Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (79 page)

This is perhaps the moment to put Lawrence’s achievements in the Middle East in perspective. Our current problems have made it fashionable to ask what Lawrence would have done or said about events there today, or to hold him responsible for what often seems to be a dangerous and ungovernable mess. In much the same spirit, Lawrence’s name is frequently evoked by generals and armchair strategists as the United States struggles to develop an effective strategy against terrorism and guerrilla warfare in the area—indeed whole books have been written about Lawrence either as the guiding spirit of insurgency or as the key to developing successful counterinsurgency tactics. Probably no comment on guerrilla warfare is more frequently quoted (often out of context) than: “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”
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Lawrence’s military reputation is remarkable, since he was both a successful guerrilla leader and a battlefield commander, a combination rarely encountered in warfare. Most people picture him as a man in flowing white robes on a camel, but he very quickly learned to incorporate armored cars and aircraft into his thinking, and he became an innovator in what we would now call combined operations.

His campaign to destroy the Turkish railway system south of Damascus also had the unintended effect of introducing the Arabs to the use of high explosives, a weapon hitherto unknown to them, and today’s improvised explosive device (IED), the roadside bomb, and the suicide bomber are all a part of Lawrence’s legacy. He understood better than anybody else in his generation the effect of surprise on the morale of an enemy—the explosion when it is least expected, placed by unseen hands where it will do the most harm, and its value in weakening the resolve of a much bigger and better-equipped army. This is a running fight of David against Goliath, with Goliath’s attention constantly distracted, so he is not only unable to give a knockout blow, but unable even to decide where to aim it.

Lawrence was not, of course, alone in destroying the hold of the Ottoman Empire over its Arab subjects; nor was he the sole architect of what replaced it. He could not have foreseen that the rise of Nazi Germany would change Jewish immigration to Palestine from a thorny issue for the British into an explosive humanitarian need, or that the discovery of vast deposits of oil would make some Arab regimes on the eastern periphery of the Middle East—Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates—fabulously rich, while leaving the more densely populated and more politically advanced states like Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon comparatively poor. Lawrence was conscious of the potential for oil, but during the 1920s Texas and California were still the world’s largest producers, and in the Middle East the biggest deposits were thought to be in Iraq and Persia, both of which were to a greater or lesser degree British client states. That ibn Saud would emerge not only as the preeminent national figure in the Middle East, but as the owner of its largest oil deposits, was not something Lawrence could have imagined in 1922.

As for Palestine, Lawrence, like Feisal, envisaged Jewish settlement there as taking place within an Arab framework. He did not doubt that the Jewish “national home” of the Balfour Declaration would one day become a Jewish state—Weizmann never made a secret of the Zionists’ ultimate ambition, though he carefully sugarcoated the pill when talking to Arab leaders—but Lawrence assumed, like many other people, that the Jews would make a useful commercial, industrial, and agricultural contribution as partners within a larger Arab world, and that Jewish nationhood would be a long time coming.

Although Lawrence is blamed by Arabs today for aggrandizing his role in the Arab Revolt, and for leaving the Arabs with two states created mainly to provide Abdulla and Feisal each with a throne, a larger Arab state was not within his power or his vision. He saw Abdulla and Feisal as stabilizing influences, and with some reason—the great-grandson of Abdulla still rules in Amman; and the grandson of Feisal reigned as the third king of Iraq until he and his family were murdered in a military coup in 1958 that ended the monarchy and brought the Ba’ath Party (and eventually Saddam Hussein) to power.

