Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (91 page)

As it happens, the conditions of life on board the
Derbyshire
were shocking, though not unusual, and in describing them Lawrence provided unflinching descriptions of squalor and filth: the account of his experience as “Married Quarters sentry” is so painful as to be almost unreadable. His friend and admirer John Buchan said after reading it that it took “the breath away by its sheer brutality.” Buchan considered Lawrence’s power of depicting squalor uncanny, and said there was nothing in
The Mint
to equal it.

Swish swish
the water goes against the walls of the ship, sounds nearer. Where on earth is that splashing. I tittup along the alley and peep into the lavatory space, at a moment when no woman is there. It’s awash with a foul drainage. Tactless posting a sentry over the wives’ defaecations, I think. Tactless and useless all our duties aboard.

Hullo here’s the Orderly Officer visiting. May as well tell him. The grimy-folded face, the hard jaw, toil-hardened hands, bowed and ungainly figure. An ex-naval warrant, I’ll bet. No gentleman. He strides boldly to the latrine: “Excuse me” unshyly to two shrinking women. “God,” he jerked out, “with shit—where’s the trap?” He pulled off his tunic and threw it at me to hold, and with a plumber’s quick glance strode over to the far side, bent down, and ripped out a grating. Gazed for a moment, while the ordure rippled over his boots. Up his right sleeve, baring a forearm hairy as a mastiff’s grey leg, knotted with veins, and a gnarled hand: thrust it deep in, groped, pulled out a moist white bundle. “Open that port” and out it splashed into the night. “You’d think they’d have had some other place for their sanitary towels. Bloody awful show, not having anything fixed up.” He shook his sleeve down as it was over his slowly-drying arm, and huddled on his tunic, while the released liquid gurgled contentedly down its reopened drain.

The voyage from Southampton to Karachi took a month, and was sheer hell—"Wave upon wave of the smell of stabled humanity,” as Lawrence put it, so awful that even India, which he disliked on sight, seemed to be a deliverance. He was sent to the RAF depot on Drigh Road, seven miles outside Karachi, “a dry hole, on the edge of the Sind desert, which desert is a waste of land and sandstone,” a place of endless dust and dust storms, indeed, where dust seemed like a fifth element, covering everything, including the food. He was assigned as a clerk in the Engine Repair Section, where aircraft engines were given their regularly scheduled overhaul—easy work. The tropical workday at that time ran from 7:30 A.M. to 1 p.m., after which he had the rest of the day off. He spent most of his day in overalls; there was no PT; there were few parades; and his greatest problems were the lack of hot water to bathe in, and sheer boredom. Being on the edge of a desert filled him with both loathing and nostalgia—in the evenings, he could hear the noise of camel bells in the distance as a caravan made its way down Drigh Road. He did not leave the depot to go into Karachi; he had no curiosity about India at all. He spent his spare time sitting on his bunk reading the fifth volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the war,
The Great Crisis;
writing letters; brushing up his Greek; and listening to classical music on the gramophone in his barracks, which he shared with fourteen other airmen.

In February, the pictures he had commissioned at such great expense for the subscribers’ edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
—oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, pastels, and woodcuts—were collected by Eric Kennington and put on display for the public at the Leicester Gallery, in London. Bernard Shaw contributed the preface to the catalog, declaiming, in his usual no-holds-barred style, “The limelight of history follows the authentic hero as the theatre limelight follows the
prima ballerina assoluta.
It soon concentrated its whitest radiance on Colonel Lawrence, alias Lurens Bey, alias Prince of Damascus, the mystery man, the wonder man,” and calling
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
“a masterpiece.” The gallery was packed for the two weeks of the show, with a long line of people waiting each day to get in. Although nobody but the subscribers could read the book, it was already creating a sensation. People eager to read it offered small fortunes in the classified ads of the newspapers for an opportunity to borrow one of the copies.

