April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 18

By Richard M. Langworth

“The only thing that’s new in the world is the history you don’t know” —WSC

If the Almighty dabbles in the creation of individuals, He must have chortled when He conjured up Lawrence of Arabia. For here was the ideal companion, surrogate, adviser, foil and friend of Winston Spencer Churchill. To paraphrase Churchill’s famous quip, Lawrence possessed all the vices WSC admired, and none of the virtues he deplored.

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He was indeed as Churchill said untrammeled by convention, independent of the ordinary currents of human action: the fair-haired westerner who helped lead the Arabs in their finest recent hours, wresting their homeland from the Ottoman Turks in World War I. Then he wrote a book about it, of the same lofty quality and style as Churchill himself. Like another of Churchill’s longtime collaborators, Louis Spears (and WSC himself), Lawrence combined a noble war record with prodigious writing talent. An admiring Churchill leaned heavily on Spears during World War II, and mourned the loss of Lawrence in the years leading up to it.

From the early Twenties until his untimely death in 1935, Lawrence was a ranking Chartwell favorite. Like such cronies as Clementine Churchill’s “three dreadful Bs,” Bracken, Beaverbrook and Birkenhead, there was an air of disrepute about Lawrence, which he’d earned by consistently defying, disappointing and repelling the Establishment. Essentially self-made, he claimed to care not a fig about his reputation, changed his name twice to stop it pursuing him. Yet this was to some extent an affectation. Churchill in later life remarked of Lawrence to Anthony Montague Browne: “He had the art of backing uneasily into the limelight. He was a very remarkable character, and very careful of that fact.”

Lawrence for his part nursed that unqualified admiration for Churchill which was de rigueur among the great man’s friends, and his unassuming, gentlemanly ways kept him from becoming a “dreadful” in Clementine’s lexicon. Their daughter Mary remembers how Lawrence would arrive of an afternoon, a short, nondescript, sandyhaired airman riding a motorcycle; and then after dressing for dinner presenting himself in the flowing robes of a Prince of Arabia.

God simply couldn’t have invented a person Winston Churchill would have liked more.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in North Wales in 1888, and began traveling in the Middle East while still an Oxford undergraduate. After obtaining a first class degree in history in 1910, he pursued Middle East archeology, exploring the Negev Desert before joining the Geographical Section of the War Office in 1914. A year later he was in Egypt, serving British military intelligence. When the Arabs rebelled against the Turks, Britain saw an opportunity to secure a vital ally against the Central Powers. Lawrence was seconded to Ronald Storrs as a British representative to the Arabs. He became successively liaison officer, adviser, friend and promoter of the Emir Feisal, whom Churchill ultimately placed on the throne of Iraq. Feisal and his son ruled, unenlightened but in the main benignly, until the revolution of 1958, which ultimately produced Saddam Hussein.

The significance of Lawrence in the Arab revolt is a matter of discussion among historians. What is unarguable is that Lawrence wrote one of the best books to come out of World War I, a classic of English literature, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, subtitled A Triumph. Among the triumphs were his surprise capture of Akaba in July 1917 and the conquest of Damascus in October 1918.

When he sat down to write the book, Lawrence worked largely from wartime notes; then he lost the manuscript along with many notes, and began writing anew mainly from memory, issuing a private printing to a limited circle of subscribers in 1926 and a commercial abridgement entitled Revolt in the Desert. It wasn’t until after his death that the full unabridged work was released publicly, achieving posthumously his lasting fame.

Lawrence accompanied Feisal to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, though he had for some time doubted Britain’s promises of independence if the Arabs helped Britain win the war. Paris did not alter his doubts. Two years later, Churchill persuaded him to return from seclusion to join the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office. In the period of which Churchill first writes of him, Lawrence went with WSC to the Cairo Conference, convened to fix the borders of the Middle East as we know them today—including an Iraq composed of disparate Shia, Sunni and Kurd elements who cordially detest each other. There Churchill argued vainly for a separate Kurdish homeland, “to protect the Kurds from some future bully in Iraq.”

