Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the beginning it was clear that Lawrence would be no ordinary recruit. Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, replied to his letter asking to join the RAF in the ranks, on January 11, 1922: “With regard to your personal point, I understand it fully, and you too, I think. I am prepared to do all you ask me, if you will tell me for how long you want to join, but I am afraid I could not do it without mentioning it to Winston and my own Secretary of State, and then, whether it could be kept secret I do not know…. What country do you want to serve in, and how? I would make things as easy as anything.” As Lawrence’s release from the Colonial Office approached, he was invited to have dinner and spend the night at Trenchard’s house in Barnet, outside London, to talk things over; and Trenchard made one more appeal to Lawrence to join as an officer, which Lawrence declined.

Trenchard approached the task of getting the most famous man in Britain into the RAF as an ordinary aircraftman with his usual common sense.Lawrence came up with the name John Hume Ross himself. He wanted a short name, and when his youngest brother Arnold mentioned a friend of their mother’s, Mrs.Ross, he chose that. On August 14 Trenchard had Lawrence come to see him at the Air Ministry, and introduced him to Air Vice-Marshal Oliver Swann,the member of the Air Council for Personnel,who was to make the final arrangements.Swann was something less than a willing accomplice.Trenchard might enjoy breaking his own regulations, but Swann lived by them and was “considerably embarrassed” at the “secrecy and subterfuge.” He “disliked the whole business,” and particularly resented the letters he received from Lawrence, which expressed a breezy familiarity and equality that Swann considered inappropriate, and also told Swann a good deal more than he wanted to know about a recruit’s life in the ranks. Swann soon came to dread Lawrence’s letters.He would comment later, with the asperity of a man determined to set matters straight at last: “One would think from [his] letters that I was a close correspondent of Lawrence’s, possibly even a friend of his. But as a matter of fact …1 disliked the whole business….I discouraged communication with or from him.”

Swann’s orders left him in no position to argue, however. Trenchard’s memorandum to him was simple and clear-cut:

It is hereby approved that Colonel T. E. Lawrence be permitted to join the Royal Air Force as an aircraft-hand under the alias ofJohn Hume Ross

AC2 No. 352087He is taking this step to learn what is the life of an airman. On receipt of any communication from him through any channel, asking for his release, orders are to be issued for his discharge forthwith without formality.H. TrenchardCASO. SwannAMP 16.8.22 Since this was dated only two days after Swann was introduced to Lawrence by Trenchard, it is apparently a written confirmation of what had been discussed at their meeting. Swann, a meticulous bureaucrat and a stickler for regulations, could not have been pleased that, apart from the hugger-mugger of slipping “Colonel T. E. Lawrence” into the ranks, something which Swann rightly feared might backfire on them all, Lawrence not only was given the right to opt out of service in the RAF but could do so at any time without going through the correctchannels—i.e., from Lawrence to his sergeant, from his sergeant to his flight commander, from the flight commander to the station commander via the station adjutant, and from there on to the Air Ministry in London. Furthermore, Swann was to be the onlyperson in the RAF, apart from Trenchard himself, who knew that AC2 No. 352087 Ross, J. H., was in fact T. E. Lawrence—so Swann was in the uncomfortable position of having to conceal the truth from his subordinates. Lawrence may have felt that this was great fun, and Trenchard may have shared that feeling, but Swann did not, and was anxious to get Lawrence off his hands as quickly as possible. It could not have made him any happier to know that Lawrence was intending to write a book about his time in the air force, a book in which Swann and his subordinates might expect to appear.

Swann nevertheless arranged for Lawrence to present himself at the RAF recruiting office in Henrietta Street at 10:30 a.m. on August 22. (The date was later altered to August 30, at Lawrence’s request, probably because he needed more time to complete the corrections on the proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom)Lawrence was to ask for Flight Lieutenant Dexter, who would interview him and help him fill out the necessary forms. Dexter had been warned that “Ross” was entering the RAF “specially,” but under no circumstances was Lawrence to tell Dexter who he really was.

Unhappily, Swann was the wrong man for planning this kind of transaction, and not at all suited for the role of Figaro. As Lawrence entered the recruiting office he was intercepted, as Swann should have guessed, by Sergeant Major Gee, who was not about to allow a seedy-looking prospective recruit to say which officer he wanted to see. Instead of taking Lawrence into Dexter’s office, Gee took him straight to Flying Officer W. E. Johns, the chief interviewing officer, who was not in on the secret, and who did not like the look of Lawrence any more than the sergeant major did. Indeed Gee, who was standing behind Lawrence, made a signal to Johns to indicate that he suspected the recruit might be a man running away from the police: such fugitives often tried to join one of the armed services in a hurry, under an assumed name, to avoid prosecution. Johns, who kept in his desk drawer an up-to-date stack of photographs of men wanted by the police, was by no means an ordinary RAF officer. He would become the author of the hugely successful “Biggles” books, ninety-eight of them, about a fictional RAF pilot hero, which remained a mainstay of boys’ reading material in Britain well into the 1950s. He edited the serious aviation magazine Flyingbut was forced out of his job by the government when he became an outspoken opponent of appeasement in the 1930s. He was not a man easily imposed on; nor was Sergeant Major Gee.

According to Johns, he questioned “Ross” sharply, and quickly ascertained that he had no copy of his birth certificate, and no references from previous employers. One might have thought the man who had traveled more than 300 miles across the desert behind enemy lines in 1917 would have provided himself with the necessary documents, or that Air Vice-Marshal Swann would have made sure he had them. Possibly Dexter had been warned not to ask for them, but Johns sent Lawrence packing to obtain these documents, and in the meantime he and the sergeant major examined the photographs from Scotland Yard and determined that “Ross” was not a wanted man. Johns was no fool, and he was thorough—he put in a call to Somerset House (the central registry of births and deaths) and discovered that no John Hume Ross had been born on the date given to him by Lawrence. When Lawrence returned later in the day with a sheaf of papers, Johns quickly realized that they were forged, and had Sergeant Major Gee show him firmly out the door.

The Air Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk from the recruiting office, and Lawrence immediately went there to give Air Vice-Marshal Swann the bad news. Swann sent him back to the recruiting office in the company of a messenger from the Air Ministry bearing a black dispatch case with a copy of Trenchard’s memo to Swann in it. Johns therefore became aware that it was now his job to get “Ross” into the RAF, and also that “Ross” was in fact Lawrence of Arabia. The secret, which Trenchard and Lawrence had hoped to keep for as long as possible, was already out, in the span of a few hours.

A further “stumbling block”* still awaited Lawrence: the medical examination. The RAF doctors were not impressed by Lawrence’s physique, and at five feet six inches (they made him an inch taller than he actually was) and 130 pounds he seemed slightly too small for the RAF; he was also a few years too old. They were curious about his scars, too. He explained away the bayonet wounds between his ribs as barbed-wire scars, but the scars on his buttocks were harder to explain. “Hullo, what the hell’s those marks? Punishment?” one of the doctors asked.

“No, Sir, more like persuasion, Sir, I think,” Lawrence replied, not yet aware that for an aircraftman a clever or flip reply to an officer’s question is always a bad idea—a lesson he would learn the hard way over the next few months.

The doctors, despite encouragement from Johns, eventually rejected Lawrence because his teeth failed to meet the RAF standard—a glance at the dental chart in Lawrence’s RAF medical records does indeed reveal an amazing number of fillings and at least two bridges to replace missing teeth, perhaps more of a comment on the standards of British dental care at the time and the national passion for chocolate than on Lawrence. (Lawrence’s dental chart shows seven teeth missing, and twelve teeth with significant decay, despite the notation that his “Oral Hygiene” was “Good.”)

While Dexter shepherded Lawrence through filling out his application to join the RAF and took care of the standard education test—Lawrence could manage the essay, of course, but not the “square roots … and decimals"—Johns went off to explain his predicament to his commanding officer, who called the personnel office at the Air Ministry to ask what to do. When he had replaced the receiver he told Johns to get “Lawrence of Arabia” into the air force, or “you’ll get your bowler hat.” This was RAF slang for being dismissed from the service. Johns resourcefully found a civilian doctor who was willing to sign the medical form. Johns then signed the form himself, and “Ross” was officially declared fit for service in the RAF. His medical form rather modestly limits the “marks” on his body to “Scars both buttocks,” overlooking the bayonet wounds on the ribs and a number of bullet scars; notes that he has perfect eyesight, as one would expect of such an expert shot as Lawrence; and gives his age as twenty-eight, whereas he was thirty-four.

Any pretense of secrecy vanished when Johns telephoned his opposite number, Flight Lieutenant Nelson, at RAF Uxbridge, the recruit training center, about fifteen miles from the center of London, “to warn him of who was on his way, for by this time Lawrence was making it clear that he had no time for junior officers.” Johns took Lawrence to the station and chatted with him while he waited for the next train to Uxbridge.

They did not part friends. Johns remarked that Lawrence left him “with the memory of a cold, clammy handshake.”

Lawrence left this slightly farcical episode out of The Mint,when he came to write it, and gives the impression that the medical examination at the recruiting office in London went more or less normally, and that the two RAF doctors were eager to pass him as fit. He may also have invented the description of his arrival at Uxbridge, in which he is one of six recruits who are met by a sergeant and marched from the railway station into camp. His description of his first night in the recruits’ hut at Uxbridge rings true enough, however, to anyone who has entered the British armed forces. His fellow recruits were noisy, swore constantly, and smelled of beer, tobacco, and sweat.

Lawrence must also have been disoriented by this sudden immersion into lower-class life. He had a remarkable ability to get on with people who were very different from himself, but these had so far been Arabs and Bedouin tribesmen, foreigners rather than his own fellow countrymen of a different background. He was well brought up, fastidious, brilliantly educated, an ex-officer, however idiosyncratic, and a man whose quiet voice and unmistakable accent identified him immediately as a gentleman. He was also a man who hated to be touched, so he had a natural fear of barracks roughhousing—fistfights, towel-slappings, and all the normal physical horseplay of young men trying hard not to show they were afraid they might not prove tough enough for the rigors of recruit training, since the first weeks of training consisted of a deliberately harsh winnowing-out process, intended to eliminate those who were weak, rebellious, or unamenable to discipline, or who simply lacked esprit de corps.

For a man who had been imprisoned by the Turks, tortured, raped, and wounded countless times, Lawrence ’s reaction to his hut mates at Uxbridge is strangely prim: “ As they swiftly stripped for sleep a reek of body fought with beer and tobacco for the mastery of the room …. The horseplay turned to a rough-house: snatching of trousers, and smacks with the flat of hard hands, followed by clumsy steeplechases over the obstacle of beds which tipped or tilted…. Our hut-refuge was become libertine, brutal, loud-voiced, unwashed.”

Of course war and danger have a certain intoxicating glamour—certainly they did to Lawrence — whereas the prospect of weeks of sodden misery in a crowded hut full of noisy young recruits does not. Hardened as Lawrence was to danger, pain, and death, he had never been to an English boarding school, an experience that might as well have been designed to create a hard, self-protective shell against the small, daily abrasions of communal living, occasional physical violence, and unwelcome intimacy. In fact, Lawrence’s description of life at Uxbridge often sounds like that of a new boy away at school for the first time; for example, he notes, with alarm, that “there had been a rumour of that sinful misery, forced games,” and that “breakfast and dinner were sickening, but ample.”

The next day, Lawrence was once more ordered to write an essay on his birthplace (which he had not seen since he was six weeks old); was submitted to fierce questioning about where he had been during the war (he came up with a story about being interned as an enemy alien in Smyrna, by the Turks); then, after waiting for two hours with forty or fifty other men (good training for the methods of the British armed services, which are usually described as, “Hurry up, and wait!”), he was sworn in at last, and became, officially, “AC2 Ross.”

He describes his hut mates as a blacksmith from Glasgow (who fails his test job), two barmen, a former captain of the King’s Royal Rifles, two seamen, a naval “Marconi operator,” a Great Western Railway machinist, lorry drivers, clerks, photographers, mechanics, “a fair microcosm of unemployed England.” Lawrence sums up this mixed bag accurately enough, pointing out that they are not the “unemployable,” the bottom of the barrel, but merely those who have lost their jobs, or their way, or had financial or woman trouble of one kind or another. At the same time, it is not Kipling’s army, or the French Foreign Legion; most of the men in Lawrence’s hut have a trade of some kind, and hope to pursue it, or something similar to it, once they have finished the twelve weeks of “square bashing” (drill), “bull” (polishing and shining their kit and their surroundings until their boots, their brass, and the barracks floor gleam like mirrors), and fatigue duties, mostly filthy, demeaning, and back-breaking hard labor, all intended to teach the raw recruit that his time and his body belong to the RAF. Not surprisingly, given his age and background, Lawrence was at first slow at drill, hated PT (physical training), and had no skill at turning his brown, lusterless boots into glossy black ones that shone like patent leather.* But like most people he found that there were others far less competent than himself, and that once the recruits in his hut were uniformed and put into the training program, their camaraderie, gruff sympathy, occasional good advice, and commitment to one another made the training program more bearable. There were no winners or losers; it was not a competitive effort and so there was no personal gain in being better turned out than the man next to you; the entire purpose of the program was to perfect the unit,not the individual, and to turn your “flight” (as a company is called in the RAF) into a gleaming, responsive, perfectly drilled body of men on the parade ground.

For somebody as individualistic as Lawrence, this was not easy to learn. Sticking it out must have required all of his admittedly formidable self-discipline, and this makes his effort to complete every part of his recruit training even more impressive. He wrote about it from time to time in some detail to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, under the mistaken impression that Swann wanted to know what the life of a recruit was like, or was interested in improving the training program. In fact, what Swann wanted most was not to hear from him at all.“I’m not very certain of myself,” Lawrence wrote to Swann, after his first few days, “for the crudities, which aren’t as bad as I expected, worry me far more than I expected: and physically I can only just scrape through the days….If I can get able to sleep, and to eat the food, and to go through the PT I’ll be all right. The present worry is 90 per cent nerves…. Please tell the C.A.S.[Trenchard] that I’m delighted and most grateful to him and to you for what you have done.Don’t bother to keep an eye on what happens to me.” It may be imagined with what dread the unfortunate Swann opened these long letters. He was convinced that no matter how well it was handled, Lawrence’s enlistment would blow up in his face, and at the same time his orders from Trenchard were precisely to “keep an eye on” Lawrence, something he could hardly do from his desk in London.

As it happened, the commanding officer of RAF Uxbridge, Wing Commander Ian Malcolm Bonham-Carter, CB, OBE, without knowing who Ross was, seems to have picked him out on sight as the wrong kind of airman.In The Mint,Lawrence reserves his harshest language for Bonham-Carter.It goes without saying that the worst thing a recruit can do is to attract the attention of the commanding officer in any way, but Lawrence succeeded in doing so almost immediately. It might have amused Bonham-Carter to know that he and “Ross” were both Companions of the Order of the Bath, but then again, probably not.In photographs Bonham-Carter is enormously good-looking, his uniform is perfectly tailored, and his expression is severe. He had a reputation as “a strict disciplinarian,” but as Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who had served with him, pointed out later—when The Mintwas finally published—a disciplinarian was exactly the kind of man who was needed to run the recruit training depot. Bonham-Carter had been wounded in the war. He lost his left leg and the use of one arm, and sustained numerous other wounds, but often refused to wear a prosthetic limb, relying on crutches instead. It may be that Lawrence’s hesitancy at PT drew Bonham-Carter’s attention, for the commanding officer would drive over from his house to watch the recruits doing their physical training before breakfast at dawn, and would join in despite his wounds, doing the exercises as best he could while supporting himself against the cookhouse wall with one hand. Lawrence dismissed this as “theatrical swank"; decided that since Bonham-Carter was “always resentfully in pain,” he was determined that the recruits should at least be uncomfortable; and complained that his presence forced the PT instructor to drag out the exercise “to its uttermost minute.” Lawrence describes the commanding officer as “only the shards of a man,” but he may have been exaggerating for effect: Bonham-Carter not only did the same physical exercises as the recruits but drove his own two-seat sports car, continued to fly, and would go on to serve during World War II as “duty air commodore” in the Operations Room of RAF Fighter Command. In any case, when Lawrence’s turn came for duty as Bonham-Carter’s “headquarters runner,” the experience was so unpleasant that during a kit inspection of one of the huts Lawrence “found himself trembling with clenched fists,” repeating to himself, “I must hit him, I must,” but held himself back. He describes watching the commanding officer “pulled over on his face” when his two leashed dogs ran after a cat, and the airmen standing around “silently watching him struggle” to get back on his feet, but refusing to help, muttering, “ ‘Let the old cunt rot.’ “ Lawrence adds that at Bonham-Carter’s next command the airfield “was ringed with his men almost on their knees, praying he would crash.”

