LAWRENCE FLEES FROM LONDON, AND FEISAL BECOMES KING IN BAGDAD
After the peace conference, and after Emir Feisal had returned to Damascus, Lawrence vanished. Many of his friends thought that he had returned to Arabia to resume the rôle of mystery man. But I doubted this, for when I had last talked to him in Paris I had asked him point-blank if he intended to go back to the East in order to help the Arabs build up their new state. His answer was most emphatically in the negative.
“I am not going to return for some years—perhaps never,” he said. “It would not be for the good of the Arabs for me to be there. As a matter of fact, I haven’t the remotest idea of what I will do. The war has so completely upset my life that it may take me several years to find myself. In the meantime I hope to discover a secluded corner somewhere in England, far from war, politics, and diplomacy, where I can read a bit of Greek without being interrupted.”
His attitude regarding return to the Near East seemed to me another indication of his far-sightedness. During their war of liberation, the Arabs had followed Lawrence partly because of his own personality but mainly because he offered them a substitute for Turkish oppression. He well knew that as soon as the excitement of war disappeared his power over them would diminish. What would have happened if he had returned to the Near East? What would have been the outcome if he had temporarily gained a position of political authority equivalent to the military position he had attained in Arabia? It is conceivable that, because of his tremendous influence over the Arabs during the war, he might at the outset have had a large following. But in a few months some one would have raised the cry, “Away with the infidel!” If he had returned to Damascus simply in the capacity of advisor to Feisal, that alone might have undermined the emir’s hold over his people. The Arabs are jealous, fickle, and suspicious, and they would have accused Feisal of being a mere puppet. If Lawrence had craved power he might conceivably have made himself an Arabian dictator by turning Moslem. But nothing could have been more remote from his mind. He had not led the Arabs to gratify personal ambition. His sole motive was to defeat the Germans and Turks, and at the same time to help his friends the Arabs win their freedom.
While the peace conference was still in session, many people said to me that young Lawrence was the person best equipped to represent Great Britain in the Near East and that he no doubt would return to Syria and Arabia in an official capacity. But Lawrence’s one ambition was to take off his uniform, drop out of political and military life, and return to his archæological studies.
I asked Nuri Pasha, one of the generals on Emir Feisal’s staff in Paris, how the Arabs intended to repay Colonel Lawrence for his great service to their country. He replied: “We have offered him everything we have, but he refuses to accept anything. But if he will consent, we wish to give him the exclusive archæological rights to all the buried cities of Arabia and Syria.”
Lawrence had other plans, however.
For months after the Peace Conference not even his most intimate friends knew what had become of him. Meanwhile I had returned to America and started a tour of the continent presenting the pictorial records of the Allied campaigns which Mr. Chase and I had prepared. But we were unexpectedly invited to appear for a season at Covent Garden Royal Opera-House, London, a thing we had never dreamed might occur, because our material had been obtained solely for America. Naturally one of the first things I endeavored to do upon arrival in England was to find Colonel Lawrence. I wanted to show him what Auda Abu Tayi and the rest of his Arabian knights looked like on the screen. Both at the War Office and the Foreign Office no one seemed to know what had become of him. He had apparently vanished into the blue just as he used to do in the desert. But a fortnight later I received a note from him. All it said was:
My dear Lowell Thomas:I saw your show last night. And thank God the lights were out!T. E. Lawrence.
My dear Lowell Thomas:
I saw your show last night. And thank God the lights were out!
T. E. Lawrence.
I discovered that this man, whom all London would have been delighted to honor, was living incognito in a modest furnished room in a side street over the Dover tube-station. Not even his landlady had any suspicion of his identity. But he could not long keep it a secret.
A few days later he came around and had tea with us. When he discovered that I was married and that my wife was with me, he seemed very much embarrassed and blushed all over. He implored me to return to America and to stop telling the public about his exploits. He said that if I stayed in London any longer life would not be worth living for him, because as a result of my production at Covent Garden he was being hounded night and day by autograph-fiends, reporters, magazine-editors, book-publishers, and representatives of the gentler sex whom he feared more than a Turkish army corps. He said that as a result of the two weeks I had been speaking in London he had received some twenty-eight proposals of marriage, and they were arriving on every mail, most of them via Oxford.
When he came to call I noticed that he had two books under his arm. One was a volume of Persian poems, and the other, judging by its title, was about the last book in the world that you would have expected this young man to be reading—this man who had been called the Uncrowned King of the Arabs, who had achieved what no sultan and no calif had been able to do in more than five hundred years, who had refused some of the highest honors at the disposition of the greatest governments of the world, who had been made an honorary descendant of the Prophet, and who will live in history as one of the most romantic and picturesque figures of all time. It was “The Diary of a Disappointed Man.”
But when Lawrence found out that there was little immediate prospect of my sailing for America, and when he discovered that he was being followed by an Italian countess who wore a wrist-watch on her ankle, he fled from London.
It was not long after this that Emir Feisal lost his throne in Syria, and there was a good deal of propaganda work being done by the French in order to encourage the British not to sponsor the Arab cause. So, despite the fact that he had gone into retirement and was trying to keep out of political affairs, Lawrence could not refrain from defending Feisal. Without appearing personally he began writing articles to the London papers, presenting the Arab side of the controversy. I will quote from one or two of them because they give one an idea of the versatility of this youth, who could wield a pen as ably as he could lead an army.
