Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (26 page)

Lawrence was intending to walk to Damascus, but a succession of events persuaded him to end his journey in Aleppo. He wrote home to explain that one of the newspapers in Aleppo had reported his murder, in a village where he had never been, so that he was treated “like a ghost” by the hotel staff and the local missionaries; then his boots had given up the ghost at last, exposing his feet to “cuts & chafes & blisters” which seemed unlikely to heal in this climate; finally, his camera was stolen (more trouble for the unfortunate police, who now had on their hands a British subject who had been shot at by a native, was reported to have been murdered, and had lodged a complaint about a stolen camera). In the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence best to go home. He was in any case down to the last of his money, he had just recovered from his fourth bout of malaria, and the rainy season was about to begin, so he left with few regrets. He prudently sent a letter to Sir John Rhys, the principal of Jesus College, to explain that he would be returning late, while also very wisely asking his father to go to Jesus and explain matters to the authorities in person. (“Sir John does not like to be bothered with college matters,” Lawrence warned his father.)

In his letter to Sir John Rhys, however, Lawrence mentioned that he had been “robbed and rather smashed up,” something which he had neglected to tell his parents, and which may have been the deciding factor in persuading him to return home, rather than the state of his shoes. Apparently, the shooting incident had not been the only attack on Lawrence: while trying to purchase Hittite seals on Hogarth’s behalf in a village near the Euphrates, he was followed and set upon by an importunate beggar, who had been attracted by Lawrence’s cheap copper watch. Thinking that it was gold, the man stalked Lawrence and hit him on the head with a rock on the deserted road, knocking him down. He then robbed Lawrence and tried to shoot him with the Mauser. Fortunately for Lawrence, the operation of the cocking bolt and the safety catch of a Mauser C96 are confusing even to experienced owners of the pistol, so the thief was unable to shoot. Instead, Lawrence’s assailant bashed him about the head again and made off with all his possessions, biting his hand severely in the fight, and leaving him for dead. Lawrence recovered enough to walk five miles to the next town, where the local authorities and (perhaps more important) the “village elders” quickly found the guilty man—no doubt they already knew who he was—and returned to Lawrence his watch, his seals, his pistol, and his money. Lawrence thanked Rhys for having helped procure the irades (safe-conduct letters) from the Ottoman government, without which the shooting incident and the attack on him might have been far more difficult to resolve, and also asked Rhys not to mention his injuries to his father.

The robbery has caused considerable difficulty for biographers, since Lawrence wrote or told several variants of it to different people. Thus, in Robert Graves’s biography of Lawrence the Mauser becomes a Colt, the safety catch of which the robber didn’t know how to move; in Liddell Hart’s biography it becomes an old Webley revolver,
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which the robber inadvertently rendered unfireable by pulling out the trigger guard; and in both these versions the robber is interrupted by a passing shepherd before he can finish Lawrence off. However it happened, it must have been a frightening experience, even for somebody as stoic and fatalistic as Lawrence, and would explain both why he decided to go home and why he went all the way back by ship, instead of much more quickly by ship to Marseille and then by train: he would have wanted his wounds to heal as much as possible before his family saw him. This attack may have been the one reported, in garbled form, in the Aleppo newspaper, causing people to believe he was dead. That it did happen is certain. Apart from the fading scars, when Lawrence returned C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon’s annotated map to him, he apologized for the bloodstain on it, and in any case there is nothing intrinsically unlikely about the attack.

Lawrence may or may not have worked as a coal checker in Port Said to help pay for his way home, and may or may not have sold his Mauser in Beirut for the same reason (though if he did sell it, as has been claimed, for only £5, he made a very poor deal for such an expensive weapon); but somehow he managed to reach home in one piece and, most important of all, with his enthusiasm for the Middle East undiminished.

