Light in August and LaSalle

Read Light in August after much procrastination. I was probably in my least receptive mind to any of his works- his compound words grated, his inability to see any of his men as possible objects of aesthetic appraisal annoyed me. My least favorite of his books to date. Possibly his 4th novel. Sandwiched between Pylon and Sanctuary I think. But punctuated, very sparingly, with moments of profound insight.
Like:
She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.

When the buggy stopped she came forward as though she had already planned it, practiced it: how she would lift him down from the seat and carry him into the house. He had never been carried by a woman since he was big enough to walk. He squirmed down and entered the house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. She followed, hovering about him. She made him sit down; it was as though she hovered about with a kind of strained alertness, an air baffled and alert, waiting to spring it again and try to make himself and her act as she had planned for them to act. Kneeling before him she was trying to take off his shoes, until he realised what she wanted. He put her hands away and removed the shoes himself, not setting them onto the floor though. He held to them. She stripped off his stockings and then she fetched a basin of hot water, fetched it so immediately that anyone but a child would have known that she must have had it ready and waiting all day probably. He spoke for the first time, then. “I done washed just yesterday,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She knelt before him

 he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn’t try to help her now. He didn’t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn’t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.

Later she put him to bed. For two years almost he had been dressing and undressing himself, unnoticed and unassisted save by occasional Alices. He was already too tired to go to sleep at once, and now he was puzzled and hence nervous, waiting until she went out so he could sleep. Then she did not go out. Instead she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. There was no fire in the room; it was cold. She had a shawl now about her shoulders, huddled into the shawl, her breath vaporising as though she were smoking. And he became wide awake now. He was waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was; whatever it was that he had done. He didn’t know that this was all. This had never happened to him before either.

It began on that night. He believed that it was to go on for the rest of his life. At seventeen, looking back he could see now the long series of trivial, clumsy, vain efforts born of frustration and fumbling and dumb instinct: the dishes she would prepare for him in secret and then insist on his accepting and eating them in secret, when he did not want them and he knew that McEachern would not care anyway; the times when, like tonight, she would try to get herself between him and the punishment which, deserved or not, just or unjust, was impersonal, both the man and the boy accepting it as a natural and inescapable fact until she, getting in the way, must give it an odor, an attenuation, and aftertaste.

Sometimes he thought that he would tell her alone, have her who in her helplessness could neither alter it nor ignore it, know it and need to hide it from the man whose immediate and predictable reaction to the knowledge would so obliterate it as a factor in their relations that it would never appear again. To say to her in secret, in secret payment for the secret dishes which he had not wanted: “Listen. He says he has nursed a blasphemer and an ingrate. I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food at his own table.”

Because she had always been kind to him. The man, the hard, just, ruthless man, merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings: It was the woman who, with a woman’s affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions. Behind a loose board in the wall of his attic room she had hidden a small hoard of money in a tin can. The amount was trivial and it was apparently a secret to no one but. her husband, and the boy believed that he would not have cared. But it had never been a secret from him. Even

 he was still a child she would take him with her when with all the intense and mysterious caution of a playing child she would creep to the attic and add to the hoard meagre and infrequent and terrific nickels and dimes (fruit of what small chicanery and deceptions with none anywhere under the sun to say her nay he did not know), putting into the can beneath his round grave eyes coins whose value he did not even recognise. It was she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.

It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them. He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry,’ he thought, lying cold and rigid in his bed, his hands beneath his head and the moonlight falling across his body, hearing the steady murmur of the man’s voice as it mounted the stairway on its first heavenward stage; ‘She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me.”

Also began Anna Karenina for the 4th time.

 It will certainly require a 5th. Maybe a 6th before I entirely give up.

Also read LaSalle by John Vernon, an excellent story told in two concurrent narrations by LaSalle and his cartographer.
From which:
The Sieur La Salle showed us one of their (Chicaza) ingenious calendars which are knotted thngs- when each day passes they untie the knot.
La Salle builds forts the way other men make shoes. When they come to someplace new, the Spanish build a church, the English a tavern, but we French build a fort or trading post."

