Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (17 page)

Taking only seven men with him—one of them would have to drop out and return to Aqaba because his camel was unfit—Lawrence set off on July 7 to bring the news of the Arab victory to Cairo. Riding continuously at a walk with only short intervals of rest, in order not to exhaust their camels, the small party arrived at Shatt, on the canal, on July 9, a journey of forty-nine hours, which pushed both men and camels to their limit, crossing over Mitla Pass
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and then across the shifting, rolling dunes to the east bank of the canal. Occasional heaps of rusting, empty army-ration bully beef cans in the desert marked the approach to civilization.

There, the natural lethargy of army administration took over, as if to mark Lawrence’s passage from Asia and the Arabs back to the world of uniforms, regulations, and orders. The lines at Shatt, it turned out, had been abandoned because of an outbreak of plague. Lawrence picked up a telephone in an abandoned office hut and found it still working. He rang general headquarters at Suez and asked for a boat to take him across the canal, but was told that this was no business of the army’s, and that he would have to call Inland Water Transport. Though he explained the importance of his mission, Inland Water Transport was indifferent. It might try to send a boat tomorrow, to take him to the Quarantine Department. He called again, and argued his case more vehemently, but this did no good—he was cut off. Finally, “a sympathetic northern accent from the military exchange” came on the line: “It’s no bluidy good, Sir, talking to them fooking water boogars: they’re all the same.” The kindly operator finally managed to put Lawrence through to Major Lyttleton at Port Tewfik. Lyttleton handled cargo shipments for the Arab forces at Jidda, Yenbo, and Wejh, and promised to have his launch at Shatt in half an hour. Once Lawrence reached Port Tewfik, Lyttleton took one look at him in his verminous, filthy robes, and brought him straight to the Sinai Hotel, where Lawrence had a hot bath, his first in months, iced lemonades, dinner, and a real bed, while his men were sent northward to “the animal camp on the Asiatic side” in Kubri, and provided with rations and bedding.

The next morning, on the train to Cairo via Ismailia, Lawrence played a game of hide-and-seek for his own amusement, in the true Oxford undergraduate tradition, with the Royal Military Police. There was nothing he enjoyed more than confronting puzzled and vexed minor authorities with the unfamiliar contrast of his blue-eyed face and upper-class accent and his present costume of Arab robes and bare feet. Although he carried a special pass issued to him by Major Lyttleton, identifying him as a British officer, Lawrence wanted to go as far as he could before showing it, and no doubt to annoy as many people on the way as possible. This kind of thing—combining a perverse schoolboy fondness for practical jokes with a flamboyant flaunting of his unmilitary ways and special privileges—was to become something of a specialty of Lawrence’s as his fame increased.

After numerous minor adventures with the authorities, Lawrence changed trains at Ismailia for Cairo, and found his friend Admiral Wemyss in conversation with a large, intimidating, and unfamiliar general, pacing up and down the platform waiting to board their private carriage on the train to Cairo. The general was Allenby, on one of his inspection tours, and his presence, together with that of the admiral, froze everyone to attention except Lawrence, who, recognizing one of Wemyss’s aides, Captain Rudolf Burmester, RN, walked forward and explained who he was and why he was there. At first Burmester was unable to recognize Lawrence, whose weight had dropped to less than ninety-eight pounds, and who was standing before him barefoot in Arab robes, but he immediately realized the significance of what Lawrence told him, and promised to load a naval ship up with “all the food in Suez” and send it to Aqaba at once. He also informed Lawrence that the unfamiliar general was Allenby, who had replaced Murray; and it was there, on the platform, that Lawrence and Allenby first set eyes on each other.

Lawrence on the railway platform after Aqaba, as Allenby strides by.

Lawrence boarded the train, arrived in Cairo at noon, and went straight to the Savoy Hotel, where the Arab Bureau was located. He walked past the sleeping sentry to General Clayton’s rooms; Clayton was hard at work, and merely glanced up at the small robed figure, and waved him away with a quick “Mush fadi,” Anglo-Egyptian slang that can mean anything from “Not now; I’m busy” to “Bugger off!”

Clayton, who supposed that Lawrence was still somewhere around Maan blowing up railway bridges, was astonished, but not vexed, to see his protégé standing barefoot on his doorsill. Clayton confirmed with one call that HMS Dufferin was already loading food at Suez for an emergency trip to Aqaba. Then, at Lawrence’s request, he drew £16,000 in gold from the bank and sent it under guard to Suez to make good the promises Lawrence had written out on army telegraph forms and left with the tribal sheikhs when the gold he was carrying ran out. It was, Lawrence said, imperative for his reputation that these notes, accepted with great reluctance—since Arabs had no faith in paper money of any kind—be redeemed as soon as possible.

Lawrence found that his uniform had been eaten by moths in his absence—or at any rate so he says in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but it is also possible that he had already decided he was more of a sensation in his Arab robes than he would be in uniform. After all, were there no servants in the hotel to look after such things? For that matter, was he the only junior officer in Cairo to have no soldier as servant? Come to that, Cairo was well known for tailors who could whip up a suit or a tropical uniform to order in a few hours. If Clayton could produce £16,000 in gold coins at the drop of a hat, it seems unlikely that with all the resources of the Arab Bureau at his disposal he could not get Lawrence into uniform in a couple of hours if he had wanted to. It seems more probable that Clayton, like Lawrence, realized that the Arab regalia was an asset. This is, in fact, the first moment at which Lawrence can be seen consciously creating the “Lawrence legend"—a creation that, like Frankenstein’s monster, would shortly take on a life of its own.

