The Great Silence (19 page)

But the theatrical urge behind the parades of the summer of 1919 was not yet exhausted. Uninspired by the moustachioed, red-faced, over-fed grandees of the military and sceptical of the handling of the war, the public fastened on a previously little known war hero. T. E. Lawrence filled the required role perfectly.

Born in Wales in 1888, Lawrence of Arabia was the third of five illegitimate sons of Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish landowner, and his lover, a children’s governess. At university Lawrence had become obsessed with physical fitness and constantly tested his bodily endurance, taking a thousand-mile walking tour of crusader castles in Syria in the summer of 1909, and training himself up for demanding military tactics. Working in Cairo as a military intelligence officer, Lawrence was soon trusted enough to be sent as liaison officer to meet Emir Feisal, the Arab military leader. In Lawrence, and the British Army he represented, Feisal found an ally to join him in his battle against Turkish control of Arabian lands. The beardless, ruddy-cheeked Lawrence, who had never before seen action, became acknowledged as the unofficial leader of the Arabian army. His understanding of the Arab sensibility, their language and way of life was unrivalled. As he criss-crossed the endless sand plains of the desert at some speed, riding on a camel, carrying ‘a large treasure of gold’, often alone and unprotected, he succeeded in uniting the
rival chieftains. With a fighting force that had swelled under his leadership, from 10,000 to twenty times that size, he displayed all the qualities of an outstanding General. It was an astonishing story.

Lowell Thomas, a 27-year-old American lecturer at Princeton University with a background in journalism, had been commissioned by the US Government to find stories that celebrated successes of the war. In May 1917 conscription had been introduced in America as a result of the country’s lack of enthusiasm at entering a European war and the Government was looking for a means to ignite ‘the people’s righteous wrath’ against the Germans. The unremitting gloom of trench warfare held no appeal to an American population remote from the conflict and with a taste for the romantic.

Thomas had arrived in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1918, as a war correspondent attached to General Allenby’s army, a position made available to him by John Buchan, writer and also Director of Intelligence in the British Ministry of Information. Thomas wandered through the dusty streets of the recently captured Holy City wearing Arab head-dress, the folds of fabric bunched at his neck or sometimes raised to his mouth as a shield from the dust. One day Thomas spotted a slim, small (at five foot five) but beautiful, blond young man with a high domed forehead and flashing blue eyes. Lawrence was ‘arrayed’, as Lowell put it, in Bedouin robes with a curved golden sword tucked firmly into his waisted sash. The British Governor, Ronald Storrs, introduced Thomas to ‘the Uncrowned King of Arabia’.

Working with Thomas was Harry Chase, in Thomas’s words ‘an unusually able cameraman’, and together he and Thomas began to make a film about the liberation of Jerusalem and the emancipation of the Arab, Jewish and Armenian communities. At the centre of the proposed film would be a new star.

In the spring Lawrence had been invited by the British Government, fully aware of the extraordinary power he wielded among his Arab associates, to attend the Paris Peace Conference. But Lawrence found his support of the Arab community at variance with Anglo-French feelings. The Allies wanted to divide the Turkish territories between them rather than handing them over to the Arabs as promised at the end of the war. Lawrence did not hide his dissatisfaction
and Harold Nicolson watched Lawrence ‘glide along the corridors ... the lines of resentment hardening around his boyish lips: an undergraduate with a chin’. On occasion Lawrence’s bad temper reduced the admittedly lachrymose acting Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, to tears. At an introductory dinner with the hero of the desert Winston Churchill was deeply shocked by the latest example of Lawrence’s arrogance. During a private investiture Lawrence had informed George V that he would rather the King returned the medal stamped with the honour of Commander of the Bath to its velvet cushion than pin it to his tunic. Lawrence had explained to the King that he felt Britain was not honouring her wartime pledge to the Arabs. The King was obviously displeased but Lawrence was intransigent, bowed and left the room. Ignoring the discomfort of the other dinner party guests listening to Lawrence tell the story, Churchill could not restrain himself from openly rebuking Lawrence for his rudeness.

Despite his heroic qualities there was something enigmatic and disconcerting about Lawrence. He would squat on the floor in the position that had become instinctive to him during his time in Arabia. People felt uncomfortable in his presence. In April 1919 Lawrence had been offered a seven-year fellowship at All Souls College, a position for which he felt himself unqualified, as someone incapable of being ‘a good dresser ... adept at small conversation and ... a good judge of port’. But flattered by the academic accolade from his old university, he accepted.