Goldwater final

 LBJ was "Light Bulb Johnson" for his scheme to save money by turn_ ing off lights in the White House ("Why doesn't he turn them on for once!) "the interim president," who "knows only one thing—how to acquire fortune and power." Goldwater's supporters crowded the speaking stand and cheered him on. Much of the audience hung back in disgust. Everyone associated with the campaign was getting bitter. Local branches began compiling affidavits on vandalism on their offices; on highways across the fruited plain, billboards admonishing "IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT" were subverted to read "IN YOUR GUTS YOU KNOW HE'S NUTS" (later reclaimed by conservatives with signs reading "PLEASE EXCUSE THE JOHNSON EXTREMISTS"). Stodgy Time printed crude jokes: "Goldwater's first major address as President: 'Ten ... nine . . . eight . . . seven . . "; "What would a Goldwater presidency be like? Brief." In Tulsa, blacks crashed the hall where Goldwater was speaking and wouldn't stop singing "We Shall Overcome" for fifteen minutes straight. In Winston-Salem, civil rights activists and conservatives were booked for assaulting one another. Each had begun chanting their opposing stories about freedom, slavery, and justice at the other; things escalated from there. (Teddy White liked to ask civil rights demonstrators and Goldwater partisans what they meant by "freedom." Each camp would denounce him for even asking such a patronizing question. "It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood," he wrote, "both wear-ing banners bearing the same word.") American campaigns had been like this before, perhaps more often than not; Lord Bryce wrote in wonderment that the presidential election of 1884 seemed to be being decided between the "copulative habits" imputed to one candidate and the "prevaricative habits" of the other. But eighty years later, the Philadelphia Inquirer could insist: "Presidential elections have been waged without untoward incident until this year." Historians forgot their history. "The peaceful arts of negotiation and persuasion," "our sagacity and our passion for the peaceful enjoyment of our national life": these, Columbia's Richard Hofstadter assured readers that October, were the hallmarks of political decision making in America. It was a foregone conclusion: when Goldwaterism was vanquished once and for all on November 3, civility would return, the two par-ties would return to their time-honored moderating role, and the nation would be restored to a healing consensus once again. Johnson's first actual campaign trip—tarmac speeches, motorcades, rallies, the works—was a twenty-four-hour sweep through every New England state on September 28. It happened against a backdrop of extraordinary events.
CAMPAIGN TRAILS On September 26, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its report on the New York City riots. There was a kind of rhetorical protocol that usually held sway when judgment was handed down on moments when the fabric of American civility had been rent. J. Edgar Hoover's report on the students who disrupted the HUAC hearings in San Francisco in 196o, "Communist Target—youth," was a paradigm case: it blamed the Communists, who had made stu-dents their unwitting dupes. And Nelson Rockefeller's Bastille Day proclamation: it concluded that the 1963 Young Republican convention had been upended by "vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within." The story they told was: America was a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe, a land of persuasion and compromise; when violence came, some exogenous toxin was always to blame. That story was immediately and instinctually told when Harlem went up in flames in the summer of 1964. Accusations for planning and executing the disturbance were hurled at Harlem's tiny number of self-proclaimed Maoists, at its scattered bands of black nationalists, at hirelings of H. L. Hunt (LBJ's favorite theory), or (as Goldwater himself feared) at agents of the Goldwater campaign. Special attention was paid to the mysterious youths that were seen lurking at key street corners with walkie-talkies and matching berets; it wa discovered that they were actually helping authorities identify the most egregious acts of looting and arson. There was no conspiracy to be found in this est FBI report. In its place were ordinary people—" 'school dropouts,' y punks,' common hoodlums,' and 'drunken kids' " making "senseless on all constituted authority without purpose or objective." J. Edgar went looking for conspiracy; he always did. He just couldn't find one. It ' - even the Communists' fault. Then, two days later, there was the Warren Report. In later days it would be the locus for theorists propounding baroque triangulations of every imagi-nable group that might gain from having the President dead; its very meaning became conspiracy. But it was digested at breakfast tables on September 28, 1964—a time when three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, trusted the government to do the right thing—differently. A conspiracy would have been far more comforting. Instead most Americans read the news at face value, and learned that all it took to rock their society to its foundations was a single man with a grievance and a gun. They had learned that all it took to fire up a riot was a bunch of rock-throwing kids—and that even a majestic Civil Rights Act would not deter them. The idea that the nation could be shielded from danger by its unique genius for conciliation and consensus was becoming a far less tenable thing.
Oswald, a magazine pointed out, "was a product of Texas (and of New York City), of the American lower-middle class, of the U.S. Marines. . . . All of those places and associations are as American as baseball. . . . There is vio.. lence in the American character, probably more than in any other national character." As if to give this new American story an exclamation point, on Sep-tember 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Missis-sippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been "unduly provoked" by "unhy-gienic" outsiders of "low morality." And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—"serving food without a license," the charge read. And then, that same week, came Berkeley.