Lawrence’s ideas for the Middle East were, always, ahead of his time. On a map that he prepared in 1918 for the British government, he sketched in color his ideas about how to divide the Arab portions of the Ottoman Empire in order to respect the geographical, tribal, religious, and racial realities of the Middle East. It is, of course, an Anglocentric view, which respects British strategic needs and ignores the claims of the French but pays due attention to ethnic realities on the ground. On the other hand, Lawrence tackled head-on some of the problems that are still plaguing the region, like the claims of the Kurds for an independent nation, and the need to find a place for the Armenians. His plan for Syria made it a much larger state than it is today, spread in an arc from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and including Trans-Jordan, with, to its east, a smaller Iraq, and an independent Kurdistan. He created an Armenian state around Alexandretta, and a smaller Lebanon, recognizing the need for a separate state there to deal with a sophisticated and partly Maronite Christian population. Palestine, too, he carefully separated, in recognition of its special problems. His sketch takes into account the distinct differences between tribal areas and settled areas; between Sunni and Shiite Muslims; between Arabs and Levantines; between Kurds and Armenians—differences which the French and British governments preferred to ignore, and which still today are the cause of bloodshed, border disputes, and endless political strife. Rather than trying to create states by drawing straight lines on the map, he tried to create states or indigenous areas based on the religion or the racial and cultural identity of the people living there, and so far as possible to take into account geographical features and water resources. His concept was not perfect, but it looks a good deal more sensible than what emerged in 1921, or what exists today. It would have given Syria a piece of the Persian Gulf oil revenues, and allowed the Kurds to keep their own oil, thus spreading wealth around the Middle East, rather than putting most of it in the hands of the most politically backward and autocratic regimes in the area. As a piece of imaginative mapmaking it is a remarkable document, and by itself ought to be enough to dispel the popular image of Lawrence as a guerrilla leader with romantic and impractical ideas.

Lawrence was only thirty-three when he returned to Britain at the end of 1921, with only two months left of the year he had promised Churchill. He had won the approval of everyone, even Curzon; he had been instrumental in the creation of two Arab nations; and he had helped to secure Britain’s presence in the Middle East. He had accomplished more in a year than anybody, even Churchill, could have expected, and there is no doubt that a great career of some sort was his for the taking. He could, for that matter, have returned to Oxford—All Souls was used to celebrity fellows who maintained a separate and successful career in politics and government in the great world outside Oxford, and Lawrence’s friend Lionel Curtis was one of them. A life as a diplomat, an adviser to the government on the Middle East, an Oxford academic, and an author was open to Lawrence—not only open, but expected of him.

He had already made up his mind, however, to go in a very different direction, and take the steps that would put an end not just to “Colonel Lawrence” but to T. E. Lawrence himself.

As with a stage magician at the end of an amazing performance, his last and most remarkable trick would be to vanish from the stage as the curtain began to fall.

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This brings to mind Noë Coward’s famous remark after seeing David Lean’s film
Lawrence of Arabia
:“if Peter O’Toole had looked any prettier they would have had to call it
Florence of Arabia!”

*
This was a mixed blessing, as Lawrence would soon discover. in 1920, he was making use of the newspaper editors for his opinions about the Middle east, but very shortly,once he decided to step out of the limelight, they would be intruding into his life in pursuit of ever more sensational (and often inaccurate) stories about him.

*
Storrs (the source of this quotation) got it slightly wrong. in fact, it read, “received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, K.C.B.—one Palestine, complete.” Samuel (by then in his nineties) was incensed when this chit, intended as a good-natured joke,was offered for sale at auction in New York, and went for $5,000. (tom Segev,
One Palestine, Complete,
New York: holt, 1999.)

*
There is a good deal of dispute about whether Churchill actually made Lawrence this offer or not, since the post was not at Churchill’s disposal—egypt came under the Foreign office, not the Colonial office. But such a detail would not have prevented Churchill from suggesting the appointment to Lawrence in a moment of enthusiasm, and in any case the prime minister, Lloyd George, later made much the same suggestion. Both men, of course, may have made the offer secure in the knowledge that Lawrence would turn it down, but certainly neither of them would have been held back by the fact that it was Curzon’s toes they were stepping on.

