Certainly, blame for all this doesn"t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated-indeed, feverishly nurtured-by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people"s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist ent.i.ty" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. This is also why the so-called Arab Spring movement of today represents such a potentially transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. For the first time since 1918, the "Arab street" is having a say in its own future, and however many roadblocks are thrown in its way, an element of civic partic.i.p.ation and personal freedom is being sp.a.w.ned that likely can never be boxed back up. To the degree that genuine democracy and self-determination does take hold-and in a region that has been politically and intellectually stunted for so long, it"s easy to only focus on the short-term chaos-the Arab world might finally embark upon the path envisioned for it by Lawrence and a handful of other dreamers a century ago.
MARK SYKES, the man whose name has become synonymous with the disastrous policies the West pursued in the Middle East after World War I, didn"t live to see their effect. Having swiftly gone from indispensable fix-it man to scapegoat in the eyes of the British Foreign Office for his coauthorship of the detested Sykes-Picot Agreement, in the autumn of 1918 Sykes embarked on an extended tour of the postwar Middle East. His diminished stature hadn"t engendered a bout of modesty, however; as he informed the Foreign Office in proposing his trip, along with calming Arab-Jewish tensions in Palestine, he intended to help reorganize the Allied political and military infrastructure in Syria, cajole the British Indian regime in Iraq into adopting a more progressive, postimperial mien, and "a.s.sist in promoting good relations between Arabs and French."
For two months, Sykes and his small entourage crisscrossed the region, each day filled with an exhausting schedule of events. But even this most vainglorious of men must have seen that in the Middle East, just as in London, his sway was vastly reduced. In Damascus, Sykes called on Gilbert Clayton, once an attentive listener to his various initiatives, only to encounter a p.r.o.nounced mulishness. Unknown to Sykes, Clayton had recently received advice from an official in London on how to handle his visitor. "Don"t take Mark at his own valuation," the official had cautioned. "His shares are unsaleable here and he has been sent out (at his own request) to get him away."
Yet as humbling as this journey was, it seemed to spark in Sykes a genuine reappraisal of his views on the Middle East. In January 1919, as he wrote up an "appreciation" of his just-completed trip, he allowed that both Britain and France had been quite wrong in their approach in the region. In a line he could have lifted from Lawrence"s Twenty-Seven Articles, he now suggested that "whoever takes over Syria ought to realize that to have a purely native administration running things badly, but with prospects of improvement, represents more real progress than having a European staff doing things properly, but [with] the natives learning nothing." It was a remarkable evolution in thinking in the man who three years earlier had coauth.o.r.ed what would turn out to be the last great compact in the service of European imperialism.
But it was too late. By the time Sykes showed up at the Paris Peace Conference in early February, his British colleagues were less interested in any evolution of his thinking than in extricating themselves from the agreement that bore his name. In the close quarters of Paris, the scorn with which they regarded Sykes took on an element of bullying. "I said something to him about the agreement," Lloyd George would recall in his memoirs, "and at once saw how I had cut him. I am sorry. I wish I had said nothing. I blame myself. He did his best."
But perhaps the prime minister"s contrition stemmed from what soon followed. On the evening of February 10, Sykes took to bed early, complaining of feeling run-down. By the next morning, he couldn"t stand. Doctors quickly diagnosed Spanish influenza, and for the next five days he lingered in great pain in his hotel room, tended to by his wife, Edith, herself ill with the disease. Sykes finally succ.u.mbed on the evening of February 16, one month short of his fortieth birthday.
AARON AARONSOHN ALSO did not live to see his plans come into being. He too was at Paris, and much as with the Zionist Commission in 1918, had been led to believe that he would a.s.sume a leadership role in the Zionist delegation to the peace conference, only to find himself relegated to the sidelines at the last minute. As he thundered in his diary on January 16, 1919, after learning that the senior Zionist leadership was about to meet in London for a strategy session, "Chaim [Weizmann] said to me incidentally, "you are coming to London also, aren"t you?" "For what?" I replied. "To receive further insults? Many thanks." I wrote that I was sick and tired of remaining in the false position of a mistress who is loved in the privacy of one"s room, but not recognized before the world."
