February 6, 1919

After long delay, Faisal and Lawrence were received today by the President. He told House he was struck by the Emir’s noble bearing; but the Arabs are greatly disappointed. Evidently the President was reserved and most certainly noncommittal. Lawrence tells me that the long-delayed interview was a formal conference rather than an exchange of views. “We merely established a ceremonial contact, and that to the Arabs is a great sorrow.”

Sir Mark Sykes was one of the strangest and most perplexing figures at the Conference. He was co-author of the Sykes-Picot agreement or protocol, which gave to the French much that Lawrence and Allenby had promised to the Arabs. [ 1920. The Sykes-Picot agreement was drawn up in 1916 for the purpose of harmonizing the conflicting claims of France and Britain to spheres of influence in the Middle East. It subdivided the Arab area and gave Syria to the French. British preponderance in Irak and in Transjordania was recognized. Palestine was given a special status but it was not very clearly drawn. While there are many contested points, in the main the agreement determines the political situation today and is thought by many to be responsible for the existing confusion.]

You get the measure of the man when I tell you that even after this slip Sykes was by no means unpopular with the Arabs. As a matter of fact they held him in high esteem with the reservation, however, that “he hez make one big mistake, but Sir Sykes he work it out all right.” And the Armenians and the Zionists also worshipped him. There was no mistake about this; “Sir Sykes” had the gift of popularity.

Sykes was born, like Robinson Crusoe, in Yorkshire, I should say about forty years ago, the only son of a Tory squire with large estates and with other resources which made him quite indifferent to the output of his fields and farms. The squire was a great traveler in out-of-the-way places and on these travels, he was generally accompanied by his boy, who seems to have escaped the servitudes of regular and methodical schooling. When the boy was but ten, Father Sykes and son spent a winter with the Druses of the Lebanon, and then the youngster was handed over to some Jesuit fathers who had started a school at Monte Carlo—of all places in the world! Later he was transferred to Brussels and from there to Weimar. He arrived in due course at Cambridge with considerable knowledge of the world and more than a smattering of four or five languages, but his tutors were unanimous in expressing the opinion that he would never be able to stand the varsity examinations that awaited him, not even the “Little Go,” which boys from the public schools took in their stride. “But I was saved this disgrace,” explained Sykes. “The blessed Boer war came and I joined up.”

In many ways Sykes was a companion piece to Lawrence, though the former had fought his way to prominence under the handicap of great wealth and the footsteps of the latter had always been dogged by poverty. They were in disagreement on many questions and particularly as to the panacea for the turbulent Arab world, and Lawrence once in my presence was quite emphatic in his words of rebuke. But Sykes was quite unruffled. “Let us approach the question in a broad-minded way,” he said. “Of course, I admit I do not always approve of the stand I have taken on a number of subjects or the things I have done in a whole-hearted way. The results of my efforts are often discouraging, but I do insist that my intentions have always been of the best.”

As Lawrence admitted, you could not be angry for long with a man who talked like this. But the situation had to be clarified, and this could only be done by bringing Sykes to book to find out how much of his recent activities were backed by instructions and how much was due to his (as many thought) over-heated imagination.

Speaking for himself, and not for the British Foreign Office of which, however, he was the titular head, Balfour admitted frequently that the Arabs had gotten us all into a “jolly mess, but I have told Sykes to be here on the ninth and he will make everything clear. You see, gentlemen, he knows those Arab lands just as I know Aberdeenshire or, say, Kent.”