There Robert Graves was unsettled by Lawrence’s constantly flickering eyes ‘as if he were taking an inventory of clothes and limbs’. In his rooms there were three prayer rugs and a four thousand-year-old clay soldier that he had brought back from a child’s grave at Carchemish where he had dug before the war. Graves and Lawrence discussed poetry, never the war, and when they went out together into Oxford to have tea in Fuller’s teashop Lawrence would clap his hands high in the air together in oriental style to attract the waiter’s attention. He had a plan, he confided to Graves, to plant mushrooms in the All Souls quad.

But no hint of such disconcerting eccentricity emerged in Lowell Thomas’s film-lecture. He first took his production to New York in
the spring of 1919, where he put up his own money to rent the Century Theatre in Central Park West. As Thomas took the stage to invite his audience to ‘Come with me to lands of history, mystery and romance’ he described ‘the young shereef’ as ‘the new Richard Lionheart’ while standing in front of an incongruous but magical image of a young man with an Anglo-Saxon face, gorgeous headdress and ornately belted robes. The first film,
WithAllenby in Palestine
, included cavalry charges, motorcycle chases amid palm groves, and camels racing across the horizon, their riders holding their rifles up high against the sky. For an adventure-loving audience searching for a few hours of escape this glamorous and colourful story compared favourably with the dull, grey muddiness of the Western Front.

The second film,
With Lawrence in Arabia
, centred on Thomas’s irresistible mix of what he listed as ‘biblical places, camels, veiled women, palm trees, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, deserts, Arabs, cavalry charges and the story of a mysterious young hero’. In Chase’s footage the humanity of the Arabian world was never missing. Arabs stared gravely into Chase’s camera lens, as British soldiers, less composed, self-conscious and prone to nervous giggling, posed as if for the still photograph they were more familiar with. Thomas himself, wearing his American army uniform and scarf-swathed headdress, occasionally ambled into the scene.

Soon the show transferred to the larger setting of Madison Square Garden, a performance space the equivalent to London’s Olympia and one of the largest theatres on the North American continent. After that Thomas took his show to Canada and an unprepared and amazed audience heard the astonishing tale at the Massey Hall in Toronto on 6 June. The following morning readers of the
Toronto Star
marvelled at descriptions of this ‘Uncrowned King’ and Lowell Thomas’s ‘astounding’ story about a ‘British Boy who united the Arabs’. The tale, the paper said, seemed to belong more properly in the fictional pages of Rider Haggard or Kipling.

Returning to New York the final performance at Madison Square Garden was once again a sell-out. An influential Briton had slipped into his place in the stalls. Mr Percy Burton, impresario and manager of such stars as Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, rushed backstage as soon as the show was over and managed to
detain Thomas long enough to tell him of his passionate insistence on a transfer to London. Thomas said it would be quite impossible. The show was already booked in theatres along the length and across the breadth of the United States. Burton was determined and persuasive. Thomas weakened. He might be able to manage a brief trip over the Atlantic, during the hottest period of the American summer, when the atmosphere in theatres there was so stifling that performances became impossible. But Thomas, sensing the upper hand was his, made two extraordinary conditions for the proposed trip. First, he asked that the most famous theatre of all, Drury Lane, should be booked for the showing, and secondly he required the King himself to issue a personal invitation to Thomas to bring the production to England. Burton was not easily beaten. Returning to London he pulled strings, made telephone calls and sent a cable to Thomas. Drury Lane was unavailable but would the stage of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden be acceptable? And yes, King George V was delighted to extend a personal invitation to Thomas to visit England with his show that summer.

By the time Thomas arrived in London on 14 August the two features had been merged into one with the new title
With Allenby in Palestine and the Liberation of Holy Arabia
. The film of General Allenby’s cavalry was a revelation to the British audience. The reviewer in the
Sphere
listed the human elements under the General’s command: ‘Hunting yeomen from the “shires” and the “provinces”, Anzacs who were bred in the saddle, Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, Gurkhas from the Salt Range, natural horsemen and above all horse-masters’. The audience for the opening night at the Royal Opera House was a hand-picked crowd of Very Distinguished People. The Prime Minister Lloyd George and most of the Cabinet came to hear the talk as well as several Generals. A publicity puff from Lloyd George himself was printed prominently on the handouts. ‘In my opinion Lawrence is one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times.’