Just as he had threatened to do many times with the Zionist Commission, Aaronsohn resolved to quit Paris altogether, and was only stayed when the Zionist leadership that had so recently snubbed him contritely beseeched his help in drawing the proposed boundary map for Palestine. "I hate the way they work," Aaronsohn jotted afterward in his diary with a note of put-upon triumph. "Give important missions to people and at the last minute realize nothing was done because they didn"t let experts do it." The map Aaronsohn drew up was a Zionist"s dream, one that, if adopted, would have extended the borders of Palestine to the outskirts of Damascus, not so much making Palestine an enclave alongside a greater Syria than transforming Syria into a virtual rump state of a greater Palestine.
On the morning of May 15, 1919, Aaronsohn was preparing to return to Paris and the peace conference after a quick visit to London. At Kenley airfield south of London, however, he discovered his flight had been delayed due to thick ground fog. By 11:30, he was just about to give up and return to London when, amid a partial clearing of the skies, the pilot of a much smaller plane, a two-seater de Havilland making a mail run to Paris, offered to give him a lift. At about 1 p.m., a French fishing boat captain working the waters off the Calais coast heard a plane flying low overhead, invisible in the thick fog, then the sound of a crash. Searching through the mist, the fisherman found scattered mail floating on the calm sea, but nothing else. Neither the body of the de Havilland pilot nor of Aaron Aaronsohn was ever recovered. Since by rabbinical law a funeral can"t be held without a body, on the evening of May 17 Aaronsohn"s friends and colleagues gathered in Paris for an "observance" of his life and contribution to the Zionist cause.
As for Aaronsohn"s colleague and sometime adversary in the Zionist cause, Chaim Weizmann, he would not only live to see the creation of the state of Israel, but serve as its first president until his death in 1952. He was joined in postwar Palestine by his rebellious younger sister Minna. For her services to the Central Powers war effort, Minna was included in a prisoner exchange between Germany and Russia in the last days of World War I. Managing yet another escape, this time from the chaos of postwar Germany, she returned to Jerusalem, where she worked for the health service of the Zionist women"s organization, Hada.s.sah.
Djemal Pasha continued his adventurous life in the postwar era, if only briefly. Having escaped from Constantinople along with his two co-pashas, Talaat and Enver, aboard a German torpedo boat in the last days of the war, Djemal wandered the battlegrounds of Central Asia, falling in and out of alliances with a bewildering array of factions. His luck finally ran out in July 1922 when he and an aide were gunned down in the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia. Claiming credit for the a.s.sa.s.sination was a shadowy Armenian nationalist organization that had vowed to liquidate those responsible for the Armenian slaughters of 191516, and which had earlier a.s.sa.s.sinated Talaat Pasha in Berlin. The following month, Enver, the last of the Three Pashas and Djemal"s coadventurer in the Caucasus, also pa.s.sed from the scene, shot in a Russian Red Army ambush in Tajikistan.
IN HIS ROLE as one of America"s Middle Eastern experts at the Paris Peace Conference, William Yale did not limit his attention to the matter of peace in the region. At the same time, and perhaps mindful that one day he would have to find a new job, he sought to quietly promote the interests of his former employer, Standard Oil of New York, with the American delegation. Between President Wilson"s stout defense of the "Open Door" free trade policy and a series of events that had occurred in Palestine in the summer of 1918, Yale had a good pretext for doing so.
While serving as the American military liaison at Allenby"s headquarters that summer, Yale had been summoned by General Arthur Money, the British chief administrator of Palestine, who demanded that he hand over Socony"s Palestine oilfield maps. When Yale refused, protesting that Money should take up the issue with Standard headquarters, the general opted for the simpler course of breaking into the old Socony office in Jerusalem and taking them. In a series of memoranda to the American peace delegates, Yale darkly warned of where these strong-arm tactics might lead, especially if the oil-hungry British were allowed free rein in their mandate territories of Palestine and Iraq. Those delegates were duly alarmed; largely at Yale"s instigation, the American campaign to force the British to honor Socony"s Palestine concessions would become a major source of friction between the two countries for the next several years.
