Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (71 page)

He and Lawrence shared a taste for schoolboy pranks. Meinertzhagen claims that they hid themselves at the top of the stairs of the Astoria Hotel, unfurled rolls of toilet paper, and dropped them down in long strips on the heads of Lloyd George, Balfour, and Lord Hardinge, who were standing in the lobby, prompting Hardinge to remark: “There is nothing funny about toilet paper.” Lawrence may have revealed to Meinertzhagen the fact that he was illegitimate, and the intimate details of his rape at the hands of the bey and the bey’s men in Deraa. Meinertzhagen would probably have been a good choice of confidant, since he was unshockable: on the subject of illegitimacy he merely told Lawrence he was “in good company for Jesus was born out of wedlock.” In late life Meinertzhagen claimed that Lawrence began to write the story of his involvement with the Arabs while he was in Paris.

Lawrence’s pace of writing was remarkable—he wrote 160,000 words in less than six months, while putting in long days at the Peace Conference, or in meetings with Feisal and the British delegation, as well as enjoying a full social schedule. In the words of Gertrude Bell—who also became part of the British delegation, to lobby for Britain’s control over what was to become Iraq—Lawrence was “the most picturesque” figure at the conference; also, he realized early on the need to win over journalists and members of the American delegation to Feisal’s cause, and dined with them constantly.

Almost everybody who was at the Peace Conference seems to have noticed Lawrence. A typical example is Professor James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University, a member of the American delegation, who wrote of Lawrence, after their first meeting: “He has been described as the most interesting Briton alive, a student of Mediaeval history at Magdalen, where he used to sleep by day and work by night and take his recreation in the deer park at four in the morning—a Shelley-like person, and yet too virile to be a poet. He is a rather short, strongly built man of not over twenty-eight years, with sandy complexion, a typical English face, bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes and a smile that responded swiftly to that on the face of his friend [Feisal]. The two men were obviously very fond of each other. I have seldom seen such mutual affection between grown men as in this instance. Lawrence would catch the full drift of Feisal’s humor and pass the joke along to us while Feisal was still exploding with his idea; but at the same time it was funny to see how Feisal spoke with the oratorical feeling of the South and Lawrence translated in the lowest and quietest of English voices, in very simple and direct phrases, with only here and there a touch of Oriental poetry breaking through.”

Lawrence made many friends in Paris, among them Lionel Curtis, some of whose ideas about turning the British Commonwealth into a multinational, multiracial federation resembled those of Lawrence; and Arnold Toynbee, the historian. Even so, it is impossible to think of the time that Lawrence spent in Paris, however productive, as happy; indeed, if Meinertzhagen is to be believed, Lawrence was frequently (and “intensely”) depressed. The ambiguity of his own role continued to disturb him—he was at the same time the most important (and most visible) part of Feisal’s small “team,” and a member of the British delegation, where Feisal was already seen as a lost cause.

Lawrence wrote home briefly on January 30, while waiting for his breakfast, to say that he was busy, and had dined only once at his own hotel since arriving in Paris (with his old friend and comrade in arms Colonel Stewart Newcombe). Certainly he saw everybody who mattered, starting with President Woodrow Wilson himself, into whose head Lawrence seems to have put the idea of a committee of inquiry into the wishes of the Syrians.
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Lawrence assiduously cultivated American journalists, and gave them long interviews. With his startling good looks, his youth, his reputation as a war hero, and his exotic headdress, he got enough attention and space in American newspapers to worry both the French and the more cautious of his colleagues in the British delegation. He fancied that he had persuaded Wilson, and the American public, to take responsibility for a free, democratic Arab state in Syria, instead of a French colony, but in this he was overoptimistic. Wilson, despite his belief in democracy and the self-determination of peoples, was wary of making any promises about America’s becoming the godfather of an independent Arab state.

