Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (85 page)

Flight Lieutenant Findlay was given the unwelcome task of breaking the bad news to him. Lawrence went to a small country hotel at Fren-sham, near Farnborough, “well-known for its large pond and bird life.” From there, he wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare asking to be given the reason for his discharge. Trenchard replied on Hoare’s behalf with a sympathetic personal letter. “As you know, I always think it is foolish to give reasons,” Trenchard wrote, pointing out that once Lawrence was identified in the air force “as Colonel Lawrence, instead of Air Mechanic Ross,” both he and the officers “were put in a very difficult position.”

Before receiving Trenchard’s letter, Lawrence had written to his friend T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s personal assistant, asking to be given a second chance. He was still sure that he had “played up at Farnborough, and did good, rather than harm, to the fellows in the camp there with me,” but this, of course, was part of the problem. Lawrence was still playing the role, even if unconsciously, of a leader of men, and the last thing that Guilfoyle or any other commanding officer wanted was one airman acting as a role model to his fellow airmen.

Trenchard moved swiftly (and perhaps mercifully) to put an end to whatever hopes Lawrence may still have had of being readmitted to the service, offering him a commission as an armored car officer, a job where his experience with and enthusiasm for armored cars would have been an asset, but Lawrence declined. He did not want a commission, and would not accept one. He returned to his attic above Baker’s office in Barton Street, Westminster, and resumed his frugal life, to look for something to replace the RAF.

He was not short of friends to search out jobs for him. Leo Amery, now first lord of the admiralty, tried without success to find Lawrence a quiet job as a storekeeper at some remote naval station, and failing that as a lighthouse keeper, but the Sea Lords were not happy at the prospect of former Aircraftman Ross in either capacity. One job offer reached Lawrence from the newborn Irish Free State, where his experience with guerrilla warfare, demolitions, and armored cars would no doubt have come in handy. (Lawrence had met Michael Collins, the charismatic Irish revolutionary, military leader, and first president of the Irish Provisional Government, in London in 1920, and the two men seem to have admired each other—not surprisingly, since Collins’s “flying columns” resembled Lawrence’s hit-and-run tactics. By 1923, however, Collins had been murdered.) In the end Lawrence’s friend Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, who had served with him in the desert after Aqaba, managed to persuade the adjutant-general to the forces at the War Office, General Sir Philip Chetwode, GCB, OM, GSI, KCMG, DSO, who had commanded the Desert Column of the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces and later XX (Cavalry) Corps under Allenby, to slip Lawrence into the ranks as a soldier in the Royal Tank Corps.

Chetwode was something less than an uncritical admirer of Lawrence. He was the general who had asked at a staff conference in 1918, during which it was determined that Chetwode’s corps should advance on Salt while Lawrence attacked Maan, “how his men were to distinguish friendly from hostile Arabs.” Lawrence, who was in Arab robes himself, had replied “that skirt-wearers disliked men in uniform,” producing a good deal of laughter, but not really answering Chetwode’s perfectly sensible question. As for Lawrence, he repeated the story in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
in a way that could only make Chetwode look pompous or foolish to readers, though elsewhere he praised Chetwode’s professionalism. However, in 1923, Chetwode, who would rise to the rank of field marshal, had of course not read
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and he shared the admiration everyone seems to have felt for Alan Dawnay, so perhaps it was the fact that the request came from Dawnay that moved him to find a place in the army for Lawrence.

When Dawnay had asked Lawrence what he was looking for, he had replied, only half jokingly, “Mind-suicide"—that is, work involving a fixed routine and no responsibility to give orders, or to make plans. Being a lighthouse keeper might have had some appeal for Lawrence had the Sea Lords been more willing to take a risk on him, but failing that, the army seemed the quickest way to vanish back into the ranks. Unlike the RAF, the army was not fussy about its recruits, and was more accustomed to having men enlist under a false name. The Tank Corps would offer Lawrence a chance to tinker with machinery, or so he thought, and he enjoyed that. Dawnay put Lawrence’s case to General Chetwode; Chetwode “sounded out” Colonel Sir Hugh Ellis, commandant of the Tank Corps Center, and reported back to Lawrence that Ellis “sees no very great difficulty about it.” So less than two months after his discharge from the RAF, Lawrence was officially enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps for seven years, plus five years in the reserve.