What might have seemed to most travelers two lucky escapes, and a good reason not to repeat the experience, merely whetted Lawrence’s appetite. Already it was clear to him that he did not want to become a don, or spend his life cataloging potsherds and glass fragments at the Ashmolean; he wanted both the freedom that only an alien world could offer him, and the adventurous life of a man of action. Just as hardship, physical challenge, and self-discipline had developed from habits into addictions, danger too became addictive. Of course to the would-be hero every assault and life-threatening encounter is merely a challenge to be overcome, a step forward in his apprenticeship—the more frighteningand the more physically punishing, the better, provided he survives. Perhaps without realizing it, Lawrence had taken his first steps on that path, as if he had already heard, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “a cry (if not from the housetops, then—more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.”

That land was not to be found among the gray spires of Oxford.

The college raised no difficulties about Lawrence’s return a week late—an unusual and physically demanding journey through the Holy Land by an undergraduate would have seemed more important than his arriving home on time; and even the dons could hardly fail to notice that he was emaciated and toughened by his experiences. One of them described Lawrence’s face as “thinned to the bone by privation.” He settled back into the routine of college life, but he was infected by more than malaria—henceforth, Lawrence’s mind was firmly fixed on the Middle East, and on finding a way to get back there for a longer time. He may not have wanted to break the news yet to Richards, but hand-printing beautiful books in a William Morris cottage in the woods (or a windmill by the sea, an alternative version of this plan) was no longer Lawrence’s goal.

After his journey, life in the tiny cottage in the garden of 2 Polstead Road too must have seemed more cramped and confining than before, and Oxford a place of narrow vistas, gray sky, and penetrating cold. Many undergraduates stumble through their third and last year at Oxford dazed by the ordeal of the final examination that lies ahead of them, and still more by the question of what they are going to do with themselves when they leave Oxford, but Lawrence was already determined to find a way back to the Middle East, and merely saw his finals as a necessary step on the way. He needed not only a “First,” but more: an interesting and provocative First; and he reenlisted his patient crammer L. C. Jane to ensure that he was well prepared. He had until the Easter vacation of 1910 to hand in his thesis, and though he boasted later of preparing it at the very last minute, the evidence seems to be that he prepared very carefullyindeed. He had it typed (typing was rare at the time), and it included a large number of maps, plans, drawings, photographs, and even postcards, which backed up his view that the crusaders had brought their architecture to the Middle East, rather than being influenced by what they found there.

He had persuaded Hogarth to write a letter of introduction to C. M. Doughty, who was to become another of Lawrence’s father figures, and now it bore fruit. The meeting between Lawrence and the old man was a success, and, in Hogarth’s words, “in no way diminished the disciple’s fervor.” In fact it served to increase Lawrence’s determination to follow in Doughty’s footsteps.

Lawrence did not seem to have had any doubts about his thesis, except for the fear that it might be too ambitious and too long for the examiners. Indeed, the material in it was so new and challenging that there was at first some doubt that anybody at Oxford was competent to judge it. In the event, Lawrence “took a most brilliant First Class,” according to his crammer L. C. Jane, so brilliant that Lawrence’s tutor gave a dinner party to the examiners to celebrate the achievement. This rare, and possibly unique, event in Oxford demonstrates the respect in which Lawrence was held, despite doubt that he was “a natural scholar.”

Afterward, Lawrence set off on a cycling tour in France with his brother Frank, who appears not to have shared Ned’s interest in castles and fortifications. Ned wrote to his mother that he was busy reading Petit Jehan de Saintré, “a xv Cent. Novel of knightly manners,” of which he had been trying to find a well-printed copy, as well as the work of “Molière & Racine & Corneille & Voltaire,” an ambitious reading program for somebody bicycling almost fifty miles a day. He pauses to explain to his mother his passion for reading, and for beautiful books. “Father won’t know all this—but if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys—not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one’s miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man’s thought. And you can never be quite the old self again.”

