Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (37 page)

Until early October 1914 Lawrence labored to complete the maps and illustrations for The Wilderness of Zin. He and Woolley had both made efforts to join the army, and Woolley, who was a good deal taller than Lawrence, eventually succeeded in getting a commission in the Royal Artillery and was sent to France, leaving Lawrence to finish the book. Newcombe, and no doubt the always well-informed Hogarth, advised Lawrence to be patient—when Turkey joined the war he would surely be needed in Cairo—and once The Wilderness of Zin was done, Hogarth found him a post in the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS). This cannot have been difficult—the department was run by Colonel Hedley, a member of the committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who was well aware of Lawrence’s gifts as a surveyor and mapmaker, and was also eager to have him, since most of the officers serving in the GSGS had been sent to France. Lawrence was taken on as a civilian, and his casual manners and even more casual clothes did not endear him to officers working in the War Office. Hedley, who valued Lawrence’s intelligence and skills, does not seem to have minded, but not everybody else was pleased to see a diminutive figure with an unruly shock of long blond hair, looking very much like an Oxford undergraduate, walking around the War Office in a position of some importance. Nor did Lawrence try to help matters by assuming an attitude of respect which he did not feel for senior officers, or by curbing his strong and unorthodox opinions. He was at once disheveled, opinionated, and cocky—not a combination of qualities likely to appeal to brass hats. It may be true that when Hogarth asked Hedley if Lawrence was being helpful, three weeks after his arrival at the War Office, Hedley replied, “He’s running my entire department for me now,” but not everyone was as happy about this as Hedley. When Hedley sent Lawrence off with some maps for General Sir Henry Rawlinson, GCB, GSI, GCVO, KCMG, who was the commander of the British IV Corps in France and another protégé of Kitchener’s, Rawlinson “nearly had a fit,” and sent him back to Hedley, saying, “I want to talk to an officer.” Hedley was a professional soldier himself, and could read the writing on the wall; and, like Hogarth, he knew his way around. He put Lawrence’s name in for a commission as a “Temp. 2nd Lieut.-Interpreter,” which he received almost immediately, and which was gazetted in the Army List for November-December 1914. (Hedley, knowing all about Lawrence’s time at Carchemish and the Sinai, probably assumed that Lawrence’s Arabic would shortly prove more useful than his skill in drawing up maps.)

In later years, Lawrence, who loved to tell a good story, used to tell people that he had never been commissioned at all, that following Rawlinson’s rebuke, he simply went out to the Army-Navy store at lunchtimeand bought himself an off-the-rack uniform; but his army file makes it clear that he was commissioned on October 23, 1914, and that there was nothing irregular about this except the haste with which Hedley managed to bring it about. No doubt with a little more time Hedley could have managed to get Lawrence a higher rank, but his main objective was to get him into uniform quickly so he could keep on doing Hedley’s donkey work in the GSGS. The only unusual aspect of Lawrence’s commission beyond the speed with which it was obtained was that he underwent neither a physical examination nor any training. That he bought his uniform ready made at the Army-Navy store may be true, however, if we judge by photographs of him in uniform.

With Lawrence’s exquisite gift for timing, he received his commission just a week before the Allied Powers declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Not only did Hedley recommend him “as an officer ideally suited for intelligence work in Egypt,” but so did almost everybody else. Lawrence’s abilities as a linguist and a surveyor, together with his travels through Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Turkey, made it certain that he would be sent to Cairo, where a new, larger, and more cosmopolitan intelligence staff was being swiftly assembled. Lawrence’s companions on the Sinai survey, Newcombe and Woolley, were brought back from France, and a group of “Middle East experts” was picked to man the new department; it included Ronald Storrs, Oriental secretary of the British Agency in Cairo and a disciple of Kitchener, with whom Lawrence would make his first trip to Jidda; Colonel Gilbert Clayton, an experienced intelligence officer with close ties to Sir Reginald Wingate in Khartoum; Aubrey Herbert, a member of Parliament well known for his sympathy with and knowledge of the Ottoman Empire; George Lloyd, another member of Parliament with great experience of the Middle East; and Lawrence himself.