Before signing up, Lawrence had to find a new name, since “Ross” had been outed. Although he told any number of people, including one of his biographers, the poet Robert Graves, that he chose the first one-syllable name he found in the Army List, the truth seems rather more complicated. He had called on the Shaws, probably to tell them of his intention to join the army, and while there he encountered a visiting clergyman who, supposing him to be a nephew of Shaw’s, remarked on how much like his uncle he looked. According to Shaw’s secretary Blanche Patch, Lawrence said at once, “A good idea! That is the name I shall take!” When he signed on in the Tank Corps he gave his name as Thomas Edward Shaw. This may or may not be true, but it seems very unlikely that Lawrence’s gratitude to and admiration for Shaw did not play some role in his choice of a name. In later years, people sometimes mistook him for Shaw’s illegitimate son, and Lawrence’s use of his surname seems to have amused Shaw himself, who would write, with his usual sharp wit, on the flyleaf of a copy of
Saint Joan,
“To Pte. Shaw from Public Shaw.”

Private Shaw has been criticized for not denying the rumor that he was “Public Shaw’s” son, but it seems hard to imagine how Lawrence could have announced to the world at large that the rumor was untrue. It would have caused another round of sensational front-page news stories and would also have raised a subject about which both men were sensitive. In any case, Bernard Shaw (who positively gloated over the rumor that Lawrence was his son) took a pleasure that was at once wicked and benign at the use of his name; and Lawrence, having at last found the name he wanted, never changed it again. He entered the army as 7875698 Private T. E. Shaw, “and was posted to A Company of the R.T.C. Depot at Bovington,” as of March 23, 1923.

Unlike Lawrence’s entrance into the RAF, this seems to have been a quick and simple enlistment. Lawrence may have learned the value of
not
“going to the top,” since General Chetwode does not seem to have bothered consulting the secretary of state for war or the CIGS about the enlistment of the hero of Aqaba.

Lawrence’s enlistment in the Royal Tank Corps (RTC) was a consequence of his misery, his sense of isolation, and his feeling of failure, after his discharge from the RAF. Like his fellow recruits at Bovington, he was there because he had failed, because he had no place to go, because he had fallen so far in his own estimation that he wanted to touch bottom: “mind suicide,” as he called it himself. Nothing about the army changed his initial reaction to it: he loathed everything from the uniform to most of his hut mates. One measure of how much he disliked it is that he made no effort to secure a job he might have enjoyed, such as engine repair, but simply drifted into being a storekeeper after his recruit training.

It is clear that Lawrence was going through something like a nervous breakdown at the time of his second enlistment, and perhaps long before. The elements are hard to define exactly, but they included the huge task he had set for himself in rewriting
Seven Pillars of Wisdom;
what we would now call post-traumatic stress; a sense of displacement at his inability to find a settled and secure place for himself in civilian life; and, above all, his increasing discomfort at the gap between the public perception of him as a hero and his own intense feelings of worthlessness and self-contempt. Lawrence could suppress much of his angst when he was involved in something that interested him, but without a focus for his enormous energy, without something that could take his mind off himself, he was consumed by his own demons. Lawrence never reached quite the level of misery that George Orwell would describe ten years later in
Down and Out in Paris and London,
and he managed to keep up a social life that prevented other people from perceiving just how severely depressed he was; but between the time he returned to Britain from the Middle East and his enlistment in the Royal Tank Corps he went through a bleak period of confusion, self-reproach, and alienation that would have broken the will of a lesser man.

Lawrence’s first impression of the RTC did not improve with time. Admittedly, he was predisposed to dislike it. “The Army is muck, stink, and a desolate abomination,” he wrote, and he never changed his mind. Every day that he put on the khaki uniform merely made him more bitterly nostalgic for the blue-gray of the RAF.

Lawrence’s friends in the great world never quite understood either of his enlistments—those who were civilians, or who knew the services only as officers, found it hard to understand the degree to which “other ranks” clung to the esprit de corps they felt for their particular regiment or service. Lawrence, after making a place for himself as an airman, found serving as a private soldier in the army a tremendous letdown. He complained that he felt “queerly homesick whenever I see a blue uniform in the street.” With the exception of a couple of other men in his hut, Lawrence’s fellow recruits appalled him. He complained to his friend Lionel Curtis—who, like Lawrence, was a fellow of All Souls—about their “prevailing animality of spirit, whose unmixed bestiality frightens me and hurts me…. This sort of thing must be madness and sometimes I wonder how far mad I am, and if a madhouse would not be my next (and merciful) stage. Merciful compared to this place, which hurts me, body and soul. It’s terrible to hold myself voluntarily here: and yet I want to stay here till it no longer hurts me: till the burnt child no longer feels the fire.”

