LAWRENCE FLEES FROM LONDON, AND FEISAL BECOMES KING IN BAGDAD
After 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 haven’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 archæological 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 after 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.
He 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.
These risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary
Arab success; then British reinforcements go out
as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are
slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is
meanwhile bombarded by artillery aëroplanes, or gunboats.
Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified.
It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions.
Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women
and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting
down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population
of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and
as a method of government it would be no more immoral
than the present system.
We realise the burden the army in Mesopotamia is to the
Imperial Exchequer, but we do not see as clearly the burden
it is to Mesopotamia. It has to be fed, and all its animals
have to be fed. The fighting forces are now eighty-three
thousand strong, but the ration strength is three hundred
thousand. There are three labourers to every soldier, to
supply and serve him. One in ten of the souls in Mesopotamia
to-day belongs to our army. The greenness of the
country is being eaten up by them, and the process is not
yet at its height. To be sure they demand that we double
our existing garrison. As local resources are exhausted
this increase of troops will increase the cost by more than
arithmetical progression.
These troops are just for police work to hold down the
subjects of whom the House of Lords was told two weeks
ago that they were longing for our continued presence in
their country. No one can imagine what will be our state
there if one of Mesopotamia’s three envious neighbours (all
nursing plans against us) attacks us from outside, while
there is still disloyalty within. Our communications are very
bad, our defence positions all have both flanks in the air,
and there seem to have been two incidents lately. We do
not trust our troops as we did during the war.
Then there are the military works. Great barracks and
camps have had to be constructed, and hundreds of miles
of military roads. Great bridges, to carry motor-lorries,
exist in remote places, where the only local transport is by
pack. The bridges are made of temporary materials, and
their upkeep is enormous. They are useless to the civil
Government, which yet has to take them over at a high
valuation; and so the new State will begin its career with
an enforced debt.
Photograph: A PEASANT WOMAN OF SYRIA
Photograph: TYPES OF CITY HEAD-DRESS FOR WOMEN
Photograph: WHERE THE HOSTS OF ISRAEL ARE SAID TO HAVE
TERMINATED THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA
English statesmen, from the Premier downwards, weep
tears over the burden thrust on us in Mesopotamia. “If
only we could raise a local army,” said Lord Curzon, “but
they will not serve” (except against us, his lordship no
doubt added to himself). “If only we could find Arabs
qualified to fill executive posts.”
In this dearth of local talent the parallel of Syria is
illuminating. Feisal had no difficulty in raising troops,
though he had great difficulty in paying them. However,
the conditions were not the same, for he was arbitrarily
deprived of his Customs’ revenue. Feisal had no difficulty
in setting up an administration, in which the five leading
spirits were all natives of Bagdad. It was not a very good
administration, but in the East the people are less exigent
than we are. Even in Athens Solon gave them not the best
laws, but the best they would accept.
The British in Mesopotamia cannot find one competent
person, but I maintain that the history of the last few
months has shown their political bankruptcy, and their
opinion should not weigh with us at all. I know ten British
officials with tried and honourable reputations in the
Sudan, Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, each and all of whom
could set up an Arab Government comparable to Feisal’s,
in Bagdad, next month. It also would not be a perfect
government, but it would be better than Feisal’s for he,
poor man, to pull him down, was forbidden foreign advisers.
The Mesopotamian effort would have the British Government
behind it, and would be child’s play for a decent man
to run, so long as he ran it like Cromer’s Egypt, not like
the Egypt of the Protectorate. Cromer dominated Egypt,
not because England gave him force, or because Egypt loved
us, or for any outside reason, but because he was so good
a man. England has stacks of first-class men. The last
thing you need out there is a genius. What is required is
a tearing up of what we have done, and beginning again on
advisory lines. It is no good patching with the present
system. “Concessions to local feeling” and such like rubbish
are only weakness-concessions, incentives to more
violence. We are big enough to admit a fault, and turn a
new page, and we ought to do it with a hoot of joy, because
it will save us a million pounds a week.
When in Arabia I would occasionally draw Lawrence into conversation
about the statesmen and leaders of the day. He invariably had
something amusing to tell about each. It was from him that I first
learned that Mr. Lloyd George employed a barber to visit No. 10
Downing Street daily to dress his famous head of hair.
On another occasion I asked him to tell me something about Lord
Curzon, he replied: “In order to give you an idea what Lord Curzon
is like I must explain to you his outlook on life. Lord Curzon
divides all the inhabitants of this earth into two groups, the
masses and the classes. The classes are Lord Curzon and the king.
Everybody else belongs to the masses.”
So while we were still at Covent Garden Opera-House, when I heard
a story about Lawrence and his first meeting with the aloof and
pompous marquis, I recalled what the colonel had said to me about
his lordship in Arabia.
