February 26, 1919

Emir Faisal has moved from his apartment in the Continental and is more at his ease in a small private hotel he has leased on the Avenue du Bois. At his request I call frequently, about twice a week. Like everyone else he wants something. First and foremost, he wants President Wilson to assume the mandate over Syria and then to appoint him as his lieutenant and deputy. When last week under instructions I told him that there is little or no prospect of this, he piped down with the more modest request to have an American army officer attached to his Mission. I have passed this on to the Colonel and he has sent it on to General Pershing with his approval. Certainly, a competent soldier should be selected, at least to accompany the Emir when he visits the battlefields on March 10; otherwise, I fear that the important participation of the American army in the Allied victory will escape notice.

In the privacy of his home, which with a few draperies and rugs he has transformed into something like a nomad’s tent, Faisal presents quite a different figure from the one he cuts when, flanked by Lawrence and Nouri Pasha, he addresses and at times browbeats the assembled prime ministers and their advisers on Middle Eastern affairs in the Clock Room at the Quai d’Orsay. There, with his rakish turban, his gallant gold-embroidered coat, his very visible scimiter, and his bejeweled revolver (by no means concealed), he looks what he doubtless is—a son of Mars, Oriental version.

But in his home, under what seems to be a canopy of silk and embroidered velvet, he presents a very different and as it seems to me a more sympathetic figure. He wears a black tunic and tight-fitting black trousers. In his hand there is always a chain of beads, a sort of rosary. He counts them constantly as though to be certain they are all there. He is frequently lavish in his praise of the American teacher, the elder Doctor Bliss who founded the college at Beyrouth. “I worship him,” he says, “as all Arabs do because he was a sage and a prophet. It was he who foretold the future of our race, and it was he who by educating our boys made that future possible. In my army there were some who had been educated by the French fathers and a few by the English doctors, but those who had studied at the American college in Beyrouth were the most reliable and efficient.”

Yesterday Doctor Bliss the younger, the son of the founder of the great school, came in while I was with the Emir and we put him through the third degree—politely, of course. But the younger Bliss is wary. He would like to see America take over the mandate for Syria, but he knows the Senate will never consent even if the President does. Perhaps he thinks it unwise to waste time discussing the question, and he simply said: “I am a bookman, an educationalist, not a statesman. Not even a politician,” he adds with a wry smile. “The President has asked me for my opinion and I have given it. I have urged him to send a commission of trained administrators to Syria to confer with the people, to find out exactly what they want, and then to decide what it would be just, and also wise, to give them now.” The President is not given to enthusiastic personal appraisements, but he has a high opinion of Faisal. Last Monday in my hearing he said: “Listening to the Emir I think to hear the voice of liberty, a strange and, I fear, a stray voice, coming from Asia.” How I wish I could pass this on to the Arabs—they are so downcast. But I have no right to do it; most certainly it was said in confidence.

Faisal with his picturesque flankers and adjutants is at once the charm and the mystery of the Conference. He can speak French quite well when he wants to and he explodes with laughter when he tells that he, too, has had parliamentary experience:

“It happened in this way. When Abdul Hamid was dethroned, the Committee of Progress that took over issued a call for an assembly, and I was summoned to Constantinople to represent the Hejaz. I worked over my speech, saluting the new freedom, for a month but they would never permit me to deliver it. They kept me under polite arrest, but it was arrest all the same, and it lasted for two years. Then I escaped to the desert; but as I traveled light, I did not take my speech with me. It is lost forever.”

The French are highly indignant over the favor shown Faisal, generally, and the high esteem in which he is held by the President and the American delegates. Hardly a day passes that “under-cover” men, closely allied to and doubtless subsidized by Paris bankers and concession-seeking syndicates, do not put in appearance and take up much of our time in denouncing the Emir as an adventurer who counts for nothing in the Arab world. “He counts indeed for less than nothing,” they insist, “because the noble Arabs know that he is in the pay of English landgrabbers who have formed companies, later to be chartered, which will, under the guise of religion, take over the Arab lands and suck them dry—as they have the rest of the world.”

Someday, perhaps, we shall know the truth about all these things, but that day has not dawned yet. In the meantime, the French and the British are fully occupied in “interpreting” the innumerable contradictory treaties they made with Arab tribes and factions during the fighting years.