*
“Evolution of a Revolt,” T. E. Lawrence,
Army Quarterly and Defence Journal.
October, 1920, p. 8.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Solitary in the Ranks”

O
n August 30, 1922, Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence, CB, DSO, enlisted in the ranks of the Royal Air Force as a recruit, under an assumed name.

Joining the RAF “in the ranks” was not a hasty decision on Lawrence’s part, unusual as it seemed to most people. There was a long tradition in Victorian and Edwardian Britain of officers and gentlemen enlisting in the ranks, but usually to expunge some sort of social or military disgrace—the “gentleman ranker” is a constant figure in Kipling’s
Barrack Room Ballads:
“He’s out on active service, wiping something off a slate—And he’s left a lot of little things behind him.”

In this, as in every other way, Lawrence was, of course, an exception to the rule. He had the education and upbringing of a gentleman, but illegitimacy was a bar to full membership in the “ruling class,”
*
* something about which he feigned indifference but to which he was, in fact,very sensitive. He had done nothing disgraceful, and he was rapidly becoming Britain’s most famous war hero. His experience as a boy soldier might have helped him make up his mind, although he may have supposed that service in the ranks of the infant RAF would be very different from serving in the old prewar British army—though if this was the case he would shortly be disappointed.

The exigencies of battle on the western front had eventually made it necessary to commission a large number of “other ranks” (the British equivalent of American “enlisted men”) and NCOs during the war, but the social gulf between officers and men remained wide, and once the war was over, it became unbridgeable again. Those who joined the armed services in the ranks in peacetime did so largely because they had failed in the civilian world, or because they were running away from something—they tended to be a rough and touchy lot, often bearing emotional scars inflicted by the British class system, and suspicious of anybody whose speech, bearing, and behavior seemed “posh.”

This was true even in the RAF, despite Air Chief Marshal Trenchard’s desire to recruit and train future skilled “technicians,” who could be trusted to look after the intricacies of aircraft and aircraft engines. “Airmen” got the same kind of rough treatment as recruits did in the older services: “square bashing,” the universal phrase for parade ground drill; endless (and often pointless) polishing and cleaning; fatigue duty, much of it intended to be exhausting and loathsome; and constant petty harassment from officers and NCOs. At just over five feet five inches and 130 pounds, and at the age of thirty-three, Lawrence was not by any stretch of the imagination a typical recruit; and given his well-educated speech and his gentlemanly manners he could hardly have expected to fit in easily with his fellow recruits, or to “muck in with his mates” on Saturday nights at the local pub. All barracks contain one or two odd specimens,
*
and men who clearly have a secret to hide, but Lawrence was odder than most.

His interest in the RAF, however, was unfeigned, and he was a good friend of Air Marshal Geoffrey Salmond and Air Chief Marshal Trenchard, both of whom admired him and were sympathetic to his desire to get into the RAF. Lawrence could easily have joined as a wing commander (the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel), and no doubt even have learned to fly, but that was never his intention. Writing to Trenchard immediately after his return from the Middle East, Lawrence made it clear that he wanted to serve in the ranks, and warned Trenchard that he did not think he could pass the physical examination. He also suggested that he wanted to write a book about “the beginning” of the RAF, and that such a book could be written only “from the ground,” not from the viewpoint of an officer.

Lawrence did succeed in writing a worm’s-eye view of recruit training “from the ground up,” but
The Mint,
which would not be published until 1955, long after his death, is hardly the full portrait of the RAF that Trenchard had wanted. It seems reasonable to guess that Lawrence’s suggestion of using his experiences as a recruit as the material for a book was at least in part intended to make the otherwise inexplicable wish of a famous, decorated former lieutenant-colonel to serve in the ranks as an aircraftman second class (AC2) under an assumed name seem more plausible. Gathering material for a book about the RAF no doubt sounded sensible enough to Trenchard, particularly since
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
though by no means finished, was already being talked about as a major literary work; it was more sensible at any rate than Lawrence’s desire to shed his identity and vanish into anonymity.