There is a feeling in England [wrote Lawrence] that the French occupation of Damascus and their expulsion of Feisal from the throne to which the grateful Syrians had elected him is, after all, a poor return for Feisal’s gifts to us during the war: and the idea of falling short of an oriental friend in generosity leaves an unpleasantness in our mouths. Feisal’s courage and statesmanship made the Mecca revolt spread beyond the Holy cities, until it became a very active help to the allies in Palestine. The Arab army, created in the field, grew from a mob of Bedouins into an organised and well equipped body of troops. They captured thirty-five thousand Turks, disabled as many more, took a hundred and fifty guns, and a hundred thousand square miles of Ottoman territory. This was great service in our extreme need, and we felt we owed the Arabs a reward: and to Feisal, their leader, we owed double, for the loyal way in which he had arranged the main Arab activity when and where Allenby directed.Yet we have really no competence in this matter to criticise the French. They have only followed in very humble fashion, in their sphere of Syria, the example we set them in Mesopotamia. England controls nine parts out of ten of the Arab world, and inevitably calls the tune to which the French must dance. If we follow an Arab policy, they must be Arab. If we fight the Arabs, they must fight the Arabs. It would show a lack of humour if we reproved them for a battle near Damascus, and the blotting out of the Syrian essay in self-government, while we were fighting battles near Bagdad, and trying to render the Mesopotamians incapable of self-government, by smashing every head that raised itself among them.Britain was having a turbulent time in Mesopotamia just when the French had ousted Feisal from Syria. Lawrence felt that there ought to be a way of putting Feisal’s talents to some use in Bagdad, and this article was his diplomatic way of introducing the plan which afterward was developed and adopted.A few weeks ago [continued Lawrence] the chief of our administration in Bagdad was asked to receive some Arab notables who wanted to urge their case for partial autonomy. He packed the delegation with some nominees of his own, and in replying, told them that it would be long before they were fit for responsibility. Brave words—but the burden of them has been heavy on the Manchester men this week at Hillah.These risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success; then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery aëroplanes, or gunboats. Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.We realise the burden the army in Mesopotamia is to the Imperial Exchequer, but we do not see as clearly the burden it is to Mesopotamia. It has to be fed, and all its animals have to be fed. The fighting forces are now eighty-three thousand strong, but the ration strength is three hundred thousand. There are three labourers to every soldier, to supply and serve him. One in ten of the souls in Mesopotamia to-day belongs to our army. The greenness of the country is being eaten up by them, and the process is not yet at its height. To be sure they demand that we double our existing garrison. As local resources are exhausted this increase of troops will increase the cost by more than arithmetical progression.These troops are just for police work to hold down the subjects of whom the House of Lords was told two weeks ago that they were longing for our continued presence in their country. No one can imagine what will be our state there if one of Mesopotamia’s three envious neighbours (all nursing plans against us) attacks us from outside, while there is still disloyalty within. Our communications are very bad, our defence positions all have both flanks in the air, and there seem to have been two incidents lately. We do not trust our troops as we did during the war.Then there are the military works. Great barracks and camps have had to be constructed, and hundreds of miles of military roads. Great bridges, to carry motor-lorries, exist in remote places, where the only local transport is by pack. The bridges are made of temporary materials, and their upkeep is enormous. They are useless to the civil Government, which yet has to take them over at a high valuation; and so the new State will begin its career with an enforced debt.
There is a feeling in England [wrote Lawrence] that the French occupation of Damascus and their expulsion of Feisal from the throne to which the grateful Syrians had elected him is, after all, a poor return for Feisal’s gifts to us during the war: and the idea of falling short of an oriental friend in generosity leaves an unpleasantness in our mouths. Feisal’s courage and statesmanship made the Mecca revolt spread beyond the Holy cities, until it became a very active help to the allies in Palestine. The Arab army, created in the field, grew from a mob of Bedouins into an organised and well equipped body of troops. They captured thirty-five thousand Turks, disabled as many more, took a hundred and fifty guns, and a hundred thousand square miles of Ottoman territory. This was great service in our extreme need, and we felt we owed the Arabs a reward: and to Feisal, their leader, we owed double, for the loyal way in which he had arranged the main Arab activity when and where Allenby directed.
Yet we have really no competence in this matter to criticise the French. They have only followed in very humble fashion, in their sphere of Syria, the example we set them in Mesopotamia. England controls nine parts out of ten of the Arab world, and inevitably calls the tune to which the French must dance. If we follow an Arab policy, they must be Arab. If we fight the Arabs, they must fight the Arabs. It would show a lack of humour if we reproved them for a battle near Damascus, and the blotting out of the Syrian essay in self-government, while we were fighting battles near Bagdad, and trying to render the Mesopotamians incapable of self-government, by smashing every head that raised itself among them.
Britain was having a turbulent time in Mesopotamia just when the French had ousted Feisal from Syria. Lawrence felt that there ought to be a way of putting Feisal’s talents to some use in Bagdad, and this article was his diplomatic way of introducing the plan which afterward was developed and adopted.
A few weeks ago [continued Lawrence] the chief of our administration in Bagdad was asked to receive some Arab notables who wanted to urge their case for partial autonomy. He packed the delegation with some nominees of his own, and in replying, told them that it would be long before they were fit for responsibility. Brave words—but the burden of them has been heavy on the Manchester men this week at Hillah.
These risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success; then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery aëroplanes, or gunboats. Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.
We realise the burden the army in Mesopotamia is to the Imperial Exchequer, but we do not see as clearly the burden it is to Mesopotamia. It has to be fed, and all its animals have to be fed. The fighting forces are now eighty-three thousand strong, but the ration strength is three hundred thousand. There are three labourers to every soldier, to supply and serve him. One in ten of the souls in Mesopotamia to-day belongs to our army. The greenness of the country is being eaten up by them, and the process is not yet at its height. To be sure they demand that we double our existing garrison. As local resources are exhausted this increase of troops will increase the cost by more than arithmetical progression.
These troops are just for police work to hold down the subjects of whom the House of Lords was told two weeks ago that they were longing for our continued presence in their country. No one can imagine what will be our state there if one of Mesopotamia’s three envious neighbours (all nursing plans against us) attacks us from outside, while there is still disloyalty within. Our communications are very bad, our defence positions all have both flanks in the air, and there seem to have been two incidents lately. We do not trust our troops as we did during the war.
Then there are the military works. Great barracks and camps have had to be constructed, and hundreds of miles of military roads. Great bridges, to carry motor-lorries, exist in remote places, where the only local transport is by pack. The bridges are made of temporary materials, and their upkeep is enormous. They are useless to the civil Government, which yet has to take them over at a high valuation; and so the new State will begin its career with an enforced debt.
