Lawrence has often been criticized for refusing the various honors offered him. But the truth of the matter is that he did not decline them merely to be eccentric. For instance, before the war he was presented with the Order of the Medjidieh by the sultan of Turkey for having saved the lives of some of the Germans at work on the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway when the natives were going to mob them. Then, shortly before the outbreak of the Arabian Revolution, while still a subordinate in Cairo, he received and accepted a number of decorations including the Legion of Honor. But he refused the rewards offered to him for what he had accomplished in Arabia because he had realized from the very beginning that the Allies, once victory was secured, would find it difficult not only to satisfy the claims of the Arabs, but even to fulfil their obligations to the Hedjaz leaders. He realized full well that the French were determined to have Syria, and he knew all along that they would never agree to the Arabs’ even keeping Damascus. Lawrence therefore felt that he did not care to accept anything in return for having conducted a campaign based on promises which the Allies could not fulfil to the extent to which he believed they ought to be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have felt differently had he known that his friend Emir Feisal would be crowned king in Bagdad after losing the Syrian throne, which Lawrence foresaw he would never be allowed to occupy for long. But at the end of the war no one dreamed that Feisal was going to be the founder of a new dynasty in the city of Harun al Rashid after first being driven out of Damascus by the French.
The only honor that Lawrence accepted was one perhaps more dear to his heart than any other, a fellowship at All Souls’ College, Oxford. This fellowship is awarded to men of exceptional scholastic attainments. There are only a score or so of them, usually men past the prime of life who are completing important historical, literary, or scientific works. For example, Lord Curzon is a fellow at All Souls, The distinction is an unusual one. It carries with it a modest honorarium and attractive quarters at the college, a delightful place for a distinguished scholar to retire. There is no prescribed work that goes with it, and Lawrence once told me that there were hut three requirements for a fellowship at All Souls: to be a good dresser, to be adept at small conversation, and to be a good judge of port. And then he added: “My clothes are an abomination; as a parlor conversationalist I am hopeless, and I never drink. So how I came to receive this honor is a mystery to me.”
After his election to All Souls, Lawrence divided his time between the college, the home of a friend in Westminster known as “the house with the green door,” and a bungalow that he built for himself in Epping Forest. The porter at All Souls said they never knew when to expect him, that when he was in residence he rarely dined with the other fellows, and that the light in his studio usually burned all night. No doubt he was busy on his Arabian book. But he did the most of his writing at the “house with the green door,” where he occupied a bare room that had been an architect’s office. One of his friends had given him a fur-lined aviator’s costume, and in the dead of winter when the cold in London is decidedly penetrating he would sit in that bleak room in his fur-lined suit writing the inside story of his experiences in far-off Araby.
On his frequent trips to Oxford he would carry his manuscript in a little black bag like those used by London bank-messengers. On one such occasion, after he had gone through the gate to the platform at Paddington Station, he put the bag down for a moment and walked over to the news-stand for a paper. When he returned, the bag was gone. It not only contained the only copy of his two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript, which he had written entirely in longhand, but it also contained the journal that he had kept faithfully through the desert campaign and many valuable original historical documents that can never be replaced. I saw him a few days later, and in telling me about the theft of the bag he referred to it jokingly and merely said: “I ’ve been saved a lot of trouble, and after all it ’s a good thing the bag was stolen. The world is simply spared another war book.” The bag and its contents were never seen or heard of again. Lawrence’s theory was that they were probably thrown into the Thames by the disappointed thief, who had hoped for a better haul. But his friends finally prevailed upon him to rewrite the book; and this time, in order to find solitude, away from the curious admirers who were constantly disturbing him at All Souls, and a solitude that carried with it a means of keeping body and soul together, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under the name of “Private Ross.” Even there he was unable to conceal his identity, and some one, for a consideration, tipped off a London newspaper, with the result that once more he found himself drawn into the lime-light. A few weeks previous he had agreed to sell the publication rights for, a large sum, but when this unexpected publicity appeared he turned down the contract, left the Air Force, called on the various London editors imploring them to allow him to live in peace and print nothing more about him, and then vanished again.