Except that Socony was apparently playing something of a sh.e.l.l game in Palestine, fiercely fighting to protect its "strike" at Kornub in order to establish a precedent for demanding equal access to the known oilfields in British-controlled Iraq. When that access was finally ceded in 1924, Standard Oil abruptly dropped all its concessions in Palestine. Scurrying into the breach, a British oil company hastily conducted its own tests at Kornub, only to find what Yale"s geologist partner, Rudolf McGovern, had found in 1914: iron tailings. Despite the periodic release of optimistic industry reports to the contrary, no commercially viable oil deposits have ever been found at Kornub.
After quitting the Paris Peace Conference in disgust in late 1919, Yale returned to the United States with hopes of being rehired by Socony. Whether due to his past impolitic remarks in the halls of 26 Broadway or because he had become too high profile in the ongoing oil battles with Britain, that effort failed. With his family"s fortune long since dwindled away and jobs scarce in the deepening American postwar recession, Yale signed on with an American trading firm and went back to Cairo. On the way, he stopped off in England and married Edith Hanna, a British nurse he had met in Jerusalem before the war.
For several years, Yale juggled a number of different part-time positions in Cairo, even as he continued to prospect for oil on his own. By May 1922, he felt he"d made a strike on the British-controlled Farasan Island off the coast of Yemen. As he told a senior Socony official, the British were keeping the oil find a secret, but if a Socony geologist was sent out, Yale knew a way for them to sneak onto the island. When that offer wasn"t pursued, Yale returned to the United States, where he took up the unlikely vocation of chicken farmer in rural New Hampshire as he worked toward getting his master"s degree in education. By 1928, he had been hired by the University of New Hampshire as an a.s.sistant professor of history.
A prodigious if not particularly gifted writer, Yale supplemented his professor"s income with articles and essays about the Middle East. These efforts gradually achieved wider recognition-he published in both the Atlantic Monthly and the Christian Science Monitor-which led to visiting lectureships and invitations to university symposia. Just as when he had lived in the region, Yale"s views on the Middle East oscillated wildly over the years, so that his 1923 call for a campaign to "smash the debasing tyranny of Islamism, which for centuries has corrupted the minds and souls and bodies of countless millions of Orientals," was neatly offset by a later screed against "the exploitive nature of Jewish nationalistic imperialism," which he charged was modeled on the "German fascist pattern."
Despite such rhetoric, Yale was sufficiently well regarded as an expert in the field to be appointed to the State Department"s Office of Postwar Planning as a Middle Eastern specialist during World War II. That position, in turn, led to his appointment as an a.s.sistant secretary to the Committee on Trusteeship at the first postwar United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. Yale"s particular area of focus was on the proposed political realignment of the Arab world through a dismantling of the discredited colonial mandate system in favor of U.N. trusteeship. It must have felt very much like dej vu, for, just as with the King-Crane Commission of twenty-six years earlier, none of the committee"s recommendations for the Middle East would be acted upon.
Returned to civilian life, Yale resumed teaching history at the University of New Hampshire, and then at Boston University until his retirement in 1967. He died in a nursing home in Derry, New Hampshire, in February 1975, at the age of eighty-seven.
FROM THE OTHER side of the Middle Eastern intelligence battlefield, Curt Prfer had a rather more colorful postwar career. Indeed, while no individual can truly personify the history of a nation, it would be hard to find a more remarkable exemplar through which to view events in Germany between the two world wars.
In 1919, Prfer was quickly drawn to one of the most poisonous myths to take root in defeated Germany, the so-called stab-in-the-back conspiracy. According to this myth, Germany hadn"t lost the war on the battlefield, but rather had been betrayed from within. Chief among these internal traitors were Germany"s liberal political parties-in a case of astoundingly poor timing, a coalition of leftist parties took control of the government just two days before the armistice-and international Jewry, seduced by the promises of the Balfour Declaration into throwing their allegiance to the Allied cause. It was a myth ultimately put to devastating use by Adolf Hitler, but it found an adherent in Curt Prfer far earlier; according to biographer Donald McKale, even as the impoverished Prfer accepted financial support from a Jewish foreign ministry coworker in the lean early postwar years, he railed against the Jews in his diary with growing vehemence.
