Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Even when they finally reached water at the wells of Arfaja, the desert still proved to be dangerous. That night, while they were drinking coffee around the fire, unseen assailants shot at them until Auda’s cousin kicked sand over the fire, putting it out, at which point they drove their attackers away with a fusillade of rifle shots, though not before one of their own was killed. They rode on the next morning, and on their twentieth day since leaving Wejh they reached the tents of the Howeitat, Auda’s own tribe, where they were feasted with one of those lavish meals that Lawrence loathed so much: hot grease and pieces of mutton on a bed of rice, decorated with the singed heads of the slaughtered sheep.

Here, they hastened to send six bags of gold coins in Auda’s care, as atribute to Emir Nuri Shaalan, who led the desert tribes in Syria and the Lebanon mountains and was one of the four great men ruling the Arabian desert. The others were Feisal’s father, Emir Hussein of Mecca, whose control over the Hejaz, the holy city of Mecca, and the Red Sea ports made him formidable; his greatest rival, ibn Saud, emir of the Rashids, a ferocious and implacable warrior who controlled the vast desert space to the east of Hejaz, with his capital at Riyadh, and whose followers were Wahhabis, fierce Muslim puritans and fundamentalists; and the idrisi, Sayid Mohammed ibn Ali, who controlled the region south of the Hejaz. The competition between the four desert rulers was intense, and in many ways more important to them than any quarrel they might have with Turkey. As to their loyalties to outsiders, Hussein was of course now the ally of Britain and France, supported by the Foreign Office in London and the Arab Bureau in Cairo, though he remained always aware of the growing power of ibn Saud. Ibn Saud received support and backing from the government of India and the Colonial Office in London. The idrisi took money from both sides and was notoriously unreliable; and Nuri Shaalan was in the pay of the Turks, though open to higher bids from the Allied Powers. British policy, as can be seen, was confused—indeed, when open warfare finally broke out between Hussein and ibn Saud after the end of World War I, the Foreign Office and Cairo backed and supported Hussein, while the Colonial Office and New Delhi backed and supported ibn Saud, so the British taxpayer ended up paying for both sides in that war. None of the four was a Jeffersonian idealist of course—Hussein’s enemies in Mecca were kept in chains in the dungeons beneath his palace, ibn Saud punished infringements of sharia with public beheadings, and both the idrisi and Nuri Shaalan were feared despots.

Lawrence had already taken the precaution of sending one of Nuri’s men on ahead with a message making it clear that they came in peace and sought his hospitality, but, in typical desert fashion, the messenger failed to arrive, and was later found lying in the desert, a desiccated corpse—a victim of thirst or murder—with the remains of his camel beside him. The Howeitat were on the move, as they sought grazing forthe camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri’s sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay.

When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence’s relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damascus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them.

Lawrence’s position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, trying to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.

Secure now that Auda would raise enough men to take Aqaba, Lawrence felt free to pursue the last and most dangerous part of his plan. He rode off alone on a 400-mile journey through enemy territory, both to test for himself the degree of support that could be expected from the Syrian tribes once Aqaba was taken, and to attract the attention of the Turks. He wanted them looking anxiously toward the approaches to Damascus, while he turned south to take Aqaba. The danger involved, and his state of mind, can be gauged by the words he scribbled for General Clayton, which he left behind in a notebook at Nebk, close to Azrak: “Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.”

The farther Lawrence was from the calming presence of Feisal and of those British officers whom he respected, like Newcombe, Boyle, and Wilson, the more alone and desperate he felt. It was one thing to take on the responsibility for leading an expedition to capture Aqaba, but quite another to come close to provoking, with whatever misgivings, a full-scale Syrian uprising, which would certainly have led to thousands of deaths, all the while knowing that the French were going to get Damascus in the end. Lawrence was willing to accept blood on his hands, but not in unlimited quantity for no purpose. He was still weighed down by what Sykes had told him, and what he already knew or guessed about the Sykes-Picot agreement.

He was also fed up with the bickering and political machinations of his nearest companions—even Auda, with his unquenchable greed for loot and his prodigious vanity, had begun to get on Lawrence’s nerves, as had the wily and ambitious Sharif Nasir; and the Syrians in his party (“pygmies,” in Lawrence’s opinion) were weaving improbable and complicated political fantasies, and were anxious to seize power for themselves. He felt tainted, corrupted, embittered. “Hideously green, unbearable, sour, putrid smelling,” he wrote of Wadi Sirhan, where the Howeitat were encamped for the moment in an ugly, pitiless landscape, rich only in poisonous snakes. “Salt and snakes of evil doing. Leprosy of the world!”

These were the ravings of a man who was not only physically exhausted, but tortured by his own guilt, and by a sense that things were passing out of his control into the hands of scheming politicians. Lawrence seems to have convinced himself that it was his duty to seek out Feisal’s friends and supporters in Syria, dangerous as this was for him and for them, and for the best part of two weeks he rode from tribe to tribe, at the mercy of anybody who wanted to claim a reward by betraying him to the Turks. The journey convinced him, correctly, that Syria was not yet ripe for revolt, and that it would take news of solid victories by the British and the Arabs to win over Syrian politicians and tribal leaders. Here in the north, Mecca seemed far away, and the notion of Sharif Hussein as the self-proclaimed “king of the Arabs” was regarded with considerable skepticism. In Syria, what people wanted was the arrival of the British army, and all the riches (and political possibilities) it would bring, but so long as General Murray was unable to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza, there seemed no point in risking torture and hanging at the hands of the Turks.

Lawrence himself describes his journey as “reckless,” which it certainly was, since the Turks had already put a price on his head; but it was not entirely fruitless. At one point he was warned that his host for the night had sent word to the Turks that he was there, and he swiftly slipped out through the back of the tent, mounted his camel, and rode away. At another point, he had a secret meeting with Ali Riza Pasha, the Turkish army commander in Damascus, outside the city walls. Ali Riza was an Arab, and Lawrence took the risk of meeting with him face-to-face to ask him to prevent an uprising in the city until the British army was close enough to prevent a massacre. On the way back to Nebk, Lawrence met with Nuri Shaalan, in the old man’s camp near Azrak. He described Nuri’s frightening appearance five years later in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “he was very old, livid and worn…. Over his coarse eyelashes the eyelids wrinkled down, sagging in tired folds, through which, from the overhead sun, a red light glittered in his eyes and made them look like fiery pits in which the man was slowly burning.

"Not only was Nuri frightening to look at it and ruthless enough to earn the respect of Auda; he was also shrewd and well informed, and questioned Lawrence closely about the intentions of the British and French in Syria. Lawrence dismissed the documents Nuri showed him, in which Britain’s promises to the Arabs over the past three years contradicted each other, and advised him to believe only the latest promise and forget the rest. This cynicism seemed to satisfy Nuri, or perhaps represented his own realistic view of the matter, and he let Lawrence go on his way. Lawrence cheerfully advised Nuri to secure his own position with the Turks by telling them he had been in the area.

Lawrence accomplished what he set out to do. He spread the news of his presence throughout Syria, even going to the trouble of blowing up a railway bridge at Ras Baalbek, on the Aleppo-Damascus line—final proof, if any were needed, that he was in Syria, and that the force he was gathering in Wadi Sirhan was intended for an attack in the direction of Damascus, not Aqaba.

Lawrence arrived back at Nebk on June 16, 1917, to find Auda and Nasir “quarrelling.” He managed to settle the quarrel by the time they set out on June 19 with the 500 men Auda had gathered. Their first march (of two days) was to Beir, in what is now Jordan, where they discovered that the Turks had dynamited the wells. They managed to clear one, but Auda was now wary about what they would find at El Jefer, fifty miles to the southwest across difficult desert terrain, where, if the wells were destroyed, their camels would die. They camped at Beir and sent a scout ahead, while Lawrence rode to the north with more than 100 tribesmen, among them Zaal, “a noted raider,” to attack the railway and ensure that the Turks would be looking in the wrong direction. They rode hard, in “six hour spells,” with only one or two hours of rest between spells. They reached the railway north of Amman and, after watering the camels, moved on hoping to destroy a bridge, only to find that the Turks were busy repairing it. Since Lawrence’s objective was to make the Turks believe he was going toward Azrak, his raiding party continued on andfound a curved stretch of the railway near Minifir. Although hunted by tribesmen in the pay of the Turks and by Turkish infantrymen mounted on mules, Lawrence and his party managed to blow up the railway and leave behind a buried mine to damage or destroy the locomotive when the Turks sent a repair train down from Damascus. They took two Turkish prisoners, deserters, who died of their wounds—there was nothing the raiding party could do for them, though Lawrence left behind, attached to a telegraph pole he had torn down, a letter he wrote in French and German indicating where they could be found.

The party moved on by night and the next day captured a young Circassian* cowherd. This posed a problem—it seemed to Lawrence unfair to kill him, but at the same time they could neither take him with them nor turn him loose, since he would certainly tell the Turks of their presence. They were unable to tie him up, since they had no rope to spare, and in any case if he was tied to a tree or a telegraph pole in the desert he would die hideously of thirst. Finally he was stripped of his clothes, and one of the tribesmen cut him swiftly across the soles of his feet with a dagger. The man would have to crawl naked on his hands and knees an hour or two to his home, but the wounds would heal eventually and he would survive.

The incident gives one a picture of Lawrence’s curious mixture of practicality and humanitarianism. Unlike the Arabs he rode with, he was constantly torn between his own system of ethics and their more savage instincts. The tribesmen had no compunction about cutting the throat of a terrified captive after robbing and stripping him. As if to prove this, Zaal led the party, maddened by the sight of a herd of fat sheep—they had been living off a diet of hard dried corn kernels for days—in a raid on a Turkish railway station at Atwi, about fifty miles east of the Dead Sea,where Zaal sniped at and killed a fat railway official on the platform. The tribesmen exchanged rifle fire with the Turks, then plundered an undefended building; drove off the herd of sheep; shot and killed four men who, unluckily for them, arrived on a hand trolley in the middle of all this; set fire to the station; and rode off. The raiding party slaughtered the stolen sheep, gorging on mutton, and even feeding it to their camels, “for the best riding camels were taught to like cooked meat,” as Lawrence notes, adding, with his usual precision, that “one hundred and ten men … ate the best parts of twenty-four sheep.” Then he blew up a stretch of track and they set out on the long journey back to Beir.

Raids like this kept the Turks on edge, while satisfying the Bedouin’s taste for plunder and action. They also acclimatized Lawrence to the ways of the Bedouin, which most British officers found infuriating. The Bedouin had no sense of time; they did not accept orders; they would break off fighting to loot, then ride home with what they had stolen; they thought nothing of stripping and killing enemy wounded; they wasted ammunition by firing feux de joie into the air to announce their comings and goings; when there was food they gorged on it, instead of thinking ahead; when there was water, they drank until their bellies were swollen, instead of rationing it out sensibly; they stole shamelessly, from friend and foe alike; their tribal quarrels and blood feuds made it difficult to rely on them when they were formed up in large numbers; by British standards they were cruel to animals; and they were distrustful of Europeans and Christians, even as allies. In order to lead them, Lawrence had to learn to accept their ways, to share their ribald and teasing sense of humor and their extravagant emotions and love of tall tales, to embrace the extreme hardships of their life, and to understand that because they were intense individualists any attempt to give a direct order to them would be treated as an insult. This was a difficult task—even such great explorers and pro-Arabists as Richard Burton and Charles Doughty had never managed to lead the Bedouin, or be accepted by them as equals—yet Lawrence succeeded, though in doing so, he gave up some part of himself that he never recovered, eventually becoming astranger among his own countrymen. Nobody understood this better than Lawrence himself, who wrote: “A man who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life…. He is not one of them…. In my case my effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes, and destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.”

That was written years later, when his intense fame, and his disappointment at his own failure to get for the Arabs what he had promised them, had embittered Lawrence about the role he played in the war. But there is no reason to believe that he felt this way as he rode back into Beir “without casualty, successful, well-fed, and enriched, at dawn.” He was fкted by Auda and Nasir, and found the rest of the party cheered by a message from the wily Nuri Shaalan that a force of 400 Turkish cavalrymen was hunting for Lawrence’s party in Wadi Sirhan, guided by his own nephew, whom Nuri had instructed to take them by the slowest and hardest of routes.

On June 28 Lawrence set out for El Jefer, despite news that the Turks had destroyed the wells. This turned out to be true, but Auda, whose family property these wells were on and who knew them well, searched out one well the enemy had failed to destroy. Lawrence organized his camel drivers to act as sappers, digging in the unbearable midday heat until they were able to expose the masonry lining of the well, and open it. The Ageyl camel drivers, less resistant to manual labor than the Bedouin tribesmen, then formed a kind of bucket brigade to bring up enough water to take the camels over the next fifty barren miles.

Lawrence sent word ahead to a friendly tribe to attack the Turkish blockhouse guarding the approach from the north to Abu el Lissal, the gateway to the wadi that led down to Aqaba, some fifty miles away. The attack was timed to stop the weekly caravan that carried food and supplies from Maan to all the outposts on the way to Aqaba, and to Aqaba itself. The taking of the blockhouse turned out to be a bloody, botchedaffair, during which the Turks slaughtered Arab women and children in their tents nearby; in retaliation the infuriated Arabs took no prisoners after the blockhouse fell to them, then sent word sent to Lawrence it was in their hands. He set out for Abu el Lissal on July 1, pausing when his party reached the railway line to blow up a long section of track, and sending a small party to Maan to stampede the Turkish garrison’s camels in the night. Despite these precautions, however, a Turkish column advanced on Abu el Lissal, reoccupying the blockhouse.

As Liddell Hart points out, this was Lawrence’s first exposure to the vicissitudes of war—a Turkish relief battalion had arrived in Maan just as the news came that the blockhouse at Abu el Lissal had been attacked. It was an accident, a coincidence, but the result was that the Arab tribesmen abandoned the blockhouse, which they had pillaged and destroyed, and the Turkish battalion set up camp at the well. Lawrence had foreseen this possibility and had an alternative plan in mind—already, he was thinking like generals he admired. It would take time and involve splitting his forces, and possibly serious losses, one part of his strength attacking the Turkish battalion to hold it in position, the other taking an alternative but slower route behind the Turks to Aqaba.

Either way, Lawrence had placed himself in a position from which no retreat was possible. There was no chance that he could take his forces back to Wejh, which was nearly 300 miles south as the crow flies, and more than twice that by any route he could take over the desert. The Turks were already in Wadi Sirhan, and could bring in reinforcements from Maan and Damascus. If they were successful Lawrence and his men would be cut off, surrounded, and killed, the Arabs as traitors to the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself, a British officer caught out of uniform in Arab clothing, was sure to be tortured, then hanged as a spy. He had no option but to move forward and seek battle.

It requires a very special kind of courage to advance and attack a larger, well-positioned force when one’s lines of communication and path of retreat have been cut. Much as Lawrence would dislike Marshal Foch when he met Foch at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919—and rejected the kind of massed frontal attack that had already led to so many million deaths on the western front—he would have agreed with Foch’s most famous military apothegm: “Mon centre cиde, ma droite recule; situation excellente. J’attaque!"*

AQABA-MAAN ZONE

Through a day of heat that produced waves of mirages, Lawrence led his party toward Abu el Lissal, pausing only to blow up ten railway bridges and a substantial length of the track. At dusk they stopped to bake bread and rest for the night, but the arrival of messengers with the news that a Turkish column had arrived spurred Lawrence on. His men remounted their camels—"Our hot bread was in our hands and we ate it as we went,” he wrote—and rode through the night, stopping at first light on the crest of the hills that surrounded Abu el Lissal to greet the tribesmen who had taken the blockhouse and lost it. Just as there was no going back, Lawrence realized, there was no going forward so long as a Turkish battalion held Abu el Lissal. Even if they could make their way around it, Lawrence’s force would still be bottled up in a valley with Turks at either end. The Arab force dismounted and spread out on the hills around the Turkish campsite, while Lawrence sent someone to cut the telegraph line to Maan. The Turks were, literally, caught napping. From higher ground the Arabs began to shoot down on the Turks, in a firefight that lasted all day. The men kept continually on the move over the rocky, thorny ground, so as not to offer the Turks a fixed target, until their rifles were too hot to touch, and the stone slabs they lay down upon to fire were so superheated by the sun that whatever patch of skin touched them peeled off in great strips, while the soles of their feet, lacerated by thorns and burned by the hot rock, left bloody footprints whenever they moved. Short of water because of the haste in which they had left, the tribesmen suffered agonies of thirst.

