Dreamers of the Day (23 page)

Now the League of Nations had given Palestine to Great Britain as a protectorate to be dealt with as His Majesty’s Government thought expedient. “Russian Zionists call it ‘a land without people for a people without land,’” Karl said, “but nearly a million people live there, Agnes. A tenth are Jews, and half again as many Christians, but three-quarters are Arab, and they will never give that wasteland up. It may be awful but it is theirs, and they value it above their children. They proved to Turkey that they would kill or die for it, and now that Lawrence has encouraged Arab nationalism?” Karl shrugged. “They will feel the presence of British colonialists and Zionist settlers as needles in their living flesh. The irony is that Palestine is such a desolation, and yet so many have desired to possess it.”

Looking out the window of the train, I couldn’t imagine why.

Until you see Palestine, Karl told me, you cannot truly understand the many passages of Scripture, Old and New, in which the commonness, cheapness, and troublesomeness of stones are drawn upon for metaphor. To dash one’s foot against a stone is a tiresome vexation; to cast seed on stony ground, an exercise in futility. To gather stones out of a vineyard is to engage in a never-ending task. To ask for bread and receive a stone is to be heartlessly disdained. “King Solomon made silver to be as stones in Jerusalem” gives an excellent notion of that king’s storied wealth.

“The Arabs, too, have a legend that explains the stones of Palestine,” Karl said. “When Allah made the world, he put all the stones that were to be used across the entire earth into two bags and gave them to an angel to distribute over the land. While the angel was flying above Palestine, one bag broke.”

And nowhere were those stones more in evidence than in Gaza.

Near the seacoast, the town was one of the largest in Palestine, which wasn’t saying a great deal. Fifteen water wells rendered the location habitable in what is otherwise a desert. Those wells have made it a prize along the route of every invader from Tutmoses III to Allenby. In its newest cemetery, three thousand British graves bore witness to its importance in the Great War.

Of course, no city is at its best near its railroad tracks, but Gaza truly was the most complete municipal horror I ever looked upon. From behind dusty glass we saw fly-ridden and filthy children standing along the right of way and between mud-brick hovels, all of which were in a state of utter dilapidation. I remember thinking that the biblical Samson might be counted fortunate to have been rendered eyeless during his time in Gaza. There was nothing beautiful, nothing gentle, nothing delightful in that terrible place. There was nothing thriving, nothing unstinted excepting only stones and fury. Those, Gaza had in howling abundance.

The children’s pebbles bounced harmlessly off the windows, and it seemed that this attack might be nothing worse than schoolboy horseplay. In a matter of seconds, however, the boys were lost in a huge mass of grown men running alongside the train. A sudden tempest of rocks rained against the side of the car. Window after window splintered. The stench of manure, the odor of unwashed male bodies, and the stink of coal smoke poured in, sharing the air with the stones.

Next to me, Lord Trenchard conveyed icy disapproval by compressing his thin lips into a tighter line. Chewing on a spent cigar, Winston laid aside his pen. Clementine stopped reading. “Not again,” she sighed, looking more annoyed than interested as she picked a piece of glass from her skirt and flicked it outside.

“I blame Shanklin,” Winston rumbled cheerfully. “There’s a riot every time she takes me somewhere.”

Sergeant Thompson appeared, slid back the compartment door, and motioned us away from the windows. A moment later, he made way for Mutt and Jeff. These were the two Palestinian police officers Thompson was counting on to recognize Arab ringleaders, and he deferred to them now.

Mutt bashed out the remaining window glass with his elbow. Jeff leaned forward with something in his hand. I shrank away, expecting him to fire on the mob. To our astonishment, he held not a pistol but a camera! He was taking photographs—God knows why, unless it was to build a case against the assassin he expected to succeed in killing Churchill.

Snarling, with his own pistol drawn, Thompson reached past Mutt and hauled Jeff out of the compartment with his free hand, all the while threatening to throw both policemen to the (French) wolves and take a (French) photograph of their (French) bodies to send to their (French) widows.

Lawrence arrived a moment later. In the corridor just beyond our compartment, he and Thompson discussed the situation in low voices, the sergeant tense, the colonel unperturbed.

“You can’t be serious!” Thompson cried suddenly. “I’m not letting him off the train in this hellhole!”

