Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  When Lawrence arrived back at Azraq castle on 12 November, he claimed to be nursing no fewer than five bullet wounds sustained in the railway attack at Minifir, and a broken toe sustained by a boiler-plate falling from the exploding train. This was the first movement in the concerto of his public chastisement for the failure at Yarmuk. The period between 14 November and his apparent ‘return’ to Azraq on 22 November marks another of those mysterious Lawrentian descents into the underworld about which nothing is certain. According to Lawrence himself, it was during this week that he suffered the most devastating and humiliating experience of his life: his capture, torture, and homosexual rape by the Turks of Dara’a. In the 1935 text of Seven Pillars, this sudden transfer from the conscious to the unconscious, from the specific to the general, is marked by the interruption of the dating-sequence. Up to 14 November, Lawrence specifies the date of events recalled on each page: for the next four pages he simply tells the reader that he is in ‘November 1917’. The hiatus extends until 20 November, when he reappears at Dara’a, having jumped six days in the process. Where was Lawrence during those six days? His story is that he remained in Azraq for some time – long enough to oversee the refurbishment of the castle, to rest, and to receive hordes of guests and supporters. One of these guests was Talal al-Haraydhin of Tafas in the Hauran, a powerful figure amongst the Fellahin, and an outlaw with a Turkish price on his head. Lawrence told Talal that he would like to see the Hauran to reconnoitre for a future rising, and they rode off together, with two specially enrolled guards, an old man called Faris and a boy named Halim. They travelled by horse, and called at Umm al-Jamal, Umtaiye, Ghazala, Sheikh Miskin, Sheikh Saad, Tafas, Tel Arar, Mezerib, ‘Uthman, Dara’a, Nisib and back to Azraq, a distance of roughly 170 miles.

  Now, Dara’a, the capital of the Hauran, was a key point on the railway, for it was here that the lines from the Hejaz to Damascus and from Haifa in Palestine to Damascus intersected. Any advance by the Arabs on Damascus, then, must necessarily take Dara’a into account. Lawrence decided to slip into the town in disguise to assess its strengths and weaknesses for a future assault. Talal could not accompany him, since his face was well known to the Turks, so Lawrence left the ponies with Halim, donned the boy’s peasant garb, and walked into the town with Faris, ‘an insignificant peasant’. Near the aerodrome, they were called by a Turkish sergeant, who grabbed Lawrence by the arm and told him roughly: ‘The Bey wants you.’ He ignored Faris and marched Lawrence in front of an officer to whom he gave ‘a long report’. The officer asked his name, and Lawrence gave it as Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra. The Turk accused Lawrence of being a deserter, and he replied that Circassians were not subject to military service. This was a mistake, and the officer called him a liar, instructing the Sergeant to enrol him in his section ‘until the Bey sent for him’. Lawrence was taken to the barracks and after dark was marched by three guards across the railway lines to the Governor’s two-storeyed house. The Bey – Nahi – a bulky, spiny-haired man, was sitting on his bed when Lawrence was brought in. He inspected Lawrence’s body, then flung his arms around him, trying to drag him down on to the bed. When Lawrence resisted he called in the sentry to pinion him, and stripped off his clothes, staring in surprise at his recent bullet-wounds. The Turk tried to touch his genitals, and Lawrence kicked him in the groin, making him stagger back, groaning with pain. He yelled for the guards to pinion Lawrence, then slapped him repeatedly in the face with a slipper, bit his neck until the blood flowed, kissed him, and drew a bayonet from one of the guards, pulling a fold of flesh over one of his ribs and working the blade through and twisting it, dabbling his fingers in the blood which poured over Lawrence’s stomach. Lawrence said something in his despair, and Nahi answered, mysteriously: ‘You must understand that I know: and it will be easier if you do as I wish.’6 Lawrence raised his chin in a gesture of refusal, and the Bey instructed the guard corporal to take him out ‘and teach him everything’.7

