Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (78 page)

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 £5,000 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 £100,000 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
he
was 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 lèse-majesté, 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 Arabia
by 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 £20,000 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?