Photograph: A PEASANT WOMAN OF SYRIA
Photograph: A PEASANT WOMAN OF SYRIA
Photograph: TYPES OF CITY HEAD-DRESS FOR WOMEN
Photograph: TYPES OF CITY HEAD-DRESS FOR WOMEN
Photograph: WHERE THE HOSTS OF ISRAEL ARE SAID TO HAVE TERMINATED THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA
Photograph: WHERE THE HOSTS OF ISRAEL ARE SAID TO HAVE TERMINATED THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA
English statesmen, from the Premier downwards, weep tears over the burden thrust on us in Mesopotamia. “If only we could raise a local army,” said Lord Curzon, “but they will not serve” (except against us, his lordship no doubt added to himself). “If only we could find Arabs qualified to fill executive posts.”In this dearth of local talent the parallel of Syria is illuminating. Feisal had no difficulty in raising troops, though he had great difficulty in paying them. However, the conditions were not the same, for he was arbitrarily deprived of his Customs’ revenue. Feisal had no difficulty in setting up an administration, in which the five leading spirits were all natives of Bagdad. It was not a very good administration, but in the East the people are less exigent than we are. Even in Athens Solon gave them not the best laws, but the best they would accept.The British in Mesopotamia cannot find one competent person, but I maintain that the history of the last few months has shown their political bankruptcy, and their opinion should not weigh with us at all. I know ten British officials with tried and honourable reputations in the Sudan, Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, each and all of whom could set up an Arab Government comparable to Feisal’s, in Bagdad, next month. It also would not be a perfect government, but it would be better than Feisal’s for he, poor man, to pull him down, was forbidden foreign advisers. The Mesopotamian effort would have the British Government behind it, and would be child’s play for a decent man to run, so long as he ran it like Cromer’s Egypt, not like the Egypt of the Protectorate. Cromer dominated Egypt, not because England gave him force, or because Egypt loved us, or for any outside reason, but because he was so good a man. England has stacks of first-class men. The last thing you need out there is a genius. What is required is a tearing up of what we have done, and beginning again on advisory lines. It is no good patching with the present system. “Concessions to local feeling” and such like rubbish are only weakness-concessions, incentives to more violence. We are big enough to admit a fault, and turn a new page, and we ought to do it with a hoot of joy, because it will save us a million pounds a week.
English statesmen, from the Premier downwards, weep tears over the burden thrust on us in Mesopotamia. “If only we could raise a local army,” said Lord Curzon, “but they will not serve” (except against us, his lordship no doubt added to himself). “If only we could find Arabs qualified to fill executive posts.”
In this dearth of local talent the parallel of Syria is illuminating. Feisal had no difficulty in raising troops, though he had great difficulty in paying them. However, the conditions were not the same, for he was arbitrarily deprived of his Customs’ revenue. Feisal had no difficulty in setting up an administration, in which the five leading spirits were all natives of Bagdad. It was not a very good administration, but in the East the people are less exigent than we are. Even in Athens Solon gave them not the best laws, but the best they would accept.
The British in Mesopotamia cannot find one competent person, but I maintain that the history of the last few months has shown their political bankruptcy, and their opinion should not weigh with us at all. I know ten British officials with tried and honourable reputations in the Sudan, Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, each and all of whom could set up an Arab Government comparable to Feisal’s, in Bagdad, next month. It also would not be a perfect government, but it would be better than Feisal’s for he, poor man, to pull him down, was forbidden foreign advisers. The Mesopotamian effort would have the British Government behind it, and would be child’s play for a decent man to run, so long as he ran it like Cromer’s Egypt, not like the Egypt of the Protectorate. Cromer dominated Egypt, not because England gave him force, or because Egypt loved us, or for any outside reason, but because he was so good a man. England has stacks of first-class men. The last thing you need out there is a genius. What is required is a tearing up of what we have done, and beginning again on advisory lines. It is no good patching with the present system. “Concessions to local feeling” and such like rubbish are only weakness-concessions, incentives to more violence. We are big enough to admit a fault, and turn a new page, and we ought to do it with a hoot of joy, because it will save us a million pounds a week.
When in Arabia I would occasionally draw Lawrence into conversation about the statesmen and leaders of the day. He invariably had something amusing to tell about each. It was from him that I first learned that Mr. Lloyd George employed a barber to visit No. 10 Downing Street daily to dress his famous head of hair.
On another occasion I asked him to tell me something about Lord Curzon, he replied: “In order to give you an idea what Lord Curzon is like I must explain to you his outlook on life. Lord Curzon divides all the inhabitants of this earth into two groups, the masses and the classes. The classes are Lord Curzon and the king. Everybody else belongs to the masses.”
So while we were still at Covent Garden Opera-House, when I heard a story about Lawrence and his first meeting with the aloof and pompous marquis, I recalled what the colonel had said to me about his lordship in Arabia.
Lawrence’s name was on every one’s lips at that time, and the anecdote is a good one whether true or not. I will recount it as told to me:
“Lord Curzon said to one of his satraps at the Foreign Office: ‘I say, who is this person, Lawrence? See that he is brought into our presence.’ Eventually another member of the cabinet unearthed the hero of Arabia and lured him to the Foreign Office. When ushered before the Great One, the latter waved his meek-looking and diminutive visitor into a chair and proceeded to deliver a lecture on the Near East to this young man who was an authority on the subject. Lawrence stood it as long as he could, and finally, unable to restrain himself longer, he said to the noble marquis: ‘But, my dear man, you don’t know what you are talking about!’”
Even while fighting in the desert Lawrence had foreseen the complications that were going to arise after the war was over; and, as noted before, in his advance on Damascus he was extremely anxious that Emir Feisal’s men should enter the city ahead of the British and French because he realized this would make it doubly difficult for the Allies to disregard their friends the Arabs when the tumult and shouting was over.
Lord Winterton, who was with the Arab forces during the fighting around Damascus, in an article in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” pays an eloquent tribute to Lawrence and tells us how he was always thinking far in advance of the problem of the moment.
“I am of the opinion,” writes the Earl, “that we owed much in those few days, before we finally effected a junction with the British, to the good generalship displayed by General Nuri, backed by L.’s advice and genius for thinking ahead of nine people out of ten.” Then in another place Lord Winterton adds: “He had no intention that the Arabs should take a back seat in the final destruction of the Turkish army. There were political as well as military considerations at stake, as the Arabs knew well, and L. was only playing on a highly keyed-up instrument. L. infected us all with his enthusiasm, and I began to feel, despite my temperamental dislike of adventurequaadventure, that it would be monstrous, if when the Turkish fox came to be broken up, the British got the body, head, and brush, and the Arabs, who had helped to hunt him for three and a half years, only got a bit of the pad. If we were in at the military death of Turkey, ‘Brer Fox,’ it would make it the more difficult to refuse the Arabs a big share of the results—spoils, if you will—of the victory.”