Lawrence also attracted the attention of the drill adjutant, Breese, a former regimental sergeant major of the Brigade of Guards, for whom drill was the equivalent of a religion, and who was responsible for the training of all the recruits once they had been separated into squads. Breese lived and breathed drill, and because he was an ex-Guardsman perfection was the only standard he knew. He announced to each new batch of recruits that any of them could come “and see him privately about any worries they had,” and Lawrence unwisely chose to take this literally and avail himself of the privilege. He thus broke two of the most important rules of surviving as a recruit: first, keep out of sight of officers as much as possible; and second, approach an officer only through your own NCO, and with the NCO’s approval. Breese, who had no idea who Ross was, asked him if he had “woman troubles,” the usual reason for an airman’s asking to see the drill adjutant, and was unpleasantly surprised when Ross indignantly denied it, and said “that what he wanted was a room where he could do some writing undisturbed.” On his cot at night, Lawrence had been writing the notes that would become the first part of The Mint,and not surprisingly he found it difficult to concentrate in a crowded, noisy hut. Breese, taken aback, replied that with 1,100 recruits in the depot it was impossible to provide each of them with a study, but that he could use the NAAFI writing room whenever he liked, on his time off. Apart from the oddness of the request, something about Lawrence’s manner—a kind of lofty sense of superiority and entitlement, just one step short of insolence, and clearly inappropriate to a mere recruit—may have put Breese on his guard, and made him decide to keep his eye on AC2 Ross.

The result was an unwelcome torrent of kit inspections for Lawrence. Breese claims to have admonished him for being untidy and “consistently dirty,* for being insubordinate to his hut sergeant, for refusing to obey an order about his kit, and for being consistently late on parade,” although this seems unlikely, given the fact that Lawrence was on “the crack drill squad,” as Jeremy Wilson points out, and also eager to please. When Breese asked Lawrence why he was late for one parade, Lawrence replied “that he had always felt a little tired in the early morning.” If so, this is the kind of clever or smart-alecky remark that might have won him the admiration of his hut mates but was bound to infuriate an officer. Breese put him up on charges several times and finally tried to have him dismissed from the RAF for insubordination, but at that point Breese was sharply warned that Ross would have to stay.

Once, when a senior officer was inspecting the hut and noticed a copy of Niels Lyhne,a novel by the Danish novelist J. P. Jacobsen, “in the original” among Lawrence’s possessions, he asked Lawrence why on earth he had joined the air force. Lawrence replied, “I think I had a mental breakdown, Sir.” This reply immediately got him put up on a charge, though it later turned out that the officer was merely interested in the presence among the recruits of a man with such an unusual level of education.**

The cumulative effect of such incidents led to exactly what Air Vice-Marshal Swann had been afraid of. First of all, it was necessary to tell Breese who “Ross” really was and warn him off; then, to Breese’s fury, Swann responded to a plea from Lawrence, spared him the last four weeks at Uxbridge, and packed him off to RAF Farnborough to be trained as a photographer, without having completed his drill course. Even thirty-two years later Breese was still fulminating about what a poor recruit “Lawrence of Arabia” had been, and regretting that, because of the interference of higher authorities, he had not been able to get Lawrence discharged from the service.

The liberal use of profanity in The Mint,and the description of Bonham-Carter, made it impossible to publish even decades after Lawrence’s death, and it therefore received altogether unmerited notoriety as a “banned book.” Most readers nowadays will be unlikely to find even the unexpurgated edition particularly shocking. The Mintis, in fact, an odd little book. The first two-thirds are about the horrors of recruit training; the last third (which Lawrence added later) is about the joys of serving on an RAF station with aircraft, and “how different, how humane” by comparison life was at the RAF Cadet College, Cranwell, when Lawrence was there three years later as an aircraft-hand. Just as his description of life at RAF Uxbridge seems too “savage” (to use his own word), so his description of life at Cranwell seems too idyllic. The book has long passages of praise to Trenchard, which Lawrence wrote knowing very well that Trenchard would be among the first to read the manuscript. “There are twenty-thousand airmen better than us between [Squad 5] and Trenchard, the pinnacle and our exemplar: but the awe of him surely encompasses us. The driving energy is his, and he drives furiously. We are content, imagining that he knows his road.” This reads uncomfortably, and improbably; unless the RAF has changed a lot since 1923, it seems unlikely that recruits would sit around the stove in their hut until late in the night swapping stories in “laughing admiration” and hero-worship of Trenchard. The hallmark of the British serviceman has always been a mocking and cynical disdain for those at the top, and the passages on Trenchard in The Mintmerely read as if Lawrence hoped to balance out the scenes at Uxbridge, which Trenchard would certainly hate, by flattering him from time to time.

There is also a passage that still has the power to shock. While Lawrence is on parade at Cranwell to mark the death of Queen Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII, he remembers a visit he once made to her, when he was a famous and decorated war hero. She was not “a Saint, a Paragon,” as the chaplain now describes her, he thinks, but “an unfortunate, a long-suffering doll.” Lawrence recalls her as a “mummified thing, the bird-like head cocked on one side, not artfully but by disease, the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face … her bony fingers, clashing in the tunnel of their rings.” This is one of the few times in the book when he refers to his previous life as the other persona he has left behind, “Colonel Lawrence,” and it is surely the cruelest passage in The Mint.Even today, when the attitude toward the British royal family has changed, it seems out of place, like an attack on the wrong person.

Enlistment in the RAF had not been the only thing on Lawrence’s mind in 1922. He was as determined to storm the literary world as he had been to enter the RAF, and he was probably the only person to whom it would have seemed that the two ambitions were not contradictory. He had sent one set of the corrected galley proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdomrun off by the Oxford newspaper printers to Edward Garnett, a gifted editor who had worked closely with Joseph Conrad and championed the work of D. H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford, and John Galsworthy. Garnett was now working as a consultant for the new publishing house of Jonathan Cape. He was a sensitive and gifted reader, with a sure touch for literary quality and a first-class sales instinct (a rare combination); he was good at building careers too, and played an important role in the lives of his authors. Garnett at once wanted to publish the book, but Lawrence shied away, writing to say that Garnett was the first person to read the book—but adding that his friend the artist Eric Kennington was already reading it. He accepted Garnett’s handwritten list of notes, suggestions, and corrections, thus setting in motion an elaborate and long-drawn-out process of mutual seduction, as Garnett attempted to steer him to Cape. Garnett’s praise of the book was enormously welcome to Lawrence, who—as the author of a 300,000-word book on which he had spent four years of his life—thirsted for recognition and praise. He revealed to Garnett that he had already received a sizable offer, sight unseen, from an American publisher for an abridged version of 120,000 words, but had said, “Nothing doing"—although the idea of an abridged, “boy’s own” version of the book in fact intrigued him. Eventually, with much patient nudging and help from Garnett, he would produce such a version: the enormously successful Revolt in the Desert.Lawrence, despite his protestations of naпvetй, had devised an extraordinarily successful way of dealing with book publishers: allowing them to read his book on the condition that they couldn’t publish it. Similarly, he would later create a tidal wave of publicity for Seven Pillars of Wisdomamong the public at large by ensuring that it was a book everyone wanted to read, but nobody could buy. Certainly his correspondence with Garnett is remarkably shrewd; he demonstrates a practical knowledge of book publishing economics while at the same time insisting that the book isn’t for sale.

In the meantime, Lawrence had set out in pursuit of bigger fish than Garnett. Taking advantage of his one brief meeting with Bernard Shaw, Lawrence had written to ask Shaw to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom.His letter was a perfect mix of flattery and modesty: “I’d like you to read it … partly because you are you: partly because I may profit by your reading it,if I have a chance to talk to you soon after, before you have got over it.” Nothing could have been more tactfully phrased, or more carefully baited, to lure Shaw into reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom;nor did it hurt that Lawrence, despite his modesty, was himself a celebrity. Shaw’s ego and vanity were world-class—indeed by wittily mocking his own weaknesses, he had made himself ever more famous, and by 1922 he was at the height of his formidable powers, both intellectual and theatrical. Perhaps more important, he had succeeded—as two previous Anglo-Irish playwrights, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde, had done—in turning himself into a “character,” whose doings and sayings were constantly publicized, and who was given wide license to say outrageous things because he was Irish and a self-proclaimed genius. As a theatrical reviewer he had been the talk of London for his wit and intelligence, and as a playwright he was, like Sheridan and Wilde, a huge success from the beginning, often confronting on the stage serious social problems that approached the limit of the lord chamberlain’s tolerance (the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was, until 1968, the official censor of the British stage). Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting is supposed to have said, as she emerged from the theater after a performance of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra,shaking her head in disapproval, “How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.” Fiercely argumentative and intolerant of any opinion but his own, Shaw was the best known of the Fabian Socialists—he outshone Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with their compulsive gathering of statistics, and H. G. Wells, despite Wells’s enormously popular novels, as the most articulate spokesman for socialism and social reform in Britain.

Shaw signified his willingness to read the book, so one copy was sent to him, and Lawrence, like any other author, chafed while waiting for his reaction. In the meantime, Lawrence had sent another copy to his friend Vyvyan Richards, who read it more promptly, and wrote a most confusing letter back about it: “It seems to me that an attempted work of art may be so much more splendid for its very broken imperfection revealing the man so intimately.” This was probably meant as praise—at least Lawrence took it that way—though on its face it seems to mean that the book’s faults revealed Lawrence’s strengths. Lawrence replied at length, to say that he knew it was a good book, but felt that “it was too big for me: too big for most writers, I think. It’s rather in the titan class: books written at tiptoe, with a strain that dislocates the writer, and exhausts the reader out of sympathy.” This is a more perceptive judgment than Vyvyan Richards’s, but luckily for Lawrence, he was a first-class writer about battle, and very good with the small, human dramas of war. When he stops trying to achieve the effect of a masterpiece, and lets his gift for description show through, his work rises to a level of its own, matched by no other nonfiction book on war in the twentieth century. In any case, Rich-ards’s praise, however qualified, was not what Lawrence was waiting for—he was awaiting Shaw’s, which was distressingly slow in coming.

Doughty’s Arabia Desertawas also on Lawrence’s mind. He felt a great debt and affection toward Charles Doughty, and had been instrumental in getting the Medici Society and Jonathan Cape to bring that difficult and sometimes impenetrable classic, more often admired than read, back into print by agreeing to write an introduction for it—one of his best short pieces, and well worth reading for its own sake. Now, though he was a mere airman in training, Lawrence continued the campaign he had begun to obtain for Doughty a Civil List pension, reaching out to the prime minister, David Lloyd George. He wrote to Doughty, “Of the present Ministry three or four are Fellows of All Souls, and most of the others are friends of mine. The Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Salisbury, and Amery, and Wood and three or four others would be glad to serve you in any way you wished.” In this generous service, he was successful. Doughty, who was old—and mostly forgotten and impoverished until Lawrence took up his cause—was overwhelmed by Lawrence’s hard work on his behalf; and it says much for Lawrence’s courage and determination that he used none of these friendships on his own behalf, but simply went on, not so much “solitary in the ranks” as, for the moment, invisiblein the ranks.

But not for much longer.

Edward Garnett, despite Lawrence’s reluctance to allow Seven Pillars of Wisdomto be published, was working painstakingly on the abridgment. This idea tempted Lawrence, both because it would remove from the book the more controversial passages he did not want the general public to read, and because it would almost certainly produce enough money to enable him to print a deluxe and very limited edition of the full text for his friends—something that Gertrude Bell had begged him to do while they were together in Paris during the Peace Conference.

In the meantime, Lawrence had been posted to RAF Farnborough, thanks to Air Vice-Marshal Swann’s intervention, and arrived there on November 7, after a brief leave, which he cut short by two days, so anxious was he to get into the “real” air force. Farnborough was indeed the real air force—it was, among other things, home to several squadrons, and it contained research and experimental facilities and the RAF school of photography.

If there was one specialty in the RAF for which Lawrence was perfectly suited, it was photography. His father had not only taught him everything there was to know about photography, but made sure that he had the best and latest equipment; and with his natural interest in technology and crafts of any kind, Lawrence quickly became an expert. Some of the photographs Lawrence took in the Hejaz, during the war, are amazing—they belong among the classic images of warfare by photographers such as Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan, and are all the more remarkable because Lawrence was a combatant, not a photojournalist, and because his equipment was by modern standards bulky and slow. His photographs of Feisal’s encampment at dawn and of the Bedouin advancing toward Aqaba are still the two most emblematic and famous pictures of the Arab Revolt. In addition, Lawrence was one of the pioneers in the use of aerial photography in mapmaking and military intelligence. He devised his own system of laying out aerial photographs in a grid pattern to use them as the basis for a map, and taught pilots how to take the pictures he needed. Lawrence could have taught the class in photography at RAF Farnborough—it is unlikely that any of the instructors there knew as much as he did, or had even a small fraction of his practical experience. Trenchard was not wrong—Lawrence’s refusal to accept a commission in the RAF deprived the air force of the opportunity of learning something from a master of irregular warfare, and from one of the few commanders who understood how to use aircraft to support ground troops or how to make practical use in the field of aerial photography.

Still, the move to Farnborough was a happy one—so happy that it may have increased Lawrence’s confidence in the RAF to the point where he became incautious. Here there was no square bashing; the NCOs were mostly instructors; the airmen were either learning or carrying out their “trades,” as the RAF calls its different specialties. The predominant noise on the station was that of aircraft engines warming up, not the yells of drill corporals, the crash of boots on the parade ground, or the sharp, metallic clatter of hundreds of men performing rifle drill. During his leave Lawrence had purchased a motorcycle, a secondhand Triumph with a sidecar—a new stage in the lifelong love affair with motorcycles that would end only with his death. For the moment his duties at Farnborough were anything but onerous, a fact which very shortly got him into serious trouble.

The November photography class had already begun, and in the usual rigid way of the air force it was considered impossible for Lawrence to join late and catch up with his fellow students, so he was put down for the next class, which began in January. The notion of wasting an airman’s time was not one that occurred to anyone in authority in the RAF—his time belongedto the RAF, to be wasted or used as his superiors and the station schedule determined. For Lawrence, however, sweeping floors or emptying the grate of the adjutant’s stove while everybody else was studying photography was insupportable. He wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, partly to thank Swann for getting him out of RAF Uxbridge early, and partly to ask Swann to get him into the November class, or even an earlier one, since, as Lawrence pointed out, “I’m already as good as the men passing out. My father, one of the pioneer photographers, taught me before I was four years old.” This was a mild exaggeration, but the letter exudes a certain overconfidence, as if Lawrence were writing to a family retainer rather than an air marshal, and can only have increased Swann’s dislike of his role.

