Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

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

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

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

It would be a stretch to say that Lawrence was happy in his self-imposed “exile,” as he called it, but he was relentlessly busy. At no point in his life did he write more letters. He spent nearly six months transforming his “notes” on his service at RAF Uxbridge and at Cranwell into a finished handwritten manuscript of The Mint,which he sent to Edward Garnett with instructions that it must not be published until 1950. He also accepted an American publisher’s offer of Ј800 to make a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey,a task for which he felt himself particularly well suited, since he had handled Bronze Age weapons as an archaeologist and had fought in a war close to that of the Greeks and the Trojans. He wrote to Eddie Marsh, thanking “Winston for his gorgeous letter,” and adding, no doubt for Churchill’s eyes, in an aside that sounds like a passage from Greenmantle:“The most dangerous point is Afghanistan…. The clash is bound to come, I think…. Do you know, if I’d known as much about the British Government in 1917, as I do now, I could have got enough of them [the people of the Middle East] behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia?”

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

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

It had not yet occurred to the powers that be in Drigh Road that AC1 Shaw (he had just been promoted to aircraftman first class, an automatic promotion which gave him no privileges, authority, or pleasure, but which he could not refuse) was in regular correspondence with Trenchard, Churchill, and Buchan about matters of state, or with Lionel Curtis about plans for transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states, or with the future Field Marshal the Earl Wavell about the future of tank warfare. Lawrence registered the death of friends: Hogarth, who, ironically, had been writing an entry on Lawrence for the Encyclopaedia Britannicawhen he died (“Hogarth is part, a great part, of Oxford, the concrete thing for which Oxford stood in my mind”); Thomas Hardy (“That day we reached Damascus,” he wrote to Mrs. Hardy, “I cried, against all my control, for the triumphant thing achieved at last, fitly: and so the passing of T. H. touches me”); Gertrude Bell (“Gertrude was not a good judge of men or situations…. But depth and strength of emotion—Oh Lord, yes … A wonderful person. Not very like a woman, you know: they make much of her concern in dress:—but the results! She reminded me in one dress, of a blue jay. Her clothes and colours were always wrong”).

Lawrence never left the depot itself—he described it as “a sort of voluntary permanent C.B.” (“C.B.” stands for a military punishment, “confined to barracks.”) Unfortunately, that did not protect him. The air officer commanding the RAF in India was Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, an old friend and admirer of Lawrence’s since 1916. It was part of Salmond’s duty to inspect every RAF station in India once a year—of course, his visit required prodigious preparation on the part of all the airmen—and following his inspection of Drigh Road Depot, he asked the commanding officer, Wing Commander Reginald Bone, CBE, DSO, “By the way, how’s Shaw getting along?” Bone was puzzled. “Shaw? Shaw?” he replied. “I do not think we have here any officer of that name.”

Air Marshal Salmond had dropped what is known in the RAF as a “clanger,” or outside it as a “brick.” Fortunately, he did not pursue the matter, but Bone kept an eye open for the mysterious AC1 Shaw and in time discovered that he was virtually the only person at Drigh Road not already in on the secret that AC1 Shaw was T. E. Lawrence.*

Bone was annoyed not to have been informed that one of his clerks was Lawrence of Arabia, and his natural tendency to take it out on Lawrence may have been increased by the fact that he had read and disliked Robert Graves’s Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure.He sought out Lawrence, and as Lawrence put it in a letter to Trenchard’s private secretary, Wing Commander T. B. Marson, another old friend, he “trod heavily on my harmless, if unattractive face.”

Salmond quickly intervened to put a stop to this, presumably at the request of Trenchard, but the effect was that Bone was further embarrassed, and began to suspect that Lawrence was spying on him. Either because he had been informed by the camp post office, or because he had simply guessed correctly, he asked his adjutant to find out whether Lawrence was communicating with headquarters. The adjutant, who might have proceeded with tact in view of the fact that the inquiry involved private letters between Airman Shaw and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Trenchard, was, in Lawrence’s words, “bull-honest,” and simply demanded to see the letters. Lawrence obediently showed him, among others, his latest letter from Trenchard, and another from Salmond, and so he “was sent for, cursed, and condemned to go up-country as a Bolshevik.” This attack caused Salmond to reappear and read Bone the riot act, but it did not make Bone any happier to have such a well-connected airman on his station. Lawrence had mentioned in his last letter to Trenchard that he had been offered “$100,000 for a seven week lecture in the United States,” and that he had turned down an offer of Ј5,000 for one of the five copies of the Oxford edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom* That Airman Shaw was turning down offers amounting to many times more than a wing commander would make in a whole service career can hardly have sweetened Bone’s feeling about him.

Matters could hardly be expected to go on like this for long—Lawrence’s presence was not only irritating his commanding officer, but also beginning to divide the officers: some thought he should be left alone, and others sided with Bone. This was certainly “contrary to the maintenance of good order and discipline,” though the fault in this instance seems to have been more that of Bone than of Lawrence. Still, Lawrence was certainly an upsetting presence to several of his commanding officers; he was in battle, and he was a master of what we would label passive-aggressive behavior. (It is called “dumb insolence” in the British armed services, and is a chargeable offense.) Lawrence also had vast reserves of connections, patience, and unconcealed mental superiority to draw on in any struggle with authority, as well as the most important quality of all: innocence. There was no rule in King’s Regulationsthat a marshal of the Royal Air Force and chief of the air staff might not write private letters to an airman, nor that the airman should not reply to such letters; still less was there any requirement that the airman should share their contents with his commanding officer. Bone was on shaky ground, but it is always easy for a commanding officer to make trouble for a mere airman. As Lawrence had discovered at Farnborough, strict kit inspections and extra guard duty were the least he could expect.

The friction between the officers at Drigh Road on the subject of Lawrence is illustrated by the adjutant, Squadron Leader W. M. M. Hurley, who had been sent to ask Lawrence whether he was writing letters to headquarters. After getting to know Lawrence, Hurley offered him the use of the typewriter in the orderly room on Thursdays (a day off, in the relaxed working conditions of the British armed services in India), and soon got to know him even better. Hurley did not agree with the commanding officer’s opinion about Lawrence at all. He admired Lawrence’s scrupulously correct attitude toward his officers, and the fact that no matter how upset he was at the many small forms of military persecution he was subjected to, he never raised his voice. Hurley remarked too on Lawrence’s appearance: “his head was everything, a noble feature indeed with a lofty forehead, very soft blue eyes and a strong chin. His body was small and wiry and must have framed a splendid constitution, when we consider the trials and the actual brutality which had been part of his share in the Arabic campaign.”

Now and again the old Lawrence broke through the barriers behind which Airman Shaw had imprisoned him. On one occasion, when the officers were carrying out their annual pistol course on the firing range, Lawrence happened to be range orderly. At the end of the day, when only the adjutant, the NCO in charge of the station’s armory, and Lawrence were left behind, Lawrence “suddenly and quietly … picked up a pistol and put six ‘bulls’ on the target,” shooting far beyond the ability of any of the officers. On another occasion, when air routes from Karachi to Britain were being discussed by a survey party of the RAF, high political officers from the government of India, and the British resident in the Persian Gulf, AC1 Shaw was hurriedly brought into the meeting from the Engine Repair Section, in his overalls, to give his crisp opinion of the trustworthiness, character, and influence of the sheikhs along the route across Iraq and Trans-Jordan. He did so, with a precision and an air of authority that astonished (and silenced) officers and civilian authorities alike.

Lawrence’s fellow airmen were impressed by his willingness to take on guard duties over holidays, when everybody else wanted to go out drinking, and by the vast number of books he collected, including “William Blake, Thomas Malory, Bunyan, Plato, and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” as well as his own copy of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,“which he kept in a small tin box under his bunk.” He happily allowed Leading Aircraftman R. V. Jones, who had the bunk next to his, to borrow his own book; and Jones, who soon became a friend, later recalled that Lawrence, who had a gramophone and frequently received packages of classical records from Britain, also ordered the latest records of Sophie Tucker to appeal to the less highbrow taste of the airmen in his barracks.

By the beginning of 1928 Lawrence’s mother and his brother Bob had left China, unable to continue their missionary work because of the hostility of the Chinese. Lawrence wrote to them, realistically, but without much sympathy: “I think probably there will be not much more missionary work done anywhere in the future. We used to think foreigners were black beetles, and coloured races were heathen: whereas now we respect and admire and study their beliefs and manners. It’s the revenge of the world upon the civilisation of Europe.” India, with its apparently subservient native masses and its small body of British rulers, made him feel this even more strongly. He was far ahead of his time in this, as in many of his other opinions, and once he was back in Britain he would unhesitatingly use his very considerable influence to change things to which he objected, such as the death penalty for cowardice. In the meantime, however, he was stuck in India, though even that did not prevent the London press from running fanciful and sensationalist stories about him. The Daily Express,for example, alleged that “instead of visiting Karachi … he goes when off-duty to the edge of the desert…. There he chats with the villagers, and joins in their profound Eastern meditations.” Lawrence wrote to his friend R. D. Blumenfeld, the editor, ridiculing this kind of thing. He did not speak any of the local languages, he protested, and had never practiced meditation; but these stories found their way back to India and may have made Wing Commander Bone more determined than ever to get rid of Lawrence.

Lawrence himself was anxious to get away from Drigh Road, because he had good reason to believe that some of the officers there were gunning for him. He was always concerned about keeping his record clean, and he knew that nothing was easier for an officer than finding a reason to put an airman under arrest for a minor or imaginary crime, and thus leave a black mark on his record. He wrote to Trenchard, explaining why he had applied to Salmond for a posting “up-country,” as the unruly mountainous region of the Northwest Frontier was then called, on what is now the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “A conversation between an officer and a civilian in a club after dinner was improperly repeated to me…. However this one was reported to have sworn he ‘had me taped’ and was ‘laying to jump on me’ when he got the chance …. So I’m going to run away to a squadron. They are small and officers mix with airmen, and aren’t as likely to misjudge a fellow. I told Salmond I had private reasons. Don’t think me a funk. At worst it’s only overcautious.”

Salmond sent Lawrence about as far away from Karachi as he could, to RAF Fort Miranshah, in Waziristan, where Lawrence arrived in August 1928. “We are only 26 all told,” he wrote, “with 5 officers, and we sit with 700 Indian Scouts (half-regulars) in a brick and earth fort behind barbed wire complete with searchlights and machine guns.” It would have been hard—perhaps impossible—for Salmond to find a more remote posting for Lawrence, but there were hidden dangers. Miranshah, a forward airfield of Number 20 Squadron, was less than ten miles away from the border between British India and Afghanistan—although the line was not only porous but meaningless to the local tribesmen, whose only loyalty was to their faith, clan, and tribe, and who raided impartially on both sides of the border. Afghanistan had been in a state of turmoil since time immemorial. “The graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan was the gateway to India, and the locus of the “great game,” in which, for more than a century, the British and the Russians had been vying with each other to control the country by bribery, secret intelligence missions, and occasional armed intervention. British and Russian agents traveled through the rough, mountainous, dangerous country in the guise of mountain climbers, botanists, or geographers, seeking out potentially friendly warlords and tribal leaders, drawing up maps, and gathering such political intelligence as could be gleaned from the bloodthirsty chaos that passed for politics in Afghanistan. In 1843, after invading the country and taking Kabul, its capital, an entire British army was defeated and slaughtered between Kabul and Gandamack. The only survivor was Dr. William Brydon, a regimental surgeon, who escaped captivity and rode to the gates of Jelalabad on a mule with the news of the disaster—the subject of a famous painting by Lady Butler. Nobody questioned the ferocity of the Afghan tribes or their determination to resist infidel foreigners in their country, but the British nevertheless fought two subsequent wars in Afghanistan, without achieving a clear-cut victory.

Shortly after Lawrence’s arrival at Miranshah, a number of the Afghan tribes staged a rebellion against King Amanullah, who had been attempting to modernize the country by introducing reforms such as schools for girls, the abandonment of the burkafor women,* and much else. The women of his court were even seen playing tennis in the gardens of the royal palace in Kabul, shamelessly wearing European tennis clothes. The result was a widespread and growing civil war, in the course of which Amanullah lost his throne. The first successor was the unlettered son of a water carrier; the next was Amanullah’s sinister, cold-blooded former war minister and ambassador to France. It does not seem to have occurred to either Trenchard or Salmond that Lawrence’s presence on the border might attract attention or cause trouble.

At first, life at Miranshah suited Lawrence. His duties as the commanding officer’s orderly room clerk were not demanding; he got along well with the airmen and the small group of officers; and since this was a working flying station, with aircraft landing and taking off, he felt himself to be back in the real RAF. He wrote a prodigious number of letters, many of them to Trenchard, who had read the manuscript of The Mint—it shocked him but did not prevent him from extending Lawrence’s service in the RAF to 1935 before he retired as chief of the air staff. Indeed a small book on how to wage war against an insurgency could be put together from Lawrence’s letters to Trenchard from Miranshah. Interestingly, both Trenchard, at the top of the RAF, and Lawrence, at its bottom, agreed that a policy of bombing tribal villages to enforce peace was more likely to do harm than good, by stirring up fierce resentment about civilian casualties.** However, such bombing was the whole purpose of the airfield at Miranshah.

At Miranshah there was little secrecy about the fact that AC1 Shaw was Lawrence—everybody knew it, and nobody cared much. “I think that the spectacle of a semi-public character contented in their ranks,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “does tend to increase their self-respect and contentment.” Flight Lieutenant Angell, the commanding officer, liked Lawrence, who never showed him a letter without having first prepared a reply for his signature. The pace of life was leisurely, with plenty of native servants to do the cleaning and polishing, even for the airmen. Lawrence worked hard on his translation of the Odyssey,despite his irreverence toward its author and its characters. “Very bookish, this house-bred man,” Lawrence wrote of Homer, and went on: “only the central family stands out, consistently and pitilessly drawn—the sly, cattish wife, that cold-blooded egoist Odysseus, and the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus. It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer’s heroes and examplars.”

Lawrence did not feel oppressed by the fact that nobody was allowed beyond the barbed wire during the day, or out of the fort at night, since he had no desire to see Waziristan. Nor was he bothered by the fact that the airmen slept with their rifles chained to a rack beside their beds, in case of a sudden attack. He went around bareheaded, to demonstrate that it was not necessary to wear a pith helmet, and often wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up instead of his tunic. He was cheerful, hardworking, and fit; he had his books, his gramophone, and his records; he was not even disturbed by the news that somebody had bought the film rights to Revolt in the Desert,which almost guaranteed a lot of unwelcome publicity about who would play Lawrence in the film. He did not expect to return to Britain before 1930, at the earliest.

Unfortunately, by the beginning of December 1928, new rumors about Lawrence were making headlines in London. The Daily Newsreported that he was learning Pashtu in preparation for entering Afghanistan, either in support of or against King Amanullah. A few days later, even more sensationally, The Empire Newsrevealed that Lawrence had already entered Afghanistan, met with the beleaguered king, “and then disappeared into ‘the wild hills of Afghanistan’ disguised as ‘a holy man’ or ‘pilgrim,’ “ to raise the tribes in the king’s support. In India, feelings ran high against Lawrence as a British arch-imperialist trying to add Afghanistan to the empire. A genuine holy man, Karam Shah, was attacked and badly beaten by a mob in Lahore when the rumor spread that he was Lawrence in disguise. In London, anti-imperialists in the Labour Party burned Lawrence in effigy during a demonstration held on Tower Hill.

The government of India was taken by surprise, since the Air Ministry had never informed it that Lawrence was serving there. On January 3, 1929, Sir Francis Humphreys, the British minister in Kabul, cabled Sir Denis Bray, foreign secretary of the government of India in Delhi, to point out that the presence of Lawrence as an airman on the border of Afghanistan created “ineradicable suspicion in the minds of the Afghan Government that he is scheming against them in some mysterious way.” The Soviet, French, and Turkish ministers in Kabul were quick to spread these rumors, and in Moscow the Soviet newspapers carried stories that were soon spread around the world by left-wing newspapers, accusing Lawrence of being an imperialist agent responsible for the unrest in Afghanistan. Under the circumstances, Humphreys felt, the sooner Lawrence was moved as far away from Afghanistan as possible, the better. Air Vice-Marshal Salmond stoutly dismissed all this as “stupid,” but in London the foreign secretary, alarmed by the spread of these stories, ruled that “Lawrence’s presence anywhere in India under present conditions is very inconvenient,” a superb piece of British understatement.

Trenchard and Salmond were overruled—Lawrence must be removed from India at once. Trenchard ordered Salmond to offer him a choice between Aden, Somaliland, Singapore, and coming home. Lawrence, indignant that he had been given only a night’s notice, was flown out of Miranshah to Lahore, without his gramophone or his records, and from there to Karachi, where he was embarked as a second-class passenger in borrowed civilian clothes aboard the P&O** liner RMS Rajputana,with orders to report to the Air Ministry as soon as he arrived home.

In contrast to his journey out to India on a troopship, his journey home was comfortable. The ship was not crowded and he had a cabin to himself. In the meantime the furor about him continued to spread, causing the Air Ministry to question the wisdom of Lawrence’s disembarking from the Rajputanaalong with the rest of the passengers onto the dock at Tilbury, where he was sure to be greeted by a mob of reporters and photographers. Instead, special arrangements were made to take him off secretly in a naval launch when the ship reached Plymouth Harbor; but the press was so intensely interested in Lawrence that this plan leaked, and when the ship arrived it was surrounded by dozens of motor launches and fishing boats hired by reporters and press photographers.

The Air Ministry consistently underrated both Lawrence’s celebrity and the ingenuity of the press, and this was a good example of both. Wing Commander Sydney Smith, the commanding officer of RAF Cattewater (the nearest RAF station to Plymouth) and former chief staff officer at Cranwell (where he and his wife, Clare, had befriended Lawrence), was sent out on the launch in civilian clothes with instructions to escort him to London with the least possible publicity. But despite all the precautions, every moment of Lawrence’s transfer from the Rajputanato the deck of the naval launch was caught on film, and would appear in newsreels and in newspapers the world over. It was even front-page news in The New York Times.In London, one headline above a front-page photograph summed up the situation from the point of view of the press and public: “GREAT MYSTERY OF COLONEL LAWRENCE: SIMPLE AIRCRAFTMAN—OR WHAT?”