and

But the direct line from Lyndon John-son to Kitty Genovese was rather hard to swallow. Only once did he devote an entire speech to how "the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay." It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television—a fact, of course, that the candi-date likely ignored as a point of pride. But "morality" was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson's people weren't exactly sure how. Memos flew back and forth: Enlist "a group of friendly criminologists"? "Judicious use of the candidate's family," "inclusion of prominent women"? Public appearances with Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman? They were floundering. No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim for these issues before Goldwater. They had never been at issue before. It was a watershed year in American mores. The Supreme Court declared school prayer a menace to the Constitution; the Boston Strangler, Kitty Gen-ovese, and other dramatic murders were forever removing America's domi-nant image of crime from the benign realm of the 1950s-vintage "juvenile delinquent." Adlai Stevenson told Colby College students, "In the great strug-gle to advance human rights even a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement." It all seemed to fit together somehow. Do-gooders uprooting neighborhoods and school districts; a smut magazine like Playboy running interviews with politicians like some kind of cultural arbiter; mari-juana smokers; what J. Edgar Hoover called "one of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed in my years in law enforcement—an overzealous pity for the criminal, and an equivalent disregard for his victim." Privileged col-lege students in California whining like victims and holding their own univer-sity hostage; the Beatles and their long hair; topless bathing suits; climbing divorce rates; this Warhol displaying Brillo boxes as "art"; that outrageous professional atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair—the list went on. Suddenly, it all seemed political—something people wanted to take a side on. Since it was a presidential year, they looked for a presidential candidate who was on their side, too. It was hardly foreordained that it would be Goldwater. The salty high-desert rebel and nightclub habitué certainly hadn't complained when Goldwa-ter Girls in bikinis passed the collection plate at one of his rallies in Beverly Hills back in May. One faction of conservatives, in fact, "libertarians"—exem-plified by the YAFers who put their founding convention at loggerheads by
CITIZENS
485 
decrying the Sharon Statement's reference to God and the Berkeley co-ed who was the Rosa Parks of the trolley-car running boards—defined their political identity by their live-and-let-live attitude on moral questions. Republicans were the party of Middle American piety. But America was a pious country. God talk on the stump wasn't so much political as pro forma; at the governors' confer-ence in Cleveland there was hardly a peep of opposition to a resolution in favor of a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. It was a liberal Democrat who denounced Ralph Ginzburg on the House floor (the notorious sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, on the other hand, was a confirmed Republican). It was Bobby Kennedy who, besides J. Edgar Hoover, was the man most likely to be thought "tough on crime." The politician best known for crusading against smutty rock and roll was Governor Matthew Welsh of Indiana—otherwise lib-eral enough to earn George Wallace's full wrath in the Indiana presidential pri-mary that spring. There was little the eminently liberal Teddy White scorned more than the Berkeley radicals at the Cow Palace: "girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans, college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals," their rhetoric inspiring Northern Negroes to riot as "revenge for Mississippi and Alabama." And the response to Rocke-feller's remarriage had been, of course, bipartisan and ecumenical. Goldwater raised these issues as they came to concern him, on the fly, almost as a quirk. "The origin of this commendable but somewhat novel resolve is not clear," The New Yorker's Richard Rovere wrote when the candi-date started his morality talk at the convention. "Goldwater exegetes say that it has never been a theme in his earlier writings and speeches." (There were hints of it in the home stretch of New Hampshire, although when Walton looked for a Goldwater speech devoted to religious piety he had to go back to early 1962 to find one.) Now the candidate raised such issues constantly. All those folks who were angry at domestic disorder, at immorality, at crime—most of whom would never consider calling themselves conservatives; some of whom had long called themselves liberals—now had a side to join: Goldwater's. And Walton knew that for millions of undecideds and lukewarm Johnson support-ers, this appeal might close the gap. The RNC' s publicity division realized it, too—and once more it badly squandered the opportunity. About half of the campaign's TV spots attacked the new morality theme, but they were sixty- and thirty-second primers on how to make even your most diehard supporters cringe with embarrassment.
and
"You don't foresee that you can keep a lid on this, can you?" he asked For-tas. (No way.) Fortas was ordered to remove "certain confidential material" from Jenkins's office. (Perhaps it included the results of an investigation Jen-kins had made on his boss's behalf of the sexual peccadilloes of their accuser in the Baker case.) And so, as two thousand well-heeled Democrats dressed for dinner (many in front of the TV, cheering the Yanks' Joe Pepitone as he blasted the grand slam that brought the Series even at three games apiece), the waiting game began. It ended at 8:02. The RNC had gotten hold of the story and released a statement: "The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security." At that, United Press ran with what it knew. Within the hour another window of vulnerability would open up—a bay window. At 9 p.m., the diners far below eagerly awaited the evening's final speaker; that speaker, meanwhile, was in his suite, fretting that the diners would greet him as a laughingstock and the Catholic hierarchs at the head table as auxiliaries to wickedness, when another story came over the wire: Jenkins had been arrested for the same crime in 1959. At this, Johnson finally lost his cool. "Why didn't Walter tell you about it this morning?" he snapped at Fortas. This new revelation could do more damage as than the previous one. It was a complex of the times. "The sexual pervert's . . . lack of emotional stability," as a government report put it, "and weakness of moral fiber make him susceptible to the blandishments of foreign agents." In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors—one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. Thus the meaning of the 1959 arrest. Already official Wash-ington was in the process of writing off the Jenkins news as a kind of tempo-rary insanity, a product of nervous exhaustion. "I just know that he must have been a very tired—had to have been very tired—a very tired man," muttered one White House official. The beloved Kansas columnist William White called the incident "a case of combat fatigue as surely as any man ever suffered it in battle"—almost to be expected, went the implication, when the enemy is one so savage as Barry Goldwater. Two arrests changed the equation. Perhaps there had been three, or a dozen, and perhaps there had been dozens of other sordid assignations that had escaped the notice of the D.C. constabulary. Perhaps this wasn't a nervous breakdown but full-fledged mental illness. Had Lyndon John-son knowingly brought a security risk into the White House, into cabinet meet-ings, into gatherings of the National Security Council? Had Lyndon Johnson done so unknowingly? So who knew how many perverts and Communists the
executive mansion might be crawling with? "They're going to play this secu-rity angle big," Johnson railed at Fortas. "They're going to say, 'Here's a man that sat in the highest councils. Who else might he have something to do with? What secrets might he give away?' " A conventional man in such matters, Lyndon Johnson must have wondered the same thing himself. He had no idea about this character-rotting failing of a man who scurried to and fro with Johnson's secrets close to his breast. He liked to repeat J. Edgar Hoover's boast: "You can spot one by the way they walk." Johnson had walked beside this one for twenty-five years. The humiliation must have been crushing. Which made his political presence of mind within moments of learning the latest news all the more astonishing. He rang up Deke DeLoach. First—small talk—he propounded his theory that the waiters at the party Jenkins attended before the arrest must have been Republican agents who put some kind of mind-control drug in his drink. "I only wish it were true," DeLoach replied. (Perhaps he had known; he and Jenkins were close friends.) Then the President got down to business: ordering an immediate, full FBI investigation. It was a brilliant way of reminding J. Edgar Hoover that he was right there on the hook with the President. Security investigations were routine for top government officials; Jenkins had been the subject of scrutiny in 1957 upon taking an administrative job on the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. The FBI missed his secret then. And since they didn't even check White House staff, who knew how many perverts and Communists the executive mansion might have been crawling with—Johnson's White House, Kennedy's, Eisenhower's, Truman's . ?

Hero

From the brilliant book by Michael Korda:
 The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The govern-ment of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopota-mia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads. Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly commit-ted supporter of Zionism;* he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon's correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France's colo-nial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, "a combination of green, red, black and white." (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.
" This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was based on the assumption that—the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples—the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowl-edge' of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.
 To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comite de l'Afrique Francaise, and his brother the treasurer of the Com le de 1'Asie Francaise, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France's mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enor-mous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France's deep historical con-nections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Cru-sades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of "France of the Middle East" were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French cul-ture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that "Syria" included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Leba-non was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews?
The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty- hence their support of the princely states in India until 1947, and their eagerness to place Emir Feisal on the throne of Iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan- both of these monarchies were invented overnight on the British model. Ibn Saud had at least turned himself into a king without British help.

and

 He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle. Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, "I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even con-vinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so." Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: "There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle." He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs' claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of posi-tions. It was not that Lawrence's philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh. In desert skirmishes Lawrence's command was direct and unchal-lenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal's younger half brother Zeid, "a cool and gallant fighter," who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal's chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence's bodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile fac-tions, since Auda's tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent "back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations," thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs' chief. It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.

and
The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the popula-tion of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Arme-nians who had escaped the massacre, as well as "a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa," part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local pop-ulation a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence's vivid description, "rushed to save their goods and their lives. . . . It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible." The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gath-ered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a "pitched battle" was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—
but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as "one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned." What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardly have fought with more professional skill and personal daring.