Much has been made by some biographers of service in the ranks of the RAF as the equivalent of a secular monastery, and of Lawrence as seeking an expiation of sorts there, but that seems far-fetched. The only thing Lawrence had to expiate was his failure to abrogate the Sykes-Picot agreement, and he felt he had emerged from that with “clean hands” after the creation of Trans-Jordan and Iraq. The truth seems to be that Lawrence had simply reached a dead end on his return to Britain at the end of 1921. He had no wish to be a civil servant, or an academician; like his father,and surely in imitation of his father’s example, Lawrence held an old-fashioned gentleman’s view that working for a living was beneath him; he had run through what money he had and faced a lot more work on
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
All these considerations contributed to his feeling of being trapped, and Lawrence, when trapped, nearly always chose to cut the Gordian knot by means of a single, sudden, startling major decision, rather than a series of small compromises. He even offered to join Colonel Percy Fawcett’s Amazon expedition in search of the “Lost City of Z,” which ended in the disappearance of Fawcett and his party. It is possible that the return to the Middle East had disturbed Lawrence’s equilibrium, as had the continuous and exhausting revision of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
which forced him to reread obsessively his account of the incident at Deraa, so that far from putting such matters to rest, he was constantly reliving his worst moments of grief, shame, and guilt.

Then too, Lawrence had lost faith in himself, and felt a need for some kind of structure to replace it. He had had, perhaps, too much freedom since the taking of Aqaba, and wanted to exchange it for an orderly, disciplined routine, in which he would not have to be responsible for other people and, above all, would no longer have to give orders. He was willing, even eager, to
take
orders, but not to give them anymore; his orders had led too many men to their deaths—a few of them men he loved—or had killed civilians, some of them guilty of no greater crime than having bought a ticket on one of the trains he destroyed. Lawrence had a lifetime’s worth of such responsibility, and the chief attraction of serving in the ranks was that he would never have to give an order to anyone again. Certainly most of these conditions could have been met in a monastery, but Lawrence does not appear to have had any religious convictions, let alone a vocation. All those morning prayers and Bible readings in Polstead Road had had the opposite effect to what his mother intended.

There was a tendency among Lawrence’s contemporaries to see his decision to shed his rank and join the RAF as a form of penance, but he always denied that. His service in the RAF, once he was past recruit training, would prove to be the happiest time of his life, with the exception of the years he spent before the war in Carchemish.

For nearly ten months Lawrence had been instrumental in making kings, creating countries, and drawing the borders of new nations and territories; he was almost as legendary a figure in peacetime as he had been in the war. But it was, at the same time, exactly the way this role appealed to his vanity, his thirst for fame and praise, his need to be at the center of things, his ability to move and influence even the most powerful of men, that he distrusted most in himself. Lawrence never underrated his powers, but “Colonel Lawrence” the kingmaker appalled him almost as much as “Colonel Lawrence” the war hero.

Throughout the first seven months of 1922 Lawrence was like a man who has painted himself into a corner. For a while he stayed on at the Colonial Office, unwillingly, as Winston Churchill’s “adviser"—Churchill was as reluctant to let him go as Lawrence was determined to leave—while at the same time he labored diligently, but without pleasure, on the seemingly endless task of revising
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
As with all the other problems the book presented, he had devised an extraordinarily difficult way of ensuring that it would not be lost or stolen again. Instead of having the pages typed as he rewrote them, he sent them in batches to the
Oxford Times,
where, he had discovered, the printers could set them in columns of newspaper type more cheaply than the cost of a typist. However, he rendered his life and that of his printers more difficult by sending them unnumbered, random pages, so there was no chance of anybody’s reading the book consecutively, and by leaving the most controversial sections of the book until last. That way, when the entire book was set in type, he could put the sheets in the right order himself, number them by hand, add the front matter, and have them bound into five sets of proofs. He would laboriously correct the copies, thus creating the first and most valuable of the many versions and editions of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
He may have looked increasingly hungry and shabby—not surprisingly, since he had to use the Westminster public baths to wash, and he worked through every night on a diet of chocolate bars and mugs of tea. He wrote later that he haunted the Duke of York’s Steps at lunchtime to catch friends making their way from the War Office to their club on Pall Mall, in hopes of being invited to lunch—a sad glimpse of what his life must have been like in the first half of 1922.

