After the fall of Damascus and the complete overthrow of the Turkish armies, and after he had helped establish a provisional government for his friend Emir Feisal, young Lawrence laid aside the curved gold sword of a prince of Mecca, packed his pure white robes and his richly brocaded ones, in which he had been received with all the honor due an Arab shereef, and hurried to London. His penetrating eyes had pierced to the end of an epoch-making perspective, involving empires and dynasties and a new balance of power in the Near East. He had achieved the seemingly impossible; had united desert tribes that had sworn eternal enmity to one another; had won them over to the Allied cause and helped Allenby put an end to German and Turkish ambitions for Near Eastern mastery.

But Lawrence realized that his work was not yet finished. He was determined that the great powers should not forget the promises made to their Arab allies. The battle of the peace conference was still to be fought. So Lawrence returned to Europe to prepare for the arrival of the Arab delegates.

An amusing incident occurred when Lawrence passed through Marseilles, where he landed in order to travel overland to London. He stepped into the British railway transport officer’s headquarters at the station to inquire the time of the next through train to Le Havre. It was a drizzly day, and Lawrence was wearing a dingy trench-coat, without insignia, over his uniform. Although Lawrence was a full colonel at this time, he still looked like an insignificant shave-tail lieutenant. The R.T.O. happened to be a lieutenant-colonel, a huge fellow, with a fierce mustache. When his visitor asked quietly about trains, the R.T.O. glanced up, gave Lawrence a withering look, and blusteringly told him that he couldn’t be bothered and that Lawrence should see his assistant. Without a word Lawrence walked out, but in the next room he took off his water-proof, and strolled right back into the R.T.O.’s august presence again, this time saying even more quietly than before, “What time did you say the next rapid leaves for Le Havre?” For the moment the R.T.O. looked as though he would like to wring Lawrence’s neck, but, catching a glimpse of the crown and two stars on his caller’s shoulder, he jumped to his feet, saluted, and stammered:

“I beg your pardon, sir. I beg your pardon.”

Nothing delights Lawrence more than to take a self-important man down a peg or two. There is no fuss and flurry or pomposity in his own make-up, and it amuses him when he occasionally encounters a blusterer who tries to play up stage.

Emir Feisal and staff were transported across the Mediterranean on board H.M.S. Gloucester as the guests of his Imperial Britannic Majesty. The French were considerably perturbed when they heard that an Arabian delegation was on its way to the peace conference, and they objected to its being recognized. France coveted Syria and realized that Feisal and his persistent young British grand vizir would attempt to thwart them. But Feisal started for Paris despite the coolness of the French.

Like all orthodox Mohammedans, the emir never touches intoxicants, and complications were narrowly averted on board the Gloucester because of the fact that several of the members of Feisal’s staff, unlike their prince, were not ardent prohibitionists. Although they could not regale themselves publicly for fear of incurring the emir’s displeasure, they would spend half an hour or so in the ward-room with the ship’s officers before dinner; and General Nuri Bey, who had been Feisal’s foremost strategist during the desert war, even ventured to take his glass to the table, and, although he sat opposite the emir, he cleverly concealed it behind the water-bottle so that Feisal could not see it.

On the voyage from Alexandria to Marseilles the Arab delegation was accompanied by Lawrence’s tent-mate, Major Marshall, who wondered just how the French were going to receive his charges upon arrival in port. When the Gloucester steamed into Marseilles there was an official French mission on the dock, but no British representatives; and the French indicated by their attitude to Marshall that further British interest in Feisal would not be welcomed and that all matters concerning Syria were purely the affairs of France. So Marshall sent a wire of inquiry to the British Embassy in Paris, and a few hours later Lawrence turned up. With his usual tact he avoided friction with the French by borrowing Marshall’s Arabian head-dress and attaching himself to Feisal’s delegation as a member of the emir’s personal staff and not as a British officer.

When the delegates assembled in Paris, Emir Feisal took up his headquarters at the HÔtel Continental on the rue de Rivoli. Wherever the Emir went, whether to an informal meeting or to an official conference, he was usually accompanied by the slightly built, insignificant-looking youth in the uniform of a British colonel. Few people at the peace conference, however, were aware that this young man had virtually led the Arabian armies during the war and was almost as important a figure in the Arab delegation as Emir Feisal himself.

Prince Feisal was quite the most imposing figure at Paris. In his flowing robes he was the center of attention wherever he went and continually sought by artists, photographers, and writers. But publicity was almost as distasteful to Feisal as it was to Lawrence, and so they would get up at six o’clock in the morning, throughout the conference, in order to go rowing in the Bois de Boulogne and escape the curious crowd, which, attracted by the picturesque dress and stately figure of the Arabian emir, followed always at his heels.