Photograph: A BRIGAND FROM JEBEL DRUZ
Photograph: A BRIGAND FROM JEBEL DRUZ
Photograph: LAWRENCE WOULD OCCASIONALLY DISGUISE HIMSELF AS A GIPSY WOMAN OF SYRIA
Photograph: LAWRENCE WOULD OCCASIONALLY DISGUISE HIMSELF AS A GIPSY WOMAN OF SYRIA
During his seven years’ wandering through the desert, dressing like an Arab, living with Arabs in their tents, observing their customs, talking to them in their own dialects, riding on his camel across a broad expanse of lonely country unbroken except by the long purple line of the horizon, lying down at night under a silent dome of stars, Thomas Edward Lawrence drank the cup of Arabian wisdom and absorbed the spirit of the nomad peoples. No Westerner ever acquired greater influence over an Oriental people. He had united the scattered tribes of Arabia and induced chieftains who had been bitter enemies for generations to forget their feuds and fight side by side for the same cause. From remote parts of Arabia swarthy sons of the desert had swarmed to his standard as if he had been a new prophet. Largely by reason of his genius, Feisal and his followers had freed Arabia from Turkish oppression. Lawrence had contributed new life and soul to the movement for Arabian independence. The far-reaching results of his spectacular and successful campaign were destined to play an important part in the final adjustment of Near Eastern affairs, and half-way measures made no more appeal to Colonel Lawrence in time of peace than in time of war.
In another of his communications to the press, when he was trying to mold public opinion in favor of the Arabs, we catch a further glimpse of his views.
“The Arabs rebelled against the Turks,” said Lawrence in a letter to “The Times,” “not because the Turk Government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own.
“Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitians have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit.”
But Colonel Lawrence has no illusions as to the capacity of the Arabs for organization and administration. He fully appreciates that these are not their strong points. But he has faith in them and believes they have a message to give the West.
“History is against the probability of the creation of an Arabic empire,” he once said to me in Arabia. “The Semitic mind does not lean toward system or organization. It is practically impossible to fuse the diverse elements among the Semites into a modern, closely knit state. On the other hand, the Semites have been more fertile in ideas than any other people. The Arabian movement has presented itself to me as the latest expression of the influence of the desert upon the settled peoples; the Semitic spirit has again exercised its influence over the Mediterranean basin. Emir Feisal is the last of the line of Semitic prophets. His campaign for Arabian independence, which made some five million converts among the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Near East, is by no means the least of those revelations by which the the Semites have so profoundly affected the Western world.
“The Semites are represented by very little art, architecture, philosophy. There have been few Jewish artists or philosophers. But we find an amazing fertility among the Semites in the creation of creeds and religions. Three of these creeds—Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism—have become great world movements. The broken fragments of countless other religions which have failed are found to-day on the fringes of the desert.
“The desert seems to produce only one idea, the universality of God. We who have gone out to discover the meaning of the desert have found only emptiness; nothing but sand, wind, soil, and empty space. The Bedouins leave behind them every extraneous comfort and go to live in the desert, in the very arms of starvation, that they may be free. The desert exacts a price for its secret. It makes the Bedouins entirely useless to their fellow-men. There has never been a Bedouin prophet. On the other hand, there has never been a Semitic prophet who has not, before preaching his message, gone into the desert and caught from the desert-dwellers a reflection of their belief. The idea of the absolute worthlessness of the present world is a pure desert conception at the root of every Semitic religion, which must be filtered through the screen of a non-nomad prophet before it can be accepted by settled peoples.”
With his exuberant imagination and his vista down the centuries, it was an easy matter for Lawrence to throw himself heart and soul into the Arabian movement. He remembered the time when the Arab Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean world, when its philosophers, poets, and scientists enriched the culture of Europe. “There are some people who have dreams at night and wake to find them all rot. There are others who have dreams in the daytime, and occasionally they come true,” he said to me one day in London. It is Lawrence’s conviction that the Arabs still have something to give the world, something that the world, particularly the materialistic Western world, sorely needs. It has been a fortunate thing for the Arabs that he had the genius to make his dreams come true.
I should like to use Lawrence’s own words in defining just what the Arabian movement means. “There is no reason to expect from the Arabian movement,” Lawrence told me, “any new development of law or economics. But Feisal has succeeded in restating forcibly the vital doctrine of the Semites, Other Worldliness; and his ideals will have a profound effect on the growing nationalist movements in Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Palestine, which are the present homes of Semitic political life.
“It is like watching the waves of the Atlantic coming in and breaking themselves against the cliffs of the west coast of Ireland. To look at them you would say the cliffs were made of iron, and the waves quite futile. But when you study a map you see that the whole coast is torn open by the wearing of the sea, and you realize that it is only a matter of time before there will cease to be an Irish question. In the same way the successive Semitic protests against the material world may seem simply so much waste effort, but some day the Semitic conviction of the other world may roll unchecked over the place where this world has been.
“I rank Feisal’s movements as one more protest against the utter uselessness of material things. I was only trying to help roll up the wave, which came to its crest and toppled over when we took Damascus. It was just rolling up the Arabs in a tremendous effort and joining the whole nation together in pursuit of an ideal object that had no practical shape or value. We were expressing our entire contempt for the material pursuits exalted by others, from money-making to making statues.”
Lawrence expresses the conviction that the Arabian movement is nothing more than a protest against outside interference. This time the protest has been directed against Turkey, but the next time it may be launched against France, Italy, Britain, or any Western nation that develops a tendency to be disregardful of another people’s deep-seated racial sentiments.
“When you can understand the point of view of another race, you are a civilized being,” once remarked Lawrence to me in the desert. “I think that England (out of sheer conceit, and not because of any inherent virtue in my countrymen) has been less guilty in its contacts than other nations. We do not wish other people to be like us, or to conform to our customs, because we regard imitation of ourselves as blasphemous.”
Later on, in Paris, Lawrence summed up for me the whole Near Eastern situation in a few words. He is of the opinion that France, in receiving the mandatory for Syria, is merely obtaining control of a temporary phase of the Arabian movement.
“The Hedjaz will be absorbed in a few years by an Arabian state to the north of it. Damascus has always been the center of Arabian self-determination, but Syria is a small country and too poor to look forward to a great agricultural or industrial future. It acts merely as a front door to Kurdistan, Armenia, and Mesopotamia. When Western enterprise restores Assyria and Babylonia to their former level of agricultural prosperity, and when advantage has been taken of the mineral wealth of Armenia and the cheap fuel of Mesopotamia, then the Arabian center will inevitably be transferred from Damascus eastward to Mosul, Bagdad, or some new capital. Mesopotamia has three times the irrigable area of Egypt. Egypt now has a population of more than thirteen millions, while there are only five millions in Mesopotamia. In the near future Mesopotamia will increase to forty millions, and Syria, which now has a population of three million five hundred thousand, will have perhaps five million. This is rather a bad outlook for Syria. But no matter where the center of Arabian gravity may shift, nothing can change the Arabian Desert and the ideals of its people.”