Here was one of the first modern “media feeding frenzies"—a forerunner of those that would later be triggered by every event in the life of Princess Diana. The photographers with their long telephoto lenses bobbed up and down in the swell of the harbor, while Lawrence, in his airman’s uniform, descended slowly on a rope ladder thrown over the side of the Rajputana,then walked across the deck of the launch to its tiny cabin, hands in the pockets of his RAF raincoat in a most unmilitary way, with a faint, sardonic smile on his face. He seemed to be thinking, “All right, you bastards, you got me this time, but nexttime you bloody well won’t!”

AC1 Shaw returns to England, 1929.

The comparison between Lawrence and Princess Diana is by no means far-fetched. They were both magnetically attractive—she was the most often photographed person of her generation, he the most often photographed, drawn, painted, and sculptured person of his; they both had a natural instinct for adopting a flattering pose in the presence of photographers and artists without even seeming to know they were doing it; they both played cat and mouse with the press, while complaining of being victimized by it; they both simultaneously sought and fled celebrity; they both—always a tricky task in Britain—managed to cross class lines whenever they chose to, she by making friends of her servants, he by serving in the ranks of the RAF and the army. Both of them were on the one hand intensely vulnerable, and on the other, exceedingly tough. Of course one recognizes the differences—Lawrence was an internationally acclaimed war hero, a scholar, and a writer of genuine distinction, perhaps even genius; and in the sixty-two years that separated their deaths in road accidents Great Britain changed radically (though not radically enough to save Diana’s marriage or her life). But it will help modern readers to understand Lawrence’s problems if they bear in mind that from 1919 to his death Lawrence was as famous, as sought after, as admired, and as persecuted by the press as Diana was. To this situation he added, by his own efforts to keep out of sight and the bungled efforts of the RAF to hide him, something of the mystery that surrounded Howard Hughes in Hughes’s later, reclusive years. Lawrence, hidden away from the press in India or at RAF stations in England, provoked exactly the same unrelenting press interest as Hughes did when he was locked away in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, and the same kind of intense, almost prurient curiosity and speculation on the part of the public. Lawrence was perhaps the first in the long line of twentieth-century celebrities who became victims of their own fame. A journalistic tradition was born on February 2, 1929, when Lawrence was greeted at sea by the RAF wing commander and the Royal Navy lieutenant commander and taken ashore through a floating gauntlet of what would now be called paparazzi.

Not surprisingly, Wing Commander Smith was no more successful at avoiding press headlines than his successors in the role of “media handler” have been since then. To avoid the Plymouth railway station, which the press was sure to have staked out, Smith rushed Lawrence to Newton Abbott; but they were discovered as soon as they boarded the train to London, and when they reached Paddington Station in London the platform was crowded with an unruly mob of photographers and journalists, jostling and pushing to get close to Lawrence, who had been presented with a letter from Trenchard firmly warning him to say nothing. When Smith and Lawrence got into a taxi, they were followed by lines of cars and taxis full of photographers; meanwhile, their taxi driver, who may have been bribed by journalists, deliberately drove slowly and took them the longest way to the flat of Smith’s sister-in-law on Cromwell Road. The wing commander rushed Lawrence into the flat in such a hurry that Lawrence literally bumped into Clare and almost sent her flying to the floor. The New York Timesreported the car chase on its front page the next day under the headline: “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA HIDES IN LONDON: FLEES REPORTERS ON ARRIVING FROM INDIA.”

The reporters could get nothing out of Lawrence, who was only quoted as denying that he was Lawrence, and saying, “No, my name is Mr. Smith.” This didn’t do him a lot of good. Whatever the expertise of the Air Ministry was in other areas, its ability to keep Lawrence’s arrival a secret was zero, much to Trenchard’s embarrassment. Lawrence grew increasingly concerned, for he was afraid that all this publicity would get him thrown out of the RAF. Nightfall finally enabled the Smiths to get Lawrence out of the flat by the back door and to the comparative safety of his old attic hideaway above Sir Herbert Baker’s office. He then spent the weekend in the seclusion of the Trenchards’ home, the last place the press would have looked for him.

He was right to be concerned about his future in the RAF. Trenchard was more amused than irritated by all these goings-on, but by this time questions about Lawrence were beginning to be asked in the House of Commons, and these posed a more serious problem for him. The accusations that Lawrence had stirred the tribes of eastern Afghanistan to rise against their king did not interest Labour members so much as why Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence had ever been allowed to enlist in the RAF as an airman under a false name. Secretary of State for Air Sir Samuel Hoare replied to these questions reluctantly and with exceedingly bad grace, as was hardly surprising, since he had consistently been opposed to Lawrence’s enlistment. Now, just as he had predicted, he was under attack for something he had resisted from the first. Hoare decided that Lawrence was now a nuisance and an embarrassment to the government.

Despite a weekend with the Trenchards, during which Lawrence must have received a lot of good advice, he elected instead to behave as if he were dealing with an insurgent tribal leader, walking alone and unarmed into the leader’s tent. No sooner had Trenchard driven him back to London than Lawrence went to the House of Commons and asked to see Ernest Thurtle, the Labour member who had been the first to ask why Lawrence had been allowed to enlist under a false name. Thurtle had not been satisfied by Hoare’s reply to his question in the House, and had given notice that he and his colleague James Maxton intended to pursue the matter further. Thurtle was, in his own way, as dedicated a man as Lawrence—an ex-serviceman with a particular interest in improving the life of servicemen in the ranks and making discipline more humane and sensible. He and Maxton must have been surprised when the object of their questions appeared in the lobby of the House of Commons, dressed in an airman’s uniform, asking to see them. To do Thurtle credit, he was willing to listen to Lawrence’s side of the story, and indeed sympathetic, once Lawrence made it clear that he was not an officer and a secret agent, but merely an airman burdened by more publicity, and more inaccurate newspaper reporting, than he could handle. Lawrence explained that any inquiry into his enlistment might have the unintended effect of deeply embarrassing his mother and his surviving brothers. He described to Thurtle “the marriage tangles of [his] father.” Thurtle was not only mollified but convinced, and he and Lawrence thereafter became close friends, thus demonstrating the good sense of Lawrence’s suggestion to Trenchard about how to deal with the murderous and obstinate Feisal el Dueish at Ur. Lawrence and Thurtle worked closely together on many of Lawrence’s pet reform schemes for the armed services.

The famous Lawrence of Arabia appearing at the House of Commons in an airman’s uniform did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, he caused a sensation, and Sir Samuel Hoare complained strongly to Trenchard, who called Lawrence into the Air Ministry and warned him sternly against any further appearances in Westminster. Lawrence apologized gracefully, though he asked if Trenchard could not find some way to shut up The Daily News,and Trenchard, patiently, asked him with gruff amusement, “Why must you be more of a damned nuisance than you need be?”

Lawrence walking around London in uniform was a constant target for journalists—as he wrote to E. M. Forster, “I am being hunted, and do not like it.” Trenchard, who was anxious to get him away, moved quickly to have him posted to RAF Cattewater, near Plymouth, where Wing Commander Smith was the commanding officer. In the meantime, Lawrence received an unexpected and welcome present from Bernard and Charlotte Shaw: a new Brough “Superior” SS-100 motorcycle.* He arrived on this motorcycle at RAF Cattewater, where his friend Clare saw him pull up at the camp gates. “On it,” she wrote, “was a small blue-clad figure, very neat and smart, with peaked cap, goggles, gauntlet gloves and a small dispatch-case slung on his back.” Lawrence was back in the RAF again, on a working station, serving under a commanding officer whom he admired and liked, and whose family made him one of their own. When Clare Smith wrote her description of Lawrence’s years at RAF Cattewater, she called the book The Golden Reign,for Lawrence was the sovereign, casting over all their lives a glow of glamour, excitement, and adventure. It was as if he had been adopted by the Smiths and their children rather than merely posted to a new RAF station. This was perhaps as close to domestic bliss as Lawrence had ever been, and he loved every moment of it.

He was also about to enter on a period of his life when he found, at the same time, contentment of another sort. RAF Cattewater was a seaplane base, so boats, launches, and speedboats were a necessary part of its equipment, although the actual seaplane squadron had not yet arrived. It was here that Lawrence began a new career as a largely self-taught expert in the building and running of the RAF’s high-speed rescue launches. During a six-year period Lawrence would make an extraordinary contribution to the revolutionary design of the boats that would be used to “fish” out of the water RAF pilots shot down over the Channel in the summer of 1940. Many of these men would owe their lives to the unconventional ideas, and the awesome ability to reach friends in high places in the Air Ministry and the government, of 338171 AC1 Shaw, T. E.

He described his new home in a letter to a friend: “Cattewater proves to be about 100 airmen, pressed pretty tightly on a rock, half-awash in the Sound: a peninsula really, like a fossil lizard swimming from Mount Batten golf links across the harbour towards Plymouth town. The sea is 30 yards from our hut one way, and 70 yards the other. The Camp officers are peaceful, it seems, and the airmen reasonably happy.”

Safely out of London, Lawrence still kept up his connections to the great world, turning down Eddie Marsh’s invitation to present the Haw-thornden Prize to his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and writing in detail to Ernest Thurtle about his objection to the death penalty for cowardice—"A man who can run away is a potential V.C.,” he noted, from experience.

He continued to write in detail to Trenchard about RAF reforms, objecting to spurs for the officers and bayonets for the men. To another friend, an airman from Farnborough, he wrote with resignation, “I’m very weary of being stared at and discussed and praised. What can one do to be forgotten? After I’m dead, they’ll rattle my bones about, in their curiosity.”

The cold of England ate into his bones—he “wished England could be towed some thousand miles to the South,” and at times he complained that he was “so tired, and want so much to lie down and sleep or die.” But he soon began to cheer up as his work became more interesting. No doubt he was also pleased to be serving as Wing Commander Smith’s clerk for the moment; he found himself instantly transformed into a kind of junior partner in running the station, even suggesting that the camp’s name should be changed to RAF Mount Batten and drafting a letter to the Air Ministry requesting the change. Smith signed the letter, and the request was quickly granted.

Despite the absence of the seaplane squadron for the time being, Smith was busy. Apart from running the camp, he was also the RAF’s representative for the organization of the next Schneider Trophy competition, scheduled for the first week of September 1929, at Calshot, near Southampton. Named after a wealthy French industrialist—the trophy’s official name was La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider—this was a speed event flown by seaplanes over a course of 150 miles. It was first flown in 1912, and by the 1920s it had become one of the most glamorous and expensive contests in the world of aviation, and a test of the major industrial nations’ technology and aircraft design. The race had begun as an annual event, but in 1928 the Aйro-Club de France decided to change it to once every two years, in view of the increasing complexity and sophistication of the designs, and the growing world economic crisis. If any nation should win the trophy three times in a row, it would go to that nation in perpetuity. By 1929, the major contestants were Britain, the United States, and Italy—Germany did not enter, because the German government had no wish to draw attention to its fast-growing aircraft industry. The fastest aircraft were often those designed by Reginald J. Mitchell, of the Vickers-Supermarine Aviation Works. Mitchell would go on to design the “Spitfire,” which was based in part on his Schneider Trophy aircraft and would become perhaps the most successful (and most beautiful) fighter aircraft of World War II.

The contest involved a huge amount of preparation on the part of the host nation, and Lawrence quickly took on much of the correspondence to and from Wing Commander Smith, as well as accompanying him to meetings, to take notes and look after the files. Since the British entries were largely government-financed (like those of the Italians and the Americans) and were run by the RAF, Smith was in charge of the British team. Thus Lawrence was involved in numerous meetings at the Treasury and the Air Ministry, during which he was occasionally recognized as the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence was at the same time working hard to finish his translation of the Odyssey,and trying to decide whether it should be published under his name (given Trenchard’s warning to keep Lawrence’s name out of the press), or indeed whether he could ever finish it at all, given the scope and variety of his duties with the RAF. In addition to being the commanding officer’s secretary-clerk, Lawrence was now a machine and workshop clerk and part of the motorboat crew. Bruce Rogers, the American book designer who had commissioned the Odysseyproject, displayed a saintly patience with the delay; he sensibly decided to wait, writing Lawrence soothing letters, rather than trying to set deadlines that Lawrence couldn’t meet.

There were occasional stories about Lawrence in the newspapers: the trashy scandal tabloid John Bullmade his life more difficult by suggesting that he spent all his time at Mount Batten tinkering with his expensive motorcycle and translating Homer—exactly the kind of story Trenchard wanted to avoid. Still, Lawrence managed to get up to London on his motorcycle from time to time, and also managed to cut the journey to just over four and a half hours. This meant riding the big Brough over “the ton” (100 miles per hour) wherever he could.* Lawrence heard Bernard Shaw read The Apple Cartaloud at the London house of Lord and Lady Astor, with a guest list of exactly the kind of people Trenchard wanted him to avoid. He soon found a soul mate in his hostess, Nancy Astor, Britain’s first woman member of Parliament, and perhaps the most energetic, flamboyant, and outspoken woman in the country. She was originally Nancy Langhorne, from Danville, Virginia; and she and her sister reached fame as the original “Gibson Girls.” After an unsuccessful marriage to Robert Gould Shaw II, she came to England and quickly married the immensely wealthy Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor. Soon Nancy Astor became something of a national institution, known for her wit, her willingness to break social barriers and traditions, and her blunt outspokenness to opponents, including Winston Churchill. Her seat as a member of Parliament was Plymouth, virtually on Lawrence’s new doorstep. When she spied Lawrence in the streets of Plymouth, he reported to a friend, “A pea-hen voice screamed ‘Aircraftman’ from a car.” Lawrence tried to escape, but she called Wing Commander Smith and “invited herself” to RAF Mount Batten, where she not only tracked Lawrence down but persuaded him to give her a ride on his motorcycle. They immediately became friends, much to the surprise of other people, for she was rich, reactionary, a militant Christian Scientist, and a dreadful bully. He described her to Charlotte Shaw as “one of the most naturally impulsive and impulsively natural people. Like G.B.S. [Charlotte’s husband], more a cocktail than a welcome diet.” (This was perhaps not the most flattering thing to say about Bernard Shaw to his wife.) Lady Astor became another of Lawrence’s impassioned correspondents, arousing both disapproval and heartache in Charlotte. “I do not know when, or with whom, I have ever maintained for so long so hot a correspondence,” Lawrence wrote Nancy Astor. “Clearly we are soul-mates.”

For a man who gave the impression of being a confirmed misogynist, Lawrence had a surprising number of female soul mates: Charlotte Shaw,Nancy Astor, and Clare Smith. Clare had certain advantages—she was young, beautiful, always elegantly dressed, adventurous, and nearby. Extremely photogenic and gay, with a taste for saucy hats, she had the plucked, finely penciled eyebrows of the period, as well as the high cheekbones and vividly painted lips. In photographs she looks like a character in a Nancy Mitford novel. Lawrence spent a lot of time with her, at the Smiths’ home—the RAF had saved money by converting a famous old Plymouth pub into the commanding officer’s house—where he was encouraged to drop in whenever he liked. They also squeezed together in the tight seat of a tiny speedboat they had been given by a wealthy yacht owner; or they sunned themselves on the Smiths’ porch. Clare loved warmth as much as Lawrence did. She called him “Tes,” after his new initials, T.E.S., and he called her Clare and her daughter “Squeak.” Clare noticed, among other things, how much he disliked shaking hands with anyone and how hard he tried to avoid it, holding his hands behind his back, and bowing slightly instead like a Japanese. However, he did not mind stroking dogs and cats—the Smiths’ dogs, Leo and Banner, were devoted to him. Clare noted also that he never smoked, drank alcohol, or swore. The two shared a love of music, and he gave the Smiths his expensive electric gramophone, so that he and Clare could listen to classical records in the evenings, and taught her how to sing lieder in German. He especially enjoyed hearing Clare sing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben,but his favorite lied was Wolf’s “Ver-schweigene Liebe.” When Clare went shopping in Plymouth, she often brought him back a cake of Golden Glory soap, a transparent glycerin soap that he especially liked because it smelled sweet and didn’t “make a mess of any bath.” This curious domesticity between an airman and the commanding officer’s wife was something that Clare seems to have accepted intuitively: “he lived a monastic life within the world of ordinary beings,” she wrote. “Thus he was able to have a deep friendship for a woman—myself—based on the closest ties of sympathy and understanding, but containing none of the elements normally associated with love.” He seemed, she thought, to have completely separated himself from the physical side of life, and indeed to be hardly even aware of it.

Her husband, far from disapproving of their relationship, which raised many an eyebrow in Plymouth, seems to have felt the same kind of affection for this strange and lonely man. When a well-intentioned friend told him that there was “a good deal of talk going on about your wife spending so much time with Mr. Shaw,” Smith simply “roared with laughter.” So did Lawrence, when the Smiths told him about it. The other airmen, and even the NCOs, seem to have had no problem with the close relationship that developed between Lawrence and the Smiths—RAF Mount Batten was small enough so that it was apparent to everybody that Lawrence never sought favors for himself, and that he was in some way a special figure, irrespective of rank—at once a problem solver and a natural leader to whom everybody came for advice. There was no secret about him at Mount Batten—the men knew he was Lawrence of Arabia and were proud to have him there, a celebrity and a person who seemed to live by his own rules. In a curious way, Lawrence had at last found happiness, perhaps for the first time since his life with Dahoum at Carchemish, or at least as much happiness as he was capable of enjoying, for he remained fiercely self-critical and ascetic.

As always, outside the gates of Mount Batten, the presence of Lawrence in the RAF continued to present problems. The Conservative government had been replaced by Labour and the new secretary of state for air, Lord Thomson, was no more disposed than his predecessor to have Lawrence in the ranks of the RAF. This was unfortunate, for the Schneider Trophy Race was bound to make Lawrence more visible, however much he tried to stay out of the limelight, and a full complement of the world’s press would be covering it.