“It’s all arranged,” Lawrence said mildly.

“You’re demented! Look at those people!”

We had slowed to a stop in a sort of public square with the station platform on one side and a large mosque opposite. Lawrence braced himself against the doorjamb and leaned across us to peer through what was left of the carriage window, as if gauging Thompson’s assessment of the mob against his own.

The train was surrounded now, and the plaza was crammed to the edges with furious chanting men, all of whom seemed intent on murdering the odious “Shershill,” given the least opportunity.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Lawrence said peaceably. “We’re going to that big hall next to the mosque. Winston will speak. I will translate. The ladies can listen at the back, but—”

“You aren’t thinking of taking the women through that,” Thompson objected, astonished.

“They’ll be quite safe with me,” Lawrence said, and gave the sergeant no opportunity to argue. “Thompson, you will come with us as far as the door, but stay outside. Stand before it until we come out again. Stand without moving, understood?”

Thompson was bug-eyed with disbelief, but outranked. “Where do you want Mutt and Jeff?” he asked, jerking his chin toward the pair standing in the aisle. Both seemed quite shaken, and honestly? I’m not sure who frightened them more: the mob or Sergeant Thompson.

“They’re Sir Herbert’s worry,” Lawrence said dismissively.

“You don’t feel the need of them?” Thompson persisted. “They’re a couple of extra guns.”

“They’re a couple of extra jokers” was the muttered response. “We’ll lose them in the crowd, on the way.” When Thompson looked aghast, Lawrence added cheerily, “Don’t worry about those two—they’ll survive.”

“It’s not those two I’m worried about,” Thompson called, but Lawrence was already striding down the aisle toward the door at the far end of the car.

I must preface what I tell you next, for in the years that followed the Cairo Conference a considerable controversy developed about T. E. Lawrence and his part in the desert revolt. The war book he mentioned to me on our way to the pyramids was eventually published and received polar reviews.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
was hailed as a literary masterpiece and denounced as a pack of lies. Lawrence himself was lionized and vilified, his exploits in the desert often confirmed and frequently denied.

I shall not pretend that I am unbiased. After spending time in his company, I grew quite fond of him. In the years afterward, we sometimes corresponded and I followed his career from afar. I did not like to hear stories that were meant to undermine his reputation, but I do try to be fair-minded, and I read many of the biographies.

Chief among Lawrence’s detractors was Mr. Richard Aldington, who published a peculiarly venomous book twenty years after Lawrence died and two years before I did. The book was first released in France under the title
Lawrence l’Imposteur,
which gives you the flavor of its contents; its title in English was not so bluntly libelous, but
Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry
was no less hostile.

I myself enjoyed Mr. Aldington’s novel about the Great War.
The Death of a Hero
is ironic, sarcastic, ferocious, and funny—very modern, actually, and quite entertaining.
Seven Pillars,
by contrast, is a brilliant but difficult book; when its author wished to conceal himself, its prose could be as monstrous and opaque as
Moby-Dick
’s.

Nonetheless, neither
Death of a Hero
nor its author ever achieved the status bestowed upon Lawrence and his work, and Lowell Thomas’s public lectures were just salt in Mr. Aldington’s literary wound. They glorified war and mortal combat in ways no bitter veteran of the Western Front could tolerate, and on behalf of his dead comrades—gassed, machine-gunned, blown to mincemeat in the trenches—Mr. Aldington must have resented the attention paid to Lawrence’s more photogenic but relatively minor desert campaign. Just as galling: in the years after the Great War, Lawrence fled from his fame—a fact that must have greatly annoyed poor Mr. Aldington, who would have enjoyed it more. Worse yet: after his death in 1935, Lawrence was treated as a secular saint. The world heaped on him the honor that it continued to withhold from a rival Lawrence never knew he had. Perhaps that was when Mr. Aldington resolved to cast as much doubt as he could on every exploit and accomplishment and talent attributed to the man who bested him, even from the grave.

Then again, I suppose it’s possible that everything Aldington wrote about Lawrence was true. I certainly cannot judge the accuracy of the wartime memories upon which Lawrence built his seven-pillared worthy house, but I can tell you this much: I can tell what we saw that day in Gaza.

