Although at the moment this is written he holds in the world to-day a position second only to that of the pope in Rome, he lives so simply that he prefers a mule to any other conveyence. But for mules he is a connoisseur and a fan. South America, Australia, and Abyssinia are combed for his favorite steeds; but the best of all, according to King Hussein, is the good Missouri “hard-tail.”
Simple, even severe in his tastes, Hussein is a rigid upholder of the Volstead clauses in Al Qu’ran. After a gloriously successful train-wrecking expedition, two of Lawrence’s Arab officers went up to Mecca on a week’s leave, taking along in their grips something stronger than rose-water, with which to celebrate. This breach of piety reached the ears of the king, who had the officers beaten in public. After that no one chose Mecca as the Arabian Montreal.
The Arabs are inordinately fond of talking-machines, but King Hussein has prohibited them in Mecca, believing them to be the invention not of Edison but of the devil. Although he himself prefers the life of a nomad and his real sympathies are with the Bedouins, he is even more severe with the tribesmen of the black tents than with the Arab townsfolk.
One day he was resting in the cool shelter of datepalms in an oasis with a circle of Bedouins squatting around him on their prayer-rugs. Out of the corner of his eye, he observed one of these Arabs slip the kuffieh belonging to his neighbor under the folds of his robes. A moment later, the owner returned and missed his handsome head-dress. Every one denied seeing it, including the culprit. Hussein stood up, terrible in his wrath, and strode over to the guilty man.
“Varlet, where is thy brother’s kuffieh?” he demanded.
“Master of mercies, I know nothing of it,” stammered the terrified man.
“Thou liest!” growled Hussein, and, picking up the gnarled club that formed part of his regal trappings, he dealt the man a terrific blow in the ribs. The thief collapsed in a heap and died next day.
Hussein, as the Grand Shereef of Mecca, was the sixty-eighth of his dynasty. As king he was the first of a new line. Now, as ruler-elect of the Mohammedan world, he revives the supremacy of his ancient clan, the Qu’reish, from whom the Prophet himself was descended. He is a man of keen intelligence, and those who know him best say that he has a natural gift for diplomacy. Certainly he will need every ounce of it if he is to keep his present difficult position as caliph over the divided and distracted Moslem world of to-day. Many do not acknowledge him. Even in his own Arabia, the powerful schism of the Wahabis pays him but scant attention. In fact the present sultan of the Central Desert and head of the puritanical Wahabis, is King Hussein’s great rival and one of the strongest men in Arabia to-day. Early in the war, according to Mr. H. St. John Philby, “Sir Percy Cox, who accompanied the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force as Chief Political Officer, immediately sent Captain Shakespear to spur Ihn Sa’ud into active operations against the Turks and their natural ally, Ibn Rashid. The campaign was launched in January, 1915, and I have always thought that, had it not been for the unfortunate accident of Shakespear’s death in the very first battle between the rival forces, Colonel Lawrence might never have had the opportunity of initiating and carrying through the brilliant campaigns with which his name is associated, and as the result of which he entered Damascus in triumph at the head of the army of the Hedjaz.”
Mr. Philby followed Captain Shakespear into the Central Desert ruled over by Ibn Sa’ud, and he had a tremendous admiration for that potentate. But by the time Mr. Philby was sent to Ibn Sa’ud’s country the Hedjaz revolt was at its height and Colonel Lawrence was well on his way toward Damascus. Mr. Philby made an extraordinary journey through the unknown heart of Arabia and turned up rather unexpectedly at the summer capital of King Hussein in the mountains near Mecca. The aged monarch in greeting the explorer called him the Lawrence of Nejd.
In the Wahabi sect sons can kill fathers or fathers can kill sons who do not join. A man can also be killed for smoking a cigarrette. These Mohammedan Puritans want to abolish the pilgrimage to Mecca and blot out all shrines, such as the sacred Kaaba and the Tomb of the Prophet in Medina. Ibn Sa’ud was the head of a powerful force of fighting men, and after the World War he had captured the city of Hail, his old enemy Ibn Rashid’s capital, and made himself the ruler of the whole of Central Arabia.
