LAWRENCE THE MAN
Although he had been cited for nearly every decoration that the
British and French Governments had to offer, Lawrence sedulously
ran away from them by camel, aëroplane, or any available method of
swift transportation.
The French Government sent word to its contingent in Arabia to
bestow upon the dashing colonel the Croix de Guerre with palms.
Captain Pisani, commandant of the French force at Akaba, was
anxious to make the ceremony an impressive affair. He wanted to
have all of the British, French, and Arab troops out on parade so
that he could deliver an appropriate eulogistic address, present
the decoration to Lawrence, and then kiss him on both cheeks. But
Lawrence heard of the plan and vanished into the desert. Several
times he gave the persistent Pisani the slip. In despair the
commandant went to Major Marshall, Lawrence’s tent-mate, who
advised him to surround the mess-tent some morning when Lawrence
happened to be in Akaba and take him by surprise. So Pisani and
his detachment waited until he returned; then turned up in full
regalia, surrounded him just as he had reached the marmalade
course, and read an impressive document relating how he had gone
for days without food or water and how he had outwitted and defeated
the Turks.
At the end of the campaign, when Lawrence returned to Europe and
left Marshall behind in Arabia, the colonel wrote asking his
tent-mate to ship his things from Akaba to Cairo. Lawrence neither
drank nor smoked but was inordinately fond of chocolate, and there
were dozens of empty tins piled in the corner of his tent, together
with books, bits of theodolites, a camel-saddle, cartridge-drums,
and odds and ends from machine-guns. In one of the empty
chocolate-tins the major found the French decoration which Pisani
had presented. He put it in his own bag, and when Lawrence came to
meet Emir Feisal and the Arab delegates at Marseilles, Major
Marshall “pulled his leg” by making another speech reminding the
colonel of his splendid work for France, and then represented him
with the Croix de Guerre with palms.
When the Duke of Connaught visited Palestine to confer the Grand
Cross of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem on
General Allenby, he intended to present a decoration to Lawrence
as well. The young leader of the Arabian forces happened at the
time to be out “in the blue,” busily blowing up Turkish trains.
Aëroplanes were sent to scour the desert for him. Messages were
dropped on various Arab camps requesting any one who saw Shereef
Lawrence to tell him to report to Jerusalem. One fine day Lawrence
came strolling in on foot through the Turkish lines, to show his
indifference of the enemy. In the meantime the ceremony in Jerusalem
had already taken place, and the Duke of Connaught had gone to
Egypt. Knowing Lawrence’s peculiar aversion to the acceptance of
medals or military honors of any kind, his associates of the
intelligence staff succeeded in seducing him to Cairo only by
inventing some other plausible pretext. Upon his arrival, a
subaltern who was not acquainted with Lawrence’s eccentricities
inadvertently tipped him off to the fine affair that was to be
staged for his benefit. Without stopping to pick up his uniform
and kit at Shepheard’s Hotel, Lawrence hurried out to the
headquarters of the Flying Corps at Helipolis, an oasis a few miles
from Cairo, jumped into an aëroplane, and taxied back to Arabia.
Not only did he care nothing for decorations, but he avoided
wearing what ribbons he possessed. Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, in his
exploits of “The Secret Corps,” says of him: “Colonel Lawrence was
given the Companionship of the Bath for his services. He was
actually recommended for the Victoria Cross, but was not granted
that supreme decoration because there had never been a senior
officer witness of his exploits—a lame enough excuse, seeing that
there was ample proof in a dozen ways that those exploits had well
and truly been carried out.” As a matter of fact, although Lawrence
was posted for the “C. B.,” he never attended any ceremony in
connection with receiving it, and he asked his friends to sidetrack
the recommendation for the Victoria Cross. He also stood aside when
he had an opportunity to become a general at the time when his
force was actually the right wing of Allenby’s army and when he
was practically filling the rôle of a lieutenant-general. He even
declined knighthood. When I asked him why he didn’t want to be
knighted, he replied: “Well, if I become a knight my tailor will
hear about it and double my bills. I have trouble enough paying
them as it is.”
