‘Scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous,’ the Major said. ‘You ought to be shot!’

Lawrence cackled with laughter, wondering what the officer would have thought had he been present the previous day. The Major muttered, ‘Bloody brute,’ smacked Lawrence across the face, and stalked off. All the fear, loathing and hypocrisy that Lawrence had borne for two years seemed to be expressed in those words ‘Bloody brute’ – ‘in my heart I felt he was right,’ he wrote, ‘and that everyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so stained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world could make him feel clean.’³⁶

Lawrence returned to the Victoria Hotel to find that Allenby had arrived. He was closely followed by Feisal, who had ridden into the city at the gallop to a tumultuous welcome. It was at the hotel that the Sharif and the General met for the first time, with Lawrence as their interpreter – precisely the role he had created and envisaged for himself over the past eighteen months. Allenby explained to Feisal that he was to have control of Syria, with the exception of Palestine and the Lebanon, but only under the guidance of the French. He informed him that he would continue to work with Lawrence as liaison, but that he would shortly be given a French liaison officer in addition. Feisal objected in no uncertain terms: he would not accept a French liaison officer, would not accept French guidance, and did not recognize French authority in the Lebanon. He also said that Allenby’s liaison officer – Lawrence – had informed him that the Arabs were to have all of Syria apart from Palestine. Allenby, astonished, inquired whether Lawrence had oudined to the Sharif the French claim to the Lebanon. Lawrence replied untruthfully that he had not. Allenby concluded that since Feisal was a Lieutenant-General under his command, he must obey orders at least for the time being.

Feisal departed as abruptly as he had come, but now in little mood for jubilation. As soon as he was gone, Lawrence told his chief that he could not work with a French liaison officer, and asked for leave to return to England. His war was over and he could do more for the Arabs behind the scenes at home. He was dog-tired, but like many men who had fought and longed for the war’s end, he found in it the ultimate anticlimax. The misery he had suffered over two years was either forgotten or had already become enshrined in legend. Now his mind was blank. An Arab army had entered Damascus, and after five centuries the conquest of Selim the Grim had been avenged. If it had not been for European ambitions, Lawrence believed, then the Arabs might have gone on to take Anatolia, Baghdad and even the Yemen, and established a new Arab empire in the East. But European greed had brought the movement to a halt in its finest hour, and Lawrence’s illusions had been shattered: … my dreams puffed out like candles,’ he wrote, ‘in the strong wind of success.’³⁷

PART THREE

THE MAGICIAN 1918-1935

20. Colonel Lawrence Still Goes On; Only I Have Stepped Out of the Way

The Peace Conference and the Colonial Office 1918 – 22

Lawrence arrived back in England a full colonel with a D S O, a C B, and a recommendation from Allenby himself that he be granted a knighthood. Only a few days after his arrival he was invited to Buckingham Palace for a private investiture by King George V, but to the consternation of everyone present politely refused both his knighthood and his medals to the King personally. He told His Majesty that the British government were about to let the Arabs down over the Sykes–Picot treaty: that he had pledged his word to Feisal that he would support him come what may, and that he might be obliged to fight Britain’s French allies for the Hashemite cause in Syria. Curiously, though, the man who refused to become a British knight also told the King that he was an ‘Emir’ (Prince) among the Arabs – a tide which he is nowhere recorded as having been granted officially. And while he refused his British medals, he accepted the Croix de Guerre from the French: the very nation whom he told George V he regarded as being his enemies. These inconsistencies suggest that there was, as usual, a darker level to Lawrence’s actions: after all, knighthoods and DSOs were almost ten-a-penny among those who had fought in the Arab campaign (though Croix de Guerre were more exotic). As Lawrence had told Hubert Young (who would himself later be knighted) in 1918, ‘there is plenty of honour and glory to be picked up without any great difficulty’.¹ Like the woman who wore ordinary clothes at the opera while everyone else wore evening-dress, Lawrence automatically became distinct, not through his acquisition of honours but by his conspicuous rejection of them. Even his admirer Liddell Hart was shrewd enough to observe that for Lawrence ‘self-deprecation, like his rejection of distinction, was a kind of vanity – his wisdom led him to see the absurdity of acclamation, then found himself liking it, then despised himself for liking it’.² The rejection of honours by the war’s most famous hero, the man whom, by 1919, the press were already calling ‘the most interesting Briton alive’,³ of course, immediately devalued such distinctions. Not surprisingly, many who had fought four hard years, some of them in conditions far more appalling than those Lawrence had seen, who had survived terrible hardships, perhaps performed great feats of personal bravery, and justifiably felt themselves deserving of recognition, were incensed by his apparent mockery.