King Hussein also has a number of other rivals. The Emir of Morocco claims the pontificate by virtue of descent through another branch of the illustrious Qu’reish. The Turks have proclaimed a republic, and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha undoubtedly hopes to seize the scepter of the Ottomans and become in fact if not in name the supreme ruler in Islam. India is puzzled, and the doctors of Al Azhar have up to late made no pronouncement on Hussein’s status.
Much, no doubt, is going on behind the scenes. We of the West are prone to underestimate the importance of Mohammedanism; one day there may be a rude awakening, for it is the creed of one fifth of the world and is an active and proselytizing creed making converts in London as well as equatorial Africa.
Like the waves of unrest and religious fervor and splendid hope that passed through Christendom at the time of the Crusades, so now, from Sudan to Sumatra, there are ominous signs of another and darker movement. Men are muttering: “Verily those who disbelieve our signs, we will surely cast to be broiled in hell-fire; so often as their skins shall be well burned we will give them other skins in exchange, that they may taste the sharper torment, for God is mighty and wise. But those who believe and do right, we will bring them into gardens watered by rivers.”
The times are difficult for a ruler of Islam, but no one has a better claim than Hussein to the great inheritance to which he has been called by popular acclamation at Bagdad.
From time immemorial the desert has been a confused and changing mass of blood-feuds and tribal jealousies. To-day there are no blood-fueds among the Arabs from Damascus to Mecca; for the first time in the history of Arabia since the seventh century there is peace along all the pilgrim road, thanks to King Hussein and his sons.
Although he is only five feet two inches in height, his regal bearing does not belie his ancient lineage and his high ambition. At sixty he is still a man of exceptional vigor, although that is not common in men of his age in the Southern Arabian Desert.
His hands, delicate and beautiful as a musician’s, impress one with a sense of power and finesse; whether or no they will be able to control the two hundred and fifty millions of the great brotherhood of Islam is one of the fascinating problems of the future.
But the real hope for the future of Arabia is centered in his son, King Feisal, who realizes that the Arabs need European and American assistance in educational and industrial fields, and Feisal is eager to inaugurate many changes that may revolutionize Arabia.
On the other hand, King Hussein is desirous that both Mecca and Medina should remain isolated from the world, during his lifetime, at least. “I am an old man,” says he, “and happy with things as they are, but I realize that changes must come.” It is possible that after the king has ruled Mecca for a few more years he may retire and allow Feisal, Abdullah, and Ali to attempt to work out their great plan for a United States of Arabia. In this event even Mecca may be opened up to the Christian and unbeliever, for Feisal and his brothers are thoroughly modern and do not sympathize with the fanaticism of old Arabia. They have already prevailed upon their father to introduce electric lights in Mecca.
Feisal, like his father, is a man of great personal courage. Were he not, he would never have united his ignorant and fanatical followers in a common brotherhood as he did. In the early days of the revolt, he was by turns rifleman, company commander, and army commander. The Bedouins were the only men he had, and they were meeting artillery-fire for the first time in their lives and did n’t like it a bit. Feisal had to lead them in camel charges, bring up the rear in retreat, and defend narrow places in the mountains with his own rifle. At the time they had few rifles and no stores, and Lawrence has revealed the fact that he kept up the spirit of his m
en with the thought of material rewards to follow by filling his treasure-chest with stones and ostentatiously loading it on a camel.