  The guards stretched him over a wooden bench, and one of them brought a Circassian whip: ‘a thong of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver) down to a hard point finer than a pencil’.8 The corporal lashed him brutally. Lawrence was shocked by the pain, and though he had resolved to number the blows, lost count after twenty. He writhed and twisted, but the Turks were holding him tightly, kneeling on his legs and grasping his wrists. When the corporal was tired, the others took turns to beat him, and in the intervals between new series, raped him repeatedly. Often, they would pull his head round to see the wounds: ‘a hard white ridge like a railway, darkening slowly to crimson leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke’.9 At last, Lawrence began to scream in Arabic, and when he was completely broken, they ceased, and he found himself lying on his back on the floor. The corporal kicked him with a hobnailed boot to get him up, damaging one of his ribs, but Lawrence grinned at him idly, ‘for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me’.10 The corporal slashed him twice in the testicles with the whip, and when he gained consciousness again, he was being raped by one guard while the others spread his legs. At this point, the Bey called, but when Lawrence was carried to him, sobbing and begging for mercy, the Turk rejected him as being too torn and bloody for his attentions. The guards carried him to a lean-to behind the Government House, where his wounds were washed and bandaged. One of the guards, who spoke with a Druse accent, whispered that the door of the next room was not locked. In the morning, he discovered that the next room was a dispensary, and found a suit of shoddy clothes hanging on the door. He put these on, climbed out of a window, and staggered out into the street, eventually making the rendezvous with Halim at Nisib, from where they rode slowly back to Azraq by horse. The only unexpected occurrence on the return journey was that a party of Wuld ‘Ali raiders, who were not yet converted to the Hashemite cause, allowed them to go unmolested. The consideration of these raiders, given as if he deserved homage, Lawrence wrote, momentarily allowed him to carry the burden which the passing days confirmed: ‘how in [Dara’a] that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost’11(italics mine). Lawrence arrived back in Azraq on 22 November, two days after his ordeal, and the following day made an affectionate farewell with Sharif’Ali, kissing and exchanging clothes just as he had done with Dahoum. He then rode for Aqaba, making the town by the 25th, having covered almost 300 miles by camel in only three and a half days.

  This is the version of events Lawrence recorded in the final text of Seven Pillars. Certainly, if he had been captured, tortured and allowed to escape, such knowledge should have been reported to Military Intelligence, especially if, as he later maintained, he had been recognized. Yet, like the other mysterious incidents of his career – such as the shooting of Hamed the Moor – this one does not rear its head in any official report. There are no witnesses, no relevant diary entries, and no corroborating accounts whatsoever. Even the soldiers stationed in Dara’a, who were known to be mostly Arabs in Ottoman service, heard no rumour of the event. If Lawrence had not mentioned it himself, then it would have remained completely unknown to history. It was only in 1919, well after the end of the war, when he was already writing Seven Pillars, that the Dara’a drama emerged. In a letter to Frank Stirling, a former colleague from the ‘Hedgehog’ operation, who was by then serving as Chief Political Officer in Cairo, Lawrence used it to discredit the Algerian Emir Mohammad Sa’id by casting aspersions on his brother ‘Abd al-Qadir, whom he claimed had defected to the Turks, ruined the Yarmuk bridge mission, and brought about Lawrence’s capture at Dara’a by describing him to the Bey, whose real name was Hajim rather than the ‘Nahi’ used in Seven Pillars. Hajim, who was an ‘ardent pederast’, had taken a fancy to him, he told Stirling, and when he refused the Bey’s advances he had been ‘put in hospital’ by his guards. He had escaped before dawn, he said, being not as badly hurt as Hajim thought. Lawrence maintained that the Bey had ‘hushed up’ the captur
e, having made such a muddle of it – and Lawrence had arrived back at Azraq ‘very annoyed’ with ‘Abd al-Qadir, whose treachery, he said, he had learned all about from the Bey and his guards. In the original letter, this last line is interposed as an afterthought in the middle of another sentence, as if it had suddenly occurred to Lawrence that Stirling might wonder how he knew for certain that it was ‘Abd al-Qadir’s description which had led to his being identified. He does not, however, indicate how he knew that Hajim had ‘hushed up’ the incident. Moreover, this account differs from the Seven Pillars version, in which Lawrence was clearly not recognized: although some ambiguity is suggested by the sentence, ‘You must understand that I know.’ Lawrence concludes that ‘It was evidently a chance shot’ – thus severing any connection with a description which ‘Abd al-Qadir might or might not have given – and this is confirmed when Lawrence notes that his companion, Halim, who entered Dara’a that night, probably in search of him, knew by the lack of rumour that the truth of Lawrence’s identity had not been discovered. We have only Lawrence’s word for it that it was ‘Abd al-Qadir who ‘shopped’ him to the Turks, and the story of treachery was very much postfactum. On 13 November, he had written Joyce that the Algerian had deserted ‘out of fear’ rather than defected to the Turks, and was then still sitting at Salkhad among the Druses – a friendly force. If this was so, then it is unlikely that ‘Abd al-Qadir could have ruined the Yarmuk raid, which had already taken place. There is no independent evidence that ‘Abd al-Qadir ever joined the Turks – he was anti-French and anti-Christian, certainly, but a fanatic Arab nationalist: the Turks may have wooed him, but Lawrence’s assertion that he actually went over to them is unconfirmed. At the end of the campaign ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother Mohammad Sa’id had declared a government in the name of the Hashemites, and had tried to murder Lawrence personally in Damascus town hall when he objected. Lawrence had ordered them arrested and intended to have them shot, but Feisal arrived and spared them. ‘Abd al-Qadir himself was killed by Feisal’s guards in November 1917, but his brother, Mohammad Sa’id, a pan-Islamist, continued to cause problems for the Hashemites. Lawrence’s letter to Stirling was written to provide evidence for the arrest of Mohammad Sa’id, which Feisal had demanded: ‘I very much regret that Mohammad Sa’id has been given so much rope,’ Lawrence wrote; ‘Feisal has asked several times for his internment. He is the only real pan-Islamist in Damascus, and in his insanity is capable of any crime against us.’12 Lawrence’s first revelation of his torture at Dara’a thus has a clear political motive.

