Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

We have Lawrence’s account of what he said to the king, in a letter he sent to Robert Graves with corrections he wanted Graves to make in his biography: “He explained personally to his Sovereign that the part he had played in the Arab Revolt was, to his judgment, dishonourable to himself and to his country and government. He had by order fed the Arabs with false hopes and would be obliged if he were relieved of the obligation to accept honors for succeeding in his fraud. Lawrence now said respectfully as a subject, but firmly as an individual, that he intended to fight by straight means or crooked until the King’s ministers had conceded to the Arabs a fair settlement of their claims.”

“In spite of what has been published to the contrary,” Lawrence added to Graves, “there was no breach of good relations between subject and sovereign.” In later years, the king, who liked to improve a good story as much as Lawrence, would tell how Lawrence unpinned each decoration as soon as the king had pinned it on him, so that in the end the king was left foolishly holding a cardboard box filled with the decorations and their red leather presentation cases. In fact the king seems to have been more curious than offended. Lawrence explained, with his usual charm, that it was difficult to serve two masters—Emir Feisal and King George—and that “if a man has to serve two masters it was better to offend the more powerful.”

At first the king was under the impression that Lawrence was turning down the KCB because he expected something better, and offered him instead the Order of Merit, a much more distinguished honor—it has been described as “the most prestigious honor on earth"—in the personal gift of the sovereign, founded by King George V’s father and limited to a total of twenty-four members. (Past members have included Florence Nightingale, and subsequent ones Graham Greene, Nelson Mandela, and Lady Thatcher.) This was not an offer to be taken lightly, but Lawrence refused it, at which point the king sighed in resignation, and said, “Well, there’s one vacant; I suppose it will have to go to Foch.”

The interview was cozy rather than formal. It had begun with the king “warming his coat tails in front of the fire at Buckingham Palace, the Morning Postin his hands, and complaining: ‘This is a bad time for kings. Five new republics today.’ “ Lawrence may have consoled the king by saying that he had just made two kings, but this seems unlikely—Hussein had made himself a king without Lawrence’s help, and Feisal had not yet been made one.* Lawrence had brought with him as a present for the king the gold-inlayed Lee-Enfield rifle that Enver Pasha had presented to Feisal, and that Feisal later gave to Lawrence in the desert. The king, an enthusiastic and expert shot and gun fancier himself—apart from stamp collecting, guns were his favorite pastime—was delighted with the rifle, which remained in the royal collection of firearms for many years until it was presented to the Imperial War Museum, where it is now a prized exhibit.

Later, Lord Stamfordham, in a letter to Robert Graves from Balmoral Castle, the royal family’s summer residence in Scotland, confirmed most of Lawrence’s account of the interview, and since Stamfordham and Lawrence dined together amicably at one point afterward, it does not seem likely that George V was offended—Stamfordham would hardly have dined “amicably” with somebody who had offended his sovereign. The two people at court who wereoffended were the queen and the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII and then the duke of Windsor), both of whom resented what they interpreted as discourtesy to the king, a resentment that Edward expressed strongly all his life.

During the course of the conversation, Lawrence expressed the opinion that all the members of his majesty’s government were “crooks,” not an uncommon opinion so long as Lloyd George was prime minister. The king was “rather taken aback” but by no means shocked or offended—his own opinion of Lloyd George was no better than Lawrence’s. “Surely you wouldn’t call Lord Robert Cecil a crook?” he asked, however, and Lawrence had to agree with the king that Cecil was certainly an exception.

In his letter to Graves, Stamfordham also made an interesting point: Lawrence had explained to the king “in a few words” that “he had made certain promises to King Feisal, that these promises had not been fulfilled and, consequently, it was quite possible that he might find himself fighting against the British Forces, in which case it would be obviously impossible and wrong to be wearing British decorations.”

One might have thought that if anything was going to shock the king it would be Lawrence’s suggestion that a British officer wearing the king’s uniform might have to take up arms against his own country, with or without his decorations, but the king seems either to have taken that in his stride, or to have decided that it was merely self-dramatizing nonsense, as indeed it was.

All things considered, Lawrence’s talk with the king was not nearly as controversial as it has often been described, but it was nevertheless surely a tactical mistake on Lawrence’s part. First of all, while Lawrence was within his right to decline new honors, he could not “turn down” those he already had, something the king understood better than Lawrence. For that matter Lawrence could just as easily have accepted the decorations without a fuss, then neglected to wear them afterward, and it would have made no difference at all. More important, the story made its way around London quickly, and usually it took the form of Lawrence being rude to the king, though he had not in fact been rude. This perplexed or outraged many people who might otherwise have admired Lawrence, or been helpful to him in getting the Arabs what they wanted.

Churchill was among them, until Lawrence had an opportunity to explain to him in private what had really happened. In those days, at least, nobody ever benefited in the long run from having been thought rude to the royal family—as Churchill knew well, since his beloved father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had learned that lesson after offending King Edward VII.

Lawrence spent the next few days preparing a long paper on the Middle East for the war cabinet’s committee, in which he succeeded in presenting both his own views and those of Feisal as if they were the same. In fact, Lawrence was prepared to accept a far higher degree of British involvement, direct and indirect, in Arabian affairs than either Feisal or his father would have wished; it was France (and direct French rule) Lawrence wanted to keep out of the Middle East, not Britain. He clung firmly to the heart of the matter—an independent Arab state in Syria, with Feisal as its ruler, under some kind of British supervision; a British-controlled Arab state in what is now Iraq; and “Jewish infiltration” in Palestine, “if it is behind a British as opposed to an international faзade.” He was effectively recommending repudiation of the Sykes-Picot agreement, and firing two warning signals: one of them idealistic, “the cry of self determination” that the United States would be likely to approve; the other practical, the information that Feisal would be willing to accept increased Zionist immigration in Palestine onlyif it remained under British control, but not if Palestine was placed under international control as the Sykes-Picot agreement provided.

Lawrence delivered this document to the Eastern Committee on November 4, and went on to meet with Winston Churchill, then minister of munitions, who had presumably not yet heard about Lawrence’s meeting with the king. This was to be the beginning of one of the most significant of Lawrence’s postwar friendships with older and more powerful men. Churchill not only was impressed by the young colonel, but would go on to become Lawrence’s lifelong supporter. Perhaps nobody would describe better the effect Lawrence had on his contemporaries than Churchill at the forthcoming peace conference: “He wore his Arab robes, and the full magnificence of his countenance revealed itself. The gravity of his demeanor; the precision of his opinions; the range and quality of his conversations; all seemed enhanced to a remarkable degree by the splendid Arab head-dress and garb. From amid the flowing draperies his noble features, his perfectly chiseled lips and flashing eyes loaded with fire and comprehension shone forth. He looked like what he was, one of Nature’s greatest princes.”

If Lawrence could inspire Churchill—a hardened politician; a former soldier himself who had ridden with the Twenty-First Lancers in the last major cavalry charge of the British army at the Battle of Omdurman in 1893, Mauser automatic pistol in hand; and the grandson of a duke—to gush like a smitten schoolgirl, it is hardly surprising that lesser men were bowled over even before Lawrence’s legend took hold. Apart from Churchill, Lawrence made an instant and lifelong friend of Edward (“Eddie”) Marsh, Churchill’s devoted and brilliant private secretary. Through Marsh, Lawrence met many of the literary figures who became his friends over the years, including Siegfried Sassoon. For somebody who already had the reputation of being reclusive, Lawrence had a genius for friendship—he was a master of what would now be called networking, and an indefatigable correspondent.

On November 8, Lawrence took the step that would bring him onto the world stage as something of an independent power. He sent an “urgent message” to King Hussein in Mecca, informing Hussein that there would be “conversations about the Arabs” in two weeks’ time in Paris, and advising him to send his son Feisal as his representative. Much as Hussein disliked and mistrusted Lawrence, he must have realized immediately the value of sending Feisal, rather than one of Feisal’s older brothers, since Feisal and Lawrence were credited in the European and American press with the capture of Damascus. Certainly Hussein already realized that his claim to be “king of all the Arabs” and likewise his claim to the vast amount of territory promised to him by Sir Henry McMahon in 1915 were going to be a hard sell in Paris, let alone in Riyadh, where his rival ibn Saud, with the backing of the British government in India, was already moving to take control of the entire Arabian Peninsula.

It should be noted that Lawrence, with the skill of a natural “insider,” was already well informed about the negotiations between Britain and France. On November 9, the Foreign Office released an Anglo-French declaration that embodied some of his suggestions, though couched in such vague and optimistic prose that it seemed to envisage both “native governments” and colonial rule. The British were in a difficult position. McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence of 1915 directly contradicted the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as well as the Balfour Declaration of 1917), and while these conflicting promises to the Arabs, the French, and the Jews could be swept under the rug so long as the war continued, victory would instantly bring the British face-to-face with the unwelcome reality of having promised more in the Middle East than they or anyone else could deliver.

On November 8, only a day after Lawrence’s message to King Hussein, the subject of the Middle East was suddenly overshadowed by the surrender of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On November 9 the kaiser abdicated. And on November 11, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” Germany itself asked for an armistice.

Those in charge of Britain’s foreign and colonial affairs were suddenly faced with a range of issues more serious and pressing than the Middle East. What was to be the future of Germany? What was to replace the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was already beginning to crumble into a number of small, mutually hostile would-be states? Who was to receive the German colonies in Africa, and on what terms? Could a viable European peace be constructed without the participation of the Russians, now controlled by a Bolshevik regime that repudiated all treaties and preached universal revolution? Clamorous advocates for new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were already appearing, maps and draft constitutions in hand; in the Balkans the Romanians were already demanding almost a third of Hungary as their reward for joining the Allies; the Serbs, on whose behalf the war had begun, were greedy to seize as much territory as possible and create a multinational Yugoslavia; and Zionists were pressing for the rapid implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

More important than all these problems was the fact that the president of the United States was planning to join in the peace talks himself, bringing with him a host of unwelcome ideas, including a “general association of nations.” The New World was embarking on an effort to remake and reform the Old. “Even the Good Lord contented himself with only ten,” Clemenceau grumbled, when he read Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points with the skeptical eye of an old-fashioned French nationalist who already knew what he wanted: Alsace; Lorraine; the Rhineland; formidable, crippling reparations; client states in the east to hold Germany in check; and, of course, last but not least, Syria, Lebanon, Mosul with its oil, and a share in the Holy Land.

At the same time, the prospect of President Wilson’s participation in the peace talks, together with a formidable American delegation,* made his majesty’s government more inclined to collaborate with the French. Only by standing together, arm in arm, bras dessus, bras dessous,could the two principal European powers hope to resist what they both saw as Woodrow Wilson’s starry-eyed idealism and naпvetй.

In the meantime, reports and advice on the Middle East continued to pour in to the Eastern Committee. Both Clayton and Hogarth sent long, detailed recommendations, basically echoing Lawrence’s views. They were quickly countered by an equally long memorandum from Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, outlining the views of the government of India. These amounted to a sharp reminder that what really mattered was the oil deposits of Mesopotamia, rather than the Syrian Desert, and a warning that it was not worth jeopardizing British interests in Mesopotamia for the sake of nebulous promises that may have been made to Hussein and his sons. Hirtzel expressed polite scorn for Lawrence, whose contempt for the Indian government and the Indian army on his brief visit to Baghdad in 1916 during the siege of Kut had not been forgotten or forgiven: “Without in the least wishing to deprecate [Lawrence’s] achievements and his undoubted genius, it must be said about him that he does not at all represent—and would not, I think, claim to represent—the local views of Northern Mesopotamia and Iraq; of the latter, indeed, he has practically no first-hand knowledge at all.”

Hirtzel also warned strongly against Lawrence’s proposal to place one of Hussein’s sons on a throne in Baghdad as king of Iraq, and another on a throne in Mosul to rule over the Kurds,* and suggested that if Britain raised objections to France’s ruling over Lebanon and Syria, the French would hardly be likely to accept British rule over Iraq.

Even the joy of victory did not prevent Stйphen-Jean-Marie Pichon, the French foreign minister, from administering a sharp rap on the knuckles to the British Foreign Office, reminding them that so far as France was concerned, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still in force and that France expected to receive everything it had been promised. Pichon reminded the British Foreign Office of France’s “historic duty towards the peoples of Syria,” just in case the members of the Eastern Committee had forgotten, or might have plans to denounce the Sykes-Picot agreement to President Wilson as exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that the Fourteen Points were intended to prevent.

Much as the British might deprecate the exaggerated territorial claims of King Hussein, or the ambitions of Syrian nationalists, when it came to the Middle East there was more sympathy for the Arabs in London—partly because of Lawrence—than for the French. Lawrence’s capacity for communicating enthusiasm was now concentrated on the task of getting Feisal to the Peace Conference, despite strong French opposition.

European diplomacy: A diminutive Lawrence tries to restrain Feisal from being tempted by France at the Peace Conference. Cartoon by Sir Mark Sykes.

In this, he succeeded triumphantly. By November 21, when he attended the next Eastern Committee meeting, Feisal’s participation was now considered indispensable by most of the members. “You do not want to divide the loot,” Jan Smuts warned the committee; “that would be the wrong policy for the future.” What Smuts meant, of course, was that the British should not be seento be dividing the loot, least of all in cooperation with the French. They should, in the words of Curzon, “play [Arab] self-determination for all it was worth … knowing in the bottom of [their] hearts that we are more likely to benefit from it than anybody else.” Lord Robert Cecil argued for the presence of a friendly Arab prince and felt “it was essential that Feisal and the British government have the same story.” This carried the implication that Lawrence, the only person who knew Feisal, should be present to coach his friend on a common “story,” one that would—it was hoped—satisfy the Americans without alarming the French.*

From November 8 to November 21, Lawrence had not only looked after Feisal’s interests but also placed himself as one of the central figures at the forthcoming Peace Conference—for by now nobody could doubt that “Colonel Lawrence” would be part of the British delegation. For a man who denied altogether having any ambition, Lawrence had played his cards as adroitly as Machiavelli.

In fact, Feisal and his exotic entourage, which included his personal slave and the newly promoted Brigadier-General Nuri as-Said, were already at sea, on board the cruiser HMS Gloucester.Just as Lawrence had been able, after Aqaba, to summon naval ships and airplanes when he needed them, now he had adroitly managed to have the Royal Navy deliver Feisal to Europe. This was not only proof of Lawrence’s prestige, but a very visible statement of British backing for the Hashemite family and its pretensions. Unfortunately, this move had not been announced to the French government, perhaps owing to a failure of communication, perhaps by an oversight, or more likely because nobody wanted to take responsibility for doing so. When the French were finally informed by their secret services that Feisal would be landing at any moment in Marseille from a British cruiser, they were predictably outraged.