In the meantime, since nobody in authority in the RAF likes to see an airman sitting around doing nothing, Lawrence “was appointed to the Adjutant’s office as an orderly,” running messages and cleaning the office first thing in the morning—menial but not demeaning duty, for an airman without a trade. The adjutant of the photography school, Flight Lieutenant Charles Findlay, who seems to have been a decent sort, did not pay much attention to his new orderly: Lawrence did not seem to him in any way out of the ordinary. At some point Lawrence must have signaled his disapproval of this waste of his time to Swann, however, for about three weeks later the station commander, Wing Commander W. J. Y. Guilfoyle, called Findlay into his office to say that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had called to ask “why A/c2 Ross is not engaged in photographic training?”

Findlay began to explain that the pupils arrived “in penny packets,” and had to be kept busy until there were enough of them to form a class, but the commanding officer cut him off short—he had already explained all that to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, but Swann “was not at all sympathetic,” and insisted that “Ross’s training must begin at once.”

The two men were “frankly perplexed.” “Who is this Ross? What’s he like?” the commanding officer asked, and the adjutant suggested that he might like to see the airman himself. Ross was sent for, on the pretext of giving him a message to deliver. As Findlay described him, “His blue eyes were set in a long, finely chiseled face. His jaw was square. But the most outstanding features were his long, sensitive fingers.” He was trim, erect, short, and while crisply respectful, his face conveyed none of the awe in which a recruit AC2 might be expected to hold his commanding officer on seeing him at close range. On the contrary, Ross gave the faint impression of being in command himself.

Once he had saluted and gone, the commanding officer “turned to the Adjutant with a look of amazement.”

“ ‘Findlay! Do you know who I think he is? Lawrence!’

‘Lawrence?’

‘Yes, Lawrence of Arabia! I saw him once in Cairo early in the war, and this airman looks uncommonly like him.’ ”

The two officers had no idea what to do next. Guilfoyle’s suspicion that AC2 Ross was Colonel Lawrence left him in the uncomfortable position of feeling that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had pulled a fast one on him, or had so little confidence in him that he had not seen fit to inform him of the real identity of one of his own airmen. Since he didn’t know what else to do, Guilfoyle ordered Findlay to start Ross’s instruction as soon as possible, even if he was in a special class of one, and to keep an eye on him for any clues as to whether he was really Lawrence. Lawrence immediately provided the clues. Recruits were given a mathematics test and were supposed to hand in their worksheets along with the answers to the problems. All Lawrence’s answers were correct, but he turned in no worksheets. When reprimanded by the instructor, he said that he had worked them out in his head, and when given another problem, he worked that one out in his head too, and immediately wrote down the correct answer. The instructor in optics complained to Findlay that Ross knew more about the subject than he did, and the same thing happened when he was put in the “Neg. Room.” As may be imagined, this did not make him popular with the instructors, and it added to the mystery surrounding Ross’s special treatment. Perhaps Lawrence would have been wiser to feign a certain degree of ignorance, rather than, to put it crudely, showing off.

He made matters worse by replying flippantly to reprimands about his turn-out on guard duty, and by answering the orderly officer “in a foreign language,” presumably Arabic, since the orderly officer would surely have recognized French; all this was bound to increase curiosity. It seems clear that Lawrence was suffering from overconfidence, brought on by the ease with which he had prodded Swann into getting him into a special class, and perhaps also by good news on the literary front.

For while Lawrence was astonishing (and provoking) his instructors, Edward Garnett was progressing rapidly with the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence was beginning, partly because of Garnett’s shrewd knowledge of how to handle authors, to come around to approving the idea of an abridged volume of 120,000 to 150,000 words, preferably the former. Neither he nor Garnett had any doubt that the book would sell, so Lawrence was relieved of his worries about running up a considerable overdraft for an AC2 to pay the artists who were making the drawings and the paintings for the limited edition of the complete text, to which he was becoming more and more committed.

At the same time, his approach to Shaw had paid off in a most surprising fashion. At the end of October, impatient at having heard nothing, Lawrence wrote a brilliantly self-depreciatory little note to the great man:

Dear Mr. Shaw,I am afraid you are rather making a labour of it, or you don’t want to tell me that it’s rubbish. I don’t want to bore you (nice of me!), and if you say it’s rot I’ll agree with you & cackle with pleasure at finding my judgment doubled.Please laugh & chuck it.Yours sincerely,T. E. Lawrence Unlike most such letters, this one very soon produced a lengthy reply, urging Lawrence to be patient and revealing that Charlotte Shaw had read the book with great admiration and had urged her husband to read it—more than urged, in fact. In his absence—he was “road tubthumping round England” for the forthcoming general election—she read every word of the awkward six-pound book, and on Shaw’s return “she began ecstatically reading passages of it aloud to him.” Shaw’s letter to Lawrence, if allowance is made for the somewhat hectoring style he used to everyone, was thoughtful, encouraging, and full of advice, much of which Lawrence was to ignore, and it clearly opened up to Lawrence the possibility of friendship with the Shaws.

Of course forming a friendship with “G.B.S.” was like letting the proverbial camel stick its nose inside the tent. Shaw was bossy, fussy, opinionated, indefatigable, irascible, determined not only to offer his friends advice but to ensure that it was followed in every detail. He was overwhelmingly generous with his time, despite his widespread commitments—a workload that would kill a horse; a firm determination to introduce to Britain not only socialism but a total reform of everything from English grammar, punctuation, and spelling to the way the British dressed, ate, and educated their children; and campaigning vigorously for such principles as wearing woolen garments next to the skin instead of cotton, total vegetarianism, and a radically different relationship between the sexes. On many of these subjects, Shaw sounded like a crank; on others, he wrote some of his greatest plays. But in any case his genius; the unstoppable flow of his eloquence; his sheer output of books, plays, letters, and pamphlets; and above all his willingness to argue with anyone about anything until whoever it was gave in out of exhaustion—all this made him seem to many like the Nietzschean superman improbably manifesting himself in England, as a fiercely bearded Anglo-Irishman.

The fact that Charlotte Shaw had read the book and liked it mattered very much indeed. The Shaws had what might best be described as an odd marriage: as noted earlier, from the very beginning they had agreed not to have sex. Charlotte had a deep-seated fear of sex and was determined never to have a child. Though it pained her often and deeply, it was part of the understanding between them that Shaw could have affairs, mostly with actresses, provided he did so with a certain amount of discretion. They got along very well together—Charlotte was wealthy and cultivated; they enjoyed each other’s company; and they respected each other’s opinions. Her enthusiasm for Lawrence’s enormous book meant something to Shaw, and her determination that he must read it himself was not something he would ignore. Like Lawrence she was afflicted by “a fearful streak of conscience and sense of duty, complicated by a sensitiveness that is nothing less than a disease.” In this Charlotte also resembled Lawrence’s mother, who certainly had a “streak of conscience” and a fierce “sense of duty,” though without Charlotte’s “sensitiveness” or Charlotte’s essential shyness, which was in such sharp contrast to Shaw’s extrovert nature and his phenomenal capacity for rudeness when he chose to inflict it on people.

By mid-November, Lawrence had told enough people about his enlistment in the RAF to make further secrecy unlikely. Garnett knew, and this was probably safe enough, since he was that rarest of book editors, one who didn’t gossip about his authors. But Lawrence would very shortly let Shaw know, and this was riskier.Also, for reasons best known to himself, Lawrence also informed his friend and admirer R.D.Blumenfeld, the editor of the Daily Express.Although Blumenfeld seems to have been uncommonly discreet for a newspaper editor, the Daily Express—Lord Beaverbrook’s sensationalist daily—was not a place where any secret was likely to be kept for long. Lawrence had written for this newspaper when he was campaigning to make the British government live up to its promises to Feisal, and had developed a certain respect for Blumenfeld in the process.He may too, like many celebrities, have believed that if you fed the beast the occasional tidbit, it wouldn’t bite you, but if so, he misunderstood the ethics of Fleet Street. Writing to Blumenfeld with the news that he was joining the RAF and adding, “This letter has got to be indiscreet…. Do keep this news to yourself,” was either naive or self-destructive, or possibly both. Blumenfeld responded, from a nursing home where he was recovering from surgery, by offering Lawrence a job, possibly writing about British policy in the Middle East. Lawrence perhaps unwisely declined, in a breezy, personal letter that could only lead to trouble if it got into the wrong hands: “Your offer is a generous and kind one: and you will think me quixotic to refuse it: but I ran away here partly to escape the responsibility of head-work…. No, please don’t publish my eclipse. It will be common news one day, but the later the better for my peace in the ranks.” Some of Lawrence’s biographers, including his authorized biographer, Jeremy Wilson, suggest that he consciously or subconsciously was seeking to bring to an end his service in the RAF, and of course this is possible; but one must bear in mind that he had only to go to a public telephone and call Air Vice-Marshal Swann, or send a postcard to Trenchard, to be released from the service.

Perhaps he wanted to achieve that end without having to bring it about himself, by forcing Trenchard and Swann to make the decision for him; on the other hand, one must set against this the fact that Lawrence, once he was discharged from the RAF, almost immediately enlisted in the army, then transferred back to the RAF as soon as he could—so clearly the military life, with its built-in foundation of discipline, order, and austerity, appealed to him. It seems more likely that Lawrence was suffering from what we would now call mood swings, perhaps as a result of his wartime stress, and that he rebounded from a deep depression and a sense of helplessness, which had engulfed him after he left the Colonial Office, to a dizzy height of overconfidence in his ability to eat his cake and have it too. After all, he had persuaded Swann to intervene on his behalf twice, he was on the brink of combining a military and a writing career, and he seemed to have everything he wanted—always a dangerous moment.

At the beginning of December Lawrence apparently made up his mind to publish the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,informing Garnett that he in turn could inform Jonathan Cape of this decision, and selecting the literary agency Curtis Brown to represent him. Their task was obviously complicated by the fact that the idea of abridging the book had first been suggested to him by Frank Doubleday, the American publisher. By the first week in December Lawrence was already deep in negotiation with Cape—like so many authors, not letting the right hand know what the left one was doing, since he should have allowed Curtis Brown to do all this for him.

At this point Shaw’s immense enthusiasm for the book, which he was still reading, was clear enough, to Lawrence’s relief: “I know enough about it now to feel puzzled as to what is to be done with it,” Shaw wrote to him. “One step is clear enough. The Trustees of the British Museum have lots of sealed writings to be opened in a hundred years…. You say you have four or five copies of your magnissimum opus, At least a couple should be sealed and deposited in Bloomsbury and New York.”** Shaw was concerned about several problems of libel (given his own writing, this was a subject he was familiar with), and suggested that an abridgment, leaving out the potentially libelous passages, would be a good idea. Lawrence must have glowed at Shaw’s description of his book as a “magnissimum opus.” And he was pleased that the great man not only took the book seriously, but favored an abridgment, which, between Lawrence and Garnett, was already moving forward quickly.

Between this whirl of correspondence, his motorcycle, his photography course, and the success of his campaign to get Doughty a pension, Lawrence may not have taken notice of the fact that reporters were appearing at RAF Farnborough asking questions about him. Not surprisingly, some were from the Daily Express,but there were also some from the biggest rival of the Express,Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail—all the big Fleet Street dailies had spies in each other’s editorial offices. On December 16, Wing Commander Guilfoyle, for whom Lawrence had already developed a strong but possibly undeserved dislike, was already writing to Air Vice-Marshal Swann that reporters had interviewed two of his junior officers, and on learning that “Colonel Lawrence” was unknown in the officers’ mess, had started to wait outside the camp gate to waylay airmen as they came and went. “Do you think,” Guilfoyle wrote stiffly, but not unreasonably, “that all this conjecture and talk is in the best interest of discipline?” Clearly, it was not, and there was worse to come.

Lawrence, in the meantime, found himself in another dilemma, this one at least not of his own making. Filled with enthusiasm for Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and acting with his usual conviction that he knew what was best for everybody, Shaw had brought the subject of the book up with his own publisher, Constable, urging the two senior partners to go after it boldly. Never one for understatement, Shaw, as he wrote to Lawrence, told them, “Why in thunder didn’t you secure it? It’s the greatest book in the world.” Shaw urged Lawrence to open negotiations directly with Constable as soon as possible, with a view to publishing an edited version of the full text first, and an abridged version later (exactly the reverse of what Lawrence wanted to do), and he bullied the two senior partners of Constable into having a talk with Edward Garnett.

This put the fat in the fire, since Garnett had already discussed the book with Cape, whose reader he was, and discussions were already taking place between Cape and Raymond Savage, Lawrence’s literary agent at Curtis Brown. Lawrence, whose intention was to bring out the abridged text first, and who had already authorized Garnett to bring the project to Cape, had to inform Shaw that all this was going on, and Shaw was, predictably, very put out. One reason for Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the firm of Jonathan Cape was that both Cape and his partner G. Wren Howard were intensely interested in producing handsome books. Their ideas about book design, layout, and typography were less extreme than Lawrence’s, but they were more likely than Constable to produce something close to what would please him. Since Cape is now a distinguished institution in British book publishing, not unlike Knopf in New York, it will surprise those who know anything about the publishing business that Shaw thundered back with a warning that Cape and Howard were “a brace of thoroughgoing modern ruffians,” and that they probably lacked the capital to produce the book. He added, for good measure, on the subject of Lawrence’s enlistment in the RAF, that “Nelson, slightly cracked after his whack on the head in the battle of the Nile, coming home and insisting on being placed at the tiller of a canal barge, and on being treated as nobody in particular, would have embarrassed the Navy far less,” a comment that was undoubtedly correct. “You are evidently a very dangerous man,” he wrote to Lawrence, with undisguised approval; “most men who are any good are….1 wonder what I will decide to do with you.”

The truth was that Lawrence felt himself already committed to Cape, and his agent was already in discussion with Cape and Howard about the contract, so Shaw’s unexpected charge into the middle of these negotiations put Lawrence in an embarrassing position with Cape, while Shaw, of course, felt foolish at having urged his own publishers to go after a book that was already as good as sold to somebody else. Over the years, this would become a pattern in the relationship between Lawrence and Shaw, yet Shaw, after an initial outburst, always forgave the younger man. From the outset, Shaw adopted the attitude of an exasperated and indulgent parent toward a wayward, difficult child. As if to demonstrate this, Shaw not only read all 300,000-plus words of the manuscript (Shaw estimated its length at 460,000 words, but this seems excessive); he also made copious, detailed notes, suggestions, and corrections, including a “virtuoso” essay on the use of the colon, semicolon, and dash, and the proposal that Lawrence drop the first chapter of the book and start with the second, which Lawrence eventually accepted, though he sensibly ignored most of the rest.

By the time Lawrence received this letter, however, his presence at RAF Farnborough had made the front page of the Daily Expressin big headlines:

“UNCROWNED KING” AS PRIVATE SOLDIER LAWRENCE OF ARABIAFamous War Hero Becomes a PrivateSEEKING PEACE OPPORTUNITY TO WRITE A BOOK The article inside was fairly innocuous by the standards of the Express,though written in its inimitable hyperbolic style—"Colonel Lawrence, archaeologist, Fellow of All Souls, and king-maker, has lived a more romantic existence than any man of the time. Now he is a private soldier.” The next day a long and more detailed follow-up piece named him as AC2 Ross, placed him at RAF Farnborough, and gave details of his daily schedule, a sure sign that somebody had been talking to the Express’sreporter. Lawrence would afterward put the blame on the junior officers, rather than his fellow airmen, and say that one of them sold the story to the Expressfor Ј30 (more than $2,000 in contemporary terms), but this number sounds suspiciously like Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and in any case Blumenfeld was already onto the story. To put this in perspective: by 1923 Lawrence was Britain’s most famous war hero, and a media celebrity on a scale that until then had been unimagined. It was as if Princess Diana had vanished from her home and had been discovered by the press enlisted in the ranks of the RAF as Aircraftwoman Spencer, doing drill, washing her own undies, and living in a hut with a dozen or more other airwomen. Every newspaper now, from the most serious to the most sensational, rushed to catch up with the Express,briefly turning the area outside the camp gates into a mob scene of reporters and photographers.