One of Colonel Lawrence’s hobbies is printing books by hand. There are few things that he likes more than an attractive book, and he has a valuable library of rare hand-printed volumes. On the edge of Epping Forest, some ten miles out from London, he built himself a little cottage with an interior resembling a chapel. Here he installed a hand-press, and when he finally finished his Arabian book he made six copies. A few were presented to friends, and one copy went to the British Museum Library to be locked up in a vault for forty years; that is, unless some one can prevail upon him to release it for publication. Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and several of Lawrence’s literary friends were among those to read it, and one of the most famous writers of the day declared that he considered it “a pyramid in English literature.”
Lawrence has great literary ability and a style of Ms own. He is as individualistic in his writing as in everything else that he does. A number of brilliant articles have come from his pen since he put aside the curved gold sword of a shereef of Mecca, and he has written an introduction to a new edition of “Arabia Deserta” which all agree forms a valuable addition to that classic. Nor could he receive higher literary praise than that, for all Orientalists concede that the foremost work ever published on Arabia is Charles Montagu Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia Deserta.” Lawrence says of it: “There is no sentiment, nothing merely picturesque, that most common failing of Oriental travel-books. Doughty’s completeness is devastating. It is a book which begins powerfully, written in a style which has apparently neither father nor son, so closely wrought, so tense, so just in its words and phrases, that it demands a hard reader.”
But Doughty’s book had been out of print for many years, and copies of it were extremely rare. “We call the book ‘Doughty’ pure and simple,” adds Lawrence, “for it is a classic, and the personality of Mr. Doughty hardly comes into question. Indeed, it is rather shocking to learn that he is a real and living person. The book has no date and can never grow old. It is the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs of the desert; and if it has not always been referred to, or enough read, that has been because it was excessively rare.”
So he set about to rectify this deficiency. He proposed that a new two-volume edition be published to sell for forty-five dollars, half what dealers had been asking for second-hand copies of the original. Doughty, an old man, had for years been devoting himself to poetry, and existing on a poet’s pittance. So Lawrence had at least three reasons for seeing a new edition published: to get the public better acquainted with a classic, to augment the income of his illustrious friend and predecessor, and to pay personal tribute to one to whom he felt deeply indebted.
In the preface Doughty says regarding Lawrence and the new edition: “A re-print has been called for; and is reproduced thus, at the suggestion chiefly of my distinguished friend, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, leader with Feysal, Meccan Prince, of the nomad tribesmen; whom they, as might none other at that time marching from Jidda, the port of Mecca, were able, (composing, as they went, the tribes’ longstanding blood feuds and old enmities), to unite with them in victorious arms
, against the corrupt Turkish sovereignty in those parts: and who greatly thus serving his Country’s cause and her Allies, from the Eastward, amidst the Great War, has in that imperishable enterprise, traversed the same wide region of Desert Arabia.”
No sooner was the edition off the press than it was exhausted, and since then more editions have followed. So Lawrence’s ambition to do something for Doughty, and gain for his classic a still wider circulation, was more than realized. Unquestionably the sale of “Arabia Deserta” was stimulated by the fact that Lawrence had written a special introduction to it in which he paid glowing tribute to the great traveler whose experiences in the desert had done so much to pave the way for his own success. Lawrence’s introduction to this new edition also gives us a hint as to his own skill with the pen and as to what we may expect from his own volume on Arabia. He writes:
The realism of the book is complete. Doughty tries to tell the full and exact truth of all that he saw. If there is a bias it will be against the Arabs, for he liked them so much; he was so impressed by the strange attraction, isolation and independence of this people that he took pleasure in bringing out their virtues by a careful expression of their faults. “If one live any time with the Arab he will have all his life after a feeling of the desert.” He had experienced it himself, the test of nomadism, that most deeply biting of all social disciplines, and for our sakes he strained all the more to paint it in its true colours, as a life too hard, too empty, too denying for all but the strongest and most determined men. Nothing is more powerful and real than this record of all his daily accidents and obstacles, and the feelings that came to him on the way. His picture of the Semites, sitting to the eyes in a cloaca, but with their brows touching Heaven, sums up in full measure their strength and weakness, and the strange contradictions of their thought which quicken curiosity at our first meeting with them.