In fact, though, due to the unfinished business of the Paris Peace Conference, a strong argument could be made that Germany hadn"t truly been defeated at all; instead, the Allies had created perhaps the best possible breeding ground for future conflict by simultaneously burdening their former enemy with crushing war reparation debts and leaving her ruling apparatus largely intact. It enabled German officials, Curt Prfer among them, to quickly begin rebuilding the alliances and networks of influence that had helped lead to war to begin with. One of Prfer"s first tasks for the foreign ministry in the postwar era was to help a number of Germany"s former partners in the Middle East-Egyptian nationalists, leaders of the Young Turk movement, pro-German Arabs-to escape retribution and resettle within the former Central Powers. Of course, this meant Germany now had a recruitment pool of malcontents for fomenting unrest in the future.
Even before the war was over, Prfer had seen a new way forward for that campaign, if only Germany learned from its past mistakes. "Our propaganda suffered," he wrote the foreign ministry on November 2, 1918, "because during the war we wanted to make up in urgency what we had neglected in peace.... With weepy accusations against our enemies, with longwinded recitals on our success, and inwardly untrue protestations of friendship for Islam, we tried to win sympathy from people who stood far from us spiritually." The next time around, Prfer urged, Germany "must seek less to educate, than to please."
Amid the musical-chairs politics of the postwar Middle East, Prfer soon had opportunity to get back into the mischief-making game. In the autumn of 1921, he was linked to a new scheme by the ever-determined Abbas Hilmi to overthrow the British regime in Egypt. A few months later, Prfer was in Rome visiting with Chaim Weizmann. If aware that his visitor had once seduced his younger sister into spying for Germany, Weizmann apparently had bigger things on his mind; as he opined to Prfer, since the French were clearly to blame for the British backing away from the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists and Germans now needed to work together against France. It was an idea with which the virulently anti-Semitic but ever opportunistic Prfer undoubtedly heartily concurred. For these and other activities, the British government finally put Prfer on an enemies blacklist, with the MI5 security agency maintaining an investigative file on him that would never be closed.
By the late 1920s, though, a certain equilibrium had settled into Prfer"s life. Having divorced his long-estranged first wife, the American Frances Pinkham, he married a much younger German woman who in 1930 bore him a son. He also continued to rise through the foreign ministry ranks, eventually becoming deputy director of its vitally important Abteilung (Department) III, the division dealing with both Anglo-American and Middle Eastern affairs. He was still in that position when Adolf Hitler came to power in July 1933.
Even though he shared Hitler"s dream of a resurgent Germany, Prfer, like many German conservatives, initially viewed the upstart n.a.z.is as useful fools, rough-around-the-edges hooligans who could be utilized but controlled by the more respectable establishment. By 1936, Prfer had sufficiently recovered from that misapprehension and his initial distaste to become personnel director of Hitler"s foreign ministry and, a year later, to officially join the n.a.z.i Party. In September 1939, with Germany having just ignited World War II with its invasion of Poland, Prfer left for South America to serve as. .h.i.tler"s amba.s.sador to Brazil.
His three years in Brazil marked a kind of personal high point. At last Prfer had achieved the status within the German diplomatic community that he had sought as far back as 1911. What"s more, by developing a close friendship with Brazil"s dictator, he helped forestall that immensely rich country from joining the war on the side of the Allies despite a treaty commitment with the Americans to do so. But alas, old habits die hard. In the summer of 1942, Prfer was directly linked to a German espionage ring operating in Brazil and ordered from the country. If disappointed by this turn of events, the amba.s.sador could at least be pleased by the timing; just five days after he and his family sailed for home, Brazil joined the Allies in the war and a warrant was issued for his arrest (he was eventually sentenced in absentia to twenty-five years for espionage).
Curiously trusting for a propaganda expert, Prfer had apparently accepted n.a.z.i p.r.o.nouncements about imminent victory at face value, so he was shocked to return to a Europe where the war was turning inexorably against Germany. For a year, he stuck it out in Berlin, even as he moved his wife and child to a home he had bought in a smaller city to escape the incessant Allied air raids. "All this is terrible for me to witness," he wrote in July 1943, "not only because I have always been a person who is very attached to his homeland and always will be, but also because I was sincerely converted to some of the beautiful ideas of National Socialism."
