Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (102 page)

As it turned out, the brutal carving up of the Turkish empire was complicated by the fact that the great oil reserves were in the most backward areas, on the eastern fringe of the Middle East. These would have the effect of transforming remote desert “kingdoms” and “principalities” into oil-rich powers, while leaving the more highly developed, better educated, and more populous parts of the area—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon—impoverished. British and French policy (as strongly as each differed from the other) ensured that there would be no unitary Arab state as a major power in which oil revenues might be used to improve the lives of ordinary Arabs, and thwarted just those ambitions which Lawrence had been at such pains to arouse, and which led Lowell Thomas, with his usual touch of hyperbole, to describe Lawrence as “the George Washington of a United States of Arabia.” Alas, after the Peace Conference, and the creation of Jordan and Iraq, Lawrence—knowing that he had done his best for the Arabs and that it was not good enough, and broken by shame and guilt at his own failure—resigned from public life and signed up as an airman, and the United States of Arabia was never born, with consequences that we are still facing today.

There is, therefore, every reason to examine objectively and clearly what Lawrence attempted to do, and to treat him not as an interesting neurotic with profound oedipal problems (though this may be true), but as both a visionary and a warrior; as a man who not only wrote an epic but lived one; and as a politician and diplomat, indeed a maker of nations, whose failure to get the Arabs what they had been promised had profound consequences for the world today, consequences that have not been played out yet, and whose outcome nobody can predict.

Few people have risen so high so quickly, or have voluntarily given up not only honors but power, and done so without regret or bitterness. Fewer still have been so famous and tried so hard to live obscurely. Lawrence found in the end peace of a kind in friendships, in literature, and in an unexpected gift for marine craftsmanship and engineering which has seldom been fully acknowledged, but to which many airmen in World War II would owe their lives.

However many books there have been about Lawrence, his is still a story worth telling, a life that needs to be described without prejudice and without a fixed agenda: a military “triumph,” as he himself called it with a combination of pride, bitterness, and irony; an extraordinary and heroic epic; and a political failure whose importance we can only begin to reckon today as we pick among the ruins of Lawrence’s hopes for the Middle East in search of a way forward.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence himself described his own genius best.

All men dream: but not equally.

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their

Minds wake in the day to find that it was

vanity; but the dreamers of the day are

dangerous men, for they may act their dream

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

*
Perhaps the most popular film the author’s Uncle Alex and his father ever made was
That Hamilton Woman,
starring Laurence olivier as Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady hamilton. Winston Churchill screened it innumerable times (it never failed to move him to tears), and took a print to Moscow as a gift to Stalin. As a result it was the only British film seen during World War ii by Soviet audiences, and extended Nelson’s heroic reputation to russia.

*
Leslie howard, whose original name was Leslie howard Steiner, was the son of an english-Jewish mother, Lillian Blumberg, and a hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner.

*
Although Mack’s book on Lawrence is in many respects fascinating—he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for it in 1977—it suffered retroactively from his subsequent notoriety as a believer in and proselytizer for the personal stories of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have returned to tell the tale.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE
“Who Is This Extraordinary Pip-Squeak?”

5
“a most excellent dinner”:
Lawrence, Letters, Garnett (ed.), 206.

6
“an odd gnome”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia,
174.

6
“Who is this extraordinary pip-squeak?”
: Aldington,
Lawrence of Arabia, 127.

8
“Into friendship with T. E. Lawrence”:
Storrs,
Orientations, 218.

8
“The first of us was Ronald Storrs”:
Lawrence,
Seven Pillars, 37.
Hereafter abbreviated SP.

9
“revolverpractice on deck”:
Storrs,
Orientations,
200.

9
“quite intolerable to the Staff”:
Lawrence, SP, 43.

9
“But when at last we anchored”:
Ibid., 47.

10
“Till now we have defended”:
Brown and Cave,
Touch of Genius, 55.

11
“Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

11
“a holiday and a joy-ride”:
Lawrence, SP, 43.

12
“like water, or permeating oil”:
Ibid., 37.

13
“incoherent and spasmodic”:
Storrs,
Orientations, 218.

13
“None of us realized”:
Ibid.

14
“a yellow silk kuffiya”:
Ibid., 201.

15
“When Abdallah quoted”:
Ibid., 221.

15
“was short, strong”:
Lawrence, SP, 48, 49.

17
“Meeting today: Wilson”:
Storrs,
Orientations, 221.

18
“took a great fancy”:
Lawrence, SP, 59. 18 “force of character”: Ibid.

18
“prophet”:
Ibid., 60.

18 ”
staggered”:
Ibid., 59.

18
“waving grateful hands”:
Storrs,
Orientations, 221.

22 Zeid, still a “beardless” young man: Lawrence, SP, 60.

25
“shelters of branches and palm leaves”:
Ibid., 64.

26
“two inches thick”:
Ibid., 68.

28
“dinner to the examiners to celebrate it”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 67.

28
“astonishingly wide”:
Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 75.

28
“schoolboy stuff”:
Ibid., 128.

30
“a garrulous old man”:
Lawrence, SP, 70.

30
“had been beaten out of Kheif”:
Ibid.