By late afternoon Lawrence himself was so parched that he lay down in a muddy hollow and tried to filter the moisture out of the mud by sucking at the dirt through the fabric of his sleeve. There, he was foundby an angry Auda, “his eyes bloodshot, and staring, his knotty face working with excitement,” in Lawrence’s words. “Well, how is it with the Howeitat?” Auda asked, grinning. “All talk and no work?"—throwing Lawrence’s earlier criticism of Auda’s tribe back in his face.

“By God indeed,” Lawrence replied tauntingly, “they shoot a lot and hit little.”

Auda was not one to take criticism (or sarcasm) lightly. Turning pale with rage, he tore off his headdress and threw it to the ground (since as Muslims the Bedouin never go uncovered, this was a significant indicator of Auda’s anger), and ran up the steep slope of the hill calling to his tribesmen to come to him. At first Lawrence thought that Auda might be pulling the Howeitat out of the battle, but the old man stood up despite the constant Turkish rifle fire, glaring at Lawrence, and shouted, “Get your camel, if you wish to see the old man’s work.”

Lawrence and Nasir made their way to the other side of the slope, where their camels were tethered. Here, sheltered from the gunfire, were 400 camel men, mounted and ready. Auda was not in sight. Hearing a sudden, rapid intensification of the firing, Lawrence rode forward to a point from which he could look down the valley, just in time to see Auda and his fifty Howeitat horsemen charging directly down at the Turkish troops, firing from the saddle as they rode. The Turks were forming up for an attempt to fight their way back to Maan when Auda’s bold cavalry charge hit them in the rear.

With Nasir at his side, Lawrence waved to his 400 camel men, who charged toward the Turkish flank, riding into a volley of rifle fire. The Turks were poorly prepared to deal with the surprise of a dense charge over rough ground of 400 camel riders. Lawrence, who was riding a racing camel that was faster than the rest, led the charge, firing his revolver, and smashed into the Turkish ranks, at which point his camel collapsed suddenly in a heap, sending Lawrence flying out of the saddle. He was knocked senseless by the fall, but luckily the bulk of his camel prevented him from being trampled to death by the force following him, which swept to either side of his camel like the sea sweeping around a rock.

When he regained consciousness and stood up, he found that he had accidentally shot his own camel in the back of the head, and that the battle was over. The sheer velocity of the two charges had broken the Turks’ formation and degenerated into a brief massacre as the riders shot and hacked away with their curved sabers at small, isolated groups of soldiers. Three hundred Turks had been killed—"slaughtered,” Lawrence wrote, with a hint of self-disgust—and 160 were seriously wounded, for a loss of only two Arabs.

Auda appeared, “his eyes glazed over with the rapture of battle,” muttering incoherently, “Work, work, where are words?"—surely a rebuke to Lawrence for his disparaging comment about Howeitat marksmanship. Auda’s robes, his holster, his field-glass case, and his sword scabbard had all been pierced by bullets, and his mare had been killed under him, but he was unharmed. Having learned from a Turkish prisoner that Maan was garrisoned by only two companies, he was eager to take the town and loot it; but Lawrence’s sense of strategic priorities was undiminished by his fall, and he managed after much difficulty to persuade Auda and the tribesmen that they must move down the wadi toward Aqaba instead. Taking Maan would certainly look like a triumph, but it would be a temporary one at best, since the Turks would quickly assemble a force big enough to recapture it. Taking Aqaba would bring Feisal’s army into Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and would give the Arabs not only a place in the strategic “big picture,” but—he hoped—one at the peace conference.

In the meantime, there seemed no alternative to spending the night on the battlefield, surrounded by the bodies of the enemy, until Auda, who was superstitiously afraid of the presence of so many corpses, and tactically concerned lest the Turks attack them during the night, or lest other Howeitat clans with whom he had a blood feud use the opportunity to kill them on the pretext of mistaking them for Turks, persuaded Lawrence to move on. Wrapped in his cloak against the damp, chilly evening, Lawrence felt the inevitable reaction to victory “when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done.”

The Arabs, as was their custom, had stripped the clothes off the bodiesof their enemies, and now wore bloodstained Turkish tunics over their robes. The more seriously wounded of the Turks would have to be left behind, so Lawrence looked around for blankets or discarded pieces of uniform to cover them from the day’s brutal sun. This had been a battalion of young Turkish conscripts. “The dead men,” Lawrence noted, “looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining down, softening them into new ivory.” He found himself envying the dead, and feeling disgust at the noise of the Arabs behind him, quarreling over the spoils; the dead were spread out in low heaps or singly where they had fallen, and Lawrence began mechanically in the moonlight to rearrange them in rows, at once a lunatic attempt to impose western ideas of neatness on the chaos of death, and a kind of self-punishing atonement for having led the attack that had killed them.

Lawrence had managed to persuade the Arabs to spare some of the Turkish officers, including a former policeman whom he persuaded to write letters in Turkish to each of the commanders of the three major outposts between Abu el Lissal and Aqaba, urging them to surrender, and promising them that if they and their men did so they would reach Egypt alive as prisoners. Considering the mood of the moment, this was a farsighted tactical move. The ground was rough and water scarce between here and Aqaba, and men and animals were by now almost completely played out. It was by no means sure that the Arabs would prevail if one of the Turkish posts offered serious resistance.

The path ahead of them was as twisted as a corkscrew—a determined team of machine gunners in the right spot could have held up an army many times larger than Lawrence’s until thirst overcame them, but fortunately his letters did the trick. The first outpost, of 120 men, surrendered immediately, opening up “the gateway to the gorge of the Wadi Itm,” which in turn led directly to Aqaba. The next day, the garrison at Kethera, about eighteen miles farther on, proved more hesitant to surrender, but after prolonged negotiations, the Arabs managed to take the place in a surprise night attack, without losses. Lawrence knew from his pocket diary that it was the night of a full lunar eclipse, and had countedon the Turks’ being superstitiously distracted by it, as well as its providing the total darkness that made the attack possible.*

Wadi Itm, as they descended it, got narrower and steeper, demonstrating convincingly how impossible it would have been for the British to fight their way up it from the sea. The garrison at Aqaba had marched inland to reinforce the last Turkish post at Khedra four miles away, but this was in fact a fatal move, for all the fortifications faced the sea, from which any attack was expected to come. Nothing had been prepared for an attack down Wadi Itm. Lawrence had sent messages on ahead to tell the local tribes to harass the Turks, and when he arrived they were already firing on the Turkish lines. The last thing Lawrence wanted was an all-out assault, which would certainly be costly in lives, and he twice repeated his offer of taking the Turks prisoner. At last, as the Turkish commander took in the number of Arabs assembled against him, he ordered his men to cease firing and surrendered on the morning of July 6, less than two months after Lawrence’s departure from Wejh.

One of the prisoners was a German army well-borer, standing out among the Turks with his red hair, blue eyes, and field-gray uniform. Lawrence paused to chat with him in German, and eased his mind by saying he would be sent to Egypt, where food and sugar were plentiful, not to Mecca. Then, while the Arabs looted the camp, Lawrence raced his camel four miles on to Aqaba, and plunged it headlong into the sea.

He had achieved the impossible—successfully carried out a dangerous, long maneuver behind enemy lines, covering hundreds of miles over what everybody else assumed was impassable terrain to capture a critical port, and killed or captured more than 1,200 Turks for a loss of only two of his own men.

Photograph by T. E. Lawrence of the Arab advance on Aqaba.

Aqaba was in ruins, “dirty and contemptible"; and now that the regular supply caravan, which meandered every two weeks from Maan down past the Turkish outposts carrying rations, had been cut off, there was no food for either victors or vanquished. Lawrence had more than 500 men, 700 prisoners, and 2,000 hungry and demanding men from the local tribes to feed. Of his Turkish prisoners forty-two were officers, and indignant at not being housed any better than their men. There were fish in the Red Sea, of course, but Lawrence had no hooks or lines, and the desert tribesmen had no knowledge of fishing—nor had they any desire to eat fish. The town was surrounded by groves of date palms, but at this season the dates were still raw, and produced violent stomach cramps and diarrhea when boiled and eaten. The Arabs could slaughter and eat their camels, of course, but eventually this would immobilize the entire force.

With his usual indifference to food, Lawrence himself did not suffer, or feel much sympathy for his prisoners—it was his general view that people ate too much anyway—but at the same time he realized that thecapture of Aqaba would be of no use to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force unless they heard of it, and that sooner or later the Turks would give some thought to retaking the port. A British armed tug had paid one of its regular visits, lobbed a few shells into the hills, and sailed on without paying any attention to the Arabs’ signals from the shore. It would be at least a week before this tug, or another ship of the Royal Navy, returned. The small force Lawrence now had assembled at Aqaba needed not just food, but modern weapons, ammunition, tents, and above all gold, since gold was the only thing that could guarantee the tribesmen’s loyalty.

Lawrence had not bothered to inform Cairo where he was going, or with what object, and he had no idea what was happening in the rest of the war. He did not therefore know that General Murray’s second attack on Gaza had failed, like the first. Gaza was no easy nut to crack—with the help of the Germans, the Turks had fortified their trenches, taking advantage of every piece of high ground and of the impenetrably thick hedges and clumps of cactus (considered worse by the troops than barbed wire), in which they had carefully sited machine gun nests. On the British side, despite huge efforts to build a small-gauge railway line to bring supplies and ammunition forward and to lay a water line, neither had been completed. Murray’s plan of attack was therefore hamstrung, since he required more than 400,000 gallons of water a day for men, animals, and vehicles. He had a large mounted force of about 11,000 sabers, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers in infantry, as well as an artillery strength of more than 170 guns (as well as a naval bombardment of Gaza from the sea, and the first use of tanks and poison gas in the Middle East); but the Turks still managed to hold their ground, and since the only way of securing water was to take Gaza, the British, having failed to do so, were obliged to break off the battle. Murray had inflicted 1,300 casualties on the Turks, at the cost of 3,000 British and Commonwealth casualties. Both Lawrence and Liddell Hart would later point out that Lawrence’s tiny force had inflicted almost the same number of casualties on the Turks for a loss of only two men!

The resulting stalemate—a miniature reproduction of the situationon the western front—was made worse by Murray’s overoptimistic dispatches home during the first battle of Gaza, which had produced first jubilation, then consternation in the war cabinet as the facts became known. The prime minister remained determined to knock Turkey out of the war, and looked for a stronger commander for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was decided to replace Murray with General Sir Edmund Allenby, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, a powerful, impatient, hard-thrusting cavalryman, know as “the bull” to men who served under him, because of both his size and his fearsome temper. Allenby had fought brilliantly in the Boer War, but quarreled badly there with Douglas Haig, who was now the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in France. Allenby, who violently disagreed with Haig’s tactics, had promptly crossed him again, and as a result it was thought wise to give Allenby a command as far away from France as possible. It was also hoped that as a cavalryman who had chafed at trench warfare he would bring a new level of energy and drive to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF).

When Allenby took his leave of Lloyd George in London, the prime minister told him “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Considering that the British army had been stuck outside Gaza for two years, this was a tall order, but Allenby, his spirits and self-confidence buoyed by being released from Haig’s command and given a show of his own, set to work immediately to breathe new life into the EEF. A consummate professional soldier, he moved his headquarters forward to Rafah,* only nineteen miles from the front line at Gaza, instead of trying to command the army from Cairo, where General Murray had preferred to remain. Allenby immediately set out to see everything he could with his own eyes, instead of relying on his staff officers for information, another failing of Murray’s. He knew he could expect no reinforcements, given the pressure on the western front, and would have to make do with what he had. He also understood at once that advancing up the coast to attack Gaza for the third time would get him nowhere. Hewould need to surprise the Turks with a new strategy, one that made use of the vast, empty desert area to the east to go around the Turkish lines and fortifications that stretched from Gaza on the Turkish right to Beersheba on their left. But what kind of army could travel great distances over a waterless desert?

Meanwhile, in Aqaba Lawrence faced two urgent problems: the first was feeding his men and his prisoners; the second was defending Aqaba against a Turkish attack, which Lawrence estimated would take about ten days. To protect Aqaba, Lawrence made use of his skill at creating maps to pick four independent strongpoints, each of which the Turks would have to attack separately if they were going to advance down Wadi Itm. He put Auda in command of one of them, and chose carefully from among the tribes to man the others. To obtain food and supplies, there was only one course open to him—to leave Aqaba and ride 150 miles across the Sinai desert to the Suez Canal. The terrain is some of the harshest in the world, with only one well between Aqaba and the Suez Canal, and the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai had the reputation of being predatory and pro-Turk.

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* 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 protйgй 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 Ј16,000 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 Ј16,000 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 Ј200,000 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.*

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.

He would write to his father later of the award: “Tell Mother they asked for that twopenny thing* she likes [the Victoria Cross], but fortunately didn’t get it. All these letters & things are so many nuisances afterwards, & I’ll never wear or use any of them. Please don’t either. My address is simply T.E.L., no titles please.”

Lawrence was already famous within the British army in the Middle East, and at his ease with figures as important as the CIGS, but even he could not have imagined that within a year he would be world famous as the “prince of Mecca,” the “uncrowned king of Arabia,” and, more permanently, as “Lawrence of Arabia,” a phrase he could never get rid of.

But who, exactly, was he?

* Lawrence brought the rifle home with him after the war, and presented it to King George V. it is now displayed prominently in the arms collection of the imperial War Museum in London.

* Lawrence was the first military hero to carry a camera with him into battle, as well as a dagger, a pistol, and a rifle. A gifted and enthusiastic amateur photographer, he also played a role in the development of aerial photography, and most of the good (and genuine) photographs of the Arab revolt are by him.

* The Geneva Conventions were not observed in the desert. Arab wounded were normally tortured, then killed by the turks, either by being bayoneted or by having their throats cut. As a result, the Arabs usually killed their own wounded, rather than leaving them to the mercy of the turks. The Arabs had in any case no way to transport or care for turkish wounded or their own. The British paid for turkish prisoners by the head, since many of them were Arabs who had been conscripted into the ottoman army and who might be persuaded into fighting the turks. on both sides, the level of cruelty was high.

* Circassians were a Caucasian people, many of whom were sent into exile in the ottoman empire after the russian army finally conquered their mountain homeland. Many of them were blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, though Muslim. Their women were exceptionally beautiful, and much prized in the harems of wealthy turks. it may have been Lawrence’s ability to pass as a Circassian that would save his life later on, when he was taken prisoner at Deraa (see page 342).

* “My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent, i shall attack!”

* Liddell Hart remarks admiringly that this is an early example of Lawrence’s genius for strategy taking over virtually without a pause from the tactical ability he had shown in the battle, and perhaps it is. Lawrence was as precocious in his military abilities as he was in almost everything else he put his hand to, and like Odysseus, the future translator of the Odyssey was at once a bold warrior, a brilliant planner, and a man with an infinite capacity for craft and deceit. Lawrence was both a hero and “Odysseus of the many wiles,” to quote from his own translation, and using his pocket diary as a weapon—in this case more potent than mortars or mountain guns, neither of which he possessed—is an early example of the kind of unexpected thinking that made him a formidable guerrilla leader.

* Now the site of a major border crossing from egypt into Gaza.

* Mitla Pass would be the site of major tank battles between the Israelis and the Egyptians in 1956, 1967, and 1973.

* The Victoria Cross has been awarded only 1,353 times since it was created on January 29, 1856, by Queen Victoria as Britain’s highest award for valor and gallantry in the face of the enemy. it can be awarded both to officers and to other ranks, and takes precedence over all other British military awards.

* The Victoria Cross is made of bronze from russian cannons captured at Sebastopol, during the Crimean War, and was popularly supposed to cost only twopence to manufacture.

CHAPTER THREE

“The Family Romance”

These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factor which enables us to understand the nature of hero-myths The later stage … begun in this manner might be described as “the neurotic’s family romance.”—Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a tall, lean, slightly stooped gentleman of distinguished appearance sat down in the small study of his modest Oxford home to write a letter to his five sons, to be opened and read only after his death. Whether he had some apprehension—unfounded, as it turned out—about his own health, or whether like many intelligent people he sensed the storm clouds of war upon the horizon, and knew that those of his sons who were old enough to do so would want to serve king and country, it is impossible to guess. In any event, he briefly, and with great dignity, outlined for them what he and their mother had never been able to share with them during all their years together as a family.

On the envelope, once he had sealed it, he wrote in his firm handwriting, “To my sons—But not to be opened except mother and I are dead—OR when mother desires to—”

My dear sons—I know this letter will be a cause of great sorrow and sadness to you all as it is to me to write it. The cruel fact is this, that yr Mother and I were never married.