  I travelled to Dara’a from Amman in a nondescript saloon with two Syrians and my friend Stephen White. Dara’a station, we discovered, was still standing, a large two-storey building of grey flint, jutting out like an iceberg from a market-place aboil with crowds. The whole railway yard, indeed, was a relic from the First World War. A rusting locomotive stood, disintegrating almost visibly, on a track by the engine-shed. I climbed up to the cab and found an engraved plate which read: A. Borsig. Berlin-Tegel 1914. This was evidently one of the German engines shipped by sea from Europe at the beginning of the war. There were other engines, of different patterns, in a similar state of trauma, sidings full of rolling stock of the same vintage – box-wagons, water-tanks, guards’ vans – even beautifully built passenger-wagons which were obviously now used as toilets. We introduced ourselves to the station-master, who was assiduously playing cards with a group of employees. He knew of Lawrence of Arabia, he said, but he had no idea where it was that Lawrence was supposed to have been tortured, or even if the story was true. The railway here still functioned, he told us – there were two trains a week between Damascus and Amman.

  We had Seven Pillars with us, and tried to reconstruct Lawrence’s movements in Dara’a on 20 November 1917 – eighty years before. In 1917 the serail or Government House had stood south of the railway line, in the centre of Dara’a town, where Lawrence was arrested. At first sight it would seem logical that this was where his ordeal took place. Although he does not say so specifically, Lawrence does mention that after the beating he was taken to a lean-to building behind the Government House to have his wounds washed and dressed. He also says, though, that he was marched across the railway to reach the Bey’s house, which must mean that it lay on the northern side of the railway, and thus could not have been the official serail. We crossed the tracks by the engine-shop, evidently a popular crossing-point for local people, and counted six lines, precisely as Lawrence had described. We turned left at a convenient hole in the fence, down a street of weary-looking palms, then right and into a square, where there stood a two-storey stone building. The building, which was large and detached, looked as if it belonged to the right era, and I noticed that some of the ground floor area was occupied by houses or shops with private doors. This would be consistent with Lawrence’s description in the Oxford version, which mentions that the Bey’s house comprised two storeys with a shop beneath. Had we discovered the place in which Lawrence had suffered the most devastating experience of his life? The details seemed remarkably accurate, even after eighty years. Yet it is perfectly possible that Lawrence picked up the geographical layout of the town not in November 1917, but in September 1918 when he stayed there for two days after it had fallen to British and Arab forces. An examination of his actual description raises some disturbing questions.

