A dreamer of the day…

# 57

   I have been reading ‘HERO. The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia’ by Michael Korda[1]. This engrossing biography describes how, ninety six winters ago, T.E. Lawrence - then a twenty-eight year old temporary 2^nd lieutenant and acting staff captain on the British army’s Cairo intelligence staff - went into Arabia in search of a leader for a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The person he was seeking turned out to be himself. The burden of responsibility for the successes and failures of that leadership led to the lowly anonymity he sought after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference had failed to deliver on the promises previously made by the British to their Arab allies.

 

Lawrence with Feisal at the Paris Peace Conference. Lawrence, in uniform but wearing an Arab headdress stands in front of Feisal’s Sudanese slave & bodyguard.

   Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, falling for once, as it should, on November 11^th. Known to our grandparents’ generation as ‘Armistice Day’, the date was fixed long ago to commemorate the cease-fire on the Western Front in 1918 – at the 11^th hour, on the 11^th day of the 11^th month. As weeks go, this has not been an unusual one in the Middle East. Turkish troops are massing on their south-eastern border, the British prime minister has been touring the Arab Gulf States desperate to flog them expensive military hardware. Total sectarian gridlock has persisted in Iraq and the blood-letting of Syria’s civil war has continued unabated. The forces opposing the evil regime of Bashar al-Assad have met in Dohar and been pounded into some kind of interim unity by the Americans, the Saudis and others from the Arab League. Oh yes, and the Israeli prime minister has been disappointed not to see the incumbent US President deposed.

   It is one of the impenetrable ‘Ifs’ of history to speculate as to how different the Middle East might be today if Lawrence had been able to secure those wartime promises of independent Arab states. Different it certainly would have been, if only because Lawrence – unlike the generals and politicians who drew the maps for the eventual ‘peace settlement’ - was aware of the religious, cultural and ethnic divergences which have persisted within the region from that day to this. According to Korda, Lawrence also proposed joint Arab-Jewish governance of Palestine and opposed the kingship of Ibn Saud. Now there’s foresight!

 Lawrence photographed by Harry Chase at Aqaba, 1918

   Back in 1914, confronted by war with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the British began a web of mutually contradictory diplomatic agreements, treaties, declarations and ‘understandings’. These can be seen as either a series of colossal blunders or standard political gambits to ensnare and manipulate potential allies, regardless of the future consequences. Given Britain’s dire Imperial record, the contradictions were more probably the result of freelancing, stupidity, opportunism, poor communications and chauvinism than of any clever conspiracies or flawed 'master plan'.

   At that time, the British military and political leadership in Egypt was primarily concerned with the defence of the Suez Canal. That meant pushing the Turks – then dug-in between Gaza and Beersheba – as far north, and away from Sinai, as possible. A revolt by the Arabs of the Hejaz would tie down large numbers of Turkish troops and protect the right flank of the British advance. The Raj, on the other hand, operating from India and ruling over the single largest Muslim population in the world, feared that “Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same.”[2] Unsurprisingly, throughout the war, Delhi was likely to be pursuing policies in Mesopotamia completely contrary to those espoused by the Arab Bureau in Cairo.

   As a result of McMahon’s exchange of letters with Sharif Hussein in 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British gave conflicting undertakings to the Arabs, to the French and to the Jews. They had, in short, promised more in the Middle East than they, or anyone else, could deliver. Based on his understanding of what had been offered, Lawrence prepared a map showing Syria as a huge arc from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and including what is now Jordan. He showed a smaller Iraq and an independent Kurdistan. He drew an Armenian state around Alexandretta [Iskenderun] and shaded-in a smaller Lebanon as a sop to the French.

Lawrence’s plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire prepared by him for the War Cabinet, October 1918.