Trenchard and Swann were appalled, but since Trenchard did not want to show that the clamor of the press could move him, he stuck to his guns for the moment. Lawrence’s “mates” took turns fooling the photographers by hiding their faces with their caps while entering or leaving the camp; and Guilfoyle repeatedly pressed Swann to remove Lawrence, earning Lawrence’s disapproval. Despite that, Lawrence became friendly enough with the adjutant, Flight Lieutenant Findlay, who was more sympathetic to his plight than the commanding officer. Findlay noted that Lawrence was genuinely “keen” on photography, and eager to get on with his course, but was “unreasonably” resentful at having to perform menial duties and camp routine—an indication that Lawrence had not yet fully understood what life was like at the bottom of the ranks. Findlay asked him “why he had recorded ‘Nil’ on his Service papers in respect of the item ‘Previous Service,’ “ to which Lawrence replied jesuitically that John Hume Ross had no “previous service.” Much later—indeed, not until June 1958—Findlay recorded his impression of Lawrence. “Participating in the life of the Royal Air Force was only a partial solution to his problem at that time, and he appeared to be still trying to shake off something. For what it is worth, a note I made at the time reads: ‘I am convinced that some quality departed from Lawrence before he became an RAF recruit. Lawrence of Arabia had died.’ The man with whom I conversed seemed but the shadow of the Lawrence who was picked up by this whirlwind of events to become the driving force of Arab intervention in the war…. It was difficult to believe Ross was the same man. The only satisfactory explanation must be that he was suffering from some form of exhaustion, that the hypersensitive man had partially succumbed to the rough and tumble of war … that he was … for the time being at least … a personality less intense.”

This was a sympathetic but entirely incorrect reading of Lawrence’s character, though it was not out of line with what Lawrence himself professed to believe—that he was no longer “Lawrence of Arabia,” and was in the process of becoming someone else. One of his reasons for writing Seven Pillars of Wisdomhad been precisely to put that whole experience behind him once and for all. Findlay refers to Lawrence’s “assumption of mental leadership” as unsettling, as was his occasional resumption of the commanding role, which is probably what prompted Shaw to call him “a dangerous man.” Findlay, even thirty-five years after the event, underrated his man.

Lawrence often made people uneasy, as if there were two separate personalities—the meek airman and the daring colonel—contending for control within him. Beatrice Webb, the astute and redoubtable Fabian social reformer, who together with her husband Sidney was among Shaw’s closest friends, described Lawrence disapprovingly after meeting him as “an accomplished poseur with glittering eyes.” Several people felt that Lawrence was a bad influence over Shaw, rather than vice versa (the majority view). “Already by the beginning of 1923,” Michael Holroyd wrote in his magisterial four-volume biography of Shaw, “Shaw was advising Lawrence to ‘get used to the limelight,’ as he himself had done. Later he came to realize that Lawrence was one of the most paradoxically conspicuous men of the century. The function of both their public personalities was to lose an old self and discover a new. Lawrence had been illegitimate; Shaw had doubted his legitimacy. Both were the sons of dominant mothers and experienced difficulties in establishing their masculinity. The Arab Revolt, which gave Lawrence an ideal theatre of action, turned him into Luruns Bey, Prince of Damascus and most famously Lawrence of Arabia. ‘There is no end to your Protean tricks …,’ “ Shaw wrote to him. “ ‘What is your game really?’ “ This was a question Lawrence was careful not to answer, then or later.

It is revealing that Holroyd refers to Arabia as “an ideal theatre of action” for Lawrence, because Shaw himself, the supreme man of the theater of the twentieth century, seemed to believe that Lawrence’s wartime self was a role that he could drop as quickly as he had picked it up, not recognizing that with Lawrence, as with himself, the role had taken over the man. “Bernard Shaw” (he disliked the name George, which reminded him of his drunken father) was an equally brilliant role, but it was not one Shaw could take off when he went home and resume the next day for the entertainment of his admirers. Neither he nor Lawrence was an actor who could change roles every night and twice on matinee days; like it or not, Shaw had over time becomethe role he had created for himself: the unorthodox, testy, argumentative agent provocateur and gadfly of British life and conventions, an amazing presence who combined some of the attributes of Shakespeare with those of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.Only his death—in 1950 at the age of ninety-four—would release him from this role.

So it was with Lawrence. He could struggle against the role he had invented; hide in the ranks of the RAF or the army to escape from it; and attempt to sublimate it into meekness, modesty, and silence—but the powerful chin, the “glittering” bright blue eyes, and the hands, at once beautiful and very strong (as Findlay shrewdly noticed), gave him away even in the drabbest of uniforms. He was nota different man after the war, “a personality less intense,” to quote Findlay. His personality, on the contrary, was remarkably consistent. His whole life had been, in a sense, a training program for heroism on the grand scale; the war had merely provided an opportunity for Lawrence to fulfill his destiny. His intense will and his determination to have things his own way were always remarkable. He had methodically pushed himself beyond his physical limits, as a child and as a youth long before the war. He had carefully honed his strength and his courage, forced himself to a lifelong repression of his own sexuality, punished himself for every temptation toward what other men would have regarded as normal impulses. Since boyhood his life had been a triumph of repression, a deliberate, calculated assault on his own senses. He would always remain, however reluctantly, a combination of hero and genius: “a dangerous man,” indeed.

Only a day after the follow-up story in the Express,the rival Daily Mailpublished a story about Cape’s negotiations to buy the rights to Seven Pillars of Wisdom,hardly a surprising leak, given the porous nature of book publishing. This news further alarmed the Air Ministry and the secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, who had not been enthusiastic about having Lawrence join the RAF under an assumed name in the first place, and whose reservations now were vindicated, putting Trenchard in an awkward position. As for the commanding officer and the junior officers at RAF Farnborough, they now faced the difficulties of giving orders to a celebrity who was also the author of what would surely be a best-selling and widely debated book, a literary event of the first order.

Until this point, Lawrence’s writing had not been a concern. The existence of Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas known only within the limited circle of his friends. The public knew nothing about it, or about his intention to write a book describing the RAF “from the inside.” Now both books were news, and big news at that. The heart of the problem Sir Samuel Hoare and Air Chief Marshal Trenchard faced was not just that Lawrence had made news but that he now wasnews. He no longer had to doanything to produce headlines.

Unfortunately, Hoare and Trenchard were not the only people this news story took by surprise. Lawrence’s letter to Bernard Shaw explaining that he had decided to take his book to Jonathan Cape had not arrived by the time Shaw read the story in the Mail,and he was predictably outraged and baffled. Despite this initial reaction, however, he had calmed down by the time he responded to Lawrence (enclosing the clipping from the Mail):“The cat being now let out of the bag, presumably by Jonathan Cape with your approval, I cannot wait to finish the book before giving you my opinion and giving it strong. IT MUST BE PUBLISHED IN ITS ENTIRETY UNABRIDGED ….I REPEAT THE WHOLE WORK MUST BE PUBLISHED. If Cape is not prepared to undertake that, he is not your man, whatever your engagements to him may be. If he has advanced you any money give it back to him (borrowing it from me if necessary), unless he has undertaken to proceed in the grand manner.”

Shaw had completely reversed himself on the subject of the abridgment, and now thought Seven Pillars of Wisdomshould be published complete, perhaps in several volumes. He renewed his criticism of Cape in vehement terms, and had Lawrence cared to parse his letter carefully, revealed that he still had not finished reading the book, and was relying at least in good part on Charlotte’s enthusiasm. Referring to the ten years he had spent on “the managing committee of the Society of Authors,” Shaw pointed out that “there is no bottom to the folly and business incompetence of authors or to the unscrupulousness of publishers.” As if all this were not alarming, Charlotte wrote an impassioned letter, the first of many: “How is it conceivable, imaginablethat a man who could write the Seven Pillarscan have any doubts about it? If you don’t know it is ‘a great book’ what is the use of anyone telling you so ….1 devoured the book from cover to cover….1 could not stop. I drove G.B.S. almost mad by insisting on reading him special bits when he was deep in something else. I am an old woman, old enough at any rate to be your mother…. But I have never read anything like this: I don’t believe anything really like it has been written before…. Your book must be published as a whole. Don’t you see that?”

Shaw himself wrote again a few days later, blending, as was his way, advice with abuse: “Like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions…. It is useless to protest that Lawrence is not your real name. That will not save you…. You masqueraded as Lawrence and didn’t keep quiet: and now Lawrence you will be to the end of your days…. Lawrence may be as great a nuisance to you sometimes as G.B.S. is to me, or as Frankenstein found the man he manufactured; but you created him, and must now put up with him as best you can.” He urged Lawrence to “get used to the limelight,” and, so far as the book was concerned, reminded him that Constable was not only “keen” on it, but had “perhaps more capital than Cape,” adding forcefully that it was a duty to publish the book unabridged.

Even before this barrage of correspondence reached Lawrence he had decided to give up on the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and to renege on his understanding with Cape—a decision reinforced when the chief of the air staff himself made an unprecedented visit to the camp, to warn Lawrence “that his position in the RAF was becoming untenable.” Trenchard tried to soften the blow, telling Lawrence that he was “an unusual sort of person, inevitably embarrassing to a CO,” but Lawrence disagreed, and felt that if Guilfoyle were a bigger man, he could ignore Lawrence’s “lurid past,” and treat him as an average airman. One result of all the publicity was that Lawrence tended to be treated in camp as if he were an exotic exhibit in a zoo, rather than an ordinary airman learning a trade, or so he felt.

Lawrence took Trenchard’s visit to mean that he could not publish anything so long as he remained in the RAF, and he wrote to inform Cape of this. By now he had too much at stake to risk being discharged from the RAF: friendships; work that interested him; his powerful, glittering Brough “Superior” motorcycle, the Rolls-Royce or Bentley of motorcycles, with which he had replaced the more modest Triumph, handmade, idiosyncratic, powerful, precision-engineered, and very fast; even his blue uniform, sharply altered by the camp tailor to fit tightly like that of an “old sweat” or an NCO. Lawrence, it must be remembered, at the age of thirty-four had no home of his own, no family of his own, no lover, and almost no possessions; his only abode was a borrowed attic room in London, so to an extraordinary degree the RAF had become his life. The barracks, the parade ground, and the mess were all the home he had, or expected to have. The relationship between Lawrence and the RAF was neither reasonable nor explicable to civilians like Shaw—it was a love affair, albeit one-sided. He was desperate not to give all that up, and therefore decided to forgo publishing the book in any form for the time being.

Jeremy Wilson points out that the Shaws were partly responsible for this decision. It of course was exactly the opposite of what they had hoped to achieve, but by insisting that the book should be published in full, not as an abridgment, they had increased Lawrence’s doubts on the subject. Certainly Lawrence might have wondered if his newfound friendship with the Shaws had been worth the price he had paid for it so far—but it may be too that for a man in Lawrence’s fragile state of anxiety and emotional exhaustion, the pressure from all sides was simply too much for him to take. Not only was it more advice than Lawrence could cope with, but much of it was contradictory: the Shaws were pushing him to publish the full book, Trenchard was warning him that anybook might bring about his dismissal from the air force, and on the sidelines his agent (Savage), his prospective publisher (Cape), and his editor (Garnett) all urged him to proceed at once with the abridgment. In the circumstances, it was understandable that Lawrence sought some security and peace of mind by giving up the book for the moment, but ironically, this did him no good at all. By the middle of January, Sir Samuel Hoare had reached the decision, as he later put it, that “the position, which had been extremely delicate even when it was shrouded in secrecy, became untenable when it was exposed. The only possible course was to discharge Airman Ross.” Lawrence was abruptly sent on leave, then discharged, though not without protest: it began to dawn on Lawrence that he was losing not only the chance to publish the abridged book, which would have kept him in comfort, but his place in the RAF as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long after Lawrence’s death, Bruce claimed to have been introduced to him early in 1922, in circumstances that seem curious and unlikely even today. According to Bruce, Lawrence was still working at the Colonial Office and was looking for somebody to do “odd jobs” for him. Bruce claimed to have briefly met Lawrence at “the Mayfair flat” of “a Mr. Murray,” presumably an acquaintance of Lawrence’s. The son of a bankrupt milk distributor in Aberdeen, Bruce was there to be interviewed by Murray “for a position which was to become vacant presently,” having been recommended for the job by his family doctor in Scotland, a friend of Murray.

In Bruce’s account of this supposed “job interview,” there is a louche sexual undertone. If Murray was interviewing Bruce for a job, one wonders why “Colonel Lawrence” (as he still was) would be watching from the sidelines. Bruce was no fool. “Lawrence did nothing without a purpose,” he was to write later, “and using people was his masterpiece.” Unkind as this judgment may sound, there is undeniably a certain amount of truth to it, at least so far as Lawrence’s dealings with Bruce are concerned. Not everybody fell under Lawrence’s spell. For example, Harold Nicolson—diplomat, author, and husband of Vita Sackville-West—wrote of Lawrence unflatteringly: “His disloyalty reminded one of the boy who would suck up to the headmaster and then sneak to him about what went on in the school. Even when he became a colonel, he was not the sort of colonel whom one would gladly leave in the office when confidential papers were lying on the desk. So sensitive a man, it seemed to me, ought to have possessed a finer sense of mercy: when, in his gentle voice, he told tales of a massacre, his lips assumed an ugly curl.” Much as Bruce was to fall and remain under Lawrence’s spell, there is no denying that Lawrence was manipulative and deceptive in dealing with him over the years.

Forty-five years later, when Bruce sold his eighty-five-page typewritten account of their relationship to the Sunday Times,he described this meeting with Lawrence in detail; but like a great many other things in his story, this description is unverified, and much of it is improbable. He described how Lawrence put him through a series of tests, and, apparently satisfied, eventually revealed that he wanted Bruce to whip him from time to time, and would pay him what amounted to a retainer to do so.

The one certain truth in Bruce’s account is that he took on the role of being Lawrence’s chief administer of corporal punishment, but it is more likely that this did not begin until after Lawrence’s enlistment at Bovington, and that Lawrence first met Bruce there, as a fellow recruit in Hut 12. Even Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, who was Lawrence’s literary executor, became sadly and reluctantly convinced that Bruce was telling the truth about this.

Bruce’s attempt to place Lawrence in the underground world of male sadomasochism in London, however, must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Admittedly, Lawrence had an interest in flagellation long before his treatment at the hands of the Turks at Deraa. He and his friend the poet James Elroy Flecker, an unapologetic masochist, had talked about the pleasures of being whipped when they were together in Lebanon beforethe war. Richard Meinertzhagen claimed that Lawrence behaved provocatively toward him in Paris, infuriating him to the point where he put “little Lawrence” over his knee and smacked his bottom. Lawrence, he reported, “made no attempt to resist and told me later that he could easily understand a woman submitting to rape once a strong man hugged her.” Meinertzhagen, however was something less than a reliable witness, since he revised and retyped his diary entries years after the event. Arnold Lawrence compared his brother to a medieval penitent who sought punishment for his sins, real or imagined, and this was certainly an element in Lawrence’s need to be whipped. Still, it is hard to draw the line between penance and pleasure, even for Lawrence.

Lawrence’s desire to be whipped is not by itself a very shocking or very unusual feature of upper-class English life ninety years ago—indeed corporal punishment is something of a staple of English humor. This is not to say that sadomasochism in various forms is not equally prevalent in most national cultures—for instance, one thinks of Germany, Austria (Dr. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian), and France (birthplace of the Marquis de Sade himself)—but in England, the connection between whipping and sexual arousal has always been at once a source of snickering humor and an activity which is only barely repressed or hidden. At a time when prostitutes still advertised with a card thumbtacked to their front door, the number of those who offered “Lessons in discipline” never failed to provoke comments from foreign tourists. It would be idle to speculate on the reasons for this, except to note that among those of the upper middle class and the upper class who attended English boarding schools, whipping on the bare buttocks, whether inflicted by masters or by older boys, was not only common but usual—it was considered salutary and character-building—and it sometimes led to a certain confusion between pain and pleasure in later life.

