Dreamers of the Day (27 page)

“Carden’s mistake was bringing Fisher out of retirement,” someone said. “Brilliant admiral, Fisher. Single-minded devotion to the navy, but if you crossed him—ruthless!”

“And widely detested,” Winston admitted, “but Fisher and I worked well together.”

“You were so young,” Clementine said, reaching out to put a fond hand on her husband’s. “I think that may have tempered Fisher a bit: the youthful First Lord of the Admiralty and the old salt.” She looked around at the others. “I never trusted the man, but Winston was endlessly patient with him.”

“Fisher saw the logic of the Dardanelles. He threw his support behind me, and I was grateful,” Winston said stoically.

“We’d just taken four hundred thousand casualties on the Somme,” Thompson told me. “An eastern front made sense.”

“Stop the Turks! Divert the Germans!” Winston cried. “That’s why we set Lawrence here in motion: to draw off their troops! Change the balance in the west!”

At Lawrence’s name, my ears pricked up. I had never understood quite how the desert campaign fit into the strategy of the war until then, but I did remember the news accounts of the Dardanelles. The British naval bombardment of the Turkish forts holding the straits was fitful, delayed intermittently by bad weather.

“But we were winning,” Winston cried. “The Turks were out of ammunition with no chance of resupply. Then de Robeck and Hamilton called off the attack,” he said disgustedly.

For Clementine, her husband’s colossal military failure remained an intensely personal event. Men who had eaten at her table had turned on her beloved husband, and she was unsparing in her condemnations. Winston was more sanguine, perhaps because he had his wife to express his own dismay at being held responsible for what he still saw as good strategy badly executed.

Have you ever noticed that those who feel guiltiest about a decision will bring it up themselves and keep on talking about it, long after everyone else has grown tired of the issue? One by one, everybody but Winston fell silent, wishing he would, too. “If we’d taken Gallipoli,” he insisted for perhaps the fourth time in half an hour, “it could have ended the war years earlier.”

Lawrence stood as though to stretch or perhaps to signal that they’d plumbed the depths of this topic, thanks all the same. I thought that he was simply bored until he approached the table where Thompson and I sat. Then, for the second time since I’d met him, I became aware of the slight tremor that could shake his whole body and of a change in the color of his eyes. Ordinarily the rich blue of a clear winter sky, when he was angry they could take on the flat, unreflective gray of carbon steel. To us, or perhaps to himself, he whispered, “I knew the name of
every man
who died under my command.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes changed again. In later wars, soldiers would call it the thousand-yard stare, when the memory of a single horrifying minute would abruptly eclipse all the intervening years.

Winston went on talking, and suddenly I understood what had driven Lawrence from the table. Gallipoli was all high-level politics to the toffs. Admirals, generals, First Lords, prime ministers, but not a single mention of the boys! Battleships were sunk, supply and troop-ships were torpedoed, all hands lost. A quarter million Australians and New Zealanders were killed as pointlessly as their brother soldiers on the western front, and with no breakthrough to justify their deaths. Churchill spoke no word of regret.

Perhaps realizing that he was losing his audience, Winston finally dropped the subject. “Listen here, Lawrence! You really must come back to London with us!”

Eyelids fluttering, the colonel came to himself, saw the reality around him, and shook off the memories. He returned to the other table but remained standing. As usual, his voice was low and rather soft, but I could make out the gist of his reply. He had forgotten how to get on with other Englishmen, he told the others wryly. He’d been happy to serve as Winston’s adviser in Cairo and his interpreter here in Jerusalem, but it was time for him to move on. There would be strategy to work out with Feisal and his brother Abdullah. They needed to make plans for the new nations of Iraq and “Trans-Jordan”—a place I had not heard of previously, but one that had apparently been magicked into existence in the past few days.

All at once, I realized how foolish I was to imagine that a man of Lawrence’s importance would have time to take me to Jebail. He’d made a spontaneous offer to buck me up when I was saddened by memories of my sister; I should have recognized it as a polite fiction, not meant to be taken seriously. Then, to my surprise, I heard Lawrence say, “—but Miss Shanklin and I will stop first in Jebail.” He turned around and told me, “I’ve organized a car for the journey. Can you be ready by six?”

“Of course,” I replied, getting to my feet and coming to his side.

“Too early for me, Shanklin!” Winston cried. “We must make our farewells now.”

Everyone rose to shake my hand cordially, and Clementine even urged me to visit her and Winston in England.