Lawrence was dispatched by the Foreign Office at once to extinguish the fire, and arrived in Marseille, via Paris, with orders to smooth things down and get Feisal to Paris, or, if necessary, to London, with as little fuss as possible. Although the French claimed that Lawrence wore his white robes to greet Feisal, this seems not to have been the case. In photographs of their meeting, Lawrence is in British uniform, but he had borrowed the Arab headdress and agalof a Meccan officer. He gave further offense to the French by not wearing the ribbons of a chevalierof the Legion of Honor or his two Croix de Guerre. He was regarded in Paris as Feisal’s “evil genius,” and as a sinister agent of the British secret services. Colonel Brйmond—France’s former military representative in Jidda and Lawrence’s old bкte noire—was ordered to intercept Feisal and Lawrence posthaste, and inform them of France’s displeasure. Regarding Lawrence, Brйmond’s instructions were uncompromising: “You must be quite candid with Lawrence, and point out to him that he is in a false position. If he is in France as a British colonel in British uniform, we welcome him. But we don’t accept him as an Arab, and if he remains in fancy dress, he is not wanted here.”

A brief tussle took place at Marseille; the British wanted Feisal to travel directly to Paris; but the French, playing for time, had quickly arranged a leisurely tour of the major battlefields, including Verdun—no doubt to show him how much greater France’s sacrifices had been in the war than those of the Hejaz—as well as a number of factories, to impress him with France’s wealth. Lawrence accompanied Feisal as far as Lyon, where Colonel Brйmond finally caught up with them. The French warning regarding Lawrence was read to them, and Lawrence, possibly choosing this occasion to return his cross of the Legion of Honor to Brйmond, bowed to French pressure and left Feisal to travel on to Paris alone. Throughout this trying episode Feisal behaved with a degree of dignity and patience that won him great admiration, but did nothing to change minds in Paris about Syria and Lebanon.

The French hoped that by keeping Feisal away from Paris they could persuade the British to confirm the Sykes-Picot agreement before the American delegation arrived in Paris. The two European powers could then present President Wilson with a fait accompli on the subject of the Middle East: a British Mesopotamia, a French Syria (including Lebanon), and some sort of face-saving arrangement in Palestine that would satisfy Britain, France, and American Zionists, for in Paris and London the Jews were—mistakenly—thought to have great influence over the American delegation. In large part because of Lawrence’s skillful propaganda, the British still felt themselves under obligation to Feisal, and deeply uncom fortable with the Sykes-Picot agreement. British troops were still occupying Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and were stubbornly (and perhaps unrealistically) prepared to play what would turn out to be a losing hand, supporting Feisal and his father against the French.

As is so often the case in politics, unforeseeable events conspired to make Feisal’s case for an independent Arab government in Syria even less promising than it had been. While Feisal was still being kept busy touring French factories (displaying a dignified, polite, but remote smile of interest), the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, arrived in London on what was supposed to be a ceremonial visit. At seventy-eight, the oldest of the Allied leaders, Clemenceau was a man of great intelligence, biting wit, and ferocious energy, nicknamed le tigrefor his savage and unforgiving political skill, whose uncompromising leadership had saved France from defeat. Stocky, powerful, speaking excellent English (in his youth he had taught French and riding for a time at a girls’ school in Connecticut), with piercing eyes and a bristling walrus mustache, his hands always clad in gray cotton gloves to hide his eczema, Clemenceau was an imposing figure, perhaps the most feared politician in France. Only the prolonged bloodletting of Verdun, the disaster of General Nivelle’s offensive, and the widespread mutinies in the French army that followed it could have brought Clemenceau back to power in 1917. Now, after victory, he was faced with making a peace that would justify or repay France’s sacrifices. Among the Allies, the only leader whom he considered his equal was David Lloyd George, but the two men loathed and distrusted each other, perhaps because they were cut from the same cloth.

Lawrence at the Paris Peace Conference, as part of Feisal’s delegation. Feisal’s Sudanese slave and bodyguard, towering over everbody else, is on the right.

As the two leaders stood together in the French embassy in London Clemenceau, who had no gift for polite small talk, and was determined to cement good relations between France and Britain before Wilson arrived, bluntly asked Lloyd George what he wanted. Lloyd George quickly replied that he wanted Mesopotamia, and all of Palestine, “from Beersheba to Dan,” as well as Jerusalem. “What else?” Clemenceau asked. “I want Mosul.” “You shall have it,” Clemenceau replied. This appeared to be a burst of generosity, but it was followed by a request for Britain’s agreement, in return, to “a unified French administration in the whole of Syria, including the inland area reserved for an independent Arab administration.”

Lloyd George knew his Old Testament—"from Beersheba to Dan” was the territory granted by Abimelech to Abraham, and claimed by David as the southern and northern limits of his kingdom—but “Dan” was to provide numerous difficulties for the lawyers and mapmakers at the Peace Conference, since it had vanished altogether from modern maps of Palestine. (It was just north of the Sea of Galilee, and just southeast of the Litani River and the present border between Israel and Lebanon. From the point of view of Lloyd George, the important thing was that this area included Jerusalem.)

South Hill, in Delvin, County Westmeath, Ireland, the home Thomas Chapman abandoned when he left his family for Sarah.

Sarah, about 1895, at Langley Lodge, Hampshire,

Janet Laurie, at about the time Ned proposed to her.

Gertrude Bell, in her desert riding costume.

Cairo, 1917. At left, Lawrence, for once in uniform; center, Hogarth; right, Alan Dawnay.

Aqaba, as it was when Lawrence captured it.

Photograph by Lawrence of Feisal’s camp at dawn

The vanguard of the Arab army arrives in Yenbo. Feisal is the figure on the black horse with a white blaze, to the right, in the lead, preceded by his slaves on foot. The figure behind him in white, mounted on a camel, is Lawrence.

Photograph by Lawrence of the Arab army on the move. Note the furled banners

December 1917:

Allenby enters Jerusalem on foot.

British and French officers congratulate each other after the entry into Jerusalem. Lawrence, in a borrowed uniform, is the short figure, third from left.

A Turkish train and railway station after Lawrence wrecked them both.

FRAMES FROM THE FILM FOOTAGE LOWELL THOMAS AND HARRY CHASE SHOT IN AQABA, 1918:

Arab cavalry deploying.

Lawrence’s armored cars, attacking the railway line between Maan and Medina

The bridge at Yarmuk.

Emir Abdulla, the future king of Jordan, reviews troops. The figure between the two British officers may be Lawrence; the tall officer on the right is Allenby

Lawrence, in 1918. The dagger is the one he bought in Mecca, and later sold to put a new roof on his cottage.

T. E. Lawrence and Lowell Thomas pose together in Arab dress for Harry Chase. This photograph was probably taken after the war, in England (note the grass and the shrubbery in the background).

March 20, 1921: the imperial conference at Cairo. Figures immediately below the Sphinx’s head are, left to right, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell, and Lawrence

Two of England’s most famous and celebrated figures: Nancy Astor and Bernard Shaw, surrounded by admirers.

Bernard and Charlotte Shaw a rare glimpse of them together, and apparently at leisure

Nancy Astor, in a characteristically energetic and combative pose.

Lawrence, barefoot, standing on a float of a seaplane

Clare Sydney Smith

Lawrence in RAF uniform, at Cattewater, about the time he became a friend of both Smiths.

Lawrence relaxes with Clare (seated, far right), with two of her friends, and dogs.

Clare and Lawrence, then Aircraftman Shaw, in the Biscuit.Clare is at the wheel.

Lawrence, at the wheel, puts the Biscuitthrough its paces at high speed, towing a water-skier

Front page of the Daily Sketch,announcing Lawrence’s death.

Eric Kennington’s bust of Lawrence for the memorial in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Eric Kennington works on his effigy of Lawrence.

Eric Kennington’s effigy of Lawrence, in St. Martin’s Church, Warcham, Dorset.

Lloyd George did not immediately inform the cabinet of his spur-of-the-moment gentleman’s agreement with Clemenceau, no doubt because he knew that some cabinet members would object. Nor was Clemenceau anxious to let his foreign minister, Pichon, know that he had just given away the oil of Mosul and the city of Jerusalem to the man who was known in Britain, not for nothing, as the “Welsh wizard.” Clemenceau soon came under attack from French imperialists and rightists for having betrayed France; and Lloyd George had inadvertently agreed to keep in place just those clauses of the Sykes-Picot agreement that most of his cabinet thought should be dropped or modified.

The day after this extraordinary example of impulsive personal diplomacy, Lawrence arrived back in Britain from France and went straight to see Lord Robert Cecil, to tell him about Feisal’s unfortunate reception in France. Cecil, as always sympathetic to Lawrence, immediately sent a note to Lloyd George asking him to meet with “Colonel Lawrence (the Arabian)” [sic],who wished to warn him of Clemenceau’s plans to undercut British and Arab aspirations in the Middle East. Because Lloyd George, unbeknownst to Cecil, had already agreed to those plans, the prime minister carefully avoided meeting with Lawrence, who was instead fobbed off with an invitation to attend his third session of the Eastern Committee, three days later. The opinion of the members was still strongly against the Sykes-Picot agreement—even Lawrence’s old opponent Lord Curzon spoke scathingly about the arrangements for Syria, describing them as “fantastic” and predicting (correctly) that they would be a source of “incessant friction between the French and ourselves, and the Arabs as third parties.”

Clearly, Curzon, like Cecil, had not yet been told of the prime minister’s bargain with Clemenceau; but A. J. Balfour apparently had,for to everyone’s surprise, since he seldom appeared at the committee, he spoke at length, emphasizing that Britain could not possibly repudiate the Sykes-Picot agreement, and that France’s claim to Syria and Lebanon must be respected to the letter. Balfour’s manner was famously languid and aloof, and even his friends complained that while he seemed urbane, he was ice-cold, but on this occasion he was unusually frank. If the Americans “chose to step in and cut the knot,” that was their business, “but we must not put the knife into their hand.” Balfour was foreign secretary, and while it could not be said that he enjoyed Lloyd George’s confidence, he was the senior Conservative member of the coalition government, and Lloyd George would almost certainly have revealed to Balfour what he still regarded as a coup, a triumph that gave the British everything they wanted in exchange for Syria and Lebanon, where they had nothing to gain. Those whose political instincts were sharp (and Lawrence was certainly among them) must have guessed that the government had in effect abandoned Feisal to make the best deal it could with the French.

On the other hand, the British, being British, were anxious to put a good face on things, and with that in mind the Foreign Office hastened to add Lawrence’s name to the members of the British delegation to the Peace Conference as an “advisor on special subjects,” in addition to being “a member of Feisal’s staff.” Thus Lawrence was placed in much the same ambiguous position at the Peace Conference as he had been in Arabia in 1917. Once again he was called on to manage Feisal on behalf of the British government, while at the same time attempting to secure for Feisal what he already knew Feisal wouldn’t get.

Lawrence himself would describe the postwar experience hauntingly in Seven Pillars of Wisdom,speaking for many of his generation who shared his bitterness: “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”

Feisal arrived in Britain on December 10. It is not certain whether

Lawrence went to Paris to meet him, in uniform, or met him on the dock at Boulogne in his white robes, looking—according to Colonel Brй-mond—"like a choir boy” as he came down the gangplank of a British destroyer under gray skies. Since Brйmond’s job, as long as Feisal was on French soil, was to stick as close to him as a watchdog on behalf of the French, it seems likely Brйmond was correct.

Lawrence stayed with Feisal and his entourage at the Carlton Hotel in London, acting as Feisal’s interpreter, and dressed in a British officer’s khaki uniform, with an Arab headdress. Two days after Feisal arrived, he and Lawrence called on the foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, to whom Feisal expressed his determination to fight the French if they tried to take control of Syria—a threat that failed to shake Balfour’s majestic calm. Later in the day Feisal had a cordial meeting at the Carlton Hotel with Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had journeyed to Aqaba to meet with Feisal in June 1918. This time Lawrence was the interpreter, and he made sure to impress on Feisal the importance of good relationships with the Zionists, especially because of American public opinion. Feisal was very conscious of this. One of the formal dinner parties in his honor was given by Lord Rothschild; and the Jewish Chroniclecommented favorably on his meeting with Weizmann. During that meeting, Feisal had stressed his belief that there was plenty of land for Jewish settlement in Palestine, and Weizmann had said that the Jews would finance and carry out large-scale public works and agricultural improvement to the benefit of both peoples, and that as many as 4 million or 5 million Jews could settle there without encroaching on Arab land.

Lawrence and Feisal would be together in Britain for almost three weeks, during which time the government did its best to keep Feisal busy. The activities included a journey to Scotland to attend a number of “civic functions,” among them a formal visit on board the British battleship HMS Orion,where Feisal and Lawrence were photographed seated glumly on the deck, Feisal looking bored and dejected, and Lawrence, a tiny figure in British uniform beside him, appearing cold, and also furious at what must have seemed to him an irrelevant waste of time. The two of them are flanked and dwarfed by the ship’s captain and a rear-admiral smiling for the camera, the admiral apparently the only happy person in the group. Efforts to keep Feisal amused seem to have been no more successful in Britain than they had been in France, especially since it cannot have escaped his attention that he was being excluded from substantive discussions. The visit to Scotland was no doubt primarily intended to keep him out of London and away from the attention of journalists; this perhaps explains why he and Lawrence look more like the victims of a hijacking than honored guests.

Lawrence tried to present Feisal’s case by writing a long piece on Arab affairs for the Times,displaying, not for the first or last time, both his skill at dealing with newspaper editors and his skill at writing polemics. He gave a condensed but spirited account of the Arabs’ sacrifices and risks during the war; drew attention to the fact that Feisal, like himself,had had a price on his head; and listed the promises made to them by the British—but despite British sympathy for the Arabs, the article does not seem to have been successful. Feisal was later invited to an investiture at Buckingham Palace at which the king decorated him with the chain, ribbon, and star of a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, and at which Lawrence wore his white robes and headdress with a gold agal.Reading between the lines suggests that Lawrence’s presence at the palace in white robes caused a certain amount of fuss with the king’s military secretary beforehand; but the king, who by now must have been resigned to Lawrence’s ways, does not seem to have raised any objection himself, whatever he may have thought of a British officer appearing at court in Arab dress.*

On January 3 there was another meeting with Weizmann, and during its course, Feisal, Weizmann, and Lawrence drew up one of the most remarkable and controversial documents in the modern history of the Middle East. In some ways, it was the most important result of Feisal’s visit to Britain. Just as the Sykes-Picot agreement represents the great betrayal of the Arab Revolt, the agreement negotiated between Feisal and Weizmann on January 3, 1919, with Lawrence’s help, was the first attempt to define the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. It embodied many of Lawrence’s ideas on the subject, and it remains even today, for most Arabs, a blueprint of what they hoped would take place. It is perhaps one of the most interesting “might have beens” in modern Middle Eastern history.

