MARK SYKES.*
MARK SYKES was one of those unusual characters who are fascinating because they defy all rules and escape all tests. Those who were his friends will never forget him ; he was vital, versatile, unconventional, unexpected. But when all this has been said we cannot think that Mr. Winston Churchill, who has written an introduction to Mr. Shane Leslie's most attractive volume, has really formed a judicious estimate of Sir Mark Sykes's merits. He laments that Sykes was cut off just as the preparation for his real life had been completed. Mr. Churchill means that statesmanship was to be the mature contribution of Mark Sykes to the service of his country. We cannot quite believe this, for Mark Sykes's life was what it was and would have continued to be so. He had not enough continuity of method, not enough " ordin- ariness," so to speak, for statesmanship. He was rather intolerant of detail when his imagination set to work and too fond of the slashing phrase which, of course, had not been sufficiently pondered. It is not just to a man, though it may be well meant, to praise him for what he was not.
Mr. Shane Leslie gives, on the other hand, a speaking likeness of what Mark Sykes was. Let us look at it and we think it will be fo and to justify what we have said about what he was not. Mark Sykes had an amazing upbringing. The son of that well-known Yorkshire landowner, Sir Tatton Sykes, he was rushed about, often at a moment's notice, into remote parts of the world while he was still a child.
• Mask Sem : his Lilo and Lew& By SW= Leslie. London : Cassell. iles. bet.) His education was continually being interrupted. Wherever those insatiable travellers, his father and mother, wanted to go he had to go too. It thus came about that although he knew very little indeed of Matthew Arnold's " good old fortifying curriculum " as taught in the public schools, he amassed an enormous amount of information about men and places which were utterly beyond the ken of the ordinary boy. In some ways he was distinctly below the standard of the common boy in conventional learning ; in other ways he was immeasurably above it, and it was not unnatural for him to regard his contemporaries as children in knowledge of the world. When he was still an infant his mother became a Roman Catholic and he was also received, knowing nothing whatever about it, into the Roman Church. What had been decided over his unconscious head had his full and active approval when lie came to understand what had been done. Throughout his life he remained a devout Roman Catholic, scrupulously careful in his observance of all the rites of the Church. Sledmere Church, which was built by Sir Tatton, stands, to quote Mr. Shane Leslie, " as Sir Tatton's permanent protest against the religious beliefs of his wife and successors."
A good illustration of Mark's difference from other boys was his early passion for reading French works on fortification. Vauban became to him a kind of Bible. " My uncle Toby " himself was not more assiduous in turning a garden into the model of a besieged place. Lord Howard de Walden was sometimes present at Sledmere to play, very willingly, the part of Corporal Trim. Mark Sykes was an excellent draughts- man and loved making maps. At this point we may say that the caricatures which he was never tired of drawing were pungent and relevant in spite of the speed at which they were produced. Many of the best are excellently reproduced in this book.
When this talented creature went to Cambridge he quite failed to pass his " Little Go." The authorities took a wise and indulgent view of his case and were quite willing to keep him on the understanding that he should work for the " Little Go." They did not say that he must pass it, because they evidently entertained no hopes that he ever would. The profit to be derived from his company would have been a boon to his fellow undergraduates, for he was a brilliant talker and overflowed with engaging fancies, but unfortunately his fellow undergraduates had not enough imagination to seek him out. As he, for his part, did not seek them out his contact with the University was not very close. Oddly enough, however, he used to contribute regularly to Univer- sity magazines and he founded a new one. This would mean in an ordinary case that the writer was soaked in the atmosphere of the University. But it was not so with Sykes. He wrote not only for the University but for others. He was a keen member of the A.D.C. and he designed some of the posters announcing the plays. The present writer would give much to have at least one of those posters. He knows where the best of the series hangs, now rather sere with age, in the rooms of a Don, and there must be others preserved by men who perceived how well worth keeping those things were. Among the authorities who had the acumen to cultivate Mark Sykes's friendship was Dr. Montagu James, who was then Provost of King's and is now Provost of Eton. Sykes's letters to him reporting his explorations and asking for advice on books he was planning to write continued for years and are delightful to read.
Dr. Foakes Jackson, the well-known theologian of Jesus College, was another who thoroughly appreciated Sykes. Professor E. G. Browne, the Professor of Arabic, was yet another. In fact, Sykes's chief friends were all men older than himself. Dr. Foakes Jackson has never forgotten how one evening in his rooms when the subject of Roman cavalry was broached Mark Sykes delivered a long extem- pore lecture on the formation of that cavalry and their method of charging in a quincunx, or group of five. Yet Sykes could not pass the " Little Go " 1 Sykes was also a great reader of Dickens, and when on one occasion it was said that Dickens could not describe a gentleman and Dr. Foakes Jackson had mentioned Twemlow in Our Mutual Friend, Sykes was quite ready with Mr. Harefield in Barnaby Budge. Truly does Dr. Foakes Jackson write—" I have learned that they are not always the brilliant youths whom the University delights to honour who ripen like medlars into withered
pedagogues or are respected as safe if incapable men of business, but those who pass unnoticed as ships in the night, and yet are heavily laden with cargoes."
Sykes's studies at Cambridge were interrupted almost as much as his life at school, and it was while he was still an undergraduate that he was given leave to stay down for a term while he travelled. The journey resulted in his memor- able discovery of the Hill of Bones in Syria. Some of the parodies published in this book show that Sykes was a real parodist. The D'Ordel skits which he wrote about the Army after leaving Cambridge, and which he attributed to the fictitious General George D'Ordel, were the delight of the Army at the time.
The chief political fact associated with Mark Sykes's name is, of course, the negotiation during the War of what is known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. This was the arrangement between Great Britain, France and Russia as regards Syria, Mesopotamia and Eastern Asia Minor. Sykes has been considerably blamed in the matter, but Mr. Shane Leslie makes it clear that he was carrying out precise instructions from the Foreign Office. Sykes's health began to give way under the strain of his unsparing exertions in the public service and he died on February 16th, 1919, having sacrificed his life as much as did any of his many friends who were killed in action. He will be long regretted in the House of Commons, where no sensible man willingly missed his speeches, but he will above all be missed as a piece of intellectual yeast which created a pleasant ferment among all around him.
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