To try and solve their riddle many of us have gone far into their society, and seen the clear hardness of their beliefs a limitation almost mathematical, which repels us by its unsympathetic form. Semites have no half-tones in their register of vision. They are a people of primary colours, especially of black and white, who see the world always in line. They are a certain people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They do not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our self-questionings. They know only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.
Semites are black and white not only in vision, but in their inner furnishing; black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts live easiest among extremes. They inhabit superlatives by choice. Sometimes the great inconsistents seem to possess them jointly. They exclude compromise, and pursue the logic of their ideas to its absurd ends, without seeing incongruity in their opposed conclusions. They oscillate with cool head and tranquil judgment from asymptote to asymptote, so imperturbably that they would seem hardly conscious of their giddy flight.
Lawrence’s command of English is amazing, by reason, of course, of his familiarity with the classics and his knowledge of both ancient and modern languages. His vocabulary is wider than that of most learned professors, and he has great descriptive powers, as we have observed from his description of the death of his friend Tallal el Haredhin of Tafas.
While in London and at All Souls, he lived much as he did in the desert. Indeed, from force of habit after his long experience in the East, he has become much like the Bedouins and has no desire for luxuries. He rarely eats or sleeps regularly, and says it is fatal if you are caught in an emergency to have formed regular habits. He usually goes without sleep one night a week and eats like a bird. It is his custom to sleep from three to ten in the morning and then take a long walk until three in the afternoon. Upon his return from his walk he would work until two in the morning, when he would go out for his dinner. The only places in London open at that unusual hour were the station restaurants, where he would tell the waiter to bring him anything he liked. He hates to order, food, and a few minutes after he has had a meal he has forgotten what the dishes were. When walking along the streets in London he is usually absorbed and pays no attention to anything until he comes to with a start and finds that a bus is about to run him down.
In avoiding the network of modern complexities he seldom has to worry about the countless things that crowd the joy out of our ultra-civilized modern life. He has no private income and scorns money except what he needs for the simple necessities of life and for his one luxury, books. His mother once told me that he had always been a trial to her because she never knew what he was going to do next. He himself declares that he probably will never marry because “no woman would live with me.”
Yet despite his scorn of money in private life, and his well nigh complete lack of it, while in the desert he had almost unlimited credit and could draw on his government up to many hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was by no means an uncommon sight to see him stuffing ten thousand pounds in gold sovereigns in one camel-bag and ten thousand in another. Then off he would go with it, accompanied only by ten or twelve Bedouins. On one occasion Lawrence drew a paltry six hundred pounds from Major Scott “to do a bit of shopping.” Major Scott kept the boxes of sovereigns in his tent at headquarters in Akaba. Major Maynard, who was in charge of some of the records, heard of this and asked for a receipt. When Scott informed Lawrence, the latter nearly doubled up with laughter and said, “He shall have it!” And so far as I could find out that was the only receipt he ever signed. As for the letters he received in the desert, he usually read them but then burned them and never bothered about answering.
His has indeed been a strange existence, full of individual experience. Fond of Oriental rugs, Lawrence picked up many rare ones during his wanderings. On the floor of his tent at Akaba were two beauties. Lawrence slept on one of them, while his companion, Major Marshall, used a camp-bed. One of the two rugs is now in the possession of Lady Allenby, while Marshall has the other. One day in the bazaar in Jedda, Lawrence saw a barber kneeling on a prayer-rug that he liked. It had two holes in it three or four inches in diameter. The barber offered it to him for two pounds, and Lawrence bought it. When he took it to Cairo and had it appraised by one of the leading rug merchants of Egypt he found that it was worth about seventy pounds after being repaired. So Lawrence sent the barber a five-pound note. At his mother’s home in Oxford he had a pile of Oriental rugs and carpets still covered with the dust of the East. A friend of the family got married at a time when Lawrence was away, and his mother sent one of the rugs as a wedding gift. When the colonel returned she told him about the incident and said she presumed it was not worth much. “That one you gave away cost me 147 pounds” ($665), replied Lawrence. But he was not the least bit vexed and promptly forgot all about it.