It is not a lengthy document, and some of its nine articles are still being fought over today, both at the conference table and on the ground. Article I establishes that Palestine will be separated from the “Arab State,” by which Feisal, Weizmann, and Lawrence meant what is now Syria and Lebanon, and controlled with “the most cordial goodwill and understanding” by duly accredited agents of the Arab and Jewish territories—in other words, it already presupposes a partition of Palestine into two separate territories. Article III envisages drawing up a constitution. Article IV permits Jewish immigration “on a large scale, and as quickly as possible, to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil,” while preserving the existing rights of Arab peasants and tenant farmers, and “assisting them in their economic development.” Article V provides for absolute freedom of religion, and prohibits any “religious test” for “the exercise of civil or political rights.” Article VI guarantees that Muslim holy places will remain “under Mohammedan control.” Article VII provides that “the Zionist organization will use its best efforts” to provide the means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities of Palestine. Article VIII—perhaps the key to the entire agreement—binds the two parties to act in “complete accord and harmony” at the coming peace conference: in short, to present a united front toward the British and the French.

The agreement can be summed up as proposing joint Jewish-Arab control over Palestine, with Britain playing a role as the guarantor and final arbiter of any disputes between the two parties, and with no limit on Jewish immigration. Feisal had already conceded that Palestine could contain 4 million to 5 million Jewish immigrants without harm to the rights of the Arab population. Since the population of Israel today is approximately 7.4 million, of which just over 1 million are Muslim, it is not so very far from what Feisal had in mind in 1919.

It is important to note that the agreement proposes neither an Arab nor a Jewish state, but rather a state under joint Arab-Jewish control, with absolute religious freedom for all, and that no limit is set on Jewish immigration. This would have produced an incalculably different history for both Palestinians and Zionists, as opposed to the ultimately doomed attempt of the British to rule Palestine under a “mandate,” from 1920 to 1948, and to set tight limits on Jewish immigration.

Feisal was already aware that the chances of putting this agreement into practice were rapidly diminishing, since when he signed it he added,in graceful Arabic script above his signature, a handwritten “reservation,” which Lawrence translated and wrote out in English, for attachment to the agreement: “If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto of Jan. 4th* addressed to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, I will carry out what is written in this agreement. If changes are made, I can not be answerable for failing to carry out this agreement. Feisal ibn Hussein.”

In short, the title deed to a joint Arab-Jewish Palestine was conditional on the Arabs’ getting an independent Arab state in Syria with Damascus as its capital, and including Lebanon and its ports, without which any such state would have been strangled at birth. Indeed Feisal had already remarked that Syria without Lebanon would be “of no use to him.” It was already clear to both Feisal and Lawrence that this was not likely to happen; so, as idealistic as the agreement with Weizmann may seem, it can also be read as a bold attempt to win Jewish support (and particularly AmericanJewish support) for Feisal’s claim to Syria, as well as Jewish financing for the Arab state. Lawrence was, at the time, steeped in realpolitik. He would later write to his comrade in arms Alan Dawnay that Feisal didn’t need financing from France: “ ‘He’ll say that he doesn’t want their money, because by then the Zionists will have a centre in Jerusalem, and for their concessions they will finance him (this is all in writing, and fixed, but don’t put it in the press for God’s sake).’ … Lawrence went on to say that the Zionists are not a Government, and not British, and their action does not infringe the Sykes-Picot Agreement…. ‘They will finance the whole East, I hope, Syria and Mesopotamia alike. High Jews are unwilling to put much cash into Palestine only, since that country offers nothing but a sentimental return. They want 6%.’ ”

Thus the price for unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine was to be Jewish financial assistance, and Jewish support for Feisal’s claim to Syria. Like Balfour, Lloyd George, and many other people in Britain, Lawrence hugely overestimated the influence and wealth of the Jews, in

America and elsewhere. Within less than fourteen years, most of Europe and America would turn a blind eye to the fate of the Jews. Even Weizmann, of all people, understood the Jews’ lack of power. The importance of Zionism was not symbolic; the pressure that made Jews in Poland, Russia, and eastern Europe consider seriously the prospect of resettling in a strange, distant, and hostile land and climate was a product of poverty, intense discrimination, and fear. Rich philanthropists like Lord Rothschild might make the Zionist settlements in Palestine possible, but those who undertook the long journey there were for the most part poor and desperate.

In the end, neither the Arabs nor the Zionists would have much effect on the Paris Peace Conference. In the long memorandum to Balfour, which Lawrence had drafted, Feisal ended by begging “the Great Powers … to lay aside the thought of individual profits, and their old jealousies” and to think of the Arabs “as one potential people, jealous of their language and liberty, [who] ask that no step be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.” The “Great Powers,” of course, did nothing of the sort, and instead shared the Arab lands between themselves, with frontiers rough-hewn by European bureaucrats and statesmen. The effect was, more or less, to guarantee that there would never be “one sovereign power” in the Middle East.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the largest, most ambitious, and most comprehensive attempt to remake the world in the history of mankind. It began on January 18, 1919, and continued for more than a year, during which Paris was filled with the huge staffs of more than thirty national delegations, as well as thousands of people from all over the world lobbying for every imaginable cause. The Peace Conference took on itself such matters as the international regulation of air travel (then still in its infancy) and the attempt to define fishing rights in the open seas, still a subject of fierce controversy between nations today; but its two major challenges were to remake Europe in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to deal with the former possessions of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

The Peace Conference was under siege, from the very beginning, by an incredible array of issues, some of them defying any rational solution or compromise, and by demands for justice from every possible national, racial, or linguistic group. None presented themselves with more dignity or with a better-prepared case than the Arabs, led by Feisal in his robes as an emir and a sharif, and Lawrence omnipresent beside him, either in British uniform with an Arab headdress or, on more formal occasions, in white robes, with his curved gold dagger. From the outset, the French Foreign Office made difficulties. Feisal was left off the list of official delegates until the British protested on his behalf, and even then he was allowed to represent only the Hejaz. In addition, his mail was opened and his cables were intercepted and deciphered by the British, and every possible obstacle was placed in his path by the French.

The British delegates were housed in three hotels: the Majestic and the Astoria, with the overflow relegated to the Hotel Continental, a thirty-minute walk away from the other two. Lawrence was allocated a small room there, which, in the tradition of French hotels of the day that were not in the grand luxeclass, had no bath. Having to use the one bathroom on his floor of the hotel was always a trial to Lawrence, whose only self-indulgence was taking long, very hot baths. By inference, his room had no telephone, either—Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, CBE, DSO, Lawrence’s rival as a daring intelligence officer, had the room below Lawrence’s at the Continental (with a bath), and reported that when Lawrence wished to communicate with him at night, he would thump on the floor to alert Meinertzhagen, then lower a message or a sheaf of manuscript on a string to Meinertzhagen’s window. When Meinertzhagen wished to communicate with Lawrence at night, he would thump on the ceiling—not such a problem for Meinertzhagen, since he was very tall. According to Meinertzhagen, Lawrence continued to wear the badges of a full colonel on his uniform, even though that rank had been given to him only for the duration of his trip home in 1918. When

Lawrence asked if he could take a bath in Meinertzhagen’s room late one night, there were “red weals on his ribs, standing out like tattoo marks,” presumably where the Turkish bey at Deraa had plunged and twisted a bayonet between Lawrence’s ribs.

Meinertzhagen and Lawrence had what might best be described as a wary relationship, and the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s diaries, which he revised, edited, and retyped later in life, is not necessarily to be relied on, though some of his account rings true. He referred to Lawrence affectionately as “little Lawrence,” and Lawrence described him as “a silent, masterful man, who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest,” which is what a lot of people said or thought about Lawrence. Meinertzhagen claimed to be the inventor of the famous “haversack ruse”: he had ridden close to the Turkish lines in 1917, pretended to be wounded, and galloped away, dropping his haversack, which contained Ј20, faked love letters, and a falsified map and war diaries, all intended to persuade the Turks that Allenby’s attack would be aimed at Gaza. Meinertzhagen’s role at the Peace Conference was, in some ways, analogous to Lawrence’s—though not Jewish, he was the expert on, the true believer in, and the spokesman for Zionist aspirations, as Lawrence was for the Arabs (a street in Jerusalem is now named after Meinertzhagen). He was wealthy and well connected; was a cousin of Beatrice Webb (a cofounder of the London School of Economics); had attended Harrow with Winston Churchill; and had once shot and killed the leader of a Kenyan tribal uprising while shaking his hand at a meeting to negotiate a truce.

Meinertzhagen, though his own nature was overbearing—his sheer size and his reputation for killing prisoners by smashing their heads in with his knobkerrie alarmed most people—seems to have understood and liked Lawrence very much. His analysis of Lawrence’s character is at once sympathetic and penetrating: “his mind,” he wrote, “was pure as gold. Indelicacy, indecency, any form of coarseness or vulgarity repelled him physically…. He had perfect manners if consideration for others counts and he expected good manners from others…. The war shattered his sensitive nature. He was shaken off his balance by the stresses, hardships and responsibilities of his campaign. These all went to accentuate and develop any little eccentricities of his youth.”

He and Lawrence shared a taste for schoolboy pranks. Meinertzhagen claims that they hid themselves at the top of the stairs of the Astoria Hotel, unfurled rolls of toilet paper, and dropped them down in long strips on the heads of Lloyd George, Balfour, and Lord Hardinge, who were standing in the lobby, prompting Hardinge to remark: “There is nothing funny about toilet paper.” Lawrence may have revealed to Meinertzhagen the fact that he was illegitimate, and the intimate details of his rape at the hands of the bey and the bey’s men in Deraa. Meinertzhagen would probably have been a good choice of confidant, since he was unshockable: on the subject of illegitimacy he merely told Lawrence he was “in good company for Jesus was born out of wedlock.” In late life Meinertzhagen claimed that Lawrence began to write the story of his involvement with the Arabs while he was in Paris.

Lawrence’s pace of writing was remarkable—he wrote 160,000 words in less than six months, while putting in long days at the Peace Conference, or in meetings with Feisal and the British delegation, as well as enjoying a full social schedule. In the words of Gertrude Bell—who also became part of the British delegation, to lobby for Britain’s control over what was to become Iraq—Lawrence was “the most picturesque” figure at the conference; also, he realized early on the need to win over journalists and members of the American delegation to Feisal’s cause, and dined with them constantly.

Almost everybody who was at the Peace Conference seems to have noticed Lawrence. A typical example is Professor James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University, a member of the American delegation, who wrote of Lawrence, after their first meeting: “He has been described as the most interesting Briton alive, a student of Mediaeval history at Magdalen, where he used to sleep by day and work by night and take his recreation in the deer park at four in the morning—a Shelley-like person, and yet too virile to be a poet. He is a rather short, strongly built man of not over twenty-eight years, with sandy complexion, a typical English face, bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes and a smile that responded swiftly to that on the face of his friend [Feisal]. The two men were obviously very fond of each other. I have seldom seen such mutual affection between grown men as in this instance. Lawrence would catch the full drift of Feisal’s humor and pass the joke along to us while Feisal was still exploding with his idea; but at the same time it was funny to see how Feisal spoke with the oratorical feeling of the South and Lawrence translated in the lowest and quietest of English voices, in very simple and direct phrases, with only here and there a touch of Oriental poetry breaking through.”

Lawrence made many friends in Paris, among them Lionel Curtis, some of whose ideas about turning the British Commonwealth into a multinational, multiracial federation resembled those of Lawrence; and Arnold Toynbee, the historian. Even so, it is impossible to think of the time that Lawrence spent in Paris, however productive, as happy; indeed, if Meinertzhagen is to be believed, Lawrence was frequently (and “intensely”) depressed. The ambiguity of his own role continued to disturb him—he was at the same time the most important (and most visible) part of Feisal’s small “team,” and a member of the British delegation, where Feisal was already seen as a lost cause.

Lawrence wrote home briefly on January 30, while waiting for his breakfast, to say that he was busy, and had dined only once at his own hotel since arriving in Paris (with his old friend and comrade in arms Colonel Stewart Newcombe). Certainly he saw everybody who mattered, starting with President Woodrow Wilson himself, into whose head Lawrence seems to have put the idea of a committee of inquiry into the wishes of the Syrians.* Lawrence assiduously cultivated American journalists, and gave them long interviews. With his startling good looks, his youth, his reputation as a war hero, and his exotic headdress, he got enough attention and space in American newspapers to worry both the French and the more cautious of his colleagues in the British delegation. He fancied that he had persuaded Wilson, and the American public, to take responsibility for a free, democratic Arab state in Syria, instead of a French colony, but in this he was overoptimistic. Wilson, despite his belief in democracy and the self-determination of peoples, was wary of making any promises about America’s becoming the godfather of an independent Arab state.

On February 6, Lawrence appeared in what was widely acknowledged as one of the most dramatic scenes of the Paris Peace Conference. Feisal’s and Lawrence’s appearance before the Council of Ten (the leaders of the Allied governments) to argue the case for an independent state in Syria had been widely anticipated, and was the subject of considerable backstage maneuvering by the French. Unwisely, Lawrence had been telling people the story of how Feisal had addressed an audience in Scotland in Arabic by reciting the Koran to them, and then whispered to Lawrence to make up whatever he pleased as the English translation. This may have been true, since Feisal had been bored and irritated at being sent on a Scottish tour by the British government. When word of it had reached the French, they hoped to catch him out playing a similar trick in Paris. Therefore they provided themselves with a Moroccan civil servant to see if Lawrence’s translation corresponded with what Feisal said. Fortunately, Lawrence had anticipated that the French would do something of the sort. He wrote out Feisal’s speech in Arabic for him, then translated it into English for himself. Opinions differ as to what Lawrence wore for the occasion. Lloyd George wrote that he was dressed “in flowing robes of dazzling white,” and Arnold Toynbee, the future author of the twelve-volume A Study of History,and a more reliable witness than the prime minister, recorded that Lawrence was “in Arab dress.” Lawrence himself insisted that he was in British uniform with an Arab headdress. Feisal, at any rate, wore the white and gold embroidered robes of a sharif of Mecca, with a curved gold dagger at his waist and a gold-thread agalon his headdress, impressing everybody, even the French, with his gravity, his melodic voice, and his dignified bearing. When he had finished his speech, Lawrence read it aloud in English, but several of the ten heads of government were still unable to understand what had been said. “President Wilson then made a suggestion. ‘Colonel Lawrence,’ he said, ‘could you put the Amir Feisal’s statement into French now for us?’ “ Lawrence then started again and read the whole speech aloud in flawless French. “When he came to the end of this unprepared piece of translation, the Ten clapped. Lawrence’s spell had made the Ten forget, for a moment, who they were and what they were supposed to be doing. They had started the session as conscious arbiters of the destinies of mankind; they were ending it as the captive audience of a minor supplicant’s interpreter.”