So far as I know there was only one thing that Lawrence wanted out
of the war, and that was something that he didn’t get. I asked him
once if there was anything to be bought with money that he couldn’t
afford but would like to have. His answer, which he gave
unhesitatingly, showed how human and simple he is. He replied, “I
should like to have a Rolls-Royce car with enough tires and petrol
to last me all my life.” The particular car that he would have
liked to have had was the Rolls-Royce tender called the “Blue Mist”
which he used during some of his railway demolition raids around
Damascus. But after the war it was overhauled and became Allenby’s
personal car at the Residency in Cairo.
Lawrence has often been criticized for refusing the various honors
offered him. But the truth of the matter is that he did not decline
them merely to be eccentric. For instance, before the war he was
presented with the Order of the Medjidieh by the sultan of Turkey
for having saved the lives of some of the Germans at work on the
Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway when the natives were going to mob them.
Then, shortly before the outbreak of the Arabian Revolution, while
still a subordinate in Cairo, he received and accepted a number of
decorations including the Legion of Honor. But he refused the
rewards offered to him for what he had accomplished in Arabia
because he had realized from the very beginning that the Allies,
once victory was secured, would find it difficult not only to
satisfy the claims of the Arabs, but even to fulfil their
obligations to the Hedjaz leaders. He realized full well that the
French were determined to have Syria, and he knew all along that
they would never agree to the Arabs’ even keeping Damascus. Lawrence
therefore felt that he did not care to accept anything in return
for having conducted a campaign based on promises which the Allies
could not fulfil to the extent to which he believed they ought to
be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have felt differently had he known
that his friend Emir Feisal would be crowned king in Bagdad after
losing the Syrian throne, which Lawrence foresaw he would never be
allowed to occupy for long. But at the end of the war no one
dreamed that Feisal was going to be the founder of a new dynasty
in the city of Harun al Rashid after first being driven out of
Damascus by the French.
The only honor that Lawrence accepted was one perhaps more dear to
his heart than any other, a fellowship at All Souls’ College,
Oxford. This fellowship is awarded to men of exceptional scholastic
attainments. There are only a score or so of them, usually men past
the prime of life who are completing important historical, literary,
or scientific works. For example, Lord Curzon is a fellow at All
Souls. The distinction is an unusual one. It carries with it a
modest honorarium and attractive quarters at the college, a
delightful place for a distinguished scholar to retire. There is
no prescribed work that goes with it, and Lawrence once told me
that there were but three requirements for a fellowship at All
Souls: to be a good dresser, to be adept at small conversation,
and to be a good judge of port. And then he added: “My clothes are
an abomination; as a parlor conversationalist I am hopeless, and
I never drink. So how I came to receive this honor is a mystery to
me.”
After his election to All Souls, Lawrence divided his time between
the college, the home of a friend in Westminster known as “the
house with the green door,” and a bungalow that he built for
himself in Epping Forest. The porter at All Souls said they never
knew when to expect him, that when he was in residence he rarely
dined with the other fellows, and that the light in his studio
usually burned all night. No doubt he was busy on his Arabian book.
But he did the most of his writing at the “house with the green
door,” where he occupied a bare room that had been an architect’s
office. One of his friends had given him a fur-lined aviator’s
costume, and in the dead of winter when the cold in London is
decidedly penetrating he would sit in that bleak room in his
fur-lined suit writing the inside story of his experiences in
far-off Araby.