When I first met Mother, I was already married. An unhappy marriage without love on either side—tho’ I had four young daughters. Yr Mother and I unfortunately fell in love with each other and when the exposй came, thought only of getting away and hiding ourselves with you Bob, then a Baby. There was no divorce between my wife and myself. How often have I wished there had been! Then I drank and mother had a hard time but happily I was able to cure myself of that. You can imagine or try to imagine how yr. Mother and I have suffered all these years not knowing what day we might be recognized by someone and our sad history published far and wide. You can think of what delight we saw each of you growing up to manhood for men are valued for themselves and not for their family history, except of course under particular circumstances. My real name when I met yr Mother was Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman Bart but needless to say I have never taken the Title. There is one little ray of sunshine in the sad history, namely, that my sister who married my cousin Sir Montagu Chapman, & my brother Francis Vansittart Chapman of South Hill (my father’s place; the life interest of which I agreed to sell) were always loving to me & it is thro’ their goodness that I have been able to leave you the greater part of the sum I have left. My brother at his death left me Ј25000. & my sister in her Will has bequeathed me Ј20000, but owing to the wording of her Will I shall not receive this Ј20000 if I die before her. She is alive but a great invalid & no fresh Will of hers wld be valid tho’ I know she intended and wished this Ј20000 to go to you all, if I should die before her. She for many years gave me Ј300 a year, which, with my own fortune, enabled us all to live very comfortably & saved Mother and me great pinching to make ends meet & also kept me from drawing on my Capital for every day expenses.

Bob’s name was registered in Dublin (near St. Stephen’s Green)as “Chapman"; hence his name in my Will. I shld recommend him to retain his name of Lawrence; a man may change his sirname [sic] anytime & need not take legal steps to do so, except he is expecting to inherit places or moneys from others, who know him by his former name.I can say nothing more, except that there was never a truer saying than “the ways of transgressors are hard.” Take warning from the terrible anxieties & sad thoughts endured by both yr Mother and me for now over thirty years; I know not what God will say to me (yr Mother is the least to be blamed) but I say most distinctly that there is no happiness in this life, except you abide in Him thro’ Christ & oh I hope you all will.Father Readers of Victorian fiction will recognize here the essential elements and tone of Dickens’s greatest novels, particularly in all these details about wills, money, the invalid sister, and the family secret, as well as the pious exhortation at the end of the letter. It is hard to think of Lawrence as a latter-day Pip or Oliver Twist, but it is in this light that we must see him and his four brothers, who grew up in the shadow of their loving parents’ secret. There is no evidence that any of them ever read their father’s letter, or even knew of its existence. Two of them, Frank and Will, would be killed early on in the war; one of them would survive the war to become perhaps its most famous hero; and of the other two, Bob, the eldest, and Arnold, the youngest, eventually made their peace with their parents’ relationship, though late in life and reluctantly. T. E. Lawrence, known in his family as Ned, seems, perhaps because he was the most sensitive and imaginative of the boys, to have guessed early on in his childhood that something was “irregular” about his parents, and apparently came by himself to the conclusion that his parents were not married. He mistakenly imagined, however, that his mother had had a relationship with an older man and had given birth to her three eldest sons by him, then met “Mr. Lawrence,” who befriended her, adopted her sons,and fathered two more. Thus he recognized himself as his mother’s son, but instinctively denied his father’s paternal role, a textbook example of Freud’s Oedipus complex. At any rate, Ned faced—earlier than the other boys—the fact that he was illegitimate, in an age when this still mattered very much indeed, and learned the truth about his parents’ relationship long before his brothers.

For those interested in heredity, it is curious to note that Ned’s father shared with his second son the altogether mistaken belief that a British title, award, or decoration can be turned down, or not “taken.” Until 1963, when the Peerage Act was amended to allow Tony Benn to renounce his title as the second viscount Stangate and thereby retain his seat in the House of Commons,* a person who inherited a peerage was obliged to accept it. Ned’s father was a baronet (a hereditary knighthood, ranked just below a peerage) whether he wanted to be or not. He could and did change his name, refuse to use his title, give up his properties, and so on, but so far as the crown and the law of Great Britain were concerned, he remained Sir Thomas Chapman, the seventh baronet. Indeed his wife, Lady Chapman, would very correctly write to the Home Office to confirm her husband’s death in 1919 to the Registrar of the Baronetage, after which the title became extinct for lack of a legitimate male heir.

The facts of T. E. Lawrence’s birth did not become widespread public knowledge until 1953,† when word leaked out about Richard Aldington’s hostile “biographical inquiry” into Lawrence’s life. This inquiry created alarm and indignation both in what remained of the Lawrence family and among those—much more numerous—who fiercely resented an attack on a British national hero, as well as concern for the feelings of Lawrence’s mother, who was then still alive.

There is no doubt that this background played a major role in forming Lawrence’s character and shaping his desire to become a hero. A powerfulcombination of shame, guilt, and ambition drove him to seek a fame brilliant enough to make the name Lawrence more worthy than the name Chapman, and thus to offer his father, the aristocrat who had put aside his title and wealth to run away with his daughters’ governess, a hero for a son.

In 1932, when the Irish Academy of Letters was founded, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote to Lawrence, then serving in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman first class under the name Shaw, to tell him that he had been proposed as an associate member. Lawrence, who was reluctant to join clubs and associations of any kind—for example, he had given up his prestigious fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and declined an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews—nevertheless sent Yeats a gracious letter of acceptance, in which he remarked, “I am Irish, and it has been a chance to admit it publicly.”

Like many things about Lawrence’s view of his family, this was not altogether the truth. His father, Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, was a descendant of William Chapman, of Hinckley, in Leicestershire, England, a distant cousin of the Elizabethan adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. William, together with his brother John, received a substantial grant of land in County Kerry, Ireland, at the expense of the Irish inhabitants, who either were cleared away or became tenants. William’s son Benjamin was a Roundhead, who served as an officer in a troop of horse raised for Parliament during the Civil War, rose to the rank of captain, and was rewarded by Oliver Cromwell with several estates in County Westmeath, Ireland. Three generations later, in 1782, Benjamin Chapman III was made a baronet, and six baronets followed over the next 137 years, each of them staunchly English and firmly Protestant. They were, in fact, members of what came to be called the “Protestant Ascendancy,” those English families that were granted huge estates from the land of the defeated and despised native Irish. The simple historical fact is that Ireland was ruled for several centuries by the English; the major landowners, of whom Sir Thomas Chapman was one, were English; and the Anglo-Irish, as the small, dominant class was called, held sway over aresentful, dispossessed, disenfranchised Catholic majority. The Chapmans, from generation to generation, lived off the income of their estates in Ireland, sent their sons to be educated in England, and married young women from families of a similar background.

T. E. Lawrence himself was born in Wales, and so far as is known never visited Ireland; thus neither his birth nor his ancestry qualified him to claim he was Irish. However, he may have been moved by a sentimental regard for his friends Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, or he may have felt an increasing sense of guilt over Britain’s imperial role.

Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, Lawrence’s father, was perhaps the most mysterious personality in the Lawrence “family romance.” We know that he went to Eton, the foremost of England’s famous public schools (which are of course expensive, exclusive, and private), and that instead of going on to Oxford or Cambridge, he attended the Royal Agricultural College, in Cirencester, in England—no doubt a more suitable education for a landed gentleman farmer, for the Chapmans’ family land in Ireland “totaled over 1,230 acres,” which required a practical knowledge of farm management from its owner if it was to remain profitable. Since the estate was valued at Ј120,296 in 1915 (approximately the equivalent of at least $10 million today), there is no question that it was farmed well, or that the Chapmans were a family of considerable landed wealth, connected by marriage with other wealthy and prominent Anglo-Irish families like the Vansittarts (T. E. Lawrence’s grandmother was a Vansittart, and the distinguished diplomat Lord Vansittart, GCB, GCMG, was his second cousin).

How much active interest Thomas Chapman took in farming is hard to determine. He seems to have lived as a wealthy sportsman, hunting, shooting (he was reputed to be the best snipe and pheasant shot in Ireland), and yachting. He was an enthusiastic amateur photographer at a time when photographers developed and printed their own pictures in an improvised darkroom at home, and when the camera was still a bulky object that used glass plates and required a tripod; and he eventually became an accomplished bicycle enthusiast, at a time when bicycling wasall the rage. Judging from his letters to his sons, he had a firm, sensible, and practical knowledge of business, although Lawrence would later claim that his father never wrote a check himself—perhaps because he was used to having “a man of business” to do that for him. Chapman admits that he drank, in his letter to his sons, but how much he drank is unclear. In Ireland toward the end of the Victorian era the pole was set pretty high, and none of Chapman’s neighbors in later years remembered him as a heavy drinker. Since the woman he married and the woman he left his wife for were both teetotalers who objected to any consumption of wine, beer, or spirits, it would not have been necessary for Chapman to be a drunk to stir up complaints about his drinking at home; but in the hunting and shooting world of Anglo-Irish landowners in those days a man would have had to drink very hard indeed to qualify as a drunkard.

Three things are absolutely clear about Chapman: he was a gentleman, in every meaning of that word; he was an enthusiastic sportsman, more interested in foxhunting and shooting birds than in farming; and he was a caring, wonderful father. In 1873 he married Edith Sarah Hamilton, a cousin, and between 1874 and 1881 they had four daughters. Whether this was a love match or a practical union between two related landowning Protestant families is hard to judge at this distance in time, but it seems clear enough that Edith and Thomas were not well suited to each other. She was fiercely religious; she was known to the local villagers as “the Vinegar Queen” because of her sour expression; and she earned considerable dislike by her practice of slipping Protestant religious tracts under the doors of her Catholic tenants and neighbors. Their home, South Hill, near Delvin, built by Benjamin Chapman, the first baronet, is one of those big eighteenth-century stone country houses that look more solid than beautiful, though a visitor in the 1950s commented on the beauty of the landscaping and the gardens, and on the Georgian grace of the interior, with its pillared hall, fine moldings, marble fireplaces, and ornamental ceilings. Edith Chapman (who became Lady Chapman when her husband inherited the baronetcy in 1914) held frequent prayer meetings; she also insisted that her husband get up in the middle of the nightto read the Bible aloud to her, and had an alarm clock by the bed to wake him for that purpose. To what extent, if any, the fact that Edith had four daughters in a row played a part in the deterioration of their marriage is hard to guess. At that time, Thomas could not have had any realistic expectation of inheriting the title. Until 1870 his elder brother William was first in the line of succession, should their cousin Sir Benjamin die or fail to have a male heir.* He therefore didn’t need a son to inherit it after him, but that does not necessarily mean, much as he may have loved his daughters, that he didn’t hope for a son, with whom he might have shared his love of horses, sailing, hunting, and shooting.

At some point between 1878 and 1880, Thomas Chapman sought a governess for his daughters, and hired a young woman from Scotland named Sarah Lawrence. Edith Chapman’s religious zeal was increasing rapidly, and it may be that she was unwilling to hire an Irish Catholic woman. If this is the case she must have been pleased by the choice, since Sarah Lawrence was deeply religious, as firmly opposed to liquor as Mrs. Chapman herself, and a fervent Protestant. Sarah was short, energetic, intelligent, and despite a very determined jaw, quite pretty. The Chapman girls adored her, and she quickly took over managing the house as well, leaving Edith Chapman to her prayers. Thomas Chapman’s drinking (and Edith’s objection to it) had by then reached the stage where he was obliged to hide liquor bottles in odd places around the house, while his wife devoted herself, when she was not holding prayer meetings, to hunting them down and emptying them. It does not sound like a happy household, but the daughters may have been shielded from much of this—or perhaps like many people, once they grew up they remembered only the happier moments and repressed the rest.

As to why Sarah was called a governess, instead of a nanny, it is hard to say. She may have been in charge of the education, moral welfare, and upbringing of the Chapman girls, with an “Irish girl” to do the heavy work of cleaning, bathing, cooking, making beds, etc.; or perhaps calling her a governess was intended put her in a higher station than that of the rest of the servants, who were, of course Irish and Catholic. In any case, her role soon became that of governess, and in later life, when she was keeping a house of her own, her five sons would all comment on her fanatical zeal, energy, and eagle eye.

Sometime in 1885 a crisis occurred. Sarah Lawrence became pregnant and was obliged to leave in disgrace and settle in Dublin. The Chapman girls were deeply distressed and upset by her departure—the second of them, Rose, could still describe, nearly seventy years later, a spiral-shaped crystal scent bottle with a silver top which Sarah had given her on leaving, and which her mother took away from her. It is clear that there was a deep affection between the girls and Sarah. Rose would describe her years later as “so gay and pretty.”

A Catholic neighbor of the Chapmans would comment, decades later, that Edith Chapman “was the sort of woman who was terribly pious, and would go to church at all hours of the day, and then if a wretched kitchen maid got into trouble, would cast her out without a character [reference]. Where did Christianity come [into] that?” It seems likely that Edith would have been even less forgiving of a governess who became pregnant than a mere kitchen maid, but in this case there was worse to come. Several months after Sarah’s departure, a family servant happened to see Sarah and Thomas Chapman together in Dublin, and—perhaps having been jealous of Sarah’s privileged place in the household—reported the fact to Edith. After an angry confrontation, Thomas “eloped,” which is to say that he walked out of his home and his marriage and went to join Sarah, who had given birth to his child, in lodgings “over an oyster bar, near the Abbey or the Gaiety theater,” in Dublin.

The scandal was enormous—the wealthy sportsman and landowner had abandoned his wife and children for the daughters’ governess, having gotten her pregnant under his own roof, challenging every assumption of a class society: the sanctity of marriage, the place of servants, the privileges and obligations of birth and wealth—all perhaps best expressed in the words of that favorite, richly complacent Victorian hymn: “The richman in his castle, the poor man at the gate, He made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate.”

The oyster bar is a wonderful touch too, of course—there is something truly Dickensian about Chapman’s instant descent from South Hill with its eighteenth-century pillared hallway to lodgings in a back street of Dublin. A neighbor remembered that the day Chapman left South Hill he had one of his horses tacked up to take a last ride over his property at five-thirty in the morning, saying good-bye not so much to his family, perhaps, as to his land and the life of a wealthy sportsman that went with it. Despite this, one of his foxhunting companions, named Magan, commented gruffly that it was “The only sensible thing that Tommy ever did—can’t think why he didn’t do it sooner.”

Sarah Lawrence, who would present Thomas Chapman with five sons, of which T. E. Lawrence was the second, lived until 1959, dying at the age of ninety-eight. She was, even in her youth, a woman of firm principles and amazing determination. Her most famous son, T. E. Lawrence, spent a lifetime trying to fathom his relationship with his mother, and never quite succeeded. He saw in her much of himself—one friend of his (a woman) remarked, “T. E. got his firm chin and the piercing blue eyes from his mother, his strength of character and ability to martyr himself in the desert. She had those martyr qualities She forced herself.” Lawrence himself would write of Sarah, “No trust ever existed between my mother and myself…. I always felt that she was laying siege to me, and would conquer, if I left a chink unguarded.” Almost everybody who met Sarah commented on the intensity of her personality, and on her indomitable will, as well as her refusal to compromise on most moral issues.

Sarah’s unflinching sense of right and wrong and her moral certainty were no doubt made a more painful burden for her by the fact that she not only bore Thomas Chapman five illegitimate sons—for his wife would never agree to a divorce—but was illegitimate herself, as her own mother had been. Sarah was born in 1861, in the north of England; her birth name was Junner, and her mother, Elizabeth Junner, had been a servant in the household of an insurance surveyor, Thomas Lawrence, in Sunder-land, County Durham. A case has been made, very convincingly, that Sarah was the child of “Thomas Lawrence’s eldest son, John,” and this certainly does seem possible—it is a reflection of a well-known social problem during the Victorian age, when female servants were often made pregnant by the master of the house (as was the case with Sarah) or by one of his sons (as was apparently the case with her mother). Almost invariably in such circumstances, the young woman paid the price, being sacked without a letter of reference, and the illegitimate babies that resulted often ended up in orphanages.