32
“standing framed between the posts”:
Ibid., 75.

32
“almost regal in appearance”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 312.

33
“Ifelt at the glance”:
Lawrence, SP, 75-76. 33 “which were twisting slowly”: Ibid., 76.

33
“And do you like our place”:
Ibid.

33
“like a sword into their midst”:
Ibid.

36
“a desperate measure”:
Ibid., 77.

37
“if their villages were spared”:
Ibid., 78.

38
“They hunger… for desolate lands”:
Ibid.

39
“view with favour the establishment”:
Knightley and Simpson,
Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 117.

42
“huge crags”:
Lawrence, SP, 95.

42
“glassy sand mixed”:
Ibid., 96.

43
“a salt wind”:
Ibid.

43
“picturesque, rambling house”:
Ibid., 97.

43
“travel-stained”:
Ibid.

45
“cool and comfortable”:
Ibid., 99.

45
spent his time reading Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur: Ibid.

48
hope “to biff the French:”
Knightley and Simpson,
Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

49
was much against my grain”:
Lawrence, SP, 103.

chapter two
Aqaba, 1917: The Making of a Hero

51
“sacrament”:
Lawrence, SP, 104.

53
“that invariable magnet of Arab good will”:
Ibid., 112.

54
“to slip in and out”:
Ibid., 114.

55
“Part of our booty”: Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,
Vols. 10-12, 9 (2000).

56
“Twenty-Seven Articles”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 670.

56
“a magnificent bay camel”:
Lawrence, SP, 117.

56
“as a mass they are notformidable”:
Lawrence,
Letters,
Garnett (ed.), 217.

57
“Guerrilla warfare is what the regular armies”:
Callwell,
Small Wars, 105.

57
“old rubbish”:
Lawrence, SP, 118.

58
“quiet, but in no other way mortified”:
Ibid., 117.

58
“While all goes well”:
Callwell,
Small Wars, 66.

59
“and stamp out Feisal’s army”:
Lawrence, SP, 121.

60
“the military art was one”:
Liddell Hart,
Lawrence of Arabia, 370.

62
“It looked like a river of camels”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 349.

66
“Our men were not materials”:
Mack,
A Prince of Our Disorder, 211.

68
“a tall, strong figure”:
Lawrence, SP, 229.

72
“feeling that this need not”:
Ibid., 184.

72
“and gave him a few moments’ delay”:
Ibid., 185.

73
“with the reckless equality”:
Ibid., 188.

74
“suffering a bodily weakness”:
Ibid., 191.

74
“woke out of a hot sleep”:
Ibid., 192.

78
“The cold was intense”:
Ibid., 212.

80
“I was about to take my leave”:
Ibid., 229.

82
“venture… in the true Elizabethan tradition”:
Liddell Hart,
Lawrence of Arabia, 143.

82
“to capture a trench”:
Ibid.

83
“The weight is bearing me down now”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 406.

86
“surly… stranger from Maan”:
Liddell Hart,
Lawrence of Arabia, 146.

90
“Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 410.

90
“Hideously green, unbearable”:
Ibid.

91
“he was very old, livid”:
Ibid., 413.

92
“quarrelling”:
Liddell Hart,
Lawrence of Arabia, 154.

95
“A man who gives himself”:
Lawrence, SP, 11

98
“Our hot bread”:
Ibid., 323.

99
“By God indeed”:
Ibid., 325.

100
“Work, work, where are words?”:
Ibid., 328.

100
“when it became clear”:
Ibid., 330.

101
“The dead men”:
Ibid., 331.

109 He walked past the sleeping sentry: Ibid., 347.

110
“Allenby was physically large”:
Ibid., 348.

110
“He [Lawrence] thinks himself”:
Aldington,
Lawrence of Arabia, 34.

110
“offering to hobble the enemy”:
Lawrence, SP, 348.

112
“a bumptious young ass”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

112 Wingate praised Lawrence: Ibid., 424.

113
“Tell Mother”:
Lawrence,
Home Letters, 340.

chapter three
“The Family Romance”

115
“To my sons”:
Item MS English C6741, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, Thomas E. Lawrence Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Orlans, Harold, “Ways of Transgressors,”
Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,
Vol. 6, 120-33.

120
Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman:
See Mack,
A Prince of Our Disorder,
5-8; and Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia,
30-31, 941-944.

121
“the Vinegar Queen”:
Mack,
A Prince of Our Disorder, 4.

122
Sarah Lawrence:
Ibid., 8-11; and Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia,
31-32, 942-943.

123
Sometime in 1885:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia,
943.

123
“so gay and pretty”:
Journal of T. E.
Lawrence Society,
Vols. 10-12, 29.

123
“was the sort of woman”:
Asher,
Lawrence, 7.

124
“T. E. got his firm chin”:
Mack,
A Prince of Our Disorder, 33.

124
“No trust ever existed”:
Ibid., 32.

128
“a real love match”:
Ibid., 13.

129
“overpowering and terrifying”:
Ibid., 8.

135 As in most English families: Ibid., 19.

135
“quiet authority”:
Ibid., 13.

138
“he knew no fear”:
Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia, 25.

Lawrence claimed to have overheard:
Mack,
A Prince of Our Disorder, 27.