Despite Lawrence’s desire to live in retirement, with only his books for his companions, his countrymen would not listen to it. When Winston Churchill took up the cabinet post of colonial secretary, one of the first things he did was to force Lawrence to come and help the Government straighten out the Near East tangle. He appointed Lawrence adviser on Near Eastern affairs, and the latter reluctantly agreed to remain at the Colonial Office for just one year. During this time the Mesopotamian problem was solved along the lines that Lawrence had originally suggested, and Emir Feisal was called to Bagdad and made king of Iraq, the modern successor to the great Calif Harun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame. Thus Feisal, despite the fact that he had lost the throne of Syria, became the founder of a new Mesopotamian dynasty and the ruler of a far more important state.
THE SECRET OF LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS
Among the hundreds of questions that I have been asked about Colonel Lawrence by press and public in every part of the world, some of the most frequent have been: What was the secret of Lawrence’s success, and how could a Christian and a European gain such influence over fanatical Mohammedans? What reward has Lawrence received? Is he going to write a book? Where is he now, how does he earn his living, and what is going to become of him? What are his hobbies? Will he ever marry? Is he a normal human being and has he a sense of humor?
Photograph: “SHEREEF” LAWRENCE
Photograph: “SHEREEF” LAWRENCE
Photograph: A CAMEL CARAVAN IN THE WADI ARABIA
Photograph: A CAMEL CARAVAN IN THE WADI ARABIA
Of course there have been a host of factors that have contributed to his success, that gained him his influence, and that enabled him to win not only the respect of the Arabs but their admiration and their devotion as well. They respected him partly because, although a mere youth, he seemed to have more wisdom than their wise men. They admired him partly because of his personal prowess, his ability to outdo them at the things in which they excel, such as camel-riding and shooting, and also because of his courage and modesty. He usually led them in battle, and under fire he was courageous to a fault. Wounded a number of times, his injuries, fortunately, were never serious enough to keep him out of action. Often he was too far from a base to get medical attention, so that his wounds were obliged to heal themselves. The Arabs became devoted to him because he gained them victories and then tactfully gave all the credit to his companions. That he was a Christian they considered unfortunate, and they decided that it was an accident and in some mysterious way “the will of Allah,” but some of them regarded him as one sent from heaven by their Prophet to help free them from the Turks.
West and East fraternize politely, if rather inharmoniously, in the more accessible towns of Arabia and Syria, for the West has money to spend and the East is avaricious. But away in the desert and wild places it is otherwise. The nomads, whose ancestors have roamed the country for four thousand years and more, resist the inquisitive eyes and hungry notebooks of foreigners who are not proved friends. They still regard stray Europeans with hostile suspicion and as fair subjects for loot. But Lawrence’s minute knowledge of their intricate customs, and his apparent complete mastery of the Koran and complex Mohammedan law, caused them to regard him with a tolerance and respect which are exceedingly rare among the fanatical peoples of the Near East. And of course his knowledge of their customs and laws was of incalculable importance in enabling him to settle disputes between antagonistic factions.
To gain his ends it was necessary for Lawrence to be a consummate actor. He was obliged completely to submerge his European mode of living, even at the risk of winning the criticism and ridicule of his own countrymen, by appearing in cities like Cairo, where East and West meet, garbed as an Oriental. His critics scoffed and said that he did this merely to gain notoriety. But there was a far deeper reason. Lawrence knew that he was being watched constantly by shereefs, sheiks, and tribesmen, and he knew that they would regard it as a very great compliment to them if he went about, even among his own people, dressed in the costume of the desert.
During those first days which I had spent with Lawrence in Jerusalem he wore nothing but Bedouin garb. Nor did he ever appear to be aware of the curiosity excited by his costume in the streets of the Holy City, for he always gave one the impression that he was engrossed in his own thoughts hundreds of miles or hundreds of centuries away. And usually on the occasion when he visited Palestine and Egypt in Arab kit, he was obliged to go direct to Ramleh or Cairo from one of his expeditions across the desert. He was therefore obliged to turn up at headquarters just as he happened to be dressed for his work, without wasting the valuable days which would have been required for him to return all the way south to the base-camp at Akaba for a uniform, just to satisfy his critics.
When in the desert he never wore anything but Arab garb, nor could he have succeeded in the amazing way that he did had he offended the Arabs by wearing European costume. When off “in the blue” on his she-dromedary, it was not feasible for Lawrence to take a wardrobe along in his camel-bags. The speed with which he trekked obliged him to travel light. In fact, he usually carried nothing but a lump of unleavened bread, a bit of chocolate, his canteen, chlorine tablets, a tooth-brush, a rifle, revolver and ammunition, and his little volume of the satires of Aristophanes in the original.
The rifle which he carried through the whole campaign had a colorful history. Just one of the ordinary British Army variety, the Turks had captured it at the Dardanelles, and Enver Pasha had adorned it with a metal plate worked with gold and carrying the inscription, “To Feisal, with Enver’s regards.” Enver had given it to Emir Feisal early in 1916, before the outbreak of the Shereefian Revolution, in order to prove to Feisal that the Turks had already won the war. Later the Emir gave it to Lawrence, and the latter carried it on all his raids. For every Turk he killed he cut a notch, a big one for an officer and a little one for a soldier. The rifle is now in the possession of King George.
Occasionally when he went to Cairo or to Jerusalem to make a report to General Allenby, he wore the uniform of a British officer, but even after he had attained the rank of colonel he preferred the uniform of a second lieutenant, usually without insignia of any kind. I have seen him in the streets of Cairo without a belt and with unpolished boots—negligence next to high treason in the British army! To my knowledge he was the only British officer in the war who so completely disregarded all the little precisions and military formalities for which Tommy Atkins and his “hofficers” are world famous. Lawrence rarely saluted, and when he did it was simply with a wave of the hand, as though he were saying, “Hulloa, old man,” to a pal. He rarely saluted any one senior to him, although he always made it a point to acknowledge salutes from men in the ranks. As for military titles, he abhorred them, and from general to private he was known as plain “Lawrence.” Several times in the desert he told me how thoroughly he disliked the red tape of the army and said that as soon as the war was over he intended to go back to archæology.