Lord Thomson was already irritated by Lawrence’s presumptions to set Air Ministry policy. Britain was in the process of completing two giant “airships” in the summer of 1929. Every major nation was intrigued by the possibilities of these huge dirigibles, which many believed represented the future of long-distance air travel. That this was an illusion was not finally demonstrated until a great German airship, the Hindenburg,burst into flames on mooring at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. The two British airships were nearly 800 feet long, longer than the Hindenburg,and carried sixty passengers in private staterooms spread over two decks, with a cocktail lounge, a dining salon, a smoking room, and “two promenade lounges with windows down the side of the ship.” In short, such an airship was a flying first-class ocean liner, with a range of 5,000 miles at sixty miles an hour. There were only three problems with the airship—the first was that there was no proof it could ever be made profitable; the second was that the hydrogen gas keeping it aloft, if mixed with air, was highly combustible; and the third was the question of how stable it might be in storms.

The air marshals were doubtful about the value of airships, which from a military point of view were in any case nothing new. The German zeppelins had bombed London in 1917-1918, and were found to be very vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and to determined fighter attack, since they were enormous, slow-moving targets. Still, Britain was naturally interested in any form of transportation that would make travel to the farthest portions of the empire a matter of only a few days; and the British were unwilling to concede the future to the Germans, who were planning scheduled flights to New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Lawrence entered the picture because he was convinced that an airship could overfly and explore the Rub al-Khali of Arabia—the so-called Empty Quarter, which no European or Arab had ever crossed—as part of its test flight to India, thus combining an aviation triumph with a notable geographical discovery. He urged this scheme on Trenchard, who was lukewarm on the subject and passed it on to Lord Thomson; but he also urged Bernard Shaw (who knew Thomson, a fellow Fabian) to make a personal appeal to the air minister. Unfortunately, Shaw was too busy to pay a call on Thomson and wrote to him instead, noting that Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arabia, would be a good person to add to the crew. As was so often the case with Shaw, his belief that any suggestion of his would be taken seriously rebounded, this time on Lawrence. Thomson replied to Shaw with enthusiasm about the idea of the airship as a means of making geographical surveys—he was a true believer on the subject of airships, which would very shortly cost him his life—but rejected Lawrence as a crew member: “As regards including Lawrence, or Private Shaw, as you have yourself described him, I will consider the matter. His passion for obscurity makes him an awkward man to place and would not improve his relations with the less subtle members of the crew.” Lord Thomson’s belief in Fabian socialism apparently did not extend to receiving suggestions from airmen, even when these were passed along to him by Bernard Shaw. Lawrence’s habit of reaching out from the ranks to the great and famous was not likely to endear him to any civilian head of aviation, even though the suggestion that he should join the flight came from Shaw, not himself. In any case, Thomson clearly took it as a challenge to his authority.

On August 23, 1929, Trenchard inspected RAF Mount Batten, and took the opportunity for a private chat with Lawrence, “telling me off as usual,” as Lawrence wrote to T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s faithful private secretary, who had retired from the RAF to take up farming. Given that Trenchard himself would retire at the end of the year, he may have felt it necessary to warn Lawrence to be more careful about Lord Thomson in the future. If so, it was wasted breath.

That Lawrence upstaged Lord Thomson—and almost everybody else—during the Schneider Trophy Cup races was not entirely his fault. The press was more interested in Lawrence than in the pilots, let alone in Lord Thomson, and it did not help matters that Lawrence knew so many of the dignitaries present, or that they stopped to chat with him. Even Trenchard was annoyed to see AC1 Shaw in conversation with Lady Astor, but there was worse to come. Lawrence, leading from the ranks as usual, had organized some airmen to clean the slipway leading to the hangar where the Italian team kept their seaplanes. Marshal Italo Balbo—the famous Italian aviator,* minister of aviation, and at the time heir apparent to Mussolini—was in charge of the Italian team, and he knew Lawrence well. Balbo paused to chat with Lawrence in Italian, and en passantasked if he could get the slipway cleaned up, since the rails were covered with scum. Lawrence proceeded to get that done in his usual efficient way, and was caught in the act by Lord Thomson, who wanted to know why a British airman was taking orders from an Italian air marshal, and passing them on to other British airmen as if he were an officer himself. There followed an animated discussion between Lord Thomson and Lawrence, which was unfortunately caught on film by the press photographers, and appeared in newspapers all over the world, to Thomson’s great embarrassment. To use RAF slang, Thomson was clearly “tearing a strip off” Lawrence and did not forgive him.

The British not only won the race but set a new world speed record, and Lawrence, except for his brush with Thomson, had enjoyed being part of it. He was also delighted by the unexpected gift of the speedboat that he and Clare Smith would spend so much time on. A wealthy friend of Wing Commander Smith’s, Major Collin Cooper, had made his motor yacht available to the RAF for the occasion, and Lawrence spent a good deal of time on board, tinkering with the temperamental engine of the tiny, two-seat Biscayne “Baby” American racing speedboat that it carried as a tender. Cooper was so impressed by Lawrence’s efficiency and hard work that when the race was over he made Lawrence and the Smiths a gift of the speedboat. Clare and Lawrence renamed it Biscuit,no doubt because at rest it sat in the water looking like a low, flat, round object rather than a long, pointed one. The Biscayne “Baby” speedboats were a one-class racing design, built in Florida, powered by a six-cylinder, 100-horsepower Scripps marine engine, and capable of more than forty miles per hour. Designed after the pattern of Gar Wood’s speedboats, the hard-chine hull had a very sharp V-shaped bow flattening out toward the stern, so that at high speed the boat raised its bow and planed over the water, rather than pushing through it. This design, partly thanks to Lawrence, would eventually be used for all the RAF high-speed rescue launches in Britain, and in the United States it was the basis for the famous PT boat, despite determined resistance by the navy in both countries. Major Cooper had the American speedboat delivered to RAF Mount Batten, and Lawrence would spend much of the winter of 1929-1930 painstakingly stripping and rebuilding the engine and refinishing the hull.

In the meantime, his brush with Lord Thomson had consequences. He had applied to Trenchard for permission to accompany a friend on a seaplane tour of Europe as a member of the crew, and Trenchard had tentatively approved, provided Thomson agreed. The sight of yet another extraordinary request from AC1 Shaw to the chief of the air staff apparently infuriated Thomson, who instructed Trenchard to inform Lawrence that henceforth he was to stay in the country, was not to fly on any government aircraft, was to keep a low profile, and was forbidden to visit or even to speak to a distinguished group of people that included Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead (the former F. E. Smith, a pugnacious, brilliant, witty, hard-drinking Conservative political figure), Lady Astor, Sir Philip Sassoon (deputy undersecretary of state for air), and Sir Austen Chamberlain, KG (the autocratic former foreign secretary, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and half brother of Neville Chamberlain). Bernard Shaw was outraged at being left off the list. Lawrence was “to stop leading from the ranks, and confine himself to the duties of an aircraftman.”

Trenchard called Lawrence down to the Air Ministry and read him, as gently as possible, the riot act, warning him that any infraction of Thomson’s rules would get him thrown out of the air force. Lawrence, it must be said, took all this calmly, no doubt counting on the fact that most people in the government and the House of Commons would not regard friendship with Lady Astor and Winston Churchill as grounds for a court-martial, but he did not want to embarrass Trenchard or create further difficulties for him. In the event, he was busy enough over the winter with Biscuitand Homer to stay out of trouble.

With the coming of better weather, Lawrence began to put the little boat to the test, and both he and Smith realized how far superior it was in design to the existing RAF rescue launches. Lawrence had painted it silver, and Clare Smith had the seats covered in navy blue cloth, with the initial S embroidered on both seat backs, so that they would serve for “Smith”and “Shaw.” Lawrence taught Clare how to drive the little boat, and despite her initial fear, the two of them were soon covering long distances at high speeds. They took the boat upriver to have lunch with Lord and Lady Mount Edgcumbe—more friends of Lawrence’s of whom Lord Thomson would surely have disapproved—and while being shown the famous twelfth-century manor house, Lawrence pointed out a priceless, museum-quality rug on which a hip bath had been standing. His expertise in Oriental rugs, begun at the Altounyan house in Aleppo before the war, had apparently not diminished over the years.

In the area of boat design at least, Lawrence’s influence could be channeled through Smith to the Air Ministry, and very soon it began to affect the design of the next generation of RAF rescue launches. So long as Lawrence’s contributions were indirect and did not make the front pages of the newspapers, he did not offend Lord Thomson. In any event, on October 5, 1930, Thomson died—a martyr to his belief in airships—when the R101, which Lawrence had hoped would explore the Arabian Desert on its way to India, crashed on a hillside in France, killing forty-eight men, including Lord Thomson, who had insisted on continuing the flight despite bad weather. For a time, this crash ended British interest in airships.

Lawrence’s next brush with publicity was another tragedy, this time the crash of a seaplane—the RAF “Iris” III—in Plymouth Sound. Lawrence had been taking his morning coffee break with Clare Smith, in a sunny spot they liked for their “elevenses,” when he saw a large seaplane descend toward the water as if to land; but instead of flattening out, it dived straight into the sea and disappeared. Before the seaplane crashed, Lawrence had realized that it was in trouble, and he ran to get the rescue boat moving. He not only organized the rescue, but dived into the sea himself to attempt to rescue any survivors. of the twelve men on board, six were saved, though both pilots were among the dead. Lawrence knew at once what had happened: the senior officer on board was not qualified to fly such a large, complex seaplane—everybody at Mount Batten knew it—but once he was airborne his seniority gave him the right to insist on taking control of the aircraft, and he had done so, with disastrous consequences. Lawrence, working through Lady Astor this time, made sure the facts were known at the Air Ministry, and as a result it became RAF policy that once an aircraft was airborne the pilot had command of it—even if he was a sergeant and the senior officer on board was a wing commander or a group captain. Henceforth, the pilot was in complete command of the aircraft, like the captain of a ship. Nobody on board, no matter how high his rank, could overrule the pilot and take control. The accident also demonstrated the importance of faster rescue launches, in situations where minutes might save lives; this was one of Lawrence’s major interests and areas of expertise.

Lawrence was obliged to testify at the RAF inquiry, which posed no problems for him, but also at a public inquest, where the press would be present. Even without Thomson, Lawrence was concerned that he would make headlines again, particularly if he was called on to criticize the officer who had taken over the controls. He was equally concerned that Wing Commander Smith might be blamed for letting an officer go up even though his incompetence as a pilot was widely known. Always the gleeful trumpeter of doom, and eager to get Lawrence out of uniform (where he did not think Lawrence belonged), Bernard Shaw wrote, “You are a simple aircraftman: nothing but an eye-witness’s police report can be extorted from you. However, as you will probably insist on conducting the enquiry, and as you will want to save your ambitious commander from being sacrificed, the future, to my vision, is on the knees of the gods. Pray heaven they sack you.”

In the end, Lady Astor did her part splendidly—her friends the press lords played down Lawrence’s role (any other airman might have been awarded a medal for his courageous effort to save lives), Smith was not blamed for the incompetence of the pilot, and the need for faster rescue launches was widely acknowledged. Shaw’s gleefully dire prediction did not come true. Writing to thank Lady Astor for her tactful and effective intervention, Lawrence invited her upriver on Biscuitfor a picnic. By this time—March 1931—Lawrence himself was beginning to feel that his best years in the RAF were coming to an end: Trenchard had left, and would shortly go on to a peerage and his next big job, as metropolitan commissioner of police; the Smiths, by now Lawrence’s surrogate family, would move on to RAF Manston, where the wing commander, promoted to group captain, would take over as commanding officer.

As for Lawrence, he moved temporarily to Hythe, near Southampton, where he lodged in a cottage on Myrtle Road while working at the British Power Boats factory, to test and improve the prototype of the RAF 200 Class Seaplane Tender. He had made himself something of “a marine expert” (in his own words), and found in the person of Flight Lieutenant W. E. G. Beauforte-Greenwood, head of the Marine Equipment Branch of the Air Ministry, another sympathetic and appreciative commander, who knew how to make the most of Lawrence’s growing (and self-acquired) skill at designing, handling, and servicing fast boats. Indeed, Lawrence knew so much about boats by now that Beauforte-Greenwood invited him to write the official handbook on the ST 200. Lawrence undertook this project with his customary zeal, and the handbook remains today perhaps the most concise and most instructive technical manual ever published. That discriminating judge of literature Edward Garnett described it as “a masterpiece of technology,” perhaps the beginning of a new genre; and Lawrence himself boasted that “every sentence in it is understandable, to a fitter,” and to a crewman as well, for he included instructions on how to handle the boat in the wind, or in high seas, and how to effect a rescue as quickly as possible. The handbook remained in use until the ST 200 Class boats were retired, well after World War II.

After the Odyssey,Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities,consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major works by minor poets. He had kept this in the form of a manuscript over the years, and gave it for a time to Charlotte Shaw. Some of the poems and poets in Minoritiesare not really minor, in fact. Lawrence included Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” a poem that Winston Churchill would quote to great effect in a speech on April 27, 1941, at one of the most difficult moments for Britain of World War II. Interestingly, Lawrence remarks that he had “read it at Umtaiye, when the Deraa expedition was panicking and in misery: and it closely fitted my trust in Allenby, out of sight beyond the hills.” These were not so much “minor poems,” in fact, as poems that had meant a lot to Lawrence at difficult points of his life.

From time to time he was tempted by further literary projects, among them a life of Sir Roger Casement, the Anglo-Irish British consular official who had been among the first to expose and document the atrocities that were committed in King Leopold of Belgium’s Congo Free State—the background and subject of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—where it was routine to chop off the right hand of any native who was slow to collect or carry ivory and rubber. Casement was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George for his revelations about the Congo, and was later awarded a knighthood for his extraordinary journey through the Amazon and his courageous attempts to protect the indigenous native population from slavery and mass murder at the hands of rubber planters. Casement was an adventurer very much like Lawrence, and something of a British hero for his humanitarian work, but in time he became one of the leading Irish nationalists and eventually resigned from the British Consular Service. Just before World War I he went to Germany, where, once the war had begun, he tried to recruit prisoners of war from Ireland for an “Irish Brigade” to fight the British. Early in April 1916 he was landed in Ireland, just three days before the Easter Rising, by a German submarine; he was captured by the British and tried for treason. The defense at his trial was hampered by references to Casement’s “black diaries,” which contained explicit descriptions of homosexual acts; these diaries almost certainly played a part in turning the jurors against him. He was found guilty and hanged in August 1916, despite pleas for clemency from W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the archbishop of Canterbury, and G. Bernard Shaw. Shaw had offered to write Casement’s speech in his own defense at the trial, an offer that Casement turned down but should probably have accepted. (Casement became an Irish hero and martyr after his death, and in 1965 his body was exhumed from its lime-pit grave at Pentonville Prison, and repatriated to Ireland, where he was given a state funeral attended by more than 30,000 people.)

For many reasons, Casement would have been an excellent subject for Lawrence, and both Charlotte and Bernard Shaw pressed him to write this biography. But in the end Lawrence decided that unless the British government allowed him to read and quote from the “black diaries,” it would not be an honest book; and no British government, Labour or Conservative, was likely to let Lawrence, of all people, see Casement’s diaries, which many of his supporters believed had been forged by the intelligence services in order to ensure his execution. “As I see it,” Lawrence wrote to Charlotte Shaw, “he was a heroic nature. I should like to write upon him subtly, so that his enemies would think I was with them till I finished my book and rose from reading it to call him a hero. He has the appeal of a broken archangel. But unless the P.M. will release the ‘diary’ material nobody can write of him.” This was not likely to happen only fifteen years after an event about which emotions ran high on both sides, so Lawrence never began the book. He gave some thought to a kind of spiritual autobiography, and Charlotte Shaw was enthusiastic about the idea, but he never did more than talk about it. His translation of the Odysseywas the last work he wrote, and it seems fitting that when he went into a bookshop looking for something to read, the salesclerk tried to sell him The Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrenceat a reduced price, since he was in RAF uniform. He told her that he knew the fellow, “and he was a wash-out.”

Lawrence always managed to have the last word about himself.

By 1932, if he had been anyone else, Lawrence would have been wearing three stripes and a brass crown on his sleeves. Indeed, had he been willing to accept a promotion, he would have been yet another of those hugely competent middle-aged men on whom the RAF (like the Royal Navy) depends: the grizzled flight sergeant or chief petty officer who knows more about his area of expertise than any officer does, whether it is guns,marine engines, or anything else; who can repair anything; and whose word is law when it comes to his specialty. It had startled Lord Thomson to hear the NCOs at Calshot referring to AC1 Shaw as “Mr. Shaw,” but they were merely recognizing that Shaw had the quiet authority of a man who knew how to get things done, and was reaching an age when he no longer looked like the glamorous young adventurer. He was still muscular and wiry, but photographs show that his hair was graying, cut now very short at the sides, though still long and unruly on top; his face had acquired a certain weather-beaten maturity; his body had filled in. He was not by any stretch of the imagination fat, but he was solid. With his strong jaw, powerful nose, and piercing eyes, he would have looked right at home in the sergeants’ mess.

The sea made much the same appeal to Lawrence’s imagination as the desert, with its emptiness and its sudden dangers. All things considered, he was where he wanted to be, and doing what he wanted to do. Much of his work around the boatyard he could do in civilian clothes, a sports jacket, baggy gray flannels, a sweater, and a scarf (Lawrence was never a natural collar-and-tie man). When Lawrence’s new commanding officer showed up at Hythe, Lawrence sent himself home on leave, having already typed up the leave ticket for his signature.

With Lord Thomson’s death, Lawrence’s busy social life resumed much as before—he often visited Cliveden, the Astors’ big country house, arriving for dinner on his motorcycle; and he kept up his correspondence with the great and famous. Harold Nicolson describes his arrival at a tea party in RAF uniform, looking “stockier and squarer … a bull terrier in place of a saluki.” The notion of Lawrence as a lonely man is belied by his letters—he wrote to Edward Marsh, to Lord Trenchard, to Sir Edward Elgar, to C. Day Lewis, to Siegfried Sassoon, to John Buchan, to Lionel Curtis, and to Robert Graves. He met and liked Noлl Coward (after being taken to a rehearsal of Private Lives),and sent Coward the manuscript of The Mintto read, a gesture of great intimacy and trust. Coward replied with a letter that begins memorably: “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?).” Lawrence also began the lengthy correspondence with B. H. Liddell Hart that would eventually produce the best book about Lawrence as a military leader and innovator, Colonel Lawrence: The Man behind the Legend.He even corresponded with W. B. Yeats, one of the poets he most admired.