On his frequent trips to Oxford he would carry his manuscript in
a little black bag like those used by London bank-messengers. On
one such occasion, after he had gone through the gate to the
platform at Paddington Station, he put the bag down for a moment
and walked over to the news-stand for a paper. When he returned,
the bag was gone. It not only contained the only copy of his
two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript, which he had written entirely
in longhand, but it also contained the journal that he had kept
faithfully through the desert campaign and many valuable original
historical documents that can never be replaced. I saw him a few
days later, and in telling me about the theft of the bag he referred
to it jokingly and merely said: “I’ve been saved a lot of trouble,
and after all it’s a good thing the bag was stolen. The world is
simply spared another war book.” The bag and its contents were
never seen or heard of again. Lawrence’s theory was that they were
probably thrown into the Thames by the disappointed thief, who had
hoped for a better haul. But his friends finally prevailed upon
him to rewrite the book; and this time, in order to find solitude,
away from the curious admirers who were constantly disturbing him
at All Souls, and a solitude that carried with it a means of
keeping body and soul together, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force
under the name of “Private Ross.” Even there he was unable to
conceal his identity, and some one, for a consideration, tipped
off a London newspaper, with the result that once more he found
himself drawn into the lime-light. A few weeks previous he had
agreed to sell the publication rights for a large sum, but when
this unexpected publicity appeared he turned down the contract,
left the Air Force, called on the various London editors imploring
them to allow him to live in peace and print nothing more about
him, and then vanished again.
Photograph: TALLAL EL-HAREIDHIN OF TAFAS
Photograph: A SYRIAN VILLAGER
One of Colonel Lawrence’s hobbies is printing books by hand. There
are few things that he likes more than an attractive book, and he
has a valuable library of rare hand-printed volumes. On the edge
of Epping Forest, some ten miles out from London, he built himself
a little cottage with an interior resembling a chapel. Here he
installed a hand-press, and when he finally finished his Arabian
book he made six copies. A few were presented to friends, and one
copy went to the British Museum Library to be locked up in a vault
for forty years; that is, unless some one can prevail upon him to
release it for publication. Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw,
and several of Lawrence’s literary friends were among those to read
it, and one of the most famous writers of the day declared that he
considered it “a pyramid in English literature.”
Lawrence has great literary ability and a style of his own. He is
as individualistic in his writing as in everything else that he
does. A number of brilliant articles have come from his pen since
he put aside the curved gold sword of a shereef of Mecca, and he
has written an introduction to a new edition of “Arabia Deserta”
which all agree forms a valuable addition to that classic. Nor
could he receive higher literary praise than that, for all
Orientalists concede that the foremost work ever published on
Arabia is Charles Montagu Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia Deserta.”
Lawrence says of it: “There is no sentiment, nothing merely
picturesque, that most common failing of Oriental travel-books.
Doughty’s completeness is devastating. It is a book which begins
powerfully, written in a style which has apparently neither father
nor son, so closely wrought, so tense, so just in its words and
phrases, that it demands a hard reader.”
But Doughty’s book had been out of print for many years, and copies
of it were extremely rare. “We call the book ‘Doughty’ pure and
simple,” adds Lawrence, “for it is a classic, and the personality
of Mr. Doughty hardly comes into question. Indeed, it is rather
shocking to learn that he is a real and living person. The book
has no date and can never grow old. It is the first and indispensable
work upon the Arabs of the desert; and if it has not always been
referred to, or enough read, that has been because it was
excessively rare.”
So he set about to rectify this deficiency. He proposed that a new
two-volume edition be published to sell for forty-five dollars,
half what dealers had been asking for second-hand copies of the
original. Doughty, an old man, had for years been devoting himself
to poetry, and existing on a poet’s pittance. So Lawrence had at
least three reasons for seeing a new edition published: to get the
public better acquainted with a classic, to augment the income of
his illustrious friend and predecessor, and to pay personal tribute
to one to whom he felt deeply indebted.
In the preface Doughty says regarding Lawrence and the new edition:
“A re-print has been called for; and is reproduced thus, at the
suggestion chiefly of my distinguished friend, Colonel T. E.
Lawrence, leader with Feysal, Meccan Prince, of the nomad tribesmen;
whom they, as might none other at that time marching from Jidda,
the port of Mecca, were able, (composing, as they went, the tribes’
long-standing blood feuds and old enmities), to unite with them in
victorious arms, against the corrupt Turkish sovereignty in those
parts: and who greatly thus serving his Country’s cause and her
Allies, from the Eastward, amidst the Great War, has in that
imperishable enterprise, traversed the same wide region of Desert
Arabia.”