In any case, Lawrence appeared before his commander in chief just ashe had been on the platform at Ismailia, barefoot, clothed in his white sharifian robes and his headdress with the golden agal. Since Allenby was, among other things, famous as a stickler for perfection in every detail of military uniform, regardless of rank, there is no doubt that he too saw in Lawrence and this unusual garb an opportunity, rather than merely a young staff officer in need of a stern lecture on the dangers of “going native.” As for Lawrence, though he had not been greatly impressed by generals Maxwell and Murray, and occasionally even made fun of them when he thought he could get away with it, he was instantly impressed, even overawed, by Allenby.

“Allenby was physically large and confident,” he wrote, “and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness was not easy to him. He sat in his chair looking at me—not straight, as his custom, but sideways, puzzled.” Lawrence felt that Allenby was trying to decide how much of what he was seeing was “genuine actor and how much charlatan,” and this was probably true enough, since Allenby was still turning that question over in his mind toward the end of his own life: “He [Lawrence] thinks himself a hell of a soldier and loves posturing in the limelight.” But Allenby was by then retired, a field marshal, and a viscount, whereas in 1917 he apparently came quickly to the opinion that Lawrence was, to use his own word, “an actor” (by which Lawrence meant “a man of action”) as opposed to a mere charlatan.

Allenby was not an easy man to impress, but Lawrence succeeded in impressing him, as he explained what he had done, what he intended to do in Syria now that he had captured Aqaba, and what he needed to do it, “offering to hobble the enemy by preaching, if given stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand sovereigns to convince and control the converts.” In fact, it would require close to £200,000 in gold sovereigns a month to fund the Arab Revolt, but even at that price the revolt was cheap. Allenby listened calmly, studied the map as Lawrence explained about the tribes, the wadis, the desert—subjects about which he was a masterful lecturer—and asked an occasional trenchant question.

Though no two people could look less alike, Allenby and Lawrencegot along famously from the beginning, partly because Lawrence knew what he was talking about, and partly because Allenby and Lawrence had many unseen similarities. They were both brilliant soldiers and at the same time intellectuals; Allenby had commanded a flying column of horsemen in the Boer War and understood the mechanics of a guerrilla war; above all Allenby was a cavalryman, who hated the brutal, wasteful head-on attacks on the western front and wanted to open up a war of movement. Like Lawrence, he sought unconventional and imaginative solutions to military problems and rejected the conventional ones, and also like Lawrence, he relished his independence. He instinctively respected Lawrence’s courage and intellect, and was willing to put up with his unorthodox behavior if it brought results, as it already had. Moving Feisal’s army north from Wejh to Aqaba would isolate the three Turkish divisions at Medina while at the same time turning Feisal’s forces loose in the Syrian desert to smash trains and railway lines, cut the Turks’ communications, and keep their attention focused in the wrong direction. Allenby saw at once that he needed a fast-moving mobile force on his right as he advanced to take Beersheba, one that could go for long periods of time without food or water in extreme heat—and here it was, ready made, with a base from which it could be supplied. He did not expect the Arab army to fight conventional battles any more than Lawrence did, but a glance at Lawrence’s map told Allenby that he could feint at Gaza while aiming his main blow at Beersheba, with its vital wells, while all the time the Turks would be looking out toward the empty desert in the northeast, wondering where the Bedouin were.

After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Allenby said to Lawrence, “Well, I will do for you what I can,” and that was that. He would prove as good as his word. Not only would the Arabs receive gold in huge amounts—which Lawrence would disburse, thus confirming his authority—they would eventually get food, small arms, ammunition, Lewis guns and instructors, Stokes mortars and instructors, armored cars, flights of British aircraft, enormous amounts of high explosives, and even camels and mules. Allenby grudged Lawrence nothing. He was even willing to put upwith the political consequences—for the taking of Aqaba, once it was properly exploited, would put the Arab army, funded and armed by the British, only 120 miles from Jerusalem and 240 miles from Damascus—which is to say, far from the Hejaz and at the very center of British and French ambitions in the Middle East. Lawrence had set in motion what would rapidly become huge changes in one of the most volatile areas of the world—ones that are still being fought over today.

Whatever Lawrence might think of them, the honors he had earned were not neglected. Colonel Wilson, who only a few months ago had referred to him as “a bumptious young ass,” recommended Lawrence for the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), a decoration for bravery for officers that is only one step below the Victoria Cross (VC), and praised his “personality, gallantry and grit.” General Sir Reginald Wingate was even more impressed by Lawrence’s secret journey through Syria than by the taking of Aqaba. Wingate praised Lawrence to the chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) in London, and going one step beyond Colonel Wilson, asked for “special recognition” of “this gallant and successful adventure"—the Victoria Cross.
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Despite this recommendation, Lawrence was ineligible for the Victoria Cross, since there were no British witnesses to his feats; but the DSO was not considered a sufficient reward, so instead Lawrence was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB), the Military Division of which was then limited to 750 members. This was an extraordinary and unprecedented honor for a man of only twenty-eight, and one that Lawrence shared with such illustrious predecessors as Nelson and the duke of Wellington. Since a CB could not be awarded to an officer below field rank, Lawrence was instantly promoted to major to make him eligible.

Lawrence never acknowledged or accepted the award; nor did he, as he later claimed, turn it down, since he was unable to. Once an award hasbeen made, on the basis of recommendations by the recipient’s superior officers, it is published in the London Gazette, the official newspaper of the crown, which, among other things, publishes all military postings, promotions, and awards. The moment the award has been “gazetted,” it is official. So far as the army and the crown were concerned, Lawrence was now Temporary Second-Lieutenant and Acting Major T. E. Lawrence, CB, and always would be, whether he accepted the actual decoration itself from the hand of the king or not. He was henceforth entitled to put the initials after his name, and to wear the ribbon of the CB on his uniform, though he never did. This is an important point because Lawrence believed that he had turned the award down, while the fact was that he could not do so, however much he may have wanted to.