The “minor supplicant’s interpreter” had effectively upstaged “the minor supplicant” in the eyes of most of the delegates, but Feisal did not seem to mind. Photographs taken at the Peace Conference show him looking sad, like a man who already suspects that he is presenting a lost cause, whereas Lawrence, always standing tactfully a pace behind him, has his usual faint, cynical smile. Behind both of them, an unusual figure even at the Peace Conference, stands Feisal’s tall, broad-shouldered black Sudanese slave and bodyguard in full Arab robes and cloak.

Despite Lawrence’s “amazing” feat, Feisal’s statement fell on deaf ears. The Italians, the Serbs, the Belgians, and the rest of the smaller Allied countries had no great interest in Syria—it was effectively a contest between Britain and France, with the United States as a neutral referee. Any hope of a united autonomous Arab state from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was dead, since the British had occupied Mesopotamia and clearly intended to stay there; and to obtain increased British support Feisal voluntarily conceded Palestine, which the British were also occupying. He—or Lawrence, as his speechwriter—included numerous references to self-determination, in an effort to please Wilson. During the prolonged questions that followed, Feisal more than held his own against Clemenceau, pointing out, with superb tact, both how grateful he was for French military support and how minimal it had been; and when Clemenceau noted that French interest in Syria went back to the Crusades, he gently asked the French prime minister: who had won the Crusades?

A spokesmen in favor of French rule in Syria went on at such length that at one point Clemenceau angrily asked his foreign minister, Pichon, “What did you get that fellow here for anyway?” Wilson signified his own impatience with the proceedings by getting up and walking around the room. “Poor Lawrence wandered among Versailles’ well-cut hedges, casting hateful glances at Arthur Balfour’s aristocratic features and baggy clothes,” commented an exiled czarist nobleman. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation, remarked on “the lines of resentment hardening around his boyish lips … an undergraduate with a chin.”

A hint that Lawrence’s patience and good nature were fraying can be found in the interview he gave to Lincoln Steffens, the famous American muckraking journalist and progressive. By the time he saw Steffens, Lawrence may have had enough of American journalists, although Steffens was the kind of man Lawrence normally admired. Still, Lawrence was not without a certain streak of skepticism and snobbery on the subject of Americans, as well as a high degree of impatience with the professed moral superiority of Woodrow Wilson, especially in view of the Americans’ reluctance to take on any commitments in the Middle East. Steffens, who called the interview “the queerest I have ever had in all my interviewing life,” met with Lawrence in the latter’s hotel room, and found the young colonel at his most difficult, argumentative, and ironic—very much a regression to the image of the languid poseur he had sometimes cultivated as an Oxford undergraduate. It didn’t help, perhaps, that Steffens wanted to talk about the Armenians, whereas Lawrence wanted to present Feisal’s case for Syria. Lawrence was far from disliking Armenians—the wealthy Altounyan family in Aleppo had been friends of his during his days at Carchemish—but he probably regarded the Armenians as a lost cause, since the Turks had murdered 1.5 million of them in 1915 without provoking the United States into breaking off diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire.* In any case, Steffens’s somewhat holier-than-thou attitude brought out the worst in Lawrence, who suggested, deadpan, that the Armenians deserved to be killed off, and that the United States, with its particular combination of idealism and commerce and its experience at destroying the American Indians, was the best power to take on the task of completing what the Turks had begun. Steffens does not seem to have fully understood that Lawrence was pulling his leg, but what emerges from the interview more strongly than anything else is Lawrence’s irritation with America’s naive good intentions, particularly when they were coupled with its total unwillingness to take on the hard part of rebuilding a new world. Lawrence also played a curious cat-and-mouse game: Steffens was forced to put Lawrence’s ideas into words, so that Lawrence could later deny having said them.

The United States was offered the mandate for Armenia at the Peace Conference and needless to say turned it down, condemning thousands more Armenians to death. Wilson also turned down all suggestions for an American mandate over Palestine, though Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was rushed in to mediate a disagreement between Feisal and Weizmann over the number of Jews who could be admitted into Palestine every year. Lawrence not only was present but drafted Feisal’s letter, which solved the dispute. Throughout March and much of April Feisal and Lawrence met with the French, the British, and the Americans, attempting to create a compromise for Syria that would be acceptable to the Arabs and the French. In the end the best they could do was to accept President Wilson’s suggestion of “an inter-Allied commission of inquiry,” if only as a delaying tactic. Lawrence wrote Feisal’s letter to Clemenceau accepting the commission, and it conveys unmistakably Lawrence’s gift for deadpan irony, as well as his bitterness, which Clemenceau can hardly have failed to notice.

The Spanish flu pandemic, which would kill between 100 million and 150 million people worldwide, raged from 1918 to 1920, and reached its peak in 1919. It was as if by some malignant stroke of irony the war had ended with a final, and even greater, human disaster. It killed Lawrence’s ebullient friend Sir Mark Sykes in Paris in February (prompting Lloyd

George to remark rather ungraciously, “He was responsible for the agreement which is causing us all the trouble with the French…. Picot … got the better of him”), and on April 7 it killed Lawrence’s father. A telegram from Oxford warned him that Thomas Lawrence was suffering from influenza and pneumonia, and Lawrence set off immediately for England to see him, but arrived too late. He returned to Paris, and did not tell anyone, not even Feisal, that his father had died, until a week later, when he requested permission to go home and see his mother. Feisal admired Lawrence’s “control of personal feelings,” and that assessment is fair enough, but Lawrence had long since made control of his personal feelings something of a fetish. He would certainly have deeply mourned the unexpected death of his father, and perhaps even more, dreaded being exposed once again to the emotional demands of his mother. Thomas Lawrence had tried, whenever he could, in his patient, gentle way, to diminish, control, or redirect those demands, but now he was no longer there to protect Ned from the full force of his mother’s attempts to intrude into his life. He must have felt overwhelmed by his father’s death, by his failure to secure Syria for the Arabs, and by the demands of his book, which forced him to relive the experiences of two years of war. He persuaded Feisal to return to Syria, rather than stay on in Paris watching his position erode, a decision Gertrude Bell endorsed. Lawrence himself decided to return to Egypt to retrieve the notes he had left behind in the Arab Bureau’s files, and now needed.

Taking advantage of the fact that the Royal Air Force (upgraded from the Royal Flying Corps into a new and independent service in 1918) was about to send fifty big Handley-Page bombers to Egypt—the first sign that Britain was going to back up its occupation of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and what is now Jordan—Lawrence sought permission to fly out with one of the first squadrons. He left Paris on May 18 for what was intended to be a week’s leave. Airplanes and the air force had always interested him, and he must have relished the opportunity of a long flight in the RAF’s biggest bomber. He must also have welcomed the chance of getting away from Paris, where the French press had been running a series of hostile articles about him, accusing him of turning Feisal’s head with notions of a united, independent Arab state; of being willing to do “a disservice” to his own country for his “sacred mission"; and of becoming “a second Gordon"*—all this carefully orchestrated by the French government.

On March 9, 1919, almost a year after his visit to Aqaba, Lowell Thomas opened his lecture—illustrated with motion pictures and tinted slides—in the Century Theater in New York. He played to packed houses. The lecture was originally titled With Allenby in Palestine, Including the Capture of Jerusalem and the Liberation of Holy Arabia,but it would shortly be changed to With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia,once Thomas realized that what the audience wanted most was Lawrence. The demand for tickets was so great that the lectures had to be moved to Madison Square Garden. Thomas promoted them with artful newspaper articles, and an advertising campaign that included giant photographs of Lawrence, in his robes and headdress, in the windows of the major department stores on Fifth Avenue, as well as a vivid full-color poster showing Lawrence charging on horseback, robes flowing, surrounded by “his” Arabs, curved sabers drawn and gleaming, against a background of the desert.

Lowell Thomas was a born publicist, huckster, and promoter, as well as one of the most successful lecturers in American history, with a phenomenal gift of gab and a naturally intimate relationship with his audience, however large, which equaled that of Mark Twain at the height of his career. Funny, folksy, and inspirational by turns, Thomas could keep people on the edge of their seats with suspense, bring tears to their eyes with sentiment, and make them hold their breath with drama. On the subject of Lawrence he not only did himself proud but had Harry Chase’s photographs and films to back him up. It is hard for us to understand the impact of his show (which changed, and was more ambitiously staged,with every performance), but at its center was something people had never seen before: a real-life drama captured on film, in which the central figure was not an actor, but a real hero: T. E. Lawrence. Thomas enthusiastically proclaimed him “Lawrence of Arabia … a young man whose name will go down in history beside those of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clive, Charles Gordon, and all the other famous heroes of Great Britain’s glorious past.” Even today, reading the typescript of Thomas’s lecture, which accompanied the film and slides, is an extraordinary and thrilling experience, so sweeping were his eloquence and his enthusiasm for his subject.

While Lawrence watched Feisal’s hopes begin to fade at the Paris Peace Conference, across the Atlantic he was about to become famous on a scale beyond anything he, or anyone else, could have imagined. With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabiawould be seen by more than 2 million people in the United States, and by even more in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, when Thomas eventually took his lecture and “picture show” on a world tour.* The London theatrical impresario Percy Burton saw the show in New York and was so overcome that he immediately offered to bring it to London; and after spirited bargaining Thomas, who insisted on opening it at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where no film had ever been played before, agreed to postpone his tour of American cities in favor of Great Britain. By then, it was already clear that the show was going to be a phenomenal success. In the end it would make Lowell Thomas a millionaire (he made a profit of $1.5 million on the show, the equivalent of at least $16 million in today’s money), and set him on the first steps of the path that took the former cub reporter from Cripple Creek, Colorado, to a motion picture, radio, and television career that would last for more than sixty years. It also transformed T. E. Lawrence permanently into “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Lowell Thomas’s show is hard to recapture accurately, since it was continually being changed. He modified it for different audiences; in Great Britain he frequently referred to Lawrence as “the prince of Mecca” (a nonexistent title conferred on him by Thomas) and “the uncrowned king of Arabia"; in the United States he described Lawrence more democratically as “the George Washington of Arabia"; in Australia he took special care to praise the role of the Australian Light Horse in the capture of Damascus. Thomas himself was not just a bold and talented producer but also a gifted narrator, with a sonorous delivery, relieved by the occasional joke, that would make him a star—indeed an institution—for the rest of his life. The show included not only the film that Chase had shot of Lawrence and the Arab army at Aqaba, as well as hand-tinted slides of Lawrence, but eventually exotically dressed young women dancing in front of a backdrop of color slides of the Pyramids to “eastern” music, braziers in which incense burned, and, for the London performance, the sixty-piece band of the Welsh Guards, as well as the “Moonlight on the Nile” scenery borrowed from Sir Thomas Beecham’s production of Handel’s opera Joseph and His Brethren.

Thomas, who had grown up in the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, had a natural tendency to turn Lawrence into a figure like Billy the Kid or Wild Bill Hickok, but wearing an Arab headdress instead of a Stetson and mounted on a camel instead of a horse. Thomas was a pitchman—subtlety (like irony) was unknown to him—but still, the core of it all was the documentary film footage he and Chase shot of the Arab army advancing across the desert, its men mounted on camels and its banners flying. Audiences were fascinated by the glimpses Thomas offered of the apparently shy, slight, modest hero in a white robe—"He had a genius for backing into the limelight,” Thomas would later say of Lawrence, as their relationship cooled, and Lawrence began to feel that he was being exploited and vulgarized, and to resent the fact that he could not appear on the street without being recognized and mobbed.

Lawrence’s charisma (a concept cheapened by overuse today, but apparently only too appropriate for Lawrence) was never in doubt. In London, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabiawould open, just as Percy Burton had promised Thomas, at the august Royal Opera House, in August 1919. It was later moved, at the suggestion of the king, to the Royal Albert Hall, which could accommodate a much larger audience, and then to the Queen’s Hall—its run in the United Kingdon alone was extended to six months, instead of the two weeks that Percy Burton had planned. Thomas also toured it in the provinces, including such cities as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Edinburgh; and everywhere it played to packed houses. Audiences listened breathlessly as Thomas told them, for example, that he had watched while Lawrence blew up a Turkish train, and that “a number of Turkish soldiers who were about attempted to capture Lawrence, but he sat still until they were a few yards from him, then whipped out his Colt revolver, and shot six of them in turn, after which he jumped on his camel and went off across the country.” Lawrence, Thomas revealed to his audience on a lighter note, was now “in hiding, but he had received 27 offers of marriage in all.”

A command performance was held for the king; and the queen saw it twice, the second time with Princess Mary, the duchess of Albany, and the earl and countess of Athlone as her guests. At the end of the performance the queen “summoned Mr. and Mrs. Thomas … to her box … and congratulated Mr. Thomas on his eloquent descriptions and his wonderful pictorial record of the campaign.” The king of Spain saw it and “expressed himself as delighted,” and Prime Minister David Lloyd George saw it twice. Winston Churchill saw it, and sent Thomas a warm letter of congratulations on his “illustrated lecture,” as did General Sir Edmund and Lady Allenby. A handbill for the London production of what eventually came to be called With Lawrence in Arabia and Allenby in Palestineshows a photograph of Lawrence in full Arab regalia brooding over the desert, above the caption: “$250,000 REWARD! DEAD OR ALIVE! FOR THE CAPTURE OF THE MYSTERY MAN OF THE EAST.” Below that is a boldface headline: “THE MOST AMAZING REVELATION OF A PERSONALITY SINCE STANLEY FOUND LIVINGSTONE.” At the bottom of the page is a boxed quote from no less a fan than Prime Minister Lloyd George: “Everything that Mr. Lowell

Thomas tell us about Colonel Lawrence is true. In my opinion, Lawrence is one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times.” Thomas, who compared Lawrence to such legendary heroes as “Achilles, Siegfried, and El Cid,” as well as to a changing list of real ones (depending on which country he was lecturing in), invented the illustrated travelogue. However, this was not a word he thought did justice to his show, which was as much a circus as a documentary—a fact that perhaps explains its enormous success.