Lawrence’s mother, a believer in the old adage “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” boasted of slapping young Ned on his bare buttocks, and appears to have singled him out for this punishment, since he was by far the most rebellious of her boys. Knowing what we do of Sarah Lawrence’s nature, it seems doubtful that a beating inflicted by her would have been gentle. One imagines that she meant it to hurt, and that she believed the Lord would expect her to put her whole strength into each blow; she was not the woman to do things by half, particularly when it came to punishing wickedness or disobedience. It may be that early in Lawrence’s life there was therefore a certain mingling of pleasure with fear and pain—and that however hard he tried to suppress any erotic arousal, he was not capable of eliminating it altogether. The connection between erotic arousal and his mother would certainly explain in part his lifelong flight from her desire for his love. As for the connection between his involuntary erotic arousal when being brutally beaten and sodomized by the Turks, that is not only obvious in Lawrence’s own account, but also quite sufficient to explain his extreme dislike of being touched, as well as his lifelong determination to avoid any kind of sexual intimacy.

At this point in his life Lawrence apparently required infrequent sessions of severe pain inflicted by another man. What is more interesting than Lawrence’s need for punishment, however, is the bizarre lengths to which he went in order to persuade Bruce that somebody else was orderingthe punishment. It is useless to speculate on the degree to which the whippings may have produced erotic arousal or even ejaculation—i.e., pleasure as opposed to punishment—and neither Lawrence nor Bruce is alive to tell us. But it is quite clear that some measure of both was involved, and that Bruce was picked partly because Lawrence guessed he was reliable, and partly because, like Sarah Lawrence, he would not resort to half measures. Even in a photograph of the young John Bruce, there is something in the eyes and the broad, inflexible mouth that suggests he would consider it his duty to make every blow hurt as much a possible.

The degree of artifice, dissimulation, imagination, and careful planning over time, which Lawrence brought to bear on the task of recruiting Bruce to his purposes, is nothing short of astonishing, and suggests just why Lawrence was regarded as a genius at intelligence and clandestine warfare. In this case, the cover story was as bizarre as the end purpose. Lawrence knew exactly how to manipulate Bruce: money alone would never be his primary motive; Bruce needed to believe in the morality of what he was doing; he needed to believe that he was enforcing punishment ordered by an older authority figure, and inflicting it on somebody who deserved it.

In Bruce’s account, Lawrence hatched a story that contained just enough truth to sound plausible. He had borrowed from friends and from “a merchant bank” money that he could not repay, and had gone to a wealthy uncle, the “Old Man,” who had inherited money that ought to have gone to Lawrence’s father. The Old Man “called him a bastard not fit to live among decent people,” who had “turned his back on God, lost an excellent position at the Colonial Office, become financially involved ‘with the damned Jews,’ insulted a Bishop and insulted King George at Buckingham Palace.” That Lawrence was “a bastard” was true, and many people did wrongly believe that he had insulted the king by refusing to accept his decorations. The story about the bishop involved an altercation between the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem and Lawrence over Jewish immigration, which had led Lawrence to declare indignantly that the bishop was not fit “to black Weizmann’s boots.” In short, Lawrence trolled through his life to find and adapt to his purpose stories that might persuade an elderly relative to punish him. More important, they were stories about acts that Bruce might believe were both reprehensible and true.

Lawrence claimed that his “uncle” was intent on saving the family honor—one of the “threats” Lawrence invented was that if he didn’t do exactly as the Old Man demanded, down to the smallest detail, “a meeting of the family would have to be called to see what was to be done with him.” This was well calculated to appeal to Bruce, who had a strong sense of family and who respected his milkman father in Aberdeen. The character that Lawrence apparently created for the Old Man is interesting. So far as one can judge, it resembled no male relative Lawrence knew, certainly not his father, whom Lawrence remembers as having stopped once when Ned was a child to upbraid a carter for whipping a horse. In reading Bruce’s account of what Lawrence had to say about his “uncle,” it seems more than likely that Lawrence built up his character from that of his mother, and merely switched genders, since Bruce was more likely to accept a male authority figure. The old Man’s strict moral judgment, his unforgiving sense of right and wrong, his absolute conviction that he knew what was best for Lawrence, and his belief in the value of punishment, pain, and discipline are exactly the qualities that Lawrence found so difficult to accept in his mother. The criticism of his own conduct that Lawrence imputes to the Old Man is exactly what his mother would have said, and the old Man’s power to influence and interfere with Lawrence’s life is what kept him away from home as much as possible.

The intensity with which Lawrence won Bruce’s compliance and his determination that Bruce must agree to do whatever the Old Man told him to do are both impressive and frightening. Lawrence was creating a detailed and plausible fictional world, and assigning Bruce a role in a psychodrama, which would continue off and on until the end of Lawrence’s life. Bruce later professed to have been shocked when Lawrence mentioned that the Old Man might call on him to inflict “corporal punishment,” but this was surely face-saving on Bruce’s part nearly half a century after the fact. It seems much more likely that Bruce guessed what Lawrence wanted from the beginning.

The first of the whippings Bruce claimed to have given Lawrence took place in Clouds Hill, the tiny brick cottage whose roof would soon be replaced. (Lawrence paid for the new roof by selling the gold dagger* he had bought in Mecca.) Lawrence was still elaborating on the fantasy that was intended to give him control over Bruce. The Old Man, he told Bruce, was disappointed because Lawrence had missed church parades, and had dispatched a bircht† with which Lawrence was to be whipped. This time Lawrence backed up the request with “an unsigned, typed letter which he said was from The Old Man,” instructing Bruce that he was not only to carry out the whipping, but “to report in writing … [and] to describe Lawrence’s demeanour and behaviour under punishment.” Bruce, the letter promised, would be paid for the whipping. These whippings (and the payments) would be continued at infrequent intervals over the next twelve years, and step by step the letters from the Old Man grew in terms of the complexity of his demands, his requests for accurate reports of Lawrence’s reaction, and the loving details of the instruments of punishment to be used. Each of these letters was of course written with great care by Lawrence himself, prescribing down to the last detail the punishments that were to be inflicted on him. When the Old Man requested a reply from Bruce, Bruce handed his letter to Lawrence, for forwarding.

Lawrence, after his beating at Deraa, had been able to remember every detail of the “Circassian riding whip” which was used on him: “tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver, with a knob inlaid in a black design) down to a hard point much finer than a pencil.” In the letters Bruce claimed to have received from the Old Man, Lawrence was just as precise, even fussy, in describing the details of what he wanted, how it was to be done, and what it was to be done with. It is, in fact, an amazing work of fantasy, backed up with carefully forged letters that were designed to convince Bruce, and succeeded. The letters may have been overkill—there is no evidence that Bruce needed anything like this much persuasion—but their tone is very revealing. It is that of “Colonel Lawrence,” direct, explicit, a person of the officer class who expects obedience from a social inferior. Nowhere is it clearer that “Colonel Lawrence” was still alive and well, than in these bizarre letters. “Private Meek,” as Bernard Shaw would call him in Too True to Be Good,treated Bruce with kid gloves—for Bruce was a difficult and demanding character. But the former lieutenant-colonel gave Bruce the commands, which, except for their subject matter, read like those a wealthy landowner might send to a farm manager. The letters Lawrence wrote as the Old Man are works of genius—with Dickensian skill, he managed to create, layer by layer, detail by detail, a crusty, demanding, difficult character whom one might almost expect to see in the next seat in a first-class railway compartment on the way “up” to London—neatly suited; his bowler hat, gloves, and umbrella beside him; with a regimental tie, a white mustache, and a monocle; reading the Timeswith furious concentration—a figure straight out of an Osbert Lancaster cartoon.

The combination of the cottage and Bruce made the army almost bearable for Lawrence, although he never grew used to wearing the hated khaki uniform or to the mindless violence and profanity of his fellow soldiers. He seldom spent a night in the cottage—he used it instead as a refuge during his ample spare time, and took a few friends there, like Bruce and Corporal Dixon. Over time, he added a phonograph, a radio, a library of books—in size, in austerity, and as a place to work it became the exact equivalent of the small cottage his parents had built for the young Lawrence in the garden of their house. It was not Lawrence’s home in any conventional sense—as E. M. Forster pointed out, “it was rather his pied-а-terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment, and found rest.” The army made few demands on Lawrence and he was thus able to devote a good deal of time to the project of printing a limited edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.In addition he had his weekends free for a social life far more intense and well-connected than that of any other private soldier in the British army.

During this time, the Shaws became central figures in Lawrence’s life, and Robert Graves introduced Lawrence to Thomas Hardy, who lived near Bovington, in Dorsetshire—"Hardy country,” where many of his novels are set. The Hardys too became close friends, and their home, Max Gate, was another place of escape for Lawrence. Other friends in this period included the Kenningtons, the novelist E. M. Forster, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Curtis, and John Buchan. Any portrait of Lawrence that fails to reflect his extraordinary gifts for friendship, conversation, and correspondence fails to reflect the man. Monastic and self-punishing as he might be, Lawrence was the very reverse of a military version of a cloistered monk; he was instead constantly on the move, constantly engaged with people, invited everywhere. Hardy, like Doughty, he came to admire and love. “Hardy is so pale,” he wrote, “so quiet, so refined in essence: and the camp is such a hurly-burly. When I come back I feel as if I’d woken from a sleep: not an exciting sleep, but a restful one…. It is strange to pass from the noise of the sergeants company into a peace so secure that in it not even Mrs. Hardy’s tea-cups rattle on the tray.”

Still, it was not just the sight of the small, slim figure in khaki, puttees, and leather gauntlets arriving on his huge, glistening bike that alarmed his friends in 1923, but the impression he gave that he cared nothing for his life and was looking for a way to end it. The Kenningtons were disturbed by his “nihilistic” thoughts. Lawrence confided to Curtis, in a series of long, heartfelt letters, his “craving for real risk.” To Shaw he confessed, “I haven’t been in the mood for anything lately except high-speed motorbiking on the worst roads.” Of course motorcycles always appear suicidal to those who don’t ride one, and Lawrence was an excellent rider; nevertheless, he was riding perhaps the most powerful motorcycle one could buy in 1923, and boasted of the risks he took.* This was no pose. Lawrence’s unhappiness—intensified by intense feelings of guilt—was deepening into despair, and his friends feared that suicide was possible. He wrote alarmingly to Hogarth, and even more alarmingly to Curtis, about his dislike of all animal life, especially his own, and of his antics on his motorcycle, when he “swerved at 60 M.P.H. onto the grass by the roadside, trying vainly to save a bird.” Shaw was moved to write directly to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, urging him to give Lawrence “a position of a pensioned commanding officer in dignified private circumstances,” and put to an end the “shocking tomfoolery” of Lawrence’s service in the ranks, which he compared to “Belisarius begging for oboles in an ungrateful country,” and warning darkly of the embarrassing consequences if Britain’s most famous war hero took his own life. Baldwin was unable to do this; he took Lawrence’s case up with Trenchard, though he failed to change Trenchard’s mind about readmitting Lawrence into the RAF. Hogarth, who had been doubtful about the approach to Baldwin in the first place, wrote with slightly weary realism to Shaw: “Lawrence is not normal in many ways and it is extraordinarily difficult to do anything for him…. He will not work in any sort of harness unless this is padlocked on to him. He enlisted in order to have the padlocks rivetted on to him.”

What saved Lawrence in 1923 was work: not in the army, where his job—"half-clerk, half-storeman"—hardly taxed his ability, but on his ever more complicated and expensive plans to get Seven Pillars of Wisdomprinted and published as he wanted it to be. Lawrence’s attitude toward his immense book alternated between a sense of failure and a glimmering of hope, sustained by those of his friends who had read it, and whose judgment resembled Siegfried Sassoon’s, who wrote to him: “Damn you, how long do you expect me to go on reassuring you about your bloody masterpiece: It is a great book, blast you.” E. M. Forster wrote to him in the same vein: “I can’t cheer you up over the book. No one could. You have got depressed and muddled over it and are quite incapable of seeing how good it is.”

In the latter part of 1923, hope took the upper hand. Lawrence decided to take on himself the printing and binding of a subscribers’ edition of 100 copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,aimed at “the ungodly rich.” The book would be lavishly printed and illustrated, and printed according to Lawrence’s frequently eccentric or antiquarian opinions, and each copy would be bound in a different material or style. The book would cost thirty guineas; it would be ready in a year and a half; and Lawrence estimated that the total cost of producing it would be about Ј3,000. Since each subscriber would have to pay his or her thirty guineas up front, the book would be self-financed. This was an outrageously optimistic business plan. In the end it would cost Lawrence about Ј13,000* to produce the subscribers’ edition, a crippling debt; and the number of copies went up considerably because he insisted on giving the book to those of his friends who could not afford the subscription and to people he loved or respected too much to accept money from them, such as Storrs, whose check he tore up. (Those who held on to their copies would have had a windfall—they could be resold instantly for many times thirty guineas, and the last one auctioned in the United States, in 2001, went for more than $100,000.)

For the next three years, Lawrence was constantly occupied with the problems of printing his book, as well as with elaborate subterfuges he concocted with the rival American publishers Frank Doubleday and George H. Doran (who would eventually merge in 1927 to form one company), intended to protect his copyright in the United States. Lawrence brought to his role as a publisher the same attention to detail and energy that he brought to everything he set his hand to, managing one of the most intricate and complicated jobs in the history of book production from his bunk in a barracks, or from the NAAFI reading room of a military camp. (The intricacy and complications were largely due to his own demands and prejudices about book design.) Of course, as is so often the case with Lawrence, he wanted to eat his cake and have it too. On the one hand, he wanted his friends to be able to read the book in the form of a sumptuous, private, limited edition; on the other hand, he wanted to avoid reviews and to prevent the general public from reading it at all.

Both Robert Graves and Bernard Shaw expressed concern about libelous material in the 1922 “Oxford” text—libel is always a big problem for authors in Britain, because of the strictness of British libel law as compared with that of the United States—but it does not seem to have been a fear of lawsuits that held Lawrence back from publishing his book in the normal way. Any British publisher would have had the text read for libel, and a solicitor who specialized in libel law might have suggested comparatively small changes that would have protected Lawrence and his publisher, rather than large cuts. More likely, the truth is that in writing Seven Pillars of WisdomLawrence had, like most authors of a memoir, expressed his own version of events, and was not eager to have it contradicted or debated in public. Much of the factual material in the book has since been confirmed by the release in the 1970s of many if not most of the documents, but throughout the book Lawrence, consciously or unconsciously, attributed to himself decisions and actions that were often initiated by others. No doubt, as he wrote, revised, and rewrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom,getting with each revision farther away in time from the events, he made himself increasingly the hero of the book. He did not falsify events or invent them, as he has been accused of doing, but he put himself at the center of the story, and by 1923 he was not anxious to expose himself to criticism, or to objections from others who had served in the Middle East.

The solution—a brilliant one—was to limit the readership to those who were either friends (like Hogarth) or admirers (like Storrs and Allenby), and who would not rush to write long, disputatious letters to the Times.** Lawrence often had contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he wanted to prevent Seven Pillars of Wisdomfrom becoming a collector’s item; on the other, by making almost every copy of the subscribers’ edition different in some way—with variations in binding, and in the number and placement of the illustrations—he inevitably produced a limited edition that would keep bibliophiles busy and puzzled for decades.