The year before, France, feeling entitled to share the spoils of victory, had acquired League of Nations “mandates” in Syria and Lebanon. “Mandate” was polite shorthand for opportunistic colony grabbing; yet nations bled white by the war, as Churchill put it, would tolerate nothing less. Britain received mandates in Palestine and Iraq. Though she granted Iraq nominal independence in 1932, Britain continued to reap the benefit of the vast Iraqi oil fields. France, by contrast, ruled her mandates with her customary iron hand into World War II. Some analysts of recent French-led resistance to the Anglo-American attack on Iraq traced France’s attitude all the way back to the 1920 division of spoils, which had left France with Syria, Lebanon, and no oil.

Though he never lost faith in Churchill, and thought WSC had addressed most Arab demands at Cairo, Lawrence was profoundly disappointed by the Paris peace conference. Once the new world had dawned, he wrote, “the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.” Ashamed that he had played their game he renounced his past, enlisting in the Royal Air Force as “J. H. Ross” in 1922. A year later he joined the Royal Tank Corps as “T. E. Shaw”; in 1925, still as Shaw, he rejoined the RAF. He retired in 1935, shortly before his death in a motorcycle accident near his bungalow at Cloud’s Hill, Dorset. Attesting to the romance of his name and achievement, the cottage is lovingly maintained as a shrine, and a Lawrence Society exists to keep his memory.

An issue of Finest Hour devoted to Lawrence has long been in our minds. Paul Alkon, Professor of English at the University of Southern California, lent not only enthusiasm but was instrumental in its scaffolding. We begin with Churchill’s famous essay on Lawrence in Great Contemporaries, and selections from the Churchill-Lawrence Correspondence. We go on to consider the writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Churchill’s advice to Alexander Korda for the film version, a project laid aside thirty years until David Lean cast Peter O’Toole as an approximate Lawrence in 1962. Finally, Paul Alkon explains why Lawrence is worthy of study today. Our cover carries the most famous portrait of Lawrence, by Augustus John, secured by permission of the Tate Gallery through the efforts of Paul Courtenay.

Current events remind us eerily of Churchill and Lawrence. I could not help recalling as I read these manuscripts Churchill’s famous remark, “the only thing that’s new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Consider for example his recollection of the time, now 82 years ago, when he and Lawrence set out for Cairo to settle affairs in the Middle East:

“…we had recently suppressed a most dangerous and bloody rebellion in Iraq, and upwards of forty thousand troops at a cost of thirty million pounds a year were required to preserve order. This could not go on. In Palestine the strife between the Arabs and the Jews threatened at any moment to take the form of actual violence. The Arab chieftains, driven out of Syria with many of their followers—all of them our late allies—lurked furious in the deserts beyond the Jordan. Egypt was in ferment. Thus the whole of the Middle East presented a most melancholy and alarming picture.”

Now in 2003, experts estimate that it will cost forty thousand troops and the modern equivalent of thirty million pounds a year to preserve order in Iraq; strife between Arabs and Jews regularly takes the form of violence; and Arab chieftains, many our late allies, lurk furious in the deserts. Plus ga change, plus c’est la meme chose.

What can we learn from Lawrence’s and Churchill’s ardent but ultimately failed efforts to promote Middle Eastern peace? That those who ignore the lessons of the past are doomed to relive it? That Arabs are not the stereotyped gaggle of lying fanatics some are inclined to view them as today? That they yearn for justice with fervor equal to that of Israelis? That the Twice-Promised Land—Lawrence to the Arabs, Balfour to the Jews—is a burden history has thrust upon us, with the slimmest chance of resolution, yet which must be resolved if peace is ever to prevail?

All of these, assuredly. But there is something more. And that is the innate decency and sense of fairness which animated Churchill and Lawrence: qualities which will be needed among statesmen of the West and East, if the lands Lawrence loved are ever to be placid, and prosperous, and free.