Lawrence believes that Feisal has a combination of qualities admirably fitting him for the leadership of the new Arab state which may rise out of the ashes of the old Ottoman Empire. Lawrence is of the opinion that Feisal will go down in history, next to Mohammed and Saladin, as the greatest Arab who ever lived. He was and still is the soul of the Arab movement. He lives only for his ideals and for his country. His only thought is for the future of Arabia. That he and his father were liberal-minded enough to take advantage of the genius and unique ability of a European unbeliever, a mere youth many years their junior, seems incredible to any one who knows the Mohammedans of the Near East, because, to the average Moslem Arab, all Christians are dogs; but King Hussein and his enlightened son even went so far as to accept their fair-haired British advisor as a fellow-Arabian prince and an honorary shereef of Mecca, a title which had always been reserved in the past for direct descendants of the Prophet, and which had never before been awarded to any other person, either Moslem or Christian.
CHAPTER XXX
LAWRENCE ELEES FROM LONDON, AND FEISAL BECOMES KING IN BAGDAD
A FTER the peace conference, and after Emir Feisal had returned to Damascus, Lawrence vanished. Many of his friends thought that he had returned to Arabia to resume the rôle of mystery man. But I doubted this, for when I had last talked to him in Paris I had asked him point-blank if he intended to go back to the East in order to help the Arabs build up their new state. His answer was most emphatically in the negative.
“I am not going to return for some years—perhaps never,” he said. “It would not be for the good of the Arabs for me to be there. As a matter of fact, I have n’t the remotest idea of what I will do. The war has so completely upset my life that it may take me several years to find myself. In the meantime I hope to discover a secluded corner somewhere in England, far from war, politics, and diplomacy, where I can read a bit of Greek without being interrupted.”
His attitude regarding return to the Near East seemed to me another indication of his far-sightedness. During their war of liberation, the Arabs had followed Lawrence partly because of his own personality but mainly because he offered them a substitute for Turkish oppression. He well knew that as soon as the excitement of war disappeared his power over them would diminish. What would have happened if he had returned to the Near East? What would have been the outcome if he had temporarily gained a position of political authority equivalent to the military position he had attained in Arabia? It is conceivable that, because of his tremendous influence over the Arabs during the war, he might at the outset have had a large following. But in a few months some one would have raised the cry, “Away with the infidel!” If he had returned to Damascus simply in the capacity of advisor to Feisal, that alone might have undermined the emir’s hold over his people. The Arabs are jealous, fickle, and suspicious, and they would have accused Feisal of being a mere puppet. If Lawrence had craved power he might conceivably have made himself an Arabian dictator by turning Moslem. But nothing could have been more remote from his mind. He had not led the Arabs to gratify personal ambition. His sole motive was to defeat the Germans and Turks, and at the same time to help his friends the Arabs win their freedom.
While the peace conference was still in session, many people said to me that young Lawrence was the person best equipped to represent Great Britain in the Near East and that he no doubt would return to Syria and Arabia in an official capacity. But Lawrence’s one ambition was to take off his uniform, drop out of political and military life, and return to his archaeological studies.
I asked Nuri Pasha, one of the generals on Emir Feisal’s staff in Paris, how the Arabs intended to repay Colonel Lawrence for his great service to their country. He replied: “We have offered him everything we have, but he refuses to accept anything. But if he will consent, we wish to give him the exclusive archæological rights to all the buried cities of Arabia and Syria.”
Lawrence had other plans, however.
For months ofter the Peace Conference not even his most intimate friends knew what had become of him. Meanwhile I had returned to America and started a tour of the continent presenting the pictorial records of the Allied campaigns which Mr. Chase and I had prepared. But we were unexpectedly invited to appear for a season at Covent Garden Royal Opera-House, London, a thing we had never dreamed might occur, because our material had been obtained solely for America. Naturally one of the first things I endeavored to do upon arrival in England was to find Colonel Lawrence. I wanted to show him what Auda Abu Tayi and the rest of his Arabian knights looked like on the screen. Both at the War Office and the Foreign Office no one seemed to know what had become of him. He had apparently vanished into the blue just as he used to do in the desert. But a fortnight later I received a note from him. All it said was:
MY DEAR LOWELL THOMAS:
I saw your show last night. And thank God the lights were out!