In early to mid-1923, Lawrence was still waiting for Shaw’s long-promised suggestions and corrections to the 1922 proof, and still circulating copies to those who had served with him and whom he respected for their comments. Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future Field Marshal) wrote back encouragingly, and the Hardys expressed their admiration. All this ought to have cheered Lawrence up, but failed to do so. He was weary of the book, sick of the Army (“A black core … of animality”), “brooding” on his own sense of dissatisfaction, unable to sleep more than an hour a night, and existing on one meal a day, usually breakfast; and although he was living in a hut with twenty-one other soldiers and a corporal, he felt as lonely as he had been in the attic on Barton Street in London. In an effort to keep his mind occupied, and produce an income beyond the army’s two shillings nine pence a day, he asked Cape about the possibility of doing some translation from the French, estimating that he could probably produce about 2,000 words a day—a figure that was seriously overoptimistic. Cape proposed that he should translate J. C. Mardrus’s 4,000-page Mille et Une Nuits (The Arabian Nights),a formidable task. In preparation for this, Lawrence agreed to translate a French novel, Le Gigantesque,about a giant sequoia tree, a book he came to dislike more and more as he translated it. He persisted with it, however—it was eventually published by Cape as The Forest Giant—but the effect was to deter Lawrence from taking on anything as challenging as Mille et Une Nuits.He took instead a French novel about fishes (even stranger than a novel about a tree), a book which he thought (correctly) English readers might not take to. When he was not translating, he and his friends worked on his cottage, repairing and altering it to his taste. He carved in the lintel over the front door of Clouds Hill two words from Herodotus best translated as “I don’t care,” or perhaps more to the point, “I couldn’t care less.”*

When the Shaws were persuaded to visit Lawrence in his cottage, as the Hardys and E. M. Forster did, Bernard Shaw remarked, perceptively, that Lawrence’s pretense of living “humbly with his comrades” as “a tanker-ranker” was misleading, and that surrounded by his army friends at Clouds Hill “he looked very much like Colonel Lawrence with several aides-de-camp.”

Soon after meeting Lawrence, Shaw described him as “a grown-up boy,” and there is an element of truth to this: both as regards Lawrence, many of whose interests and tastes (motorcycles, for example, or the tiny, cozy cottage, with sleeping bags coyly marked Meumand Tuam)remained boyish, and who scrupulously avoided any of the adult entanglements of love, marriage, and domesticity; and as regards Shaw’s own relationship to him, which was that of an exasperated father. Lawrence had not only adopted Shaw’s name as his own, but found in the name of the village where the Shaws lived, Ayot Saint Lawrence, a kind of portent. Lawrence’s visits to the Shaws throughout 1922 and 1923 had made him, to all intents and purposes, almost a member of the family, and also gave him the unusual opportunity of sharing in the creation of one of Shaw’s best plays, Saint Joan.His visits were curtailed when one of his fellow privates borrowed his motorcycle and crashed it, but he soon managed to acquire another Brough, and in the meantime remained in constant correspondence with both Shaws.

Occasionally, Public Shaw launched a Jovian taunt at Private Shaw: “I have written another magnificent play. When I finish a play, I write another: I don’t sit down gloating in a spectacular manner over how the old one is to astonish the world. Yah!” Nevertheless, Charlotte sent Lawrence the draft acting script of Saint Joan,and Lawrence responded— boldly—with a long, detailed letter of suggestions to the great man. He answered via Charlotte, though he must have been aware that she would show the letter to her husband. He did not comment on the way Shaw had made use of his character and career in creating the part of Saint Joan herself. Like Lawrence, Joan had fought a powerful army to place a king “upon the throne of a nation-state"; like Joan, Lawrence had succeeded against the odds, and had then been dismissed (as she was martyred); like Joan, Lawrence combined unearthly courage with the ability to inspire men to follow him, and invented unorthodox military tactics that confounded the professionals; like Joan’s, Lawrence’s small size, humility, and modesty, whether real or feigned, did not prevent him from being the center of all attention wherever he went; and like Joan, he adopted a costume that separated him from his own countrymen—he went barefoot, in the robes of an Arab, and she wore the armor of a man. Even Joan’s way of expressing herself in the play resembles Lawrence’s—Shaw was nothing if not observant in pursuit of a character. In the words of Michael Holroyd, Shaw’s biographer, “With their missionary zeal to mould the world to their personal convictions, Joan and Lawrence were two small homeless figures elected by the Zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” The comparison intrigued Shaw from his first meeting with Lawrence and gave him the key to creating a Shavian heroine who was at once saintly and proud, modern and medieval, as well as a deeply androgynous figure.

Lawrence was courageous enough to criticize one scene as “adequate” and another as “intolerable.” But on the whole he liked the play, and he praised the fifth act as “pure genius,” though several people have felt that Saint Joanwould have ended better without it (among these were Lawrence Langner and the Theater Guild, producers of the play in New York, who were afraid the audience members would miss their last train home). Lawrence pointed out that Shaw “doesn’t know how men who have fought together stand in relation to one another,” and gave him some sensible suggestions. Once the play had opened, Lawrence went to see it in London, and wrote to Charlotte of Sybil Thorndyke’s performance as Joan, “There isn’t as much strength in Joan … as I had gathered in reading her,” but added that since he had made the role and the text his, in his mind, “there was a little resentment at having others’ interpretations thrust on my established ones.”

Although Lawrence never enjoyed his years in the army as a private, one senses, in 1923 and 1924, not so much a softening of his attitude as an increasingly busy social and intellectual life that kept his mind off it. He was often in London, and was once even invited to a dinner to celebrate Armistice Day, given by Air Chief Marshal Trenchard. Lawrence accepted provisionally:

I’d like to very much: but there are two difficulties already in my view:

It is Armistice day, and I do not know if leave will be given.

I have a decent suit, but no dress clothes at all.The leave I will ask for….The clothes are beyond my power to provide: and I fear that Lady Trenchard might not approve a lounge suit at dinner….Please ask her before you reply. In the event, Lawrence attended the dinner at the Army and Navy Club in uniform, surely the only private soldier in the British army to be dining that evening with the equivalent of a four-star general. Again and again, there are instances of Trenchard’s breaking the rules for Lawrence. He called General Chetwode, the army adjutant-general, to arrange for special leave for Lawrence, and called again, in a rage, because Lawrence, who was on the defaulters’ list for having missed a parade in order to accept an invitation to tea from Thomas Hardy, was unable to meet him at the Air Ministry. Despite Lawrence’s complaints, there was no lack of powerful friends smoothing his path, and no hesitation on his part in asking them to do so.

Nor was there a lack of glamorous job offers. Sydney Cockerell tried to persuade Lawrence to accept the post of professor of English literature at Tokyo University, a position of some prestige; and Trenchard gave him a chance to complete the official history of the Royal Flying Corps in the 1914-1918 war, since the author of the first volume, Sir Walter Raleigh,had died leaving four or five volumes to go. Hogarth had given the job a try, but he was suffering from “all sorts of minor ailments,” as well as diabetes, and the air war was no great interest of his. Here, surely, was a job Lawrence could do superbly—and without having to leave England—but he turned it down, because he did not want the responsibility, and offered it instead to Robert Graves, who, with a wife, children, and a mistress, was in great need of money. But Graves also declined what Lawrence described as “a three-year job, worth Ј600-Ј800 a year,” an optimistic guess, since the completion of the official RFC history would, in fact, take another twelve years.

Although Lawrence still shrank from the prospect of letting people read Seven Pillars of Wisdom,he had made the important step of putting its financing in the hands of Robin Buxton, a friendly banker, who as Major Buxton had led an Imperial Camel Corps unit of 300 men in support of Lawrence during the latter part of the war. Buxton was a rare type—an unflappable banker, endowed with energy, common sense, and a real affection for Lawrence; and Lawrence seems to have put together a “brain trust,” consisting of Alan Dawnay, Hogarth, and Lionel Curtis, to advise him on how many copies to print and what to charge. He was, as usual, an infuriatingly difficult author. He wrote to Buxton: “I’d rather the few copies: I had rather one copy at Ј3,000 than 10 at Ј300, or 30 at Ј100 or 300 at Ј10….1 hate the whole idea of spreading copies of the beastly book.” All this, of course, was still based on the notion that the whole job could be done for Ј3,000, which was hopelessly optimistic. At the same time, Lawrence decided that for moral reasons he should not make any money from the book, and gave up any claim to royalties. His choice of using the Oxford University Press to set the type was thwarted when it backed out, fearing the libel problems in the text. Lawrence eventually settled on hiring his own printer, an American named Manning Pike recommended by the artist Eric Kennington. Although this was his first attempt to design and set a book, Pike was a craftsman-artist after Lawrence’s heart. Still, Pike soon became a martyr to Lawrence’s cranky ideas about typography, a legacy of his passionate admiration for William Morris. Lawrence cut and changed the text to make paragraphs end on a page, to eliminate “rivers” of white space in the type, and to eliminate “orphans” (small pieces of text at the end of a paragraph). Lawrence’s interest in typographical design soon became obsessive, and without a publisher like Cape or an editor like Garnett to control expenses, he began altering his text merely for the sake of its appearance on the page—Pike was, after all, in no position to contradict him. “The business will be done as crazily as you feared,” Lawrence wrote to Shaw, and he was not exaggerating. Shaw’s own ideas about spelling, punctuation, and typesetting were at least as cranky as Lawrence’s, but his business sense was far sounder; he squeezed the maximum amount from his publishers, and was horrified that Lawrence proposed to forgo any profit from his book. Leaving his brain trust to find the necessary number of subscribers, Lawrence proceeded to have plates made of the illustrations and pay for the typesetting equipment Pike needed. He went through at least one more nerve-shredding round of revising the text, and then did so again as Pike began to produce proof sheets. This time he was aided, or perhaps hampered, by Shaw’s detailed suggestions and advice (followed shortly by Charlotte’s somewhat more timidly expressed ones), which finally arrived like a bombshell two years after Lawrence had first sent him the book:

Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo….I invented my own system of punctuation, and then compared it with the punctuation of the Bible, and found that the authors of the revised version had been driven to the same usage, though their practice is not quite consistent all through. The Bible bars the dash, which is the great refuge of those who are too lazy to punctuate….1 never use it when I can possibly substitute a colon; and I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces. As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rough rules for you.When a sentence contains more than one statement, with different nominatives, or even with the same nominative repeated for the sake of emphasizing some discontinuity between the statements, the statements should be separated by a semicolon when the relation between them is expressed by a conjunction. When there is no conjunction, or other modifying word, and the two statements areplaced baldly in dramatic apposition, use a colon. Thus, Luruns said nothing; but he thought the more. Luruns could not speak: he was drunk. Luruns, like Napoleon, was out of place and a failure as a subaltern; yet when he could exasperate his officers by being a faultless private he could behave himself as such. Luruns, like Napoleon, could see a hostile city not only as a military objective but as a stage for a coup de thйвtre: he was a born actor.You will see that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.But by far the most urgent of my corrections—so important that you had better swallow them literally with what wry faces you cannot control—are those which concern your libels. I spent fifteen years of my life writing criticisms of sensitive living people, and thereby acquired a very cultivated sense of what I might say and what I might not say. All criticisms are technically libels; but there is the blow below the belt, the impertinence, the indulgence of dislike, the expression of personal contempt, and of course the imputation of dishonesty or unchastity which are not and should not be privileged; as well as the genuine criticism, the amusing good humored banter, and (curiously) the obvious “vulgar abuse” which are privileged. I have weeded out your reckless sallies as carefully as I can.Then there is the more general criticism about that first chapter. That it should come out and leave the book to begin with chapter two, which is the real thing and very fine at that, I have no doubt whatever. You will see my note on the subject.I must close up now, as Charlotte wants to make up her packet to you. E. M. Forster too had written to Lawrence in detail, criticizing the elaborate style, which Lawrence toned down considerably now that publishing the book was a realistic prospect. It was a moment that was at once stimulating and deeply depressing for Lawrence, as if he were at once summoning up from the past and finally burying the experiences of two years of war, six years after it had ended. He had carried the burden of Seven Pillars of Wisdomfor so long that it must have seemed to him impossible to put it down.

It was soon apparent that there would be no shortage of subscribers—indeed, Lawrence would have trouble keeping the number down to the limit he wanted to set—and also that the entire project was going to prove far more costly than he had supposed. The extraordinary workload he had heaped upon himself, on top of a soldier’s normal day, would have broken the health of a far stronger man, and there is ample proof that he was sinking deeper into depression. It is no accident that he had written confidingly to Charlotte Shaw a kind of de profundis,explaining his experience at Deraa:

I’m always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender…. About that night I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things…. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from the pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter. What he did notpoint out was that in the description of the incident in Seven Pillars of Wisdomit is quite clear that the real horror was notthe pain, but the fact that he experienced pleasure at the pain; that his sexual “surrender” was as “unforgivable” in his mind as it would be for a woman experiencing pleasure from a gang rape. He certainly never mentioned that he had gone to considerable trouble and some expense to reproduce the moment, whenever the need overcame him. Jock Bruce was still in his hut at Bovington, and among the soldiers he invited to his cottage.

Lawrence’s misery continued. He appealed once more to be allowed back into the RAF, but even a change in government did not help; the Conservative secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, was adamantly opposed to having Lawrence back in the RAF. Hoare, who had known Lawrence well in Palestine and Jordan, feared the inevitable publicity, and may also have resented the direct appeal that Shaw made to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin over Hoare’s head, which suggested that Lawrence might take his cause to the newspapers. John Buchan put in a good word for Lawrence with Baldwin as well, but to no avail. Baldwin, a man who combined extreme political shrewdness with genuine indolence, must have felt besieged by Lawrence’s friends, but true to form, he listened politely and did nothing.

To Buchan, Lawrence at least offered an explanation of a kind, writing to thank him for talking to Baldwin: “I don’t know by what right I made that appeal to you on Sunday…. They often ask ‘Why the R.A.F.?’ and I don’t know. Only I have tried it and liked it as much after trying it as I did before. The difference between Army & Air is that between earth & air: no less.” Even Lawrence’s pal at Bovington, Corporal Dixon, thought he was crazy on the subject of the air force, as did the sinister Bruce, but it made no difference; “I can’t get the longing for it out of my mind,” he wrote Buchan, and that was true. Lawrence’s yearning for the RAF was not a matter of reason.

Meanwhile, Manning Pike was slipping far behind with his typesetting—Lawrence had committed his book to a man who was not only inexperienced but subject to “fits of extreme depression,” and on top of that “had an unhappy marriage.” Lawrence, sunk in depression himself, was obliged to cheer Pike up. At the same time, Buxton, Lawrence’s banker, was reluctant to increase his overdraft. In the end, there seemed no other way out but for Lawrence to resign himself to staying in the Royal Tank Corps, and sell the rights to an abridged version of Seven Pillars of Wisdomto finance the printing of the subscribers’ edition. Cape, despite Lawrence’s earlier decision to withdraw from his agreement to the abridged version, offered Lawrence a comparatively modest advance of Ј3,000; and with whatever misgivings, Lawrence accepted it, and agreed to publication in 1927, giving himself enough time (and money) to complete the limited edition. Most, if not all, of the abridgment had already been made by Garnett, but of course it would now have to be redone in view of the changes Lawrence had made in the text of the complete book.

Lawrence might have continued to serve in the RTC and work on the two different versions of his book, however unhappily, but in May 1925 Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabiawas at last published in Britain. It had been a huge success in the United States, and became one again in Britain, reviving curiosity about Lawrence at just the moment when he felt most defeated. The same old exaggerations, told in the jocular voice of an American pitchman, were made more unbearable for Lawrence because he had given Thomas so many of his stories and anecdotes in the first place. Overwhelmed, Lawrence wrote a plaintive letter to Edward Garnett, describing his book as “muck,” and adding that this “gloomy view of it deepens each time I have to wade through it…. I’m no bloody good on earth. So I’m going to quit … [and] bequeath you my notes on recruit life in the recruits’ camp of the R.A.F.”