On February 6, Lawrence appeared in what was widely acknowledged as one of the most dramatic scenes of the Paris Peace Conference. Feisal’s and Lawrence’s appearance before the Council of Ten (the leaders of the Allied governments) to argue the case for an independent state in Syria had been widely anticipated, and was the subject of considerable backstage maneuvering by the French. Unwisely, Lawrence had been telling people the story of how Feisal had addressed an audience in Scotland in Arabic by reciting the Koran to them, and then whispered to Lawrence to make up whatever he pleased as the English translation. This may have been true, since Feisal had been bored and irritated at being sent on a Scottish tour by the British government. When word of it had reached the French, they hoped to catch him out playing a similar trick in Paris. Therefore they provided themselves with a Moroccan civil servant to see if Lawrence’s translation corresponded with what Feisal said. Fortunately, Lawrence had anticipated that the French would do something of the sort. He wrote out Feisal’s speech in Arabic for him, then translated it into English for himself. Opinions differ as to what Lawrence wore for the occasion. Lloyd George wrote that he was dressed “in flowing robes of dazzling white,” and Arnold Toynbee, the future author of the twelve-volume
A Study of History,
and a more reliable witness than the prime minister, recorded that Lawrence was “in Arab dress.” Lawrence himself insisted that he was in British uniform with an Arab headdress. Feisal, at any rate, wore the white and gold embroidered robes of a sharif of Mecca, with a curved gold dagger at his waist and a gold-thread
agal
on his headdress, impressing everybody, even the French, with his gravity, his melodic voice, and his dignified bearing. When he had finished his speech, Lawrence read it aloud in English, but several of the ten heads of government were still unable to understand what had been said. “President Wilson then made a suggestion. ‘Colonel Lawrence,’ he said, ‘could you put the Amir Feisal’s statement into French now for us?’ “ Lawrence then started again and read the whole speech aloud in flawless French. “When he came to the end of this unprepared piece of translation, the Ten clapped. Lawrence’s spell had made the Ten forget, for a moment, who they were and what they were supposed to be doing. They had started the session as conscious arbiters of the destinies of mankind; they were ending it as the captive audience of a minor supplicant’s interpreter.”

The “minor supplicant’s interpreter” had effectively upstaged “the minor supplicant” in the eyes of most of the delegates, but Feisal did not seem to mind. Photographs taken at the Peace Conference show him looking sad, like a man who already suspects that he is presenting a lost cause, whereas Lawrence, always standing tactfully a pace behind him, has his usual faint, cynical smile. Behind both of them, an unusual figure even at the Peace Conference, stands Feisal’s tall, broad-shouldered black Sudanese slave and bodyguard in full Arab robes and cloak.

Despite Lawrence’s “amazing” feat, Feisal’s statement fell on deaf ears. The Italians, the Serbs, the Belgians, and the rest of the smaller Allied countries had no great interest in Syria—it was effectively a contest between Britain and France, with the United States as a neutral referee. Any hope of a united autonomous Arab state from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was dead, since the British had occupied Mesopotamia and clearly intended to stay there; and to obtain increased British support Feisal voluntarily conceded Palestine, which the British were also occupying. He—or Lawrence, as his speechwriter—included numerous references to self-determination, in an effort to please Wilson. During the prolonged questions that followed, Feisal more than held his own against Clemenceau, pointing out, with superb tact, both how grateful he was for French military support and how minimal it had been; and when Clemenceau noted that French interest in Syria went back to the Crusades, he gently asked the French prime minister: who had won the Crusades?

A spokesmen in favor of French rule in Syria went on at such length that at one point Clemenceau angrily asked his foreign minister, Pichon, “What did you get that fellow here for anyway?” Wilson signified his own impatience with the proceedings by getting up and walking around the room. “Poor Lawrence wandered among Versailles’ well-cut hedges, casting hateful glances at Arthur Balfour’s aristocratic features and baggy clothes,” commented an exiled czarist nobleman. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation, remarked on “the lines of resentment hardening around his boyish lips … an undergraduate with a chin.”