He was no parlor conversationalist. Lawrence rarely said anything to any one unless it was necessary to give instructions or ask advice or answer a direct question. Even in the heat of the Arabian campaign he sought solitude. Frequently I found him in his tent reading an archæological quarterly when the rest of the camp was worked up to fever-pitch over a plan of attack. He was so shy that when General Sir Gilbert Clayton, the distinguished commander of the Secret Corps, or some other officer sought to compliment him on one of his exploits, he would get red as a school-girl and look down at his feet.
Several years ago, in Calcutta, Colonel Robert Lorraine, the eminent actor-airman, said to me, “But if Lawrence is so extremely modest and shy, why did he pose for so many photographs for you?” A keen question and a natural one. And out of justice to Lawrence I think I ought to answer it, even at the expense of disclosing a professional secret. My cameraman, Mr. Chase, uses a high-speed camera. We saw considerable of Colonel Lawrence in Arabia, and although he arranged for us to get both “still” and motion pictures of Emir Feisal, Auda Abu Tayi, and the other Arab leaders, he would turn away when he saw the lens pointing in his direction. We got more pictures of the back of his kuffieh than of his face. But after much strategy and after using all the artifices that I had learned as a reporter on a Chicago newspaper, where it was worth one’s job to fail to bring back a photograph of the fair lady involved in the latest scandal, I finally manœuvered Lawrence into allowing Chase to take a “sitting shot” on two different occasions. Then while I kept Colonel Lawrence’s attention away from Mr. Chase by keeping up a rapid fire of questions regarding our projected trip to the “lost city” of Petra, which he believed to be the primary object of our visit to Arabia, Mr. Chase hurriedly took a dozen pictures from as many different angles, and in less time than it usually requires for a fussy studio photographer to set up and expose two plates. Any one familiar with the methods of newspaper photographers will appreciate the simplicity of this where you are working out of doors in good light. If you’ve got a graphlex and don’t get stricken with buck-fever at the critical moment, you can get photographs of St. Vitus himself. I realized that Lawrence was one of the most romantic figures of the war. I knew that we had a great scoop. And I had made up my mind that we would not leave Arabia until we had the photographs we wanted. Frequently Chase snapped pictures of the colonel without his knowledge, or just at the instant that he turned and found himself facing the lens and discovered our perfidy. When two experienced hunters start out for game, one to act as decoy and the other to do the shooting, the poor victim has about as much chance as the Bengal tiger who has been selected as the target for visiting royalty.
But to get back to the topic of how Lawrence succeeded in obtaining such a wonderful hold over the Arabs by dressing like them and mastering the smallest details of their daily life, by his courage, his modesty, his physical prowess and his mature wisdom, there can hardly be any question that the way in which this youth gained the confidence, not only of the more cosmopolitan descendants of the Prophet who rule over the cities of Holy Arabia, but also of the Bedouin tribes of the desert, will be regarded by historians of the future as one of the most amazing personal achievements of this age.
The phenomenal character of his accomplishment can be more accurately appraised if we keep in mind that for thirteen hundred years, since the days of Mohammed, fewer Europeans have explored Holy Arabia than have penetrated mysterious Tibet or Central Africa. The zealous Mohammedans who live around the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina prevent Christians, Jews, and other non-Mohammedans from profaning holy soil, and the unbeliever who ventures into this part of Arabia is indeed lucky if he returns alive. So Lawrence’s achievements seem all the more extraordinary when we remember that he admitted openly that he was a Christian. For even though he did wear the robes and accoutrements of a shereef of Mecca, he only actually posed as an Oriental when he slipped through the Turkish lines wearing the veil of a native woman.
Of course the vast wealth which he had at his disposal, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gold sovereigns with which he paid his army, was of vast importance. But though the Germans and Turks also tried using gold, their weakness lay in the fact that they “had no Lawrence,” declares H. St. John Philby, the Arabian authority, who represented Britain in the Central Arabian Desert ruled over by Ibn Sa’ud.
Colonel Lawrence played the part of a man of mystery endowed with the ability to do everything superlatively well, outvying the Arabs at everything from statecraft to camel-riding, and even to using delicate shadings of their own language. In fact, language seems easy for him. In addition to his mother-tongue, he speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and German, some Dutch, Norwegian, and Hindustani, is a master of ancient Latin and Greek, and can manipulate many of the Arabic dialects of the Near East.
Lawrence was exceedingly careful never to enter into competition with the Bedouins unless he was quite certain of excelling them. He also gained a reputation as a man of deeds rather than words, which greatly impressed the desert-dwellers, who for the most part chatter as incessantly as the crows of India. When he did speak he had something of importance to say and knew whereof he spoke. He seldom made errors, and when he did he took care that the Arabs should ultimately regard it as a success. He was an indefatigable worker even under conditions of ever-insistent hospitality, and he would work far into the night when his Arab colleagues were asleep. It was late at night, or while trekking across the desert swaying in the camel-saddle, that he would plan his far-reaching policies of diplomacy and strategy. Small and wiry, he seemed made of steel. But the desert war left its indelible mark on him in more ways than one, for one of his brothers confided to me that ever since his return from Arabia he has suffered from severe heart-strain.
Auda Abu Tayi, always sincere in his judgment of people, once said to me: “I have never seen any one with such a capacity for work, and he is one of the finest camel-riders that ever trekked across the desert.” A Bedouin can pay no finer compliment. Then added Auda, “By the beard of the Prophet, he seems more than a man!”
THE ART OF HANDLING ARABS
Colonel Lawrence believed in the Arabs, and the Arabs believed in him, but they would never have trusted him so implicitly had he not been such a complete master of their customs and all the superficial external features of Arabian life. I once asked him, when we were trekking across the desert, what he considered the best way of dealing with the wild nomad peoples of this part of the world. My motive was to try to get him to tell in his own words something about the methods that had enabled him to accomplish what no other man could. I am confident that he thought I wanted the information merely for my own immediate use in dealing with the Bedouins with whom we were living. Had he suspected that I was attempting to make him talk about himself, he would have turned the conversation into other channels.