Lawrence’s name was on every one’s lips at that time, and the
anecdote is a good one whether true or not. I will recount it as
told to me:
“Lord Curzon said to one of his satraps at the Foreign Office: ‘I
say, who is this person, Lawrence? See that he is brought into our
presence.’ Eventually another member of the cabinet unearthed the
hero of Arabia and lured him to the Foreign Office. When ushered
before the Great One, the latter waved his meek-looking and
diminutive visitor into a chair and proceeded to deliver a lecture
on the Near East to this young man who was an authority on the
subject. Lawrence stood it as long as he could, and finally, unable
to restrain himself longer, he said to the noble marquis: ‘But, my
dear man, you don’t know what you are talking about!’”
Even while fighting in the desert Lawrence had foreseen the
complications that were going to arise after the war was over; and,
as noted before, in his advance on Damascus he was extremely
anxious that Emir Feisal’s men should enter the city ahead of the
British and French because he realized this would make it doubly
difficult for the Allies to disregard their friends the Arabs when
the tumult and shouting was over.
Lord Winterton, who was with the Arab forces during the fighting
around Damascus, in an article in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” pays an
eloquent tribute to Lawrence and tells us how he was always thinking
far in advance of the problem of the moment.
“I am of the opinion,” writes the Earl, “that we owed much in those
few days, before we finally effected a junction with the British,
to the good generalship displayed by General Nuri, backed by L.’s
advice and genius for thinking ahead of nine people out of ten.”
Then in another place Lord Winterton adds: “He had no intention
that the Arabs should take a back seat in the final destruction of
the Turkish army. There were political as well as military
considerations at stake, as the Arabs knew well, and L. was only
playing on a highly keyed-up instrument. L. infected us all with
his enthusiasm, and I began to feel, despite my temperamental
dislike of adventure _qua_ adventure, that it would be monstrous,
if when the Turkish fox came to be broken up, the British got the
body, head, and brush, and the Arabs, who had helped to hunt him
for three and a half years, only got a bit of the pad. If we were
in at the military death of Turkey, ‘Brer Fox,’ it would make it
the more difficult to refuse the Arabs a big share of the
results—spoils, if you will—of the victory.”
Photograph: A BRIGAND FROM JEBEL DRUZ
Photograph: LAWRENCE WOULD OCCASIONALLY DISGUISE HIMSELF
AS A GIPSY WOMAN OF SYRIA
During his seven years’ wandering through the desert, dressing like
an Arab, living with Arabs in their tents, observing their customs,
talking to them in their own dialects, riding on his camel across
a broad expanse of lonely country unbroken except by the long
purple line of the horizon, lying down at night under a silent dome
of stars, Thomas Edward Lawrence drank the cup of Arabian wisdom
and absorbed the spirit of the nomad peoples. No Westerner ever
acquired greater influence over an Oriental people. He had united
the scattered tribes of Arabia and induced chieftains who had been
bitter enemies for generations to forget their feuds and fight side
by side for the same cause. From remote parts of Arabia swarthy
sons of the desert had swarmed to his standard as if he had been
a new prophet. Largely by reason of his genius, Feisal and his
followers had freed Arabia from Turkish oppression. Lawrence had
contributed new life and soul to the movement for Arabian
independence. The far-reaching results of his spectacular and
successful campaign were destined to play an important part in the
final adjustment of Near Eastern affairs, and half-way measures
made no more appeal to Colonel Lawrence in time of peace than in
time of war.
In another of his communications to the press, when he was trying
to mold public opinion in favor of the Arabs, we catch a further
glimpse of his views.
“The Arabs rebelled against the Turks,” said Lawrence in a letter
to “The Times,” “not because the Turk Government was notably bad,
but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives
in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French
citizens, but to win a show of their own.
“Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried.
Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and
Tahitians have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed,
or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense
of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit.”
But Colonel Lawrence has no illusions as to the capacity of the
Arabs for organization and administration. He fully appreciates
that these are not their strong points. But he has faith in them
and believes they have a message to give the West.
“History is against the probability of the creation of an Arabic
empire,” he once said to me in Arabia. “The Semitic mind does not
lean toward system or organization. It is practically impossible
to fuse the diverse elements among the Semites into a modern,
closely knit state. On the other hand, the Semites have been more
fertile in ideas than any other people. The Arabian movement has
presented itself to me as the latest expression of the influence
of the desert upon the settled peoples; the Semitic spirit has
again exercised its influence over the Mediterranean basin. Emir
Feisal is the last of the line of Semitic prophets. His campaign
for Arabian independence, which made some five million converts
among the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Near East, is by no means
the least of those revelations by which the the Semites have so
profoundly affected the Western world.
“The Semites are represented by very little art, architecture,
philosophy. There have been few Jewish artists or philosophers.
But we find an amazing fertility among the Semites in the creation
of creeds and religions. Three of these creeds—Judaism, Christianity
and Mohammedanism—have become great world movements. The broken
fragments of countless other religions which have failed are found
to-day on the fringes of the desert.