Garnett took this as a suicide threat and, thoroughly alarmed, wrote to Shaw, who once again took the matter to Stanley Baldwin, and pointed out that the suicide of one of Britain’s most famous heroes because he had been refused permission to transfer from the army to the RAF would be a scandal. The last thing Baldwin wanted was a huge scandal—it was his fate to have to deal first with Lawrence and then with the far more embarrassing problem of King Edward VlII’s wish to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and make her his queen. As a result, in August 1925 Private T. E. Shaw rejoined the Royal Air Force at last as 338171 AC2 Shaw.

* An exception was made for the acknowledged illegitimate children of members of the royal family. King William IV’s nine illegitimate children received titles and were ranked in precedence above a marquess. All of them attended the king’s coronation in 1830, and one of them later became a favorite aide-de-camp to King William’s niece and successor, Queen Victoria.

* The author served in the RAF from 1951 to 1953, and recruit training then (at RAF Padgate) did not seem all that different from training in Lawrence’s time.

* Johns’s words. Since he was an accomplished writer of fiction, he may have overdra-matized his role, but his account reads convincingly enough.

* In the RAF, as in all the British armed services, this is a long, painstaking, timehonored process involving black Kiwi boot polish, the handle of a service spoon heated in hot water to just the right temperature, methylated spirits, spit, and many hours of elbow grease, with a polishing rag.

* This does not necessarily mean that Lawrence was physically dirty—unlike most of his fellow recruits he devoted much time and effort, and occasional small bribes, to seeking out ways to have a hot bath as often as possible.in the RAF “dirty“ can imply nothing worse than a speck of tarnish on a cap badge or a smudged fingerprint on the polished lid of a shoe polish can.

* Although Lawrence had a remarkable gift for languages, and according to his youngest brother, A. W. Lawrence, could pick up the gist of any language very quickly, there is no other evidence that he knew Danish well enough to read it. This may have been a case of gilding the lily, on the part of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who was a friend and contemporary of Wing Commander Bonham-Carter, and whose dyspeptic opinion of Lawrence—also expressed to this author, who edited Sholto Douglas’s memoir—was that “so far as the RAF was concerned, he was scarcely more than a nuisance,” deliberately creating difficulties for the junior officers under whom he served. (Sholto Douglas, Years of Command,New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, 144-145.)

* He was referring to the British Museum Library and to the New York Public Library.

* There are a number of conflicting accounts of the relationship between Lawrence and Bruce, among them that of John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who actually met Bruce while researching his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence in the 1970s; Jeremy Wilson’s much more cautious and skeptical take on Bruce in his biography of Lawrence; and the frankly sensation-alistic account given by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson in The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia,based on their series for the (London) Sunday Times.Bruce also wrote his own account, on which Knightley and Simpson based theirs. Even reduced to the bare minimum of what everyone accepts took place between Lawrence and Bruce, it is still a disturbing story.

* Lawrence sold the dagger to his friend Lionel Curtis, who donated it to All Souls College,where it still is.

† The “birch” was actually a bundle of twenty to twenty-four birch or elder twigs about twenty-eight to forty-eight inches in length, tied together at one end, the first six inches wrapped tightly with a strip of leather to form a handle, and was then in use as regulation punishment in British prisons. it was a big step up in severity from a schoolmaster’s cane, but several steps down from a cat-o’-nine-tails.

* The author owned a motorcycle from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty-six, including the two years he spent in the rAF. it was, in fact, reading about Lawrence as a boy (and hearing about him from the author’s uncle Sir Alexander Korda and from h. Montgomery hyde) that made him decide to buy a motorcycle and join the RAF.

* About $1 million in today’s money. A guinea was ₤1 and one shilling. Until the advent of decimal currency it was considered rather more respectable to charge in guineas than pounds—fashionable tailors, antique dealers, etc., always priced things in guineas. Thirty guineas was about the equivalent of $155 in the 1920s, or about $2,400 in today’s terms.

* Lawrence was right to fear this. For example, when the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Revolt in the Desert,was published in 1927, Sir Arnold Wilson, former civil commissioner in iraq and Lawrence’s old antagonist, wrote that Lawrence was responsible for “the estrangement of Anglo-French relations in the Middle east … [and] helped induce [Britain] to adopt a policy which brought disaster to the people of Syria.” Wilson also accused Lawrence of condoning homosexuality, of imputing homosexuality falsely to the Bedouin, and of turning the Arab Bureau into “a cult of which Lawrence is the chief priest and Lowell Thomas the press agent.”(Wilson, “Revolt in the Desert,” Journal of the Central Asia Society,14, 1927.)

*This is from the tale about hippocleides,suitor of the princess Agarista. having drunk too much at dinner, hippocleides “disgraced himself by standing on his head and beating time [to the music] in the air with his legs (the Greeks wore short skirts).” (John Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder.) At this unseemly display Agarista’s father, angered, shouted, “You have danced away your wife!” to which hippocleides responded, “I don’t care.” Lawrence himself translated it as “Wyworri?” Note that there is a strong sexual element to the story, since Hippocleides had shocked his prospective father-in-law by exposing his genitals. This subtext may be read into the inscription; and Lawrence, and the better educated of his visitors, must surely have been aware of it. An alternative translation might be “I’ll do what I please, whatever you think of it,” which seems closer to Lawrence’s point of view.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Apotheosis

He is all adrift when it comes to fighting, and had not seen deaths in battle.—T. E. Lawrence, commenting on Homer,in the note to his translation ofthe Odyssey, 1932 Lawrence, like Homer’s Odysseus, was home again. On July 16, 1925, Trenchard signed the order approving Lawrence’s transfer from the army to the RAF for a period of five years of regular service and four years in the reserve. A week later Lawrence was ordered to report to RAF West Drayton for processing. All this was done far from the attention of the press. At West Drayton, he was immediately recognized. “A Flight-Sergeant came along …. ‘Hello, Ross,’ he greeted him, and was immediately corrected by a dynamo-switchboard attendant behind him who said: ‘Garn, that ain’t Ross … he ’s Colonel Lawrence.’ ”

After the usual medical examination, Lawrence was sent on to RAF Uxbridge in charge of a corporal. When he arrived there, on a Friday afternoon, nobody wanted to know anything about him, and nobody was willing to sign for him. He was “dragged in to the Headquarters Adjutant, the last hope. He glared. ‘What are you?’ I very stilly replied ‘Yesterday I was a Pte in the R.T.C.’ He snorted ‘Today?’ ‘I think I’m an A.C. twice in the R.A.F.’ Snort second. ‘Will you be in the Navy tomorrow?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said I. ‘I can’t sign for you. I don’t want you.’ ‘I don’t want anybody to sign for me.’ ‘Damned silly …who the hell are you?’ At this point my feeble patience broke. ‘If your name was Buggins, and I called you Bill …’ Then he yelled with joy, recognizing my names for him … and gave me tea.” (This from a long letter to one of Lawrence’s pals from Bovington, Private E. Palmer, nicknamed “Posh.”)

That night Lawrence was fully “kitted out,” and at long last exchanged the hated army khaki for the beloved RAF blue, carrying back to his hut “two kit bags, a set of equipment,** great coat, bayonet, like a plum tree too heavy with fruit.” Saturday he “squared” the camp tailors to alter his uniforms to the preferred tight fit and knife-edge creases. Sunday he spent “Blancoing” his webbing (it was issued in the same khaki color as the army’s but had to be altered to RAF blue with a product called blanco) and polishing his bayonet. On Monday he took the train for RAF Cranwell, home of the Royal Air Force Cadet College, where candidates for a regular commission were trained. This was the RAF equivalent of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Royal Naval Academy at Dartmouth. It was also a real aerodrome, where the cadets learned to fly. Like all airmen, Lawrence was really happy only with the comforting noise of engines revving up. Trenchard had chosen well. The commandant of the Air College was Air Commodore A. E. (“Biffy”) Borton, who had flown with the RFC in support of Lawrence in the desert, and later commanded the air force in Palestine. It was Biffy Borton who had flown the big Handley-Page bomber that so awed Lawrence’s tribesmen when it landed on a desert airstrip, and he instantly recognized Lawrence and sent for him. Lawrence was not only back in the air force; he was under the command of a man whom he liked and trusted, and who admired him. The gloom of the past two years lifted ever so slightly.

Lawrence was posted to B Flight, as an aircraft hand. His immediate world consisted of a sergeant, a corporal, and fourteen airmen, who shared the same hut. Their job was to look after the six training aircraft used by the fifteen officers and cadets of B Flight. The work interested Lawrence, who loved machinery, and except for an early morning parade he spent most of his day in overalls working around the aircraft. Inevitably, there was a close relationship between the pilots and their ground crew—a pilot’s life depended on the men who serviced his aircraft, so there was none of the distance that existed between officers and men in the army. Nor was any great secret made of the fact that AC2 Shaw was in fact Lawrence of Arabia. A good many of the airmen knew or guessed it, and Biffy Borton and his wife occasionally invited AC2 Shaw to their quarters for the evening, as did Borton’s chief staff officer, Wing Commander Sydney Smith, and his lively and beautiful wife, Clare. The Smiths had known Lawrence in Cairo, and both of them liked and understood him. Clare shared Lawrence’s passionate interest in music, and was able to maintain an easy and unforced relationship with him, in which neither his present rank nor his past glory was an issue. She may have been the only woman who actually flirted with Lawrence, an experience which he seems to have enjoyed.**

As for Lawrence, he himself was discreet, and never took advantage of his friendship with the Bortons and the Smiths, or with the college medical officer, an elderly wing commander who was a former surgeon to the king, and now quietly took on Lawrence as, in effect, a private patient. Normally, an airman who makes friends with officers is distrusted by other airmen, but Lawrence never lorded it over his mates or sought special favors. His own sergeant, Flight Sergeant Pugh, summed up his feelings about AC2 Shaw in words rarely heard from an NCO about any of his men: “He was hero-worshipped by all the flight for his never failing, cheery disposition, ability to get all he could for their benefit, never complaining…. Quarrels ceased and the flight had to pull together for the sheer joy of remaining in his company and being with him for his companionship, help, habits, fun and teaching one and all to play straight.” Something of his old spirit, which he had shown when teasing Auda Abu Tayi, seems to have returned, touching the men who slept in Hut 105 at Cranwell.

Of course a service college is not an ordinary camp, even for the lowliest airman. At Cranwell the focus was on the cadets, not the airmen who looked after their aircraft—and it boasted amenities that included an excellent library (to which Lawrence would add a specially bound copy of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom),a weatherproof hut for his latest Brough “Superior” motorcycle, a noncommissioned aristocracy of sergeant pilots and sergeant technicians, and even a swimming pool. Lawrence and some of his mates would run to the pool “at first dawn” on summer mornings, “to dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies as closely as a skin:—and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no loneliness any more.”

“No loneliness any more,” expresses very precisely what Lawrence sought and found in the RAF; and while the bond between Lawrence and his air force mates was hard for friends like the Hardys, the Shaws, Winston Churchill, Hogarth, and Lionel Curtis to understand, it was vital to him. He was like the kind of schoolboy who goes home on a holiday from boarding school reluctantly, because his closest friends are his schoolmates. Lawrence corresponded with his mates when he was away, sending long, interesting letters, full of what he was doing; he even corresponded with some of the soldiers he had liked at Bovington, such as Corporal Dixon and Posh Palmer, and with those airmen who had been with him in Uxbridge. He made them small loans and did them small favors, and remained genuinely interested in their lives and open about his own life.

However widespread his friendships among the rich, the famous, the talented, and the politically powerful were, it was in the barracks, not the drawing room, that he found an antidote to his loneliness.

This is not to say that Lawrence could not switch from one world to the other. He would ride his Brough motorcycle (he had christened the first one Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder,” and would continue naming the others Boanerges II, Boanarges III, etc.) down to London, or off to country houses when he could get leave, always turning up in the uniform of an airman, to the astonishment of butlers and hall porters. He paid a visit to Feisal, now king of Iraq, in London, and they both went off for lunch at Lord Winterton’s house in Surrey. Winterton, now undersecretary of state for India, had served with Lawrence in the advance on Damascus, but Lawrence tried to resist being drawn into nostalgic talk about the war. He “found Feisal lively, happy to see me, friendly, curious,” as well he might be at the sight of “Aurens” in a simple airman’s uniform—as much of a disguise, of course, as the Arab robes and headdress had ever been. Even in Lawrence’s letter to Charlotte Shaw describing this visit, his ferocious self-renunciation is replayed with frightening intensity: “So long as there is breath in my body my strength will be exerted to keep my soul in prison, since nowhere else can it exist in safety. The terror of being run away with, in the liberty of power, lies at the back of these many renunciations of my later life. I am afraid of myself. Is this madness?”

Lawrence takes delivery of a Brough Superior Motorcycle. George Brough is on the left.

Seldom has anybody stated more clearly his determination never again to be placed in a position of power over others. With all his formidable willpower Lawrence was determined to shackle the part of himself that had sought fame, glory, and greatness, and never allow it to rise again except in the pages of his book. Nobody knew better than Lawrence what he was capable of. He had executed a man in cold blood, suffered torture, killed people he loved, witnessed the ruthless murder of prisoners in the aftermath of battle. Nor was anybody more anxious to do penance. It was as if one of the great heroes of medieval times, one of those figures whose castles and tombs Lawrence had spent so much of his boyhood studying, had put aside his honors and retired in midlife to a monastery, tending to his herb garden and performing his humble chores, a simple brother, hoping not to evoke curiosity, pity, or interest. Yet, with the contradictory impulse that was so much a part of his nature, Lawrence was hard at work on two projects that were bound to stir up renewed interest in him: the completion of the thirty-guinea subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom(now planned to consist of 150 copies) and the abridged, popular version of the book, to be called Revolt in the Desert.Also, he had allowed Robert Graves, who desperately needed money, to convert a proposed children’s book about him into a full-scale biography.

Sometimes stormy, sometimes mundane, Lawrence’s correspondence with Charlotte Shaw continued, while she and G.B.S. involved themselves in the formidable task of proofreading the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,which Manning Pike was struggling to set as Lawrence (and the Shaws) wanted it. Some hint of how demanding the job was can be gleaned from Lawrence’s instructions to Charlotte about making insertions in the text.

This bundle of proofs is sent, with an envelope, on its way to Pike. You were not satisfied with galley 18: so I have had it re-set, or its middle part, and the new piece is pinned on…. The rules are simple:i. Page always thirty-seven lines.ii. Each page begins with a new paragraph, and a small capital extending over three lines. Spaces for these are left in the new proof.iii. The last line of each page is solid, i.e. extends to the right hand margin.iv. No word is divided.v. Paragraphs end always after the half-way across the line. Even in our own age of computerized typesetting, any one of these rules would present problems, particularly iii and iv, so it is hardly surprising that the work absorbed a huge amount of time and effort on the part of Lawrence and Charlotte and nearly drove Manning Pike crazy. It does not seem to have occurred to Lawrence that the completion of either of these two projects would bring the national press back to the gates of Cranwell in pursuit of the “uncrowned king of Arabia.” But then, with Lawrence, one never knows. He does not seem to have been able to go for more than a year or two without bringing down on his head exactly the kind of attention he claimed to fear most. As Charlotte had once told her husband, “Something extraordinary always happens to that man.”