The borrowed background set had originally been designed for the Moonlight-on-the-Nile scene from Handel’s oratorio
Joseph and His Brethren
. In front of the painted palm trees stood the band of the Welsh Guards in their scarlet uniform. As a tribute to Lawrence’s
birthplace the band had been asked by Thomas to provide ‘half an hour of atmospheric music’ to put the audience in the right mood. Several skimpily dressed young women with undulating midriffs followed the choir and performed the dance of the Seven Veils with remarkable authenticity. The audience, especially the men among them, were mesmerised. From behind the scenes came the distinctive sound of the Arab call to prayer, a new arrangement written by Thomas’s wife and sung by an Irish tenor.

As Thomas appeared on stage, a musky incense filled the theatre, billowing from several braziers positioned up and down the aisles. ‘Come with me to lands of history, mystery and romance ...’ he again began as the Welsh bandsmen struck up their musical accompaniment, amplifying the tale of danger, colour and courage. Every grunt of a camel and each rumbling sound that preceded a charge of the cavalry was given its own peculiar musical effect.

Lawrence himself never appeared on stage although at least five times that year he crept into the Albert Hall after the lights were dimmed to watch in anonymity. Thomas’s wife would sometimes spot him and Lawrence would blush crimson at being discovered and rush away into the dark. To some who knew him though, his figure was unmissable, looking out into the darkness as if he were ‘looking out from under a tent’ and standing, according to the war artist Eric Kennington, ‘as if he were floating - like a fish’.

In an unprecedented move, newspaper editors cleared the front pages of advertisements and ran the reviews for Thomas’s show in their place. Allenby came. Feisal came. Sir Ernest Shackleton came and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the cameraman Harry Chase to jump ship, to work on some technical adaptations to Shackleton’s own footage of the Antarctic. General ‘Fighting Charlie’ Cox came, the Australian Brigadier General, and was so impressed by what he saw that at the end of the performance he mounted the platform to congratulate Thomas and in his enthusiasm lost his balance, toppling into the orchestra pit below and breaking a leg. Winston Churchill should have been at a late-night sitting in the House of Commons; he was nowhere to be seen. Someone let slip that despite his personal reservations about the ‘King’ of Arabia, Churchill had been unable to resist scuttling off to see the show that everyone was talking about.

More publicity ensued. Hundreds of people desperate for a ticket would bring portable stools and sit all day outside the box office in the hope of a seat. The King requested a special performance at Balmoral in Scotland where he and Queen Mary were spending the summer. The Royal Opera itself remained conveniently outside London, playing to a surprised but delighted provincial audience who had expected them to move back to their home in the capital. As the summer came to an end, however, Sir Thomas Beecham could stay away no longer even though he was benefiting from the profits of Thomas’s full houses. There was a new operatic season to launch and Beecham had no choice but to return.

Thomas cancelled the American tour as Burton took yet another brave step. The Royal Albert Hall had a capacity of six thousand. He booked it. To the astonishment of his family, but most of all himself, by the end of the summer Lawrence had become one of the most celebrated of all wartime heroes. His patriotism was ranked with that of Rupert Brooke. Indeed, by surviving the war he had even eclipsed Brooke’s previously unchallenged position.

Lawrence was ambivalent about his fame. He felt that the war years had taken him ‘to the top of the tree without the fun of swarming about the middle branches’. War seemed to have interrupted a natural maturing and peace seemed to trap rather than liberate his character. A new but increasingly close American friend, a fellow literary enthusiast, Ralph Isham, observed that summer how Lawrence’s ‘hatred for his body was a boy’s hatred; his fear of women was a boy’s fear; his terror of being noticed was a boy’s terror’. Isham wondered if this idolisation would one day topple him and urged his friend to return to ‘the infinity, the silence’ of the desert. Lawrence himself wrote to another friend, Nancy Astor, that ‘everything bodily is hateful to me ... this sort of thing must be madness and sometimes I wonder how far mad I am.’ He compared his fame to a ‘tin can attached to a cat’s tail’.