Elizabeth Junner apparently died of alcoholism (not an uncommon fate for such women). Her daughter Sarah seems to have been taken in by a grandfather and to have spent her childhood in Spartan conditions on his farm in Perthshire, Scotland, where she had to walk six miles back and forth to school five days a week. The death of her grandmother made it necessary to place Sarah in the care of an aunt, who may have been the servant of the rector of “a low church” parish. Sarah spent several unhappy years there, subjected to a strong and unforgiving religious upbringing, apparently unalleviated by any warmth or affection. Typically of Scotland, she received a good education, however. At some point she was sent to Skye, an island of bleak and barren beauty, where she may have done housework; and at the age of eighteen she was selected by the agent for the Chapman estate, who had been searching for a reliably Protestant Scottish nanny or governess to look after the Chapmans’ daughters. Sarah shortly journeyed to Ireland to join the household at South Hills, with consequences we already know. She seems to have adopted the surname Lawrence along the way, borrowing it no doubt from whatever her mother had told her about the man who had been her father; but like her son T. E. Lawrence she changed her surname often, and on the birth certificates of her sons she is variously identified as “Sarah Chapman (formerly Laurence) [sic],” “Sarah Maden,” and “Sarah Jenner.” Some of this variation may be due to inattention or careless spelling by busy clerks, but it is still unusual, and perhaps reveals a certain anxiety about her ambiguous position as an unmarried mother.

In an age when reliable contraception was largely unavailable, illegitimacy was a widespread consequence of placing young single women as domestic employees in large households, where they were exposed to temptation and were at the mercy of their employers or older male servants; hence, the housemaid “in the family way” is a stock figure in Victorian melodrama and music hall.

Unlike her mother, Sarah Junner managed to create a better life for herself by the sheer strength of her personality and her good education. It may be that once she was fired, Thomas Chapman’s first instinct had been to keep her in lodgings in Dublin and visit her on his frequent trips there. If so, he underestimated her determination, and perhaps also the strength of his feelings for her. In the event, he continued living at home and visiting Sarah in Dublin until their son Montagu Robert (always known in the family as “Bob”) was born in December 1885. It was only then, when they were already illicit parents, that they were observed by a servant, and that Edith Chapman confronted her husband.

It is testimony to Sarah’s strength of character that Thomas Chapman not only gave up his own name but also adopted for himself what he assumed was Sarah’s surname. He did not do this by deed poll or any other legal document—he simply started calling himself Lawrence, and that was that. It is not clear whether he took the name voluntarily, or whether this was one of Edith’s demands for their separation, but in any case changing his name does not seem to have bothered him. Between Sarah’s various surnames and Thomas’s change of name, it is hardly surprising that T. E. Lawrence found it so easy to adopt different names for his own service in the army and the RAF.

In 1885 the modern need for official documents about one’s identity hardly existed. There were of course no computers, no credit cards, and no driver’s licenses; the idea of attaching a photograph to a document was still in its infancy; birth and death certificates were more likely to be kept in parish archives than in government files, and were therefore subject to the perils of poor spelling, bad handwriting, hearsay evidence, and a pious concern to tidy up the written record and gloss over small human failings among the parishioners.

Still, even under his new name, Thomas Lawrence could hardly expect to go unnoticed in a small city like Dublin in the 1880s. The scandal of his departure from home certainly was public knowledge. A shopkeeper in Delvin said many years later that from the moment of Thomas’s departure, Edith refused to “go out in society,” and fell back on the support of her numerous relatives.

Perhaps inevitably, the newly named Lawrence family soon took up a rootless and wandering existence outside Ireland, in remote places where Thomas was unlikely to be recognized. First they moved to the village of Tremadoc, in Carnarvon, North Wales, where Sarah gave birth to their second child, Thomas Edward Lawrence, on August 16, 1888; then to a house in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, where Sarah gave birth to their third son, William George, in December 1889; then briefly to the Isle of Man, then to Saint Helier in Jersey, in the Channel Islands; then to Dinard, a seaside resort in Brittany, where there were many English visitors and residents—perhaps too many, for they moved again, first to a rented house on an estate in New Forest, in Hampshire, and finally to a large, comfortable redbrick house of their own in Oxford, at 2 Polstead Road.

A photograph taken of Sarah with four of her sons (Arnold was not yet born) in the summer 1894 at Langley Lodge, in the New Forest, is interesting. First, the picture shows Sarah in an elegant ruffled blouse and a fashionably tight skirt, holding baby Frank, and makes it clear that despite giving birth to four children she still had a remarkably trim figure and a tiny waist, as well as a very pretty face. Second, the house looks rather grand, with big columns on the porch, and carefully tended greenery. The boys look healthy, are blond, and are all dressed in sailor suits, with straw hats. Next to Ned’s bare knees sits an alert small dog, apparently a terrier, its doubts about being photographed mirrored by the expression on Ned’s face. The boys’ little shoes are brightly polished—evidence, one suspects, of a nanny or maid behind the scenes hard at work. It does not look exactly like the penurious background that the grown-up T. E. Lawrence describes when writing about his childhood; and judging from the expression on Sarah’s face it rather bears out his rare, and somewhatbaffled, admiring description of his parents’ relationship as “a real love match.”

Although Thomas Chapman—now Thomas Lawrence—had left behind most of his wealth, he received a modest but comfortable yearly income, and had some limited access to capital—they were by no means penniless exiles. What is more, there was a certain pattern to their moves. All these places were near enough to Ireland to make it easy for Thomas to go back to Dublin on “family business” connected with the estate when necessary; and the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and Dinard were well placed to give him the maximum opportunity to indulge his love of sailing. The eventual move back to England, first to a house in Hampshire, then to one in suburban Oxford, reflects both a concern that if one of their boys was born in France he would become subject to military service there, and a desire to have the boys educated at home in their own language. By the time they reached Oxford in 1896, they had four children: Bob, Ned, Bill, and Frank. (The fifth boy, Arnold, was born in Oxford in 1900. In addition, Sarah gave birth to three other sons, two stillborn and one who lived for only a few hours.)

If one reason for the deterioration of the Chapmans’ marriage was that Edith Chapman produced four girls in succession and no son, Thomas can only have been satisfied by his decision to leave her for Sarah, who bore him eight boys, of whom five lived and thrived. In fact, by all accounts, Thomas, though not an ebullient personality, seems to have become far more cheerful than he had been when he was living with Edith. He enjoyed the company of his sons, and was anything but remote or diffident where they were concerned; indeed no detail of what they were doing seems to have been too small to interest him, and his letters to them when they were older are models of a what a parent’s letters ought to be—full of practical advice and commonsense suggestions, as well as letting the boys, particularly Ned, explore their own limits without nagging or scolding. Thomas remained an enthusiastic shot, though now on a smaller scale, having given up his estates, and he taught the older boys to shoot well, although they did not share his enthusiasm for shooting gamebirds. He also taught them how to sail, enjoyed bicycling with them, conveyed to them his own skill at carpentry and photography, and imparted, at least to Ned, his interest in church architecture. In an age when upper-class parents were often distant, and left the upbringing of their children to nannies and tutors, he was quite the reverse, deeply involved in everything they did.

There is no doubt that Sarah was the driving force in the family, however. She was always in motion, a whirlwind of energy, the family disciplinarian. People who did not know her well thought her “overpowering and terrifying,” and she pushed her sons relentlessly and ruled their lives with alarming strictness. Many who met Sarah found her charming, but her blunt outspokenness and fiercely held opinions could also be disconcerting to strangers. On the other hand, since these are exactly the characteristics that the English admire in the Scots, and that the Scots themselves believe set them apart from the distant politeness and hypocrisy of the English, the wiliness of the Welsh, and the charm-laden duplicity of the Irish, many people found this side of Sarah endearing too.

T. E. Lawrence himself, even when he was older and a national hero, still found his mother terrifying, and as soon as he could, he carefully arranged his life to see as little of her as possible. From the beginning, he seems to have attracted her attention like a lightning rod, unlike the other boys. During the war, Auda Abu Tayi would refer to Lawrence as “the world’s imp,” and impishness seems to have been a permanent part of his character even when he was an infant—certainly his mother seems to have come down much harder on him than on his brothers, for naughtiness, disobedience, and a general failure to live by her strict and unforgiving rules.

Against this picture of Sarah as a domestic tyrant is the fact that the Lawrences were in their own way a happy family,* in which both parentsarranged their lives around the needs of their children—although to a degree that may, at any rate to Ned, often have felt suffocating. Thomas Lawrence had no work or job, and apart from his infrequent visits to Dublin on “family business” and his occasional day in the field with a few shooting companions, he was often at home. Sarah, with or without “help,” was a constant presence, cleaning, tidying, polishing, and keeping the whole household up to her very high standards of perfection. They must have made an odd-looking couple: he very tall, courtly, stooped, and thin; she tiny, much younger, and continuously in motion. Socially, they were even odder, by turn-of-the-century English standards. Thomas was, despite his change of name, recognizably a member of the upper class, in the way he dressed, in his speech, and in his polite but detached relationship to workmen and others of “the lower classes.” Sarah’s accent was unmistakably Scottish; her firm, direct way of dealing with people was very different from his; and she was comfortable with members of what was then still called “the working class.” People who met them instantly thought that there was something strange about them as a couple, a mismatch between the languid politeness of the Old Etonian and the alarming energy of the former governess. Some even noticed that Sarah never referred to Thomas as “my husband,” but instead always spoke of him as “Mr. Lawrence,” or “the boys’ father.”

Though in later life T. E. Lawrence would remark, half in complaint, half in admiration, that his parents lived on a “workman’s salary” of not more than Ј400* a year, and had to pinch pennies to make ends meet with five sons, in fact they seem to have lived comfortably enough, and not to have wanted for anything. Doubtless it was a big step down in income for a man who had been born to considerable wealth, but in late Victorian and Edwardian England Ј400 a year was the income of a member of the middle or “professional” class, not of a workman, and its current equivalent would be at least $100,000, if we bear in mind that in 1890 taxation was very low. It is also clear enough that from time to time Thomas Lawrence had access to capital: hence his ability to buy bicycles for his sons and himself, to continue sailing and shooting, and to fund Ned’s bicycling tours in France and a walking tour in Syria when Ned was older. On the other hand, Sarah was certainly always aware of the need to scrimp and save—it was part of her character, implanted by her own impoverished childhood.

T. E. Lawrence would inherit both parents’ attitudes toward money: on the one hand, like his mother, he reduced his expenses to the absolute minimum; but like his father’s, his attitude toward money was “lordly” when it came to things like his custom-made Brough motorcycles (the Brough was a two-wheeled equivalent of a Rolls-Royce). He spent a fortune by any standards paying artists to do the paintings and the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and having the copies individually bound in leather by the finest bookbinders in England. His generosity to friends was lavish to the point of impoverishing himself.

Naturally, the elder Lawrences’ lives were conditioned to a certain degree by the need to maintain their secret, but that apparently did not prevent them from having friends, from going out, or from having visitors—indeed everybody who knew them remarked on what good company the Lawrences were. During the years when they lived in Dinard, they had many friends among the British residents—the area around Dinard, in Normandy, was an inexpensive place for Britons to live or retire—and the family of their landlord, the Chaignons, not only became friends, but would maintain the contact when the boys were grown up.

The same was true during the time the Lawrences spent in the New Forest, when Bob, Ned, and Will had many friends, one of whom, Janet Laurie, would be a friend of Ned’s for life—so far as we know the only girl to whom he ever proposed marriage. This was the case in Oxford too. The “isolation” of the Lawrence family has certainly been exaggerated, especially when it came to the friends of the boys, who were constantly in and out of the house.

The eventual choice of Oxford was sensible, both because it offered excellent opportunities for education—the parents were determined to give the boys the best possible education—and because in a university town, which was essentially middle-class, there were fewer people who would have heard their story, or who might recognize Thomas Lawrence as Thomas Chapman. In London, by contrast, the story of Thomas Chapman’s running off with his daughters’ governess was well known among people of his class, a kind of scandalous object lesson in how not to conduct an affair; he would certainly have been recognized at his club, whereas in Oxford he could use the Oxford Union as a club without being bothered—the dons, wrapped up in their own insular world, were unlikely to have heard the gossip about him, or to care.

Another reason for choosing Oxford was that it was then a lively religious center. Sarah’s religious feelings had always been strong, and they grew stronger still as she took on herself the responsibility for the sin of breaking up Thomas’s marriage and giving him five illegitimate children. She was not a religious zealot like Edith Chapman, but she wanted a place to bring up her children in a religious atmosphere, and Oxford certainly was that. Hardly a day passed in Oxford without the sound of choral singing, organs, and bells somewhere. Not that Sarah was a High Church Anglican, or would have approved of the pomp and circumstance of religion as it was practiced at the university. She was a strict follower of the evangelical movement, and attended Sunday service at St. Aldates Church, in the center of Oxford, planted firmly opposite Christ Church College and Cathedral, in stubborn opposition to High Anglicanism, with its “Roman” rites and elaborate services. The evangelicals, or Low Church Anglicans, then as now, preferred simpler services, emphasized the personal relationship between the communicant and Jesus, and believed that the Bible should be taken literally. The Lawrence family met for prayers and Bible reading every morning before the older children left for school, as well as on Sundays, with the boys kneeling beside their father as he led the service, and he or Sarah read aloud to them from the Bible.

Of course this kind of religious home life was more common in the late Victorian era than it is now, but even by late Victorian standards religion played a large role in the lives of the Lawrence family, and was certainly a bond between Sarah and Thomas. She was fervent in her belief, and Thomas seems to have been too, though in the polite and unobtrusive manner of his class. He was a gentleman in religion as in everything else, whereas Sarah was consumed by a need to save him, to compensate by the intensity of her faith for the sin into which she had led him, and to atone for it by ensuring that her sons’ religious feelings were as strong as her own. To some extent, she succeeded—her eldest son, Bob, would eventually accompany her to China as a missionary; Frank and Will seem to have retained throughout their short lives a certain degree of religious feeling. But Arnold was much less religious; and with her second son, Ned, she failed completely, and therefore, throughout his life, fought all the harder to save him.

The problem went far beyond the fact that Ned was the “Peck’s bad boy” of the Lawrence family, an incorrigible rule-breaker and mischievous practical joker, with a gift for spinning imaginative tales—Sarah recognized that in other ways Ned was the child who most resembled her. He had her determination; her features; her piercing, bright blue eyes; and, as he grew older, her stature, though the other boys all took after the father in height as well as coloring. Frank, for example, was tall, lean, a good scholar, but also brilliant at exactly those team sports that are generally taken to indicate character in England: rugby and cricket. Will was described by a contemporary as “really an Adonis to look at, beautiful in body,” tall, graceful, a prizewinning gymnast. As striking as Ned’s face was, and as physically strong as he became, he hated competitive sports and avoided as much as he could all forms of organized games—not an easy thing to do in an English school, nor one that made for popularity, either with the masters or with the other boys.

Because of T. E. Lawrence’s fame, few families have been subjected to such intense scrutiny as the Lawrences, or have been the subject of so much retroactive psychoanalysis. The fact that his mother was the disciplinarian of the household, and that she carried out herself whatever physical punishment she decided was needed, has been given an exaggerated role in the development of Lawrence’s admittedly complex personality. In keeping with her very literal view of Christianity, Sarah had an equally simple faith in the old adage “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” In her old age, when T. E. Lawrence became a friend of Lady Astor,* his mother remarked that “one of the reasons that Lord Astor’s horses never won is because he wouldn’t whip them.” On the other hand, descriptions of Sarah as a sadistic mother are wildly overdrawn. Using a whip or a switch on children was more the rule than the exception at all levels of society in the late nineteenth century, and none of the Lawrence children, when they were grown, seem to have complained about it. She never had to whip Bob or Frank, and Arnold remembered being whipped only once, but she was obliged to whip Ned on his buttocks frequently, for fairly routine misbehavior, or for refusing to learn to play the piano. It seems likely that there was a clash of wills between Ned and Sarah—T. E. Lawrence would sum it up by writing that “we do rub each other up the wrong way"—which did not develop between her and the other boys. Her youngest son, Arnold, would later say that his mother wanted “to break T. E.'s will,” but this is merely to say that throughout her life she wanted all her sons to be obedient, pious, and truthful, and that Ned, unlike his brothers, was not necessarily or consistently any of those things. Biographers have speculated about the extent to which T. E. Lawrence’s strong streak of masochism in later life, as well as his extraordinary ability to endure pain and deprivation, was a product of the beatings he received from his mother, but this seems doubtful. Sarah loved her sons, was loved by them, and took an interest and great pride in everything they did. At all times, there were present in the house a full-time nanny and other servants, as well as Thomas Lawrence, so it is unlikely that the whippings were in any way cruel or unusual punishment, or carried out in such a way as to leave deep psychic scars. As in most English families of their class, the nannies were a calming and beloved presence—one of them stayed for several years, and when she left to join her sister in Canada, she was replaced by another with whom T. E. Lawrence was still in correspondence many years later, when he was famous.

