There was much work to be done: the police to be appointed, the water supply to be attended to, electrical power to be restored, sanitation to be established, starving people to be fed. In fact, within a few days Lawrence had set running a system which endured for the next two years. An Australian doctor asked him to attend to the Turkish barracks, which was now a makeshift hospital without a single medical orderly, and packed with dead and dying men. Lawrence realized that it had been forgotten, went to inspect it himself, and was appalled. The floor was littered with dozens of bloated, putrefying corpses, lying in stinking pools of blood and excrement. Many of them were only freshly dead, and most had been gnawed by rats. Hearing a faint sighing, Lawrence lifted his robe and walked through the bodies to find a ward full of dying men who implored him for mercy. Quickly he commandeered some Turkish prisoners, who went about burying the dead in a common grave in the nearby garden. That night he started out of sleep, sweating and trembling with the memory of the dead bodies, and the following day he returned to the hospital to find things a little better: one room had been cleaned and disinfected ready to house the most serious cases, and there were medical orderlies present. Suddenly he was confronted by a British major of the Medical Corps, who asked if he was in charge. ‘In a way, I suppose I am,’ Lawrence replied.
‘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’. 1Like 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’. 2The 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’, 3of 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.