The center of this first, small storm of publicity meanwhile sat in the Drigh Road Depot, Karachi, keeping track of engine repairs as AC2 Shaw,almost as far removed from the limelight as it was possible to get. “I do wish, hourly, that our great Imperial heritage of the East would go the way of my private property …. However it’s no use starting on that sadness, since coming out here is my own (and unrepented) fault entirely,” he wrote to a friend. In March
Revolt in the Desert
was published; it sold, as Lawrence boasted to a friend, “Something over 40,000 copies in the first three weeks” in the United Kingdom alone, and would go on to sell 90,000 copies before Lawrence managed to get it withdrawn.
*
* In America it was an even bigger success, selling more than 130,000 copies in the first weeks, and ensuring that Lawrence’s debts and overdraft from the production of the subscribers’ edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
would be wiped clean. With money pouring in, Lawrence, still determined not to make a profit, founded an anonymous charity fund to educate the children of disabled or deceased RAF officers. The RAF Benevolent Fund, created by Trenchard, provided the same for all ranks, but Lawrence felt that since the majority of pilots killed in action were officers in those days, his fund would fill a special niche. No doubt it would have surprised Lawrence’s fellow airmen in Room 2 of the barracks at the RAF Depot on Drigh Road, Karachi, not to speak of the officers there, that AC2 Shaw was sitting on his bunk, writing pad on his knees, giving away thousands of pounds; but as usual Lawrence was anxious to keep his benevolence, as well as his identity, to himself.

Through March and April the glowing reviews of
Revolt in the Desert
continued to arrive—Charlotte had thoughtfully subscribed to a clipping agency on Lawrence’s behalf. The only reviewer who seemed to dislike the book was Leonard Woolf, husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf; he chided Lawrence sternly for imitating Charles Doughty’s style (“so imitative … as to be near parody”), although even Woolf admitted to enjoying the book once he had overcome his irritation. It was typical of Lawrence’s ability to cross class lines that he heard about Woolf’s review from his old regimental sergeant major at Bovington Camp. Lawrence correctly pointed out to his friends that he had, for better or worse, created his own style. With this one exception, the reviews he received would have pleased any author. The
Times Literary Supplement
called the book “a great story, greatly written.” The
Times
called it “a masterpiece.”
The Daily Telegraph
described it as “one of the most stirring stories of our times.” From London came the flattering news that Eric Kennington had completed a new bust of Lawrence in gilt brass. A letter arrived from Allenby praising Lawrence for “a great work"; this was both a relief and a pleasure, given Lawrence’s admiration for his old chief. John Buchan—author of
Greenmantle,
and the future Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada—wrote to say that Lawrence was “the best living writer of English prose.”

Although self-doubt was ingrained in Lawrence’s nature, he could not help being pleased at the reception of his book, in both forms. He had accomplished exactly what he set out to do: to achieve fame as a writer while keeping the full text of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
out of the public’s hands. As was so often the case, he had neatly managed to fulfill what would have seemed to anyone else contradictory ambitions. Of course
Revolt in the Desert
rekindled his fame throughout the English-speaking world, though this time his story was conveyed in his own words, rather than in those of Lowell Thomas. Like it or not, he was now perhaps the most famous man of his time: his face, half-shrouded by the white Arab headdress with the golden
agal,
was instantly recognizable to millions of people; his status as hero was such that, of all the millions of men who fought in what was coming to be called the Great War, Lawrence would eventually become the one remembered by most people.

In the eyes of the world the hero had eclipsed the man. Without seeming to have desired it, Lawrence had reached a virtual apotheosis—it was as if the real person had been swallowed by the legend. Not only Bernard Shaw believed that if Britain had a Valhalla, Lawrence belonged in it. The immense success of his books, the mystery that surrounded him, his puzzling disappearance at the very moment when the English-speaking world was focused on his achievements—all this represented something of a miraculous feat itself. Not only had he managed to escape the press, but in India his presence went unnoticed. Unlike Uxbridge, Farnborough, Bovington, and Cranwell, the RAF depot in Karachi was a place where he remained for the moment merely AC2 Shaw, an ordinary airman meticulously keeping track of engine parts and attracting little or no attention.