Jock Bruce had not altogether vanished from Lawrence’s life, though he appeared less frequently, as if the intensity of Lawrence’s demons was declining. According to Bruce, he was called down to whip Lawrence in 1929, when Lawrence returned from India, and again in 1930—he continued to receive his Ј3 a week, whether he was called on to apply the birch or not. Bruce claimed that the worst beating of all, a kind of marathon of torture, took place in the autumn of 1930, when Lawrence traveled all the way from Cattewater to Aberdeen with a new set of demands from the unappeasable old Man. These included swimming in the North Sea (“The water was freezing cold and very rough,” Bruce wrote, certainly a torture to somebody who hated the cold and disliked swimming as much as Lawrence did), and riding lessons, some of them bareback, which Lawrence hated, to be followed by a severe whipping. oddly enough, Lawrence managed to write a long letter to Frank Doubleday, the American publisher, from the cottage Bruce had rented for all this punishment, making it sound like a jolly weeklong seaside holiday, and describing Jock Bruce, not inaccurately, as “the roughest diamond of our Tank Corps hut in 1923.” Judging by the date, it is possible that this particularly sophisticated and elaborate series of punishments was intended to atone for the success of Revolt in the Desert.Nothing quite like it was repeated, although Bruce claims to have whipped Lawrence again in 1931, in 1935, and “six or seven times” after that. Charlotte Shaw was certainly aware of much of this—Lawrence was more frank about himself with her than with anyone else—though it seems doubtful that she passed any of it on to her husband, who was busy writing a play about Lawrence, Too True to Be Good.But then there was much about herself that Charlotte hid from her husband, including the sheer volume and intimacy of her correspondence with Lawrence, which, for once, deeply shocked the normally imperturbable Shaw when he discovered it after her death.

One has the impression that in some ways Lawrence’s glamour as a hero was fading slightly. The public had come to accept him as “Aircraftman Shaw,” and however odd his decision to serve in the ranks still seemed to many people, it was no longer news, even after Shaw’s play opened. Lawrence paid a visit to Janet Laurie Hall-Smith, to whom he had once proposed marriage, and who was now a married woman and the mother of four children. It may be that Janet had asked for his help—her husband was a difficult man, whose ambition to be a great artist had failed, and who, in order to support his rapidly growing family, was stuck in a bank teller’s job in the small seaside town of Newquay, in Cornwall, then a rather stuffy summer resort. Hall-Smith had won the DSO in the war, and he may have resented Lawrence’s cavalier disregard for his own honors, as well as his fame and the fact that he had given Janet money early in her marriage, when the couple were virtually penniless. Janet herself had changed, not surprisingly, from the slim, tomboyish girl Ned had loved to a plump, matronly woman with more than her share of troubles; this may have dismayed Lawrence. In any event, as seen through the eyes of Janet’s daughter Emma, Lawrence fades into insignificance. He had agreed to join the Hall-Smiths for “a beach picnic,” but turned up very late, a “small man, made smaller, dwarfed, by the size of [his] motorbike,” as Emma remembers him. Whereas the children are wearing bathing suits, Lawrence “is wearing a uniform of thick, scratchy material, heavy, clumpy boots, and knee-breeches. Our legs are bare, but his are bandaged from the ankles up, by what are called, we know, puttees. How horribly hot and uncomfortable he’s bound to be, poor man, inside his layers of stuffy clothing.” When her sister Pam says that she is Lawrence’s godchild, he replies, with undisguised annoyance, that he has too many godchildren to count, mortifying the two little girls. “I didn’t think he’d be so little,” Pam says sadly, and the girls are doubly disappointed when their father and Lawrence appear to quarrel—Mr. Hall-Smith had hoped to achieve fame at last by painting his portrait, but Lawrence refuses and roars away on his motorcycle without saying good-bye to the girls.

Although Lawrence appears to have been quite good with the children of his friends, he was not always at ease with children he didn’t know. For example, Anthony West, the illegitimate son of H.G.Wells and Rebecca West, describes meeting Lawrence, and being more impressed by his Brough motorcycle, “the best motorcycle out,” than by Lawrence himself. He remembered Lawrence as a name-dropper who blushed easily. When his aunt—who,like his governess, falls almost instantly under Lawrence’s spell—tells him that he should make allowances because Lawrence is an extraordinary person, the young West says uncompromisingly: “I didn’t want to have to make allowances for him….1 wanted him to be a hero.”

“ ‘Ah, yes—that—’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘One does. And that’s his great problem. It’s the problem all heroes have to cope with—when you’ve made your gesture you’ve got the rest of your life to live.’

“ ‘Do you think it’s very difficult for him—being a hero?’

“ ‘Oh, yes, it’s very hard work wearing a halo—or any other mark of distinction for that matter.’ ”

Aunt Gwen had a point— thepoint, in fact—whether she really said it, or Anthony West is speaking through her words: it isvery hard work being a hero, much harder than becoming one; and although Lawrence spent the better part of his adult life, from 1918 to 1935, trying to escape from his own reputation, he never succeeded. Perhaps nobody with so enormous a reputation as his could have. Children, for whom he was a kind of mythic hero, sensed, perhaps more quickly than adults, the curious contrast between the heroic legend and the small airman with the diffident and curiously remote manner. Adults knew what Lawrence had been or done, and understood how hard he had tried to put all that behind him; children merely saw that he did not resemble what they thought of as a legendary hero like King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and were correspondingly disappointed.

Lawrence returned to RAF Mount Batten in 1931, but found it had lost its appeal now that the Smiths were no longer there. In addition, the Air Ministry decided to end “boat testing and experimenting” at Mount Batten, so Lawrence was left with nothing of any personal interest to do.

He did not find his commanding officer inspiring, either; and in March 1933 he “applied to be released from further service” as of April 6. Rather unimaginatively, his new commanding officer forwarded the application to the Air Ministry, with the note, “The discharge of this airman will cause no manning difficulty.” The story leaked to the newspapers, which gave it full play, alarming the air member for personnel, Air Marshal Sir Edward Ellington, GCB, CGM, CBE, since everybody from Lord Trenchard on down assumed that Lawrence was being thrown out of the RAF. Until now, Lawrence had asked his many friends in high places to use their influence to get him intothe RAF or to keep him there. Now the position was reversed: the Air Ministry, deeply concerned about bad publicity, was determined to keep him inthe air force at any price. The secretary of state for air, the marquess of Londonderry, demanded to know why AC1 Shaw wanted to leave the RAF. Sharply prodded by Sir Philip Sassoon—member of Parliament, undersecretary of state for air, and a friend of Lawrence’s—Air Marshal Ellington ordered Wing Commander Andrews, Lawrence’s unfortunate new commanding officer at Mount Batten, to find out whether Lawrence had any grievances, and if so to remedy them at once.

However, Lawrence had no grievances, as such. He merely wanted a responsible job that interested him, rather than routine station duties; and he told his commanding officer that if there was any special job in which the chief of the Air Staff “could [find him] particularly useful” he would stay on—a modest enough request from an aircraftman to the chief of the Air Staff! Since Trenchard’s successor was Lawrence’s old friend Air Chief Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, a solution was quickly found. Lawrence was posted to RAF Felixstowe, site of the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment, where he would wear civilian clothes in order to avoid publicity and travel around the various boatyards producing launches for the RAF, looking after the interests of the Air Ministry. “Lawrence of Arabia has decided to stay on in the Air Force,” the secretary of the Air Ministry wrote to Trenchard, to reassure him, with a combination of relief and mild amusement. “As he knows a good deal about motor boats he has been given a fairly free hand to go round various motor boat firms in the country.” Lawrence eventually found it more convenient to take a room in Southampton, rather than live at RAF Felixstowe, and was therefore relieved of any of the normal duties of an airman. As usual, Lawrence had gotten exactly what he wanted: a job in which he could help in the design, building, and testing of high-speed motor launches, but without the supervision of an NCO or an officer, or even the need to wear uniform. It was a position unique in the RAF, tailor-made for Lawrence. At the boatyards, where everybody knew who he was, he was referred to with respect as “Mr. Shaw.”

The long-delayed publication in the United States of Lawrence’s translation of the Odysseybrought him a good deal of publicity, since his name was on it. The book was praised by the distinguished classical scholar C. M. Bowra, who “agreed with Lawrence’s view of the Odysseyas a story.” In general Lawrence received praise for his rendering of “scenes of action” and fighting, which, as in Seven Pillars of Wisdom,were his strong points as a writer. He had completed the translation on an elegiac note, writing at the end of the manuscript: “This last page of my version of the Odyssey upon which I have spent almost as long as odysseus and travelled further, which has furnished me with luxuries for five years and so wholly occupied my hours off duty that I had no leisure to enjoy them …” Indeed, Lawrence’s Odysseyis exactly that— hisversion, not a conventional translation, or a “crib” of the original, but rather a far more ambitious attempt to make the story accessible for a modern reader without trying to convey the poetic form of the original, and without the tiresome repetition of metaphors that had a specific emotional meaning for Homer’s audience. In Lawrence’s version, the Odysseycan be read like a novel, which of course it is, and the fact that his version of it is still in print today is proof he succeeded. Nobody, after all, understood better than Lawrence the difficulties facing a warrior and hero on returning home, or could write more feelingly about it: “surely I am not in clear-shining Ithaca? I think I have lighted on some foreign land, and you are telling me it is my Ithaca only in mockery, to cheat my soul.”

Again and again, Odysseus reflects Lawrence’s thoughts, and his predicament: that of a man forever trapped in his role as a hero, with whatever regrets and second thoughts about the war he has fought, whose return brings him no peace, since everything at home has changed. Oxford was Lawrence’s Ithaca, but it had changed since 1914, and changed even more with the death of his father and of two brothers, and then, later, with the death of Hogarth. Lawrence had found no peace there, and placed himself in self-imposed exile. “Few men,” he wrote about Homer, “can be sailors, soldiers and naturalists,” yet Lawrence was all three: a gifted and fearless sailor (Jeremy Wilson notes that he took one of the ST 200 launches he had developed on a 740-mile journey from Calshot to Scotland through high seas and “appalling conditions” at “an average speed of 18.3 knots”); a brilliant and courageous soldier; and, as page after page of Seven Pillars of Wisdomshows, a writer about nature of no mean distinction, with amazing powers of observation and a remarkable fund of knowledge about geology, botany, and agriculture. Just as the young scholar and archaeologist had not hesitated to put his hand to generalship, and to invent his own tactics, so the task of translating into modern, idiomatic English one of the world’s greatest classics had not prevented Lawrence from succeeding at giving the work his own special stamp. From time to time, we perceive that Lawrence is mocking both the gods and Ulysses for taking themselves too seriously.

B. H. Liddell Hart’s book, the third major biography of Lawrence written during his lifetime, was published in 1934. Liddell Hart boldly affirmed that Lawrence was a military genius of the first magnitude. Lowell Thomas’s book had come out first, in 1924, presenting Lawrence as a scholar turned warrior hero, and creating for hundreds of thousands of readers the portrait of “Lawrence of Arabia” that would persist and thrive despite every effort of Lawrence to contradict or obliterate it over the years. Lawrence’s friend Robert Graves had attempted an altogether more serious biography, published in 1927, which Lawrence went to a good deal of trouble to correct in detail, but which still portrayed him as a popular hero, though Graves was far too intelligent to be an entirely uncritical admirer. Liddell Hart was in an altogether different category; a somewhat controversial celebrity himself, he had become, at an early age, the supreme judge and critic of war and generals in Britain, and certainly the first person to make military history both popular and taken seriously as a form of literature. Generals often wrote books about each other, or about the art of war, but these were either far too technical and abstruse for the average reader or, in many cases, self-serving and intended as frontal attacks on the character and abilities of the authors’ rivals. Liddell Hart, from the beginning, sought to treat war as a science, and to write about it in prose that would be at once lively and completely accessible to the average reader. Although he reached only the rank of captain in the war, he evolved a series of theories and formulas about war that made generals and politicians come to him for advice. Liddell Hart could be waspish with those who did not agree with him, and he overwhelmed his opponents by a combination of industry—he was enormously productive—and the sheer breadth of his knowledge. His career as a self-anointed expert was helped by the fact that everyone in Britain from the king down recognized the 1914-1918 war as a military disaster that was only barely redeemed by victory and must never be repeated; hence anybody offering a way to eliminate trench warfare and frontal attacks from battle was bound to attract not only attention, but admirers and disciples. Thanks to Liddell Hart, even the generals who were responsible for the slaughter now discovered—like Moliиre’s Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme,who learned to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life—that they had been practicing, with whatever deficiencies, a fine and subtle art, rather than just sending hundreds of thousands of men stumbling forward through mud to their death. Liddell Hart was a formidable logician and analyzer of facts. Had the line “Elementary, my dear Watson!” not already been used, he could have made it his, for in many ways he resembled Sherlock Holmes, although his magnifying glass was turned toward tactics, lines of communication, and fortifications instead of cigarette ash and footprints. An adviser to prime ministers, ministers, and generals, and a philosopher of war, he experienced almost a comedown when he accepted the post of military correspondent at the Times.

In every way the opposite of Lawrence, Liddell Hart was tall, elegant, storklike, fond of the good things of life, and so fascinated by women that he oversaw the smallest details of the lingerie for both his wives, was exacting and deeply involved in the design of their corsets, and regularly measured the waists of his two daughters. He was in fact a walking encyclopedia on the subject of lingerie—or as one of his biographers, Alex Danchev, refers to it wittily, “l’artillerie de la nuit”—as knowledgeable about bras and merry widows and garter belts as he was about war. A perfectionist in all things, he was obsessed by the ideal of the feminine wasp waist, which was the Schwerpunkt* (to borrow a phrase from German strategic thinking) of his sexual desire. Despite these differences, he and Lawrence got along very well; and Lawrence, in his many letters to Liddell Hart and in his lengthy written commentaries on the text, is perhaps franker about himself than he is with anyone else except Charlotte Shaw. He respected Liddell Hart as a scholar, and was pleased to be taken seriously as a strategic thinker. Their admiration and friendship were genuine.

Liddell Hart made contact with Lawrence as early as 1927, in one of his many guises as military editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—it was part of his strategy to command as many positions in the field of military commentary and journalism as he could—proposing that Lawrence should write the article on “Guerrilla Warfare.” Lawrence, then in Karachi, declined to write the entry but suggested how it could be pulled out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom;and Liddell Hart proceeded to do this for the fourteenth edition of the encyclopedia, above the initials T.E.L. This began a learned correspondence between the two men, which continued over the next seven years. Anybody who doubts that Lawrence was an exceptionally well-read strategic thinker need only consult the correspondence between him and Liddell Hart in T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers,† which itself provides something of a textbook in battle analysis and strategy. It was not until 1929 that Liddell Hart was finally persuaded by his agent David Higham to write a book about Lawrence. The book took him four years to complete—very unusually, since he typically dashed off books as quickly as he could, to keep his elaborate lifestyle afloat. The two men met frequently, and nothing ever dimmed Liddell Hart’s admiration for his much smaller friend (in photographs taken of the two of them, Lawrence seems dwarfed by Hart’s height, and in one of these photos he stands on a bollard to bring their heads to the same level). Liddell Hart called Lawrence “the Spirit of Freedom come incarnate to a world in fetters.” This was insightful, for even though Lawrence had placed himself in a military world of tight restraints, he remained what Liddell Hart called an “anarch,”always determined to reach his own conclusions and to do things his own way, though without forcing them on anyone else. Lawrence also told Liddell Hart, who was concerned about the daring way he rode his motorcycle, “It’ll end in tragedy one day.”

Lawrence, standing on a bollard, with B. H. Liddell Hart.

Still, there was no sign of gloom on Lawrence’s part, as the inevitable date of his retirement from the RAF in 1935 approached. He was spending (overspending, in fact) on the rebuilding and modernization of Clouds Hill, in anticipation of living there full-time, and seeking translation jobs from publishers to provide a modest income for himself. He would have been gratified by the reviews of Liddell Hart’s biography of him had they not reawakened people’s interest, and had he not spoken so frankly to Hart about his parentage. He had said that “Lawrence” was a name as false as “Ross” and “Shaw,” with the inevitable result that the newspapers sought to find out his real name, and came close to uncovering the secret of his illegitimate birth—about which he no longer cared, but which would have embarrassed his mother and his two surviving brothers.

The king, in a strange moment of insight, had once called Lawrence the happiest man in the kingdom, and perhaps it was true—he was doing what he wanted to do; he had exhausted his ambitions; he had no ties to anyone or anything. His mother and his brother Bob were back in China; his youngest brother, Arnold, was married and hard at work on a career as an archaeologist. Robert Graves, who knew Lawrence as well as anyone, claimed by way of defending his right to call himself Irish, “the rhetoric of freedom, the rhetoric of chastity, the rhetoric of honour, the power to excite sudden deep affections, loyalty to the long-buried past, high aims qualified by too mocking a sense of humour, serenity clouded by petulance, and broken by occasional black despairs, playboy charm and theatricality, imagination that overruns itself and tires, extreme generosity, serpent cunning, lion courage, diabolical intuition, and the curse of self-doubt which becomes enmity to self and sometimes renouncement of all that is most loved and esteemed.” Whether these are Irish traits or not—and Lawrence’s claim to be Irish was not a strong one—perhaps nobody ever summed him up better, except that Graves left out Lawrence’s curious mixture of vanity and modesty.