“Be sure to give Thompson a few days’ warning,” Winston rumbled cheerily. “He likes to prepare for the uprisings your presence seems to provoke.”

The detective sergeant himself surprised me almost speechless. He took my hand as Winston had, but bent very low to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Take care of yourself, miss.”

I was amazed at how fond of him I’d grown, despite his complaints and gruffness. “You do the same,” I told him, rising on tiptoes to return his gesture, and we bid each other both good night and good-bye.

I imagine you’ve had quite enough of my travelogues. Believe me, I felt the same way myself by the time we left Jerusalem. I was saturated with sites and sights, and felt quite unable to absorb a single additional fact, no matter how edifying.

Lawrence, too, was ready to blow off steam, and his means of doing so involved a borrowed army staff car with a Rolls-Royce engine and no springs. With our luggage secured, I climbed into the front seat and accepted a scarf he thoughtfully provided to tie over my hat. With that, he cranked the engine and, a moment later, yelled, “Hang on!”

During the hours that followed, I made my peace with death while Lawrence made a temporary peace with life. Grinning into the sun, eyes narrowed against the wind, he hurled us along rutted, potholed, crowded roads. The first time he veered off to jounce overland, a small scream escaped me and I braced myself against the dashboard. Lawrence glanced at me, his brows raised in genuine surprise. “Oh,” he said, and from then on, he warned me when he intended to drive off the road.

That was his only concession to a nervous passenger, but soon I was caught up in his frank and heedless joy. Flinging the car around rockfalls, lurching onto the sandy shoulders to avoid flocks of sheep and the occasional stray goat, flying past camels and donkeys laden with trade goods, swerving to provide wide berth to anyone wearing robes and sandals, he worked clutch and gearbox, wheel and brakes, all four limbs constantly engaged. If a sudden change in direction startled me, or a thumping bounce threatened to catapult me out of the seat, I got a grip on myself by watching him and admiring the sheer physical mastery required to dominate such speed and power.

Conversation was all but impossible over the roar of the unmuffled Rolls and the noise of the wind in our ears. Only once did I try to ask a question, when we passed the first of several startlingly green enclaves amid the scrub and thornbushes. “What’s that?” I yelled, pointing.

“Jewish settlement,” he yelled back.

Halfway up the coast, he pulled the car over and fishtailed to a pebble-scattering stop near the shade of an olive grove. For a while, there was no sound except the clicking of hot metal. His face alight, Lawrence turned to me expectantly, and to please him, I said, “That was fun!” To my surprise, I found that I meant it, and when he saw that, he gave a full-throated shout of laughter. That was when I realized that he had lost the giggle in my presence. It was the nicest moment of our time together.

Cross-legged on the ground and comfortable in khaki trousers and a white knit shirt, Lawrence shared out a picnic lunch. We ate flat bread, salty goat cheese, and succulent oranges while gazing at the waves of the Mediterranean as they raced one another up the beach below. If the low mountains and gaunt hills of Palestine were naked and stony, the soft green of the Lebanon reminded me of home. Much of the land around us was cultivated, and I could see why Lillian loved this place. Lemon and almond and fig trees scented the more prosaic stands of ash and cypress nearby, and there were flowers everywhere! Early spring anemones were just past, but lupines were in full bloom: blue and white and yellow. I picked out pink stock and mauve vetches. Blue borage and iris. Lavender clover, and alliums of many varieties. Blood-red poppies, with their sad associations. Pink bindweed, cheerful white daisies.

When he was finished, Lawrence wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and waved toward the countryside. “Your sister brought me here once,” he told me. “‘So many blossoms,’ she said, ‘seen in a single glance on a single hillside, with God alone the Gardener.’ She had a way with words.”

“And do you share her belief in the Gardener?” I asked.

“I did once.” After a while, he said, “Saint George slew his dragon here. Exactly when and where remains unknown, but no dragon has been seen since.”

“So George must have bagged him!” I agreed.

He smiled, his eyes on the sea. “This coast was Phoenician once. Then Greek, then Roman. That tower?” he asked, nodding toward a tall ruin across a broad ravine. “Crusader. Eleventh century.”

Larks were singing hard overhead, and we watched a cloud of martins gathering to nest in the shelter of the ancient walls.

“Fifty-second Lowland Division took that beach in ’17,” Lawrence told me. “It’s French now, I suppose.”

