Dreamers of the Day

As I made my way back to the summit and to my room in Government House, Clementine Churchill’s habit of afternoon “siestas” began to seem eminently sensible. I washed away the dust of the road with a quick bath and stretched out on the bed, drowsily wondering what Karl was doing, and how Rosie was. And then it happened: lying in the quiet borderlands between dozing and dream, I heard Lillian speak again, her lovely voice as serene as I remembered it.

I always had faith in you, Agnes, she said, as clearly as if she sat at my bedside. I knew you would find your way.

It was such a comfort then, but looking back now, in my present circumstances? I may have lost my way forever in Jerusalem. I certainly haven’t found it yet.

Supper that evening was an informal but semiofficial one, with the London delegation and the top officials of Government House gathered. There were ten men at Churchill’s table. When Clementine joined them, looking rested and cool, the men rose. Well brought up, and the youngest among them, Lawrence pulled out a chair for her. The talk and laughter resumed.

I was ending my stay feeling pleasantly tired but, like everyone who worked with the relentlessly energetic Churchill, Thompson was exhausted. “It’s almost over, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Clementine told me you’re leaving for Aleppo day after tomorrow.”

“And from there, on to Malta and Naples,” Thompson said, rubbing his eyes. “Who knows what fresh hell they’ll present?”

There was a shout of laughter at the big table, where Winston was holding court with Falstaffian humor.

“He’s self-centered. He makes the world revolve around him, and he can be an awful bore, but I’m starting to like the man.” Thompson paused to light one of the Turkish cigarettes Winston had insisted he smoke instead of his pipe. “Maybe he just takes some getting used to. Like these things!” he said, blowing out exotic smoke. “There’s something about him.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I know what you mean.”

Eventually, of course, the whole world would know what Thompson meant, but that was years in the future. In 1921, Churchill was still a youngish bureaucrat with a shadowed record. Indeed, the conversation that night soon turned to the defeat that almost destroyed his political career, and Thompson sighed. “Here we go again—Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. He just can’t let it go.”

Like most disasters, the decisions leading to it had seemed like good ideas at the time. The jolly little war that was supposed to have ended by Christmas of ’14 had become a ghastly stalemate. With both sides dug into their trenches, there was nothing but horror to show for the mounting casualties of that first winter, Thompson told me, so England’s War Council argued about the way to break the deadlock on land. “Churchill made a case for an attack on Turkey through the Dardanelles Straits,” Thompson whispered, “but Kitchener wouldn’t release any troops from the western front. And the czar’s armies had all they could handle in the Caucasus.”

“When Carden said he thought the straits could be forced by sea power alone,” Winston was telling the others, “the whole atmosphere changed! Fatigue was forgotten! The War Council could see its way clear of the western front.”

“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 wi

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 troopships 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?”