As to the question of why such whippings were carried out by Sarah rather than Thomas, this may merely reflect the fact that he himself must have been caned by older boys (“prefects”) and by masters during his years at Eton, a practice which was then common in public schools. Thomas was not the only nineteenth-century Englishman of his class to leave school with a marked distaste for corporal punishment. Winston Churchill, who was beaten at Harrow (Eton’s rival) and much resented it, did not blame his father (whom he idolized) for sending him there, but as a result never laid his hand on his own son Randolph, whose behavior might have persuaded even the most benevolent of fathers to pick up a whip. All the Lawrence boys agree that their father retained a “quiet authority” in the family, and that he could be “very firm when necessary,” sometimes intervening when he thought Sarah was being “unduly harsh,” and invariably making the bigger decisions that affected their lives.

The biggest of these, of course, was deciding where the boys should go to school. It is impossible to guess whether Thomas regretted not being able to send his sons to Eton, but in any case there was no way that he could have afforded to send five boys there; nor, despite the fact that he was an Old Etonian himself, would Eton have accepted them in the knowledge that they were illegitimate. It also may be that having been sent to a boarding school, Thomas did not want to subject his sons to the same experience, but it is more likely that neither parent wished to send the boys away. The boys were the center of their lives, the main justificationfor their illicit union, the clearest sign that it had been “blessed,” and the greatest source of their happiness. The first thing any outsider ever noticed about the Lawrences was how close they were to each other—indeed when Ned went “up” to Oxford, to a college that was only a few minutes away from his home by bicycle, he came home every night, despite the fact that undergraduates were supposed to spend their first two years living in their college. The boys were not afraid to leave home; nor did their parents discourage them from doing so, even in the case of Ned, whose journeys on foot would take him through some of the most dangerous country in the world; but for different reasons neither Thomas nor Sarah shared the enthusiasm of the English upper class for sending children away to school as early as possible.

The school they chose was the City of Oxford High School, whose elaborate Victorian facade still stands on George Street, close by Jesus College, where Ned would spend his undergraduate years, and the Ashmolean Museum, where his interest in archaeology was first kindled. The school was a high-minded hybrid, founded in 1888 by Thomas Hill Green, fellow of Balliol College and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. It was originally intended to provide Oxford dons, now that they were allowed to marry and reside outside their college, with a school for their children that would form a kind of educational ladder leading them to Oxford University on their graduation, while also admitting children of Oxford’s growing middle class. Much admired in its time, the school’s architecture was in Victorian high Gothic style, and was eccentric and lavish even by the standards of Oxford, with a glazed domed tower of vaguely Turkish appearance, surmounted by an elaborate weather vane, and below it a wonderful clock with gilt hands set against a golden sunburst on a bright blue background. The cornerstone was laid by Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, and the school was unusual in that it was a joint enterprise of the university and the city of Oxford. The fact that the City of Oxford High School did not attempt to imitate such great public schools as Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester was something of an asset for Oxford dons, many of whom would have beenuncomfortable with the atmosphere of snobbery and the bullying that went on in the famous boarding schools of England. The school’s staff, curriculum, and seriousness of purpose were second to none; its fees were reasonable; and no embarrassing or difficult questions were raised about accepting the sons of “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence” as pupils.

Until the move to Oxford, Ned had had little in the way of formal schooling, except for an hour a day at the Йcole Sainte-Marie in Dinard, and no experience of English school life, though he already showed signs of alarming precocity, and a voracious appetite for learning as much as he could about a wide variety of subjects. Both in France and in England he was taught by a governess, as well as by his mother and father, and it was clear to everyone that Ned was both enormously intelligent and naturally diligent. As to his precocity, Sarah claimed that Ned had learned the alphabet by the age of three, and his eldest brother, Bob, recalled that Ned could read the newspaper upside down at the age of five (though it is hard to gauge the usefulness of this feat). He spoke French fluently by the age of six, and started to learn Latin at age five. (Ned, who seems early on to have shown an aptitude for languages, learned French quickly as a second language; and in later life he would address the Council of Four at the Paris Peace Conference in fluent French.) His interests included the architecture of castles, armor, weapons, heraldry, old coins, medieval glassware, the geography and history of the Holy Land, and military tactics, as well as photography and carpentry. Ned, like many gifted children, paid more attention to what interested him than to the formal curriculum of the school, and on the subjects he cared about he was so well-informed and opinionated as to alarm even the most learned adults. A voracious reader, he went through books at a rapid rate, most of them outside his assigned reading, and although he would later claim to be able to extract the gist of a book quickly, the truth seems to be that like many bright children he skipped the parts he found dull, or disagreed with. All his brothers were intelligent, dutiful students, but Ned was in an entirely different category—a slightly unfocused prodigy.

It must be said that the masters at the City of Oxford High Schoolrecognized almost instantly that Ned was special. This might not have been the case at a boarding school, for it was clear from the beginning that he would never “fit in” conventionally, and that he was resolutely determined to avoid team sports of every kind, hanging on the sidelines with a knowing grin on his face—not an easy thing to get away with in any English school. Years later one of his masters would remark that “he knew no fear and we wondered why he did not play games.” This was a shrewd comment, for Ned was already almost totally fearless, and determined to build up his strength and put it to a test, but at the same time he disliked all forms of organized competition. He became, like his father, a bicycle enthusiast, and always had the latest kind of racing bike—another indication that Thomas Lawrence had access to money when he wanted it, and never stinted his boys on anything. Ned often tinkered with his bikes to make them faster, and at an early age he pushed himself to amazing speeds and distances. Other boys seem to have respected him, rather than being outraged by his peculiar sense of humor and by the fact that he was an unapologetic “loner,” perhaps because he was also a self-taught wrestler.

The fact that Lawrence was “different” from the two brothers nearest him in age, both of whom were enthusiastic about games and good “team players,” has sometimes been attributed to the fact that he knew early on about his parents’ secret whereas they did not. Lawrence claimed to have overheard, when he was four and a half years old, a conversation between his father and a solicitor about Thomas Lawrence’s estates in Ireland, and although he drew the wrong conclusion, it is not impossible that a very bright child might have managed to overhear enough of the conversation to deduce that there was something irregular about his parents’ situation. Lawrence would not have been the first child to pay an unhappy price for eavesdropping, and learning thereby something he did not want to know, and in his case he felt he must keep it a secret from his brothers. It would also, no doubt, have contributed to his resistance toward his mother’s strong religious exhortations and her insistence on complete obedience, knowing that her own behavior had been less than perfect. Atany rate, whatever significance young Ned’s knowledge of the family secret may have had, it did not prevent him from feeling a strong, protective, and often touching affection for his brothers. The fact that the Lawrence boys were so close must also have helped protect Ned from the kind of bullying that a boy who won’t play organized games might expect to attract in any school.

Although one of the “houses” of the City of Oxford High School would be named after T. E. Lawrence, he does not seem to have enjoyed his school years there. He disliked being forced to follow the curriculum, rather than devoting his time to his own interests, and he would complain, once he was grown up, that he had lived in morbid fear of being punished by the masters, even though there is little or no evidence that he was ever in fact disciplined severely in school. He wrote several essays for the school magazine, and these already demonstrated his ability as a writer—for he was as anxious to make his name as a respected author as he was to be a military hero. The ferocious, almost photographic attention to detail and the love of landscape that make Seven Pillars of Wisdom a great piece of nature writing as well as a war memoir are already evident in his essay on a family cycling tour in the countryside, as is the mocking, mordant tone that occasionally surfaces in his youthful satires on cricket and on the relentless pursuit of scholarships, neither of which can have pleased the masters who read them.

It would be a mistake, however, to see Ned as a misfit at the City of Oxford High School. He seems to have had plenty of friends, and he was not above ordinary rough horseplay—indeed, in the autumn of 1904 his leg was broken just above the ankle in “a playground scuffle.” This accident would not normally have been of any great consequence, but in Ned’s case, as is so often true of episodes in the life of T. E. Lawrence, there are certain mysteries about it. The break was apparently slow to heal, and kept Ned out of school for the rest of the term. This is odd—it was not a compound fracture, and if the leg was in a cast, there seems no good reason why he should have been kept at home. Some biographers have suggested that the break itself, or the slow mending of the bone, mayhave been caused by Ned’s preference for a vegetarian diet, but this too seems unlikely: a diet of bread, milk, cheese, vegetables, and fruit would have been high in calcium and might even have speeded the healing process better than the usual British diet of starchy foods and overcooked meat. Also, both Ned and his mother believed that the accident halted his growth.* His mother may have preferred to imagine that the broken bone was the reason why he stopped growing, rather than accepting the more likely possibility that his shortness was a genetic gift from her.

In any event, Ned stopped growing after the schoolyard accident, and he would always be rather sensitive about his height, though he masked his sensitivity by occasional self-mockery. Even his friend Storrs refers to him as “a gnome,” and his fellow officers in the Middle East during the war often referred to him as “little Lawrence,” though not necessarily without affection. Usually, in group photographs nearly everybody towers over him, except Emir Abdulla and Gertrude Bell. His shortness was certainly accentuated by his very large head, though this effect was somewhat disguised when he wore long, flowing Arab robes and a headdress. That may have been one reason he continued to wear Arab clothing for portraits and official occasions even after the war was over.

The fact that Ned was out of school for the best part of one term did not prevent him from earning the prizes and scholarships he had mocked so cleverly in the school magazine. In the same year as the accident, at the age of sixteen, he took the Junior Oxford Local Examinations, which included tests in religious knowledge, arithmetic, history, English (language and literature), geography, Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics,and “was placed in the First Class.” His weakest marks were in arithmetic and mathematics, but “he gained a distinction in Religious Knowledge,” perhaps not surprisingly after all those prayer meetings and daily Bible readings.

During the year he continued his strong interest in archaeology. Together with a similarly inclined friend, C. F. C. Beeson, he toured Oxford and the surrounding areas, making brass rubbings of medieval tombs in churches and tipping workmen for old glass fragments and pottery in building sites. Beeson was somewhat awed by the intensity of Ned’s interest in archaeology, but the two boys seem to have gotten along well enough. Oxford was a good place for apprentice archaeologists at that time, owing to the numerous new buildings and enlargements being made to various colleges, and the boys brought most of their “finds” to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum—indeed they brought so many interesting sixteenth-and seventeenth-century finds to the museum, many of which were accepted for the Ashmolean’s collection, that the two schoolboys were praised by name in the Annual Report of the Museum for 1906, an unusual distinction. It is typical of Lawrence’s lifelong ability to attract the admiring attention of powerful older men that he eventually came to the attention of David G. Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who would become his mentor in archaeology and would make possible the years Lawrence spent in the Ottoman Empire as an archaeological assistant before the war. Indeed Hogarth was the first and by far the most important of Lawrence’s many surrogate father figures.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, a student of myths, examines the psychology of the hero, and perfectly describes the part that David Hogarth would play in Ned Lawrence’s life: “His role is precisely that of the Wise Old Man of the myths and fairy tales whose words assist the hero through the trials and errors of the weird adventure. He is the one who points to the shining magic sword that will kill the dragon-terror … applies healing balm to the almost fatal wounds, and finally dismisses the conqueror back into the world of normal life, following the great adventure into the enchanted night.”

High-flown as these words may seem, they might serve as an aptdescription of Lawrence’s life—and his hold on our imagination. Ned may have had no idea where or how far the objects he and his friend Beeson dug up from the ground would eventually lead him, but like so much else in his life, they drew him inexorably toward the path of a hero, a first small step away from maternal protection and domination.

As mentioned, biographers of T. E. Lawrence have tended to focus on his mother as the source of his many problems, including a general aversion to women (with some notable exceptions); a morbid fear of sexual contact, even of physical touch; a self-punishing spirit; and a refusal to accept the rewards that he had earned. Lawrence himself certainly expressed the somewhat extreme opinion that it would have been better for his parents if he and his brothers had never been born. “They should not have borne children” was his final judgment on the matter, based on the deep psychological and social gulf between them, which, he supposed, was responsible for the painful conflict he felt within himself.

It is understandable that Sarah has received greater attention (and blame) than Thomas from those who have written about T. E. Lawrence—she lived for nearly a quarter of a century after her famous son’s death, and for forty years after Thomas Lawrence’s death, so that many of Lawrence’s friends met her, and were impressed by her strength of character. Lawrence’s father, by contrast, died before his son had achieved a kind of apotheosis as a hero and a worldwide celebrity, and has therefore been relegated to an offstage role in the Lawrence family drama.

Of course to become a fully functioning adult any son must break free from his emotional dependence on his mother, a task made more difficult when the mother is as strong-willed as Sarah, and as reluctant to let her children go. In Ned’s case there is another, and perhaps more powerful, influence at work: the desire to be heroic; and that is, inevitably, centered on the father.

Although Thomas (Chapman) Lawrence’s presence in most books about T. E. Lawrence is ghostly, that was by no means the case in life. This is, perhaps unconsciously, partly Ned’s doing; at fifteen he wasalready a master dissimulator. In Lawrence’s own accounts of his childhood—the most important sources being his letters to Charlotte Shaw, wife of Bernard Shaw; and to Lionel Curtis, who became something of a soul mate of Lawrence’s after the war, when they were both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford–it is his mother toward whom he directs attention, both for forcing her strict religious ideas on her sons and for taking their father away from the lordly status he had enjoyed as a wealthy landowner and baronet. The fact that his father had willingly given up wealth and status for love, and may have been happy with his decision, was not one that Lawrence wanted to contemplate; nor did he wish to consider the fact that his mother exchanged life as a domestic servant for a lifelong relationship with a gentleman (admittedly living under a false name), a huge leap upward in status.

That is not to deny that it was a love match; it clearly was, and the fact that Sarah bore Thomas eight children argues for a fairly intense erotic attachment on both sides, however much guilt Sarah had to struggle with as a result—indeed she is said to have believed that she was risking damnation for herself in order to save him, and that their five living sons were proof that God might forgive her. Toward the end of her long life, she is said to have murmured over and over again, “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner.” This summed up her faith in salvation for herself, and it pained her deeply that Ned did not share her faith.

Even though Ned may have believed, from what he had overheard and misunderstood as a child, that Thomas Lawrence was not his real father, it was nevertheless not his mother’s approval that he sought. It was always approval from his father, and from the alternative father figures he would collect along the way—hence his briskly dismissing in advance the pride his mother would feel when she learned that he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross. His suggestion in his letter home was unmistakably that the Victoria Cross was exactly the kind of sentimental and popular tribute to valor his mother would like, but that his father, as a gentleman of superior education and breeding, would despise it as much as Lawrence did.

As Ned gained greater freedom to move about on his own, or with friends like Beeson, and took advantage of the latest racing bicycle to increase the distance he could travel and the amount of time he spent away from home, his interests became those that would appeal to Thomas Lawrence, rather than to his mother. His father—whose closest friend was the learned H. T. Inman, author of The Churches of Oxford—was after all far more likely than his mother to appreciate Ned’s brass rubbings and archaeological finds. Church architecture, medieval warfare, the classics—these were all areas in which Ned’s father was knowledgeable; and in some pursuits, like bicycling, woodworking, carpentry, and photography, Thomas was a patient instructor and quick to appreciate and praise Ned’s considerable abilities. In later life T. E. Lawrence would play a large part in building a house for his fellow archaeologists at Carchemish (in what is now Iraq), and carry out not only wood carving but quite elaborate and ambitious stone carving that convinced experts it was Hittite rather than his own work; he also took remarkable photographs under the most difficult conditions imaginable. Thus, Ned not only learned from his father but worked hard to please him. Indeed, his first effort at carpentry and woodcarving was a finely finished book case he made for his father. Thomas Lawrence was not at all a distant offstage observer of the continuing dramatic confrontation between Sarah and Ned; instead he was a constant and much-admired presence in Ned’s life.

It is not uncommon for an adolescent boy to fantasize that he is the offspring of somebody far more impressive than his putative father and that one day he will be recognized, by his noble and valorous feats, and restored to his rightful place—indeed this fantasy is the basis for many myths and children’s stories in every culture. In Ned’s case, this natural fantasy was made more intense by the suspicion that Thomas Lawrence might, in fact, not be his father. To this suspicion was no doubt added, later, the painful fact that Thomas had given up the station in society which would have enabled Ned and his brothers to go to Eton, like their father, rather than attend the City of Oxford High School as day boys, and would have confirmed them as “gentlemen,” members by birth of the upper class, unlike their mother.