We moved toward the trailing end of the railroad carriage, and as we approached the vestibule, the noise swelled: two thousand men shouting, chanting, screaming. Never had I witnessed emotion as violent as that which greeted the arrival of Winston Churchill and Sir Herbert Samuel in Gaza. Those two persons were the very embodiment of colonialism and Zionism: His Britannic Majesty’s secretary for the colonies and the British high commissioner for Palestine, who was himself a Jew. As Karl had anticipated, their mere presence in Gaza was “like a needle in the living flesh” of the men who made up that roaring sea of waving fists.

Without a word, Lawrence stepped from the shadow of the carriage into the sunlight that poured down between the cars. Having made himself visible, he lifted one hand slowly. A loose white sleeve fell back from a thin-boned, sinewy wrist. Like the pope of Rome, he raised the first and second fingers above the other two, as though in blessing.

And there was…silence.

In an instant, faces distorted by hate and fury were transformed: by startlement, by joy, by adulation. A moment later the crowd erupted, transported by the simple sight of him. Imagine winning the World Series at a home game. Imagine the grand finale of a Fourth of July fireworks display, or an ovation at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth. Thousands chanted his name.
“Aurens! Aurens! Aurens!”
Some wept.

Smelling of cigar, Winston gazed over my shoulder. “I’d heard,” he said, awestruck, “but if I hadn’t seen it myself…”

“And if the war had continued another year?” Sir Herbert suggested quietly, just behind me.

“He might have ruled the East,” Winston agreed. “By 1919, that little man could have marched to Constantinople with all Arabia at his back.”

Outside, Lawrence stepped down onto the platform. The crowd fell silent again and moved back, to make a space for him. Somewhere in the distance, we heard a goat bleat. A child at the edge of the crowd piped a request and was lifted onto his father’s shoulders. When Lawrence turned, the crunch of coarse sand beneath his sandals was audible. He held out one hand toward us, his face serene and eyes seraphic. “Come along,” he said, twitching his fingers in invitation. Casual as could be.

We looked to Thompson, who shook his head but shrugged helplessly, then nodded. One by one, we descended the three steps and followed Lawrence in the eerie quiet as the crowd made way for us. Many reached out to touch him, murmuring
“Aurens!”
as he passed.

Across the square, the door of the ramshackle public hall swung open to reveal a gathering of tribal chieftains and municipal officials, sweating and perfumed. A great cheer went up when Lawrence was glimpsed through the battered entrance of this jerry-made building, but he stepped aside, deferentially waving Winston and Sir Herbert ahead with a low sweep of his hooded arm. Clementine and I followed; with a slight movement of his eyes, nothing more, Lawrence reminded us to remain at the back of the room. Thompson took up his post just outside, looking as though he just
dared
the crowd to start something. And there he stayed, formidable and unmoving, as Lawrence had instructed.

I don’t really remember much of what Winston said in that meeting hall. My eyes were on Lawrence, who contrived to make himself a wren again, even in his resplendent robes. Standing to one side and a bit behind, eyes downcast, he repeated Churchill’s speech first in Arabic and then in fluent French—the real stuff, not Thompson’s kind—when someone in the audience requested it.

This done, he conveyed the concerns and comments of the gathered dignitaries. No matter what they asked or said, Winston produced nicely phrased political pleasantries, and though the meeting took the better part of two hours, he uttered nothing of substance. What, after all, could he say that was both honest and unlikely to spark renewed passion?

In the back of that stifling room, yearning for fresher air and somewhere to sit, I suddenly realized that, though Winston held their national aspirations in his own pudgy hands, this might have been the first time he’d met with any Arabs. As far as I knew, not a single individual who actually lived in the region had attended the Cairo Conference, even as an observer. Last week, in private, Winston and his Forty Thieves had sealed the fate of everyone here and of generations to come. Public meetings like these were just for show.

In Versailles and in Cairo, I think it’s fair to say, Lawrence did his best to represent the people of the Middle East, but he was just one man, with conflicting loyalties at that. His self-imposed mission was to balance internal imperial interests with international politics, and both of those with the expectations of millions who themselves had competing interests. Arabs, Lebanese, and Djebel Druses. Syrians, Kurds, and Armenians. Native-born Jews and European settlers. Turks, Persians, and Mesopotamians. Egyptians, Palestinians, and a thousand Bedouin tribes. All of these, and more, wanted something that usually involved taking land from someone else.