Part 30

There is little to add to this account. The French have had great trouble in Syria since Feisal left and their repressive methods have involved them in war with the Druses and a destructive bombardment of Damascus; and in heavy expenses in running the province.

Feisal, ruling securely in Bagdad, has sent his son to an English Public School, so that when he succeeds his father relations between England and Irak may continue cordial. Zeid was not too old to become an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. He rowed in the ‘2nd Torpids’ boat, and the next term wired apologies to the Master of Balliol for coming back late: Feisal was ill and Zeid thought that it was his duty to act as Regent in Irak until he recovered. Abdulla in Transjordania, the country east of the Jordan and south of the Yarmuk, with an opening to the Red Sea at Akaba, still enjoys his practical joking and blindman’s buff; he manages his kingdom well enough (his first prime minister was Ali Riza), though the townsmen and villagers complain that he is too lenient to the semi-nomadic tribes in letting them off taxes. However, it is not want of firmness on Abdulla’s part: when old Auda, from the edge of his dominions, refused to pay his taxes, sending an insolent message, Abdulla caught him and put him into gaol at Amman. Of course Auda, being Auda, escaped, but the old man then thought better of it and paid the taxes. Auda died this year of cancer; his amulet protected him to the end from death in battle; and, as Lawrence once prophesied, the Middle-Ages of the Desert Border have died with him.

Abdulla originally came to Transjordania with the idea of making war on the French to avenge his brother’s expulsion, but has suspended his hostile intentions. An amusing incident occurred in 1921 when he found two French Catholic priests stirring up anti-British propaganda. He dismissed them from his kingdom and put in their places two American Presbyterian missionaries. When a furious protest came from the Vatican, Abdulla replied innocently, pleading his ignorance of the difference between the various Christian sects; however, as Lawrence happened to be with him at the time, we may doubt this.

Certainly the extraordinary disappearance of a steam-roller, from the Palestine Border, which later after much useful work in road-making across in Transjordania was found again abandoned near the border, may be safely put down to Lawrence’s magic; and perhaps also Abdulla’s official letter to the Palestine Government, saying that among their hosts of steam-rollers the Transjordanians have great difficulty in identifying any deserting machines from Palestine, suggests Lawrence’s style.

Abdulla’s most dangerous neighbour is Ibn Saud, who now rules practically the whole of the Arabian peninsula. Ibn Saud has the support of a puritan sect of Arabs known as the Brothers, founded over a hundred years ago by a prophet called Wahab; hence they are sometimes called the Wahabis. Arabia under him is going through a period not unlike the Commonwealth in England under Cromwell, except that Ibn Saud is far more strict than Cromwell in keeping religious virtue among his followers. Smoking a cigarette, even, is an abominable offence. He has stopped inter-tribal raiding throughout his dominions, but permits raiding across the borders. He has spread his influence as far north as Jauf, from which he has expelled the Ruwalla—old Nuri the Emir is dead—and across Sirhan.

The worst thing about the Brethren is that they have learned Turkish methods of war and employ them even against Arabs who are not Brethren. A body of about a thousand of these fanatics came marching up in 1922 from the Central Oases in an eight-hundred-mile raid on Amman. They surprised a little village close to the railway, twenty miles south of Amman, and massacred every man, woman and child. The chief of the Faiz Beni Sakhr, however, caught them a day or two later and few escaped back to Arabia to tell the tale: no prisoners were taken. The Faiz victory was accidentally helped by a British aeroplane which happened to be flying over: the Brethren thought that it was going to bomb them and threw down their arms.

Against further inroads Abdulla has an efficient defence force with British advisers. It is unlikely that the Wahabi faith will spread to the settled country from the desert. The new prosperity in the north of the Arabic-speaking area since the departure of the Turks will discourage this. The railway south from Damascus is working again, but only as far as Maan and not very busily; a branch-line is, however, planned to Akaba.

Of Lawrence during this political period there are many stories which one day will be collected, true and false together, in a full-length ‘Life and Letters’ which this book does not, of course, pretend to be. I can, however, vouch for the truth of two or three typical ones. Lawrence went to Jiddah in June 1921 and tried to make the treaty with Hussein to which he refers in the letter that I have quoted. Hussein kept him arguing for two months in the heat, hoping to break down British opposition to his claim for a paramount position above other Arab princes, and finally put him off altogether, suggesting that he should continue the negotiations with his son Abdulla in Amman. Lawrence sent a cipher cable to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Minister. ‘Can do nothing with Hussein. Are you fed up or shall I carry on with Abdulla?’ Curzon, who was a stickler for the diplomatic phrasing of official despatches, asked his secretary: ‘Pray, what does this term _fed up_ signify?’ The secretary, who had a sense of humour, replied, ‘I believe, my lord, that it is equivalent to “disgruntled.”’ ‘Ah,’ said Curzon, ‘I suppose that it is a term in use among the middle classes.’ When ‘carry on’ had also been explained, Curzon gave consent to the Abdulla negotiations and Lawrence carried them on. Meanwhile the secretary, a friend, had told him in a private letter of the ‘fed-up’ episode. So Lawrence, having successfully concluded his negotiations with Abdulla, again cabled to Curzon in cipher: ‘Have wangled things with Abdulla. Details follow by letter. Note, the necessary verb “wangle” is absent from the diplomatic cipher. I submit that a letter-group be allotted to it to save spelling it each time.’ The word is now in the cipher book.