By the end of 1934, Lawrence was again facing the potential of huge publicity. The British Fascists were attempting to claim him as their own, despite the fact that he had turned down an invitation to one of their meetings with a jocular note suggesting that his only interest in them would be if they put an end to the popular press, and that he would dance on the grave of the Daily Express, Daily Chronicle,and Daily Herald.Since he signed his note, “Yours not very seriously, T. E. Shaw,” it can be assumed that he had no interest in becoming a Fascist leader, a fact which was confirmed by no less an authority than the prospective British Fьhrer and head of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Lawrence was not about to exchange RAF blue for a black shirt, and he had no enthusiasm for Mussolini either.

Lawrence was now working in Bridlington, Yorkshire, on the North Sea, looking after the winter overhaul of the RAF launches and living in the Ozone Hotel. His enlistment in the RAF would at last come to an end in March 1935, but so long as he was still serving, he was determined to give the RAF value for its money. He worried about how he would support himself at Clouds Hill after he left the air force, and whether he would be able to afford his motorcycle. He described his predicament to Lady Astor: “In March 1935 the RAF takes away from me the right to serve it longer, and I relapse into a self-supporting life. My Cottage, 35/—a week, 24 hours a day. I am so tired that it feels like heaven drawing near.” Job offers came in, including one as secretary to the Bank of England, though this was unlikely: it is hard to imagine him in a respectable City position, wearing striped trousers, a black coat, and a hat to work every day, neatly furled umbrella in hand. The truth was that he didn’t really want a job or a position; he simply wanted to make enough money to live his own way. Despite his years of service in the army and the RAF his personality remained basically that of a bohemian and an artist.

He worried about the possibility that Revolt in the Desertmight be made into a film; this had concerned him since 1928, when the trustees (of which he was not one) sold an option on the film rights. Lawrence was concerned not only about the publicity and the question of who would play him, but about the possibility of a ham-handed attempt to build a “sex interest” into the story, by creating a role for a female star. By now the rights had passed into the hands of Alexander Korda,* the Hungarian-born producer who had made Britain’s first internationally successful film, The Private Life of Henry VIII,in 1933. This was the first British film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and its star, Charles Laughton, became the first British actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Lawrence rightly feared that Korda was much more likely to actually make the picture than the previous owners of the rights. He went down to London to have it out with Korda, but found to his surprise that the film producer listened to him patiently and sympathetically, and appeared to agree. “I lunched with Alexander Korda, the film king,” Lawrence reported to Charlotte Shaw: “He was quite unexpectedly sensitive, for a king: seemed to understand at once the inconveniences his proposed film would set in my path … and ended the discussion by agreeing that it should not be attempted without my consent.He will not announce its abandonment, because while he has it on his list other producers will avoid thought of it. But it will not be done. You can imagine how this gladdens me.”

Korda would later speak with great fondness of Lawrence, and described him as “the nicest man I ever failed to do business with.” What he had actually agreed to—a fine, but significant, point—was that the film would not be made without Lawrence’s consent until after his death.Far from wanting to include a “sex interest,” Korda had planned to base the script very closely on Revolt in the Desertand to have Leslie Howard play Lawrence. He wanted to have his brother Zoltan, who was about to make Sanders of the River(with Paul Robeson), direct the desert sequences; and to have his brother Vincent do the art direction. Korda liked Lawrence from the start (finding him “trиs sympathique”), and he also realized that making a film against Lawrence’s wishes would bring down on him a host of protests from just the kind of Englishmen whose respect and friendship he wanted. In any case, Korda regarded the ownership of the film rights of important books as a kind of savings account. He was buying the goodwill of the authors—everybody likes to receive an unexpected check, hence Korda’s purchase of the screen rights to Winston Churchill’s two-volume biography of Marlborough. Also, if he was patient, sooner or later somebody else might eventually want to make a film of even the most improbable book, and he could then sell the rights at a profit. It was a form of saving for his old age, for a man who preferred gambling to saving. In any case, the more options he took on books, the more friends he made. Lawrence understood this intuitively; he wrote to Robert Graves, “Korda is like an oil-company which has drilled often and found two or three gushers, and has prudently invested some of its proceeds in buying options over more sites. Some he may develop and others not.”

Lawrence enjoyed Bridlington, despite its melancholy ambience of an unfashionable summer resort in midwinter, and was comfortable at the Ozone Hotel, where he had a tower room looking out over the harbor wall to the sea. Officers seldom put in an appearance—one who did recalled him wearing a blue pullover, a scarf, an old sports jacket, and a pair of gray flannels. Lawrence ordered the few NCOs around with consummate tact, while they responded by calling him “Mr. Shaw,” as did his formidable landlady. The equipment officer at RAF Catfoss, Flight Lieutenant R. G. Sims, had known Lawrence in Iraq, and Lawrence became a close friend of Sims and his wife, once more crossing what would have been for anyone else the rigid class barrier that separates other ranks from officers in the British armed forces. The Simses took Lawrence to concerts in Hull, and he became a frequent dinner guest in their cottage. Reggie Sims, as so many other people had, occasionally spotted the undiminished presence of Colonel Lawrence in AC1 Shaw, as on the day he came into a room where Lawrence was absorbed in studying a blueprint. For a moment Lawrence ignored his presence, then his head rose, and “his eyes blazed forth for a moment or two in what Sims took to be scorn or hate. Then there was a sudden half-smile of recognition. ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Sir.’ A. C. Shaw murmured apologetically, ‘but for a moment I took you for a reporter.’ ”

His capacity for extracting awe and respect from his superiors was also undiminished. When a senior officer inspecting the boatyard had a question and was told he should ask Aircraftman Shaw, he snapped back, “When I want the advice of an A.C.1 I will ask for it!” The following night Lawrence and the senior officer—who in the meantime had agreed to an entire list of requests for tools and equipment Lawrence had requested—were seen dining together amiably. Nor had his habit of dining with the great and famous changed. He applied for weekend leave to accept an invitation to Lympne, the country house of Sir Philip Sassoon, where he dined in his airman’s uniform, seated next to Lady Louis Mountbatten, whom he enlisted to persuade the undersecretary of state for air to take some hats out to Singapore, for Clare Smith, whose husband had been posted there, and who apparently had not been prepared for the elaborateness required of ladies at official functions in the colonies.* His past was always catching up to him, sometimes in improbable ways: he was obliged to interview an imposter who had been arrested for pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia; a woman wrote to the local police complaining that he was her husband who had abandoned her; the amateur theatrical society of Bridlington put on, with great fanfare, a performance of Shaw’s Too True to Be Good,which Lawrence at first elected not to attend on the grounds that too many people in Bridlington already knew that “Mr. Shaw” was “Lawrence of Arabia” and would recognize him as “Private Meek.” “They would have cheered, or jeered, probably: cheered, I’m afraid, so I funked it,” he wrote to Charlotte, but then he changed his mind and went to see it with a party of RAF officers and their wives, laughed through the whole performance, and stood around afterward signing people’s pro-grams—again the dichotomy between avoiding fame and relishing it that makes Lawrence such a puzzle. He applied for another weekend leave to spend two days being painted by Augustus John in his airman’s uniform and peaked cap—a startlingly ambiguous portrait in which Lawrence’s face and pose are those of a tough-minded general, while his uniform is that of a simple airman. Unlike most portraits of Lawrence in Arab dress, this one has a certain specific gravity; instead of looking weightless, here he looks solidly rooted, massive, more like a monument than a man. John, despite his famously blustery, aggressive nature, had a sixth sense as an artist, and may have already concluded that Lawrence’s future was unlikely to be a quiet retirement in his Dorsetshire cottage, translating French novels and tinkering with his motorcycle.

The Simses gave a dinner party for Eric Kennington, one of Lawrence’s favorite artists, when Kennington visited Lawrence at Bridlington. By this time it no longer seemed to matter to anyone that Lawrence was merely an AC1—and Lawrence, preparing himself for the inevitable, made a friend of Pilot Officer A. J. Manning, in command of the “armament school” at Catfoss. He confided to Manning that he wanted to steer a middle course between being a pauper and having more money than he felt comfortable with. “He wanted to establish a balance, ensuring his independence,” recalled Manning, who went on to become an air commodore.

To Robert Graves, who had written to say that the Timeshad asked him to update its obituary of Lawrence—not a premonition on anybody’s part, but merely something that was done regularly for famous people—he replied cheerfully and at great length, urging that his work with Churchill in the Middle East after the war, and particularly his part in developing high-speed motor launches for the RAF, should not be put in the shadow of what he had done in Arabia during the war. “The conquest of the last element, the air,” he wrote, “seems to me the only major task of our generation; and I have convinced myself that progress to-day is made not by the single genius, but by the common effort.”

On Monday, February 25, 1935, dressed for once in uniform, Lawrence presented himself more formally to Pilot Officer Manning. “Aircraftman Shaw, sir, interview before discharge,” said the flight sergeant as Lawrence came smartly to attention. After a brief chat, Manning signed the discharge form, ending Lawrence’s career in the RAF.

Leaving behind the Brough motorcycle, Lawrence set off on a bicycle tour, dressed in his sport jacket and gray flannels and wearing a thick scarf, hoping thereby to avoid the press. He intended to reach Clouds Hill in stages, counting on the fact that few journalists would notice a middle-aged man in civilian clothes riding a bicycle on country roads—though it has to be said that not many men Lawrence’s age would have attempted a bicycle trip of more than 200 miles in February. One of his gunners from the Arabian campaign, with whom he had been in correspondence for several years, had leaked the story that he was leaving the RAF, and The Daily Expressran a long article about it on February 17, thus alerting all the other newspapers to the story. Lawrence had had a few days of leave coming to him, and had taken his discharge early, hoping to avoid publicity, but a photographer still managed to get a picture of him on his bike, leaving Bridlington, with his hair still trimmed short on the sides, RAF-style, but, as usual, unruly.

Once on the road he was free. He had intended to ride south and visit Frederic Manning, the author of Her Privates We,one of the best novels written in the English language about the horror of life and death in the trenches. It could be published only in expurgated form during Manning’s own lifetime (and under his serial number rather than his name), but even in that diminished form it had deeply impressed not only Lawrence, but Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound as well. Lawrence had come to like Manning—a lonely Australian who, like Lawrence, never married, led a withdrawn and solitary life, and was haunted by the war. Unfortunately, two days into his journey, Lawrence learned that Manning had died. “How I wish he hadn’t slipped away in this fashion; but how like him,” Lawrence remarked. “He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was.”

Lawrence changed course for Cambridge to see his brother Arnold, who was at that time reader in classical archaeology at Cambridge University. From there he went by stages toward Clouds Hill, where, when he arrived, he found his way blocked by an unruly mass of reporters and photographers.

Horrified—he needed and had anticipated peace and quiet—he bicycled to London. Sir Herbert Baker had given up his offices on Barton Street, so Lawrence no longer had access to his old attic room; instead, he stayed in lodgings under (yet another) assumed name, while taking out membership in the Youth Hostels Association, since he vaguely intended to tour around the country by bicycle until interest in him had died down. He must have been aware that this was unlikely, for he wrote a letter complaining about the behavior of the press to the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth, who was chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the son of that most shameless of press lords Lord Rothermere. Stranded away from his only home, he missed the RAF enormously, and complained to Kennington that he felt like “a fallen leaf.” He must have been given some reason to believe that the siege of his cottage had been called off, for he went back there and found it deserted, to his relief.

The relief was short-lived. Within a few days the press was back in force: reporters were hammering on his door and demanding that he appear and make a statement, and photographers were climbing to his roof and breaking the tiles in order to get a picture of him through the window. Infuriated, he made his escape through the garden, so fiercely hounded by the reporters that he gave one of them a black eye—the only record of any violence on Lawrence’s part toward anyone since he reached Damascus in 1918.

Lawrence wrote a heartfelt letter to “Dear Winston,” imploring him to intercede with Harmsworth, and bicycled over to see Churchill at Chartwell, his country house. Perhaps Churchill managed to deal with Harmsworth—he had, from long experience, a way with press lords—or perhaps the press had published enough about Lawrence’s leaving the RAF to satisfy readers—but in either case, by the third week of March the siege ended, and Lawrence was left in undisputed possession of his own home. His nerves were badly shaken by the intensity of the press, and he was still undecided about what to do with himself now that he was a civilian again. For the moment, he collected his few belongings and the motorcycle he was no longer sure he could afford, and settled back into Clouds Hill, like a man waiting for the next act but in no hurry for it to arrive.

The Shaws had set out on a world tour, and his mother and his brother Bob had returned to China, but Lawrence kept up his industrious correspondence, both with the great world and with those who had served with him in the ranks. He tinkered with his house, feeling the slight bewilderment and loss of a familiar routine that comes over many people when they retire. He had expressed a wish to have a “porthole” in the bedroom of his cottage, and T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s former private secretary, found him exactly what he was looking for in a ship breaker’s yard, and sent it off to Lawrence by rail. Lawrence spent a good deal of time and effort cleaning it up and installing it in the wall, and scratched Marson’s initials in the polished brass rim “in memory.” Thanking Marson, he added: “All here is very quiet, but I am still calling the RAF ‘we’ in my talk. That is very sad.” He had any number of pet projects he wanted to carry out in the cottage, and therefore may not have taken Nancy Astor seriously when she wrote to him, “I believe when the Government re-organizes you will be asked to re-organize the Defence forces. I will tell you what I have done already about it.” She invited him to lunch at Cliveden, to meet Stanley Baldwin, who would shortly replace Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister in the coalition national government, but Lawrence gracefully refused both the invitation and any such job. “Wild mares would not take me away from Clouds Hill,” he wrote to her, “… so do not commit yourself to advocating me.”

Lady Astor’s suggestion that he would soon be offered the job of reorganizing Britain’s defenses should be taken with a grain of salt. As a member of Parliament and the wife of the immensely wealthy owner of The Observershe was in the habit of assuming that all her suggestions would be taken seriously. Except for Winston Churchill, there was nobody whose advice on matters of defense Stanley Baldwin was less likely to take seriously than Nancy Astor; nor did defense and foreign policy hold much interest for Baldwin to begin with—he was reported to sleep soundly through cabinet meetings whenever either of these subjects was discussed. His motto might have been peace at any price: not just peace in Europe, but also peace from Lady Astor’s importuning him. Nor is it even remotely likely that Baldwin would have given Lawrence a place in reorganizing the national defenses, first of all because his policy was to let sleeping dogs lie, and second because Lawrence, like Churchill, represented exactly the kind of enthusiastic and publicity-attracting amateur strategist whom Baldwin most distrusted.* Baldwin’s ambition was to rely as much as possible on solid Tory party figures and professional civil servants—the more cautious, the better—and until very late in the day he continued to believe that Hitler could be bought off by territorial concessions or would come to his senses like a reasonable man, as did Lady Astor, for that matter.

On May 12, 1935, Lawrence wrote what was almost certainly his last letter, to K. T. Parker, “keeper” of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to express his pleasure that Augustus John’s portrait of Hogarth would be hung in the Ashmolean—where, as a child, Lawrence had left pottery shards he had dug up, for Hogarth’s scrutiny. “At present I am sitting in my cottage and getting used to an empty life,” he wrote, but without any trace of self-pity or depression. Indeed, he ended the letter on a hopeful note.

He had, in the meantime, received a letter from Henry Williamson, an acquaintance who was the author of Tarka the Otter,a book Lawrence had greatly admired. Williamson was a member of the British Union of Fascists, but the purpose of his letter was not to convert Lawrence to Sir Oswald Mosley’s cause, but to get advice about a manuscript that had been entrusted to Williamson by V. M. Yeates, the author of Winged Victory,before his death. Yeates was also an author Lawrence admired— Winged Victory,a harrowing semiautobiographical account of a fighter pilot’s experience of air combat during the war, was regarded as a classic by most readers at the time—so it is hardly surprising that Lawrence invited Williamson to have lunch with him at Clouds Hill. If there was anybody who knew everything there was to know about editing and publishing an account of war, it was Lawrence. There is no reason to believe that Lawrence was becoming more interested in Fascism, or that Williamson was coming to recruit him.

On the morning of Monday, May 13, Lawrence rode to the nearest post office, at Wool, the village just outside Bovington Camp, with a parcel of books he wanted to send to a friend. He also sent Williamson a telegram: “LUNCH TUESDAY WET FINE. COTTAGE ONE MILE NORTH BOVINGTON CAMPSHAW.”

In keeping with the mysteries that surround Lawrence’s life, much has been made of this seemingly innocuous telegram, suggesting some urgency on Lawrence’s part. But since Williamson had concluded his letter to Lawrence with, “I’ll call in anyway on Tuesday unless rainy day,” Lawrence’s “WET FINE” had no such connotation. He was simply saying, in effect, “Come for lunch Tuesday, never mind the weather,” a very sensible reply in England. The cryptic quality that some scholars find there is merely a reflection of the way people compressed telegram messages to the bare minimum of words and punctuation. Lawrence was not wealthy, and every word had to be paid for. Having completed his errands he got back on his motorcycle and set out for home, a trip of about a mile and a half.

The road between Bovington and Lawrence’s cottage should have presented no special problems. It was and remains a narrow country road with several bends, but no sharp curves. The sides of the road are either steep or heavily wooded. There are three dips, deep enough so that any one of them might conceal an oncoming vehicle momentarily; and in 1935 the surface was still tar, on top of which loose gravel had been sprinkled. For obvious reasons this is not an ideal surface for a motorcycle—loose gravel always presents a danger—but Lawrence knew the road well, and was an experienced rider. What appears to have happened was that he approached one of the dips in the road at about thirty-eight miles per hour or less (the motorcycle was found still in second gear after the accident), and did not realize that two local boys on bicycles were in front of him, since they were concealed in the dip. Instead of riding one behind the other, they were riding side by side, going in the same direction as he was, so when Lawrence suddenly saw them, he had no easy way to get around them. He must have swerved sharply to avoid hitting them and braked hard at the same time, but he hit the rear wheel of one of the bicycles, at which point he lost control of his motorcycle; the brakes may have jammed, the bike may have skidded, and he was thrown forward over the handlebars. The bike fell away to the right, spinning in the loose gravel and gouging a mark in the road, while Lawrence landed on his head, then slid off the road, coming to a stop as his head hit a tree trunk. The first impact was hard enough to kill him, though it did not. He was unconscious, however, and bleeding heavily.