Of course no legendary hero successfully disappears forever, as Lawrence surely knew better than anyone else. However modestly AC2 Shaw behaved, however carefully he did his job as a clerk, however quietly he kept to himself, there were still occasional signs that he was no ordinary airman. At Cranwell, the telegraph boy had been astounded by the number of telegrams he had to deliver every day to AC2 Shaw (at the time, ordinary people received a telegram only if there was a death in the family), as well as by the fact that Shaw always tipped him a shilling. At Drigh Road everybody was equally astounded by the number of letters and packages that AC2 Shaw received; books, gramophone records, gift boxes of food, manuscripts, play scripts, envelopes full of press clippings. Shaw spent most of his meager pay buying stamps to answer this constant stream of mail.

Among the letters of praise he received was one from his friend Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, recently promoted to marshal of the Royal Air Force. Trenchard was writing to his most unusual airman to say that he couldn’t put down his copy of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(bound in RAF-blue leather), and that he had insured it and left it in his will to his little son. “When I opened your letter,” Lawrence replied, “I gasped, expecting something of ill-omen. However, all’s well…. There is no local press, and I arouse no interest in the camp.” He dropped a quick hint in his reply that there was to be “another ‘life’ of me this autumn, written by a friend, the poet Robert Graves,” a piece of news which must have made Trenchard sigh. One after the other, the books had flowed out: first Lowell Thomas’s
With Lawrence in Arabia,
then Lawrence’s own books, and now Robert Graves’s biography.
*
* Each one made headline news; there was no reason to suppose that Graves’s would be an exception; and the last thing Trenchard wanted was to have Lawrence in the news again.

It would be a stretch to say that Lawrence was happy in his self-imposed “exile,” as he called it, but he was relentlessly busy. At no point in his life did he write more letters. He spent nearly six months transforming his “notes” on his service at RAF Uxbridge and at Cranwell into a finished handwritten manuscript of
The Mint,
which he sent to Edward Garnett with instructions that it must not be published until 1950. He also accepted an American publisher’s offer of £800 to make a new translation of Homer’s
Odyssey,
a task for which he felt himself particularly well suited, since he had handled Bronze Age weapons as an archaeologist and had fought in a war close to that of the Greeks and the Trojans. He wrote to Eddie Marsh, thanking “Winston for his gorgeous letter,” and adding, no doubt for Churchill’s eyes, in an aside that sounds like a passage from
Greenmantle:
“The most dangerous point is Afghanistan…. The clash is bound to come, I think…. Do you know, if I’d known as much about the British Government in 1917, as I do now, I could have got enough of them [the people of the Middle East] behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia?”

To Trenchard, who was in part responsible for defending Iraq, and for preventing incursions into Trans-Jordan, Lawrence wrote in detail proposing a whole new policy for the Middle East. With his old self-confidence he also mentioned ibn Saud, whose advance was threatening Feisal and worrying Trenchard: “The fellow you need to influence is Feisal el Dueish…. If I were at Ur, my instinct would be to walk without notice into his headquarters. He’d not likely kill an unarmed, solitary man … and in two days guesting I could give him horizons beyond the Brethren [ibn Saud’s Wahhabi fundamentalist warriors]…. Such performances require a manner to carry them off. I’ve done it four times, or is it five? A windy business … Beduin on camels will make a meal of any civilized camel-corps: or of infantry in the open: or of cavalry anyhow. Nor does a static line of defence avail. You need an elastic defence, in depth of at least 100 miles. Explored tracks for cars, threading this belt, approved landing grounds,sited pill-boxes of blockhouses, occupied occasionally and then fed and linked by armoured cars, and supervised from the air….1 could defend all E. Transjordan with a fist-full of armoured cars, and trained crews.”

Since this was being written from his bunk by the RAF equivalent of a private to the RAF equivalent of a five-star general, it is fairly remarkable stuff, all the more so since it still remains good advice for dealing with desert raiders and insurgents, and indeed forms the basis for current strategy regarding similar enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan more than ninety years later. Trenchard certainly took it seriously, and recognized that Lawrence knew what he was talking about. He also knew that it would require a man with Lawrence’s special courage to walk into an enemy leader’s tent alone and unarmed, risking his life on the Muslim tradition of hospitality toward a guest.