My dear Lowell Thomas:
I saw your show last night. And thank God the lights were out!
T. E. Lawrence.
I discovered that this man, whom all London would have been delighted to honor, was living incognito in a modest furnished room in a side street over the Dover tube-station. Not even his landlady had any suspicion of his identity. But he could not long keep it a secret.
A few days later he came around and had tea with us. When he discovered that I was married and that my wife was with me, he seemed very much embarrassed and blushed all over. He implored me to return to America and to stop telling the public about his exploits. He said that if I stayed in London any longer life would not be worth living for him, because as a result of my production at Covent Garden he was being hounded night and day by autograph-fiends, reporters, magazine-editors, book-publishers, and representatives of the gentler sex whom he feared more than a Turkish army corps. He said that as a result of the two weeks I had been speaking in London he had received some twenty-eight proposals of marriage, and they were arriving on every mail, most of them via Oxford.
When he came to call I noticed that he had two books under his arm. One was a volume of Persian poems, and the other, judging by its title, was about the last book in the world that you would have expected this young man to be reading—this man who had been called the Uncrowned King of the Arabs, who had achieved what no sultan and no calif had been able to do in more than five hundred years, who had refused some of the highest honors at the disposition of the greatest governments of the world, who had been made an honorary descendant of the Prophet, and who will live in history as one of the most romantic and picturesque figures of all time. It was “The Diary of a Disappointed Man.”
But when Lawrence found out that there was little immediate prospect of my sailing for America, and when he discovered that he was being followed by an Italian countess who wore a wrist-watch on her ankle, he fled from London.
It was not long after this that Emir Feisal lost his throne in Syria, and there was a good deal of propaganda work being done by the French in order to encourage the British not to sponsor the Arab cause. So, despite the fact that he had gone into retirement and was trying to keep out of political affairs, Lawrence could not refrain from defending Feisal. Without appearing personally he began writing articles to the London papers, presenting the Arab side of the controversy. I will quote from one or two of them because they give one an idea of the versatility of this youth, who could wield a pen as ably as he could lead an army.
There is a feeling in England [wrote Lawrence] that the French occupation of Damascus and their expulsion of Feisal from the throne to which the grateful Syrians had elected him is, after all, a poor return for Feisal’s gifts to us during the war: and the idea of falling short of an oriental friend in generosity leaves an unpleasantness in our mouths. Feisal’s courage and statesmanship made the Mecca revolt spread beyond the Holy cities, until it became a very active help to the allies in Palestine. The Arab army, created in the field, grew from a mob of Bedouins into an organised and well equipped body of troops. They captured thirty-five thousand Turks, disabled as many more, took a hundred and fifty guns, and a hundred thousand square miles of Ottoman territory. This was great service in our extreme need, and we felt we owed the Arabs a reward: and to Feisal, their leader, we owed double, for the loyal way in which he had arranged the main Arab activity when and where Allenby directed.
Yet we have really no competence in this matter to criticise the French. They have only followed in very humble fashion, in their sphere of Syria, the example we set them in Mesopotamia. England controls nine parts out of ten of the Arab world, and inevitably calls the tune to which the French must dance. If we follow an Arab policy, they must be Arab. If we fight the Arabs, they must fight the Arabs. It would show a lack of humour if we reproved them for a battle near Damascus, and the blotting out of the Syrian essay in self-government, while we were fighting battles near Bagdad, and trying to render the Mesopotamians incapable of self-government, by smashing every head that raised itself among them.
Britain was having a turbulent time in Mesopotamia just when the French had ousted Feisal from Syria. Lawrence felt that there ought to be a way of putting Feisal’s talents to some use in Bagdad, and this article was his diplomatic way of introducing the plan which afterward was developed and adopted.
A few weeks ago [continued Lawrence] the chief of our administration in Bagdad was asked to receive some Arab notables who wanted to urge their case for partial autonomy. He packed the delegation with some nominees of his own, and in replying, told them that it would be long before they were fit for responsibility. Brave words—but the burden of them has been heavy on the Manchester men this week at Hillah.
These risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success; then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery aëroplanes, or gunboats. Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.
We realise the burden the army in Mesopotamia is to the Imperial Exchequer, but we do not see as clearly the burden it is to Mesopotamia. It has to be fed, and all its animals have to be fed. The fighting forces are now eighty-three thousand strong, but the ration strength is three hundred thousand. There are three labourers to every soldier, to supply and serve him. One in ten of the souls in Mesopotamia to-day belongs to our army. The greenness of the country is being eaten up by them, and the process is not yet at its height. To be sure they demand that we double our existing garrison. As local resources are exhausted this increase of troops will increase the cost by more than arithmetical progression.
These troops are just for police work to hold down the subjects of whom the House of Lords was told two weeks ago that they were longing for our continued presence in their country. No one can imagine what will be our state there if one of Mesopotamia’s three envious neighbours (all nursing plans against us) attacks us from outside, while there is still disloyalty within. Our communications are very bad, our defence positions all have both flanks in the air, and there seem to have been two incidents lately. We do not trust our troops as we did during the war.
Then there are the military works. Great barracks and camps have had to be constructed, and hundreds of miles of military roads. Great bridges, to carry motor-lorries, exist in remote places, where the only local transport is by pack. The bridges are made of temporary materials, and their upkeep is enormous. They are useless to the civil Government, which yet has to take them over at a high valuation; and so the new State will begin its career with an enforced debt.