Flattery he was quick to detect. A distinguished Frenchman, M. Dubost, eulogized him somewhat fulsomely in the course of an after-dinner speech at the HÔtel de Ville. When it was over a Moroccan interpreter asked the emir how he liked it. Feisal’s only reply was, “Hasn’t he beautiful teeth?”

To induce the Arabs to fight in the World War, Britain had made certain promises which French interests made it extremely difficult to fulfil. But during the peace conference Feisal’s tact and personal charm did much to win friends for the Arabian cause in Paris. No one ever came away from him in an angry mood. On one occasion, at a meeting of the Council of Ten, M. Pichon referred to the claims of France in Syria, which he said were based on the Crusades. Emir Feisal listened respectfully, and when the French statesman had finished his address he turned toward him and inquired politely, “I am not a profound student of history, but would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?”

Lawrence’s personal attitude regarding the peace conference was straightforward and simple: if Great Britain was not going to guarantee independence to the Arabs and if she proposed to leave them in the hands of the French so far as their Syrian aspirations were concerned, for his part he intended to devote his energies and talents to helping his Arab comrades in arms contest France’s claims and obtain the rights for which they had so valiantly fought.

During the war the British had sponsored the Arabian movement for independence and made it possible for King Hussein and his sons to maintain their army against the Turks. The French, on the other hand, had merely sent a small detachment to Arabia, which could hardly even have survived had it not been for the supplies it received from Lawrence and his British colleagues. But the embarrassing fly in the ointment was the “you-take-this, and-I’ll-take-that” compact between the British and French in which it had previously been decided that France was to have Syria as her sphere of influence. Emir Feisal and Colonel Lawrence felt sure if that compact was adhered to in the face of Arab claims that Syria would become a French colony despite the fact that the bulk of her population wanted neither French control nor French coÖperation.

In presenting the Arabian case and in coaching Emir Feisal to meet the delegates on their own ground, Lawrence was a match for any diplomat at the peace conference. He had the geography of Arabia, Syria, and Palestine at his finger-tips. He spoke many of the dialects of the Near East. He had lived with the Ansariya, the Yezedis, the Ismailia, the Metawileh, the Christian Maronites of the Lebanon. He had broken bread with the Druses and sat around the coffee-hearths of nearly every tribe of the desert. He could hold forth for hours on the intricate political relations, religions, and tribal feuds of the Arabs and their neighbors. The cities of Syria were as familiar to him as London and Oxford. Sitting in a hotel room overlooking the garden of the Tuileries in Paris, he made the ancient cities of the East live in vivid phrases for frock-coated gentlemen who had never deviated from the straight streets of continental capitals.

Lawrence admitted that Beyrouth, the foreign door of Syria, was French in feeling and in language, in spite of its Greek harbor and its great American university. But he insisted that Damascus, the historic city of Syria, long the seat of lay government and the religious center, was pure Arab, whose sheiks were orthodox “Meccan” in their opinions and exceedingly anxious to be free from alien rule. He also argued that the great industrial cities of Hamah and Homs were more jealously native than any other Syrian centers.

He maintained that the Arabian case rested on four important documents, which he described as follows:

“First: The British promise to King Hussein of October, 1915, which undertook, conditional on an Arabian revolt, to recognize the ‘independence of the Aarbs’ south of latitude 37 degrees, except in the Mesopotamian provinces of Bagdad and Basra, and except where Great Britain might not consider herself ‘free to act without detriment to the interests of France.’

“Second: The Sykes-Picot Agreement made between England and France in May, 1916, which divided the Arabian provinces of Turkey into five zones; roughly, (a) Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, to be ‘international’; (b) Haifa and Mesopotamia from near Tekrit to the Gulf, to be ‘British’; (c) the Syrian coast from Tyre to Alexandretta, Cilicia, and almost all southern Armenia from Sivas to Diarbekir, to be ‘French’; (d) the interior (mainly the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Urfa, Deir, and Mosul) to be ‘independent Arab’ under two shades of influence: (1) between the lines Akaba-Kuweit and Haifa-Tekrit, the French to seek no ‘political influence’ and the British to have economic and political priority, and the right to supply ‘such advisors as the Arabs desire’; (2) between the line Haifa-Tekrit and the southern edge of French Armenia or Kurdistan, Great Britain to seek ‘no political influence’ and the French to have economic and political priority and the right to supply ‘such advisors as the Arabs desire.’