I could hear the resignation in his voice. “And who knows what comes next?” I remarked. “One thing about the Middle East seems certain: another army is always waiting, just around the bend.”

For a time I listened to the birdsong and enjoyed the scenery, but Lawrence was somewhere else. When he spoke again, his tone was strangely dispassionate. “When the war was over, a shepherd boy—eight years old—was brought before the military governor in Ramallah. He was charged with bomb throwing.”

“Good gracious! An eight-year-old?”

“His defense was that he found lots of those smooth round things out in the fields along the Nablus road—the place was littered with unexploded ordnance. One day when his sheep were loitering, the boy picked up one of the bombs and tossed it at them. The results were splendid. It made a big noise, he said, and the sheep hurried after that.”

Caught between amusement and horror, I asked, “Was he convicted?”

“Sent home with a warning.”

War after war, I thought. Generations of boys growing up with weapons as toys and no one but warriors to admire…“Where is Trans-Jordan?” I asked. “I heard the name mentioned last night, but I’ve never seen it on a map.”

“The maps haven’t been drawn yet,” he said. “We’re still sorting it out. Most likely, we’ll split the Palestine Protectorate. West of the Jordan River will be called Palestine, and it will include a national home for the Jews under Arab rule with British administration.” How will that work? I wondered, feeling like an old hand, but Lawrence continued, “Across the Jordan—
Trans
-Jordan, you see?—Feisal’s brother Abdullah will rule.”

“So much of what you hoped for has come to pass.”

“It might. Some of it.” He lay back, his long Nordic head cushioned on his hands. Watching the sky, he said, “Nothing here is easy. Blood feuds are never settled or forgotten. Compromise is all but impossible. If a tribe is weak, they say, How can we yield anything to our enemies? If a tribe is strong, they ask, Why should we yield anything to our enemies?”

“And where will the tribe of Israel fit, among so many foes?”

He sat up again, and when he spoke there was more energy in his voice. “I have great hopes for the Zionist influence in the region,” he said. “The Jews can be a bridge, I think, between East and West. They are an Oriental people with Occidental knowledge. And you saw their
kibbutzim
—their farm cooperatives, those green patches we passed? Remarkable progress in a very short time. We visited a settlement a couple of days ago.”

Thompson had mentioned that to me. “Fine, clear-eyed men,” he’d reported. “Women of strength and calmness. Beautiful children.”

“They have financial support from outside the region,” Lawrence said, “and they’re experimenting with scientific farming methods. If they can make the desert bear crops, they’ll bring prosperity to the whole area. Feisal agrees.”

I was surprised by his optimism, given Karl’s doubts, but before I could ask anything more, Lawrence uncoiled from the ground in a single fluid motion. He was wearing a wristwatch, but he studied the sun’s position on the horizon instead. It was getting late.

“Shall we spend a night in Beirut,” he asked, “or push on to Jebail?”

“Push on,” I said, and received a toothy grin as my reward.

Traffic in Beirut was terrible, and we reached the American Mission long past the time that visitors would ordinarily appear. The school’s porter was amazed to see us, and I gathered our unexpected visit was one of Lawrence’s unannounced guerrilla raids.

Word spread. Soon the parlor was filled with staff members, including my sister’s beloved friend Miss Fareedah el-Akle. Once everyone got over the shock of our arrival, we were welcomed with much rejoicing and even more food. There were half a dozen bowls of hot and cold salads; a walnut paste spiced with chilies; a mixture of mint leaves and tomatoes with cracked wheat berries and onion called
tabbouleh;
minced lamb with pine nuts and onion. Piles of chicken kebabs and lamb kebabs and two big platters of rice. Finally, when we swore we could eat no more, there were bowls of grapes and apples and oranges, and honey-drenched pastries filled with pistachios.

Naturally Lawrence was made much of, and after heartfelt condolences on the loss of my sister and her family, I was regaled with many stories about Lillie and Douglas, and the pranks of my two nephews. The children did not live long, but I was gratified to know that they must have had a grand boyhood. That night, in fact, we were surrounded by children; they piled in around the adults, listening to the stories while nibbling on fried
falafel
or dipping flat bread into a grainy paste that looked and tasted something like peanut butter. No bedtime was enforced, but neither were there tantrums or demands for attention. Sometime after eleven, a sweet little boy, not quite two, climbed onto my lap with a perfect confidence that he would be cuddled, and I was happy to fulfill his expectation.