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 withthe 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 attachй 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 Wisdomwas 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 Ј200 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 work out at Ј213. 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 exactlywhat 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 without 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.

He was still working on his manuscript, but without any conviction that it should ever be published. It was a giant, self-imposed task; and whereas most people write in the expectation of seeing their books published and reviewed, Lawrence seemed to be writing to get the war, and his role in it, out of his system. Perhaps for that reason, he included material that might be judged libelous or even obscene, by the strict standards of the time.

On August 14, 1919, Lowell Thomas’s “illustrated travelogue” opened at least at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Lawrence had not been affected by Thomas’s success in New York—in the days before radio or television, let alone instant telephone communication, New York was far away, and a theatrical success there was merely a curiosity on the opposite side of the Atlantic. But in London Thomas made Lawrence, overnight, by far the most famous and acclaimed British hero of World War I, and what is more, a livehero, who lived only a short train ride from London. Lawrence had cooperated willingly with Thomas and Chase at Aqaba, on what he thought was a “propaganda film” for the American government, made under the orders of Colonel House, President Wilson’s closest adviser. Even so, he gave the two Americans only a few days of his time, and was notably reticent. He saw no harm in pulling Thomas’s leg, or in having a little fun at his expense, and cannot have imagined that the film would ever be made, or indeed that he would live to watch it, still less that it would be enlarged into a kind of three-ring circus. His colleagues at Aqaba had had their fun with Thomas too, telling him tall tales and burnishing Lawrence’s legend. Aqaba was a dull, infernally hot place, and the opportunity of amusing themselves at the expense of two earnest Americans was not to be missed.

None of this is to suggest that Lowell Thomas was taken in—he was anything but credulous—but he was a showman,looking for a great story and, if possible, for a British hero who could be made appealing to an American audience (not an easy task, given the constraints of the British class system). He saw no profit in skepticism, and never hesitated to turn a good story into a better one, and Lawrence was first and foremost a good story, set against a great background. Thomas made the most of it.

Although Lawrence has been criticized for cooperating with Thomas, he could hardly have foreseen that a documentary film would fill London’s biggest halls and theaters to capacity six nights a week and two matinees, let alone that the Metropolitan Police would have to be called out in force night after night to handle the huge crowds. On the night the Allenbys attended the show, Lowell Thomas reported that “Bow Street was jammed all the way from the Strand to Covent Garden … and we turned away more than ten thousand people.” Lowell Thomas’s wife, Fran, wrote to her parents that the show was having “a colossal success,” and she was not exaggerating. Lawrence himself saw it five or seven times (depending on whose account we believe), apparently without being recognized except by Fran Thomas, who noted that “he would blush crimson, laugh in confusion, and hurry away with a stammered word of apology.” That Lawrence was not initially offended at being turned into what he called “a matinйe idol” seems clear enough. He wrote a nice letter to Thomas, adding that he thanked God the lights were out when he saw the show, and invited the Thomases to Oxford for a sightseeing tour.

Thomas had not only put Arabia on the map but made T. E. Lawrence a perennial celebrity. The normally staid Daily Telegraphsummed it up nicely: “Thomas Lawrence, the archaeologist, … went out to Arabia and, practically unaided, raised for the first time almost since history began a great homogeneous Arab army.” The Telegraphpredicted that, thanks to Thomas, “the name Lawrence will go down to remotest posterity besides the names of half a dozen men who dominate history.”

Lawrence would have had to be superhuman not to feel a glow at all this fame and praise. However much he pointed out that he had notbeen unaided, that he was only one of a number of British officers helping the Arabs, his modesty only increased his popularity and fame. Here was no boastful hero, but a shy, modest, unassuming one, willing, even eager, to give credit to others. Lowell Thomas, in fact, stated how difficult it was to interview Lawrence about his own feats, then went on to publish in Strand Magazinea series of hero-worshipping articles about Lawrence, which, together with his lecture, he would soon transform into an internationally best-selling book.

“In the history of the world (cheap edition),” Lawrence complained to his old friend Newcombe about Lowell Thomas, “I’m a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second Knight, a Strand-Magazine strummer.”

It is against this background that one must view Lawrence’s life in 1919: as an ex-soldier struggling with a huge and difficult book; as a diplomat whose effort to give Feisal and the Arabs an independent state had failed; as a man who, to quote Kipling, “had walked with kings, nor lost the common touch,” and was now stranded in his rooms in an Oxford college, or at home under the thumb of a demanding mother, all the time besieged by admirers, well-wishers, celebrity hunters, and cranks.

Lawrence tried to take up some of his old interests—he wrote to his friend Vyvyan Richards about resuming their old plan for setting up a printing press together to produce fine, limited editions of great books. It says much for Richards’s affection for Lawrence that he was still open to this pipe dream after an interval of so many years; and it is hard not to believe that at this point Lawrence was simply casting around for some escape from the demands of his book, which was constantly growing in complexity, and from the rapidity with which his real accomplishments were being overshadowed by Thomas’s romantic image.

It is possible that the completion of Seven Pillars of Wisdommight have solved many of these problems—he had already written more than 200,000 words—but since at the time Lawrence didn’t expect to publish it, the book remained, in a sense, a perverse blind alley. One of Lawrence’s peculiarities as a writer was that despite his immense gifts, he believed firmly that writing was a skill which could be learned like demolition, and he was constantly on the lookout for people who could teach him the formula for writing poetry or constructing a sentence. More often than not, such suggestions, however sensible, were ignored. Like Charles Doughty, whose Arabia Desertahe so much admired, Lawrence seems to have invented his own prose style, which is at once archaic and lush, and becomes simple only when he is writing directly about the fighting. The descriptions of landscapes are magnificent, but throughout the whole long book—it grew to some 400,000 words at one point, and was eventually cut to about 335,000 for the so-called Oxford text of 1922, which is now regarded as definitive—there is a sense of a man perhaps trying too hard to produce a masterpiece. This need not necessarily be a bad thing—neither Ulyssesnor Finnegans Wakeis an easy book to read, after all; and D. H. Lawrence, whose books T. E. Lawrence admired (although in Lady Chatterley’s LoverD. H. Lawrence made fun of a certain “Colonel C. E. Florence … who preferred to become a private soldier”*), worked hard to produce a prose style distinctly his own. Still, there can hardly be a book in the history of English literature that was ever more thoroughly rewritten, revised, and agonized over line by line than Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and the pity of it is that it shows. It was a labor, not so much of love as of need, duty, and pride, and—more than that—another self-imposed challenge.

Whatever its merits, the first draft of the book, containing all but three of the eleven sections, much of Lawrence’s research material, and many of his photographs, was either lost or stolen from him in Reading Station late in 1919—a catastrophe that can only have added to his depression. Although the full text of Seven Pillars of Wisdomwould never be published in any conventional way in Lawrence’s lifetime (he went to enormous trouble and expense, as we shall see, to produce his own limited subscription edition, and to protect the copyright in Great Britain and the United States), Lawrence had occasionally handed the manuscript to his friends for their suggestions or corrections—at least four people seem to have read it in handwritten form. That explains why he sent or gave his only copy to Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, who was then posted to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Lawrence went down to get his friend’s opinion and corrections, and to go back to Oxford with the manuscript. So many versions of what then happened have been related, some of them fanciful, that it has become part of Lawrence’s legend. These include the possibility that Lawrence may have “lost” the manuscript deliberately, in other words, abandoned it; that it was stolen by an agent of the British or French secret service to ensure it would never be published; and that the incident was totally fabricated by Lawrence, presumably out of morbid vanity or to add a note of drama to the writing of the book. All these theories are unlikely—Lawrence was genuinely distraught, and Hogarth was horrified when he heard of the loss.

The truth is quite simple: Lawrence had neglected to bring a briefcase with him to carry the manuscript, so Dawnay lent him an “official” one. Such a briefcase does not resemble a bank messenger’s bag, as has been suggested, but is made of black leather, with the royal coat of arms stamped on the front flap in gold—quite an impressive-looking object. Obliged to change trains at Reading, Lawrence waited in the station cafй, and when his train was called he boarded it without picking up the briefcase, which he had placed under the table. Despite great efforts, the case was never found or returned.

It may of course be true that Lawrence had a subconscious desire to lose it, though this seems rather far-fetched; and it certainly seems odd that a thief would pick up the briefcase, examine the contents, and not think in terms of returning it for a reward—but then, we have no way of knowing whether the manuscript had Lawrence’s name and address on it. In any event, it vanished. Lawrence’s initial reaction was hysterical laughter, perhaps to avoid tears. Of course it may seem odd today to give the only copy even to so trustworthy a friend as Alan Dawnay, but in those days the only way to copy a handwritten manuscript was by photographing every page. Hence most writers either typed a copy and a “carbon” or hired a typist to do it. Oxford must have been full of such typists, given the number of theses and manuscripts being written there, but Lawrence may not have wanted to be bothered hiring one, or may have felt it was too expensive.

There seems to have been no doubt in his mind that he would start from scratch and write it all over again, and Hogarth urged on him the importance of doing just that. By this time, Lawrence seems to have been fed up with All Souls, or more likely with his mother, since he spent more of his nights at Polstead Road than at All Souls, and he accepted the offer of Sir Herbert Baker, a distinguished architect he had met, to lend him the top floor of a building Baker rented in Westminster for an office. Sitting down to reconstruct a whole book would be a grueling and daunting task for anyone, but Lawrence made it an exhausting and physically punishing marathon, perhaps because only by turning it into a physical and mental challenge could he force himself to do it at all. He wrote at an incredible pace, producing “95% of the book in thirty days,” sometimes writing thousands of words at a sitting, and eventually completing more than 400,000 words. At one point he wrote 30,000 words nonstop in twenty-two hours, possibly a world’s record. It is almost impossible to keep straight the number of parts that Lawrence wrote—he called these parts “books,” and their number varies from seven to ten. Some of the books he would revise again and again over the next six years, particularly Book VI, which describes the incident at Deraa.

Probably no part of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,even the pages about Deraa, gave Lawrence more trouble than the dedication of the work, which he went to endless pains to get right. He not only wrote it over and over again, but—unsure whether it was prose or poetry—gave it to his young friend Robert Graves, already an admired war poet, to help him turn it into blank verse, and submitted it to at least one other poet for advice. Despite changes made by Graves, it is what it is, neither fish nor fowl, at once awkward and deeply moving:

To S.A.I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in starsTo earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for meWhen we came.Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were nearand saw you waiting:When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran meand took you apart:Into his quietness.Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wageours for the momentBefore earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blindworms grew fat upon Your substance.Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a memory of you.But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and nowThe little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow Of your gift. The identity of S.A. has stirred up controversy ever since the book first appeared in print, partly because Lawrence was deliberately mysterious. It has been suggested that the dedication is to Sarah Aaronsohn, a courageous Jewish spy who committed suicide after being captured and tortured by the Turks; or to Fareedeh el Akle, Lawrence’s teacher of Arabic. Since Lawrence never met Sarah Aaronsohn, and since Fareedeh el Akle lived on to great old age denying that Lawrence had dedicated the book to her, neither theory is plausible. Lawrence himself further confused the matter by saying that S.A. represented both a person and a place; but it seems self-evident from the context that the dedication is to

Dahoum, his friend in Carchemish before the war, and that it expresses not only Lawrence’s love for Dahoum but his bitter regret that Dahoum did not live to see the victory.

The first four lines also suggest a very unusual degree of grandiloquence for Lawrence: “I drew these tides of men into my hands” and “wrote my will across the sky in stars” are an usually direct claim to Lawrence’s authorship and leadership of the Arab Revolt, in contrast to his usual practice of giving full credit to other people. If they represent his real feelings—as they may, since the dedication is evidently to Dahoum—this is one of the few places where Lawrence lets his real self and his pride show through, an unexpected moment when the hero appears without apology or disguise.

Like many great works of literature Seven Pillars of Wisdomis a product of an intense obsession, driven first by Lawrence’s need to explore and explain his own role in the Arab Revolt, and second by his need to portray the revolt as an epic, heroic struggle, full of larger-than-life figures (Auda Abu Tayi, for instance) and noble motives (those of Feisal particularly). Also as with many of the world’s great books, the author was unwilling to give it up, or stop changing and revising it. Seven Pillars of Wisdomremained a work in progress until 1927, and even today is still available in two different versions. Although Lawrence was scrupulously accurate about himself, in this book he approached the Arabs in much the same spirit as Shakespeare approached the English in Henry V,determined to make his readers see them as he did—as glorious figures, inspired by a great ideal. When parts of the story did not reflect this, he played them down as much as possible.

The top floor of Baker’s building was unheated, so Lawrence worked through the nights in a “flying suit,” believing that cold, hunger, and lack of sleep would concentrate his mind. The room had neither a kitchen nor running water, so he lived off sandwiches and mugs of tea bought at street stands, and he washed at public baths, a London institution that has pretty much vanished.

In his authorized biography, Jeremy Wilson points out, correctly, that Lawrence got a head start by incorporating into his manuscript all the reports of his actions he had written for the Arab Bulletin,and that he decided to alleviate the comparative dryness of these reports by inserting long and sometimes lyrical descriptions of the landscape. This explains the curious shifts of tone in the finished book, from reportorial to lyrical. Wilson suggests that the second version—the version Lawrence wrote under such intense, self-imposed pressure—was deliberately intended to underplay the British role in the Arab Revolt, so as to build up Feisal’s claim to Syria. When he wrote the lost first draft, in Paris and on the way to Egypt and back, Lawrence may still have had some hope that the French would relent, or that the British (and perhaps the Americans) would force them to, but by the winter of 1919-1920 he can have had no such illusion, so the second draft may have been written more as a propaganda document than the first. As Wilson puts it, “the book had now assumed a strongly political role"—though what use it would have been to the Arab cause if it was not going to be published remains unclear. In any case, from the beginning, Lawrence had tried carefully to put the spotlight on the Arabs, without in any way diminishing the enormous contribution made by British money, arms, specialists, officers, and men, and by the Royal Navy. We cannot examine the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,but in every subsequent version of the book Lawrence seems notably fair-minded toward the Indian machine gunners, the British armored car personnel and drivers, and above all Allenby and his staff, though they are overshadowed by the greater glamour of the Bedouin tribesmen. Still, the book was Lawrence’s story, and his story was among and about the Arabs.

