Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (32 page)

Lawrence was an inspired guerilla leader, and soon became the effective commander of Hussein’s revolt. He himself led its first foray out of the Peninsula, into the country at the head of the Red Sea, and he presently came to see himself as a King-maker, escorting the Hashemite family to the thrones of the Arabs. He became not simply a colleague of the Arab leaders, but actually a friend, so restoring to imperial affairs a relationship between imperialist and client that had scarcely existed since eighteenth-century India.
2

It might have come to nothing, though, and the Hashemites might have faded from the imperial scene, if Lawrence had not persuaded Allenby, then organizing his invasion of Syria, of the potential importance of the Arab revolt. We have a picture, from Lawrence’s own writings, of the first meeting between the two men, when Lawrence implanted in Allenby’s mind the idea that the Arabs might have great meaning for the British future. It took place at the general headquarters in Cairo. Lawrence had ridden overland from Aqaba, at the head of the Red Sea, and was dressed self-indulgently
à l’
Arabe
, flowing white robes, gilded dagger at the waist, sandals flip-flopping incongruously along the military corridors. He was the local equivalent in fact of the Anglo-Indian irregulars who, in turban and sashed tunics, had ridden with their cavalrymen through so many Victorian adventures, but in the ramrod world of Allenby’s command, he was a rarity indeed. He looked faintly absurd, suggestively feminine, highly unmilitary.

Across the table sat The Bull, tremendous with command. One can almost feel the tension, even now, as the temperaments faced each other. They looked at one another with suspicion. Allenby thought Lawrence rather a fraud, with too high an opinion of himself as a soldier, and an altogether disproportionate view of the importance of his Arabs. Lawrence feared Allenby to be just another brass-hat. But even as Lawrence offered his plans, we may feel the atmosphere changing. Lawrence recognized the hidden spark in Allenby. Allenby dimly saw in Lawrence some hint of greatness. The idea of the Arabs as allies, not merely mercenaries, gained a new meaning when Lawrence talked of it, so fresh from the peninsula. He wanted to spread the Arab revolt northwards, into Syria, and he wanted more weapons and ammunition for the Arabs, more gold, more air support.

The general, so Lawrence himself thought, could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan—‘the problem was working behind his eyes’. But he was convinced. ‘At the end he put up his chin and said quite directly, “Well, I will do 
for you what I can”’—an improbable cadence, but then Lawrence preferred a mannered prose.

When Allenby resumed his campaign through Syria, his right flank consisted of the Hashemite army, commanded by the Emir Feisal, third son of the Grand Sharif, and directed by Lawrence; and when Damascus fell Arabs and British rode into the city together, something new in imperial victories. Feisal set up an Arab administration in Syria; Abdullah, his brother, was promised by his father the throne of Iraq. Everywhere the flag of the Hashemites flew, and the wide kingdom of the Arabs seemed to be at hand. Lawrence had given McMahon’s promises meaning, it seemed, and Allenby had sealed them.

From Cairo and London, though, the prospects looked different, for the British were already preparing to divide the Arab lands with their European allies in a muffled version of the African Scramble. They had admitted to nobody that their instinctive purpose had been to gain an imperial supremacy over the Middle East, but it was so. Their Allies assumed it, and sometimes one could read it between the lines even of their own most Wilsonian announcements. At the end of the war the British published a declaration, jointly with the French, assuring the Arabs they would be absolutely free to choose what Government they wished, but there was a sting to the rider. The only concern of the Allies, it said, was ‘to offer such support and efficacious help as will ensure the smooth working of the governments and administrations’.