A late member of the Foreign Office staff, who wishes to remain anonymous, has told me an even odder story of Lawrence and Lord Curzon. ‘It was at the first meeting of the British Cabinet held to discuss the Middle-Eastern situation. Curzon made a well-turned speech in Lawrence’s praise, introducing him. I could see Lawrence squirming at the praise, which he seemed to think was misplaced, and at the patronage. Lawrence already knew most of the ministers present. It was a very long speech and when it ended Curzon turned to Lawrence and asked him if he wished to say anything. Lawrence answered sharply, “Yes, let’s get to business. You people” (imagine Curzon addressed as “you people”!) “don’t understand yet the hole you have put us all into!” Then a remarkable thing happened. Curzon burst into tears, great drops running down his cheeks, to an accompaniment of slow sobs.

‘It was horribly like a mediæval miracle, the weeping of a church image. I felt dreadful; probably Lawrence did too. However, Lord Robert Cecil, who seemed to be hardened to such scenes, of which hitherto I only knew by hearsay, interposed roughly: “Now, old man, none of that!” Curzon wiped his eyes, blew his nose in a silk pocket-handkerchief, and dried up. And business proceeded.’

At Paris Lawrence had several rows with politicians and soldiers. The most sensational was in the hall of the Hotel Majestic, the headquarters of the British delegation. A major-general began treating him as an interfering young fellow who had no business to be poking his nose into matters that did not concern him. Lawrence retorted warmly. The general barked out, ‘Don’t dare to speak to me in that tone. You’re not a professional soldier.’ This stirred Lawrence. ‘No,’ said he, ‘perhaps I’m not; but if you had a division and I had a division, I know which of us would be taken prisoner.’

Throughout these years Lawrence lived in great retirement. The advertising of his Arabian adventure both by the Press and by Mr. Lowell Thomas’s cinema lecture-tour proved most unwelcome to him. He received an enormous mail, including, it is said, over fifty offers of marriage from unknown women, and was relentlessly and unsuccessfully pursued by lion-hunting hostesses. Most of the time that he was not writing his book or engaged in politics he spent reading, catching up with modern literature after a four years’ break, and looking at pictures and sculpture.

In his visit to the East in 1921, treaty-making, he did return by air as had been prophesied, and found a crowd still waiting at the aerodrome to greet him with ‘Aurans at last!’ A friend of mine was talking to him shortly afterwards, at Jerusalem, when an Arab came up and saluted. It was a member of the body-guard, ‘an awful-looking scoundrel with love-locks and a sash-full of weapons.’ Lawrence asked if he was doing anything important now. The man, trembling with pleasure at seeing Lawrence, answered, ‘No, lord, nothing important.’ ‘Then you must go to Basra and enrol in the service of Lord Feisal, who will want your services and the services of the rest.’

Lawrence met Foch at Paris. It is related that Foch remarked in a friendly way to Lawrence, ‘I suppose now that there will soon be war in Syria between my country and your Arabs? Will you be leading their armies?’ ‘No,’ Lawrence answered, ‘unless you promise to lead the French armies in person. Then I should enjoy it.’ The old Marshal wagged his finger at Lawrence. ‘My young friend, if you think that I am going to sacrifice the reputation that I have so carefully compiled on the Western Front by fighting you on your own ground and under conditions imposed by yourself, you are very much mistaken.’ Asked whether this story was true, Lawrence has replied that ‘the event has faded from my retentive memory,’ which can mean anything that anyone likes it to mean.

One more story (out of its place but recalled by this discussion of international affairs):

When Lawrence was working up from Akaba into Syria he once took a mobile hospital with him on a raid. All the stretcher-camels were, for economy of transport, loaded up with dynamite. The Royal Army Medical Corps Headquarters in Palestine got to hear of this and telegraphed expecting that the Arab Army would in future observe the Geneva Convention which insists that the transport devoted to fighting shall be kept distinct from that devoted to medical work. Lawrence on his next raid therefore left both hospital _and doctor_ behind. The Medical Headquarters again protested, and Lawrence replied that transport could not be wasted on non-combatants. This enraged the Surgeon-General, who tried to catch Lawrence by wiring a peremptory request to know how Lawrence proposed, in the absence of his medical officer, to dispose of his wounded. Lawrence then replied tersely, ‘Will shoot all cases too hurt to ride off.’ This closed the argument.

