* Jeremy Wilson points out that Lawrence changed their names in Seven Pillars of Wisdom—they were actually Othman (Farraj) and Ali (Daud).

*From 1922, when Shaw first met him, Lawrence floats eerily into and out of Shaw’s plays: not only as Saint Joan, but elsewhere: as Private Meek in Too True to Be Good,and even as Adolphus Cusins, Barbara’s fiance in Major Barbara. Cusins is a slight,unassuming Greek scholar who in the end decides to become an armaments king, and hisdescription again might also serve for Lawrence: he is afflicted with a frivolous sense of humor … a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character presents himself as and indeed actually is considerate,gentle, explanatory … capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.(New York: random house, 1952, 228.)

*Even in the United Kingdom there was doubt. Asquith, the prime minister, noted in his diary on March 13, 1915, that “the only other partisan of this proposal [the Balfour Declaration] is Lloyd George who, i need not say, does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future.” (earl of oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections,1928.)

*There are conflicting accounts of Lawrence’s camel borne field library, but Liddell hart, who got the information from Lawrence himself, reports that he carried with him Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the comedies of Aristophanes

* This is the same place as Abu el Lissal. Transliterations of Arabic place names into English were, and remain, idiosyncratic.

* A tender was an open car converted into the equivalent of what Americans call a pickup truck.

*his position was not unique. Captain J. r. Shakespear played much the same role toward ibn Saud on behalf of the government of india. When Shakespear was killed in a desert skirmish, he was replaced by St. John Philby, the noted Arabist, ornithologist,and convert to islam, and father of the master spy and traitor Kim Philby.

* Wavell meant, in modern terms, 12,000 cavalrymen, 57,000 infantrymen, and an artillery strength of 540 guns.

*These were the standard “bangers” of the British army. Lawrence occasionally ate meat, when it was a question of being polite to his Arab hosts, or when there was nothing else to eat but camel meat. on at least one occasion he expressed pleasure at a piece of gazelle roasted over an open fire. his vegetarian bent was not dogmatic

*The famous term describing non upper class usage that is, lower middle class and middle class usage that Nancy Mitford enshrined in the english language when she wrote “The english Aristocracy” for Encounter in 1954. Whatever else he was, Lawrence was an oxonian who spoke impeccable upper class english. The word “powwow”from a fellow officer would grate on his nerves as much as “serviette” for “napkin.”

*in his memoir, The Fire of Life, General Barrow asserts he had no such conversation with Lawrence, and that since indian cavalry regiments on the Northwest Frontier always had a certain number of riding camels attached to them, he was as familiar with camels as Lawrence was. on the otherhand, Barrow may not have realized only a fewhours after the scene between them at Deraa that Lawrence was pulling hisleg.

* To put this in perspective, the number of the brothers’ Algerian followers in and around Damascus may have been as high as 12,000 to 15,000 people (David Fromkin,A Peace to End All Peace, New York: holt, 1989, 336).

*Abd el Kader would eventually be shot by sharifian police outside his home in Damascus on September 3, 1919 a classic instance of the clich “shot while attempting to escape.” Mohammed Said lived on to become a supporter of French rule in Syria.

CHAPTER NINE

In the Great World

… that younger successor of Mohammed, Colonel Lawrence, the twenty-eight-year-old conqueror of Damascus, with his boyish face and almost constant smile—the most winning figure … of the whole Peace Conference.         —James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference Despite General Allenby’s abruptness, he and Lawrence had not lost their esteem for each other. Allenby may well have felt that Lawrence’s departure from Syria would make it easier for Feisal to get used to the inevitable, in the form of a French replacement, but if so he was wrong. Throughout the coming peace talks in Paris Lawrence would remain—to the fury of the French, and the occasional exasperation of the British Foreign Office—Feisal’s confidant, constant companion, interpreter, and adviser, the only European with whom Feisal could let his guard down. In Cairo, Lawrence gave Lady Allenby one of his most treasured mementos, the prayer rug from his first attack on a Turkish train. Allenby not only wrote to Clive Wigram,* assistant private secretary to King George V, asking him“to arrange for an audience with the King” for Lawrence, but at Lawrence’s request made him “a temporary, special and acting full colonel,” a rank that entitled Lawrence to take the fast train from Taranto to Paris instead of a slower troop train, and to have a sleeping berth on the journey. Allenby also wrote to the Foreign Office to say that Lawrence was on his way to London to present Feisal’s point of view on the subject of Syria.

Lawrence’s return therefore had a semiofficial gloss—far from coming home to shed his rank and be “demobilized,” in the military jargon of the day, Lawrence arrived with the crown and two stars of a colonel on his shoulders and a string of interviews arranged at the very highest level of government. Although Lawrence claimed to have felt like “a man dropping a heavy load,” there seems to have been no doubt in his mind, or Allenby’s, that he was returning to Britain to take up the Arab cause.

Lawrence was exhausted, thin almost to emaciation, weighing no more than eighty pounds, as opposed to his usual 112. This is borne out both by Lawrence’s older brother Bob, who was shocked by his appearance when he arrived home, and by James McBey’s startling portrait of him, painted in Damascus, in which his face is as thin and sharp as a dagger, and his eyes are enormous and profoundly sad. It is the face of a man worn out by danger, stress, responsibility, and disappointment. The faintly ironic smile on his lips seems to suggest that he already suspects nothing he fought for is likely to happen. The confusion, chaos, jealousies, and violence in Damascus may already have convinced him that there was not going to be a noble ending to his adventures.

On the ship from Port Said to Taranto, Italy, Lawrence persuaded his fellow passenger and former fellow soldier, Lord Winterton, a member of Parliament, to write on his behalf requesting interviews with Lord Robert Cecil (the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs*) and A. J. Balfour (the foreign secretary). Lawrence also interrupted his journey in Rome for a talk with Georges-Picot about the French position in Syria. During the course of this discussion Picot made it very clear, if there had been any doubt in Lawrence’s mind, that France remained determined to have Lebanon and Syria, and rule them from Paris in much the same way as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There was a place for Prince Feisal as the head of a government approved by France, and under the tutelage of a French governor-general and a French military commander, but he should have no illusions about creating an independent sovereign state.

Tragedy: Lawrence, exhausted, emaciated, and shorn of illusions. Damascus, 1918.

There occurred on this journey an incident that puzzled Lawrence’s biographers while he was still alive and provided material for them long after his death. Either at Taranto, between the ship and the train, or at Marseille, where the train presumably stopped before going on to Paris, Lawrence saw a British major dressing down a private for failing to salute, and humiliating the private by making him salute over and over again. Lawrence intervened, and when the major asked him what business it was of his, he removed his uniform mackintosh, which had no epaulets and hence no badges of rank; revealed the crown and two stars of a full colonel on his shoulders; pointed out that the major had failed to salute him; and made the major do so several times. Lowell Thomas’s version of this incident differs radically from Liddell Hart’s: according to Thomas, Lawrence asks the railway transport officer (RTO) at the Marseille station, a lieutenant-colonel (“a huge fellow, with a fierce moustache”), what time his train leaves, is snubbed, and then takes off his raincoat to show that he outranks the pompous RTO. In Robert Graves’s biography, Lawrence sees “a major … bullying two privates … for not saluting him,” and neglects to return their salute until Lawrence appears and makes him do so. Whichever one of these stories is true, they all illustrate the same point, which is Lawrence’s dislike of conventional discipline and of officers’ abusing their power over “other ranks.”