As an adolescent, Ned had two contradictory but not uncommon reactions. One was to build up and even to exaggerate his father’s previous social status, emphasizing Thomas’s “lordly” ways and former wealth. The other was to impress his father by beating him at his own games. If Thomas Lawrence rode 100 miles in a day on his bicycle, Ned would ride (or claim to have ridden) 200. He would practice endlessly to become not just as good a shot as his father, but a better one; would become not just an amateur interested in church and castle architecture, but an expert, who claimed to have visited, studied, and sketched every significant castle in Britain and France. Clearly, part of this is familiar: the adolescent boy’s driving hunger for his father’s approval and praise. But there is also an element of rivalry, which Ned carried to enormous lengths, and which he clearly won, though it brought him no pleasure, and no release from his feelings.

That these feelings were strong and impossible for Ned to reconcile is demonstrated by a mysterious episode in which he ran away from home and joined the army. It is placed by different biographers as occurring sometime between 1904 and 1906, though 1904 seems more probable, since Ned would then have been sixteen, a more likely age for a boy to run away from home. Lawrence alluded to this episode several times in later life, but tried to keep it out of the biographies that were written during his lifetime, probably so as not to cause his mother more pain. Since Ned had no relatives to run away to—his mother’s relatives were unknown to him, and his father’s lived under a different name—he did perhaps the only thing he could think of to escape from what had become intolerable to him. Joining the army was a drastic and perhaps desperate decision, and almost certainly a cry for help.

In the Victorian-Edwardian era, service in the ranks of the British army was almost as low as you could fall on the social ladder; the “Tommy,” in his red coat, was still regarded, in the duke of Wellington’s famous words about his troops two generations earlier, as “the scum of the earth, recruited for drink!” The popular view of signing on as a soldier was captured by one working-class mother who remarked that she would rather see her son dead “than wearing the red coat!”

As a result, the British army was something less than scrupulous in accepting recruits. The recruiting sergeant seems to have been willing to overlook Ned’s height and obvious immaturity, and signed him up as a boy soldier in the Royal Garrison Artillery. This antiquated branch of the Royal Artillery was similar to the U.S. Coast Artillery and served in forts built to protect major ports and naval facilities from attack. Boy soldiers were trained as trumpeters and buglers, but no special precautions were taken to separate them from adult soldiers in the barracks. Ned may have served in the Falmouth Garrison, on the south coast of Cornwall, but for how long is hard to know. He would later claim that he was there six to eight months, but this is very unlikely—his school friends did not remember any such long absence; nor did his surviving brothers. A more likely version is that he spent six to eight weeks there, or possibly only six to eight days. However short a time Ned served in the army, though, it was not an experience he would ever forget. The brutality, the foul language, the rough banter about sex, the fistfights, the drunken brawling on weekends—none of these can have been easy for a child of Sarah’s to endure, even for a few days. Interestingly enough, he claimed not to have minded the discipline, which in those days was rough-and-ready at the hands of noncommissioned officers of the old school.

His father, possibly at Ned’s urgent pleading, moved quickly to buy him out of his enlistment, a recognized practice in those days. Thomas Lawrence not only managed to get Ned out of the army but may also have managed to erase the whole episode from the army’s files. Thomas demonstrated more skill at facing down the army bureaucracy than he gets credit for, and obviously knew how to resume the role of a gentleman with friends in high places when he had to.

This family crisis—no other word will do—evidently also led Thomas and Sarah, however reluctantly, to reconsider how to deal with their brilliant and difficult second son, who, it was now quite evident, was going to require very different treatment from the other four boys. It is not hard to see here too the evidence of the father’s quiet authority in persuading Sarah that this particular colt needed to be ridden on a lighter rein. Overthe next two years, a number of changes were made, all of them intended to give him greater freedom. His bicycling trips became longer and more extended; the peculiarities of his vegetarian diet became a pretext for his skipping family meals; he would eventually be allowed to switch from preparation for a mathematics scholarship at the university, which he hated, to history, which was more to his liking; and finally, less than two years after he had run off to join the army, his parents built him a small cottage in the garden at 2 Polstead Road, which allowed him to live separately from the rest of the family.

This was obviously a large concession to a son who had demonstrated just how far he was willing to go in placing himself beyond his mother’s reach. T. E. Lawrence later claimed that he had actually built the cottage himself, but his account was contradicted by his mother, and seems unlikely—the cottage (which still stands) not only is attractive but shows every evidence of skilled professional construction, especially in the steeply countered cathedral roof, rising to a solid central brickwork chimney. Given his own skills, Ned surely helped with the woodwork and the interior; the lines of the exterior woodwork are very elaborate and fanciful indeed for a simple cottage, and may show his hand and imagination at work. Although the cottage was explained away as a place for Ned to study in once he had switched to history and become an undergraduate at Oxford, it seems in fact to have been designed from the outset for him to live in, with a fireplace, a stove, running water, electric light, and “a house telephone.” It is impossible not to see this arrangement as a victory over his mother, giving him the ability to come and go without supervision, freeing him from her insistence on knowing what he was doing at all times, and giving him complete privacy—an unusual, indeed enviable situation for a boy of eighteen or nineteen living at home at that time!

Ned’s decision to switch from mathematics to history is probably a case of following his own growing interests—but more than that, it reflects his impatience with abstract learning, and with any subject having clearly defined rules. He appears to have learned languages, for example, instinctively, by talking and by trial and error, but without making any attempt to master and memorize tedious grammatical rules, which bored him. He was a familiar and difficult figure in academic life: the brilliant young man with rather too many interests, who resists learning the basics of anything thoroughly, and who skates by at examination time on a combination of omnivorous reading, strong opinions, and verbal dexterity. As a result, Ned’s entrance to Oxford was neither as easy nor as automatic as it might have been.

In the summer of 1906, when Ned was eighteen and had only one more year to spend in school, he made his first trip abroad, with his friend Beeson—another big step in the untying of his mother’s apron strings, though he would try to make up for that by the length and detail of his letters home. After taking the Oxford Local Examinations, a prerequisite for entering Oxford University, he set off on a two-week cycling tour of Brittany, using Dinard, where the Lawrence family was still remembered with fond feelings, as his home base. In the end, his friend Beeson (whose nickname was “Scroggs”) went home before Ned did, so he spent almost two weeks more touring by himself.

Ned’s letters home are remarkable, and not just for their length and their amazingly descriptive detail, but also for his evident determination to hide his own feelings from his mother. The letters were meant to be read by the whole family, and are affectionate enough in tone, but they also exude a certain steely detachment and distance, which may not have escaped his mother’s notice. Certainly they are very unlike the monosyllabic, dutiful letters that most schoolboys send home, and while the intelligence, power of observation, and insight they demonstrate would astonish and even alarm most parents, they are also a bit chilling. A single surviving earlier letter from Ned to his mother, from Colchester, when he and his father were on a cycling trip in 1905, is signed, “Love to yourself,” but perhaps significantly the letters from the 1906 trip, with a couple of exceptions, are mostly signed, “With love to all,” or, “With love to everybody,” or they simply end without any closing at all.

Two other things are noticeable in the letters. The first is that Ned’s commitment to a vegetarian diet was apparently rather less strict abroad than at home, since he boasts of having tried some of everything on the prix fixe luncheon menu at the Grand Hфtel de l’Europe in Dinan, which included sardines, fowl, cold meats, and hash. Second, he was scrupulously careful about accounting for every penny (and, indeed, halfpenny) he spent.

A longish letter, written on August 14 to his mother, runs to some 1,400 words, and includes two excellent architectural drawings. Almost all of it is about the Chвteau de Tonquйdec, with minute attention to the interesting details of the latrines, and it reveals an astonishing knowledge of medieval building techniques. (In some respects, his letters home were notes for future works.) He also mentions that he has reached his highest speed to date on a bicycle—thirty miles an hour in high gear on the sand of a nearby beach—and feels he is fit enough to ride 100 miles a day for months. All this must have been of interest to his father (and is perhaps intended to impress him) but probably not to his mother, to whom the letter is addressed. Another letter, 2,300 words long, is mostly about the Chвteau de la Hunaudaye; it reads like a learned guidebook, and contains a full-page detailed plan of the fortress, one of two in this series of letters home, done in pen and ink by Ned, which could hardly be improved on by a professional architect, and which illustrate not only his thorough knowledge of medieval architecture at this early age, but even more his understanding of medieval warfare. He knows why the fortress was built the way it was, and what its strengths and weaknesses were—in short, his is an expert’s view of how to defend or attack a fortified place, and how to make the best use of the topography in siting and building one.

It would be a mistake to leap from this to comparisons to the young Napoleon, who is said to have relied on his tactical instincts to win schoolyard fights; but much that is contained in young Ned’s letters to his family reads like a brilliant and insightful essay on medieval fortifications and warfare by a particularly gifted cadet at Sandhurst or West Point, and makes it easy to understand why T. E. Lawrence’s notes and dispatches from the field were read with such interest even at the level of the chief of the imperial general staff. His observation and grasp of significant details, his broad overview, and his crisply expressed conclusions are all in evidence here—the schoolboy demonstrates the same skill in writing reports and drawing maps as the temporary second-lieutenant and acting staff captain would demonstrate eight years later, though one guesses that none of it is what his mother wanted to hear.

His knowledge of medieval clothing and armor is, if anything, even more impressive, perhaps even daunting. The unfamiliar words flow by on page after page: maniple, chausable, dalamtic, stoles, alb (but no tunic, Ned observes), on a bishop’s effigy; jupon, genouilliиres, jambs, sollerets, on the effigy of Tiphaine du Guesclin, widow of Jean V de Beaumanoir, which exhibits a rare combination of fifteenth-century haute couture and armor—Ned meticulously counts the twenty-two round buttons on her jupon, notes that her spurs have rowels, and describes her face and hairstyle in detail. These letters seem very serious and almost self-consciously erudite, as if Ned was already practicing to write essays for his tutor, or to write his thesis, which would also be on the subject of medieval military architecture, with plans, drawings, and photographs by himself.

One letter, addressed to one of his younger brothers, Will, in reply to Will’s letter describing his rather tentative exploration of a Roman or Celtic camp and possible burial mound at home, is very much du haut en bas, full of detailed suggestions and warnings, and ends with a reminder that digging is good exercise. It is not exactly supercilious in tone, but close to it. Another, to his older brother Bob, also deals with Will’s excavations, but in a bossier way—nothing more is to be done until Ned comes home, and until Woolley, an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean, with whom Ned is already on close terms, has been consulted. Ned also notes that he has received a letter from Scroggs informing him that he has received “a first with distinction in Scripture & English” in the Oxford Local Examinations, but with no other results. A fuller letter describinghis results arrived from his mother a few days later. “The result is on the whole not as good as I had hoped,” he replied, “although I am quite satisfied with the Eng.” He does not seem to have been much disturbed.

As Jeremy Wilson notes in his authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence, Ned “had been placed in the First Class; of 4,645 candidates, only twelve had achieved a higher total.” His worst results were in algebra and geometry, and for a future translator of The Odyssey he did rather poorly in Greek and Latin, but one might guess that the examiners of schoolboys were more interested in grammar—not one of Ned’s strong points in any language—than in fluency, style, and literary knowledge.

It is usually difficult to read much into the letters home of eighteen-year-olds, but as in so many other things, T. E. Lawrence is an exception. The later T. E. Lawrence is perfectly apparent in these letters written in 1906: the urge to push himself as hard as he could physically; the astonishing accumulation of knowledge, and the mastery of every detail of any subject that interested him; the curious combination of extreme aesthetic sensibility and a fascination with the art of warfare; the fear that his mother’s will, stronger even than his own, will prevail over him unless he keeps his guard up at all times; the determination to win his father’s approval, as well as to beat him at those things Thomas cares most about; the instinctive position of leadership he takes toward his brothers, even Bob, the firstborn. All these traits would remain true of T. E. Lawrence for the rest of his life. Not only was the child (as Wordsworth put it) “father of the Man"; he was the man.

Ned’s “First” did not guarantee him entry to the Oxford college of his choice. With the aid of a private tutor (called a crammer in England), L. Cecil Jane, who was to become an admirer and friend throughout Ned’s years at Oxford, and for many years beyond, he prepared to take the examination for a scholarship at St. John’s College, his older brother Bob’s college, in December 1906, but he was unsuccessful.

A month later, in January 1907, further crammed by the indefatigable Jane, Ned tried, this time successfully, for a scholarship at Jesus College,where his birth in Wales would work to his advantage. The college’s founder, Hugh Price (or Aprice), who lived during the reign of Elizabeth I, was a Welshman, and over the centuries the college had developed strong links to Wales. Considering that Lawrence would later claim to be Irish, it is ironic to note that his birth in Wales secured him not only a place at Jesus but a scholarship of Ј50 a year. Ned was, of course, no more Welsh than Irish, but the fact apparently passed unnoticed at Jesus. Perhaps with this in mind, Ned went on a cycling tour of Welsh castles over the Easter vacation, and found the Welsh “rather inquisitive,” but apparently honest. Once again he tested his limit in terms of speed and endurance on a bicycle, and sent home long, detailed, but curiously impersonal letters about castle architecture.

In the autumn of 1907 Ned would “go up” to Jesus College at the age of nineteen, for three years—years which, in many ways, would be the most influential of his life. In later life he would complain—rather unfairly, one would judge—about his school days, which he described as “miserable sweated years of unwilling work,” but about Oxford he had no such feelings. He remarked in a letter to Liddell Hart, “When … I suddenly went to Oxford, the new freedom felt like Heaven.”

* Sir Alec Douglas-home would take advantage of the change in the law to renounce his place in the peerage as the fourteenth earl of home and become prime minister the same year.

† Although they had been revealed in a French biography of Lawrence as early as 1941.

* in fact, William died in 1870 without issue, and Sir Benjamin would die in 1914, also without issue, at which point Thomas succeeded to the title.

* They may have been an exception to the famous first line of tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Lawrences constituted a very happy family, but one that hardly resembled anyone else’s.

* This is t. e. Lawrence’s estimate, but Jeremy Wilson, the author of The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence, estimates that it was, including interest from capital at his disposal, more like Ј1,000 per year, which would be equivalent to about $125,000 a year today.

* This was an unlikely friendship, but t. e. Lawrence and Lady Astor got along famously. Forceful and vivacious, she bullied and protected him like a mother hen, and so far as is known she was the only woman he ever allowed to ride pillion on his motorcycle. Nancy Astor, whose birth name was Langehorne, was a native of Danville, Virginia; she was married to the enormously wealthy Viscount Astor, and was the first woman ever elected to a seat in Parliament. in later life, she was an appeaser, and the Astors’ great country house Cliveden was the social and spiritual center of those who sought peace with Germany and conciliation with hitler. She once told Winston Churchill, “if i were your wife, i’d put poison in your coffee,” to which he replied, “And if i were your husband, i’d drink it.”

* Three doctors–Maurice Carter, MD; Avodah offit, MD; and Thomas Murray, MD– have expressed strong doubt that a broken bone in an otherwise healthy boy could possibly halt or impede growth. in any case, there is considerable controversy about t. e. Lawrence’s adult height. his American biographer Lowell Thomas puts his height at five feet five and a half inches; one of his British biographers, the poet robert Graves, puts it at five feet six inches; some people put it as low as five feet three inches; Lawrence’s medical records during his service in the rAF put it at five feet five inches. At the time the average height of an englishman of his age was five feet six inches. height was then something of a class matter–the upper classes, given a better diet, tended to be taller than the “working class,” so Lawrence was certainly short for somebody of his class, though not very much shorter than, say, the Prince of Wales (the future King edward Viii, afterward the duke of Windsor), or Winston Churchill.

CHAPTER FOUR

Oxford, 1907–1910

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town…. Proud and godly kings hath built her, long ago, With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, And the streets where the great men go.—James Elroy Flecker, “The Dying Patriot”

I was a modest, good-humoured boy.It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.—Sir Max Beerbohm, “Going Back to School” In Britain one “goes up” to Oxford or to Cambridge; conversely, if dismissed or expelled, one is “sent down.” Lawrence, of course, did not so much “go up” as go sideways—his home in Oxford was only a few minutes from Jesus College by bicycle. For most of his fellow undergraduates, Oxford was the first great adventure of their young lives, away from home and boarding school at last, in a place where they were treated as adults, and expected to behave like adults—with a certain allowance always made, of course, for the follies of young men of the upper classes letting off steam. For Lawrence it was slightly less of anadventure—he had already run away from home and experienced life in barracks with scores of older recruits in an age when each metal cot was exactly two feet away from the next. Still, it was a huge change in status.