“The handling of Arabs might be termed an art, not a science, with many exceptions and no obvious rules,” was his answer. “The Arab forms his judgment on externals that we ignore, and so it is vitally important that a stranger should watch every movement he makes and every word he says during his first weeks of association with a tribe. Nowhere in the world is it so difficult to atone for a bad start as with the Bedouins. However, if you once succeed in reaching the inner circle of a tribe and actually gain their confidence, you can do pretty much as you please with them and at the same time do many things yourself that would have caused them to regard you as an outcast had you been too forward at the start. The beginning and end of the secret of handling Arabs is an unremitting study of them. Always keep on your guard; never speak an unnecessary word; watch yourself and your companions constantly; hear all that passes; search out what is going on beneath the surface; read the characters of Arabs; discover their tastes and weaknesses, and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles; have no ideas and no interests except the work in hand, so that you master your part thoroughly enough to avoid any of the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your success will be in proportion to your mental effort.”
To illustrate the importance the Bedouins place on externals, Lawrence told me that on one occasion a British officer went up country; and the first night, as the guest of a Howeitat sheik, he sat down on the guest rug of honor with his feet stretched out in front of him instead of tucked under him in Arab fashion. That officer was never popular with the Howeitat. To the Bedouin it is as offensive to display the pedal extremities ostentatiously as it would be for us to put our feet on the table at a dinner-party. A short distance behind us in the caravan rode a chief of the Shammar Arabs who had a great scar across his face. Lawrence related this story:
“While that fellow was dining with Ibn Rashid, the ruler of North Central Arabia, he happened to choke. He felt so much humiliated that he jerked out his knife and slit his mouth right up to the carotid artery in his cheek, merely to show his host that a bit of meat had actually stuck in his back teeth.”
The Arabs consider it a sign of very bad breeding for a man to choke over his food. Not only does it show that he is greedy, but it is believed that the devil has caught him. Other fine points of etiquette are bound up in the fact that the Bedouins never use forks and knives, but simply reach into the various dishes on the table with their hands. For instance, it is extremely bad form for any one to eat with his left hand.
The dyed-in-the-wool nomad of Arabia never makes allowances for any ignorance of desert customs in forming his judgment of a stranger. If you have not mastered desert etiquette, you are regarded as an alien and perhaps hostile outsider. Lawrence’s understanding of the Arabs and his unfailing ability to do the right thing at the right moment was uncanny. Of course, he could not have lived as an Arab in Arabia if he had not learned the family history of all the prominent peoples of the desert, including the complete list of their friends and enemies. He was expected to know that a certain man’s father had been hanged or that his mother was the divorced wife of some famous chieftain. It would be as awkward to inquire about an Arab’s father if he had been a famous fighter as it would be to introduce a divorced woman to her former husband. If Lawrence desired any information he gained it by indirect means and by cleverly leading the conversation around to the subject in which he was interested; he never asked questions. Fortunately for the Arab Nationalist movement and for the Allies, Lawrence had got beyond the stage of making mistakes before the war and at one time was actually a sheik of a tribe in Mesopotamia.
“It is vitally important for any one dealing with the desert peoples to speak their local dialects, not the Arabic current in some other part of the East,” declared Lawrence. “The safest plan is to be rather formal at first, to avoid getting too deeply involved in conversation.” Nearly all the officers sent to coöperate with the Arabs in the revolt spoke the Egyptian-Arabic dialect. The Arabs despise the Egyptians, whom they regard as poor relations Therefore, most of the Europeans sent by the Allies to coöperate with the Hedjaz people found themselves coldly treated. The Allies succeeded in winning the Arabs to their cause because Lawrence was able to crystallize the Arabian idea of winning independence from the Turks into a definite form and because he had attained the unusual distinction of being taken into the bosom of most of their tribes.
It was Colonel Lawrence who was mainly responsible for the permanent elevation of Hussein, Feisal, and Abdullah to their respective thrones. Lawrence believed that the best way to consolidate the desert peoples and wipe out their terrible blood-feuds would be to create an Arabian aristocracy. Nothing of this kind had ever existed in Arabia before, because the nomads of the Near East are the freest people on earth and refuse to recognize any authority higher than themselves. But all Arabs have for centuries accorded a little extra respect to the direct descendants of the founder of their religion. Lawrence, in his attempt to persuade the Arabs to recognize shereefs as specially chosen people, cleverly took advantage of the fact that the family tree of Hussein towered higher, in fact, than a eucalyptus—right up to the Prophet himself. But I am sure he would never have been able to accomplish this if he had not received the unlimited financial support of the British Government. A stream of several hundred thousand pounds in glittering golden sovereigns was poured into Arabia each month to enable the young archæologist to pay King Hussein’s Arabian army. Lawrence had practically unlimited credit. He could draw any amount he desired up to a million pounds or so. But gold alone would not have sufficed, for the Turks and Germans had tried its lure and failed. The Arabs hated the Turks even more than they loved gold.
Since the beginning of time the sheiks or patriarchs of one tribe have had absolutely no influence with members of other tribes. Shereefs, who really do not belong to any tribe, were recognized as superior leaders only by the people of Mecca, Medina, and the larger towns. The word “shereef” or “shrf,” as it is spelled in Arabic (a language without vowels), signified “honor.” A shereef is supposed to be a man who displays honor. In the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Shereef Hussein and Shereef Feisal had long stood high in the esteem of the inhabitants, who were accustomed to refer to them as “Sidi” or “Lord.” The care-free Bedouins, unlike their city cousins, merely addressed them as “Hussein” and “Feisal” without bothering about titles. But Lawrence, with his usual powers of persuasion, convinced even the Bedouins that they should adopt the term “Sidi” in referring to all shereefs. So successful was he that within a few months, in spite of the fact that he was a foreigner and a Christian, they honored even Lawrence with this title because of their deep and genuine admiration for him.
Lieutenant Colonel C. E. Vickery, C.M.G., D.S.O., etc., another able officer of the regular army who played a prominent part in the campaign and afterward acted as British agent at Jeddah, gives us a vivid glimpse into the formality of a shereef’s daily life. Colonel Vickery is one of the few Europeans who have ever visited Taif, the summer capital of the Hedjaz, a city that is not nearly so sacred as Mecca or Medina, but nevertheless a place about which the outside world knows nothing.