When the year was up during which he had promised to serve as Near Eastern advisor at the Colonial Office, Lawrence put on his hat and walked out. Since then he has found a new exhaust for his surplus energy. He met an army officer who had a high-power motor-cycle which was too much for the latter to handle. So Lawrence bought it and streaks it about England much as he formerly raced across the North Arabian Desert in the “Blue Mist.”
When an undergraduate at Oxford, he and another student made a solemn compact that if either ever did anything particularly noteworthy he would wire for the other to come so that they could celebrate. In 1920 Lawrence telegraphed his friend as follows; “Come at once. Have done something.” This was the first word that had passed between the two since their pre-war college days. When the friend arrived this is what Lawrence had done that he thought worth celebrating: he had just finished his bungalow on the edge of Epping Forest, and was keeping cows!
Epping Forest is a semi-national preserve of some sort, and there is a law that forbids the erection of non-movable structures. After Lawrence had finished his bungalow the police came and pointed out to him that he had broken the law because his house was a stationary edifice. So Lawrence bought some
paint and made four camouflage red wheels on the sides of the cottage. This so amused the authorities that they said no more about the law. But not long afterward a fire wiped out nearly everything he had.
As to what will happen to Lawrence in the future, only Allah knows. One thing is certain, that he will not permit his country to make a hero out of him. The maker of history has once more become the student of history. But Lawrence may live to see the effect of the wave that he rolled up out of the desert, in the form of an important new power in the East. As a result of the Arabian war of liberation, which was not a foolish dream on paper, and as a result of Allenby’s smashing campaign in Palestine and Syria, three new Arabian states have come into existence: the kingdom of Hedjaz under Hussein I, of Mecca; the independent state of Transjordania under Hussein’s second son, the Sultan Abdullah; and the kingdom of Iraq in Mesopotamia, where Hussein’s third son, King Feisal I, occupies the throne. It is the dream of these three, assisted by Hussein’s eldest son, the Emir Ali, who remains in Mecca, one day to form a United States of Arabia.
Much depends on King Feisal. Colonel Lawrence played the dominate part in making him the greatest Arab in five centuries. But the task before Feisal is stupendous. He has vision and high ideals for his people. Will he be strong enough to maintain his position in Bagdad and remain the leading figure in the Arabian world? Events are now moving swiftly in the Near East. If King Feisal can, through the quiet force of his personality, continue the work of wiping out the ancient quarrels between the tribes and cities of the desert in which task he and his father and brothers were given such effective help by Lawrence, and if the nations of the West will send railway, sanitary, and irrigation engineers and disinterested military and political advisers; coöperate in the establishment of schools; and lend financial support, the glory that once was Babylon’s may come again in Mesopotamia. The future of King Feisal and his brothers may be the future of Arabia. None may know the end of the story. But one thing is certain, and that is that Feisal, like his romantic, predecessor, Harun al Rashid of the Arabian Nights, is a just and merciful monarch; but had it not been for the youthful Lawrence, Feisal would not be ruling in Bagdad to-day, nor would his brother Abdullah be the sultan of Transjordania, nor would the Arabs recently have had the opportunity to proclaim King Hussein as the Calif of all Islam and Commander of the Faithful. For it was this young man who destroyed the thousand-year-old network of blood-feuds, who built up the Arabian army, who planned the strategy of the desert campaign and led the Arabs into battle, who swept the Turks from a thousand miles of country between Mecca and Damascus, who was the brains of the epic Arabian campaign and rode in triumph through the bazaars of Damascus, and established a government for Prince Feisal in the capital of Omar and Saladin, the oldest surviving city in the world. But without a complete understanding of the mentality and instinct of Arabia, and without a sincere love for the peoples of the desert, this would never have been possible. Nor is it surprising that with such love and understanding from such a man, translated into successful policies and glorious deeds, he won the adoration of the Arab race.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 30