A hint that Lawrence’s patience and good nature were fraying can be found in the interview he gave to Lincoln Steffens, the famous American muckraking journalist and progressive. By the time he saw Steffens, Lawrence may have had enough of American journalists, although Steffens was the kind of man Lawrence normally admired. Still, Lawrence was not without a certain streak of skepticism and snobbery on the subject of Americans, as well as a high degree of impatience with the professed moral superiority of Woodrow Wilson, especially in view of the Americans’ reluctance to take on any commitments in the Middle East. Steffens, who called the interview “the queerest I have ever had in all my interviewing life,” met with Lawrence in the latter’s hotel room, and found the young colonel at his most difficult, argumentative, and ironic—very much a regression to the image of the languid poseur he had sometimes cultivated as an Oxford undergraduate. It didn’t help, perhaps, that Steffens wanted to talk about the Armenians, whereas Lawrence wanted to present Feisal’s case for Syria. Lawrence was far from disliking Armenians—the wealthy Altounyan family in Aleppo had been friends of his during his days at Carchemish—but he probably regarded the Armenians as a lost cause, since the Turks had murdered 1.5 million of them in 1915 without provoking the United States into breaking off diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire.
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In any case, Steffens’s somewhat holier-than-thou attitude brought out the worst in Lawrence, who suggested, deadpan, that the Armenians deserved to be killed off, and that the United States, with its particular combination of idealism and commerce and its experience at destroying the American Indians, was the best power to take on the task of completing what the Turks had begun. Steffens does not seem to have fully understood that Lawrence was pulling his leg, but what emerges from the interview more strongly than anything else is Lawrence’s irritation with America’s naive good intentions, particularly when they were coupled with its total unwillingness to take on the hard part of rebuilding a new world. Lawrence also played a curious cat-and-mouse game: Steffens was forced to put Lawrence’s ideas into words, so that Lawrence could later deny having said them.

The United States was offered the mandate for Armenia at the Peace Conference and needless to say turned it down, condemning thousands more Armenians to death. Wilson also turned down all suggestions for an American mandate over Palestine, though Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was rushed in to mediate a disagreement between Feisal and Weizmann over the number of Jews who could be admitted into Palestine every year. Lawrence not only was present but drafted Feisal’s letter, which solved the dispute. Throughout March and much of April Feisal and Lawrence met with the French, the British, and the Americans, attempting to create a compromise for Syria that would be acceptable to the Arabs and the French. In the end the best they could do was to accept President Wilson’s suggestion of “an inter-Allied commission of inquiry,” if only as a delaying tactic. Lawrence wrote Feisal’s letter to Clemenceau accepting the commission, and it conveys unmistakably Lawrence’s gift for deadpan irony, as well as his bitterness, which Clemenceau can hardly have failed to notice.

The Spanish flu pandemic, which would kill between 100 million and 150 million people worldwide, raged from 1918 to 1920, and reached its peak in 1919. It was as if by some malignant stroke of irony the war had ended with a final, and even greater, human disaster. It killed Lawrence’s ebullient friend Sir Mark Sykes in Paris in February (prompting Lloyd

George to remark rather ungraciously, “He was responsible for the agreement which is causing us all the trouble with the French…. Picot … got the better of him”), and on April 7 it killed Lawrence’s father. A telegram from Oxford warned him that Thomas Lawrence was suffering from influenza and pneumonia, and Lawrence set off immediately for England to see him, but arrived too late. He returned to Paris, and did not tell anyone, not even Feisal, that his father had died, until a week later, when he requested permission to go home and see his mother. Feisal admired Lawrence’s “control of personal feelings,” and that assessment is fair enough, but Lawrence had long since made control of his personal feelings something of a fetish. He would certainly have deeply mourned the unexpected death of his father, and perhaps even more, dreaded being exposed once again to the emotional demands of his mother. Thomas Lawrence had tried, whenever he could, in his patient, gentle way, to diminish, control, or redirect those demands, but now he was no longer there to protect Ned from the full force of his mother’s attempts to intrude into his life. He must have felt overwhelmed by his father’s death, by his failure to secure Syria for the Arabs, and by the demands of his book, which forced him to relive the experiences of two years of war. He persuaded Feisal to return to Syria, rather than stay on in Paris watching his position erode, a decision Gertrude Bell endorsed. Lawrence himself decided to return to Egypt to retrieve the notes he had left behind in the Arab Bureau’s files, and now needed.