“It was quite dark when we arrived, very cold and stiff,” relates Colonel Vickery. “We were asked into the guest-chamber—a fine apartment, its floors covered with priceless Persian carpets, and round the walls cushions and pillows. Courteously our host turned to us and, embracing us on each cheek, prayed Allah to bless us and murmured the graceful compliment that we were now in our own home. For an hour we sat in that room drinking coffee and highly sugared tea and smoking, while we watched an Eastern scene that centuries have not changed. The shereef had only been absent a day, but such is the etiquette of the East that it behooved all to pay their respects to him on his safe return from a journey. To the threshold of the door from time to time came relatives, friends, and slaves. All removed their slippers and entered the room—the door was open—according to their station. The slaves came in quickly bent with due humility, and hastily kissed the two fingers extended to them and as hastily withdrew. Dependents entered more leisurely and kissed the back of the shereef’s hand. Turning it over, they then kissed the part between the first finger and thumb and withdrew quietly.
“Friends came in, and for these the shereef rose, showed a faint reluctance at having his hand kissed, and embraced them on one cheek with murmured salutations. For his relatives he rose, allowed his hand to be kissed with seeming reluctance, and then saluted them warmly on each cheek, straining them to his breast and murmuring many and heartfelt wishes for their long life and happiness.”
The special deference paid to shereefs by the townsmen and villagers, in particular, had long ago developed in the city Arabs a sense of their own superior responsibility and honor. That, of course, was of great assistance to Lawrence in creating his Arabian aristocracy. In fact, it was by the sagacious use of this personal responsibility that Lawrence and his associates were able to unify the rival tribes and develop men capable of acting as subordinate leaders under King Hussein, Prince Feisal, and his brothers. In order to carry out his plans for widening the influence of the shereefs and making Hussein the recognized ruler of the Hedjaz, Lawrence had first to win the confidence of all the rival tribes. Then, quietly, in such a manner as to make them think the idea entirely their own, he induced them to forget past tribal differences and unite under the leadership of Hussein and his sons and the other shereefs, in order to drive out the hated Turk in the hope of helping bring the war to a victorious conclusion for the Allies, and in the hope of restoring the califate and the former splendor of their ancient empire.
King Hussein had to rely entirely on tribal loyalty for his military strength. His personal Bedouin following was drawn principally from two of the most numerous tribes of the desert, the Harb and the Ateibah, together with one tribe of inferior rank, the Juheinah. These three tribes occupy a great block of territory embracing three quarters of the Hedjaz and a strip of western Nejd. South and west of this block, but within the limits of the Hedjaz, dwell half a dozen small tribes, the Hudheil, Beni, Saad, Buqum, Muteir, Thaqif, and Juhadlah. Still further south is a group of powerful tribes, the Dhaur, Hasan, Ghamid, Zahran, and Shahran, whose adhesion meant the favorable disposal of stouter fighting material than the Hedjaz itself could supply. All of them sent contingents to assist King Hussein. From the country north of the central group he drew reinforcements from three of the smaller Anazeh tribes. The Billi, immediately north of the Juheinah, enrolled to a man, and they were followed by the Atiyah and Howeitat. The great Howeitat tribe, which roams the country between the head of the Gulf of Akaba and the lower end of the Dead Sea and Central Arabia, has more enemies, causes more trouble, and takes part in more blood-feuds than any other group of tent-dwellers. One can meet no more obstinate, unruly, and quarrelsome people. They seem to have no fear. The Howeitats find it impossible to unite even among themselves when attacked from without. About the only thing they possess in common are wounds and the same tribal marks on their camels. This great tribe has two subdivisions, the Ibn Jazi and the Abu Tayi, of which old Auda Abu Tayi, the Bedouin Robin Hood, is the chieftain. But Auda is chieftain only by virtue of his daring and prowess, for no man in that spirited group cares to bow down before the authority of any sheik. For fifteen years the two sections of the Howeitat waged relentless war upon each other until the mild-voiced Shereef Lawrence succeeded in getting them both to unite with Hussein and Feisal to drive out the Turks. But even then Lawrence found it advisable to keep the two sections attached to different parts of his army so that they could not leap at each other’s throats. Both were willing to obey Lawrence’s orders so long as they were kept apart, but in the event of their meeting they regarded themselves in honor bound to start a row. Auda Abu Tayi and his people consider the Druses, who wage the most merciless war in the desert, among their most bitter blood-enemies, and Lawrence more than had his hands full to prevent them from killing each other instead of the Turks. In 1912, fifty of Auda’s fighting men, mounted on camels, captured eighty Druse cavalrymen in battle. This is striking evidence of the fighting ability of the Howeitat warriors, because one horseman is usually worth two camelmen in a fight, because of the fact a horse can be manœuvered so much more rapidly. Since that engagement the Druses have been continually on the alert, hoping to take the Howeitat by surprise and annihilate them. In spite of these minor insurgencies, the Howeitat, under Auda’s leadership, became the finest fighting force in Western Arabia, regarded by Colonel Lawrence as the backbone of his wild desert army.
Perhaps train-wrecking was Lawrence’s most spectacular pastime, but nothing he did was more significant or remarkable than this consolidation of the Arab tribes. With them, raiding hostile neighbors was both their amusement and their business. To invite two enemy chieftans into Emir Feisal’s tent to swear friendship and loyalty over the ghosts of stolen horses and camels was like asking a Wall Street Magnate to turn over his fortune to Communists.
In order to illustrate the delicacy of the problem that Lawrence manipulated, let me cite a particular instance. In June, 1917, we were attending a conference in the courtyard of Emir Feisal’s palace at Akaba, a one-story structure resembling, with its extensive interior courtyard, a Spanish hacienda. The palace is situated in the little town back of a fringe of waving palm-trees, the only green splash of color in this stretch of sand, where once was located the great seaport of King Solomon. In a circle around the emir were seated thirty shereefs and sheiks, all heads of prominent tribes, and among them six sheiks of the Ibn Jazi Howeitat. All of a sudden I saw a swift change come over the unusually impassive countenance of the young Englishman. Jumping to his feet, Lawrence slipped noiselessly to the doorway of the courtyard. I saw him speak to a group of Arabs who were about to enter and then lead them off in another direction. Later, when I asked him the reason for his speedy exit, he informed me that the warriors at the entrance were none other than the renowned Auda, his cousin, Mohammed, and some of the other leading fighting men of the Abu Tayi. He added that if Auda and his companions had come on through into the palace courtyard, a bloody battle might have been fought right in front of Emir Feisal, possibly resulting in the total disruption of the Arabian forces.