No sooner was the edition off the press than it was exhausted, and
since then more editions have followed. So Lawrence’s ambition to
do something for Doughty, and gain for his classic a still wider
circulation, was more than realized. Unquestionably the sale of
“Arabia Deserta” was stimulated by the fact that Lawrence had
written a special introduction to it in which he paid glowing
tribute to the great traveler whose experiences in the desert had
done so much to pave the way for his own success. Lawrence’s
introduction to this new edition also gives us a hint as to his
own skill with the pen and as to what we may expect from his own
volume on Arabia. He writes:
The realism of the book is complete. Doughty tries to
tell the full and exact truth of all that he saw. If there is
a bias it will be against the Arabs, for he liked them so
much; he was so impressed by the strange attraction, isolation
and independence of this people that he took pleasure
in bringing out their virtues by a careful expression of their
faults. “If one live any time with the Arab he will have all
his life after a feeling of the desert.” He had experienced
it himself, the test of nomadism, that most deeply biting of
all social disciplines, and for our sakes he strained all the
more to paint it in its true colours, as a life too hard, too
empty, too denying for all but the strongest and most
determined men. Nothing is more powerful and real than
this record of all his daily accidents and obstacles, and the
feelings that came to him on the way. His picture of the
Semites, sitting to the eyes in a cloaca, but with their brows
touching Heaven, sums up in full measure their strength
and weakness, and the strange contradictions of their
thought which quicken curiosity at our first meeting with
them.
Photograph: COL. T. E. LAWRENCE
Photograph: GENERAL FAKRI PASHA, THE TURKISH TIGER
WHO DEFENDED MEDINA
To try and solve their riddle many of us have gone far
into their society, and seen the clear hardness of their
belief, a limitation almost mathematical, which repels us
by its unsympathetic form. Semites have no half-tones in
their register of vision. They are a people of primary
colours, especially of black and white, who see the world always
in line. They are a certain people, despising doubt,
our modern crown of thorns. They do not understand our
metaphysical difficulties, our self-questionings. They know
only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our
hesitating retinue of finer shades.
Semites are black and white not only in vision, but in
their inner furnishing; black and white not merely in clarity,
but in apposition. Their thoughts live easiest among
extremes. They inhabit superlatives by choice. Sometimes
the great inconsistents seem to possess them jointly.
They exclude compromise, and pursue the logic of their
ideas to its absurd ends, without seeing incongruity in their
opposed conclusions. They oscillate with cool head and
tranquil judgment from asymptote to asymptote, so imperturbably
that they would seem hardly conscious of their
giddy flight.
Lawrence’s command of English is amazing, by reason, of course, of
his familiarity with the classics and his knowledge of both ancient
and modern languages. His vocabulary is wider than that of most
learned professors, and he has great descriptive powers, as we have
observed from his description of the death of his friend Tallal el
Haredhin of Tafas.
While in London and at All Souls, he lived much as he did in the
desert. Indeed, from force of habit after his long experience in
the East, he has become much like the Bedouins and has no desire
for luxuries. He rarely eats or sleeps regularly, and says it is
fatal if you are caught in an emergency to have formed regular
habits. He usually goes without sleep one night a week and eats
like a bird. It is his custom to sleep from three to ten in the
morning and then take a long walk until three in the afternoon.
Upon his return from his walk he would work until two in the
morning, when he would go out for his dinner. The only places in
London open at that unusual hour were the station restaurants,
where he would tell the waiter to bring him anything he liked. He
hates to order food, and a few minutes after he has had a meal he
has forgotten what the dishes were. When walking along the streets
in London he is usually absorbed and pays no attention to anything
until he comes to with a start and finds that a bus is about to
run him down.
In avoiding the network of modern complexities he seldom has to
worry about the countless things that crowd the joy out of our
ultra-civilized modern life. He has no private income and scorns
money except what he needs for the simple necessities of life and
for his one luxury, books. His mother once told me that he had
always been a trial to her because she never knew what he was going
to do next. He himself declares that he probably will never marry
because “no woman would live with me.”