This rather extraordinary brain trust would eventually be joined by the ubiquitous Hogarth, and by Gertrude Bell. The British taste for last-minute improvisation—always contrasted with the grim efficiency of the Germans—is in part contradicted by the formation of the Intelligence Department of General Headquarters, Cairo, which, though improvised, was made up of strong-willed and independent thinkers, with very different backgrounds and experience, each of them in his or her own way brilliant and well-informed, and—except for Clayton, who would become their indispensable leader—none of them a professional soldier. It is doubtful that the German army could have put together such a colorful and opinionated group of civilians to run its intelligence department, or would have paid any attention to them if it had.

Such diversity was unlikely to produce unanimity, nor was it expected to. Herbert and Lloyd were both Turcophiles of long standing, and while everybody wanted to defeat Turkey now that it had joined the Central Powers, there was less agreement on how to replace it. Voltaire wrote of God, S’il n’existait pas, il fallait l’inventer (“If He did not exist, we should have to invent Him”). Similarly, if the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, it would have to be reinvented—a daunting prospect, which would entail resolving the competing ambitions in the Middle East of Britain, France, and Russia, and at the same time attempting to satisfy the mutually hostile aspirations of Arabs (both Shiite and Sunni), Kurds, Armenians, Maronite Christians, Jews (both Orthodox and Zionist), and many others, all of them for the moment living, however unhappily, under Turkish rule. This vast and backward area was at once the strategically vital link between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the birthplace of three of the world’s great monotheistic religions; and Mesopotamia was already recognized as one of the world’s largest reserves of petroleum, just as the navies of the great powers, led by Britain, were converting from coal to oil.

Storrs would later describe the intelligence group in a little poem, with his usual urbane wit, as:

Clayton stability,
Symes versatility,
Cornwallis is practical,
Dawnay syntactical,

Mackintosh havers,

And Fielding palavers,

Macindoe easy,

And Wordie not breezy:

Lawrence licentiate to dream and to dare

And Yours Very Faithfully, bon à tout faire.

It was not instantly apparent that Lawrence’s role would be “to dream and to dare,” and he may not have even realized it himself yet. He was, in fact, despite his eagerness to get back to the Middle East now that he was in uniform at last, delayed for weeks in London. The “general officer commanding” (GOC) in Egypt had wired the War Office for a map of the roads of the Sinai, which it didn’t have, so Lawrence was put to the task of converting and expanding The Wilderness of Zin into a military document. He belittled his own work, and joked that he had to make up or invent much of it and that he would hate to be sent into a battle using his own maps, but it was finally done by the end of November. He complained that he had now written the same book twice, both times without pay—and on December 9 he and Newcombe finally took the train for Marseille, and from there sailed to Egypt.

He was preceded by a message from the director of military operations in the War Office to the GOC in Egypt, General Sir John Maxwell, introducing him as: “a youngster, 2nd Lt. Lawrence who has wandered about in the Sinai Peninsula, and who came in here to help in the Map Branch.” Not every second-lieutenant is posted overseas with an introduction from one general to another, but even at this early stage of the war, with only one pip on his sleeve, Lawrence was being treated as someone of unusual importance.