XXX

Lawrence wrote his great history of the Arab Revolt, _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_. or seven out of ten books of it, between February and June, 1919, in Paris. He did the present beginning of the introduction in six hours in the Handley-Page aeroplane, on his way from Paris to collect his belongings in Cairo: the rhythm of it is affected, he says, by the slow ‘munch, munch, munch’ of the great Rolls-Royce engines. In London he wrote an eighth book, but had all the eight stolen from him about Christmas 1919 while changing trains at Reading. Only the introduction and the drafts of two books remained.

He has never imagined a political motive for the theft, but his friends have. They even whisper darkly that one day the lost text may reappear in certain official archives. Lawrence himself hopes it will not: he had destroyed most of his war-time notes as he went along and when he began again the weary task of rewriting the quarter of a million words he could not quite trust his memory. However, Colonel Dawnay, who saw both texts, tells me that one chapter at least that he read more carefully than others in the original seems to be the same, word for word and almost comma for comma, in the second version. Lawrence still had two skeleton-diaries and some rough route-sheets, but little else.

This second writing was done in less than three months at the rate of some four to five thousand words a day. But Lawrence, immoderate as usual, did not keep to a daily ration. He did it in long sittings and probably set up a world’s literary record by writing Book VI in twenty-four hours between sunrise and sunrise without a pause. Book VI was about 34,000 words in length! ‘Naturally the style was careless,’ he says. But it served as a basis for a careful literary rewriting; which is the _Seven Pillars_ as it was finally published. He wrote it in London, Jiddah and Amman in 1921, again in London in 1922, in the Royal Tank Corps near Dorchester in 1923 and 1924, and in the Royal Air Force at Cranwell in 1925 and 1926. He checked the historical accuracy with the help of all available official documents and his British friends who had served with the Arab army.

Lawrence does nothing by halves and not only set about making the book a history of the Arab Revolt which the Arabs themselves would never write, but one that he would not be ashamed of as literature. For this last ambition he secured the advice of two of the best-known English writers and taught himself with their help to write professionally.

_Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ is, beyond dispute, a great book: though there is such a thing as a book being too well written, too much a part of literature. Lawrence himself realizes this and was once, indeed, on the point of throwing it into the Thames at Hammersmith. It should somehow, one feels, have been a little more casual, for the nervous strain of its ideal of faultlessness is oppressive. Lawrence charges himself with ‘literary priggishness,’ but that is unfair. His aim was, all the time, simplicity of style and statement and this he achieved in the most expert way. He has, somewhere, confessed to a general mistrust of experts and it may be that he should have carried it further, and dispensed with expert advice in literary matters too. (Possibly, though, in actual practice he did; he was always a difficult pupil.) On the whole I prefer the earliest surviving version, the so-called Oxford text, to the final printed book which was the version that I first read consecutively. This is a physical rather than a critical reaction. The earlier version is 330,000 words long instead of 280,000 and the greater looseness of the writing makes it easier to read. From a critical point of view no doubt the revised version is better. It is impossible that a man like Lawrence would spend four years on polishing the text without improving it, but the nervous rigor that the revised book gave me has seemingly dulled my critical judgment. I may add that Lawrence had foreseen the effect that the book would have on me and refrained for many years from letting me see it.

Lawrence was anxious to make the book as solid as possible, so he employed the best artists that he could find to do drawings for it under the art-editorship of Eric Kennington.

He published something more than a hundred copies for subscribers at thirty guineas apiece and gave away half as many more to friends. But he was so keen to do things well that he actually spent £13,000 on the edition—the reproduction of the pictures alone cost more than the subscrip-tions—leaving himself £10,000 out of pocket. It was to pay this debt to his backers (for he has no private means) that the abridgment _Revolt in the Desert_ was undertaken for public sale. He made it in two nights, at Cranwell Camp, with the help of two other airmen, Miller and Knowles. The _Seven Pillars_ was never intended for publication: it was to be a private record for Lawrence and a few friends. _Revolt in the Desert_ was only published by the accident of the £10,000 debt. It is a series of incidents loosely strung together and purged of the more personal material. Single copies of the _Seven Pillars_ now sell at extraordinary prices.

Lawrence has not made a penny himself from either of these books. He was scrupulous to arrange that when the debt of the _Seven Pillars_ was paid off the extra money made by _Revolt in the Desert_ should not go to him. It has been a set determination of his to make nothing out of the Arab war directly or indirectly. His army pay went towards the expenses of the campaign. His salary from Winston Churchill for the year at the Colonial Office he did not spend on himself either, but used it for official purposes. (On the other hand, Lawrence’s friends have much benefited by his generosity. The gift of a _Seven Pillars_ with the note ‘please sell when read’ has been worth as much as £500.)

