When the delegates assembled in Paris, Emir Feisal took up his headquarters at the Hôtel Continental on the rue de Rivoli. Wherever the Emir went, whether to an informal meeting or to an official conference, he was usually accompanied by the slightly built, insignificant-looking youth in the uniform of a British colonel. Few people at the peace conference, however, were aware that this young man had virtually led the Arabian armies during the war and was almost as important a figure in the Arab delegation as Emir Feisal himself.
Prince Feisal was quite the most imposing figure at Paris. In his flowing robes he was the center of attention wherever he went and continually sought by artists, photographers, and writers. But publicity was almost as distasteful to Feisal as it was to Lawrence, and so they would get up at six o’clock in the morning, throughout the conference, in order to go rowing in the Bois de Boulogne and escape the curious crowd, which, attracted by the picturesque dress and stately figure of the Arabian emir, followed always at his heels.
Flattery he was quick to detect. A distinguished Frenchman, M. Dubost, eulogized him somewhat fulsomely in the course of an after-dinner speech at the Hôtel de Ville. When it was over a Moroccan interpreter asked the emir how he liked it. Feisal’s only reply was, “Hasn’t he beautiful teeth?”
To induce the Arabs to fight in the World War, Britain had made certain promises which French interests made it extremely difficult to fulfil. But during the peace conference Feisal’s tact and personal charm did much to win friends for the Arabian cause in Paris. No one ever came away from him in an angry mood. On one occasion, at a meeting of the Council of Ten, M. Pichon referred to the claims of France in Syria, which he said were based on the Crusades. Emir Feisal listened respectfully, and when the French statesman had finished his address he turned toward him and inquired politely, “I am not a profound student of history, but would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?”
Lawrence’s personal attitude regarding the peace conference was straightforward and simple: if Great Britain was not going to guarantee independence to the Arabs and if she proposed to leave them in the hands of the French so far as their Syrian aspirations were concerned, for his part he intended to devote his energies and talents to helping his Arab comrades in arms contest France’s claims and obtain the rights for which they had so valiantly fought.
During the war the British had sponsored the Arabian movement for independence and made it possible for King Hussein and his sons to maintain their army against the Turks. The French, on the other hand, had merely sent a small detachment to Arabia, which could hardly even have survived had it not been for the supplies it received from Lawrence and his British colleagues. But the embarrassing fly in the ointment was the “you-take-this, and-I’ll-take-that” compact between the British and French in which it had previously been decided that France was to have Syria as her sphere of influence. Emir Feisal and Colonel Lawrence felt sure if that compact was adhered to in the face of Arab claims that Syria would become a French colony despite the fact that the bulk of her population wanted neither French control nor French coöperation.
In presenting the Arabian case and in coaching Emir Feisal to meet the delegates on their own ground, Lawrence was a match for any diplomat at the peace conference. He had the geography of Arabia, Syria, and Palestine at his finger-tips. He spoke many of the dialects of the Near East. He had lived with the Ansariya, the Yezedis, the Ismailia, the Metawileh, the Christian Maronites of the Lebanon. He had broken bread with the Druses and sat around the coffee-hearths of nearly every tribe of the desert. He could hold forth for hours on the intricate political relations, religions, and tribal feuds of the Arabs and their neighbors. The cities of Syria were as familiar to him as London and Oxford. Sitting in a hotel room overlooking the garden of the Tuileries in Paris, he made the ancient cities of the East live in vivid phrases for frock-coated gentlemen who had never deviated from the straight streets of continental capitals.
Lawrence admitted that Beyrouth, the foreign door of Syria, was French in feeling and in language, in spite of its Greek harbor and its great American university. But he insisted that Damascus, the historic city of Syria, long the seat of lay government and the religious center, was pure Arab, whose sheiks were orthodox “Meccan” in their opinions and exceedingly anxious to be free from alien rule. He also argued that the great industrial cities of Hamah and Homs were more jealously native than any other Syrian centers.