Before leaving London, Lawrence had written to his brother Will, who was still in India, advising him to do nothing in a hurry—apparently in recognition of the fact that it was going to be a longer war than Will supposed—and mysteriously warning him, “Keep your eye on Afghanistan.” Now, from Cairo, he wrote again to Will to say that he had beenthere for six weeks, “in the office from morning to night,” trying to make sense of the news that was brought to him from all over the Ottoman Empire, and preparing “geographical essays” for general headquarters (GHQ). To the family he wrote quite a jolly letter, first to express gratitude for their sending his bicycle out to Cairo, then giving his somewhat outspoken opinions about his new colleagues, as well as revealing that he sees “a good deal” of General Maxwell, the GOC, whom he describes as “a very queer person, almost weirdly good-natured, very cheerful…. He takes the whole job as a splendid joke,” an odd description of the general in command of the entire Middle East. Of the two members of Parliament, he describes Lloyd as “very amusing,” and Herbert as “a joke, but a very nice one.” He mentions a few more odd additions to the staff, including Père Jaussen, an Arabic-speaking French Dominican monk from Jerusalem; and Philip Graves, the correspondent for the Times of London. Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had lent Lawrence the money at Petra, had just arrived “on her usual winter trip to Egypt,” and invited him to dinner. In general it sounds as if Lawrence was having a very much jollier and more sociable life in Cairo than at home. The letter reads as if censorship of officers’ mail was not yet being exercised efficiently, or perhaps the Intelligence Department had some way to get around it. What Lawrence did not mention to his family was his remarkably quick jump up the promotion ladder: he had been appointed an acting staff captain less than three months after he had been commissioned as a second-lieutenant.

Lawrence’s dislike for Egypt, Cairo, and the Egyptians had not diminished, even though he seems to have settled in very fast this time. All members of the intelligence staff were quartered together at the Continental Hotel (at ten shillings a day) with a direct line to GHQ, at the Savoy Hotel, and Lawrence bicycled over to his job every morning. His army pay was £400 a year, so he was well off in Cairo. He saw General Maxwell frequently—the commander in chief does not appear to have been in any way a remote figure—but Lawrence’s opinions were already his own: “So far as Syria is concerned it is France & not Turkey that is theenemy,” he wrote home. This idea was to form the basis for much of what he did in 1917–1918, but it was far from British policy.

Indeed, British policy in the Middle East was hampered from the beginning both by France’s historic claim to Lebanon and Syria, the origins of which went back to the time of the Crusades and included French support for the Maronite Christians of Lebanon; and by the fact that the British government in London and the government of India in Delhi had radically different ideas about the Middle East. Kitchener had always looked to the Arabs with the thought that given British support they might one day form a dominion or a colony under British rule, creating a British “block” or area that would stretch from the western border of Egypt through much of what is now Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, and extending south in Africa to include Sudan, which he himself had conquered, and of course the Suez Canal, which would then be protected by British possessions, rather than exposed at the extreme western end. To achieve this, it would be necessary to stoke the fires of Arab nationalism and separatism, which in the view of most people burned so low as to be invisible, since “the Arabs” scarcely even recognized themselves as such, and remained divided by region, by tribe, by clan, by religious differences, and by mutual enmity. The gap between the urbanized Arabs of Beirut or Damascus and the nomads of the Arabian Desert was so great as to seem unbridgeable, and the Turks had skillfully played one group against the other for centuries.

From the vantage point of the government in India a very different view prevailed. First of all, the largest single Muslim population in the world was in India, under British rule. Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same. Worse still, the sultan of Turkey, impotent figurehead though he had now become, was caliph, the commander of the faithful, the successor of Muhammad, the spiritual leader of all Muslims everywhere, and the only person entitled to proclaim a jihad, or holy war, against the infidel. The last thing the government of India wanted on its doorstep was an Arab holy war. Moreover, the government of India, ifobliged to fight the Turks, wanted to do so in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and had in mind for it a full colonial government—in short, rule from Delhi. Properly farmed, it was believed, Mesopotamia could produce grain to help India through its periodic famines, and could be policed by the Indian army. Indeed, within days of the British declaration of war against Turkey the Indian Army Expeditionary Force (which had been at sea for nearly three weeks, waiting for news of the declaration) had landed to ensure the safety of British oil installations in the Persian Gulf. Shortly afterward this force took the city of Basra, where Sir Percy Cox was installed as chief political officer, and announced that all of Mesopotamia was now under the British flag and would henceforth enjoy “the benefits of liberty and justice,” but not of course those of national independence.