abdulla’s doubts were soothed in part by a down payment against his annual subsidy of £5,000 in gold and the flypast of a squadron of RAF aircraft, in which Lawrence participated, intended to reassure Abdulla that the British could support him if he was threatened by the French. Feisal was reassured by a substantial subsidy and the promise of British help, if needed, “against his own people,” a request that showed a good deal of realism on his part about the future relationship of the Iraqi people to their monarch, as well as a British promise to mediate between his father and ibn Saud. In case mediation didn’t work, it was hoped that bribery might do the trick, and ibn Saud was paid £100,000 in gold to leave King Hussein in possession of the Hejaz and the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. Lawrence displayed a degree of tact, persuasion, and sheer dogged persistence that would have qualified him for a knighthood had he not already turned one down.

  As usual, Lawrence communicated directly and at length with Winston Churchill, now back in London; with Lord Curzon at the Foreign Office; and with General Allenby in Cairo—in a stream of well-written messages, full of good suggestions and vivid descriptions of personalities and events. Lawrence was, in fact if not in title, a proconsul, making major decisions on his own, and explaining them later to the person who seemed most likely to approve. Lawrence later wrote to Robert Graves, unusually for him, “I take most of the credit of Mr. Churchill’s pacification of the Middle East upon myself. I had the knowledge and the plan. He had the imagination and courage to adopt it.” This was, as it happened, a bold but accurate claim: Lawrence had a central role in shaping the borders of the modern Middle East and in placing Hashemite monarchs on the hitherto nonexistent thrones of Iraq and Jordan. Nothing, after all, is fated: the British started with many obligations (a guilty one toward Feisal, and another, less guilt-ridden and more self-imposed, toward the Zionists), yet Lawrence, without ever appearing in the foreground, managed to impose his own ideas on everyone, and shape the area according to his own vision. Afterward, when Lawrence had left the scene, Zionists complained that a large part of what should have been Palestine had been given to Abdulla; many Iraqis complained that they had received a Sunni monarchy rather than a republic; Arabs everywhere complained that France and Britain had shared the Middle East between them and carved it up into client states; and the British complained that they had been burdened with the costs and responsibility of maintaining peace and order from Baghdad to Cairo, and from Amman to Suez, as well as with the impossible task of mediating between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews. Lawrence believed, as he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, that Britain was “quit of the war-time Eastern adventure with clean hands,” though what he really meant was that he was quit of it with clean hands, and this much is certainly true. He had done his best to undo the Sykes-Picot agreement, and had placed two of Hussein’s sons on semi-independent Arab thrones—he could hardly have done more.

  He was not quite “quit of it” yet, however. After a brief spell in London in May, Churchill sent him back to the Middle East, to Jidda, to undertake the impossible, which was to persuade King Hussein to agree in writing to all the various and conflicting arrangements that had been made by the Allies in the Middle East since the end of the war. Given that Hussein would not budge from the exact language of his correspondence with McMahon in 1915, that he had proclaimed himself king of “all the Arabs” everywhere (and would shortly, and ill-advisedly, declare himself caliph as well), and that he regarded ibn Saud as an upstart and the British mandate for Palestine as unacceptable, this was not a task which even Lawrence welcomed, happy as he was to get away from his desk at the Colonial Office.

  Nor was he, in this case, necessarily the right man for the job, even though he was given “special, full” plenipotentiary powers by his old adversary, Curzon, “empowering” him “to negotiate and conclude, with such Minister or Ministers as may be vested with similar power and authority on the part of His Majesty the King of the Hejaz, a treaty between the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Hejaz.” There was a slight thaw between Lawrence and Curzon, perhaps b
ecause Lawrence had been obliged to ask Curzon to prevent the publication of Lowell Thomas’s adulatory biography in the United Kingdom, on the rather flimsy grounds that it might contain material that would embarrass the government or constitute a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Curzon, whose view of the matter seemed to be one of lèse-majesté, allowed a letter to be sent in his name on Lawrence’s behalf to Hutchinsons, the London publisher, and managed to set back the publication of With Lawrence in Arabia by four years. In fact, Thomas had merely included some passages from the Arab Bulletin, which he had been allowed to copy in Cairo. The publication of government secrets did not concern Lawrence so much as the possibility that Thomas’s enthusiastic buildup of him would be taken by King Hussein, Abdulla, and Feisal as a denigration of their own roles in the Arab Revolt—and the fact that by now he was tired of Thomas’s praise, and of the money Thomas was making off his legend.

  Narrow-minded, old-fashioned, stubborn, and infuriating, King Hussein had never liked or trusted Lawrence the way he had Storrs, and he was still deeply suspicious of Lawrence’s relationship with Feisal. The threat to the Hejaz from ibn Saud and his fanatical Wahhabi followers had frightened the old man into a stricter application of sharia law, including the cutting off of a hand for theft; chained prisoners clanked mournfully in the dungeons beneath his residence. Still, what Churchill and Curzon wanted from the king was not a more democratic rule over his subjects, but merely his signature, freeing them of further obligations and of future complaints that the British had acted without the consent of the Arabs. Lawrence was free to use any means at his disposal—at various points in the interminable negotiations, conducted at a snail’s pace in the intolerable humidity and heat of Jidda, he offered Hussein a yacht, a fleet of airplanes, and a visit from the Prince of Wales, all to no effect. At one point he secured Hussein’s agreement to fifteen of the nineteen articles in the draft treaty, and he remained confident that the king’s signature could probably be purchased if the price was high enough, but this was overoptimistic. Hussein alternated between long periods when he appeared to be listening sensibly to Lawrence, and moments when he lost his temper, shouted, or walked out of the room, leaving his son Zeid to continue the negotiations in his place. At one point, he called for his curved dagger and threatened to commit suicide; Lawrence replied calmly that then negotiations would have to be carried on with his successor. It seems very likely that Hussein was already suffering from the effects of senility—certainly Abdulla and Feisal, though still respectful toward their father, thought so—but he may also, in the Oriental manner of bargaining, merely have been stringing out the negotiations for as long as he could to see just how high the British were willing to go.