The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (41 page)

His father was an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Sir Thomas Chapman. But after having sired four daughters with his wife, Chapman ran away with the nursemaid and had five sons (Lawrence was the second), adopting the
nursemaid's last name as his own but never marrying her. He also never divorced his first wife, who became Lady Chapman when he inherited the baronetcy. Lawrence knew nothing of this until he was a teenager; before that, he grew up in an apparently conventional, even pious, Protestant Christian household of evangelical stripe.
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His father, far from being a rogue, appeared a mild-mannered man dominated by his wife.

“Ned” (as the young T. E. Lawrence was known) was simultaneously practical (he liked knowing how things worked), literary (especially in an historical and aesthetic way), and imaginative (including embellishing the truth to make a better story—such as claiming Napoleon's birthday as his own, though he was born a day earlier). With his schoolmates he was cheerfully aloof. He relished friendship, but only on terms where he felt he could maintain his independence and integrity. He was impudent and flippant, but sensitive to his own amour-propre. Though not a sportsman, he developed a wiry, muscular physique. He consciously trained himself to be capable of performing knightly deeds, in part by pushing his body to its limits with marathon bike rides, often taken to visit castles or churches (to make brass rubbings). He was thoroughly immersed in medieval tales of chivalry and martial valor. A tad rebellious, Lawrence ran away at age seventeen and enlisted in the Royal Artillery before his father found him and got him out. A life in the ranks was no life for the son of Sir Thomas Chapman; he must go to Oxford.

So he did, but he was no collegiate roisterer. He lived alone in a cottage in his parents' garden; he neither drank nor smoked; he ate sparingly and was, as he was to remain, chaste.
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He studied medieval armaments and fortifications and chivalric literature; he joined the Oxford University Officer Training Corps as well as a rifle club and became an expert marksman with a pistol; he also became a protégé of the archaeologist (and future intelligence officer) David Hogarth, who was himself a dedicated British imperialist. Hogarth encouraged Lawrence to read books on modern military
strategy and study Arabia, and helped him arrange a trip to Syria, which Lawrence undertook for his thesis on crusader castles.

Lawrence graduated with a first-class degree in 1910. Hogarth then hired him for an archeological dig in Carchemish, Syria, which had a military intelligence purpose: to observe progress on the construction of a German-Ottoman (Berlin to Baghdad) railway. Lawrence worked on the site until the First World War.
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During this time he perfected his knowledge of Arabic, learned to pass for an Arab (dressing as one when he went exploring), and was regarded as a good manager of the Arab workmen. These talents came in handy when, in 1914, he became a British intelligence officer, an enthusiastic player of “the Great Game”—albeit in a different theatre from the Northwest Frontier, and with a different enemy.

It was a game of jihads. Through its Turkish ally, Germany tried to instigate a jihad against the British Empire, which counted millions of Muslim subjects. The British, however, had already made diplomatic overtures to
Ibn Ali Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, who not only refused to announce a jihad against the British, but was eager to gain their support for an Arab revolt against the Turks.

He had an ally in T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence's aim, at least initially, was not to serve Arab nationalism (which didn't exist outside the minds of theoreticians) but to bring the Arabs under British influence. If in doing so he betrayed the interests of the Arabs he helped lead, Lawrence replied, “I risked the fraud, on the conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we break our word and win than lose.”
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In 1916, Lawrence was sent briefly to Mesopotamia, where, among other tasks, he was charged with assessing the prospects of an Iraqi Arab revolt against the Turks. The Indian Foreign Office thought Mesopotamia did not have the makings of an independent state. Lawrence was inclined to agree: “I have been looking... for Pan-Arab party at Basra. It is about 12 strong,” he reported.
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He was glad to return to Cairo because for him the real action was in the Hejaz, the coastal strip of Arabia that faces the Red Sea and encloses Mecca and Medina. This was the base of Sherif Hussein, who by June 1916 was in open rebellion against the Turks.

In October 1916, the bumptious but brilliant Captain Lawrence—who could both charm and appall with his flippancy, his sense of superiority, and his disdain for military protocol and uniform (he was invariably dressed in the wrong kit, even before he took on Arabian robes)—left for the Hejaz. Abdullah ibn Hussein, one of Sherif Hussein's sons, was taken by the elfin Englishman. Lawrence was less impressed, thinking Abdullah too fleshy and lazy and untrustworthy, and too eager to rely on British troops, to be the hero he wanted to lead the Arab revolt. He met two other sons of Sherif Hussein, Ali (the eldest, dismissed by Lawrence as a physically feeble religious fanatic) and Zeid (the youngest: callow, unsuitable, raised in a Turkish harem), before he met Feisal whom he knew “at first glance . . . was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab revolt to full glory.”
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Feisal also had the advantage of knowing English, though he was not fluent; and Feisal's family, the Hashemites, had the advantage of descent from Mohammed. Lawrence became the British liaison officer to Feisal.