Oxford University was and remains a nebulous institution, more of a gas than a solid, as T. E. Lawrence would later describe the Arab Revolt, and guerrilla warfare in general. In order to join it young men (and now of course young women) apply to the colleges of their choice, take an examination, and undergo a firm and probing interview. If accepted, they will spend three academic years at their college, during which the university into which they have been matriculated will seldom touch their lives, except in the form of the “proctor” and his bowler-hatted “bulldogs,” enforcers of the university regulations while undergraduates are outside their own college in the streets of Oxford. The university’s buildings are spread through the town—among them are such architectural landmarks as the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Ashmolean Museum—but the life of the university and much of its teaching take place within the thirty-odd walled-in colleges. When asked where they “went to university” Oxonians are more likely to give the name of their old college than that of Oxford: Magdalen, Christ Church, Jesus, Balliol, etc., each college being, effectively, a world in itself. For both the undergraduates and the fellows (known as “dons"—a hangover from the days when the older colleges were still Catholic ecclesiastical institutions), their college is their home, the center of their world, as the regiment is for officers and senior NCOs in the British army. They eat there; they study there (for the most part); the undergraduates live there for the first two of their three years, as do bachelor dons; and the undergraduates’ academic career is centered on their once-a-week meeting with their tutor, often a fellow of their college, who usually sets them an essay to write, and listens to it at the next tutorial, giving his opinions afterward and setting a direction for further reading, sometimes over a glass of sherry. Much of the benefit of an Oxford education is derived from the undergraduate’s relationship with the tutor—if the personalities dovetail, if there is a bond of mutual sympathy and interest, muchcan be attained. In the absence of these things, disenchantment can quickly set in.*

Lawrence, as so often in his life, was a special case. Unlike his classmates, he did not live at his college. They had assigned “rooms,” usually a sitting room-study and a bedroom; there were several rooms to a staircase, with “a scout"—a combination of valet, butler, and housemaid—to look after the residents. Rooms ranged from medieval discomfort to palatial grandeur, according to the students’ ability to pay, and according to an indecipherable social code in the office of the bursar, who made the assignments. In Lawrence’s day, it was quite common for undergraduates to be served breakfast, lunch, or tea in their rooms, and for those who could afford it, full dinner parties, with a special menu and wines chosen from the college’s cellar. The entrance to each set of rooms (usually two to a landing) was through a pair of doors, and when the outer one was closed (this was called “sporting one’s oak”) it was a sign that one did not wish to be disturbed. Thus the undergraduates had a degree of privacy that few of them could have enjoyed at boarding school or, for the most part, at home.

Lawrence’s principal tutor, Reginald Lane Poole, was actually at his older brother’s college, St. John’s, rather than at Jesus. Poole was not perhaps the ideal tutor for such a rara avis as Lawrence—he was keeper of the archives and lecturer of diplomacy at Oxford, the author of 151 scholarly works, a forbiddingly conventional historian who preferred solidly based research to brilliant insight, and who was described by one of Lawrence’s friends at Oxford as looking “as if he descended from a long line of maiden aunts.” In fact, Lawrence seems to have found two much more interesting and (perhaps interested) unofficial tutors: his crammer, L. C. Jane, whom he continued to visit, often at odd hours of the night; and David Hogarth, the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who, untilhis death in 1927, remained one of the most powerful influences in Lawrence’s life.

Except for one term in 1908, Lawrence continued to live at home throughout his years at Jesus, and since he seldom ate dinner “at Hall"—indeed, he seldom participated in any conventional meal, except that he had a fondness for tea (among his few self-indulgences was a sweet tooth)—his contact with his fellow undergraduates was minimal. He did not take part in team sports or frequent the Junior Common Room or join any of the undergraduate clubs and societies that are deemed to be an essential part of the Oxford experience. In short, he managed to attend Oxford on his own terms. The only exception was his service in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps. Lawrence was one of the first to volunteer, no doubt in part because as a schoolboy he had been in a similar organization, the St. Aldate’s Church Lads’ Brigade, and perhaps because he thought he might as well put to some use his brief service in the army. In addition, he was made a signaler, a position that in those days involved cycling, his passion. Besides, his enthusiasm for military matters was genuine, and not necessarily confined to reading books on strategy and tactics.

Lawrence was never friendless, despite his Cheshire cat-like invisibility at Jesus. “Scroggs” Beeson was up, though not at the same college, and Lawrence made friends with several undergraduates at Jesus, including an American Rhodes Scholar from Kansas, W. O. Ault; and Vyvyan W. Richards, a “Welsh-American,” with whom Lawrence had a more intimate friendship than with any other contemporary. Ault’s tutor was also Reginald Lane Poole, and as Ault was also studying medieval history he saw quite a lot of Lawrence, who introduced him to the art of taking brass rubbings. Lawrence seems to have been the only person at Jesus who did not treat Ault as an outsider because he was American.

Vyvyan Richards was rather more of a soul mate than Scroggs or Ault, a sensitive young man who shared Lawrence’s medieval interests and, like Lawrence, was a passionate devotee of William Morris, the Victorian aesthete and founder of a school of arts and crafts. Much of Morris’s work was in the Gothic revival mode—indeed, the curious roof design of Lawrence’s cottage in the garden at 2 Polstead Road looks very much as if it had been inspired by the cupolas of the famous “Red House” Morris had designed and built for himself and his wife Jane.* Lawrence and Richards shared Morris’s passionate commitment to designing and printing beautiful books, when possible by hand, with hand-set type, eschewing altogether the modern linotype and the machine press, in favor of medieval printing methods and hand-painted illumination.

They even discussed setting up a hand press of their own somewhere in the English countryside, and devoting themselves to printing limited or single-copy editions of the great books—a plan that elicited a rare degree of disapproval from Lawrence’s usually silent father. It is not altogether clear whether Thomas Lawrence disapproved of the fantasy that a hand press could be made into a paying proposition, or whether he realized immediately, unlike his son, that Richards was a homosexual and deeply attracted to Ned. On the first point Thomas was a sound judge of business schemes—he had, after all, once managed a very large estate, and was still involved in it—and on the second he was worldly enough to recognize the nature of Richards’s affection for Ned immediately, even if Ned did not. It had been only thirteen years since Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecencies,” in what had been one of the most publicized scandals of the age, and homosexuality not only was on every parent’s mind but was punishable by social disgrace and even imprisonment.

Vyvyan Richards may have summed up the nature of their friendship best when he said, much later in life, “Quite frankly, for me it was love at first sight,” and went on to regret that Lawrence “had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He never gave even the slightest sign that he understood my motives, or fathomed my desire…. I realize now that he was sexless—at least that he was unaware of sex.” This may or may not be true—perhaps Lawrence was more aware of the nature of Richards’s interest than he let on, but at the same timewas unwilling to respond to it, and since he nevertheless liked Richards, solved the problem by simply ignoring it. It may have consoled Richards to suppose that Lawrence was “sexless,” but it seems more likely that Lawrence was, from an early age, determined to suppress any sexual feelings, whether toward Richards or anyone else. It is possible, of course, that he might have been homosexual had he allowed his sexual instincts to emerge, but since he was a master of self-control, this never happened until much later in his life, and even then in a very strange form.

At the time he met Richards, Lawrence was in the process, common to most undergraduates, of testing his limits. Richards reported that his friend went swimming at night in the winter, plunging through a gap in the ice into a river (probably the Cherwell). Lawrence also went without food or sleep for protracted periods of time, and spent many hours at the Oxford University Officers’ Training Course pistol range, practicing with both the strong and the weak hand to the point of exhaustion. It is possible that Lawrence was already preparing himself for some great feat—military glory and heroism were never far from his mind—but he may also have been submitting himself to a punishing and demanding regime intended to subdue and control just those urges which Vyvyan Richards hoped to arouse in him. In those days it was believed that ejaculation of any kind weakened the body, and athletes were sternly warned against sexual relationships and masturbation. Lawrence, as one who always carried things too far, invented for himself the most punishing physical routine he could stand.

Whether or not he recognized the nature of Richards’s affection, Lawrence was held back from any sexual activity by a naturally abstemious nature, a lack of any sensible sexual education, and his extreme religious upbringing at home. In addition, Lawrence never experienced the sexual curiosity that develops between boys in boarding school, and he had had what may have been a frightening experience as a boy in a barracks full of grown men. The result, perhaps intensified by self-consciousness over his short stature, was to produce a personality that was not so much “sexless” as armored against sexual temptation, and thelonger he avoided any kind of sexual relationship, the more difficult it became for him to have one. His youngest brother, Arnold, was of the opinion that Lawrence died a virgin, and he was surely right.

It is very significant that at the same time Lawrence was gently deflecting Vyvyan Richards’s advances, while retaining Richards as a friend—and actually making plans for the two of them to share a William Morris-inspired country cottage where they would hand-print aesthetically satisfying volumes, a cottage complete with separate “shut beds” marked “Meum” and “Tuam"—Lawrence made the mistake of proposing marriage to a young woman.

Lawrence’s first sight of Janet Laurie has a certain innocent sexual ambivalence to it. In the spring of 1894, when the Lawrences moved to New Forest, the Lauries were neighbors. Apparently, Janet’s parents had wanted a son, and therefore had the little girl’s hair cut short, and dressed her in a boy’s clothes—one of those strange decisions that, at the time, often made otherwise quite ordinary English families seem bizarre to foreigners. One Sunday morning, when the Lawrences were attending church, Ned saw Janet sitting in a pew in front of him, and said to his nanny, “What a naughty little boy to keep his hat on in church.” Janet turned around, stuck her tongue out at him, and said, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.” “And a very rude little girl,” Nanny said predictably, but a friendship had been struck, and Janet soon became a frequent visitor at Langley Lodge. Although Sarah was generally dismissive of girls—"We could never be bothered with girls in our house,” she would tell the poet Robert Graves, when he came to write a biography of T. E. Lawrence after the war—she seems to have made an exception for Janet, whom Ned particularly liked, since Janet was something of a tomboy.

Over the years, Janet became a friend of all the Lawrence boys; for a time, she was at a boarding school in Oxford, and although she went home after the death of her father, she continued to pay frequent visits to 2 Polstead Road, and “sometimes stayed there.” She seems to have played the role of a sister to all the boys, and to have been accepted by their parents almost as one of the family.

A photograph of Janet taken when she might have been about seventeen shows an attractive young woman, with a striking profile, very lively eyes, and a full mouth, dressed in a white blouse rather like a man’s shirt, with a tie, possibly the summer uniform of her school. She manages to look severe and sensual at the same time. Everybody who met her agreed that she was “a lovely girl,” as well as being good-natured and fun. Sarah went so far as to hope that her eldest son, Bob, might marry Janet one day, and no doubt did what she could to encourage that, but Bob was too serious and easily shocked to attract Janet. Ned would later say of his older brother, who would become a missionary doctor, “He is illuminated from inside, not from out. His face very often shines like a lamp.” Janet set her cap at the taller and better-looking Will instead, incurring Sarah’s displeasure, since Sarah disliked having her plans thwarted.

Ned was “more than two years younger” than Janet, and considerably shorter. She saw him as a beloved and mischievous younger brother, always up to such tricks as sneaking her into his room at Jesus for tea, or egging her on to toss a sugar cube through the open window of a don. She was therefore surprised when Ned abruptly proposed to her one evening after dinner, though she might have guessed that something was up when Ned waited until everybody else had left the dining room, then carefully bolted the door. Given Ned’s taste for practical jokes, she very likely assumed that she was about to become the victim of one, and was therefore understandably astonished when he asked her to marry him, without even a preliminary kiss, indeed without even looking her in the eye. Although she would later say she realized at once that he was serious, her immediate reaction, perhaps out of shock, was to laugh. A moment of dreadful embarrassment followed—there they were, locked in the dining room, with the rest of the Lawrence family no doubt wondering what had become of them. Ned was deeply hurt, but he confined himself to saying, “Oh, I see,” and seems afterward never to have held it against her.

It is a scene straight out of an English farce, but it must have been an awful moment for Lawrence. Some of those who have written about himhave raised the possibility that Janet’s refusal to marry him was what drove him to spend years in the Middle East in the company of men, but that may be attaching too much importance to the incident. It seems more likely that Lawrence was attempting to sort out his problems with Vyvyan Richards’s increasing emotional dependency by abruptly proposing to Janet—he was always one for the big, dramatic, life-changing gesture. Whatever the case, Lawrence was never as ill at ease with women as has been claimed. Many of them, like Janet, were close friends, but in the end, Lawrence no more wanted a sexual relationship with a woman than he did with Richards.

It may be true that Lawrence “worshipped Janet from afar,” in later years, or that he referred to her to a friend as “the girl I adore,” but one should not read too much into this. His feelings for Clare Sydney Smith, the wife of his commanding officer toward the end of his life, were amiable enough, but there is no hint of any sexual interest on Lawrence’s part;* he was comfortable enough with women who had the capacity and patience to break through his rather brittle defenses, and yet respected his privacy and the orderly way he isolated himself when he felt a need for isolation. Except for the impulsive marriage proposal, he preferred to keep his distance, and cannot ever have imagined that he could live within the confines of marriage. One suspects that apart from the momentary damage to his amour propre, Lawrence was probably more relieved than upset when Janet turned him down.

Despite his peculiarities Lawrence, like other undergraduates, sought fun in breaking rules and regulations, and in the kind of pranks that seem daring and hilarious at the time, but may not necessarily seem so many years later when they are retold. Lawrence, like many undergraduates over the centuries, became an expert at climbing the walls and towers of the Oxford colleges, by day to take photographs and by night for his own amusement. One of his biographers, Robert Graves, claimed that Lawrence invented “the now classic climb from Balliol College to Keble College,” and it may be so.* His mother vigorously denied that Ned ever left his cottage in the garden to crawl around the roofs of Oxford at night; she said that he was always home by midnight. But since he often visited his friend the crammer, L. C. Jane, between midnight and four in the morning, this may be just another example of parental self-delusion. One friend told of Lawrence’s turning up in his rooms one evening, exhausted after having studied for forty-five hours nonstop without food or sleep, and firing a revolver loaded with blank cartridges out the window. This friend also told of Lawrence’s nearly drowning when he insisted on canoeing on the Cherwell during a winter flood. A famous feat of Lawrence’s was to lead a canoe trip at night down the Trill Mill stream, the sewer that runs under the streets of Oxford, firing blank cartridges up through the gratings in the streets above. Whether this was a first or not is hard to say—it has certainly been done again since.

Despite his eccentricities regarding nourishment and sleep, Lawrence’s years at Jesus do not seem all that different from the usual undergraduate experience. In those days, there was a deep social divide between “exhibitioners"—bright young men who had won a partial scholarship and were expected to work hard and earn a “First"—and young men from well-to-do families and public schools, for whom Oxford was more likely to be a social experience. Lawrence and his friends were clearly in the former group: basically serious, hardworking, and determined to do well, but not averse to the occasional prank—indeed Lawrence’s taste for practical jokes and for pulling the legs of people naive enough to believe him was apparently already fully developed, and would not invariably seem among his most endearing qualities.

In one way, however, Lawrence was very different from most undergraduates. He already had a very firm sense of what he wanted to do, andremarkable skill in meeting, and winning over, those who might one day be of use to him. It was also clear to Lawrence what he did not want to do, which was to become a don himself. This was just as well, since even the admiring Jane did not consider him “a scholar by temperament.” He still had Byronic fantasies of becoming a hero and of liberating a people—it was not yet clear which people he had in mind—and something more than a layman’s interest in military history, strategy, and tactics; but his interest in archaeology and medieval buildings was the strongest focus of his work at Oxford. Revealingly, Lawrence chose to write a thesis on medieval fortifications, about which he already knew a good deal, indeed perhaps more than his examiners. This subject would have the further advantage of allowing him to make use of his growing skill as a photographer and a cartographer, as well as providing a good reason for spending the vacations away from home. Warfare was never far from his mind, despite his other interests.

In preparation for his thesis, Lawrence did another of his marathon bicycle tours of France, sending home long letters, which often read as if he intended to incorporate them into the thesis later on. In the summer of 1907 he had taken a bicycle tour through northern France, traveling part of the route in the company of his father, who was on the way to join the rest of the Lawrence family on Jersey, in the Channel Isles, where they were spending their summer holiday. In the summer of 1908 he went alone on a much more ambitious 2,400-mile tour of France to examine the castles and fortresses he had not already seen. Once again, his letters (mostly to his mother) are formidably detailed, evincing Lawrence’s lifelong struggle to create a literary style of his own. His interest in the Middle East is clearly strong and growing. In his first letter he asks his mother to send him all the information she can get from the newspapers about political events in Turkey, where the sultan was under pressure from the “Young Turks” to grant a constitution. Lawrence refers to “the rubbish here that they call newspapers,” exhibiting exactly the same tone of impatience with the French that he would show toward them during the war, and afterward at the peace conference.