T. E. LAWRENCE.
I discovered that this man, whom all London would have been delighted to honor, was living incognito in a modest furnished room in a side street over the Dover tube-station. Not even his landlady had any suspicion of his identity. But he could not long keep it a secret.
A few days later he came around and had tea with us. When he discovered that I was married and that my wife was with me, he seemed very much embarrassed and blushed all over. He implored me to return to America and to stop telling the public about his exploits. He said that if I stayed in London any longer life would not be worth living for him, because as a result of my production at Covent Garden he was being hounded night and day by autograph-fiends, reporters, magazine-editors, book-publishers, and representatives of the gentler sex whom he feared more than a Turkish army corps. He said that as a result of the two weeks I had been speaking in London he had received some twenty-eight proposals of marriage, and they were arriving on every mail, most of them via Oxford.
When he came to call I noticed that he had two books under his arm. One was a volume of Persian poems, and the other, judging by its title, was about the last book in the world that you would have expected this young man to be reading—this man who had been called the Uncrowned King of the Arabs, who had achieved what no sultan and no calif had been able to do in more than five hundred years, who had refused some of the highest honors at the disposition of the greatest governments of the world, who had been made an honorary descendant of the Prophet, and who will live in history as one of the most romantic and picturesque figures of all time. It was “The Diary of a Disappointed Man.”
But when Lawrence found out that there was little immediate prospect of my sailing for America, and when he discovered that he was being followed by an Italian countess who wore a wrist-watch on her ankle, he fled from London.
It was not long after this that Emir Feisal lost his throne in Syria, and there was a good deal of propaganda work being done by the French in order to encourage the British not to sponsor the Arab cause. So, despite the fact that he had gone into retirement and was trying to keep out of political affairs, Lawrence could not refrain from defending Feisal. Without appearing personally he began writing articles to the London papers, presenting the Arab side of the controversy. I will quote from one or two of them because they give one an idea of the versatility of this youth, who could wield a pen as ably as he could lead an army.
There is a feeling in England [wrote Lawrence] that the French occupation of Damascus and their expulsion of Feisal from the throne to which the grateful Syrians had elected him is, after all, a poor return for Feisal’s gifts to us during the war: and the idea of falling short of an oriental friend in generosity leaves an unpleasantness in our mouths. Feisal’s courage and statesmanship made the Mecca revolt spread beyond the Holy cities, until it became a very active help to the allies in Palestine. The Arab army, created in the field, grew from a mob of Bedouins into
an organised and well equipped body of troops. They captured thirty-five thousand Turks, disabled as many more, took a hundred and fifty guns, and a hundred thousand square miles of Ottoman territory. This was great service in our extreme need, and we felt we owed the Arabs a reward: and to Feisal, their leader, we owed double, for the loyal way in which he had arranged the main Arab activity when and where Allenby directed.
Yet we have really no competence in this matter to criticise the French. They have only followed in very humble fashion, in their sphere of Syria, the example we set them in Mesopotamia. England controls nine parts out of ten of the Arab world, and inevitably calls the tune to which the French must dance. If we follow an Arab policy, they must be Arab. If we fight the Arabs, they must fight the Arabs. It would show a lack of humour if we reproved them for a battle near Damascus, and the blotting out of the Syrian essay in self-government, while we were fighting battles near Bagdad, and trying to render the Mesopotamians incapable of self-government, by smashing every head that raised itself among them.
Britain was having a turbulent time in Mesopotamia just when the French had ousted Feisal from Syria. Lawrence felt that there ought to be a way of putting Feisal’s talents to some use in Bagdad, and this article was his diplomatic way of introducing the plan which afterward was developed and adopted.
A few weeks ago [continued Lawrence] the chief of our administration in Bagdad was asked to receive some Arab notables who wanted to urge their case for partial autonomy. Le packed the delegation with some nominees of his own, and in replying, told them that it would be long before they were fit for responsibility. Brave words—but the burden of them has been heavy on the Manchester men this week at Hillah.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 26