Beautiful ideas aside, this natural-born survivor also had the instinct to find a way out. In September 1943, Prfer led his family across the border into neutral Switzerland, where, much as in 1918, he remained until Germany"s fall. The difference between his return in 1918 and that of 1945 was that this time the Allies weren"t going to allow German militarists another reprise. The home Prfer had purchased in Baden Baden, it turned out, had been confiscated from a Jewish family, and was taken away from him. The former amba.s.sador was also put through the American "de-n.a.z.ification" investigation process, where he was cleared of war crimes even as many of his immediate superiors in the foreign ministry were sent to Nuremberg. The British might have had more desire to catch up to the man who had been their nemesis for three decades, but they too lost interest when in October 1945 it was reported the always frail Prfer was either dead or dying of tuberculosis.
But maybe not quite. Three years later, a sharp-eyed British intelligence officer in New Delhi noted a curious little item in the Daily Telegraph of India relating to the future training of Indian diplomats at Delhi University. "Students will be under the supervision of Dr. Pruffer," the article noted, "a former German diplomat who left his country on the advent of the n.a.z.i regime."
From a bit of sleuthing, it was eventually determined that the anti-n.a.z.i "Pruffer" and the pro-n.a.z.i Prfer were one and the same. Much as had occurred in Cairo nearly forty years earlier, the British moved to deny Prfer his coveted academic position, and he eventually returned to Germany. He finally died there-for real this time-in early 1959, at the age of seventy-seven. In a fitting irony, his only child, Olaf, with whom the failed former Oriental scholar had long been estranged, would eventually immigrate to the United States and become a renowned archaeologist.
OF ALL THE spies and intelligence agents who dueled with each another in the Middle East during World War I, the one most determined to divorce himself from the region in its aftermath was T. E. Lawrence. As he wrote a friend during his 1921 service for Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office, "the Arabs are like a page I have turned over, and sequels are rotten things."
In early 1922, with that service ending, Lawrence pet.i.tioned the head of the Royal Air Force for permission to join the force. There were several curious details to this request. Due both to his celebrity and former military rank, Lawrence might easily have entered the RAF as a senior officer, but instead he specifically requested to come in "with the ranks," meaning as an ordinary private. Also, he was no longer T. E. Lawrence; as he informed the RAF chief, his new name was John Hume Ross.
Making his pet.i.tion especially puzzling was that Lawrence had always been openly contemptuous of military culture. As he would write in Seven Pillars, the military uniform "walled its bearers from ordinary life, was sign that they had sold their wills and bodies to the State, and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.... The soldier a.s.signed his owner the twenty-four hours" use of his body, and sole conduct of his mind and pa.s.sions."
But perhaps it was not so puzzling after all. In Arabia, Lawrence had exerted life-and-death control over thousands, had cobbled together a cause and an army as he went along. All the while, he had been tormented by a sense of his own fraudulence, the awareness that the men who fought and died at his side were almost certain to be betrayed in the end. As he would suggest in Seven Pillars, and state quite explicitly in letters to friends, after Arabia he never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again.
Joined to this was a desire for anonymity, to leave behind who and what he had been. Lawrence displayed this desire most overtly in the decision to change his name-first to John Hume Ross and then to Thomas Edward Shaw-but it took more subtle form, a kind of psychological washing of the hands. In the one very short mention of the Cairo Conference in Seven Pillars, Lawrence wrote that Churchill "made straight all the tangle" in the Middle East, fulfilling Britain"s promises to the Arabs "in letter and spirit (where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our Empire or any interest of the peoples concerned." Knowing the full extent of those promises, and writing at a time when his cherished Syria remained under French control, Lawrence couldn"t possibly have believed his own a.s.sertion. Similarly, considering all that is contained in its pages, it"s very hard to regard the subt.i.tle to Seven Pillars-"A Triumph"-as anything but self-mockery.
Yet putting paid to all that had occurred so as to no longer have to think about it may well have been a matter of personal survival. What"s sadly evident in many of Lawrence"s postwar letters to friends, as well as in comments he made to his contemporary biographers, is that he suffered from many of the symptoms of what was known at the time as "sh.e.l.l shock," and what is today referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Over the remainder of his life, Lawrence suffered from recurrent nightmares, endured severe bouts of depression-several of which included the contemplation of suicide-and gradually cut himself off from many of his former friends amid an intense desire to be alone.