Cleo additionally

Explosive though it was, that interview came as a relief to the Sen-ate, to which there was only one danger greater than a public feud between the two Caesarians. Antony wielded political power. Octa-vian was respected, and surprisingly popular. Enthusiastic demon-strations greeted him throughout his travels. Far better that the two rivals obstruct each other, went the thinking, than that they join forces. Antony noted as much in his garden that spring morning. Octavian was fresh from his studies. Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace considered it their business to pro-long discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other. He was of course right. And no one was better at fomenting dissension than Cicero, who could always be counted on, as a contemporary put it, to malign the prominent, blackmail the powerful, slander the distinguished. He now gamely obliged. To Cicero the contest was a baneful one between weakness and villainy. In truth there were a dizzying number of options. Am°4 Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius remained very much in the Pic ture. A bold young man with a gift for assembling armies, Pompey 5
Man Is by Nature a Political Creature • 157
son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father's still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father's beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar's sec-ond in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar's army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.* It seemed that
Octavian
alone was without a command.
The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the
parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect. "I don't trust his age and I don't know what he's after," Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian— a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions ruddy—as a commander in chief. He profferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)
and
For Cleopatra's visit we have 'only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod's account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some inten-sive time in each other's company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra's were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and bal-sam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub's oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region's most valuable export. As for Jericho's dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields. Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra's. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territorY; he had no desire to be "King of a wilderness." There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relent-less and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for zoo talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared him-self the company of any of Cleopatra's agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleo-patra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malthus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that "it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him." The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother's religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was
as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Ara-maic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, D Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sen-sitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the busi ness, one  who—in addition to his own literary and musical accom-plishrnent Cleopatra appeared , Wr graceless in Cleopatra's silken presence. heres had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to — 's children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy

and

Also on Caesar's behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes' traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra's Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in minia-ture. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander's case, Macedonians in PtolernY's. In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman air
mander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck It is im. possible to say whose ambition had brought about the spar-kling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra's fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the mes-sage of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called "the two most magnificent people in the world." Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and announced embraced common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They nn  a new order. Cleopatra presided over the ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar's son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra's rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the Political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra's side. Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in ques-tion, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony's to distribute.
At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which wa how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreach ing by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, "a Dionysia, revel, led by an eastern harlot." With the Donations a munificent An tony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he set tied on Octavian.

Trafalgar

The invasion of Britain was abandoned because the element of surprise was lost, but mostly Napoleon's plans had to be set aside because he did not understand the problems of war at sea anywhere near as well as he did the deployment of armies on land. He was used to organising grand projects that relied on the fast and reliable transmission of orders to move large armies across the land-scape, and he wanted to use the same approach for the dispositions of his warships. It was a policy doomed to failure, because he did not allow for the vagaries of contacting fleets at sea. This was done through despatches carried by relatively small, lightly armed ships that relied on speed and manoeuvra-bility rather than firepower to elude capture. Speed of communication at sea seldom approached that on land, mainly because it was far more difficult to find a ship and deliver mes-sages than for a despatch rider on land to take orders to an army. Lines of communication at sea were also at the mercy of wind and weather, and it was common practice to send dupli-cate despatches in different ships to increase the chances of the information reaching its destination. In such circumstances, close central control of naval operations was impossible — a fact that Napoleon repeatedly failed to grasp. As on land, Napoleon also frequently countermanded his own orders by sending one messenger ship to follow another, without any thought that only one, or possibly none, might reach their destination in time. While trying to impose tight control on his ships at sea through a constant stream of orders, he produced more chaos than if he had left his admirals to their own devices. After so many abandoned invasion plans, he still failed to learn from his mistakes, blaming his subordinates instead. His latest plan was for Vice-Admiral Honore-Joseph-Antoine Ganteaume to lead his fleet from Brest on the north-west tip of France to Martinique in the 'West Indies. In the meantime Vice-Admiral Villeneuve was to take his fleet from Toulon on the south coast of France, collect the Spanish admiral Frederico
Carlos Gravina with five Spanish warships from Cadiz, and ren-dezvous with Ganteaume at Martinique. These combined forces would next attack British possessions in the West Indies, thereby drawing British ships away from Europe to deal with this threat. They would then return to take control of the English Channel so that the invasion of Britain could take place. Napoleon's whole strategy was based on deceiving the British; Ganteaume was to leave Brest unseen so that British ships would be occupied looking for him; a large enough fleet was to stay at Cadiz to ensure that the British maintained the blockade and so could not rapidly reinforce their fleet in the Channel; and Villeneuve was to sail for the West Indies in the hope of induc-ing a large part of the British Navy to give chase. It was a strategy that would work well enough with armies on land, but it was far too complicated and too precise to have much chance of working at sea. Because he did not trust his admirals, Napoleon also issued increasingly detailed and rigid orders in an attempt to force them to do exactly what he wanted. On 3o March 1805, Villeneuve's fleet had sailed from Toulon, setting in motion a train of events that would culminate in the Battle of Trafalgar nearly seven months later. The first part of Villeneuve's mission was successful; he avoided the British block-ade, and Nelson only found out that he had gone four days later.