The glue that held the Arab revolt together was English bribery. Some, like Feisal, were devoted; the British officers were dutiful; but many of the Arabs came for English gold and fought for no cause more elevated than pleasure and plunder. Their morale was boosted by the Royal Navy, which
could support them from the Red Sea, and when the Arabs were on the march, Lawrence recorded, it “was rather splendid and barbaric.”
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Lawrence was, by now—and at Feisal's request—dressed in Arabian clothes, and it is easy to imagine how this medievalist “romantic Tory” (as one of his biographers described him)
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could feel he had drawn the “tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house.”
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Cardinal Newman described Toryism as loyalty to individuals and institutions—and that was the defining drama of Lawrence's life as an officer. He was loyal to his country and its empire, but he was also Feisal's political and military adviser. Feisal recognized Lawrence's devotion to him and his cause, admiring “his patience, discretion, zeal and his putting the common good before his own personal interest.” “Such honesty, such faithfulness,” thought Feisal, “are found in but few individuals.”
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Lawrence did not see an inherent conflict between British and Arabian interests, and neither did Feisal, who believed in British protection. Both were resolute against French ambitions in Syria and Lebanon
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—yet the indulgence of such ambitions was precisely what had been secretly agreed to in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. When Lawrence became aware of Sykes-Picot is uncertain; what is certain is that it put him in a difficult position with Feisal. He was not, however, alone in
his opposition to Sykes-Picot. Lord Curzon, for one, became an open opponent of the agreement after it was revealed by the Bolsheviks; and whether and how it might be fulfilled would become a matter of contention at the postwar peace conference at Versailles, where Lawrence continued to act as Feisal's adviser and advocate.

Of course, the war had to be won first, and it was the forces of the British Empire (Australians in the forefront) led by British General Edmund Allenby, a Lawrence ally, who routed the Ottoman Turks. The British, however, were eager, for political reasons, to give much of the credit to the Arabs, among whom Lawrence had become renowned for his wisdom, courage, and skill at train-wrecking (it helped his reputation that the Turks put a pretty price on his head). It was Lawrence and Allenby who kept the Arab revolt together when it looked as though it might collapse in 1918 because of a contretemps between Feisal and his father.

Indeed, putting aside Sykes-Picot, the British had every imperial interest to advance the Arab cause on Lawrence's well-founded grounds that the Arabs preferred British oversight to French colonial control. In June 1918, the British government made this manifest, announcing that His Majesty's Government would recognize the independence of all areas “liberated from Turkish rule by the Arabs themselves.”
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Lawrence pretended the Arabs had liberated Damascus when in fact it had been done by Australian General Sir Henry Chauvel; the pretence was politically expedient because it put the French on the diplomatic defensive against Hashemite claims on Syria.

When the war ended, Lawrence lobbied for scrapping Sykes-Picot. In its place he proposed his own plan, which limited French claims to Lebanon, carved out a larger sphere for the British, and gave Syria to Feisal and Mesopotamia to Abdullah and Zeid under British protection. In Palestine, Lawrence believed there was no inevitable conflict between Zionist and Arab aspirations—indeed, he supported both—and he won Feisal's support
for the Balfour Declaration. Feisal agreed to Jewish emigration into Palestine provided that Palestine remain under British control and that the Zionists offer financial support to his Arab state in Syria.

Lawrence turned down decorations from King George V, because of what he felt Britain owed the Arabs. The Arabs, however, were less certain of this than Lawrence was, because there was no unified Arab front; in fact, the Hashemites were fighting the forces of Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, another Arab loyal to Britain, and one with his own extraordinary British adviser, Harry St. John Philby. Philby and the British India Office believed Ibn Saud was the great power on the Arabian Peninsula, not the Hashemites—and in due course they would be proved right.

It was finally resolved, in 1920, that the French should indeed have Syria and Lebanon, and the British Palestine and Mesopotamia. Winston Churchill (secretary of state for war and soon to become colonial secretary) persuaded Lawrence to join him as a special adviser to help clean up the postwar mess. Part of this was done by air power, as Lawrence and Churchill were enthusiasts for using the RAF to police and tame the turbulent tribes of Iraq (Lawrence had warned about a “Wahhabi-like Moslem form of Bolshevism”
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developing there). Part of it was political, as Churchill and Lawrence pushed to have Feisal installed as the monarch of Mesopotamia, his consolation prize for having lost Syria, and to carve out a new state, Transjordan, as a consolation prize for his brother Abdullah. Lawrence and Churchill managed to pull this off, with Lawrence shoring up Abdullah's regime when it looked like it might collapse (today's King Abdullah II of Jordan owes his position to Lawrence of Arabia). They could not, however, reach an accord with Sherif Hussein, who was too stubborn, greedy, and mercurial. Without Britain's protection he was ousted from the Hejaz by the forces of Ibn Saud in 1924 and became an exile in Transjordan. Lawrence left the Colonial Office in 1922, reasonably pleased with what he and Churchill had achieved, writing how he “must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.”
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He predicted, “There'll be no more serious trouble for at least seven years,” which, in those territories for which Britain was responsible, proved broadly true.
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In 1935 he wrote to Robert Graves, “How well the Middle East has done: it, more than any part of the world, has gained from the war.”
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