What Sarah made of all this is hard to know—as so often with Lawrence’s letters home, it reads as if he were trying out ideas and phrases that he intended to develop, refine, and use later, perhaps in this case for a letter to his friend Vyvyan Richards, who still expected Lawrence to join him in the hand-printing venture; or perhaps Lawrence was merely trying to persuade his mother that the plan for printing books with Richards was a better one than his father thought.

On his return to Oxford Lawrence was persuaded by C. F. Bell to go for a bachelor of literature (BLitt) degree as the next rung up on the academic ladder, his subject to be “Mediaeval Lead-Glazed Pottery from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries.” Although he twice failed to win “a research fellowship” at All Souls College, he managed to get a grant of £50 from Jesus College, but one senses that his heart was not really in the problems of lead-glazed pottery, however much they fascinated Bell.

Even though he left immediately for Rouen, to look “at mediaeval pots,” Lawrence also dropped what must have been a bombshell for his friend E. T. Leeds and for Bell, who had envisioned him safely seated at a desk in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, examining potsherds on his return from France. “Mr. Hogarth is going digging, and I am going out to Syria in a fortnight to make plain the valleys and level the mountains for his feet:—also to learn Arabic,” he informed them. “The two occupations fit into one another splendidly.”

“The dangerous crises of self-development are permitted to come to pass under the protecting eye of an experienced initiate … who then enacts the role and character of the ancient mystagogue, or guide of souls,” wrote Joseph Campbell in analyzing the development of the hero, and the need, at the crucial stages of the hero’s life, for a wise, firm, and knowing mentor—one who sets the apprentice hero on the correct path and furnishes him with the knowledge and the weapons he will need, and who, above all, points to the great task that lies at the end of the many trials and terrors.

Nobody would have been more familiar with the role Merlin played in the life of King Arthur than Lawrence, whose appetite for medieval romance, myth, and poetry was voracious, and who would carry Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur into battle with him. Henceforth, Hogarth would play that role in Lawrence’s life.

In the meantime, it is clear, Lawrence was delighted to be freed from the pottery fragments in the Ashmolean, and sent to Syria. He sailed on December 10, 1909, for Beirut, and what would be the happiest years of his life.

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A typical case of the latter kind was the dislike between the future poet laureate and television celebrity John Betjeman and his tutor at Magdalen College, C. S. Lewis, author of, among other things, The Narnia Chronicles. Lewis called Betjeman an “idle prig” and was instrumental in sending him down, and Betjeman later described Lewis as arid, unsympathetic, and uninspiring, and blamed his failure at oxford on Lewis.

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At Bexleyheath, south of London.

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This may not have been true, however, on Clare’s part, to Lawrence’s great embarrassment.

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Although Graves too was an oxonian, there is some doubt that he got this right. Mark Blandford-Baker, the home bursar of Magdalen College, oxford, points out, “Balliol is surrounded by trinity plus a bit of St. John’s.” Lawrence may have been pulling Graves’s leg.

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Lawrence is fairly specific about this, though he seems to have carried several different kinds of pistols over the years. if his reference to the Mauser is true, then it is exactly the same kind of pistol which the young Winston Churchill carried when he charged with the twenty-First Lancers at the Battle of omdurman in the Sudan, Kitchener’s great victory, in 1898, and with which he shot several Mahdist tribesmen.

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he was created marquess of Curzon in 1921.

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This pretty much confirms that the pistol he carried was a Mauser C96–no other pistol had adjustable sights calibrated for up to 1,000 meters, which made sense because the pistol could be carried in a wooden holster that clipped to the butt serving as a stock, thus allowing it to be fired like a carbine. it was, however, a bulky and heavy weapon, not easily concealable, and would seem to prove that Lawrence must have carried more than what he could stuff into his pockets.

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In the Lowell Thomas version the pistol becomes a Colt.45 Peacemaker, which the robber doesn’t realize has to be cocked with the thumb before firing; but this may be a sop to American readers–Lawrence clearly identifies it as a Mauser.