“The desert seems to produce only one idea, the universality of
God. We who have gone out to discover the meaning of the desert
have found only emptiness; nothing but sand, wind, soil, and empty
space. The Bedouins leave behind them every extraneous comfort and
go to live in the desert, in the very arms of starvation, that they
may be free. The desert exacts a price for its secret. It makes
the Bedouins entirely useless to their fellow-men. There has never
been a Bedouin prophet. On the other hand, there has never been a
Semitic prophet who has not, before preaching his message, gone
into the desert and caught from the desert-dwellers a reflection
of their belief. The idea of the absolute worthlessness of the
present world is a pure desert conception at the root of every
Semitic religion, which must be filtered through the screen of a
non-nomad prophet before it can be accepted by settled peoples.”
With his exuberant imagination and his vista down the centuries,
it was an easy matter for Lawrence to throw himself heart and soul
into the Arabian movement. He remembered the time when the Arab
Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean world, when its
philosophers, poets, and scientists enriched the culture of Europe.
“There are some people who have dreams at night and wake to find
them all rot. There are others who have dreams in the daytime, and
occasionally they come true,” he said to me one day in London. It
is Lawrence’s conviction that the Arabs still have something to
give the world, something that the world, particularly the
materialistic Western world, sorely needs. It has been a fortunate
thing for the Arabs that he had the genius to make his dreams come
true.
I should like to use Lawrence’s own words in defining just what
the Arabian movement means. “There is no reason to expect from the
Arabian movement,” Lawrence told me, “any new development of law
or economics. But Feisal has succeeded in restating forcibly the
vital doctrine of the Semites, Other Worldliness; and his ideals
will have a profound effect on the growing nationalist movements
in Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Palestine, which are the present
homes of Semitic political life.
“It is like watching the waves of the Atlantic coming in and
breaking themselves against the cliffs of the west coast of Ireland.
To look at them you would say the cliffs were made of iron, and
the waves quite futile. But when you study a map you see that the
whole coast is torn open by the wearing of the sea, and you realize
that it is only a matter of time before there will cease to be an
Irish question. In the same way the successive Semitic protests
against the material world may seem simply so much waste effort,
but some day the Semitic conviction of the other world may roll
unchecked over the place where this world has been.
“I rank Feisal’s movements as one more protest against the utter
uselessness of material things. I was only trying to help roll up
the wave, which came to its crest and toppled over when we took
Damascus. It was just rolling up the Arabs in a tremendous effort
and joining the whole nation together in pursuit of an ideal object
that had no practical shape or value. We were expressing our entire
contempt for the material pursuits exalted by others, from
money-making to making statues.”
Lawrence expresses the conviction that the Arabian movement is
nothing more than a protest against outside interference. This time
the protest has been directed against Turkey, but the next time it
may be launched against France, Italy, Britain, or any Western
nation that develops a tendency to be disregardful of another
people’s deep-seated racial sentiments.
“When you can understand the point of view of another race, you
are a civilized being,” once remarked Lawrence to me in the desert.
“I think that England (out of sheer conceit, and not because of
any inherent virtue in my countrymen) has been less guilty in its
contacts than other nations. We do not wish other people to be like
us, or to conform to our customs, because we regard imitation of
ourselves as blasphemous.”
Later on, in Paris, Lawrence summed up for me the whole Near
Eastern situation in a few words. He is of the opinion that France,
in receiving the mandatory for Syria, is merely obtaining control
of a temporary phase of the Arabian movement.
“The Hedjaz will be absorbed in a few years by an Arabian state to
the north of it. Damascus has always been the center of Arabian
self-determination, but Syria is a small country and too poor to
look forward to a great agricultural or industrial future. It acts
merely as a front door to Kurdistan, Armenia, and Mesopotamia. When
Western enterprise restores Assyria and Babylonia to their former
level of agricultural prosperity, and when advantage has been taken
of the mineral wealth of Armenia and the cheap fuel of Mesopotamia,
then the Arabian center will inevitably be transferred from Damascus
eastward to Mosul, Bagdad, or some new capital. Mesopotamia has
three times the irrigable area of Egypt. Egypt now has a population
of more than thirteen millions, while there are only five millions
in Mesopotamia. In the near future Mesopotamia will increase to
forty millions, and Syria, which now has a population of three
million five hundred thousand, will have perhaps five million. This
is rather a bad outlook for Syria. But no matter where the center
of Arabian gravity may shift, nothing can change the Arabian Desert
and the ideals of its people.”
Despite Lawrence’s desire to live in retirement, with only his
books for his companions, his countrymen would not listen to it.
When Winston Churchill took up the cabinet post of colonial
secretary, one of the first things he did was to force Lawrence to
come and help the Government straighten out the Near East tangle.
He appointed Lawrence adviser on Near Eastern affairs, and the
latter reluctantly agreed to remain at the Colonial Office for just
one year. During this time the Mesopotamian problem was solved
along the lines that Lawrence had originally suggested, and Emir
Feisal was called to Bagdad and made king of Iraq, the modern
successor to the great Calif Harun al Rashid of Arabian Nights
fame. Thus Feisal, despite the fact that he had lost the throne of
Syria, became the founder of a new Mesopotamian dynasty and the
ruler of a far more important state.