In a letter to Trenchard, Lawrence was more composed, carefully comparing the army with the RAF in the spirit of an inspecting officer. The army, he reported, was more lavish than the RAF in providing food, bedding, hot baths, libraries, and fuel (presumably coke for the cast-iron stove in the hut), and the officers “speak and act with complete assurance, believing themselves better than ourselves: and they are: whereas in the RAF I had an uncomfortable feeling that we were better than the officers.” In the the army, officers still enjoyed a natural and untroubled sense of class superiority. In the RAF, officers were uncomfortably conscious that many of the other ranks knew more about aero engines, or radios, or the intricate riggings of an aircraft, or even flying than any officer did, whereas, in the army the mere fact of holding the king’s commission was enough to demand and receive respect from the other ranks; the gulf between officers and men was enormous.

To Curtis, Lawrence was franker: “It’s a horrible life and the other fellows fit it.” The endless drill and PT sapped Lawrence’s strength—this was not just a matter of his wounds; he was also far older than the other recruits. Lawrence hated it all, and even the fact that “self-degradation” was his own game did not accustom him to “this cat-calling carnality seething up and down the hut, fed by streams of fresh matter from twenty lecherous mouths…. A filthy business all of it, and yet Hut 12 shows me the truth behind Freud.” Lawrence—who, after all, had pioneered the use of armored cars in the desert—was also disappointed that there was no apparent interest in teaching the recruits anything about tanks. It was sixteen weeks of uninterrupted, soul-destroying “square bashing,” gimlet-eyed inspections, and PT.

At the end of his training, he was assigned to an easy job as a clerk in the quartermaster’s stores—very likely this was a sign that those who had gotten him into the army were still trying to protect him as best they could. He had plenty of time on his hands to work on the revisions of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
and write letters. Once he was settled in the job, he moved his new Brough “Superior” motorcycle up to Bovington, provoking the envy and admiration of his fellow soldiers (who knew that it cost the equivalent of several years of a soldier’s pay). He earned some relief from bullying by giving joyrides on it to a favored few. This too must have made Private Shaw seem like an unusual kind of soldier, both to the officers and to the men. Lawrence soon increased the curiosity by renting a nearby cottage called Clouds Hill, in Moreton, about a mile and a half from the camp, where he could get away from the army altogether when he had free time.

Built in 1808, Clouds Hill was more or less derelict. By coincidence Lawrence was renting it from “a distant cousin” of his father, a Chapman, for two shillings sixpence a week. Bit by bit Lawrence took on the task of making it habitable. He made a few friends in the Tank Corps; and to one of them, Corporal Dixon, who seemed comparatively well read, he even confided his real identity when Dixon asked him what he thought of all the stories about Colonel Lawrence, and whether he thought it was just “a stunt” on the part of the RAF to encourage recruiting. Dixon and a few other friends from Bovington helped Lawrence with the work that needed to be done; and by applying his own gift for building and decoration, he very shortly completed the basics. The cottage was small, damp (because of the overhanging trees), and secluded, and it would eventually become not just his hideaway from Bovington, but his only home. Like a snail’s shell, it would gradually be reshaped exactly to Lawrence’s Spartan ideas about living; indeed it became almost an extension of his personality.

One of the friends from Bovington was John (“Jock”) Bruce, a tough, dour young Scotsman, about nineteen years old when Lawrence first methim. In a letter to Charlotte Shaw over a year later, Lawrence described him as “inarticulate, excessively uncomfortable,” which is putting it mildly, since everybody else seems to have found Bruce more than a little menacing: a silent, hulking figure always intensely protective of Lawrence. “Bruce feels like a block of granite,” Lawrence wrote to Charlotte, “with myself a squashed door-mat of fossilized bones between two layers.”
*
* This is a very striking description of Bruce, whose role in Lawrence’s life would be precisely to make his friend and employer feel “squashed” by a giant, implacable, unmovable weight.