Perhaps to alleviate Lawrence’s depression, Charlotte kept up a stream of presents. Hardly any airman at Cranwell can ever have received more frequent packages: a novel by Joseph Conrad; a bundle of magazines, followed a few weeks later by two more books, and a few days later by more magazines, newspapers, and a copy of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer;a week later, another novel; and shortly afterward a box of four books from an antiquarian bookseller and a gift basket of chocolates and cakes from Gunter’s, the fashionable Mayfair tea shop. The gift basket from Gunter’s arrived without a card, but Lawrence was in no doubt about who had sent it. This was a mutual though sexless seduction. Lawrence responded with long letters, sometimes gently teasing (a contrast to Bernard Shaw’s cruel teasing), sometimes self-mocking (as when Lawrence likened the sumptuously illustrated and bound subscribers’ edition to “a scrofulous peacock”); he also sent her further proofs from Pike, to be read over for misprints. Since poor Charlotte had weak eyes, her constant attention to the proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdomis a further demonstration of her devotion to Lawrence, and his growing dependence on her. It would not be exaggerating to say that she mothered Lawrence—this was easier to do now that his mother and his eldest brother, Bob, had left to take up their own adventure as missionaries in China. For his part, he accepted being mothered by Charlotte, but there was more to it than this: they were also kindred souls, who could share with each other emotions and experiences that they could not have shared with anyone else—his reaction to the rape at Deraa, her fear of sex and childbirth—and that in Charlotte’s case would have been brushed off or explained to her in Fabian or Freudian terms by her husband. It was as close to a love affair as either of them—two people who scrupulously avoided even the mildest terms of endearment in their thirteen years of correspondence—could ever have approached.

Like so many of Lawrence’s friends, the Shaws learned to accept his appearance at their doorstep on his motorcycle, much as they disliked the machine. Lawrence had already survived two serious accidents while he was at Bovington, either one of which could easily have killed him. As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as a minor motorcycle accident.” It was not so much that Lawrence was a bad or dangerous rider—George Brough, the designer and manufacturer of his motorcycles, would argue that on the contrary, he was a skillful and careful one—but he used his motorcycle as everyday transportation, often over long distances and poor roads in bad weather. Fallen leaves, puddles, and patches of ice can all cause a skid even at less than daredevil speeds; and in the 1920s and 1930s a motorcycle headlight was, by modern standards, dim and unreliable. (It was not for nothing that Joseph Lucas, founder of the major British manufacturer of automotive electrical equipment, was known to owners of motorcycles as the “prince of darkness.”) Moreover, though Brough was something of a genius, his motorcycles were, for their day, large, heavy, and very powerful machines, a lot to handle for a slight man in his late thirties with a history of broken bones.

At an earlier stage of his life, Lawrence had traveled to far-off foreign places and had written to his family at home. Now, it was Lawrence who was in England while his mother and Bob were far away in China, which was impoverished, turbulent, dangerous, swept by competing warlords and by revolution, and at every level of society deeply hostile to European missionaries. It was now Lawrence who arranged for parcels to be sent abroad. He went to W. H. Smith’s, the British chain of newsagents, where his uniform was greeted with suspicion, to take out subscriptions to the Timesand the New Statesmanto be sent to his mother in China; he also mailed packages containing items she had requested: Scott’s journals, salts of lemon, and padlocks for her trunks. Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, and his wife were living temporarily at Clouds Hill—tight quarters for a married couple—while Lawrence spent Christmas Eve of 1925 alone in Hut 105 at Cranwell, correcting the proofs of his book and reading T. S. Eliot’s collected poems, apparently content. On Christmas Day, he wrote to his mother, who had asked if he needed money, summing up his plans and his financial state:

No thanks: no money. I am quite right that way just now. How I’ll stand a year or so hence, when all the bills of the reprint of my book come in, I don’t know. The subscribers (about 100) have paid Ј15 each, to date. That is Ј1,500 more due from them. The expenses to date are Ј4,500. The Bank has loaned me the rest, against security from me. To meet the deficit I have sold Cape (for Ј3,000 cash + a royalty) the right to publish 1/3 of the book after January 1, 1927. And there will be American serial & other receipts, too. Probably I’ll come out of it well enough off. For his mother’s benefit, Lawrence oversimplified the immense task of printing the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.He also significantly underplayed the many difficulties he had imposed on Cape and his American publisher Doran over Revolt in the Desert,particularly by setting a limit to the number of copies of the abridgment that could be printed during his lifetime and thus eliminating for all practical purposes the possibility of a runaway best seller. In any case, he was determined not to benefit personally from either version of his memoir. This was high-minded but shortsighted—the two books would have made him a rich man, had he been willing to become rich. In this, as in other matters, Lawrence clung to his policy of renunciation. He very much wished to be recognized as a great writer, but—perhaps unlike all other authors—he did not want to profit from writing, or to endure (or encourage) the publicity that would inevitably accompany success.

The excellence of Lawrence’s relationship with the airmen of his flight can be guessed by the fact that he hired a bus to take them all, including Pugh, to the annual air show at Hendon, just outside London. As the deadline—March 1926—approached, he also got two of his hut mates to help him in the laborious task of cutting the text of Seven Pillars of Wisdomfor the abridgment, “as with a brush and India ink, [he] boldly obliterated whole slabs of text,” at night in Hut 105, and cutting the first seven chapters entirely, thus deftly turning the account into a very superior adventure story. His cuts were not only bold but painstaking and supremely confident; he made almost no insertions, or “bridges,” to link the text together, yet it reads so smoothly and seamlessly that one would never imagine it had been cut out of a much larger whole. No doubt Lawrence was guided to some degree by Edward Garnett’s previous abridgment,but his own version differed in some crucial ways. In particular, he eliminated the death of Farraj (which Garnett was reluctant to give up), partly because it required too many pages to explain and partly, one guesses, because the tone of Revolt in the Desertwas considerably more upbeat than that of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence’s shooting the wounded Farraj to keep him from falling into the hands of the Turks was exactly the kind of moral ambiguity that he wanted to keep out of the abridged book.

In truth, Revolt in the Desert,though it is dwarfed by Seven Pillars of Wisdom,is a far more readable book. It opens with a bang at Lawrence’s arrival in Jidda—the first line is, “When at last we anchored in Jeddah’s outer harbour … then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless,” a very effective beginning—and it is by no means an insubstantial volume. The 1927 Doran edition is 335 pages long, or about 120,000 words. Interestingly, the author is identified on the jacket, binding, and title page as ‘T. E. Lawrence': the British-style single quotation marks are Lawrence’s way of suggesting that this person was mythical rather than real. Lawrence had many misgivings about putting his name on the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and at one point decided to use the initials T.E.S.; but in the end, he opted to eliminate any mention that he was the author at all. Since all the copies are signed to the subscriber or to the person to whom he was giving the book, putting his name on the title page seemed to him unnecessary. This is perhaps the only case in literary history in which a major work has appeared with no indication of who the author was. Although he was still as opposed to bibliophiles as ever, Lawrence and his airmen aides went to considerable trouble to make every copy of the subscribers’ edition different, so that in some small way no two copies would be identical, thus keeping collectors busy for the next nine decades trying to spot and identify the differences. Some, of course, were easy—Lawrence had Trenchard’s “partial” copy (it was missing a few illustrations) bound in RAF blue leather, or as close as the bookbinder could get to that elusive color. He wrote to Trenchard: “It is not the right blue of course: but then what is the right blue? No two airmen are alike: indeed it is a miracle if the top and bottom halves of one airman are the same colour…. I told the binder (ex-R.A.F.) who it is for. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘it must be quite plain and very well done.’ ”

It was fortunate that Lawrence finished his labors when he did. In the spring of 1926, coming to the aid of a man whose car had been involved in an accident, he offered to start the engine and the man neglected to retard the ignition. The starting handle flew back sharply, breaking Lawrence’s right arm and dislocating his wrist. Showing no sign of pain or shock, he calmly asked the driver to adjust the ignition, cranked the engine again with his left hand, then drove his motorcycle back to Cranwell. In Flight Sergeant Pugh’s words, “with his right arm dangling and shifting gears with his foot, [he] got his bus** home, and parked without a word to a soul of the pain he was suffering.” The medical officer was away, and it was the next day before he could see Lawrence, who still did not complain. “That is a man!” Pugh commented admiringly. Although Lawrence recovered from this injury, later photographs often show him clearly nursing his left arm and wrist, and it seems safe to say that it gave him pain for the rest of his life.

By 1926 it was clear that Lawrence’s posting to Cranwell would soon have to end. One reason for this was RAF policy, which required that an airman must eventually be posted overseas—to India or Egypt for a period of five years, or to Iraq for two years (because of its vile climate). It would be impossible to send Lawrence to Egypt, where his presence would surely have a political effect—after all, he had been offered the post of British high commissioner in Cairo to succeed Allenby, and he was known to be in favor of greater independence for Egypt. Posting him to Iraq would be even more difficult; his friend Feisal was its king, and Lawrence’s presence there would cause consternation, besides stimulating the Sunni tribesmen to who knew what dreams of war and plunder. Nobody had forgotten how the tribes had ridden in from the desert crying “Aurens, Aurens” and firing off their rifles to greet him in Amman in 1921. That left only India, which was not an attractive proposition for Lawrence: he had done the government of India out of its ambition to occupy and control Iraq, and for that and other reasons was disliked by Indian officials, some of whom still bitterly resented the opinions he had expressed about them during his visit to Baghdad in 1916.

Trenchard offered Lawrence a chance to stay in Britain, but Lawrence was more realistic; the publication of Revolt in the Desert,of which 40,000 words would first be serialized in the Daily Telegraph(which had paid Ј2,000, or about the equivalent of $160,000 in today’s money), and the release of Seven Pillars of Wisdomto the subscribers would make him headline news again, all the more so because Revolt in the Desertwould be published in America at the same time. “It is good of you to give me the option of going overseas or staying at home,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “but I volunteered to go, deliberately, for the reason that I am publishing a book (about myself in Arabia) on March 3, 1927: and experience taught me in Farnborough in 1922 that neither good-will on the part of those above me, nor correct behaviour on my part can prevent my being a nuisance in any camp where the daily press can get at me…. Overseas they will be harmless, and therefore I must go overseas for a while and dodge them.”

It was already clear that Seven Pillars of Wisdomwould be oversubscribed: the list of subscribers included, among writers alone, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Hugh Walpole; and among other notable figures it included King George V (Lawrence contrived to return the check for the king’s copy and make him a present of the book).** Lawrence declined to give the usual two copies to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Museum Library, as was required for copyright purposes, having already donated the original manuscript to the Bodleian. This was an infringement of the U.K. Copyright Act, but being Lawrence he got away with it.

His last weeks in England were spoiled by another serious motorcycle accident, in which his latest Brough was badly damaged, but Lawrence sustained only a cut on his knee. He had to rent out his cottage, collect the books he wanted to take with him, and make his good-byes to the Shaws and the Hardys. The farewell to Hardy was a sad moment for them both. Hardy was eighty-six, and neither of them expected he would live to see Lawrence’s return. They stood on the porch at Max Gate in the cold weather, talking, and Lawrence finally sent Hardy into the house to get a shawl to wrap around his neck and chest. While Hardy was inside, Lawrence pushed his motorcycle quietly down to the road, started it up, and drove away, to spare Hardy the pain of saying farewell, and to spare his own feelings too, for he loved Hardy deeply. He sent his mother’s copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdomto his brother Arnold, to look after it until she returned to England; and he wrote to her in China, chiding her gently for staying there despite the danger, and warning her and Bob of the futility of “endeavours to influence the national life of another people by one’s own,” a reflection not only of his dislike of Christian missionaries, but of his own experience with the Bedouin.

He sailed for India on December 7, 1926, on board the Derbyshire,an antiquated, squalid troopship, packed with 1,200 officers and men, as well as a number of their wives and children, in conditions that shocked him. “I have been surprised at the badness of our accommodation,” he wrote to Charlotte, “and the clotted misery … on board.” Conditions were so bad that Lawrence wrote a letter of complaint about them to his friend Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, knowing that Marsh would pass it on. This became something of a habit with Lawrence—throughout his life in the RAF he made behind-the-scenes efforts to improve the lives of servicemen by bringing problems to the attention of those with the power to change things for the better. He persuaded Trenchard to drop many of the small regulations that plagued airmen’s lives unnecessarily—reducing the number of kit inspections to one a month, for example, as well as allowing airmen to unbutton the top two buttons of their greatcoat (unlike soldiers), removing the silly “swagger sticks” they were supposed to carry when in walking-out uniform, and abolishing the requirement to wear a polished bayonet for church parades. Lawrence wrote detailed letters about anything that seemed to him unfair, antiquated, or just plain silly, and in a surprising number of cases won his point, substantially improving the life of “other ranks.” Churchill was serving at the time as chancellor of the exchequer, and had already made the disastrous decision to return the pound to the gold standard, which many economists would later decide was the starting point of the great worldwide Depression; but at Lawrence’s behest he paused long enough to inquire into the conditions of shipping British service personnel and their families. Lawrence had an uncanny knack for bringing to the attention of those in high office conditions about which they would not normally have been informed, and getting them to do something. This was perhaps the only aspect of his fame that he found useful. His correspondence is full of injustices he wants corrected, or idiotic regulations he wants abolished. He served as a discreet and entirely unofficial equivalent of what is now called an ombudsman, and was responsible for a surprising number of commonsense reforms, including the abolition of puttees for airmen and their replacement with trousers, and the replacement of the tunic with a high collar clasped tightly around the neck by a more comfortable tunic with lapels, worn over a shirt and tie. These interventions were seldom, if ever, for his own benefit; nor did he mention them to his fellow airmen. He was always a master of the skillfully handled suggestion that allowed other people to take the credit, just as Bernard Shaw re-created him in the role of the omniscient, omnipotent Private Meek in Too True to Be Good.

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

Swish swishthe water goes against the walls of the ship, sounds nearer. Where on earth is that splashing. I tittup along the alley and peep into the lavatory space, at a moment when no woman is there. It’s awash with a foul drainage. Tactless posting a sentry over the wives’ defaecations, I think. Tactless and useless all our duties aboard.Hullo here’s the Orderly Officer visiting. May as well tell him. The grimy-folded face, the hard jaw, toil-hardened hands, bowed and ungainly figure. An ex-naval warrant, I’ll bet. No gentleman. He strides boldly to the latrine: “Excuse me” unshyly to two shrinking women. “God,” he jerked out, “with shit—where’s the trap?” He pulled off his tunic and threw it at me to hold, and with a plumber’s quick glance strode over to the far side, bent down, and ripped out a grating. Gazed for a moment, while the ordure rippled over his boots. Up his right sleeve, baring a forearm hairy as a mastiff’s grey leg, knotted with veins, and a gnarled hand: thrust it deep in, groped, pulled out a moist white bundle. “Open that port” and out it splashed into the night. “You’d think they’d have had some other place for their sanitary towels. Bloody awful show, not having anything fixed up.” He shook his sleeve down as it was over his slowly-drying arm, and huddled on his tunic, while the released liquid gurgled contentedly down its reopened drain. The voyage from Southampton to Karachi took a month, and was sheer hell—"Wave upon wave of the smell of stabled humanity,” as Lawrence put it, so awful that even India, which he disliked on sight, seemed to be a deliverance. He was sent to the RAF depot on Drigh Road, seven miles outside Karachi, “a dry hole, on the edge of the Sind desert, which desert is a waste of land and sandstone,” a place of endless dust and dust storms, indeed, where dust seemed like a fifth element, covering everything, including the food. He was assigned as a clerk in the Engine Repair Section, where aircraft engines were given their regularly scheduled overhaul—easy work. The tropical workday at that time ran from 7:30 A.M. to 1 p.m., after which he had the rest of the day off. He spent most of his day in overalls; there was no PT; there were few parades; and his greatest problems were the lack of hot water to bathe in, and sheer boredom. Being on the edge of a desert filled him with both loathing and nostalgia—in the evenings, he could hear the noise of camel bells in the distance as a caravan made its way down Drigh Road. He did not leave the depot to go into Karachi; he had no curiosity about India at all. He spent his spare time sitting on his bunk reading the fifth volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, The Great Crisis;writing letters; brushing up his Greek; and listening to classical music on the gramophone in his barracks, which he shared with fourteen other airmen.

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

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

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

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