Probably no vehicle accident up until Princess Diana’s has received more detailed scrutiny than Lawrence’s. His death has been variously ascribed to a foreign or domestic assassination, or to some combination of death wish and speed, or suicide. True, Lawrence had written “In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body,” and he loved riding at high speeds, but it was subsequently established that he was going less than forty miles an hour when he was killed, so he was neither a victim of high-speed driving nor a successful suicide. As for the assassination theory, there seems no very good reason why either the British or the German intelligence service would have wanted Lawrence dead. Although The Daily Expresswould claim that he carried “the plans for the defence of England in his head,” that too seems a typical Fleet Street exaggeration. Certainly Lawrence had ideason the subject, but he was not privy to any secrets.

Though nobody said so at the inquest, his death was yet another proof that a motorcycle accident at anyspeed is dangerous. The helmets of the day were not scientifically designed to prevent head injury, and in any case Lawrence never wore a proper helmet—in extremely bad weather he sometimes wore a leather flying helmet, which would have offered no protection from impact. If he had landed on his side he might have suffered nothing worse than a few broken bones, but he was thrown forward and instead landed on his head, fracturing the skull.

The subsequent inquest and many further investigations by private individuals do not provide much more than this in the way of fact. A soldier, Corporal Catchpole, who heard the crash and ran to the site of the accident claimed to have seen a black car speeding away from the scene; the boys denied that they were riding side by side, no doubt warned by their parents not to admit that they had been breaking the law, though they were notorious for larking about on the road; and some people have speculated that the front brake cable in Lawrence’s Brough may have snapped, although this seems unlikely: Lawrence was always conscientious to the point of fussiness about maintaining his bikes.

Catchpole flagged down a passing army lorry, and ordered the driver to take Lawrence and one of the boys, who had sustained minor injuries, to the Bovington camp hospital, the nearest medical facility, where Lawrence was quickly identified. After that the army took control, although Lawrence was a civilian and the accident had taken place on a civilian road. All ranks were warned that they were not to talk to newspapermen, and reminded that they were subject to the Official Secrets Act; newspaper editors were informed that bulletins about Lawrence’s health would be issued by the War Office. As anyone could have predicted, this had the effect of increasing interest in Lawrence’s crash, adding a note of mystery to what was simply a tragic road accident. Even without that, however, it was a major news story throughout the world. Arnold Lawrence was informed of the accident by the Cambridge police, and arrived the next day at Clouds Hill with his wife.

Lawrence lay unconscious in the hospital at the army camp he had disliked so much when he was exiled from his beloved RAF. Distinguished specialists in brain injuries were sent for; the king dispatched two of his own physicians, including the future Lord Dawson of Penn, and telephoned himself, asking to be kept informed. The Home Office, not wanting affairs left entirely in the hands of the military, sent two plainclothes officers from Scotland Yard, one to sit in Lawrence’s room, while his relief slept on a cot outside in the corridor. To be fair, this was probably less from any fear of foreign agents or security issues than to prevent an enterprising newspaper photographer from finding a way in to take a picture of Lawrence on his deathbed.

Everything that could be done was done, given the limited facilities of the Bovington camp hospital; but as the doctors had concluded after examining Lawrence, the case was hopeless.

Lawrence lingered six days, never regaining consciousness, with his lungs becoming increasingly congested, and died just after eight in the morning on Sunday, May 19.

He was forty-six years old.

Postmortem examination revealed that Lawrence would have lost his memory and would have been paralyzed had he survived.

He was buried in the nearby churchyard of Moreton. His old friend Ronald Storrs (now Sir Ronald, and governor of Cyprus) was the chief pallbearer. The others were the artist Eric Kennington; Colonel Stewart Newcombe, who had known Lawrence since the Sinai survey before the war; a neighbor; and two service friends of Lawrence’s, one from the army and the other from the RAF.

The small ceremony was quiet, despite a mob of photographers and reporters, and many of Lawrence’s friends were present: Winston Churchill and his wife, Lady Astor, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Allenby, Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Curtis, Augustus John, Wavell, Alan Dawnay. As the coffin was lowered into the ground the soldier and the airman, on opposite sides of the grave, shook hands over it; and at the last moment a neighbor’s little girl ran forward and threw a bunch of violets on the top of it.

Nancy Astor, in tears, ran to put her arms around Churchill, who was also in tears, and cried, “Oh, Winnie, Winnie, we’ve lost him.”

The king’s message to Arnold Lawrence would appear the next day in the Times:

The King has heard with sincere regret of the death of your brother, and deeply sympathizes with you and your family in this sad loss.Your brother’s name will live in history, and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country and feels that it is tragic that the end should have come in this manner to a life still so full of promise. Perhaps fortunately, because of his gifts of description, Ronald Storrs—who had taken the young Lawrence with him on his journey to Jidda in 1916, and had watched him wave good-bye from the shore at Rabegh, the day before his ride up-country to the meeting with Feisal and, in Storrs’s words, to “write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England"—was the last to see him before his burial.

I stood beside him lying swathed in fleecy wool; stayed until the plain oak coffin was screwed down. There was nothing else in the mortuary chamber but a little altar behind his head with some lilies of the valley and red roses. I had come prepared to be greatly shocked by what I saw, but his injuries had been at the back of his head, and beyond some scarring and discolouration over the left eye, his countenance was not marred. His nose was sharper and delicately curved, and his chin less square. Seen thus, his face was the face of Dante with perhaps the more relentless mouth of Savonarola; incredibly calm, with the faintest flicker of disdain…. Nothing of his hair, nor of his hands was showing; only a powerful cowled mask, dark-stained ivory against the dead chemical sterility of the wrappings. It was somehow unreal to be watching beside him in these cerements, so strangely resembling the aba,the kuffiyaand the agalof an Arab Chief, as he lay in his last littlest room, very grave and strong and noble. His plain, modest headstone merely describes him as “T. E. Lawrence, Fellow of All Souls College,” as if even in death he was still resisting the rank of colonel and all his decorations. Below are inscribed the words:

The hour is coming & now isWhen the dead shall hearThe Voice of theSON OF GODAnd they that hear shall live. They were placed there, we may be sure, to please his mother, rather than from any wish of Lawrence’s, who was at best a nominal Christian. At the foot of the grave is a smaller stone, in the shape of an open book, bearing the words ”dominus illuminatio mea,” which may be translated “The Lord is my light,” but which can also mean “May God enlighten me.”

The open book and the Latin phrase form part of the heraldic coat of arms of Oxford University, and it is perhaps the most fitting memorial to Lawrence, who grew up among the ancient walls and towers of Oxford, and whose character was formed by it more than by any other single element, perhaps the most extreme example of the scholar turned hero in the eleven centuries of its existence.

* A full set of equipment consisted of large pack, small pack, webbing belt, ammunition pouches, canteen and bayonet holders, rifle sling, and all the straps that held everything together; it had to be assembled in an exact pattern, brass buckles gleaming.

*Clare Sydney Smith would eventually write a touching book about her friendship with Lawrence, The Golden Reign.Nancy Astor (Viscountess Astor), the first woman member of Parliament, had a relationship with Lawrence that was certainly flirtatious—she was the only woman who rode pillion behind him on his motorcycle—but she was rather too formidable a personality to be described as a flirt.

* “Bus,” like “kite,” is RAF slang for an aircraft, particularly a multiengine bomber or transport, and by extension also a motor vehicle of any kind.

* Lawrence printed 128 “complete” copies (with all the illustrations) for the subscribers, as well as thirty-six complete copies and twenty-six incomplete copies (the latter lacking some of the illustrations) to give away to friends, plus twenty-two copies without plates and certain textual omissions to go to the George h. Doran Company in New York, some to secure U.S. copyright, others to be offered for sale at the prohibitively high price of $200,000 a copy (about $3.2 million in today’s money). of these copies, Lawrence kept six. ( Letters, 295, 466, quoted in hyde, Solitary in the Ranks.)

* Perhaps more than any other single title, Revolt in the Desertensured the survival and profitability of its U.K. publisher, Jonathan Cape.

* Lawrence had met robert Graves when Graves came up to Jesus College, oxford, as an undergraduate after the war (in which he had served with distinction as an infantry officer, and which he would later describe in Goodbye to All That). Graves had by then already achieved some fame as one of the British war poets, and he would go on to write more than 140 books before his death in 1985 at the age of ninety.

* By this time Lawrence had changed his name by deed poll to Shaw. Legally and officially he had abandoned the name which his father had chosen on leaving ireland, and which Lawrence himself had made famous. it made little difference, of course—to most of the world he remained and would always remain “Lawrence”—but it at least removed the objection of some officers to the fact that he was serving in the ranks under a false name.

* The figure of 5100,000 in 1927 would be about $1.6 million today; Ј5,000 would be about 5375,000.

* All this may sound familiar to the reader eighty-two years later.

*Those who favor this policy today (in much the same area where Lawrence was in 1928) should bear those doubts in mind. Whether by biplane or by drone, bombing people’s villages and killing their wives and children will inflame, not put down, an insurgency.

* The luxurious liners of the Peninsula & orient Steamship Company were the preferred way of traveling to and from Britain to the British colonies in the east; they played much the same role as the French Messageries Maritimes.

* Lawrence was embarrassed by the excessive generosity of this gift, even though it turned out that some of his wealthy friends, like Buxton and Curtis, had also contributed toward it, and in the end decided to pay for it himself. Buxton, ever the astute banker, had managed to get Brough to agree to a discount (Lawrence was his most famous customer), so the final price was ₤144 four shillings and sixpence (₤144/4s/6d),or about $7,500 in today’s money.

*The author was stationed for a time in the early 1950s at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Bodmin, Cornwall, about thirty miles northwest of Plymouth, and frequently quently rode his motorcycle up to London for the weekend in under six hours; he can vouch for the fact that on the roads in existence before the motorways were built, Lawrence was pushing it.

* At that time (and up until 1940) any large formation of aircraft was known in every air force in the world as a “Balbo,” after the spectacular long-distance, large-formation flights Balbo had led to publicize italy’s aviation strength.

* The Schwerpunktwas the central aim of German strategy, the focal point against which must be directed the maximum concentration of force to effect a breakthrough. The concept was characterized in World War ii by General Guderian’s comment,kleckern, klotzen!(“Don’t fiddle around, smash!”).

† London: Cassell, 1938.

*Alexander Korda (1893—1956) was the author’s uncle. Zoltan Korda (1895—1961) was the middle brother; and the author’s father, Vincent Korda (1897—1979), the youngest brother.

*Photographs of Clare Smith generally show her wearing a smart beret with a diamond brooch, not at all the kind of hat expected of a group captain’s wife in Singapore.

*To his credit, Baldwin did authorize expenditure on what would come to be called radar and on the eight-gun monoplane fighter (the Spitfire and the hurricane), but that was because they were presented to him in the most unobtrusive way by professionals he trusted. The task of “reorganizing” Britain’s defenses was not put into the hands of one person until April 1940, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s successor, most reluctantly made Winston Churchill chairman of the Committee of Service Ministers and Chiefs of Staff, in addition to his post as first lord of the admiralty.

EPILOGUE

Life after Death

Lawrence is in the select group of heroes who become even more famous after death than they were while alive. The Library of Congress lists more than 100 books about him, of which fifty-six are biographical, and that number does not include several children’s books, two very successful plays, a major motion picture, and a television docudrama, as well as numerous Web sites devoted to his life and work. As Lawrence had feared, “the Colonel,” as he sometimes called his former self in a spirit of derision, just keeps marching on, despite every effort on Lawrence’s part to kill him off. Doubtless, if he had had his way, Lawrence would have been buried with the name T. E. Shaw inscribed on his headstone, but his brother Arnold stood firm in opposing that, and so it is as T. E. Lawrence that he lies in Moreton churchyard, and is commemorated by sculptures of various sizes in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral; at Jesus College, Oxford; at the City of Oxford High School; and in the tiny church of St. Martin’s, near Clouds Hill, where Eric Kennington carved a life-size recumbent effigy of Lawrence in his Arab robes and headdress, his hands crossed over his Meccan dagger as if in prayer, very similar to the medieval effigies of knights, crusaders, and their wives that Lawrence had photographed in his childhood.

The limelight that Bernard Shaw had warned him about has never dimmed, and he remains as famous now as he was seventy-five years ago, and perhaps even more controversial. In part this is because there exists a flourishing Lawrence cult, fueled by the Lawrence legend, that has kept an apparently endless number of controversies going on the subject of Lawrence, many of them created, not always inadvertently, by Lawrence himself. As early as 1929 he had predicted, in a letter to a friend, “I am trying to accustom myself to the truth that I’ll probably be talked over for the rest of my life: and after my life too.”

After Lawrence’s death his brother Arnold was bombarded by letters from admirers who saw Lawrence as the central figure of a new religion, in which they hoped Arnold might play the role of Saint Paul. Even before his death Lawrence was painted by “an Austrian-born religious artist named Herbert Gurschner” as a gently smiling, beatific religious figure in RAF uniform with a beggar’s cloak like that of Saint Francis thrown over his shoulders, against a lush background of Egyptian religious symbols. His left hand is raised in a kind of casual blessing, and through the long, graceful fingers of his right hand run grains of golden desert sand.

Arnold sensibly resisted attempts to make his brother a religious symbol or a martyr, but the impulse was already there to turn Lawrence into many things he had never been. He has been celebrated as an antiwar figure, although Lawrence’s feelings about war were ambivalent, to say the least. He has been made the hero of a novel portraying him as a thwarted homosexual who welcomes his own death, though nobody could have fought harder to be asexual than Lawrence, and there is no evidence that he wanted to die. He has been attacked as a total fraud and liar by one biographer, though the release of hitherto secret government files had by 1975 proved that Lawrence did everything he claimed to have done (and kept meticulous records), and that, if anything, he underplayed the importance of his role in the war and as Churchill’s adviser on Middle Eastern affairs after the peace. He has been blamed by the Arabs for the existence of Israel, and criticized by the Israelis as pro-Arab. Insurgents such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara have claimed to follow his methods of guerrilla warfare; but anti-insurgency fighters, such as the United States Army today, also claim to use his tactics. He sometimes gets a bad press as a sadist because of the killing of Turkish and German prisoners after the Arabs discovered the massacre of Arab civilians in Tafas, in 1918, and as a masochist because of the whippings meted out to him by John Bruce. He is criticized as an imperialist who wanted the new Arab states to be within the British Empire, and as an anti-imperialist who disliked Britain’s rule over India.

Lawrence as a religious cultfigure, with a pilgrim‘ s cape and sand running through his fingers. In the background, various mystical symbols. Painting by Herbert Gurschner, an Austrian-born religious artist, 1934.

Given the secrecy in which much of his life was passed, it is hardly surprising that some people refused to believe he was dead at all, and that according to persistent rumors he was recovering from his injuries in Tangiers, and would return whenever England was in danger. There were numerous “sightings” of him, usually in Arab dress, in the Middle East.

As the years passed, and the heroes of the Great War slipped from the public memory, Lawrence became one of the few people who couldbe remembered from that terrible war—a stand-in, as it were, for all the others. He had not been one of the young officers who had gone to their death unflinchingly, leading their platoons over the top into German machine gun fire; nor had he been one of the legion of faceless men, the PBI or “poor bloody infantry,” slogging through the mud and barbed wire. He was, in a curious way, classless; he had belonged to no regiment; he had fought according to his own rules; he was free from the cant and the naive patriotic enthusiasm that began to ring false to people in the 1930s; and he became, like Nelson, a pillar on which British patriotism rested, eccentric, perhaps, but undeniably a hero.

Even World War II did nothing to shake Lawrence’s reputation. On the contrary, his tactics were followed to the letter very successfully by the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) in Libya in 1941 and 1942: Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas their Bible, and Lawrence their patron saint. No less an authority than Field Marshal Rommel said, “The LRDG caused us more damage than any other unit of their size,” praise from the enemy that would not have surprised Lawrence. His influence remained strong: his old friend and admirer A. P. Wavell was in command of the Middle East; and Lawrence inspired a number of bold imitators, chief among them Major-General Orde Wingate, DSO and two bars—the son of General Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdarof the Egyptian army who had recommended Lawrence for the “immediate award” of the Victoria Cross in 1917. Unorthodox, courageous, and a born leader, Orde Wingate applied Lawrence’s techniques, both in the Middle East and in Burma, with great success, becoming, like Lawrence, a great favorite of Churchill’s. Most military figures from World War I seemed irrelevant during World War II, but Lawrence’s reputation remained unscathed.

Lawrence’s literary reputation grew steadily. After his death Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas at last published in normal book form, using the text from the subscribers’ edition rather than preferred “Oxford version” of 1922; it sold more than 60,000 copies in the first year and went on to become a steady seller in English on both sides of the Atlantic, and in many other languages. (The Mintwas not published until 1955, and then it appeared in two versions: one expurgated and the other in a limited edition, with the barracks language intact.) The immense task of publishing Lawrence’s letters proceeded, and these won him perhaps even more praise than his books, for the sheer quantity and the quality of his correspondence was extraordinary. He was the subject, as well, of much careful scholarship. With both his flanks—military and literary—secure, Lawrence might have continued as a respected English hero, except that it would not have been in character for him to do that, dead or alive.

The great crisis in Lawrence’s reputation was caused by the publication in 1955 of Richard Aldington’s controversial Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry.Aldington had set out to write a conventional, admiring biography of Lawrence, at the suggestion of his publisher, but as he researched the book he discovered that he neither liked nor trusted Lawrence, and came to the conclusion that Lawrence had systematically twisted the facts to create his own legend.