He may have been particularly primed for this continuing torment by his own actions on the battlefield. As a boy, he had been obsessed with the tales of King Arthur"s court and the chivalric code, had dreamed of leading a heroic life. In the reality of war, however, Lawrence had seen men blown to bits, often by his own handiwork, had left wounded behind to die, and had ordered prisoners to be killed. Just as any thoughtful person before or after him, what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the c.u.mulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly ant.i.thetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.
Also indicative of Lawrence"s craving for anonymity were the circ.u.mstances of the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In 1922, he had handprinted just eight copies of his wartime memoir for close friends, but as word of the book spread, Lawrence was urged to release it publicly. His compromise was to produce a slightly abridged two-hundred-copy run of Seven Pillars in 1926, along with a vastly shorter ma.s.s-market version, Revolt in the Desert. The books might have made Lawrence wealthy, but he donated all royalties from the hugely successful Revolt in the Desert to an RAF charity, and refused to publish another edition of Seven Pillars during his lifetime.
While publicly denigrating his work as a trifle, Lawrence confided to a friend the secret hope that his memoir might join the canon of the very best of English literature. In this, he was to be disappointed. In truth, Seven Pillars is a fabulously uneven book, its occasional soaring lyricism and startling psychological insights all too often subsumed by long disquisitions on topography and a riot of local place names and fleeting characters likely to leave the reader struggling. Despite the glowing and insistent plaudits of many-certainly Lawrence deserves great credit for being one of the first modern writers to present an unflinching look at the grotesqueness of war-Seven Pillars remains one of those books that, as even an admiring critic acknowledges, "is more often praised than read."
After his first attempt at disappearing into the RAF as "Airman Ross" failed-he was quickly unmasked by the British press-Lawrence joined the Royal Tank Corps under the name of T. E. Shaw, then quietly transferred back into the RAF in 1925. For the next decade, he occupied a succession of lowly positions within the air corps-for nearly a year he served as a simple base clerk at a remote RAF base in India-while also engaging his mechanical bent with work on a new generation of high-speed military rescue boats. In 1929, he bought a tiny cottage in rural Dorset, Clouds Hill, just a mile from the Bovington Camp where he had served in the Tank Corps, and this became his refuge from a still-clamoring public and press. While he continued to write-in 1928, Lawrence penned an account of his postwar military service, The Mint, followed by a translation of Homer"s Odyssey-the bulk of his time was devoted to his decidedly prosaic military duties, with off hours spent riding his beloved Brough motorcycle through the English countryside or voraciously reading at Clouds Hill. Despite the a.s.sertion of some biographers that this period in Lawrence"s life was also highly productive and interesting, it is hard to escape the image of a sad and reclusive man, his circle of friends and acquaintances steadily dwindling to a mere handful, and many of these only maintained by the occasional quick note from Lawrence explaining why he couldn"t see them. "Please apologize humbly for me to Mrs. S.F. [Newcombe]," he wrote Stewart Newcombe in February 1929, after apparently failing to show for a scheduled visit. "Something has gone wrong with the works, and I can"t wind myself up to meet people."
One who insisted on a face-to-face meeting was Faisal Hussein. During a state visit to England in 1925, the now king of Iraq and Lawrence attended a luncheon at a politician"s estate. It proved a rather awkward gathering, with the two old comrades in arms seeming to have little to say to each other, and Lawrence discomfited by their host"s constant invocation of "the good old days." "I"ve changed," Lawrence wrote his confidante, Charlotte Shaw, afterward, "and the Lawrence who used to go about and be friendly and familiar with that sort of people is dead. He"s worse than dead. He is a stranger I once knew."
During another state visit, in 1933, King Faisal had to lean on his contacts in the British military to all but order "Private Shaw" to a meeting.
By early 1935, Lawrence resolved to leave the RAF, even as he dreaded the long and unstructured days that lay ahead of him. His apprehensions proved quite accurate. As he wrote to a friend on May 6 from Clouds Hill, just two months into his retirement, "at present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die. Let"s hope that will not be my continuing state."
It would not be. Precisely a week later, on the morning of May 13, Lawrence rode his motorcycle to Bovington Camp to send a telegram. On his return, just a few hundred yards from Clouds Hill, he swerved to avoid two bicycling boys on the narrow road. Clipping the back tire of one of the bicycles, he lost control of the motorcycle and crashed, striking his head on the asphalt. Suffering from ma.s.sive brain injuries, Lawrence lingered in a coma at the Bovington Camp hospital for six days, before finally dying early on the morning of May 19, 1935. He was forty-six.