Lawrence was awash with contradictory impulses. He wanted the book to be read by those whose judgment, experience, and suggestions for changes he respected, but not to be published and reviewed in the normal way. It was as if he hoped to protect himself against criticism, allegations that he was wrong, or arguments that he had changed the emphasis of events in the Middle East to put himself in the limelight and show the Arabs in a better light than they deserved. He toyed with the idea of publishing what he called a “boy-scout” version of the book in the United States, sharply condensed, and with all the controversial material left out. He even went so far as to start negotiations for it with F. N. Doubleday, the Anglophile American book publisher, whom he had met in London—indeed his correspondence with Frank Doubleday (whose nickname, coincidentally, was “Effendi”) should be sufficient to dispel any notions that Lawrence was indifferent to money, or had no head for business. Among the dozen or so alternative ideas he had for the book, once it was completed, he considered printing one copy only and placing it in the Library of Congress to ensure copyright, or offering one copy for a sale at a price nobody would pay, $200,000 or more. The idea of an abridged edition would eventually be realized with Revolt in the Desert,in 1927, but overall the curious history of Seven Pillars of Wisdomis one of the more tangled and complicated episodes in book publishing.

The immediate reason for the negotiations with Frank Doubleday was that Lawrence needed the money to build a house on his land in Epping and to open the private press with Vyvyan Richards. The rest of Lawrence’s ideas represent imaginative ways to protect the copyright and prevent the text from being pirated without enabling people to actually buy and read the book. Throughout his life, Lawrence did his best to prevent people from reading the unexpurgated text, either because he shrewdly grasped that nothing creates more interest than a famous book readers can’t buy, or because he disliked the whole business of publication and the reviews that accompany it. Despite a reputation for innocence and eccentricity in business matters, which he was careful to maintain, the curious thing is that in the end Lawrence by and large managed to get his own way.

Had Lawrence been willing to allow Seven Pillars of Wisdomto be published in the normal way, perhaps accompanied by a numbered deluxe edition, there is no doubt that it would have been a huge best seller, and would have made him a fortune. But money was always secondary to Lawrence, whose attitude toward the whole subject was a curious blend of his father’s and his mother’s. His father, he knew, had “lived on a large scale,” on his estate in Ireland, and although Lawrence says that his father never so much as wrote out a check, Thomas Lawrence’s correspondence shows that he not only had a sound head for business but made sensible provision for his sons. Whatever mysteries may still have surrounded Thomas Lawrence, his death must have dispelled most of them. Indeed one subject over which Lawrence revealed a certain amount of bitterness was the fact that the Chapman family did not reach out to him once he became famous, and that his fame did not persuade them to accept him as one of their own.

Lawrence should have been comparatively well off. His “gratuity” on leaving the army was apparently difficult to calculate, given the many changes in his rank, and the fact that the paperwork followed far behind his travels even to EEF headquarters in Cairo, let alone back to the War Office in London. Thus, in 1919, a puzzled War Office official, wrestling with underpayments and overpayments, came to the tentative conclusion that if Lawrence had been a temporary major and “Class X staff officer,” he was owed Ј344, minus overpayments of Ј266, which would have given him a gratuity of Ј68 on relinquishing his commission. If he had been paid as a lieutenant-colonel, the gratuity should be Ј213; if he was being paid as a lieutenant-colonel anda Class X staff officer, his gratuity should be Ј464. A further calculation by a higher authority lowers this figure to Ј334. Some of this confusion is due to the exigencies of wartime service, some to the traditional inefficiency of the Paymaster Corps, and some no doubt to Lawrence’s own lack of interest in such details. A note in the file points out, for example, that there is no record that Lawrence was ever commissioned in the first place. Lawrence himself remembered receiving a gratuity of Ј110, which seems on the low side, but in any case he had accumulated almost Ј3,000 in back pay. His scholarship from All Souls was worth about Ј200 a year, and he had a set of rooms at the college, and meals, had he cared to make use of them.

Thomas Lawrence had left Ј15,000 to be divided among his sons, with the expectation that more would be coming in, in the form of a legacy from his sister, and also provided comfortably for Sarah Lawrence. After the death of Will and Frank, this legacy would have given Lawrence Ј5,000, plus the Ј3,000 in back pay. If Lawrence had put the entire Ј8,000 away in some tidy investment, it would have been the equivalent of about $600,000 in terms of today’s purchasing power, and should have produced an income equivalent to about $20,000 a year. When added to his scholarship from All Souls, this would have given him the equivalent of about $35,000 a year today—not bad for a man with abstemious habits, no dependents, and virtually no living expenses.

Perhaps because he had overestimated how much he would receive from his father’s estate, Lawrence spent a good deal of his accumulated back pay buying land at Pole Hill for the house and printing press he intended to build there. Investing in farmland was not the wisest thing to do, since the land was primarily of interest only to Lawrence himself. As for the money his father had left him, Lawrence soon found himself in what would have been for anyone else a difficult moral position. Neither Will nor Frank had lived to inherit a share of the Ј15,000 Thomas Lawrence had left his sons, so when Lawrence discovered that Janet Laurie was in desperate need of money, he gave her the Ј3,000 that would have been Will’s share. This was apparently in accord with Will’s wishes. Lawrence later wrote that Will had left “a tangle behind” with respect to Janet, without making it clear exactly what kind of tangle it was. Lawrence should have been in a position to know, since Will had made him his executor, and it certainly seems possible that although Janet became engaged to another man after Will went to war, he may still have believed she would marry him eventually, despite Sarah’s opposition. That Sarah’s opposition survived Will’s death is at any rate clear enough—as late as 1923 Lawrence was unwilling to admit even to his friend Hogarth what he had done with the money.

It is to Lawrence’s credit that he respected Will’s wishes, despite the fact that shortly after the war Janet married Guthrie Hall-Smith, who was a war hero and then an impecunious artist. She asked Lawrence to give her away at the wedding, but after agreeing, he backed out, feeling that the difference in height between them would make him look “silly,” or, perhaps more important, concerned that word of it would get back to his mother. His generosity toward Janet thus left him with virtually no capital, and drastically reduced his income.

This did not prevent him from buying rare, hand-printed books and paintings, including one of Augustus John’s portraits of Feisal (which Jeremy Wilson estimates may have cost him Ј600, roughly the equivalent of $45,000 today). Nor did it prevent him from commissioning artists to draw and paint the portraits and illustrations for Seven Pillars of Wisdom,an extended effort that took years and cost far more than he could afford. It resulted in Lawrence’s becoming one of the most important patrons of British artists in his day, a kind of modern Maecenas, but without the requisite fortune.

He enjoyed sitting for portraits, and was constantly invited to do so. He was amused and delighted when the portrait Augustus John painted of him in his white Arab robes and camel-hair cloak was sold at auction to the duke of Westminster for Ј1,000, a record price. Lawrence called it “the wrathful portrait,” presumably because of the red cheeks John had given him, for his expression in the painting is in fact straightforward and benign.

He returned to Oxford in April with much of the book in hand, and set about cutting the text for the “boy-scout” edition he had discussed with Doubleday. He eventually put this to one side, since he was adamantly opposed to publishing the book in Britain, where it could of course be expected to sell the most copies. In any case, he was soon occupied again with events in the Middle East, which were deteriorating just as he had predicted. Since nothing had been settled in Paris, discussion of the “mandates” was moved to a new conference at San Remo, a small Italian seaside resort. In comparative obscurity, now that the Americans had made it clear that they would take on no responsibilities in the Middle East, the British and French divided the whole area even more drastically than the Sykes-Picot agreement had proposed. Apart from the vast Arabian wasteland, which was left for ibn Saud and King Hussein to dispute between themselves, the British were awarded the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia, and the French the mandates for Lebanon and Syria.

No provision was made for an inland, independent Arab state of any kind, although a large area had been set aside for just that purpose by Sykes and Picot. Lawrence worked hard to arouse opposition to this brutal carving up, and he had a good deal of support, in the newspapers and among politicians on both sides of the House. Lawrence, despite his claim to dislike publicity, had a positive genius for getting it. Much as he would suffer, over the next fifteen years of his life, from constant speculation and headlines in the press about him, he was as adept at running a press campaign as he had been at leading the guerrillas. He was even willing to be referred to as “Colonel Lawrence,” in order to get published. He managed to get his opinions about the Middle East into almost every newspaper, from the Timesand The Observerto The Daily Mailand The Daily Express.At one point Lawrence, in a bitter outburst, compared British rule in Mesopotamia unfavorably with Ottoman rule. At another, imitating Swift’s A Modest Proposal,he suggested that if the British were determined to kill Arabs, Mesopotamia, where “we have killed about ten thousand Arabs this summer,” was the wrong place to start, since the area was “too sparsely peopled” to maintain such an average over any long period of time. He also remarked sarcastically that fighting the Arabs would offer valuable “learning opportunities” for thousands of British troops, thus adding the War Office to the list of British bureaucracies he had offended. In both Syria and Mesopotamia local uprisings rapidly got out of control, just as he had predicted, and were put down with brutal force. By the summer of 1920 Feisal had fought and lost a pitched battle against the French army in Syria, with heavy losses to the Arabs, and had been obliged to leave the country. He had been placed forcibly, but with formal politesse,on board a special train at the orders of the French government, and dispatched to Alexandria, in Egypt, together with his entourage, consisting of an armed bodyguard of seventeen men, five motorcars, seventy-two of his followers, twenty-five women, and twenty-five horses, rather to the dismay of his British hosts, who complained that “one never knows how many meals are required for lunch or dinner.” At the same time the British found themselves attacked on all sides in Mesopotamia, and threatened with growing unrest in Egypt.

Lawrence’s views were straightforward: that responsibility for affairs in the Middle East should not be divided between the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Colonial Office, and the India Office, because such a division was a recipe for disaster; that attacking the Arabs merely for attempting to get what the British had promised them was a fatal mistake; and that keeping more than 50,000 British troops in what was now coming to be referred to as “Iraq” to hold down a country that would have been peaceful and prosperous if given a reasonable degree self-government was morally wrong and financially suicidal.

Far from being extreme, Lawrence’s was the voice of reason and common sense, and his fame added a certain weight to his advice, as did the support of people like Charles Doughty, the author of Arabia Deserta;Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the Arabian traveler and poet; George Lloyd; David Hogarth; Arnold Toynbee; Lionel Curtis; and many others. Lawrence even won over St. John Philby and Gertrude Bell, despite the fact that they supported ibn Saud rather than King Hussein and the Hashemite family in the contest for power over Arabia and the Hejaz. Indeed Lawrence made a forceful case in the newspapers against the idiocy of supporting both sides in the struggle, with the India Office financing ibn Saud and the Foreign Office King Hussein. Objections were raised in the Foreign Office, particularly by Lord Curzon, about these “calculated indiscretions” by someone who had been part of the British delegation to the Peace Conference, and might still be under some obligation to the Foreign Office, but Lawrence’s campaign in favor of Feisal and an independent Arab state seems to have struck most people as moderate, sensible, and, as Curzon clearly feared, very well-informed.

Given the fact that Lawrence was merely one person whose only resources were his pen and his name, he made amazing headway in changing the British government’s ideas about the Middle East. The idea of Lawrence as a shy or reclusive neurotic is sharply contradicted by his energetic and largely successful attempt to redefine British policy in 1920. He seems to have known, met with, and written to almost everybody of consequence, including the prime minister and the editors of the leading newspapers.* Some idea of the aura of celebrity that clung to Lawrence can be gained from the introduction to his perfectly sensible piece in The Daily Express:he is described once again, in the unmistakable, gushing prose style of Lord Copper’s Daily Beast,as the “daring,” “almost legendary” “Prince of Mecca” and “the uncrowned king of Arabia,” a “slight and boyish figure … with mind and character oozing through his eyes … and an unquestionable force of implacable authority.”

Lawrence succeeded in marshaling behind his ideas a wide variety of influential figures, enough certainly to outweigh the objections of Curzon, whom he thought of, perhaps unfairly, as his bкte noire, and the Foreign Office. That was in part because the attempt to rule Iraq as if it were an extension of India was so clearly a failure, and in part because there was no appetite in Britain for the wholesale slaughter of Iraqi civilians by British troops, or for the large amounts of money needed to police Palestine and Iraq, and to suppress the Arabs’ desire for a national identity. The British had been obliged, thanks to the Sykes-Picot agreement and Lloyd George’s impulsive bargain with Clemenceau, to let the French rule and garrison Lebanon and Syria, but they were not under any obligation to follow the French example.

Although 1920 was a difficult year for Lawrence—he had lost his manuscript and had seen his hopes for Feisal and for a fair settlement in the Middle East crushed—his achievements had been nevertheless remarkable. He had rewritten Seven Pillars of Wisdomfrom scratch, and was now revising it in painstaking detail, as well as working hard on a pet project of his: to find a publisher for Doughty’s Arabia Deserta,which had long been out of print. He wrote a long introduction to the new edition of Arabia Deserta,which would be his clearest and most eloquent description of Bedouin life and Arab culture. In addition to all this, he had widened his circle of friends, not only among artists but among writers, poets, politicians, and journalists, to a degree that was to play a very important role in his life; for just as Lawrence was a prolific writer of enormously interesting letters—his correspondence represents a vast and varied literary masterpiece in some ways even more impressive and interesting than his books—he had a particular genius for friendship. When he was a loner, as he would be for the rest of his life, his friends played much the same central emotional role in his private life that family, marriage, and children play in the lives of most people. There is a tendency to write about Lawrence as if he had been a lonely man living the secular equivalent of life in a monastery—but none of this is remotely true of the real Lawrence, whose friendships were enduring and important and cut across the lines of class and rank in a very un-English way. In none of his letters does Lawrence “talk down” to his friends in the ranks, or flaunt his superior education or heroic reputation. The tone of his letters is nearly always the same—he is highly personal, at ease, solicitous, frank about himself, and eager to hear the other person’s news. His critics have taken exception to some of his letters as inappropriate or impertinent—such as those he wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Oliver Swann on entering the RAF as a recruit—but this is to ignore the fact that at heart Lawrence was indifferent to rank, and wrote in the same easy, natural style to everyone. The list of people whom he met in 1919 and 1920 and who remained his friends for life is enormous, and includes (among many others) Augustus John, Sir William Rothenstein, Robert Graves, Lionel Curtis, Eric Kennington, and Edward Marsh. For Lawrence there was no such thing as casual friendship —allhis friendships were important to him, and all those who became his friends felt in some way permanently connected to him, whatever role he chose to play in the complicated drama of his life as Lawrence afterArabia. For in many ways, the best and most productive years of Lawrence’s life were still to come. He adamantly refused to shape himself as “Colonel Lawrence” or to allow his life to be defined only by the two years he had spent fighting in the desert.