Yet despite his scorn of money in private life, and his well nigh
complete lack of it, while in the desert he had almost unlimited
credit and could draw on his government up to many hundreds of
thousands of pounds. It was by no means an uncommon sight to see
him stuffing ten thousand pounds in gold sovereigns in one camel-bag
and ten thousand in another. Then off he would go with it,
accompanied only by ten or twelve Bedouins. On one occasion Lawrence
drew a paltry six hundred pounds from Major Scott “to do a bit of
shopping.” Major Scott kept the boxes of sovereigns in his tent at
headquarters in Akaba. Major Maynard, who was in charge of some of
the records, heard of this and asked for a receipt. When Scott
informed Lawrence, the latter nearly doubled up with laughter and
said, “He shall have it!” And so far as I could find out that was
the only receipt he ever signed. As for the letters he received in
the desert, he usually read them but then burned them and never
bothered about answering.
His has indeed been a strange existence, full of individual
experience. Fond of Oriental rugs, Lawrence picked up many rare
ones during his wanderings. On the floor of his tent at Akaba were
two beauties. Lawrence slept on one of them, while his companion,
Major Marshall, used a camp-bed. One of the two rugs is now in the
possession of Lady Allenby, while Marshall has the other. One day
in the bazaar in Jedda, Lawrence saw a barber kneeling on a
prayer-rug that he liked. It had two holes in it three or four
inches in diameter. The barber offered it to him for two pounds,
and Lawrence bought it. When he took it to Cairo and had it
appraised by one of the leading rug merchants of Egypt he found
that it was worth about seventy pounds after being repaired. So
Lawrence sent the barber a five-pound note. At his mother’s home
in Oxford he had a pile of Oriental rugs and carpets still covered
with the dust of the East. A friend of the family got married at
a time when Lawrence was away, and his mother sent one of the rugs
as a wedding gift. When the colonel returned she told him about
the incident and said she presumed it was not worth much. “That
one you gave away cost me 147 pounds” ($665), replied Lawrence.
But he was not the least bit vexed and promptly forgot all about
it.
When the year was up during which he had promised to serve as Near
Eastern advisor at the Colonial Office, Lawrence put on his hat
and walked out. Since then he has found a new exhaust for his
surplus energy. He met an army officer who had a high-power
motor-cycle which was too much for the latter to handle. So Lawrence
bought it and streaks it about England much as he formerly raced
across the North Arabian Desert in the “Blue Mist.”
When an undergraduate at Oxford, he and another student made a
solemn compact that if either ever did anything particularly
noteworthy he would wire for the other to come so that they could
celebrate. In 1920 Lawrence telegraphed his friend as follows:
“Come at once. Have done something.” This was the first word that
had passed between the two since their pre-war college days. When
the friend arrived this is what Lawrence had done that he thought
worth celebrating: he had just finished his bungalow on the edge
of Epping Forest, and was keeping cows!
Photograph: THE KING-MAKER
Photograph: SUNSET IN THE LAND OF THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS
Epping Forest is a semi-national preserve of some sort, and there
is a law that forbids the erection of non-movable structures. After
Lawrence had finished his bungalow the police came and pointed out
to him that he had broken the law because his house was a stationary
edifice. So Lawrence bought some paint and made four camouflage
red wheels on the sides of the cottage. This so amused the
authorities that they said no more about the law. But not long
afterward a fire wiped out nearly everything he had.
As to what will happen to Lawrence in the future, only Allah knows.
One thing is certain, that he will not permit his country to make
a hero out of him. The maker of history has once more become the
student of history. But Lawrence may live to see the effect of the
wave that he rolled up out of the desert, in the form of an
important new power in the East. As a result of the Arabian war of
liberation, which was not a foolish dream on paper, and as a result
of Allenby’s smashing campaign in Palestine and Syria, three new
Arabian states have come into existence: the kingdom of Hedjaz
under Hussein I, of Mecca; the independent state of Transjordania
under Hussein’s second son, the Sultan Abdullah; and the kingdom
of Iraq in Mesopotamia, where Hussein’s third son, King Feisal I,
occupies the throne. It is the dream of these three, assisted by
Hussein’s eldest son, the Emir Ali, who remains in Mecca, one day
to form a United States of Arabia.