Aldington’s book virtually destroyed his own health and his career as a writer. He was an odd choice for the thankless task of debunking Lawrence. He was not an investigative journalist, and he was far from being a mere crank; he was a respected, if minor, war poet, a novelist, a translator, a fairly successful biographer (of Voltaire, the duke of Wellington, and D. H. Lawrence), and a friend of such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. A whole book has been written about Aldington’s attempt to deconstruct Lawrence’s legend—an attempt that began as a perfectly conventional exercise in biography rather than a deliberate attack on one of Britain’s greatest heroes. Aldington, a prickly, quarrelsome, difficult character, may not even have realized that when he set out to write about Lawrence he had a chip on his shoulder—not just because Lawrence had achieved, it seemed almost effortlessly, the fame that eluded Aldington himself, but also because Aldington had served through some of the worst fighting on the western front, rising from the ranks to become a commissioned officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment. Aldington had been gassed and shell-shocked, and his experience of war made him contemptuous of Lawrence’s role in what Lawrence himself described as “a sideshow of a sideshow"; he remarked disparagingly to a friend, “These potty little skirmishes and sabotage raids which Hart and Lawrence call battles are somewhat belly-aching to one who did the Somme, Vimy, Loos, etc.” Not only did it seem to Aldington that Lawrence had had an easy war of it compared with those who fought in the trenches, but Lawrence had been rewarded with fame beyond even his own imagination, with decorations and honors that he had treated contemptuously and with the friendship of great and powerful figures. In short, whether Aldington realized it or not, his book about Lawrence was spoiled by his own envy of his subject from the very beginning; and the more deeply Aldington delved into Lawrence’s life, the more bitter he became.

Aldington was one of those people who take everything literally—even his admirers do not credit him with a sense of proportion (or a sense of humor)—and the tone of his book about Lawrence was, from page 1, that of a man in a rage; it was a sustained 448-page rant, in which he at tacked everything about Lawrence, apparently determined to blow up the legend once and for all. Much of it is minor stuff; partly, this is the fault of Lowell Thomas and Lawrence’s other early biographers—his friends Robert Graves, the poet and novelist; and B. H. Liddell Hart, the military historian and theorist—who had written panegyrics to Lawrence without any serious effort at independent research or objectivity. Sooner or later, somebody was bound to come along and correct the balance.

It was Aldington’s misfortune, however, to have unearthed proof that Lawrence and his four brothers were illegitimate, and to reveal it while Lawrence’s mother was still alive. This struck most people, even those who were not admirers of Lawrence, as tactless and cruel.

Aldington was also the victim of an idйe fixe: he believed that his whole case rested on whether or not Lawrence had told the truth in saying that he had been offered the post of British high commissioner in Egypt in 1922, when Field Marshal Lord Allenby seemed about to give it up in disgust. This dispute, into which Winston Churchill, then in his last year as prime minister, was drawn most reluctantly, sputtered on for ages, though it is obvious to anybody reading about the episode today that Churchill, then colonial secretary, in fact didsuggest this appointment to Lawrence, though perhaps not altogether seriously, and that Lawrence, who never wanted the post, which was not in any case for Churchill to offer, later came to the conclusion that it had been offered to him genuinely. This was a reasonable belief, since Churchill was given to just that kind of impulsive gesture; and Lloyd George, then the prime minister, and himself notoriously impulsive about offering people high government positions without informing his colleagues in the cabinet, seems to have brought the subject up with Lawrence as well.

In any event, Aldington’s book, when it was eventually published in 1955 after years of bitter quarrels with his own publisher, his long-suffering editor, and innumerable lawyers, brought down on him a landslide of abuse and criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. He succeeded in tarnishing Lawrence’s image for a time, but at the cost of his own reputation and career—a sad object lesson in the perils of obsessive self-righteousness.

Aldington might have known better had he written a biography of Nelson instead of Wellington, for Nelson, despite character flaws that in some ways mirrored those of Lawrence, won a permanent place in the hearts of the British, while the victor of Waterloo, a cold and haughty aristocrat, never did. Nelson, like Lawrence, was a man who desperately craved attention and sought fame, who artfully cloaked vanity and ambition with humility, whose private life was something between a muddle and a disgrace, and who constantly appeared in the limelight without ever appearing to seek it. Like Lawrence he was small, physically brave to an extraordinary degree, able to endure great pain and hardship without complaint, and indifferent to food, drink, and comfort. Unlike Lawrence, he not only avidly sought honors, medals, titles, and decorations, but insisted on wearing them all even when doing so put his life at risk. However, both of them were cast from the same mold, heroes whose human weaknesses and flaws merely made them loved all the more, both by those who knew them and by those who admired them from afar. From time to time, in the more than two centuries since Nelson’s death, people have written books attempting to put his myth in perspective, but to no avail—he remains as popular as ever, and hardly a decade goes by without the launching of a biography, a film, or a novel* (for example, there was a novel by Susan Sontag), adding yet another layer to his fame. So it is with Lawrence.

The release in 1962 of David Lean’s monumental epic film Lawrence of Arabiaas good as washed away Aldington’s attempt to tarnish Lawrence’s legend. One of the longest, most beautiful, most ambitious, and most honored films ever made, Lawrence of Arabiaintroduced a new generation to Lawrence the man and Lawrence the legend, and returned Lawrence to the kind of celebrity he had enjoyed (or endured) when Lowell Thomas first brought him to the screen in 1921.

The real hero of Lawrence of Arabiais neither Lawrence nor its director, David Lean, but its producer, Sam Spiegel, who not only persuaded Columbia Pictures to finance one of the most expensive films ever made, but who put it in the hands of a director notoriously resistant to the wishes of a studio, and quite as determined as Lawrence had been to have his own way.

The genesis of Lawrence of Arabiawent back a long way, with many false starts and disappointments—enough to discourage anyone less resilient than Spiegel. When Lawrence died in 1935, Alexander Korda still owned the rights to Revolt in the Desert.He had agreed not to make a film so long as Lawrence was alive, but with Lawrence’s death he was free to proceed. He had a star in mind to play Lawrence, the English actor Leslie Howard,* who had been a big success in Korda’s The Scarlet Pimpernel; and he spent a good deal of time and money developing a script, written by Miles Malleson, who would go on to become a beloved English character actor, and edited by none other than Winston Churchill, then still in the political wilderness.

Korda’s film was never made. Financing was difficult; more important, Korda, who was always sensitive to the opinions of those in government and in “the City,” soon discovered that nobody wanted it made. A big film about Lawrence was bound to offend the Turks, who did not want to be reminded of their defeat; it would also anger the Arabs, who would not be pleased by the portrayal of the Arab Revolt as being led by a young English officer. Since it was hoped that the Turks might fight on the Allied side if there was another war, or at least stay neutral, and that the Arabs would stay quiet, it was discreetly suggested to Korda that it might be better to put the film aside for the moment. Nobody wanted to see angry Arab mobs burning down cinemas in Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, or burning Lawrence in effigy again. Korda took the setback philosophically, and stepped neatly from one desert film to another, sending his brother Zoltan off to make The Four Feathers,a film that could offend nobody but the Sudanese, about whose feelings few people cared in those days, and that turned out to be a huge hit.

Once World War II began, the film about Lawrence went to the bottom of Korda’s large pile of optioned and purchased books; and after the war, events in the Middle East—anti-British rioting, assassinations, and the Arab-Isreali war—made the project seem even less appealing. Occasionally Korda floated rumors that he was planning to make it, now with Laurence Olivier as Lawrence, but that was only in the hope of interesting somebody who would take it off his hands. That person eventually turned up in the larger-than-life form of Sam Spiegel, a producer whose taste for the grand film was equal to Korda’s, and who bought the screen rights to Revolt in the Desertover luncheon at Anabelle’s, the chic club next door to Korda’s offices at 144-146 Piccadilly. Spiegel bought the whole package: the book, the existing screenplay, all the preliminary sketches. (Over coffee, brandy, and cigars, he also bought the film rights to The African Queen,which prompted Korda, in a rare burst of poor judgment, to say, “My dear Sam, an old man and an old woman go down an African river in an old boat—you will go bankrupt.”)

Perhaps the only person who could have brought Lawrence of Arabiato the screen was the indefatigable Spiegel, who made the impossible happen by sheer willpower and chutzpah on an epic scale. To begin with, because of the numerous Arab wars against Israel, the cause of Arab freedom and independence was not a popular one in Hollywood. Then too, Spiegel began by hiring Michael Wilson, an experienced screenwriter who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, to rewrite the original script—Spiegel hired blacklisted talent because it was cheaper, not out of political sympathy. Then, when Wilson’s screenplay turned out to have an antiwar tone inappropriate to Lawrence, he hired Robert Bolt, an Englishman, to make it more triumphant. His first choice for Lawrence was Marlon Brando, whom he had hired for the lead in On the Waterfront;and on this assumption he was able to persuade Columbia Pictures to finance the film, which, from the beginning, was planned as an epic that would appeal to both an American and an international audience. Spiegel managed to keep Columbia on the hook even after Brando turned down the role, as did Albert Finney, a British actor who was in any case hardly the big international star Columbia had been counting on. Finally, Spiegel got Columbia to accept Peter O’Toole, a comparative unknown, in the title role, as well as a British director, David Lean, known for his grandiose (and expensive) ideas and his determination not to be bullied by studio executives. Spiegel also hired a supporting cast of predominantly British actors, including Alec Guinness to play Feisal, and an Egyptian unknown, Omar Sharif. Nobody but Spiegel could have persuaded Columbia to finance this package, or to sit still through the interminable problems of filming on three continents, let alone to accept a film that was 227 minutes long, with a musical prelude and an intermission.

The result was a masterpiece. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director; it made (and continues to make) a fortune; and it appears constantly on lists drawn up by various bodies of the best movies of all time, and as number one on lists of the best epic pictures of all time. The director Steven Spielberg called it “a miracle,” and so it is.

It is not,however, either the full story of Lawrence’s life or a completely accurate account of the two years he spent fighting with the Arabs. Arnold Lawrence remarked, “I should not have recognized my own brother,” when he saw the picture, and most people who had known Lawrence were horrified by it, even Lowell Thomas, which in his case was a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence scholars feel even more strongly about it, and there exists a Web site on which each key scene of the film is compared with the reality of what happened. Still, even if this is a worthy endeavor, it misses the point. What Spiegel and Lean set out to do, after all, was to produce entertainment,as well as a film that would make money worldwide for Columbia—hence Spiegel’s original choice of Brando for the role of Lawrence. As with George C. Scott’s portrayal of General George Patton, the object was to produce, not a faithful docudrama that would educate the audience, but a hit picture. O’Toole, like Charles Laughton as Henry VIII or Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, was an actor playing a role, not any more like the real Lawrence than Shakespeare’s Henry V necessarily resembles the historical soldier-king. Lawrence of Arabiacan be enjoyed for itself—criticizing it for its inaccuracy is like arguing that Gone with the Winddoes not provide the depth of information and historical objectivity of Ken Burns’s television documentary on the Civil War: each has its merits, but the one is not a substitute for the other.

Other portrayals of Lawrence on the stage or screen have not added much. The respected British playwright Terence Rattigan wrote Ross,for which John Mills was cast in the title role, but it tended to explore Lawrence’s alleged homosexuality, to such a degree that Sam Spiegel attempted to have it suppressed. (Knowing Spiegel, though, one could guess that he was probably trying to appease Columbia Pictures and get publicity for his own film, rather than expressing outrage.) A made-for-television film about Lawrence at the Paris Peace Conference starred Ralph Fiennes, but was a rather wooden docudrama about how the Arabs were treated by the Allies—just the kind of issue Spiegel and Lean were determined to avoid—though it has to be said that Fiennes at least lookedmore like Lawrence than Peter O’Toole did.

Perhaps the one thing that Richard Aldington’s book and David Lean’s film have in common is that they have raised the level of scholarship on the subject of Lawrence, as Lawrence’s admirers pored over his letters and manuscripts in search of ways to refute Aldington’s unflattering portrait and Peter O’Toole’s heroic portrayal. The release of British government documents in the 1960s and 1970s has, in the skillful and determined hands of Jeremy Wilson, the authorized biographer of Lawrence and certainly the leading scholar of the subject, provided a much clearer view of just how great Lawrence’s accomplishments were in the war, and how meticulous he was in describing all of it. The publication by Jeremy Wilson of four expertly edited volumes of Lawrence’s correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw has also dramatically enriched our knowledge of what Lawrence was thinking and doing from 1922 to 1935, and also arouses, in any objective reader, considerable sympathy for him. Lawrence’s account to Charlotte of what happened to him at Deraa, for example, makes it hard to accept the view that he invented the episode.

There are probably more people who know ofLawrence today than ever. At least two major biographies have appeared: one by Jeremy Wilson (1989), which is authoritative and formidably documented; and a psychological study by John E. Mack, MD* (1976), who was a professor at Harvard Medical School and a psychoanalyst. But people seldom know all that much aboutLawrence, and many still see him, in their mind’s eye, as Peter O’Toole, much the way people still think of Captain Bligh as Charles Laughton. Mack’s book, whatever its merits, demonstrates the dangers of psychoanalyzing the dead, who after all cannot speak for themselves, and also the fact that Lawrence has, since his death, been taken over by numerous groups and turned into a gay hero, an anti-imperialist hero, or, even more improbably, a hero who betrayed the Arabs and encouraged increased Jewish immigration in Palestine. The fact is that Lawrence defies simplification and refuses to be pigeonholed, in death as he did in life. It is his complexity—his curious mixture of shyness and vainglory, of heroism on the grand scale and self-doubt about his own feats, of political sophistication and occasional naпvetй—that makes him special. He was a hero, a scholar, a diplomat, a brilliant writer, endowed with enormous courage and capable of reckless self-sacrifice, and behind the facade that Lowell Thomas and the newspapers built up around him, also the kindest, gentlest, and most loyal of friends, and that rare Englishman with no class prejudices of any kind, as at ease in a barracks as he was in Buckingham Palace, in the desert, or at Versailles.

The difficulty with books about Lawrence is that most of them start with a definite thesis or fixed idea, or are aimed, whether consciously or unconsciously, either at correcting the wilder misstatements in Lowell Thomas’s book (in the case of the earlier biographies like those of Graves and Liddell Hart), or at expunging the misleading portraits of Lawrence produced by David Lean and Aldington. The result is that while every fact, however minor, has now been examined, and psychoanalytical explanations have been provided for every facet of his character, the real Lawrence—and those qualities which made him a hero, a military genius, a gifted diplomat, the friend of so many people, and the author of one of the best and most ambitious great books ever written about war—has tended to disappear under the weighty accumulation of facts and the biographical disputes. Clearly, Lawrence had, throughout his life, an amazing capacity to inspire devotion, passionate friendship, fierce loyalty, and intense admiration, even from those who saw his faults as clearly as he himself did; and this is the Lawrence that needs to be re-created if we are to understand him and his remarkable hold on the imagination of people even three-quarters of a century after his death.

Then too, history has brought Lawrence back into the minds of those who are concerned with events in the Middle East. Not only did Lawrence introduce the Arabs to a new kind of warfare; his determination to “give them,” as he saw it, an Arab state and his definition (and vision) of what that state should be are still at the center of every diplomatic dispute, war, insurrection, and political revolution throughout this vast area. Lawrence cannot be held responsible for the mess in the Middle East, any more than he was solely responsible for the Arab Revolt, which had already broken out before he arrived in Jidda, but everybody from Allenby down seems to agree that the revolt would never have succeeded to the extent it did without his vision and energy, and certainly he did his best throughout 1917-1918 and from 1919 to 1922 to give the Arabs the state they wanted. This, after all (despite lengthy Freudian explanations for his behavior), rather than his illegitimacy or the incident at Deraa,was the great moral crisis of his lifetime, which drove him to give up his name, his rank, and his decorations and join the RAF as a recruit under an assumed name.

Lawrence was at least partly responsible for the creation of present-day Iraq (with all its ethnic and religious contradictions) and Jordan, and he played a substantial role in the creation of Palestine as a separate entity. The British and French division of the immense Turkish empire that extended north and south from Syria to Yemen and east and west from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf—an area from which Lawrence had played a major, and admittedly flamboyant, role in driving out the Turks—was the primary guilt that Lawrence bore, and that explains much of his life from 1922 to his death in 1935.

He was partly instrumental in the creation of not one but threeMiddle Eastern kingdoms. Only one of these, Jordan, survives today in its original form; but much of the map of the Middle East was drawn by Lawrence, quite literally, as we have seen; and if he could not give the Arabs what they most wanted—a “greater Syria"—he at any rate helped to give them the states that now exist there, and, for better or worse, the dream of a larger, united Arab nation, which for a brief time led to the union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic, and which is still the motivating force behind much of the unrest and violence of Arab nationalism. Lawrence himself foresaw only too clearly what the price would be if the Allies failed to give the Arabs what they wanted—and had been promised—and the long-term consequences of letting the French take Lebanon and Syria as mandates—in effect, colonies—and letting the British take Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. He did his best to persuade a reluctant Feisal to accept the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, but he understood that this acceptance was dependent on the Arabs’ getting a meaningful state, and was unlikely to be achieved in the long run if the Middle East was carved up into small and mutually hostile units, under French or British colonial administration.

As it turned out, the brutal carving up of the Turkish empire was complicated by the fact that the great oil reserves were in the most backward areas, on the eastern fringe of the Middle East. These would have the effect of transforming remote desert “kingdoms” and “principalities” into oil-rich powers, while leaving the more highly developed, better educated, and more populous parts of the area—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon—impoverished. British and French policy (as strongly as each differed from the other) ensured that there would be no unitary Arab state as a major power in which oil revenues might be used to improve the lives of ordinary Arabs, and thwarted just those ambitions which Lawrence had been at such pains to arouse, and which led Lowell Thomas, with his usual touch of hyperbole, to describe Lawrence as “the George Washington of a United States of Arabia.” Alas, after the Peace Conference, and the creation of Jordan and Iraq, Lawrence—knowing that he had done his best for the Arabs and that it was not good enough, and broken by shame and guilt at his own failure—resigned from public life and signed up as an airman, and the United States of Arabia was never born, with consequences that we are still facing today.

There is, therefore, every reason to examine objectively and clearly what Lawrence attempted to do, and to treat him not as an interesting neurotic with profound oedipal problems (though this may be true), but as both a visionary and a warrior; as a man who not only wrote an epic but lived one; and as a politician and diplomat, indeed a maker of nations, whose failure to get the Arabs what they had been promised had profound consequences for the world today, consequences that have not been played out yet, and whose outcome nobody can predict.