He was, in fact, about to embark on one of the most important adventures of his life—one that would, in many ways, shape the Middle East as we know it today. Lawrence’s press campaign against the government’s policies in the Middle East not only had been successful, but had been followed with close attention by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, who watched with rising concern the cost of putting down Arab and Kurdish rebellions in Iraq (estimated at Ј20 million there alone), of separating Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and of trying to prevent Emir Abdulla, Feisal’s older brother, from attacking the French in Syria. Lloyd George even discussed Lawrence’s ideas directly with him, bypassing Curzon; this was just as well, since Lawrence’s first suggestion to the prime minister was “to relieve Curzon of the responsibility.” But as Lawrence later told Liddell Hart, “Lloyd George made it clear that he could not remove Curzon from the Foreign Office, [so] the alternative was to remove the Middle East from him. This possibility, once planted in Lloyd George’s fertile mind, soon fructified.” Thus Lawrence had made the step from the peaceful cloisters of All Souls to 10 Downing Street, advising the prime minister behind the scenes on Middle East policy, and moving it in the direction he wanted.

Certainly Lloyd George appreciated at once Lawrence’s suggestion that British policy in the Middle East should be placed in the hands of one man, and what is more knew exactly in whose hands to place it. Winston Churchill had rejoined the government as minister of munitions in 1917, after commanding an infantry battalion on the western front for several months following the inquiry into the Dardanelles campaign. Early in 1919, he became secretary of state for war and secretary of state for air, in which roles he presided, among other matters, over the British effort to crush the rebellion in Iraq. The experience left him with an interest in the Middle East and a firm belief that the RAF could control large areas at a fraction of the expense (and bloodshed) of ground troops.

Lloyd George had always treated Churchill with the respect most sensible people reserve for a fused hand grenade. They were friends and rivals, both of them fiercely ambitious for power. Of the two, Churchill was the more volatile, and at this point by far the more politically vulnerable, and Lloyd George, for all his fabled Welsh charm, did not conceal from his old friend the fact that only his personal intervention had persuaded the reluctant members of the Liberal and Conservative coalition to allow Churchill back into the government at all. Churchill was in the cabinet on suffrage, and at the pleasure of the prime minister, never a man to confuse good intentions with political self-interest. In any case, Lloyd George concluded that Churchill was the obvious man for the job—a choice which had the additional advantage that if Churchill failed, the prime minister could lay the entire responsibility on him.

Churchill was no expert on the Middle East, although he had strong opinions about it. He had “a virgin mind” on the subject, he told one of his advisers—but unlike his rivals in the cabinet, he relished the opportunity to shape the future of a vital portion of the globe. Doubts did not trouble him; nor did the vested interests of the Foreign Office, still less previous promises made to the Arabs, in which he had played no part. His partiality toward Zionism was strong and sincere, but like Lloyd George he saw his task as preserving above all vital British interests—protection of the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Iraq, and the safe air route to India across Arabia from Cairo to Baghdad—while cutting sharply the enormous expense of keeping large numbers of British troops in the Middle East. Being who he was, Churchill had, beyond these practical goals, the imagination, the courage, the vision, and the boundless self-confidence to undo what Britain had reluctantly agreed to at the Paris Peace Conference, and create a new reality in the Middle East, at least so far as the British were concerned. To make it clear that responsibility for the Middle East would no longer be shared between the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the War Office, Churchill proposed to set up a “Middle East Department.” Not surprisingly, his first significant step was to persuade T. E. Lawrence to become his political adviser and his emissary to the Arabs—though Churchill may not have been aware that Lawrence was the one to recommend himto Lloyd George for the Middle East.

Oddly enough, Lawrence initially hesitated. Churchill’s omnipresent private secretary and their friend Eddie Marsh first broached the idea to Lawrence in December 1920, but Lawrence initially showed little enthusiasm, perhaps because he knew it meant returning to the role of “Colonel Lawrence.” This was, of course, to underestimate the persuasive powers of Winston Churchill. Lawrence took his first step toward joining Churchill’s team by sounding out Feisal, who was in London at the time to protest against the French occupation of Syria. Confirming Churchill’s confidence in him, Lawrence managed to get Feisal to promise a willingness to make a new start from the Arab side. Feisal agreed to put aside for the moment his objections to French rule in Lebanon and Syria, acknowledging the inability of the British government to alter French policy in the Middle East—and to settle for a Hashemite presence in Iraq and what is now Jordan, where his brother Abdulla was at present de facto ruler of the local Bedouin tribes. Though it was not appreciated at the time, the most significant concession Lawrence wrung from Feisal was that his father would give up any claim to rule Palestine. This had the advantage, from Feisal’s point of view, of leaving the explosive issue of a Jewish “national home” in the hands of the British, who would very soon come to regret the responsibility, and the promises they had made to the Zionists.

Lawrence had planned to make a journey to some of the principal sites mentioned in Seven Pillars of Wisdomwith Eric Kennington, the distinguished war artist, who had caused a sensation in London with his modernist depictions of troops in the trenches. The paintings appealed to Lawrence as a contrast to the more formal portraits he planned to have painted, and he was reluctant to cancel the trip. (After Lawrence’s death Kennington carved both an effigy of Lawrence in the medieval style, and the bust of him, a copy of which is placed in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.) Lawrence was simultaneously tempted and repelled by the thought of returning to the Middle East, but he swiftly developed for Churchill the same intense mixture of affection, loyalty, and respect that he had for Allenby, and eventually he allowed himself to be won over, as Churchill had been confident he would be. Lawrence attempted to set as a prior condition that all Britain’s promises to the Arabs should be met, but Churchill refused to do this.Lawrence gave in—indeed he can hardly have expected that Churchill would agree to totally abandon the Sykes-Picot agreement, and undermine both Britain’s and France’s positions in the Middle East.

Lawrence’s success with Feisal before he had even accepted a job, and almost a month before Churchill formally took office, demonstrated just how valuable he would be. For all his occasionally erratic or emotional decisions, Churchill was an experienced politician, who wanted to be in a position to claim that he had listened to more than one opinion.Lawrence’s role as political adviser and emissary to the Arabs was vital to the success of Churchill’s mission, but he carefully balanced Lawrence’s pro-Arab views by adding to his staff Sir John Shuckburgh as assistant undersecretary; an experienced civil servant, Lawrence’s old chief Sir Gilbert Clayton, as military adviser; Hubert Young, once appointed as Lawrence’s understudy during the Arab Revolt; and Richard Meinertzhagen, who had been Lawrence’s confidant at the Hotel Continental during the Paris Peace Conference. Clayton, with his background in military intelligence and his knowledge of Egypt, was the perfect man to prevent friction between the War Office and the ebullient new secretary of state for the colonies. Young—who had clashed with Lawrence in 1917 and 1918, had been co-opted by the Foreign Office, and over time had been converted to Lawrence’s views on Middle Eastern policy—might be trusted to keep Lord Curzon from interfering. Meinertzhagen, whose fervent and uncritical enthusiasm for Zionism was almost unique among British officers, could be trusted to reach out to the Jewish communities in Palestine and to represent their point of view forcefully. Churchill would soon add to this group Gertrude Bell, whose knowledge of Iraqi politics and personalities would be of great value. Although Lawrence had irritated Gertrude Bell with his newspaper campaign in favor of Feisal and his doubts about ibn Saud, they had been friends for too long not to patch up their differences. As for Young, he and Lawrence had long since made peace; and Lawrence was under the impression that he himself and Meinertzhagen were friends. Indeed, it may not have been until much later that Meinertzhagen began to revise his diaries to represent a very different view of “little Lawrence,” remarking that Churchill’s attitude “almost amounted to hero worship,” and that Lawrence was “a most remarkable man, with a most remarkable record, but as unscrupulous as he is dangerous. His meek schoolboy expression hides the cunning of a fox and the intriguing spirit of the East…. We all know that Lawrence is a humbug, though as able as a monkey. ” He was later to change his mind again; after Lawrence’s death, he wrote, “I cherish his memory. ” But whatever Meinertzhagen really thought of Lawrence, the two of them worked together well enough under Churchill.

Lawrence became a civil servant on February 18, 1920, at a salary of Ј1,600 a year—about $120,000 a year in today’s terms. He had asked for only Ј1,000, but Churchill dismissed this at once as too modest, and said, “We’ll make it Ј1,600,” enough to enable Lawrence to fund Kennington’s journey to the Middle East alone to do the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence had decided not to spend any of his salary on himself beyond the bare necessities, since he did not think it was right to accept money for trying to invent a solution to a problem he had helped to cause. Lawrence then sat down in a room at the Colonial Office, which he shared with Young, and on their first day together, they drew up the agenda for the meeting Churchill planned to hold in Cairo. “Talk of leaving things to the man on the spot,” Lawrence wrote; “we left nothing.”

As John Mack points out in A Prince of Our Disorder,it had always been Lawrence’s habit to work through older and more powerful figures, influencing them in the direction he wanted them to go, but remaining in their shadow and carefully not seeking any personal credit. He had worked that way with Hogarth, with Clayton, and with Allenby—it was only in the desert, with Feisal, that he had stepped hesitantly into the limelight himself, tempted by the opportunity he was offered to carry out in practice his own theories about warfare, and to test his own courage and endurance in the hardest conditions imaginable. Even there, when he was in Feisal’s presence he did his best to stay in the background, as the adviser and liaison officer, not the bold guerrilla leader, always careful to suggest by indirection, until eventually he and Feisal began to think as one, and each could predict what the other would say or do. He quickly achieved the same kind of relationship with Churchill.

Lawrence and Young not only drew up the agenda for Churchill’s meeting in Cairo, but so far as possible tried to provide both the questions and the answers, to ensure that there should be no surprises or disagreements. Lawrence’s recommendation to Churchill was succinct: “You must take risks, make a native king in Iraq, and hand over defence to the RAF instead of the Army.” Lawrence’s experience working in tandem with the air force in the desert had given him a good understanding of how a comparatively small number of aircraft could produce a disproportionate effect on relatively primitive tribal forces. He saw very clearly that the object should never be to invade or occupy territory with troops—a waste of time, manpower, and money against nomadic or seminomadic people—but to threaten punishment from the air and, only when necessary, carry it out. Relatively speaking, it was even humane; aircraft could drop leaflets on the rebellious natives warning that they would return to bomb a specific target the next day, and so long as there was someone on the ground who could read, women, children, herds, and flocks could be removed to safety. Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, KCB, KCMG, DSO, who had commanded the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East during the war, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO, the “founder of the Royal Air Force” and its first chief of the air staff, knew Lawrence, and were in sympathy with his ideas, as well as eager to prove that a few squadrons of aircraft could “police” a whole country. The result was that from its creation in 1921 to the end of the renewed British occupation during World War II, Iraq was a proving ground for Lawrence’s visionary ideas about air power; and for several decades the principal RAF base at Habbaniya, outside Baghdad, was one of the largest military airfields in the world. Lawrence had no trouble persuading Churchill of his views, and still less in suggesting who the “native king” of Iraq should be.

In his book about Lawrence, the military historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote: “Lawrence can bear comparison with … Napoleon in that vital faculty of generalship, the power of grasping instantly the picture of the ground and situation, of relating the one to the other. He generated too the same electric current of command.” While this is high praise, coming from such a distinguished critic of strategy, what Liddell Hart did not point out was that Lawrence’s genius for diplomacy and politics was, if anything, more striking. He anticipated by more than fifty years Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy,” using aircraft to fly from one leader to another throughout the Middle East in intensive bursts of negotiation and persuasion, restlessly pursuing consensus before second thoughts had time to sink in among his interlocutors. It was not just that he was a young man in a hurry—he was perhaps the first person to appreciate that speed, in diplomacy as in warfare, was a vital weapon, and that keeping up the pressure was the best way to produce agreement.

Lawrence worked in the Middle Eastern Department of the Colonial Office for just over a year, yet in that short time he not only managed to help create the borders of modern Iraq, and place his friend Feisal on its throne as its first king, but also managed to create a kingdom in all but name for Feisal’s brother Abdulla in what was then known as TransJordan and later became the Kingdom of Jordan. He tried and failed to make a negotiated peace between King Hussein and ibn Saud, and was instrumental in persuading the British to give a measure of independence to Egypt, while maintaining a British military presence strong enough to ensure British control of the Suez Canal until 1956.

The transformation of the warrior into the diplomat was immediate and successful, beyond even Churchill’s hopes. Lawrence even allowed himself to be described in his diplomatic credentials as “Our most trusted and well-beloved Thomas Edward Lawrence Esquire, Lieutenant-Colonel in Our Army, Companion of Our Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Companion of Our Distinguished Service Order,” exactly those honors he had refused to accept from King George V, who must have chuckled when he saw and signed the warrant. Lawrence dressed as a civilian during this period of his life in the Middle East, looking a bit ill at ease without a uniform or his robes, in a formal dark suit, often worn with dusty desert boots. In one famous photograph he is shown mounted on a camel in front of the Sphinx, looking a good deal more comfortable than Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell on either side of him. In most group photographs he seems anxious to get as far to the edge of the picture as possible. The curious thing is that even without the flowing robe, the headdress, and the gold dagger, and despite the fact that he is almost always the shortest person in the photograph, Lawrence’s face still attracts the eye instantly. There remains something commanding about the eyes and the thrust of the powerful jaw that contradicts the meek pose and the nondescript three-piece suit, with the trousers always a few inches too short.

The velocity of his movements throughout the Middle East is astonishing even today, particularly when one keeps in mind that air travel then involved sitting in the open cockpit of a biplane and landing on the RAF’s improvised, dusty air strips in the desert. A quick glance at Lawrence’s journey is revealing. On February 16, 1921, he had a further meeting with Feisal to discuss Iraq and Trans-Jordan. On February 18, he joined the Colonial Office, and together with Young drew up the agenda for the Cairo meeting. On March 2, he left for Egypt. On March 12 the meeting began there, at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. The next day Churchill sought the cabinet’s approval to offer the throne of Iraq to Feisal, on terms discussed between him and Lawrence. On March 24 Lawrence cabled Feisal to leave London for Mecca, “by the quickest possible route,” then left Cairo to meet with Abdulla in Amman. On March 9 he arrived in Jerusalem. On April 21 he flew to Cairo to meet Feisal, and by May 11 he was back in London. He spent the summer and autumn going back and forth on critical diplomatic missions to King Hussein in Jidda, to Abdulla in Amman, and to the imam of Yemen.