Still, Lawrence did not have a totally reclusive life during this period in London. He was involved constantly with painters, publishers, poets, printers, and writers, and seems rather to have enjoyed the air of mystery that hung around him even then. One of his acquaintances, Sydney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and a kind of literary and artistic gadfly, took him, quite by chance, to pick up George Bernard Shaw’s portrait by Augustus John from Shaw’s London home. It was thus, casually, in March 1922, that Lawrence met Shaw, who, together with his wife Charlotte, would play an important role in Lawrence’s life over the next thirteen years. It would be incorrect to say that Shaw was at the height of his fame—his fame burned at a bright, steady level from before the turn of the century to his death in 1951, and burns on even today, more than half a century later, and nobody ever gloried more in his own fame. Lawrence’s fame was equally bright, though he, unlike Shaw, was dismayed by it. In any case, a first contact was made that Lawrence would pursue diligently, in a campaign as carefully planned and executed as any of his military campaigns. The resulting friendship was one of most extraordinary and literarily productive of the twentieth century.

Churchill finally gave in and allowed Lawrence “to leave the payroll of the Colonial Office on July 1st, while retaining him as an honorary advisor.” Churchill had known about Lawrence’s desire to join the ranks since January, and while he was sympathetic, it was hardly something he understood at heart, having lived on a firm basis of late Victorian class distinction as a grandson of one duke and cousin of another. Trenchard had in any case consulted him, as well as his own secretary of state, about Lawrence’s wish to join the RAF, and with a more tolerant view of human behavior, had expressed his willingness to accept Lawrence as a recruit. Churchill was considerably more skeptical about “Colonel Lawrence’s”chance of slipping into the RAF unnoticed, but he was willing to let Lawrence try. Trenchard went so far as to give Lawrence a privilege to which no other airman was entitled—at any time, if and when he chose to, he could leave the RAF, no questions asked and no obstacles placed in his way. Thus Lawrence was entitled to enter the RAF under a name of his own choosing, and to leave it if at any time he decided it had been a mistake; Trenchard could hardly have been fairer or more generous, as Lawrence gratefully recognized.

Lawrence dramatized his entrance into the RAF in writing
The Mint,
with its famous opening lines: “God this is awful. Hesitating for two hours up and down a filthy street, lips and hands and knees tremulously out of control, my heart pounding in fear of that little door through which I must go in order to join up. Try sitting for a moment in the churchyard? That’s caused it. The nearest lavatory, now …. A penny; which leaves me fifteen. Buck up, old seat-wiper: I can’t tip you and I’m urgent. Won by a short head….One reason that taught me I wasn’t a man of action was this routine melting of the bowels before a crisis. However, now we end it. I’m going straight up and in.”

In fact, Lawrence’s entry into the RAF had been carefully choreographed well in advance, and there was no chance at all that he would be rejected. The overdrawn description of his fear before entering the RAF recruiting office, at 4 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, makes artistic sense, since in writing it Lawrence chose to portray himself as everyman, a generic narrator, rather than as a former lieutenant-colonel and war hero. As a result,
The Mint
sometimes reads more like fiction than a memoir, or than the piece of documentary reporting that Lawrence had in mind.One reason why it fails as reporting is that the most important fact of all is largely missing: the narrator is not an anonymous, terrified civilian trying to sign up for seven years of service and five years in the reserve but Lawrence of Arabia posing as an airman. The fact that Lawrence had an escape clause from the RAF is not mentioned either. Even the looseness of his bowels “before a crisis” seems unreal—nowhere in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
does he mention this problem, even though he is often in situations that would terrify anyone.