and

It was this sudden leap in technology to specially designed warships that carried cannons from commandeered merchant ships as mere transport for soldiers that led to Trafalgar, warships became weapons in their own right, capable of destroying other ships or land-based fortifications without any troops leaving the ship. Naval strategy rapidly changed from an emphasis on ramming and boarding to the concerted use of artillery to disable an enemy before they were close enough to ram or board. In the two centuries leading up to Trafalgar, this was the situation that had prevailed. By trial and error, the design of ships and cannons gradually improved, as did the quality of gunpowder, and at the time of the battle, wooden sailing warships had reached the very peak of technical perfection, with the expertise of the best seamen leaving little room for more advances. Trafalgar was to be the last major pitched battle between two large fleets of sailing wooden war-ships. Within sixty years the first iron battleship was launched, causing a race between European navies for more powerful guns to destroy enemy battleships and ever-thicker armour to protect them. In the meantime the development of steam engines broke the reliance on wind power and changed naval tactics for ever. With the advent of iron and steam, the advantage lay firmly with the fleet that had the best technology; no longer could the sheer skill, professionalism and endurance of the ships' crews, as at Trafalgar, produce a decisive victory in the face of unfavourable odds. Although the ships were cleared for action in great haste, because this was how the crews had practised the manoeuvre in order to be ready for any emergency, with hindsight the sailors found they had plenty of time — perhaps too much time. William Robinson, a seaman on board the Revenge who had volunteered five months before the battle, later remembered:
As the enemy was thus driven to risk a battle, they exhibited a specimen of their naval tactics by forming themselves into a crescent, or half-moon, waiting for our approach; which did not take place until ten minute of twelve o'clock, so that there was nearly six hours to prepare
for the battle, while we glided down to them under the influence of a gentle breeze . . . During this time each ship was making the usual preparations, such as breaking away the captain and officers' cabins, and sending all the lumber below — the doctors, parson, purser and loblolly men were also busy, getting the medicine chests and bandages out; and sails prepared for the wounded to be placed on, that they might be dressed in rotation, as they were taken down to the after cockpit. In such a bustling, and it may be said, trying as well as serious time, it is curious to notice the different dispositions of the British sailor. Some would be offering a guinea for a glass of grog, whilst others were making a sort of mutual verbal will, such as, if one of Johnny Crapeau's [actually `Crapaud', the French word for 'toad' and the seamen's slang for a Frenchman] shots . . . knocks my head off, you will take all my effects; and if you are killed, and I am not, why, I will have yours, and this is generally agreed to. During this momentous preparation, the human mind had ample time for meditation and conjecture, for it was evident that the fate of England rested on this battle.

and

 After his decisive victory and just days after occupying Vienna, the news of the French and Spanish defeat at Trafalgar reached Napoleon on 16 November, upon which 'he flew into one of those fits of passion which always disgrace a Hero more than an individual. Several couri-ers were immediately dispatched with orders, which . . . [were later] altered or changed. It is said that he sent commands to Ganteaume, instantly to revenge with the Brest Fleet the disas-ters of the Toulon [Villeneuve's] fleet.'20 Napoleon eventually took notice of his aides and countermanded these orders to the Brest fleet. Less than a month later, on 7 December, the allies of Britain suffered an even greater disaster than Ulm, when Napoleon crushed the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz — a defeat so decisive that it caused the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, to say of a map of Europe, 'Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.'21 At the end of i8o5, it was obvious that there was an uneasy stalemate; Britain had command of the sea, but Napoleon would shortly have control of Europe. It would be ten years before he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. For Britain's allies on the Continent, the immediate outlook was bleak, and from the French point of view,
He [Napoleon] desired that little should be said about Trafalgar in the French newspapers . . . [and] Europe itself was willing enough to observe that silence which he desired. The mighty resonance of his steps on the continent drowned the echoes of the cannon of Trafalgar. The powers who had the sword of Napoleon at their breast were but little cheered by a naval victory, profitable to England alone, without any other result than a new extension of her commercial domination, a domination which they disliked and tolerated only from jealousy of France. Besides, British glory did not console them for their own humiliation

and
at Tilsit, a small town on the Polish-Lithuanian border, Napoleon agreed a peace treaty after the French had decisively beaten the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland. With Russia under the sway of Napoleon, the Continental System soon began to have a serious effect on Britain. Of more immediate concern was another part of the treaty that was meant to remain secret, which covered how France and Russia would divide up Europe between them with an aggressive appli-cation of the Continental System, amalgamate the French and Russian fleets, which were to be increased by more shipbuilding, and seize the fleets of Portugal and Denmark — both still neu-tral states. The secret treaty was known almost instantly in Britain, the information being carried by an English smuggler turned spy, and the government realised that it must act quickly to pre-empt Napoleon's plan. The Portuguese royal family and the Portuguese fleet were escorted to the safety of the colony of Brazil on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, a Russian fleet in the Tagus River in Portugal was blockaded by British ships, leaving a few Russian vessels isolated and relatively pow-erless in the Adriatic. A plan was then set in motion to deal with the Danish fleet at Copenhagen, which was important not so much for the ships there as the seamen, since the Danish Government required every seafarer to serve six years in the navy, if they were needed, with four thousand men always avail-able and a reserve of over twenty thousand. These were all skilled and experienced seamen — the essential element that the French Navy lacked. On 25 July 1807, the British Admiral Lord Gambier set sail with a strong force of battleships and transport ships to Copenhagen, on the correct assumption that the Crown Prince of Denmark would refuse to surrender his navy. After several days of bombardment, partially from ships, but mainly from artillery batteries that had been established ashore, the city surrendered on 7 September. British losses were minimal, but about 250 Danish soldiers were killed, and because General Peyman who commanded the Danish defence had earlier refused to take advantage of the British offer to evacuate the city, over two thousand civilians also died. Those Danish ships that were not considered worth taking to Britain were destroyed, and the operation effectively stopped Napoleon's revised plans for invasion. From now on Napoleon relied on the Continental System to bring Britain to its knees, and there appeared to be every possibility of doing so. Bad harvests in 1808, 1809 and 181o, as well as the continuing mechanisation of both agriculture and industry in Britain, caused widespread unrest and often violent opposition. Luddites smashed factory machines; turnpike cottages were burned in anger against road tolls; and serious rioting occurred in several places. If strictly enforced, the Continental System would have succeeded, since by 1811 English factories were being forced to close down because there was no market for their products and because warehouses were already choked with unsold goods. The problem for Napoleon was that the cutting of trade between the Continent and Britain hurt the Continental countries almost as much. The Continental System was everywhere subverted or only half-heartedly applied. Corruption and smuggling were rife, and even Napoleon him-self sanctioned the relaxation or circumvention of the rules when it suited him. In France, the bourgeoisie — Napoleon's most faithful supporters — were alienated by goods being unob-tainable or else scarce and overpriced. The end result was an even greater strain on his imperial economy that had already been suffering under the burden of financing his military cam-paigns. The final straw was his invasion of Russia in 1812. Not merely a military disaster, the campaign made an implacable enemy of the Tsar. One by one the allies of France switched their allegiance to Britain and Russia, until Napoleon was forced to abdicate two years later and was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