The first difficulty Lawrence faced was not so much Feisal’s initial reluctance to exchange his claim to the throne of Syria for that of Iraq—the latter had originally been promised to his brother Abdulla—although this was a factor, but Churchill’s need to have it appear that the people of Iraq had called Feisal to the throne. Churchill’s requirement was much harder to stage-manage, particularly given the doubts of Colonel Arnold Wilson, the stiff-necked acting chief political officer in Iraq, under whose orders the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 had been brutally repressed. Wilson remained skeptical about Feisal’s appeal to the Iraqis, and about the Hashemite family in general, and his skepticism was initially shared by Gertrude Bell. Lawrence quickly managed to convert Bell to his point of view—his cheery self-confidence usually brought that about. The problem of Wilson, a firm believer in the use of force and in the inability of the Arabs to govern an area like Iraq, was solved by knighting him, then replacing him with the more malleable Sir Percy Cox.

Gertrude Bell was assigned—among many other more important tasks, including persuading the initially reluctant Shiites and the Jews of Baghdad to accept a Sunni king—the job of devising a national flag, drawing up a code of court etiquette, and selecting a recognizable national anthem. (The last proved impossible, so the initial choice was the music of “God Save the King,” without the lyrics.) Deciding on Iraq’s borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a previous agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commercial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad.

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, and 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 Ј5,000 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 Ј100,000 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 hewas 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 because 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 lиse-majestй, 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 Arabiaby 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.

Lawrence arrived in Jidda at the end of July, only to discover that soon after his arrival Hussein had to break off the talks to return to Mecca and go on a pilgrimage. Lawrence used that period for an extended journey to visit the imam of Yemen, an even more difficult man to negotiate with. The imam had been, however reluctantly, on the Turkish side throughout the war, and now wished to extract the highest possible price for pledging his loyalty to Britain and promising not to attack the British port of Aden. Lawrence judged that Aden could probably defend itself, if necessary. He may be one of the few summer visitors to Aden—popularly believed to be the burial place of Cain and Abel—who found the place “attractive,” and he spent a good deal of time there, and on board ship working on his revisions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.He offered the imam a Ford motorcar as a gesture of peace, and wrote a long, detailed, thorough, and positive report on the commercial possibilities of Aden, which he foresaw as the thriving free port and banking center it later became. Reading Lawrence’s report on Aden to Sir John Shuckburgh in the Colonial Office, one is struck again by the breadth of his remarkable talents, and by his strong practical streak; he was not just a hero, a guerrilla leader, or a gifted strategist—he had a remarkable eye for the commercial development of what we would now call the third world. His report on Aden makes one aware of just how valuable he might have been as a senior official of the Colonial Office, had he been willing to stay there beyond the year that he promised Churchill. It also makes one regret that Lawrence did not accept Churchill’s offer to make him high commissioner of Egypt when that post fell vacant—he would have been very good at it, and both the British and the Egyptians would have benefited from his combination of tolerance and common sense.*

Lawrence took a steamer back to Jidda, where he resumed his negotiations with King Hussein on August 30, in an atmosphere of high domestic drama, since the king’s sons had formed a kind of committee to carry on the negotiations, and reported every night to the queen, who then lectured King Hussein about what he must do. Not surprisingly in these conditions, the king sulked and threatened to abdicate. Negotiations ground to a halt in mid-September, when Curzon cabled Lawrence to proceed as rapidly as possible to Jerusalem, since Abdulla was raising problems about staying on in Trans-Jordan.

Lawrence, depressed by the weeks of fruitless negotiations with Hussein in Jidda, and with the imam of Yemen, was reluctant to begin all over again with Abdulla; but after meeting with Sir Herbert Samuel for several days, he traveled on wearily from Jerusalem to Amman. He and Samuel had agreed that the best outcome for everybody would be for Abdulla to step down, and then for Trans-Jordan to be reintegrated with Palestine; but once Lawrence reached Amman he seems to have caught his second wind, and he became more optimistic about Trans-Jordan’s survival. With considerable difficulty, he persuaded Abdulla to stay put.

Lawrence was obliged to stay in Amman until mid-December, acting as Abdulla’s chief political officer; vigorously reforming the local police and the collection of taxes; and facilitating the lagging formation of the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion, Abdulla’s “native army,” which was under the command of Lawrence’s old friend Frederick Peake, “Peake Pasha,” of the Egyptian army’s Camel Corps. It may be that the presence of a friendly comrade in arms helped Lawrence to snap out of his depression. Peake remarked on Lawrence’s “depressed [and] incommunicative” state when he arrived in Amman, and thought he was “weighed down” with exhaustion and the disappointments of trying to create new states from the debris of the Ottoman Empire, but also noted that like many another war veteran he cheered up when he was with his old desert cronies. Lawrence took one look at Peake’s recruits and intervened at once to get them what they needed. “Peake cannot show his men in public till they are reasonably smart and till they have rifles,” he complained to the Colonial Office, with a trace of his old cheeky humor, “for in Trans-Jordan every man of military age carries a rifle as a mark of self-respect, and Peake’s, the so-called Military Force, is the only unarmed body of men in the country.”

Lawrence not only set up the political structure over which Abdulla would rule until his death and over which a great-grandson, Abdulla II, now rules, but chose his own successor, St. John Philby.As it turned out, this was an unusual but inspired choice. Lawrence and Philby had disagreed sharply over many things, since Philby was the closest adviser of ibn Saud and an outspoken opponent of King Hussein; but Philby was not just a gifted Arabist and a courageous explorer—he was also a skilled administrator and a forceful personality,whom Lawrence trusted to build solidly on the foundations he himself had laid in Amman. Philby, not normally an uncritical admirer of Lawrence’s, commented: “I leave all business to Lawrence …. He must carry on while he remains here, and I am well content to let him do so. He is excellent, and I am struck with admiration of his intensely practical, yet unbusinesslike, methods.” These “unbusinesslike” methods included destroying the passports of people Lawrence didn’t trust, as well as any files that he thought might be incriminating. Lawrence was a much better administrator than he is usually given credit for, although his methods were never those of a conventional bureaucrat.

In the meantime, Lawrence did his best to get Abdulla to persuade his father to sign the draft treaty; but sympathetic as Abdulla was to the need to do so, he could not sign in his father’s place. By the end of the year, Lawrence was back in London, with only a few months left of his service in the Colonial Office, and at a rather low ebb. He had exhausted most of his money on the gift to Janet Laurie and on commissioning illustrations for his book, and now felt that the text wasn’t yet good enough to print. He was tired, ill (possibly from a return of his malaria), and unwilling to move back into his rooms at All Souls. He toyed with the idea of setting up his own press, but without much conviction—by now, he did not have enough capital left to start a business on even a very modest scale. In his letters he refers to money he expected to receive that had not come in, and probably never would. This refers to the fact that his father’s younger sister Caroline Chapman, who had intended to leave a sum of Ј20,000 to her brother, with the intention that the money should be divided between his sons, died shortly after her brother, in 1920. Since Thomas Chapman had predeceased her, and she had not made any change in her will to provide for this—she was too ill to do so—the money went to his four daughters instead, a severe blow to Lawrence. He had no intention of continuing to serve at the Colonial Office, but if not that, then what?

This is perhaps the moment to put Lawrence’s achievements in the Middle East in perspective. Our current problems have made it fashionable to ask what Lawrence would have done or said about events there today, or to hold him responsible for what often seems to be a dangerous and ungovernable mess. In much the same spirit, Lawrence’s name is frequently evoked by generals and armchair strategists as the United States struggles to develop an effective strategy against terrorism and guerrilla warfare in the area—indeed whole books have been written about Lawrence either as the guiding spirit of insurgency or as the key to developing successful counterinsurgency tactics. Probably no comment on guerrilla warfare is more frequently quoted (often out of context) than: “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”*

Lawrence’s military reputation is remarkable, since he was both a successful guerrilla leader and a battlefield commander, a combination rarely encountered in warfare. Most people picture him as a man in flowing white robes on a camel, but he very quickly learned to incorporate armored cars and aircraft into his thinking, and he became an innovator in what we would now call combined operations.

His campaign to destroy the Turkish railway system south of Damascus also had the unintended effect of introducing the Arabs to the use of high explosives, a weapon hitherto unknown to them, and today’s improvised explosive device (IED), the roadside bomb, and the suicide bomber are all a part of Lawrence’s legacy. He understood better than anybody else in his generation the effect of surprise on the morale of an enemy—the explosion when it is least expected, placed by unseen hands where it will do the most harm, and its value in weakening the resolve of a much bigger and better-equipped army. This is a running fight of David against Goliath, with Goliath’s attention constantly distracted, so he is not only unable to give a knockout blow, but unable even to decide where to aim it.

Lawrence was not, of course, alone in destroying the hold of the Ottoman Empire over its Arab subjects; nor was he the sole architect of what replaced it. He could not have foreseen that the rise of Nazi Germany would change Jewish immigration to Palestine from a thorny issue for the British into an explosive humanitarian need, or that the discovery of vast deposits of oil would make some Arab regimes on the eastern periphery of the Middle East—Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates—fabulously rich, while leaving the more densely populated and more politically advanced states like Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon comparatively poor. Lawrence was conscious of the potential for oil, but during the 1920s Texas and California were still the world’s largest producers, and in the Middle East the biggest deposits were thought to be in Iraq and Persia, both of which were to a greater or lesser degree British client states. That ibn Saud would emerge not only as the preeminent national figure in the Middle East, but as the owner of its largest oil deposits, was not something Lawrence could have imagined in 1922.

As for Palestine, Lawrence, like Feisal, envisaged Jewish settlement there as taking place within an Arab framework. He did not doubt that the Jewish “national home” of the Balfour Declaration would one day become a Jewish state—Weizmann never made a secret of the Zionists’ ultimate ambition, though he carefully sugarcoated the pill when talking to Arab leaders—but Lawrence assumed, like many other people, that the Jews would make a useful commercial, industrial, and agricultural contribution as partners within a larger Arab world, and that Jewish nationhood would be a long time coming.

Although Lawrence is blamed by Arabs today for aggrandizing his role in the Arab Revolt, and for leaving the Arabs with two states created mainly to provide Abdulla and Feisal each with a throne, a larger Arab state was not within his power or his vision. He saw Abdulla and Feisal as stabilizing influences, and with some reason—the great-grandson of Abdulla still rules in Amman; and the grandson of Feisal reigned as the third king of Iraq until he and his family were murdered in a military coup in 1958 that ended the monarchy and brought the Ba’ath Party (and eventually Saddam Hussein) to power.

Lawrence’s ideas for the Middle East were, always, ahead of his time. On a map that he prepared in 1918 for the British government, he sketched in color his ideas about how to divide the Arab portions of the Ottoman Empire in order to respect the geographical, tribal, religious, and racial realities of the Middle East. It is, of course, an Anglocentric view, which respects British strategic needs and ignores the claims of the French but pays due attention to ethnic realities on the ground. On the other hand, Lawrence tackled head-on some of the problems that are still plaguing the region, like the claims of the Kurds for an independent nation, and the need to find a place for the Armenians. His plan for Syria made it a much larger state than it is today, spread in an arc from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and including Trans-Jordan, with, to its east, a smaller Iraq, and an independent Kurdistan. He created an Armenian state around Alexandretta, and a smaller Lebanon, recognizing the need for a separate state there to deal with a sophisticated and partly Maronite Christian population. Palestine, too, he carefully separated, in recognition of its special problems. His sketch takes into account the distinct differences between tribal areas and settled areas; between Sunni and Shiite Muslims; between Arabs and Levantines; between Kurds and Armenians—differences which the French and British governments preferred to ignore, and which still today are the cause of bloodshed, border disputes, and endless political strife. Rather than trying to create states by drawing straight lines on the map, he tried to create states or indigenous areas based on the religion or the racial and cultural identity of the people living there, and so far as possible to take into account geographical features and water resources. His concept was not perfect, but it looks a good deal more sensible than what emerged in 1921, or what exists today. It would have given Syria a piece of the Persian Gulf oil revenues, and allowed the Kurds to keep their own oil, thus spreading wealth around the Middle East, rather than putting most of it in the hands of the most politically backward and autocratic regimes in the area. As a piece of imaginative mapmaking it is a remarkable document, and by itself ought to be enough to dispel the popular image of Lawrence as a guerrilla leader with romantic and impractical ideas.

Lawrence was only thirty-three when he returned to Britain at the end of 1921, with only two months left of the year he had promised Churchill. He had won the approval of everyone, even Curzon; he had been instrumental in the creation of two Arab nations; and he had helped to secure Britain’s presence in the Middle East. He had accomplished more in a year than anybody, even Churchill, could have expected, and there is no doubt that a great career of some sort was his for the taking. He could, for that matter, have returned to Oxford—All Souls was used to celebrity fellows who maintained a separate and successful career in politics and government in the great world outside Oxford, and Lawrence’s friend Lionel Curtis was one of them. A life as a diplomat, an adviser to the government on the Middle East, an Oxford academic, and an author was open to Lawrence—not only open, but expected of him.

He had already made up his mind, however, to go in a very different direction, and take the steps that would put an end not just to “Colonel Lawrence” but to T. E. Lawrence himself.

As with a stage magician at the end of an amazing performance, his last and most remarkable trick would be to vanish from the stage as the curtain began to fall.

* This brings to mind Noл Coward’s famous remark after seeing David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia:“if Peter O’Toole had looked any prettier they would have had to call it Florence of Arabia!”

* This was a mixed blessing, as Lawrence would soon discover. in 1920, he was making use of the newspaper editors for his opinions about the Middle east, but very shortly,once he decided to step out of the limelight, they would be intruding into his life in pursuit of ever more sensational (and often inaccurate) stories about him.

* Storrs (the source of this quotation) got it slightly wrong. in fact, it read, “received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, K.C.B.—one Palestine, complete.” Samuel (by then in his nineties) was incensed when this chit, intended as a good-natured joke,was offered for sale at auction in New York, and went for $5,000. (tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete,New York: holt, 1999.)

* There is a good deal of dispute about whether Churchill actually made Lawrence this offer or not, since the post was not at Churchill’s disposal—egypt came under the Foreign office, not the Colonial office. But such a detail would not have prevented Churchill from suggesting the appointment to Lawrence in a moment of enthusiasm, and in any case the prime minister, Lloyd George, later made much the same suggestion. Both men, of course, may have made the offer secure in the knowledge that Lawrence would turn it down, but certainly neither of them would have been held back by the fact that it was Curzon’s toes they were stepping on.

*“Evolution of a Revolt,” T. E. Lawrence, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal.October, 1920, p. 8.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Solitary in the Ranks”