Among the pallbearers at his funeral were his old friends Ronald Storrs and Stewart Newcombe, while those in attendance included Winston Churchill and the poet Siegfried Sa.s.soon. For the occasion, King George V sent a message to Lawrence"s surviving younger brother, Arnold. "Your brother"s name will live in history, and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country."
Churchill"s eulogy was rather more loquacious: "I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again."
It"s easy to read in Churchill"s last sentence an allusion to the new danger that by 1935 was already building over Europe: the rise of n.a.z.i Germany. If Churchill imagined, however, that a living Lawrence might have played a signal role in meeting that danger, he was surely mistaken. As Lawrence himself had been trying to tell the world for many years, the blue-eyed "warrior of the desert" had pa.s.sed from the scene long before, lost to the first great cataclysm of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments.
The broad scope of this book required research in some twenty different governmental archives or private collections on three continents. It would have been an utterly impossible task without the very able group of historians and researchers who a.s.sisted me in various aspects. These include Tara Fitzgerald, Claire Flack, Lars Lued.i.c.ke, Frederic Maxwell, Andrea Minarcek, Kevin Morrow, Eamonn O"Neill, and Anna Van Lenten. Of these I must especially thank Kevin Morrow, who not only undertook research trips to California and Israel on my behalf, but also oversaw the collection, organization, and translation of both French and German archive material; I"m sure I would still be quite at sea with this project without his help.
I would also like to thank the curators and administrators of the various archives and private collections that I sought a.s.sistance from over the course of this project, all of whom were unfailingly helpful and generous with both their time and advice. While these are just a fraction of all those who helped me, I"d particularly like to thank Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre, St. Antony"s College, Oxford; Liz Gray, David Pfeiffer, and Eric Van Slander at the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marion Freudenthal and Ilonit Levy at the NILI Museum, Zichron Yaakov; Alex Rankin at Boston University; Carol Leadenham at the Hoover Inst.i.tution, Stanford University; and Lynsey Robertson at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge University. I must also single out Howard Diamond and the staff of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who made it something of a personal crusade to pinpoint when a sandstorm was likely to have struck Beersheva in early January 1914.
While it was my intention in this book to consult original source material as much as possible, there are two authors to whom I feel especially indebted. My research on Curt Prfer would have taken infinitely longer-and, in fact, would have still been incomplete-without the pioneering work of Professor Donald McKale at Clemson University, and his two seminal books, Curt Prfer and War by Revolution. I also want to thank Professor McKale for taking the time to read an early version of the book, and for his very helpful comments. Second, the author of any book in which T. E. Lawrence is a significant presence must acknowledge the trailblazing achievements of Jeremy Wilson in his authorized biography, Lawrence of Arabia. While I respectfully disagree with Mr. Wilson on several aspects of Lawrence"s actions in Arabia, I am deeply indebted to the astounding amount of scholarly research he has done on Lawrence, which has greatly aided all of us who have followed in his wake.
I also benefited from a small group of advance readers on this project, some of whom read for historical accuracy and others for more stylistic concerns. In the first category, in addition to Donald McKale, I want to sincerely thank Roberto Mazza at Northern Illinois University and Thomas Goltz at Montana State University, both of whom were extremely generous with their time and deeply insightful with their suggestions. In the latter category, I wish to thank my friends Michael Fields, Wilson Van Law, and Seth McDowell for valiantly struggling through a problematic early draft of the book, and most especially Frances Shaw, who, without complaint, suffered through several more. Also in this category I must include my wonderful agent and dear friend, Sloan Harris, at International Creative Management Partners, a man who always knows how to ride that delicate line of simultaneously providing encouragement and cracking the whip.