DeMille

Mitch Leisen decorated a library with false bindings. DeMille pulled them all down onto the floor in a display worthy of Belasco, and demanded that Leisen put real books on the shelves. But authenticity went only so far. Since the film had an important courtroom scene, Joy attended some tri-als by way of research, and noted that there were few histrionics when someone was found guilty. During the scene in the film where she was to be found guilty, Joy stayed motionless, then closed her eyes and collapsed. DeMille called cut and said, "When are you going to start acting, Miss Joy?" "You don't appreciate what I gathered from my experience," said Joy, explain-ing that she was only doing what a woman she had observed at trial had done. "Well," said DeMille, "I'd like it a little bit more—portrayed is the word." Joy batted her eyes and gave a conventional representation of female grief. Manslaughter is heavy on production values and negligible in most other areas. Joy plays a willful, wild society girl, Thomas Meighan a handsome, stalwart, dull district attorney.

and

In constructing the script, DeMille stayed close to the Gospels except for •ne particular. He never believed the biblical account of Judas's betrayal. "Why ould a man sell out someone for a mere 30 pieces of silver after he had seen him erform miracles?" he asked, not unreasonably. There had to be something else, omething like ... sex. What if Judas had had or wanted to have Mary Magdalene nd was frustrated by Jesus' conversion of her? That's motivation! DeMille knew this particular plot point might raise ecclesiastical eyebrows, so he had researchers scour the literature for ammunition. They found similar ideas in Mary Magdalene, a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, in a couple of obscure poems, and Judas Iscariot, a novel by Leonid Andreyev, who wrote He Who Gets Slapped. Good enough! Shortly before production began, he wrote Bruce Barton, one of the pro-duction's advisors, asking for suggestions about deletions. "It appears to me that we have 17 reels of picture . . . and I would like to get it as close to 12 reels as possible." Barton was clearly worried about the opening with Mary Magdalene: "Couldn't Mary's costume and her movements in the first scene be planned in such a way as to subordinate the sex suggestion as much as possible? Mary, if she was as successful at her trade as we show her, probably insisted on a good deal of respect from her admirers in public." More usefully, Barton suggested that .DeMille cast some of the disciples with younger actors: "This was largely a movement of young men. Jesus was only 29 or 30. . . . All the disciples were presumably under 50, and most of them probably in their thirties. Old men and middle aged men do not ordinarily go off after new teachers or ideas." The final script for The King of Kings was a Homeric 366 pages long. It was similar to most of Cecil's scripts from the mid-1920s in that it carried his hand-written notes and interpolations on nearly every page, usually specifics about per-formance rather than staging. DeMille also made a series of notes for shots, or dramatic moments that could be integrated into the movie:

The unforgettable introduction of Jesus as seen through the returning sight of a blind child was also outlined by DeMille: "Through the darkness comes great rays of light and in the light an indistinct figure of the CHRIST is seen, then the rays leave and as they do, the figure shapes itself into the face of CHRIST, looking with love and pity upon the blind girl. She SEES, falls at his feet, kissing the hem of his garment . . ." DeMille ties healing to the spiritual sight that characterizes faith; the audience sees Christ at the same time as the formerly blind girl. DeMille had a staff of twelve researchers plowing through documentation on the period, and the pressures of producing an accurate biblical production sometimes nudged people into violating biblical precepts. Head researcher Bessie McGaffey wrote DeMille on July 27, less than a month before the start of produc-tion, "According to the Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 4 and Kitto's Encyclopedia Volume 1 the Crown of Thorns was a branch of the bush Zizyphus Spina Christi which is noted for its long thorns. Mr. Wright, the florist, obtained two branches which I am now giving to you. He obtained it from a bush growing on a vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Sapphire Street, Redondo Beach. . . . Would suggest that we go down and steal this bush at once."

and

Production of The King of Kings began on August 24, 1926, and continued until January 8, 1927, using over 3.4 million feet of film. The film was made on a six-days-a-week schedule, and shot in rough script continuity. The location for Galilee and the loaves and fishes sequence was Catalina Island, where an entire village was constructed. DeMille had the idea that the cast and crew should sleep in a little colony of cabins, combining his love of moviemaking with his love of the outdoors. After the first day of shooting, he turned to an assistant and said, "This has been the happiest day of my life." But not everybody was equally thrilled with the sleeping arrangements. One day they were shooting a scene on the Catalina shore when a luxurious yacht sailed into camera range. DeMille exploded, sending out an assistant to get rid of the yacht. The assistant reported that the yacht was for H. B. Warner; that he would be sleeping on it every night. "And with whom was this arrangement made?" DeMille inquired in that quiet, low voice that presaged real trouble. Told that the arrangement had been made directly with Warner, DeMille said, "I thought the idea was that we're all to live and eat and sleep here, to stay in the mood of this setting which we took so much time and care to create and to let this atmosphere soak into us. If I thought Mr- Warner needed a yacht, I'd have brought my own. Just who does he think he is?" "Jesus Christ, sir," piped up one very brave man. After a thoughtful moment, DeMille said, "That puts me at something of a disadvantage, doesn't it?" For the rest of the location shoot, DeMille managed to avoid looking at the arrival or departure of Warner's yacht because it spoiled his mood.