Much depends on King Feisal. Colonel Lawrence played the dominate
part in making him the greatest Arab in five centuries. But the
task before Feisal is stupendous. He has vision and high ideals
for his people. Will he be strong enough to maintain his position
in Bagdad and remain the leading figure in the Arabian world?
Events are now moving swiftly in the Near East. If King Feisal can,
through the quiet force of his personality, continue the work of
wiping out the ancient quarrels between the tribes and cities of
the desert in which task he and his father and brothers were given
such effective help by Lawrence, and if the nations of the West
will send railway, sanitary, and irrigation engineers and
disinterested military and political advisers; coöperate in the
establishment of schools; and lend financial support, the glory
that once was Babylon’s may come again in Mesopotamia. The future
of King Feisal and his brothers may be the future of Arabia. None
may know the end of the story. But one thing is certain, and that
is that Feisal, like his romantic predecessor, Harun al Rashid of
the Arabian Nights, is a just and merciful monarch; but had it not
been for the youthful Lawrence, Feisal would not be ruling in
Bagdad to-day, nor would his brother Abdullah be the sultan of
Transjordania, nor would the Arabs recently have had the opportunity
to proclaim King Hussein as the Calif of all Islam and Commander
of the Faithful. For it was this young man who destroyed the
thousand-year-old network of blood-feuds, who built up the Arabian
army, who planned the strategy of the desert campaign and led the
Arabs into battle, who swept the Turks from a thousand miles of
country between Mecca and Damascus, who was the brains of the epic
Arabian campaign and rode in triumph through the bazaars of
Damascus, and established a government for Prince Feisal in the
capital of Omar and Saladin, the oldest surviving city in the
world. But without a complete understanding of the mentality and
instinct of Arabia, and without a sincere love for the peoples of
the desert, this would never have been possible. Nor is it
surprising that with such love and understanding from such a man,
translated into successful policies and glorious deeds, he won the
adoration of the Arab race.
Little did young Lawrence dream, when he was studying Hittite
ruins, that it was his destiny to play a major rôle in building a
new empire, instead of piecing together, for a scholar’s thesis,
the fragments of a dead-and-buried kingdom. Captain Tuohy has
tersely said in his brief note in “The Secret Corps,” for “romantic
adventure his career has probably been unexampled in this or in
any other war.”
This twenty-eight-year-old poet and scholar had started across the
Arabian Desert in February, 1916, to raise an army, accompanied by
only three companions. I do not know of a more helpless task than
this that has been essayed during the last thousand years. They at
first had no money, no means of transportation except a few camels,
and no means of communication except camel-riders. They were trying
to raise and equip an army in a country which has no manufacturing
interests, which produces very little food and less water. In many
parts of Arabia water-holes are a five days’ camel trek apart. They
had no laws to help them, and they were trying to raise an army
among the nomadic Bedouin tribes that had been separated from one
another by blood-feuds for hundreds of years. They were trying to
unify a people who quarrel over the possession of the water-holes
and pasture-lands of Arabia, and war with one another for the
possession of camels; a people who, when they meet one another in
the desert, usually substitute volleys of pot-shots for the
conventional rules of Oriental courtesy.
In habit, instinct, and mental outlook Europe is utterly at variance
with Asia, and it is rarely, only once in hundreds of years, that
there comes forward some brilliant Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Latin who,
possessing an understanding that transcends race, religion, and
tradition, can adopt the Eastern temperament at will. Such men were
Marco Polo, the Venetian, and General Charles Gordon. Such a man
is Thomas Edward Lawrence, the modern Arabian knight.
[End]
End of Project Gutenberg's With Lawrence in Arabia, by Lowell Thomas