“Third: The British statement to the seven Syrians of Cairo dated June 11, 1917. This assured the Syrians that pre-war Arabian states, and Arabian areas freed by military action of their inhabitants during the war, should remain entirely independent.

“Fourth: The Anglo-French Declaration of November 9, 1918, in which Great Britain and France agreed to encourage native governments in Syria and Mesopotamia, and without imposition to assure the normal working of such governments as the people themselves should adopt.

“All these documents were produced under stress of military urgency to induce the Arabs to fight on our side.

“I can find no inconsistencies or incompatibilities in these four documents,” said Lawrence, “and I know nobody else who can. It may then be asked what is the cause of the difficulties among the British, French, and Arabs. It is mainly because the agreement of 1916, second document, is unworkable and no longer satisfies the British and French Governments. As, however, it is, in a sense, the ‘charter’ of the Arabs, giving them Damascus, Homs, Hamah, Aleppo, and Mosul for their own, with such advisors as they themselves judge they need, the necessary revision of this agreement is a delicate matter and can hardly be made satisfactorily by England and France without giving weight and expression also to the opinion of the third interest—the Arabs—which it created.”

The problem was, indeed, a delicate and intricate one to handle. Great Britain had entered into certain agreements with France and had made definite promises to the Arabs and other promises to the Zionists. Emir Feisal was frankly opposed to France. He claimed that the new Arabian Kingdom should include all of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. France, by all the etiquette of old diplomacy, considered that she had special and incontestable rights in Syria, dating from the Crusaders. The French had founded educational institutions throughout the country, financed railways, and engaged in other forms of peaceful penetration. They considered themselves the historical protectors of the Christians in Syria. The Zionists were looking forward to a cultural state in Palestine under the protection of the British. All these varied and in some cases conflicting interests had to be considered and, if possible, satisfied.

Emir Feisal, backed up by Lawrence’s advice, insisted that the new Arabian state should include, not only the Hedjaz, but all Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine as well. Feisal would not listen to any proposal that Palestine should ever become a Jewish state. From his point of view, and in this he represented the opinion of the whole Arab world, Palestine could not be looked upon as a separate country, but as a province which should remain part and parcel of Syria. He maintained that, as there was no natural boundary and no frontier between the two countries, what affected one must affect the other, and that both from a geographical and racial standpoint Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia were inseparable. At the same time he raised no objection to the Zionist proposal to encourage the immigration of the Jews into the country, and to allow the Jews to have full control of their own schools, establish a Jewish cultural center, and participate in the government of Palestine.

“The Jews, like ourselves, are Semites,” agreed Emir Feisal. “And instead of relying upon any of the great powers, we should like to have the coÖperation of the Jewish people for assistance in building up a great Semitic state. I appreciate fully Zionist aspirations, even extreme Zionist aspirations. I understand the desire of Jews to acquire a home-land. But so far as Palestine is concerned, if they have made up their minds that it is to be Palestine or nothing, then it must be Palestine subject to the rights and aspirations of the present possessors of the land. Palestine is still in effect the land of the Arabs and must remain an integral part of the Arabian state.”

Feisal, quite naturally, took an immediate and intimate view of the territorial rights and political aspirations of the Arabs. He was personally concerned in the establishment of an Arabian state and in all the problems that might threaten its success. But Lawrence, with his sixth sense and his imaginative understanding of the rise and fall of empires, appraised events in terms of rounded periods rather than of years. The Arabian question, the Palestine question, the Syrian question, must all sift and change with the sands of time.

In spite of all the diplomatic circumlocution, red tape, and super-politeness that veneered the proceedings in Paris, Emir Feisal was under no delusion as to the true spirit that permeated the peace conference, and before he and Lawrence would start out to attend one of the meetings Feisal would playfully unsheathe his gold dagger and whet it a few times on his boot.

The emir is a keen wit and many stories are told of his clever retorts in Paris. After he had been at the conference for a few weeks some one asked him to give his opinion of modern statesmen as a result of what he had thus far seen of them. He replied: “They are like modern paintings. They should be hung in a gallery and viewed from a distance!”

The final outcome of the battle of the peace conference was a partial victory for Emir Feisal and Colonel Lawrence. They did not get all that they had asked for, nor did they expect to. France was given control of Beyrouth and the Syrian coast; Britain accepted a mandate over Palestine; but the Arabs were allowed to retain control of the interior of Syria and to make their beloved Damascus the capital of their new state.