The success of _Revolt in the Desert_ called for a French translation but when an application for the rights came from a Paris publisher Lawrence offered permission on one condition—that the book must bear on its jacket the inscription: ‘The profits of this book will be devoted to a fund for the victims of French cruelty in Syria.’ So there could be no French translation so long as he controlled the book rights.

I have never yet met with an explanation of the meaning _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ in all that has been written about the book. It is reminiscence from a chapter in the _Book of Proverbs_, part of which runs as follows:

‘Wisdom hath builded a house: she hath hewn out her seven pillars. She crieth upon the highest places of the city, “Whoso is simple let him turn in hither.... If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself.”’

The idea is, I believe, further elaborated in later Jewish theological writings. This title was all that Lawrence rescued from an earlier book of travel written in 1913 and destroyed in 1914; it compared the seven cities of Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus and Medina.

_The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ will not be reprinted in Lawrence’s lifetime. It is not a book, people agree on Lawrence’s behalf, that should be published for a popular audience. (A simple member of the public, an electrician, was shown the most painful chapter while proofs were being passed. Then he could do no work for a week, but walked up and down the pavement outside his house, unable to rid his mind of the horror of it. The chapter about the Turkish hospital is almost as painful.) Also popular publication might, they say, involve Lawrence in a series of libel actions: he seems to spare nobody in his desire to tell the whole story faithfully (least of all himself). Again, the censor might, it is suggested, ban as obscene some of the more painfully accurate accounts of Turkish methods of warfare. But in any case Lawrence never intended publishing the book, except privately, so these remarks are really irrelevant. The book was first written as a full-length and unrestrained picture of himself, his tastes, ideas and actions. He could not have deliberately confessed to so much had there been any chance of the book coming out. Yet to tell the whole story was the only justification for writing anything at all. And once written a strictly limited publication of the book promised to remove the need of even thinking about that part of his life again.

The historical accuracy of Lawrence’s account has been jealously questioned by some overseas reviewers of _Revolt in the Desert_: he has been accused of self-interested exaggeration. However, as there were forty or fifty British officers, besides Arabs, as witnesses of his activities and as no one of them has challenged the accuracy of his statements, this criticism hardly calls for answer. Moreover, all the documents of the Arab Revolt are in the archives of the Foreign Office and will soon be available to students, who will be able to cross-check Lawrence’s account and are likely to find that his chief fault has been telling rather less than the truth.

It has been suggested that Lawrence’s part in the Eastern War was devoid of serious military significance. Part of a letter protesting against this point of view may be reprinted from a London weekly. I know the writer as an expert in these matters:

‘SIR,—

‘Your reviewer of _Revolt in the Desert_ denies the Arab Army any “serious military significance,” and suggests that Allenby’s advance on Damascus would have been successful had it never existed. As one who took part in the Palestine campaign, and was for a considerable time entrusted with the preparation of the “Enemy Order of Battle,” may I affirm the contrary? The revolt of 1916 isolated the Assir Division of six battalions, destroyed two-thirds of the Hejaz Division of nine battalions and brought a new division (58th) from Syria to Medina. In the autumn of 1917 when Lord Allenby struck his first blow the equivalent of twenty-four battalions was strung out on the line from Deraa to Medina. I include mounted infantry and camel corps. Some artillery was also engaged. Had the Arabs sat still two-thirds of this force, which included good Anatolian units such as the 42nd and 55th Regiments, would have been available for the Gaza-Beersheba front. In 1918 the British threat to Transjordania only became possible because of the growing strength of the revolt and the increasing sympathy of the local Arab population for Arab success. Lord Allenby’s demonstrations and the activity of the Arabs tied up more and more Turks and some German units, and by September, 1918, reinforcements from Rumania (part of the 25th Division) and the Caucasian front (48th Division) liberated by the Russo-Rumanian collapse, had been used up east of Jordan instead of on the Palestine front. Without going into details of military organization and the dislocation of troops, dull reading to any but the professional military historian, I can confidently assert that the Arab Army of 4,000 fighting men and an uncertain number of occasional pillagers was worth an Army Corps to the British Army on the Palestine front, not only on account of the Turks, whom it kept busy in the wrong place, but on account of the strain it put on Turkish transport and supply.

‘Finally, may I remark that Lawrence and his Arabs saw a good deal more at Tafas than one mutilated Arab woman, and the wonder to me is not that they saw red then, but that they generally showed such astonishing restraint against an enemy who habitually shot his Arab prisoners, tortured Arab wounded with obscene ingenuity, and often indulged in gross brutalities, at the expense of non-combatants, women and children.

‘Yours, etc.,

‘B.’