Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

This was to come later. For the moment ‘Abdallah sat out the meeting stoically. Lawrence, who had spoken little, had taken an immediate dislike to him. The Sharif, he admitted later, was ‘too clever’. He knew that ‘Abdallah was his father’s right-hand man, and highly popular among the Arabs. He had been the prime mover in the revolt from the beginning – indeed, in many ways it might be said that ‘Abdallah had createdthe Arab Revolt. Cheerful, extrovert, highly cultured and sophisticated, he did not fit Lawrence’s concept of the ‘noble savage’, and bore no relation to his ‘innocent’ Dahoum. He was of strong character – highly intelligent, worldly-wise, experienced, blooded in battle, and a superb chess-player – more than a match for Lawrence’s manipulation. If the British were to influence the situation to their advantage, Lawrence realized, they must find and set up as a figurehead a leader who was more malleable and susceptible to their design. He had been monitoring affairs in the Hejaz closely since June, and knew that the situation was critical. The revolt, he said, was ‘standing still, which, with an irregular war, was a prelude to disaster’. ⁴Secretly, though, he was against sending British troops, but for other reasons than those argued by Murray. First, as an arch-propagandist, he was aware that guerrilla wars were fought partly on an ideological level, and to have infidel soldiers in the Hejaz would make Hussain look like a Muslim renegade ready to hand over the Holy Cities to unbelievers. Secondly – and to Lawrence even more important – if the British were to fight Arab battles for them, the Arabs would have little claim, at the end of the war, to an independent state. They must, at least, be seento be conducting their own revolt. Lawrence had a passionate belief in the cause of Arab freedom, but though he wished to see the Arabs free of the Ottoman Turks, it is unlikely that he ever believed they could be entirely independent. From the beginning he envisaged not a single Arab state but a congeries of petty states, nominally independent but actually under the benevolent aegis of the British Empire, which would naturally fill the vacuum in the Near East left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The war had to be won, and British and Arab interests dovetailed at this point: both wanted victory against the Turks. Lawrence could therefore happily serve both the cause of British victory and Arab independence, satisfied that, for now, there was no conflict between them. If such a conflict arose, though, he had no doubt where his true loyalties lay: ‘I’m strongly pro-British and also pro-Arab,’ he would tell Clayton later, ‘France takes third place with me: but I quite recognize that we might have to sell our small friends to pay our big friends, or sell our future security in the Near East to pay for our present victory in Flanders.’ ⁵Though he may secretly have divined that the Hashemite problem lay in poor leadership, and privately decided that he could provide the guidance they needed, he was a committed intelligence officer, and never saw himself ‘leading from the front’. Indeed, he had not expected, nor wished, to be sent into the field. He firmly believed that his place was behind a desk, and in the past months had done an excellent job in designing and having printed a set of Hejaz postage stamps whose object was to establish before the eyes of the world that the Hejaz was, in fact, already independent.

Lawrence’s first mission to the Hejaz had come about in an indirect way. In May, General Murray had made more changes to his intelligence organization, stripping Clayton of his carte blancheand assigning him solely to the work of the Arab Bureau, which was now under the direction of Major Kinahan Cornwallis. The Intelligence Department in Cairo, of which Lawrence remained a member, was to be reunited with its Ismaeliyya counterpart under the command of Major G. V. W. Holdich. The Bureau and the Intelligence Department were to remain quite distinct entities. Lawrence did not wish to be separated from Clayton, and had sounded out the possibility of a transfer to the Bureau. When Holdich had barred any such transfer, Lawrence had resorted to guerrilla tactics, plaguing senior officers by correcting the grammar in their reports, and mocking their poor knowledge of geography and customs in the Near East. One morning a staff officer had phoned him, demanding to know where certain divisions of the Turkish army were currently located. Lawrence had given him a thoroughly competent description of the composition and location of the divisions, to the extent of pinpointing the actual villages in which they were quartered.

‘Have you noted them in the Dislocation files?’ the officer asked.

‘No,’ Lawrence replied, ‘they are better in my head until I can check the information.’

‘Yes,’ said the officer. ‘But you can’t send your head along to Ismaeliyya every time.’

‘I wish to goodness I could,’ Lawrence concluded, ringing off.

Such ploys amounted to insubordination, and had not endeared Lawrence to his superiors. Finally, he had taken his case to Clayton, who had agreed to request his transfer through London, in order to circumvent Holdich. Meanwhile he managed to get Lawrence out of the way by asking to ‘borrow’ him from GHQ. Clayton’s major problem with the Hejaz was that, bereft of any intelligence officers in the front line, he had little idea of what was really happening, or how many troops were involved. Parker – the Hejaz IO – was largely confined to Rabegh, and while both he and Wilson had met Feisal, they felt that the Sharif tended to exaggerate, claiming, for instance, that the Turks massed against him numbered 25,000 strong. This was clearly nonsense, but Clayton wondered what other exaggerations were being passed off in the name of truth. Frankly, he did not trust Wilson’s judgement either, and suspected him of doctoring intelligence reports to agree with his own assessments, and indeed, he sometimes wondered if Wilson was entirely compos mentis.What were the actual dimensions of the threat from Medina? Parker, in Rabegh, had been pressing Clayton for some time to send an officer inland to obtain desperately needed intelligence, and had clearly hoped to go up country himself. On 9 October, though, Clayton wrote to Wingate that Storrs was being sent back there to see ‘Abdallah and possibly Hussain. ‘I propose to send Lawrence with him, if GHQ will let him go,’ he wrote. ‘They ought to be of use, and between them bring back a good appreciation of the situation.’ ⁶They had left Suez on the Lamaon 14 October. Lawrence would later claim to have gone down to the Hejaz on his own initiative, to find ‘the master spirit’ of the revolt, and wrote that he had asked for two weeks’ leave. Storrs, on the other hand, claimed that he had requested Lawrence for the expedition, simply because he enjoyed his company, and had thus created ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as well as the Arab Revolt. The leave was a fact – a technicality designed to undermine any protests Holdich might have produced – but Storrs’s claim to have applied for him, like his own claim to have gone there of his own choosing, was spurious. He had been sent to the Hejaz by the Arab Bureau, and he had been sent with a particular – and vital – mission in mind.

Lawrence knew that in order to make a proper appreciation he would have to visit Feisal on the Darb Sultani, and the thought did not attract him. He was well aware that the Hejaz was crawling with informers and Turkish sympathizers, and if captured he might be shot as a spy. Moreover, no Christian officers – not even Wilson or Parker – had ever been allowed to visit the front. However, he used all his charm with ‘Abdallah, pretending to support the Sharif’s view that a British landing was necessary, and suggesting obliquely that the decision not to send troops was by no means final. He argued that if he were allowed to speak to Feisal, and see the situation for himself, he might be able to give his backing more convincingly to ‘Abdallah’s case. ‘Abdallah was doubtful. He telephoned Hussain in Mecca to ask his opinion, and the Sharif greeted the proposal with mistrust. This was perhaps the most crucial moment in Lawrence’s entire life. If ‘Abdallah had put the phone down, the story might have ended there and then. Lawrence might have gone back – not unhappily – to his desk in Cairo, and Colonel Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, might never have been born. But for some reason, ‘Abdallah did not put the receiver down. He pushed his father on the point, then handed the phone to Storrs, who supported the idea with all the rhetoric at his command. Reluctantly, against all his principles, the Sharif agreed that Lawrence might ride up the Wadi Safra to visit Feisal. There was to be no turning back: the die had been cast, and the legend-in-the-making had found its path.