Hero

 From 1875, when Disraeli, with the help of the Rothschilds, purchased Khedive Ismail Pasha's shares in the Suez Canal Corporation for £4 million, to 1956, when Britain and France went to war with Egypt over Nasser's nationalization of the canal, the protection of the canal had always been regarded as one of the most vital of British interests. The canal was the priceless link between Britain and its vast colonial possessions and domin-ions in the East. The fear that in the event of war the Turks might attack the canal as a surrogate for the Germans was one of the main reasons for British control of Egypt and the Sudan. Mention of any threat to the canal or any improvement to its defenses therefore invariably produced an instant response, so it is hardly surprising that despite the relatively slow communications of the period, the holiday season, and the normal languor of government and private committees, Woolley and Lawrence (accompanied by Dahoum) arrived in Beersheba on January 9, 1914, after having spent Christmas in Carchemish, and got to work immediately. From Beersheba south and east there were no roads or railway. Quite apart from the difficulties of the terrain, which were considerable, the Turks wanted nothing that might encourage the British to advance north from Egypt in the event of war, and the British would have regarded any attempt to build roads or a railway as a threat to the canal. "The place is
an absolute wilderness," Lawrence wrote home about the Sinai. "Not even any Arab tribes there: empty, they say." Gaza was, in those days, "a picturesque little crusading town of about 20,000 people: a fine xiith Cent. Church." Nothing appeared to have been prepared for them, although a telegram informed them that Captain (later Colonel) S. F. Newcombe of the Royal Engineers was on his way with a caravan of cam-els. Woolley and Lawrence bought themselves tents, "camp outfit, hired servants, etc. (all on credit, since the P.E.F. had sent our money to Jerusa-lem)," and made their way to Beersheba with their gear on a donkey, to wait for Newcombe. Lawrence noted that already, "the Turkish Gov. is exceedingly shy of us, and is doing its best to throw all possible difficul-ties in our way"; this problem would grow worse throughout the expedi-tion. Whatever had been decided about the map survey in Constantinople, here, only a few miles from the Egyptian border, the police recognized a foreign, Christian intrusion when they saw one, and acted accordingly. Fortunately, Lawrence and Newcombe liked each other at once, and their friendship would last throughout the war years and beyond. Law-rence's attitude toward professional soldiers was, and would remain, ambivalent. From an early age he felt he had mastered the art of war—very few professional soldiers had anything like his broad knowledge of military history and literature, his ability to inspire others, his endurance, or his sense of terrain and topography. Whatever Lawrence's preference for the methods of Marshal de Saxe over those of Napoleon, he would not have disagreed with the latter's comment, "In war, as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional." As time would show, Law-rence was something of a self-taught genius in tactics and strategy, and he already knew it; this knowledge must have made it all the more difficult for him to accept that he could never have been a regular officer in the Post-Edwardian British army.
and
The sharifian family was respected as being descended from the prophet and as guardian of two of
the three holiest cities in Islam. Consequently, the family was an object of suspicion to the Turkish government, all the more so since Mecca, in the Hejaz, was so far removed from the centers of Turkish power that before the building of the single-line railway to Medina, the journey to Mecca could take weeks or months. Even after the completion of the rail-way, there was still a daunting journey of 250 miles on camel or on foot from Medina to Mecca across a forbidding desert dominated by preda-tory Bedouin. Abdulla's importance and diplomatic skill were such that he not only met with Ronald Storrs but may have met with Kitchener himself; but neither of them was able to offer any meaningful support so long as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire were at peace (or to pro-vide Abdulla with the half a dozen modern machine guns he wanted). The moment they were at war, however, Storrs suggested reopening the discussion with Abdulla; and Kitchener, now in London as secretary of state for war, agreed. Abdulla, speaking for his father, sought British support against the Turks, and after a series of messages from Mecca to Cairo to London and back, it was given, on the condition that the sharif (and "the Arab nation") assist Britain in the war against Turkey. Kitchener not only had given his approval but had sought the approval of the prime minister and Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, thus committing Britain in principle to arm and finance a revolt in the Hejaz against the Turks under the lead-ership of Sharif Hussein. The timing of the revolt and the exact meaning of the phrase "Arab nation" were left undefined for the moment; still, at one stroke, Great Britain had committed itself to the creation of an Arab state and to the leadership of Sharif Hussein and his sons. Kitchener went even farther. In his message to Abdulla, he not only alluded to an Arab state but as good as pledged Britain to support Sharif Hussein as a new caliph, replacing the Turkish sultan: "It may be," Kitchener wrote, falling into language as stately and opaque as that of Hussein himself, "that an Arab of the true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina, and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil which is now occurring."
Since Kitchener's utterances, not unlike those of the sharif, tended to be Delphic, it is hardly surprising that his message of October 30, 1914, has been a source of controversy for the past ninety-five years. That and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are among the most fiercely disputed documents in the history of British diplomacy. It is clear enough, though, that British policy now promised "the Arabs" (without as yet defining who and where they were) a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire if they helped to defeat the Turks, and offered the sharif (and his family) a role of special political and religious importance within such a state, as well as suggesting that he should assume spiritual leadership of all Mus-lims everywhere (something that was hardly in the gift of the British government). Not surprisingly, these assurances were accepted with alacrity by the sharif, and very shortly afterward he offered the first proof of his allegiance to the Allies' cause. Almost immediately after the outbreak of war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire the sultan, though now hardly more than a figure-head, in his role as calpih proclaimed a jihad against the Allies. The proc-lamation appeared to have had little effect on Muslims in India, in North Africa, or even in Egypt. Although the sharif of Mecca had been expected to announce his adherence to the jihad, he showed no sign of doing so. His silence on the matter was deafening, and registered clearly in Con-stantinople and Berlin. It may or may not be true that the British acquired their empire "in a fit of absence of mind,"* but certainly their policy for the Middle East was improvised in haste and as something of an afterthought, by men who were overwhelmed by the sheer size and ferocity of the war only three months after it had begun. However, when Lawrence arrived in Cairo, British policy, at any rate on the surface, appeared to coincide with his own view, except for the intrusion of the Indian army and government into Mesopotamia, which Lawrence opposed from the start. He plunged into his duties in Cairo with enormous enthusiasm—and daily expanded