Ten days later, when he writes from Aigues-Mortes, in Provence, the fact that his attention is moving toward the Middle East is repeated, in a kind of poetic vision that prefigures his travels there: “I rode to Les Baux, a queer little ruined & dying town upon a lonely ‘olive sandalled’ mountain. Here I had a most delightful surprise. I was looking from the edge of a precipice down the valley far over the plain, watching the green changing into brown, & the brown into a grey line far away on the horizon, when suddenly the sun leaped from behind a cloud, & a sort of silver shiver passed over the grey: then I understood, & instinctively burst out with a cry of ‘T??assa, T??assa’ [Thalassa, Thalassa], that echoed down the valley & startled an eagle from the opposite hill.” The shout of the Greeks in Xenophon’s Anabasis when they at last glimpsed the Black Sea shining in front of them after their 1,000-mile retreat from what is now Iraq came naturally to a young man steeped in the classics, as Lawrence was; but, more important, it was his first distant glimpse of the Mediterranean.

Today, we can have no idea of what it then meant to a well-educated young Englishman—the Mediterranean is now just a few hours away by plane, and its shores are an endless array of tourist destinations—but in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was still the focal point of European imagination, culture, and respect for the past, a world at once classical and deeply romantic.

A day later, Lawrence reached the sea and bathed in it, writing afterward to his mother, “I felt at last that I had reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East: Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria … they were all there, and all within reach…. I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow.”

Perhaps fortunately, no such passage was offered, and Lawrence bicycled off to Nоmes, and from there by stages to Narbonne and Carcassonne. He was bronzed, thin, and fit, and he amazed the French by his feats of endurance and his diet—he ate 126 green plums in one day, or so he claimed. He was plagued only by dense clouds of mosquitoes (which, as any tourist to the region can attest, are still a problem today) and by Americans who overtipped tourist guides at the major sites. Perhaps in deference to his mother, Lawrence spent more time writing home about churches than castles. On this trip, as on all future ones, Lawrence carried a camera—whether his own or his father’s is not clear—and although he depreciates his own pictures, and says he expects to have to burn them, they are, like his drawings, far beyond the usual work of amateur photographers.

He arrived back at Oxford in the first week of September, having assembled a good part of what he needed in terms of his thesis, though he had not as yet decided what the exact theme would be—it would not be enough to have examined a large number of English and French fortresses and describe them in detail; he would need to develop a theory about them and demonstrate it convincingly. This was provided for him by C. F. Bell of the Ashmolean, when Lawrence was showing him the drawings and photographs from the summer trip. Bell suggested that Lawrence might study the question whether the earliest crusaders had brought back to Europe from the Middle East the pointed arch and vault that are the trademarks of medieval Gothic architecture, or whether instead they had brought these ideas with them to the Middle East, thus introducing those architectural elements into the Arab world. To Lawrence, one of the major attractions of his friend Bell’s idea lay in the fact that the distinguished Oxford scholar Charles Oman, author of The Art of War in the Middle Ages, took the latter point of view, which was therefore the orthodox answer. Nothing would be more likely to pique the examiners’ interest than an undergraduate’s attacking accepted or conventional wisdom, particularly when it was held by such a formidable figure as Oman, who was virtually a one-man historical industry. In fact, Lawrence could hardly have chosen a more tempting person to contradict than Professor Oman, whose influence was enormous in just those areas where Lawrence intended to make his career: history and archaeology. The “imp” in Lawrence must have been instantly aroused. And as if that were not temptation enough, it was immediately apparent to Lawrence that in order to write his thesis, he would need to journey to the Middle East and survey the crusaders’ castles for himself. Since this was exactly where he dreamed of going, the attraction was irresistible.

Bell’s boss D. G. Hogarth was an experienced traveler who had worked on archaeological digs in Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, and Crete, and Lawrence sensibly consulted him. Hogarth was discouraging—the summer was the wrong time of year to go; Lawrence would need money to hire a guide and servants to look after his tent and animals. Lawrence replied firmly that he was going, and intended to walk, not to ride, and do without a tent or servants altogether. “Europeans don’t walk in Syria,” Hogarth said; “it isn’t safe or pleasant.” Lawrence replied, “Well, I do,” and thus a lifelong friendship began.

Feeling that he had failed to convey the dangers facing travelers to the Middle East, Hogarth suggested that Lawrence write for advice to C. M. Doughty, the famous explorer of Arabia and author of the book Arabia Deserta, which would play an influential role in Lawrence’s life. Hogarth may not at this point have realized the degree to which danger and physical hardship constituted a challenge for Lawrence, or that testing his powers of endurance was as irresistible as taking a potshot at Professor Oman’s theories. Doughty’s reply was even more discouraging than Hogarth’s well-intentioned advice. In Doughty’s opinion, the heat in July and August would be unbearable; he described Syria as “a land of squalor,” considered travel on foot “out of the question,” warned of “ill-will” toward Europeans on the part of the local population, and suggested that at a minimum a mule or a horse and its owner were necessary.

Coming from a man who had taken the pilgrim route to Mecca under appalling conditions, and gone on to reach some of the most remote cities in central Arabia, it was advice that any sensible person would have taken; but Lawrence cheerfully replied that his “little pleasure trip” promised to be more interesting than he had bargained for, and proceeded to read Doughty’s book, which was nearly 600,000 words long and one of those great classics more talked about than read. Lawrence was strongly influenced by Doughty’s idiosyncratic, convoluted, somewhat antiquarian style, and by Doughty’s courage in following the Bedouin through the desert from Damascus to Jidda without any of the privileges and comforts of a European traveler. Doughty, like Hogarth, would become a friend and admirer of Lawrence, always eager to hear of his young acolyte’s adventures.

Lawrence prepared himself methodically for the journey—first, he found an instructor in Arabic, a half-Irish, half-Arab Protestant clergyman. He also found, in the person of E. H. New, somebody who could improve his architectural drawings. In both cases he benefited from the fact that in Oxford there is always somebody, somewhere who is an expert on any subject, however abstruse—it is just a question of digging him or her out. Lawrence also dug out C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon, who had actually visited some of the castles Lawrence was interested in, and who lent Lawrence his own maps, on which he had made many useful notations.

Lawrence planned to wear “a lightweight suit with many pockets,” into which he put two thin shirts, a spare pair of socks, the all-important camera, and film packs. He also carried what his biographers describe as “a revolver,” but which may in fact have been a Mauser C96 7.63-millimeter automatic pistol,* with adjustable sights, which he mentions in one of his letters. His father gave him either Ј100 or Ј200 for the journey—it is hard to know which, but either way it represented a considerable sum of money at the time, $10,000 at least in contemporary terms. From this, Lawrence paid his passage, and bought what was then an expensive pistol and a camera that cost Ј40.

His father’s generosity was matched by that of the Earl Curzon,† who was a former viceroy of India and then chancellor of the University of Oxford (and with whom Lawrence would clash bitterly after the war, when Curzon was foreign secretary). At the urging of the head of Lawrence’scollege, Curzon persuaded the Ottoman government to issue the necessary irades—essentially letters of safe conduct to be shown to the local authorities—without which travel in the more remote parts of the Ottoman Empire was very difficult.

In our own age, when a journey to even the most faraway places is measured in hours and when young people backpack all over the world and keep in touch by cell phone, it is hard to imagine just how isolated and primitive the Ottoman Empire once was. The Turkish railway system, most of it financed and built by the Germans, was still makeshift and primitive, and whole sections had yet to be built. To travel from Haidar Pasha, on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, the starting point of the Baghdad Railway, to Baghdad, nearly 900 miles away, it was necessary to leave the train and take to donkey, horse, or mule twice, since two important tunnels remained uncompleted; and the lines to the south were of different gauges, so that passengers and goods had to be unloaded and reloaded at several points. In addition, there were still only single-line tracks, which enormously complicated the task of moving rail traffic in two directions. This alone made travel in the Ottoman Empire a daunting proposition.

Hospitals were few, far between, and primitive; diseases such as cholera and malaria were rife; sanitation was lacking outside hotels de grand luxe in the major cities; roads were mostly dirt tracks; and south and east of Damascus the Arabs made a practice of robbing strangers. Except for Constantinople, a big and cosmopolitan city, life in most of the Ottoman Empire was still ruled by family, clan, or tribe; and much of the empire was inhabited by rival or warring nationalities and ethnic groups. The “Young Turks” who had taken power in 1908 were determined to modernize the country, but progress was slow, and deeply resisted. Over the decades, the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of Europe, and subjected to any number of humiliating concessions. Under one such concession, foreigners were tried according to the laws of their own country, rather than those of Turkey; as a result, both the Turks who ruled the empireand the Arabs who resented the presence of all foreigners were deeply hostile to the western powers.

Still, all this must be set against the spontaneous generosity of all the ethnic groups in the empire, especially the Arabs, to whom hospitality to a stranger was (and remains) both a religious obligation and a matter of honor. They managed, however, to combine this with a voracious appetite for theft—so long as you were not a guest under their roof, or in their tent, you were fair game. Thus it was that Lawrence received food and a night’s lodging, however poor his host, but was also shot at, robbed, and badly beaten. Missionaries of numerous denominations and nationalities, including Americans, Scots, and Jews, also offered him hospitality. In all his lengthy letters home Lawrence benefited from the fact that the British and most of the major European powers ran their own post offices and postal services in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish post office being notoriously unreliable. His letters give no hint of homesickness, fear, complaint, or self-doubt. He walked more than 1,000 miles, mostly on rough, rocky paths, for up to thirteen hours a day in temperatures ranging from ninety to 107 degrees, and visited the sites of thirty-six crusader castles—an extraordinary achievement.

He left England on June 18, 1909, on board the P&O liner SS Mongolia. It made only two short stops, at Gibraltar and Marseille, then went on to Port Said, where he was stuck for five nights in one of the most raucous and sordid ports on earth waiting for a berth on a ship to Beirut. He spent most of his time on board studying Arabic, and although he dismissed the voyage as “a monstrous waste of time,” he seems to have enjoyed the variegated company at his table on the Mongolia: “a French girl & a German male, a Swede, two Spaniards, an Indian of some sort, an Italian, an Arab, and a Greek. Swede, & Hindu talk English.” He reached Port Said on June 30, and reported home by letter that he enjoyed good bathing on the beach; had seen the Suez Canal; and was eating melons, peaches, apricots, and grapes—and that nevertheless Port Said was “a horrible place” (few travelers will disagree). He did not arrive in Beirut until July 6—eighteen days for a journey that would now take six hours.

From the beginning, he set himself a demanding pace, averaging about twenty miles on foot a day. Although he is usually portrayed as an instinctive loner, he had actually made plans in Beirut to go with a party of five American tutors at the American College there, but one of them fell ill, so they dropped out and he went on alone. He had no trouble finding places to stay, either in native homes or at missions, though he remarks on the number of flea bites he picked up—inevitably, since most Palestinian houses were built on two levels, the higher end for the family, and the lower one for the animals, both under one roof. He praised the food even in the most modest homes: leben, a kind of thin yogurt, eaten by dipping a piece of rolled-up bread into the bowl; two kinds of bread, one small and dusted with sesame seeds and cumin, which he liked, and the other a very thin, flat, round bread, sometimes three feet in diameter and very dry and brittle, which he didn’t. He always offered to pay; sometimes money was accepted, but mostly it was not. His letters home could serve as models for anybody writing about travel and adventure off the beaten path, and there is in them, though he seldom gets credit for it, a certain sweetness toward people, a desire to believe the best of them until they proved otherwise. He always radiated a powerful, even incandescent enthusiasm and curiosity that seemed to light up everything he saw, however weary, footsore, or sick he was.

And sick he was, quite often—he had already contracted malaria on his bike trip through the south of France, and now he contracted a different and more serious strain; his feet gave him endless trouble; his face and hands were burned and chapped by the heat and the wind; he was covered with insect bites from head to foot; and he clearly didn’t care.

Those who have not read Lawrence’s letters home, to his parents and to his brothers, can have no idea of just how likable he was, and how far removed from the neurotic figure, obsessed by his own illegitimacy, whom some of his biographers and critics have described. What is more, his letters reveal an enviable family picture—there is not a hint of jealousy between the brothers, and his parents are interested in every single thing that Ned does. However fierce the psychological tug-of-war wasbetween Sarah and her second son—a contest that Ned could never win, but that he learned to avoid by putting as much distance as he could between himself and his mother—their concern for each other and his efforts to please her are clear. Simply by being in the Holy Land, of course, he was pleasing her as he could never have done by traveling in France, no matter how many miles he rode a day, or how few shillings a day he spent on himself.

It is, one assumes, largely for her benefit that his letters are not just about local customs and crusaders’ fortresses, but are shot through with biblical references: “From Dan we passed to the site of Abel-Beth-Maachah, where Sheba was finally run to earth by Joab.” Lawrence never neglects to point out each of the biblical sites he visits, though these sites are not his primary interest, of course; and he displays throughout his letters an amazing amount of biblical knowledge—perhaps not so extraordinary for somebody brought up in a family with daily Bible readings. He notes that he has stood on the place where the Arabs believe Jonah was cast ashore, and describes a beautiful spring dedicated by the Greeks to Pan in the village of Banias (on the Golan Heights), which “Mother will remember from Matthew xvi or Mark viii and other places.”

Given Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the Arab cause, it is interesting that he remarks about Palestine: “The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.” After describing the primitive farming methods of the Arabs, he notes by contrast that he has just heard the news of Louis Blйriot’s first crossing of the Channel by airplane. Lawrence has great sympathy for the Arabs, but a brisk impatience with the Turks, whom he sees, correctly, as retarding political development and education, and imposing on all subject races of the empire a bureaucracy that is slow moving, corrupt, and punitive. Although he has yet to meet the Bedouin, or even to see the desert—for he is trudging up and down the stony hills of what is now Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, climbing, as he remarks wearily (and with pardonable exaggeration), the height of Mont Blanc every day—he notes with approval the farmers “ploughing intheir fields” with a revolver on their belt or a rifle over their shoulder, and the occasional appearance of a desert Arab in a kufiyya. As if it were a premonition of many a page in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes of the heat in northern Palestine: “Inland, up the mountains, it is cooler, though when one gets among the large rocks one is stifled: they seem almost to give off a vapour, or heat-breath, that is horrible; add to that a sirocco, a wind that shrivels every green thing it meets, that blisters one’s face & hands, & makes one feel that one is walking towards some gigantic oven; and you get an idea of the vast possibilities.” Since he adds that the shaded hallway of the hotel in Tiberias, even though cooled by a large block of ice, was over 106 degrees, and that it felt “quite cool” compared with the temperature outside in the sun, gives some idea of what Lawrence had in mind by unbearable heat.

It was not only heat that didn’t bother Lawrence—he was also exposed to the sudden violence of the Middle East, and took a certain delight in the experience. His attitude was similar to that of the young Winston Churchill: “Nothing in life is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” Lawrence, who was destined to form with Churchill both an effective team at the Colonial Office and a lifelong mutual admiration society, took much the same delight in the crack of bullets whipping past his head, and had his first experience of it near Aleppo, in what is now Syria. More remarkably, while he tried to pass the incident off with lighthearted good humor in a letter to his mother, he made no attempt to hide what had happened from her, when it would presumably have been very easy to do so by simply not mentioning it.

In Latakia, he had spent the night in the house of a young Arab nobleman, Abdul Kerim, who had just acquired a Mauser pistol similar to Lawrence’s, and amused himself by blazing away from his fortresslike house on a hill at the surrounding villages. A few days later, while Lawrence was on his way to Aleppo, over “the worst road on the face of the globe,” “an ass with an old gun” on a horse took a shot at him from about 200 yards. Since Lawrence was wearing a suit and shoes, and on foot, it would have been obvious that he was a European—the man with the gunmay have felt it was his religious duty to take a potshot at an infidel, or perhaps intended more practically to rob Lawrence, or perhaps both. Lawrence fired back and grazed the horse, which bolted and carried its rider about 800 yards away (not a bad snap shot with a pistol at 200 yards). Lawrence then carefully put up his rear sight as high it would go and fired a shot right over the man’s head,* prompting him to gallop away as fast as he could ride, astonished that “a person with nothing but a pistol could shoot so far.”

Lawrence complained to the governor of the district, who sent all his police out to search for the man, with (of course) no results; one thinks of the police chief’s weary order in Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” The consensus was that Lawrence’s assailant had hoped to bluff him into paying for a safe passage; if so, that was certainly a misreading of Lawrence’s character.

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,* 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 Ј5, 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 Saintrй, “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 “Moliиre & 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.”