Cynics knew what ‘efficacious help’ meant, in the imperial vocabulary, and so it was to prove. At the peace conference Feisal represented his father, actually as King of the Hejaz, in his own eyes as King of the Arabs: the only other Asians present were the Indians and the Chinese. He argued for the complete independence of the Arabs—‘as representing my father, who, by request of Britain and France, led the Arab rebellion against the Turks, I have come to ask that the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia … be recognized as independent sovereign peoples, under the guarantee of the League of
Nations.’ But he had no chance. Nobody bore himself with more dignity at Versailles than this descendant of the Prophet, immaculate in his Sharifian robes, guarded at the Hotel Metropole by two huge Nubians with drawn swords, and attended often by the now celebrated Lawrence. But dignity availed him nothing in the end. The United Arab Kingdom collapsed in disillusionment (‘a madman’s notion’, Lawrence himself called it, ‘for this century or the next probably’), and Feisal was presently ejected by the French from his throne in Damascus. When the final arrangements for the Middle East were agreed by the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference, the Hashemites were not represented at all.

This is what was decreed. In the Arabian peninsula the
status
quo
would be maintained, with King Hussein confirmed in his sovereignty of the Hejaz. France was given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, traditionally French spheres of activity since the days of the Crusades. The Zionists got their National Home. The rest would be British, embodied in mandatory Governments in Palestine (including Transjordan) and Iraq. From the half-truths and evasions of their wartime policies, from the rivalries and intrigues of Versailles, from the discomfiture of the Arabs, from the pressure of the Zionists, from the power of Allenby and the complex imaginings of T. E. Lawrence there really had come into being a new province of the Empire.

Among many British Arabists a profound sense of shame set in, to dog their attitudes and even affect their policies until the end of the Empire. They felt they had betrayed their friends, and believed the imperial policies to have been dishonourable. This is how one of them, Walter Smart of the Egyptian service, summed up the wartime exchanges in hindsight: ‘The Anglo-French bargaining about other peoples’ property, the deliberate bribing of international Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity … all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war.’ The Arabs were no less bitter in their disillusionment. Feisal retired sadly to the Hejaz; the Iraqis burst into rebellion against their British overlords; Transjordan subsided into squabbling groups
of tribes and petty States, precariously held in check by a handful of Englishmen.

Among those most deeply affected by this denouement was Lawrence, whose private mortifications were thus sublimated into a public emotion. Shame was to be the
leitmotif
of his epic memoir,
Seven
Pillars
of
Wisdom,
and he was outspoken in his view that Britain had ill-treated the Hashemite family, now reduced once more to their guardianship of the Holy Places. Fortunately there presently came into office one of those public men improbably held in thrall by the Lawrentian enigma, Winston Churchill. Setting up a Middle East Department at the Colonial Office, and appointing Lawrence as his particular adviser, he set out to straighten accounts, if not with the Arabs in general, at least with the Hashemites. In 1921 he summoned a conference at Cairo to interpret in imperial terms the decisions of the Peace of Versailles.

‘Practically all the experts and authorities on the Middle East’, he later wrote, ‘were summoned’, which meant in the context of the times that of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British and two Arab. There is a famous photograph of this conference, taken at the Mena House Hotel—where Churchill, who spent much of his time painting pictures, guarded by an armoured car, held a one-man exhibition of Pyramidical portraits. There we may see, frozen for ever in their official poses, the true progenitors of the Anglo-Arab empire. The chubby-faced, balding man in the centre is of course Churchill himself, twenty years older than he was at Spion Kop, and by now an experienced imperialist. The young man in the three-piece suit, papers untidily protruding from his jacket pocket, is T. E. Lawrence. The only woman in the group, wearing a wide flowered hat and a fox fur, is Gertrude Bell, writer, orientalist, explorer, and forceful protagonist of the British presence in Iraq. On Churchill’s left is Sir Percy Cox, ‘Kokkus’ to the Arabs, who so fatefully advocated a British advance to Baghdad in 1915, on his right is Sir Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, charged with the fostering of the Zionist National Home. Tactfully
among the paladins stand the two Iraqis, the soldier Jaafar al Askari, in a spiked helmet, and Sam Browne, the politician Sasun Effendi Haskail, in a tarboosh and wing collar, and in front of them all, guarded by a kneeling Sudanese, two young lions gambol emblematically on the gravel.