Innocence

The owner of La Ricordanza, in i 568, was a member of the Ridolfi family, certainly, but a midget, married to a midget, and with a daughter, born to them after many disappoint-ments, who was also a midget. They seem to have been by no means the only family in this predicament, or something like it, at the time. There were, for example, the Valmarana at Monte Berico, just outside Verona. Here the daughter of the house was a dwarf, and in order that she should never know that she was different from the rest of the world, only dwarfs were allowed into Villa Valmarana as her playmates and attendants. At the Ricordanza, however, Count Ridolfi con-sulted a medical man of scholarly reputation, Paolo della Torre, who practised at Torre da Santacroce. Paolo advised him in a letter that it was all very well for the Valmarana, who had an abundance of dwarfs in both the villages beneath their walls. Travellers through those parts used to make a detour to see these dwarfs, and if none appeared the carriage-driver would offer to get down from his seat and root them out of their dwellings to be looked at. It was not realised at the time that the inhabitants of Monte Berico suffered from a lung disease and the low concentration of oxygen in their blood produced a high incidence of dwarfism. `Such people would not be suitable to serve your worship,' Paolo went on. 'I would advise you not to lament the scarcity of them at the Ricordanza. In respect to stock, or race, we must remember that, in Macchiavelli's words, Nature has implanted in everything a hidden energy which gives its own resemblance to everything that springs from it, making it like itself. We can see the truth of this in the lemon tree, whose smallest twig, even if the tree is unfortunate enough to be barren, still has the fragrance which is the soul of the lemon.' This letter was relevant, and it was civilised, but it was not helpful. With great difficulty and many enquiries the Ridolfi followed up reported instances of midget families, so that by the time she was six their only child had a retinue suitable to her position, a tiny governess, a tiny doctor, a tiny notary, and so forth, all to size. The child never went out, and was confident that the world consisted of people less than 1.3 metres high. To amuse her, a dwarf (not a midget) was sent for from Valmarana, but without success. She pitied him, because she thought how much he must suffer from knowing that, as a dwarf, he was different from anyone else at Ricordanza. Then, in trying harder and harder to make her laugh, he fell and cracked his head, which made the little girl cry so bitterly that he had to be sent away. The Ridolfi suffered from having to practise so many decep-tions on their daughter. But deception, to a quite unexpected extent, grows easier with habit. The whole property had, of course, been extensively adapted, although only one of the special stairways through the gardens remains today, with its miniature steps of grass and marble. As to the statues, none of them were made by local sculptors, though so many stone-quarries were handy. The commission was given to someone
completely unknown, thought by some authorities to have been a Turkish prisoner of war. At the same time Count Ridolfi heard of a little midget girl, illegitimate but of good family, who lived as far away as Terracina, and they arranged for her to come and live with them. Fortunately she was born dumb, or, at all events, when she arrived at the Ricordanza she was dumb. It was impossible, therefore, for her to describe the human beings she had seen while she lived outside the walls of the villa. All the care and attention of the little Ridolfi were now for Gemma da Terracina. Having failed to teach this new and beloved friend to talk, which was something even the cage birds could do, she asked to give up studying Latin and Greek herself, or, at least, never to have them read aloud. Music was an even more serious matter. The Ridolfi had a private organist, and nobody who has ever seen it will ever forget the toy-like instrument in the salotto, whose sounds are still as clear as a bird's. It must have been a sacrifice to silence this organ, and probably quite a needless one, since there was no proof that Gemma was deaf. But less than twelve months later Gemma began to grow at a very noticeable rate, as though her body had set itself to make up for its eight stunted years. By the next spring she was a head taller than the family doctor, who lived with the chaplain and the notary in a suite of rooms built for them over the chapel. The doctor, consulted, had very little to suggest. He tried administering oil of juniper to stunt the growth, and then, when this failed, a remedy of Pliny's, who says that Greek tradesmen used to rub a hyacinth bulb over young slaves to prevent the growth of pubic hair. The Ridolfi began to fear that their doctor was a fool. In anguish, they searched on all sides for better advice. Della Torre was, once again, of little comfort. Another letter of his, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale, points out the folly, in the last resort, of attempting to reverse Nature. 'Don't be so concerned,' he adds, 'with the matter ofhappiness.' There is also an exchange between Ridolfi and his brother, the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, who says nothing about Nature, but warns that human happiness must be left to Heaven. 'Certainly,' the Count replies, 'as far as I myself am concerned, but surely I am right to exert myself on other people's account, what better study could there be?' And his daughter was not in the least concerned about herself, only about her friend. She knew, after all, that if Gemma were ever to have to go back to the outside world, where no-one was more than 1.3 metres in height, she would be treated as a monster — dumb, into the bargain, and unable to explain herself. The whole situation was cruelly embarrassing already. And the little girl took to walking a few steps ahead of Gemma, so that their shadows would be seen to be the same length. The Count reflected that neither Nature nor Heaven has allowed for anyone, certainly not for any child, with such a compassionate heart as this only daughter of his. Impossible and unthinkable to separate her now from Gemma, and he was driven to promise her that if she could think of any way to help Gemma in her desperate condition they would try it, no matter what the cost. She was now about eight years old, the age at which the mind works logically and without hesitation on what it has learned so far, because it is not troubled by the possibility of any other system. It was for this reason (for instance) that she had never questioned the fact that she herself was confined to the Ricordanza. She knew, on the other hand, something about pain, and that it was worth suffering to a certain extent if it led to something more appropriate or more beautiful. Some-times, for example, when it was a special occasion, she had her hair curled. That hurt a little. The lemon trees, too, on the terraces of the Ricordanza, were sometimes dipped by the gardeners in boiling water, so that they lost all their leaves, but the new leaves grew back more strongly. Meanwhile, Gemma had taken to going up and down the wrong steps in the garden, the old flights of giant steps which had been left here and there and should have been used only for occasional games. The little Ridolfi made a special intention, and prayed to be shown the way out of her difficult-ies. In a few weeks an answer suggested itself. Since Gemma must never know the increasing difference between herself and
the rest of the world, she would be better off if she was blind — happier, that is, if her eyes were put out. And since there seemed no other way to stop her going up and down the wrong staircases, it would be better for her, surely, in the long run, if her legs were cut off at the knee.
This story is not the one given out nowadays in the leaflet pro-vided by the Azienda di Turismo or by the Committee for Visit-ing the Most Beautiful Villas of Florence — it starts in the same way, but ends differently. Nor, probably, is the Ricordanza, for all its high and airy position, for all its lemon terraces, really one of the most beautiful villas of Florence. Nor, in a sense, is the present Count Ridolfi really a Count, although the leaflet calls him that, because all titles were abolished in Italy after the Second World War. And, in the course of their descent, the Ridolfi family has taken so many turns and half-turns, so many doubtful passages, that the past generations can hardly be held responsible for those of the twentieth century. No more midgets among them now. Still a tendency towards rash decisions, per-haps, always intended to ensure other people's happiness, once and for all. It seems an odd characteristic to survive for so many years. Perhaps it won't do so for much longer.