Finally, while I can"t recall this being the case for any other book I"ve written, I still remember the precise moment when the genesis of this one occurred: during a dinner conversation with my very good friend and editor, Bill Thomas, in the winter of 2008. I think we both instantly knew this was the book I needed to write-in fact, had been working toward writing for most of my journalistic career-and even if I have occasionally cursed Bill"s name since then whilst in the midst of writing or research difficulties, I"m eternally grateful for the enthusiasm, patience, and diligence he"s shown these past years in bringing the idea to fruition. I would also like to thank all the staff of Doubleday for tolerating my semi-permanent presence in their offices for several months while finishing the book"s fact-checking and copyediting, especially Melissa Danaczko and Coralie Hunter for their unstinting helpfulness in dealing with both my researching idiosyncrasies and computer illiteracy.
And last, I want to thank all the friends and family members who have been so tolerant of my canceled meetings, unreturned phone calls, and general absence of the past five years. With the book now done, I propose to be a much more attentive friend and relative going forward.
Notes.
While I have drawn from a very wide variety of archival and secondary materials in this book, a few sources specifically related to the book"s princ.i.p.al subjects proved especially valuable. As far as archival material is concerned, these are the diaries of Aaron Aaronsohn (NILI Museum and Archives, Israel); the diaries of Curt Prfer (Hoover Inst.i.tution, Stanford University); the unpublished memoir of William Yale (Boston University); and the World War Iera records of the British Foreign and War Offices (National Archives, Kew, England). Since some of those records were decla.s.sified within the past decade, for certain aspects of the book I had the opportunity to draw on material not previously available.
In addition, I am indebted to Donald McKale for his biography Curt Prfer: German Diplomat from the Kaiser to Hitler, which is one of the few sources of material for Curt Prfer"s early life. With regard to T. E. Lawrence, John Mack"s A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence is the most incisive psychological portrait ever drawn of the man. Most of all, I owe a tremendous debt of grat.i.tude to Jeremy Wilson and his authorized biography, Lawrence of Arabia; due to Wilson"s exhaustive research, his work remains the starting point for all serious Lawrence scholarship.
I also relied on a number of other primary and secondary materials for historical background on specific aspects in the book-for example, prewar Germany-and I have noted in corresponding endnotes those sources that I found particularly useful.
Abbreviations Used in Notes BU-William Yale Papers, Boston University.
GLLD-George Lloyd Papers, Churchill College.
HO-Hoover Inst.i.tution, Stanford University.
MSP-Mark Sykes Papers, Middle East Centre, St. Antony"s College.
NARA-National Archives (U.S.).
PAAA-Political Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amtes).
PRO-National Archives (formerly Public Records Office) (UK): PRO-ADM-Admiralty Records.
PRO-CAB-British Cabinet Records.
PRO-KV-Security Service Records.
PRO-FO-Foreign Office Records.
PRO-WO-War Office Records.
SADD-Sudan Archives, University of Durham.
UNH-William Yale Collection, University of New Hampshire.
UT-T. E. Lawrence Collection, University of Texas.
YU-William Yale Collection, Yale University.
ZY-NILI Museum and Archives, Zichron Ya"aqov, Israel.
Introduction.
1 On the morning: Lawrence"s official rank at this time was actually lieutenant colonel, but several weeks earlier he had been temporarily given full colonel status so as to facilitate his speedy return to Great Britain. As a result, from October 1918 onward, he was frequently referred to in official correspondence as "Colonel Lawrence."
2 "I have some presents": Lawrence to Liddell Hart, notes on interview of July 29, 1933, p. 2; UT Folder 1, File 1.
3 As a boy: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 562.
4 In subsequent years: Lord Stamfordham, King"s Private Secretary, to Lawrence (Shaw), January 1 and 17, 1928: A. W. Lawrence, Letters to T. E. Lawrence, pp. 18486. See also Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, pp. 39293, and Churchill in A. W. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), 19394.
5 "a sideshow": Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 274.
Chapter 1: Playboys in the Holy Land.
1 "I consider this new crisis": Djemal Pasha, quoted in Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War, p. 19.
2 By dawn, the winds: Yale, It Takes So Long, chapter 1, p. 10; BU Box 7, Folder 7.
3 Now that the khamsin had pa.s.sed: Yale wrote several different, and slightly conflicting, accounts of his first meeting with T. E. Lawrence, including in his memoir, It Takes So Long. The most detailed, and the source for most information here, is his article "T. E. Lawrence: Scholar, Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat" (undated, but presumably written shortly after Lawrence"s 1935 death); BU Box 6, Folder 1.