It was scarcely a conference really. Churchill and Lawrence had already made its decisions—‘over dinner’, Lawrence said, ‘at the Ship Restaurant in Whitehall’. But the grandees at Mena House ordered the new arrangements, and gave to all the British officials in the Middle East some sense of unified purpose. Churchill’s solution was to create two new kingdoms in the Arab world, the Kingdom of Iraq, the Emirate of Transjordan. Both would have Hashemite monarchs, Feisal in Baghdad, Abdullah in Amman, but both would be unmistakably protégés of the British.

So the new empire was established—‘knitting together the old’, thought the historian Arnold Toynbee, then a Foreign Office official. By the middle 1920s Britain was overwhelmingly paramount in the Middle East, and her control of the Arab world was absolute, if not in principle, at least in fact. The routes to India were safe as never before, the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the Abadan refinery, all were securely in British possession. ‘I must put on record my conviction’, Lawrence wrote after surveying this consummation, ‘that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands’—or if not with clean hands, he might have added, at least with full pockets.

None of the new territories became colonies, and Aden was to be, first to last, the only true British possession among the Arabs. Elsewhere the new suzerainty was veiled in euphemism. Egypt was proclaimed independent, in 1922, but remained a British fief just the same. The Persian Gulf emirates were officially Protected States, or States in Treaty Relationship, but did what they were told. Iraq and Transjordan had their own monarchs and Governments, but were effectively run by British advisers, and policed by British forces. Palestine was a Mandated Territory, but was governed by the familiar Colonial Office hierarchy of Chief Secretary and District Commissioner, Director of Public Works and Conservator of Forests. The vassal dynasty of the Hashemites, the front of British control
among the Arabs, adopted under the tutelage of the Empire all the trappings of western kingship, and there were Baghdadi tailors By Appointment to the Royal House, and two new royal palaces for the penniless Emir of Transjordan, one for the summer in the Moab mountains, one for the winter by the blue Dead Sea.

This was a little forlorn. It was the example and policy of the British that turned old Hussein’s sons and grandsons into Arab parodies of Windsors or Hanoverians. They were more easily controlled, of course, as members of the royal brotherhood: like the subservient rulers of Indian princely States, or the more docile chiefs of black Africa, they were absorbed into the purposes of their patrons. When the Emir Abdullah of Transjordan remarked one day that the only lady whose hand he would ever kiss was Queen Mary of England, he was expressing as much a political as a domestic condition.

The Iraqi dynasty, whose first king was the fighting prince Feisal, soon degenerated into pastiche. Though in 1930 Iraq theoretically became an independent Kingdom, it really remained a British puppet, and the royal family willingly connived in the sham. Only a generation removed from the arcane chieftaincies of the Hejaz, now they seemed almost as British as the British themselves. English tutors and governesses, English nannies, English coachmen, English grooms and mechanics were installed in Kasr al-Rihab, the Palace of Welcome, on the outskirts of Baghdad. An English architect designed a Royal Mausoleum. The royal sons were sent to Harrow, and though the Queens of Iraq remained generally in purdah, the Kings made frequent public appearances, in immaculate lounge suits, or feathered topees and gauntlets, driven in crested landaus by white-gloved grooms. Feisal died in 1933; his headstrong successor Ghazi was killed driving his sports car too fast across Baghdad; the climactic years of the monarchy were dominated by the regency of the Crown Prince Abdulillah, who looked after the throne during the boyhood of his cousin, King Feisal II.

This interregnum was the true allegory of the British presence among the Arabs, for there was never a client prince more subtly
anglicized than Abdulillah, or a regime which seemed, except to its struts and sycophants, more inevitably fated. Abdulillah was your true Anglo-Arab, the most transient of all imperial types, for it had scarcely a generation in which to appear, reach its fulfilment and be obliterated. He was educated at Victoria College, Alexandria, a transplanted English public school specifically designed, like the Princes’ Colleges in India, to produce surrogate Britons. A slim and elegant man, with a small dark moustache, sloping eyebrows and a Mongolian puffiness about the cheeks, he had adopted all the externals of the British style. Reticent, formal, courtly, shy, strict about protocol, devoted to pedigree, he was made to be a well-heeled monarch in exile, growing old charmingly in house parties of the English shires, or on hospitable Italian terraces. Instead he was the all too proper figurehead of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.