Few people have risen so high so quickly, or have voluntarily given up not only honors but power, and done so without regret or bitterness. Fewer still have been so famous and tried so hard to live obscurely. Lawrence found in the end peace of a kind in friendships, in literature, and in an unexpected gift for marine craftsmanship and engineering which has seldom been fully acknowledged, but to which many airmen in World War II would owe their lives.

However many books there have been about Lawrence, his is still a story worth telling, a life that needs to be described without prejudice and without a fixed agenda: a military “triumph,” as he himself called it with a combination of pride, bitterness, and irony; an extraordinary and heroic epic; and a political failure whose importance we can only begin to reckon today as we pick among the ruins of Lawrence’s hopes for the Middle East in search of a way forward.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence himself described his own genius best.

All men dream: but not equally.Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of theirMinds wake in the day to find that it wasvanity; but the dreamers of the day aredangerous men, for they may act their dreamwith open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. * Perhaps the most popular film the author’s Uncle Alex and his father ever made was That Hamilton Woman,starring Laurence olivier as Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady hamilton. Winston Churchill screened it innumerable times (it never failed to move him to tears), and took a print to Moscow as a gift to Stalin. As a result it was the only British film seen during World War ii by Soviet audiences, and extended Nelson’s heroic reputation to russia.

* Leslie howard, whose original name was Leslie howard Steiner, was the son of an english-Jewish mother, Lillian Blumberg, and a hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner.

* Although Mack’s book on Lawrence is in many respects fascinating—he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for it in 1977—it suffered retroactively from his subsequent notoriety as a believer in and proselytizer for the personal stories of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have returned to tell the tale.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE“Who Is This Extraordinary Pip-Squeak?”

5 “a most excellent dinner”:Lawrence, Letters, Garnett (ed.), 206.

6 “an odd gnome”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,174.

6 “Who is this extraordinary pip-squeak?”: Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 127.

8 “Into friendship with T. E. Lawrence”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

8 “The first of us was Ronald Storrs”:Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 37.Hereafter abbreviated SP.

9 “revolverpractice on deck”:Storrs, Orientations,200.

9 “quite intolerable to the Staff”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

9 “But when at last we anchored”:Ibid., 47.

10 “Till now we have defended”:Brown and Cave, Touch of Genius, 55.

11 “Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

11 “a holiday and a joy-ride”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

12 “like water, or permeating oil”:Ibid., 37.

13 “incoherent and spasmodic”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

13 “None of us realized”:Ibid.

14 “a yellow silk kuffiya”:Ibid., 201.

15 “When Abdallah quoted”:Ibid., 221.

15 “was short, strong”:Lawrence, SP, 48, 49.

17 “Meeting today: Wilson”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

18 “took a great fancy”:Lawrence, SP, 59. 18 “force of character”: Ibid.

18 “prophet”:Ibid., 60.

18 ” staggered”:Ibid., 59.

18 “waving grateful hands”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

22 Zeid, still a “beardless” young man: Lawrence, SP, 60.

25 “shelters of branches and palm leaves”:Ibid., 64.

26 “two inches thick”:Ibid., 68.

28 “dinner to the examiners to celebrate it”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 67.

28 “astonishingly wide”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 75.

28 “schoolboy stuff”:Ibid., 128.

30 “a garrulous old man”:Lawrence, SP, 70.

30 “had been beaten out of Kheif”:Ibid.

32 “standing framed between the posts”:Ibid., 75.

32 “almost regal in appearance”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 312.

33 “Ifelt at the glance”:Lawrence, SP, 75-76. 33 “which were twisting slowly”: Ibid., 76.

33 “And do you like our place”:Ibid.

33 “like a sword into their midst”:Ibid.

36 “a desperate measure”:Ibid., 77.

37 “if their villages were spared”:Ibid., 78.

38 “They hunger… for desolate lands”:Ibid.

39 “view with favour the establishment”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 117.

42 “huge crags”:Lawrence, SP, 95.

42 “glassy sand mixed”:Ibid., 96.

43 “a salt wind”:Ibid.

43 “picturesque, rambling house”:Ibid., 97.

43 “travel-stained”:Ibid.

45 “cool and comfortable”:Ibid., 99.

45 spent his time reading Malory’sMorte d’Arthur: Ibid.

48 hope “to biff the French:”Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

49 was much against my grain”:Lawrence, SP, 103.

chapter twoAqaba, 1917: The Making of a Hero

51 “sacrament”:Lawrence, SP, 104.

53 “that invariable magnet of Arab good will”:Ibid., 112.

54 “to slip in and out”:Ibid., 114.

55 “Part of our booty”: Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,Vols. 10-12, 9 (2000).

56 “Twenty-Seven Articles”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 670.

56 “a magnificent bay camel”:Lawrence, SP, 117.

56 “as a mass they are notformidable”:Lawrence, Letters,Garnett (ed.), 217.

57 “Guerrilla warfare is what the regular armies”:Callwell, Small Wars, 105.

57 “old rubbish”:Lawrence, SP, 118.

58 “quiet, but in no other way mortified”:Ibid., 117.

58 “While all goes well”:Callwell, Small Wars, 66.

59 “and stamp out Feisal’s army”:Lawrence, SP, 121.

60 “the military art was one”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 370.

62 “It looked like a river of camels”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 349.

66 “Our men were not materials”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 211.

68 “a tall, strong figure”:Lawrence, SP, 229.

72 “feeling that this need not”:Ibid., 184.

72 “and gave him a few moments’ delay”:Ibid., 185.

73 “with the reckless equality”:Ibid., 188.

74 “suffering a bodily weakness”:Ibid., 191.

74 “woke out of a hot sleep”:Ibid., 192.

78 “The cold was intense”:Ibid., 212.

80 “I was about to take my leave”:Ibid., 229.

82 “venture… in the true Elizabethan tradition”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 143.

82 “to capture a trench”:Ibid.

83 “The weight is bearing me down now”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 406.

86 “surly… stranger from Maan”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 146.

90 “Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 410.

90 “Hideously green, unbearable”:Ibid.

91 “he was very old, livid”:Ibid., 413.

92 “quarrelling”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 154.

95 “A man who gives himself”:Lawrence, SP, 11

98 “Our hot bread”:Ibid., 323.

99 “By God indeed”:Ibid., 325.

100 “Work, work, where are words?”:Ibid., 328.

100 “when it became clear”:Ibid., 330.

101 “The dead men”:Ibid., 331.

109 He walked past the sleeping sentry: Ibid., 347.

110 “Allenby was physically large”:Ibid., 348.

110 “He [Lawrence] thinks himself”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 34.

110 “offering to hobble the enemy”:Lawrence, SP, 348.

112 “a bumptious young ass”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

112 Wingate praised Lawrence: Ibid., 424.

113 “Tell Mother”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 340.

chapter three“The Family Romance”

115 “To my sons”:Item MS English C6741, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, Thomas E. Lawrence Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Orlans, Harold, “Ways of Transgressors,” Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,Vol. 6, 120-33.

120 Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman:See Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder,5-8; and Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,30-31, 941-944.

121 “the Vinegar Queen”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 4.

122 Sarah Lawrence:Ibid., 8-11; and Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,31-32, 942-943.

123 Sometime in 1885:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,943.

123 “so gay and pretty”:Journal of T. E. Lawrence Society,Vols. 10-12, 29.

123 “was the sort of woman”:Asher, Lawrence, 7.

124 “T. E. got his firm chin”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 33.

124 “No trust ever existed”:Ibid., 32.

128 “a real love match”:Ibid., 13.

129 “overpowering and terrifying”:Ibid., 8.

135 As in most English families: Ibid., 19.

135 “quiet authority”:Ibid., 13.

138 “he knew no fear”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 25.

Lawrence claimed to have overheard:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 27.

“a playground scuffle”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 27.

141 “was placed in the First Class”:Ibid.

141 Oxford was a good place: Ibid., 28.

144 His father—whose closest friend: Ibid., 30.

147 “a house telephone”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

152 “When… I suddenly went to Oxford”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 41.

chapter fourOxford, 1907-1910

155 “as if he descended”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 62.

157 “Quite frankly, for me”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 29.

158 At the time he met Richards:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 60.

159 His youngest brother, Arnold:Ibid., 67.

159 “I’m not a boy”:Ibid., 20.

159 “We could never be bothered”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 36.

160 “He is illuminated from inside”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 14.

160 She saw him as a beloved:Ibid., 64.

161 “worshipped Janet from afar”:Ibid., 66.

162 His mother vigorously denied:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 46.

162 One friend told of Lawrence’s:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

162 Lawrence’s nearly drowning:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 48.

162 A famous feat of Lawrence’s:Ibid., 49.

163 It was also clear to Lawrence:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

166 In Doughty’s opinion:Ibid., 54.

167 “a lightweight suit”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 69.

167 “a revolver”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 62.

171 “From Dan we passed”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 97.

172 “quite cool”:Ibid., 89.

172 “Nothing in life is more exhilarating”:Churchill, Story of the Malakind Field Force, 172.

173 “a person with nothing”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 107.

174 “Sir John does not like”: Ibid., 109.

174 “village elders”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 74.

174 The robbery has caused:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 76.

175 he apologized for the bloodstain:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 74.

176 “a cry (if not from the housetops)”:Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 14.

176 “thinned to the bone”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 75.

177 “in no way diminished”:Ibid.

177 Lawrence did not seem:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 68.

177 “took a most brilliant First Class”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 68.

177 busy readingPetit Jehan: Lawrence, Home Letters,10.

178 “a research fellowship”:Wilson, Lawrence, 69.

178 “The two occupations fit into one another”:Ibid.

178 “The dangerous crises”:Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 8.

chapter fiveCarchemish: 1911-1914

181 “a man of action”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 20.

181 It comes as no surprise:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 102.

182 When Lawrence went up to Jesus College:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 21.

182 “a cynical and highly-educated baboon”:Ibid., 20.

182 “a boy of extraordinary”:Ibid., 30.

183 “the only man I had never”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 369.

184 “a dreary and desolate waste”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 71.

186 Lawrence sailed for Beirut:Ibid., 76.

187 “They were always talking”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 122.

187 “the spiritual side of his character”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 77-78.

188 “Lawrence seems to me”:Ibid., 78.

189 “sit down to it”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 130.

189 “archeological overseer”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 78.

190 “was flagrantly and evidently an exotic”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 137.

190 “Turkish & Greek”:Ibid.

190 “the Lejah, the lava no-man’s-land”:Ibid.

193 “admitted to six or seven murders”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

193 “set her before him”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 154.

194 Bell was disappointed:Wallach, Desert Queen, 93.

195 “stained [purple] with Tyrian die”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 51.

195 “Can you make room”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 85.

196 “beautifully built and remarkably handsome”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 97.

197 “an interesting character”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 173.

198 “I am very well”:Ibid., 176.

198 “efforts to educate himself”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 95.

199 Apparently impressed by Hogarth’s letters:Ibid., 92.

200 “I am not enthusiastic about Flecker”:Sherwood, No Golden Journey, 47.

202 “Great rumors of war”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 182.

203 Lawrence turned up for digging:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 84-85.

203 “was not an Oxonian”:Ibid., 85.

205 “such as Bedouin sheiks wear”:Ibid., 192.

205 He seems to have been reading:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 101.

208 “essential immaturity”:Ibid., 85.

208 “frail, pallid, silent”:Ibid., 81.

208 “when the police tried”:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 43.

209 “explicit promise”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 103.

210 Lawrence was using Dahoum:Ibid., 104.

211 Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum:Arnold Lawrence (ed.), T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, 89.

214 Lawrence notes in a letter home:Lawrence, Home Letters, 210.

215 “for the foreigner [this country]”:Ibid., 218.

216 He wrote to England for medical advice:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 107.

216 “a big garden”:Sherwood, No Golden Journey, 153.

216 “carelessly flung beneath a tree”:Ibid., 146.

217 “I feel very little the lack”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 230.

217 He wrote to his youngest brother, Arnold:Ibid., 226.

219 “Flecker, the admiral at Malta”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 85.

219 “gun-running” incident:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 118.

220 Although skeptics about Lawrence:Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 36.

221 “Buswari and his great enemy”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 254.

222 “running around with guns”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 946.

224 “a place where one eats lotos”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 161.

225 “couldn’t shoot the railway bridge”:Ibid., 255.

225 “a pleasant, healthy warmth”:Ibid.

226 Already there had been protests:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 123-124.

227 “a pocket Hercules”:Lawrence to Edward Marsh, June 10, 1927. Lawrence, Letters,Garnett (ed.), 521.

228 By the end of August:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 126.

228 “the most beautiful town”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 441.

230 “You must not think of Ned”:Ibid., 447.

230 “was still in Ireland”:Ibid., 256.

231 “olive tree boles”:Ibid., 274.

232 “I cannot print with you”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 132.

232 “from west to east”:Ibid., 137.

234 “approach Kenyon”:Ibid.

234 “Hogarth concurs in the idea”:Ibid., 138.

235 “a picturesque little crusading town”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 281.

238 Newcombe was not dismayed:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 141.

238 “back to Mount Hor”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 286.

240 On March 21, Woolley and Lawrence:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 143-145.

240 A Circassian working for the Germans:Ibid., 144.

241 “the only piece of spying”:Ibid., 147.

241 More interesting still was the amount of information:Ibid.

chapter sixCairo: 1914-1916

248 “In Constantinople the seizure”:Randolph Churchill and Gilbert, Winston Churchill, 1914-1916,Vol. 3, 192.

248 “As the shadows of the night”:Churchill, The World Crisis,Vol. 1, 227.

250 COMMENCE HOSTILITIES: Geoffrey Miller, “Turkey Enters the War and British Actions.” December 1999, http://www.gwpda.org/naval/turk mill.htm.

251 “He’s running my entire department”:Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 63.

251 “I want to talk to an officer”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 124.

252 “as an officer ideally suited”:Ibid., 126.

253 “Clayton stability”:Storrs, Orientations, 179.

254 “a youngster, 2nd Lt. Lawrence”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 154.

254 “Keep your eye on Afghanistan”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 300.

255 “in the office from morning”:Ibid., 301.

257 “bottle-washer and office boy”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 167.

257 He was well aware of events:Ibid., 169.

258 “pieced together”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 131.

259 Abdulla’s concern was that the Turkish government:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 164-165.

259 One son, Emir Feisal:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 72.

260 “It may be”:Wilson, Lawrence, 165.

264 “The assault I regret to say”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 721.

264 “You will never understand”:Ibid., 304.

265 “If I do die”:Ibid., 718.

267 “To the excellent and well-born”:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 167.

271 “a twenty-minute Parliamentary debate”:Storrs, Orientations, 229.

272 “a devout Roman Catholic”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 193.

273 “There is nothing so bad or so good”:Shaw, Man of Destiny, 87.

274 “every aspect of the Arab question”:Wilson, Lawrence, 235.

274 “bravura”:Ibid., 235.

275 Picot was a master of detail:Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 190.

279 It was hoped that a French zone:Ibid., 192.

280 “the imaginative advocate”:Lawrence, SP, 38.

281 “I’ve decided to go off alone”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 410.

282 “I have not written to you for ever”:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 110.

283 “I’m fed up, and fed up”:Ibid., 109.

283 The Arab Bulletin was a secret news sheet:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 242.

283 The only one of them:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 109.

283 “to put the Grand Duke Nicholas in touch with”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 242.

285 The British Force in Egypt and the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force:Ibid., 252.

286 “to biff the French out of Syria”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

288 “go free on parole”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 149.

289 Lawrence arrived to undergo a difficult interview:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 268-269.

289 Although Khalil was “extremely nice”:Ibid., 272.

290 “about 32 or 33, very keen & energetic”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 326.

291 “a German field mission led by Baron Othmar von Stotzingen”:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 191.

292 “pronging playfully at strangers”:Storrs, Orientations, 188.

293 “Long before we met”:Ibid., 221.

chapter seven1917: “The Uncrowned King of Arabia”

297 if Clayton “thought”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 419.

297 “he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present”:Wavell, Palestine Campaigns, 96.

299 “an obstinate, narrow-minded”:Lawrence, SP, 351.

299 “gracious and venerable patriarch”:Storrs, Orientations, 213.

300 “as usual without obvious coherence”:Lawrence, SP, 352.

300 “half-naked”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 1079.

300 “in the third little turning to the left”:Ibid., 432.

302 “no spirit of treachery abroad”:Lawrence, SP, 353-355.

302 “Many men of sense and ability”:Arnold Lawrence (ed.), T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, 115.

302 “idle to pretend”:Ibid., 117.

305 “You very good man”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 441.

309 “a ladder of tribes”:Lawrence, SP, 367.

309 “tip and run” tactics:Ibid., 368.

311 It is a tribute to Lawrence’s skill:Ibid., 367-383.

312 “in a chilled voice”:Ibid., 387.

312 “a squadron of airplanes”:Ibid., 388.

313 “his best man present”:Ibid., 392.

313 “strange flat of yellow mud”:Ibid., 398.

317 “Out of the darkness”:Ibid., 407.

317 “a shambles of the group”:Ibid., 408.

320 “I hope when this nightmare ends”:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 106.

321 “He who gives himself to the possession”:Lawrence, SP, 11.

325 “African knobkerri”:Ibid., 429.

325 “on a series of identical steel bridges”:Ibid., 432.

326 “unfit for active service”:Ibid., 433.

329 “could outstrip a trotting camel”:Ibid.

330 “luscious”:Ibid., 447.

331 “They had lost two men”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 450-455.

331 “war, tribes and camels without end”:Lawrence, SP, 450.

331 “like the mutter of a distant”:Ibid., 450.

332 “Beware of Abd el Kader”:Ibid.

333 “held what might well be the world’s record”:Ibid., 453.

333 “some 40,000 troops of all arms”:Wavell, Palestine Campaigns, 117.

333 “dismounted and cleaned up”:Ibid., 123.

334 “General Allenby’s plan”:Ibid.

334 “nothing would persuade”:Lawrence, SP, 462.

334 “steeped in an unfathomable pool”:Ibid., 464.

335 “I only hope TEL”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 455, citingD. G. Hogarth to his wife, November 11, 1917, Hogarth Papers, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

336 The fumes from the explosive:Lawrence, SP, 471.

338 “pointing and staring”:Ibid., 478.