A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin does for the British Empire administrators dealing with the Middle East before, during and after the First World War what Oren Kessler does for the 1936 Arab Revolt. He records it in great detail and reveals the astonishing ignorance of the men who were cutting up the Middle East and its future.

Lowell of Arabia

from Chapter 57, A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

Lawrence, a one-time junior officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo, had by now become a celebrity, due to the efforts of an American named Lowell Thomas. Thomas, a 25-year-old fledgling showman from Ohio who until then had knocked about North America in search of fame, fortune, and adventure, had been working at a part-time job teaching public speaking at Princeton when, at the end of 1917, he raised enough money to go to England and then to send himself and a cameraman to the Middle East war front in search of a salable story with romance and local color. There he found Lawrence, wearing Arab robes, and decided to make him the hero of a colorful story he was about to write - a story about the Arab followers of Hussein and Feisal and the role they had played in the war against Turkey. The story was to form the basis of a show, in which - sacrificing truth to entertainment values - Thomas would picture Lawrence as the inspirer and leader of an Arab revolt that destroyed the Turkish Empire.

Thomas' s show was a lecture with photos. It was entitled The Last Crusade and Thomas opened it at the Century Theater in New York in March 1919, with the backing of the New York Globe. A few weeks later he moved it to the old Madison Square Garden, a vast auditorium in which to accommodate the crowds that Thomas hoped to attract. An English impresario then arranged to bring the show to London, where it played to the largest halls: the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Albert Hall.

It was a masterpiece of ballyhoo and it set show business records. It played in London for six months and was seen there by perhaps a million people. Thomas then took the show on a road tour around the world. It made young Lowell Thomas rich and famous; and it converted "Lawrence of Arabia" into a world hero.

Lawrence, though embarrassed by the crudeness of Thomas' s account, gloried in its bright glow. When The Last Crusade played in London, Lawrence frequently came up from Oxford to see it: Thomas' s wife spied him in the audience on at least five different occasions, causing him to "flush crimson, laugh in confusion, and hurry away."

The public believed Thomas' s account; so that when Lawrence became an adviser to Winston Churchill, his appointment over- shadowed all others. His reputation grew. He passed off his fantasies as history, and, in the years to come, Lawrence was to claim far more credit for his share in Churchill's achievements as Colonial Secretary than was his due.

But Lawrence's indirect influence on policy was considerable, for his account of the Arab uprising was believed by Churchill, who lacked personal knowledge of the matter, not having been involved in Middle Eastern affairs during the war after 1916. Unaware of the extent to which Lawrence and Lloyd George's staff had exaggerated the role of Feisal's Arabs in winning the war, Churchill was prepared to accept Lawrence's thesis that Britain owed a great deal to Feisal and his followers.

* A few years later Thomas wrote a book called With Lawrence in Arabia, based on the show, repeating the story he had told to his mass audiences of millions around the world. It was an immensely readable, high-spirited write-up of Lawrence's service career - much of it untrue - that made its points through hyperbole. The Arab Bulletin, which appeared in twenty-six copies, in Thomas's account appeared in only four. Feisal's corps of 3,500 men, added to the several thousands serving under Feisal's brothers during the war, when added up by Lowell Thomas produced an Arab army of 200,000.

Pushing Kitchener, Wingate, Clayton, Hogarth, Dawnay, Joyce, Young, and other important British officials into the shade, Thomas showed young T. E. Lawrence single-handedly igniting and leading the Hejaz revolt. Thomas placed Lawrence in the Arabia desert fomenting the Hejaz revolt in February 1916;14 in fact, Lawrence had a desk job in Cairo at that time, and visited Arabia for the first time the following October.