Lawrence’s commitment to the Hashemites was, however, also very real. He was determined to vindicate the promises he had made to Feisal during the war, and to rescue his own sense of honour. Within days of arriving back he was bombarding War Office and Foreign Office officials with his views, and on 29 October – the day on which he met the King – he also appeared in front of the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet. The meeting opened with a eulogy by Lord Curzon, acting Foreign Secretary, on Lawrence’s achievements, upon which Lawrence ungraciously blurted out: ‘Let’s get to business. You people don’t understand the hole you have put us all into!’ – causing the volatile Curzon to burst into tears. Lawrence’s views were uncompromising, but they did not encompass the single Arab state Hussain had demanded from McMahon in 1916. Mesopotamia, he said, should be divided into two, with Sharif Zayd in Baghdad, presiding over the northern part, and Sharif ‘Abdallah, in Basra, supervising the southern. Feisal, in Damascus, should rule the whole of Syria, with the exception of the Lebanon, which should go to the French, and the Alexandretta district, which should be jointly run by the Allies. In Palestine, the Arabs would accept Jewish immigration as outlined in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, but would resist any attempt to establish a Jewish state there. A single British authority, based in Egypt, should watch over the fledgling Arab states, which would effectively cut out Anglo-Indian interference. Lawrence already knew that British hands were tied by Sykes-Picot: Mosul, in Mesopotamia, had been allocated to the French, while Palestine had been assigned to international administration. If Britain opposed French aspirations both in Palestine and Mesopotamia, which she coveted for her own sphere of influence, she would find it most difficult to oppose French claims in Syria too.

The armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, and the Peace Conference began at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris in January the following year. Here, Lawrence drew great attention to himself by his flamboyant adoption of Arab headdress, his fluent Arabic and his obvious devotion to Feisal. Acting as Feisal’s interpreter, he laid out the Hashemite proposals on 6 February. The French had been determined from the beginning that there would be no concessions over Syria, and demanded that both littoral and inland Syria should be governed by a single authority. These demands were supported by a vigorous campaign in the French press. Lawrence and Feisal had two strong cards, however: first the backing of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, who proposed a policy of self-determination for Syria, and second, General Allenby’s army, which was still actually deployed in the country, and which the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, refused to withdraw until the conference had made a decision. No such decision was ever reached, however. President Wilson stood by his belief that an inquiry should be set up to ascertain the will of the people, and in June the King-Crane commission arrived in Palestine. The commissioners probed deeply and made extensive inquiries, and in August reported to Wilson in Washington in favour of a temporary system of Mandates, proposing the United States as mandatory power for Syria, Great Britain for Iraq, and excluding France entirely on the grounds that a French Mandate in Syria would lead to war with the Arabs. The commissioners also recommended abandoning the idea of creating in Palestine a Jewish Commonwealth, which they believed could not be established without force. The King–Crane report was a remarkable and prophetic document, but predictably it was ignored by France and Britain. By the time it was released, Wilson himself was ill, and without his impetus the European Allies simply decided to make a settlement of their own. In September Lloyd George informed French Prime Minister Clemenceau that he was pulling British troops out of Syria and Cilicia on 1 November. The British garrisons in Cilicia – west of the line drawn by Sykes-Picot – would be replaced by French troops, while those in Syria proper would be replaced by an Arab force. British troops would, however, remain in Palestine and Mesopotamia. At first Lawrence regarded this as a victory, and he wrote personally to Lloyd George, thanking him for the decision: ‘… you have kept all our promises,’ he wrote, ‘… and my relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great.’⁴ He returned to England and on 1 September, with as little ceremony as had attended his commission in the army in 1914, he demobilized himself from it forthwith.