   At Paris in 1919, the British abandoned the Arabs and made a territorial deal with the French. Syria, then as now, was far too complicated for outsiders to resolve. None of the parties could even agree where ‘Syria’ began or ended. There were nomadic Bedouin to accommodate alongside city dwellers in Damascus and Jerusalem and the settled farmers and villagers of Palestine. And not everyone was a mainstream Muslim. There were Shia Muslims at odds with Sunnis. There were Druses, Circassians, Jews, Armenians and Kurds. The Christians were divided between Maronites, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics. Then there were the Algerians who had fled to the Levant from France’s colonial wars in Algeria. Down south, in the Hejaz, there were no cities equivalent to Jerusalem, Beirut, Aleppo, Homs, Hama or Damascus. Lawrence was optimistic that the Arabs and Jews might work together to develop Palestine but he would be dead before the exploitation of oil on the eastern periphery of Arabia made the least populated and most politically backward communities into the richest and most powerful. Oil was found in Iraq and all down the coast of the Persian Gulf, but not on the Mediterranean side, thereby ensuring that the more populous and more politically evolved territories like Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria have remained relatively poor.

   Korda mentions how Lawrence is frequently ‘credited’ with the invention of IEDs, roadside bombs and even suicide bombers. One of the stated aims of this biography is “to dispel the popular image of Lawrence as a guerrilla leader with romantic and impractical ideas.” But anecdotes, many of them humorous, and incidental details are not overlooked. After the war, Lawrence refused to accept any honours, titles or decorations; even those offered by King George V himself. As he explained to an earlier biographer, Robert Graves, Lawrence told the king “that the part he had played in the Arab Revolt was, to his judgement, 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 honours for succeeding in this fraud.”[3] It seems that Lawrence promptly unpinned each decoration and handed it back as soon as the king had pinned it on him.

 

 1918: Lawrence’s Rolls-Royce armoured car [the Blue Mist] rolls into Damascus

   In 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading British Jew was appointed High Commissioner in Palestine. Winston Churchill came to visit him in Jerusalem and Lawrence took both men on a sight-seeing trip to Petra. Surrounded by a crowd of cheering Arabs, Churchill waved happily and asked Lawrence to translate what the men were chanting. “Death to the Jews,” answered Lawrence, quietly.

   George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte befriended Lawrence and Korda mentions that Michael Holroyd (Shaw’s biographer) believed GBS made use of Lawrence’s androgynous character and his irregular military career when writing Saint Joan. Both Lawrence and Jeanne d’Arc were small, homeless figures, “elected by the zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” Korda remarks that GBS had a way of blending advice with abuse and quotes from one of Shaw’s letters to Lawrence; “Like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions… It is useless to protest that Lawrence is not your real name. That will not save you.”[4]

   In 1922, Lawrence attempted to enlist in the RAF under the assumed name of ‘John Hume Ross’. Even though he had prepared the ground by arrangement with the Chief of the Air Staff, Viscount Trenchard, when Lawrence arrived at the recruiting office, neither the Sergeant nor the interviewing officer liked the look of him. They were very suspicious that he had no copy of his birth certificate nor any reference from a previous employer. Deciding that he was most likely a criminal on the run from the law, they quickly showed him the door. The interviewing officer – it turns out - was none other than Flying Officer W.E. Johns who went on to write ninety-eight adventure stories about “Biggles”, a fictional RAF pilot hero

   Korda describes very fully how the war left Lawrence feeling stained. “In essence this was the feeling that would motivate him throughout the rest of his life: the belief not just that he had failed the Arabs by not getting them the state and the independence they had fought for, but that he was rendered, by what he had done, seen, and experienced, permanently unclean, unfit for the society of decent people, a kind of moral leper.”[5] As Lawrence wrote in his own story, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “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 remake in the likeness of the former world they knew….We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”[6]

   Korda acknowledges that no one has described his own genius better than Lawrence did himself and, after 699 pages, the book supplies Lawrence’s own words as his epitaph:

“…but the dreamers of the day are

dangerous men, for they may act their dream

with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw

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[1] Hero – The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Michael Korda. Aurum Press Ltd., London 2012.

[2] Op cit. page 256

[3] Op cit. page 448

[4] Op cit page 573.

[5] Op cit. page 435

[6] As quoted by Korda, op cit. page 462.