  First, in the 1935 version, Lawrence writes that he entered Dara’a with a man called Faris who had been specially engaged for the Hauran reconnaissance. Yet in the Oxford text he gives his companion’s name as Mijbil – a Biashr, whom he had recruited months earlier. Why was it necessary for him to change the man’s name and conceal this fact, and why, for that matter, does he change the name of the Bey from Hajim to Nahi? Lawrence gives various reasons for changing names in Seven Pillars, but the most convincing is the one he gave Hubert Young, whose name he changes at one point in the text to ‘Sabin’. When Young objected that ‘it may perhaps be said that you put me under a false name … because you knew you were telling lies about me’, Lawrence answered, ‘But that is why I have put you under a false name.’13 Secondly, many details of the flogging are not credible. The whip could not conceivably have had a point finer than that of a pencil. If Lawrence was not recognized, how could the soldier who arrested him possibly know that the Bey wanted him? What was the content of ‘the long report’ the soldier gave to his superior in Turkish, about a man he had merely picked up on the street whose name and origin he did not yet know? Lawrence might possibly have been mistaken for a Circassian from a distance when dressed in local costume, but how likely is it that he would consistently be taken for one when stripped naked?

  These quibbles may be pedantic, and they do not prove that Lawrence invented the Dara a incident, but put together they suggest, at least, a certain current of dishonesty in his account.

  In the British Museum’s Manuscripts Department, I turned to the pocket diaries which had shed some light on the Sinai trip, hoping that they would solve the enigma of Dara’a. Searching for the entry of 20 November, I discovered to my surprise that the page had been torn out. This was remarkable, for it was the only missing page in either of the two diaries for 1917 and 1918. At the bottom of the previous page, for 14 November, Lawrence’s entry read ‘Kasr [Azraq]’ and then, added in another pencil, ‘To the Hauran’. This suggested that he had been in Azraq on the night of the 14th and had left for the Hauran subsequently – it was impossible to say when, because of the missing page. I noticed that the pages had been numbered in Lawrence’s handwriting, but this must have been after the removal of this page, since the numbers ran on as if no page was missing. This and the addition of ‘To the Hauran’ at the base of the previous page suggested strongly that it was Lawrence himself who had torn it out. What possible motive could he have had for ripping a page out of his diary, I wondered? Two answers immediately sprang to mind. First, that Lawrence had been so disgusted and ashamed of what had happened at Dara a that he could no
t bear to re-read his diary entries. Second, that he had been covering up for something. In the first case, I thought, if Lawrence had been so disgusted by his treatment at the hands of the Turks he need not have made an entry in the diary at all: customarily, anyway, he entered little more than the place in which he spent the night. Consistently, then, the missing sheet would have included the names of the places he visited with Talal, and would have read simply ‘Dara’a’ for the night of 20 November. If this was so, there would seem to be little that could have disgusted him later. I also asked myself why, if Lawrence had truly wished to forget the incident, he should have brought it to light in the first place. If he had kept quiet, no one else need ever have known. A more logical conclusion was that he was not at the places he claimed to have visited between 14 and 22 November, and that he had removed the page to conceal that fact. The missing page covered six days: the next entry is 22 November, when Lawrence was ‘back’ in Azraq. The question was, did he leave Azraq at all?

  The journey to Dara’a and back, allowing time for hospitality with Talal’s family and an entire day at Dara’a, would have amounted to at least five days – perhaps five and a half. This would give a departure date from Azraq of 17 November at the very latest. Since it is certain that Lawrence returned to Azraq from the Yarmuk-Minifir mission on the 12th, his stay would have amounted to just five nights. Yet, turning to his Seven Pillars description of his time at Azraq, I found strong hints that he was there for a far longer period. He ‘established himself in the southern gate-tower, he wrote, and settled down to have a ‘few days’ repose’ until the guests started coming in. When those few days were over, the guests began arriving ‘all day and every day’: ‘we sat down to enjoy these dregs of Autumn – the alternate days of rain and shine’ after which ‘at last the world turned solidly to rain’. Visitors were converted ‘very slowly’ to the Hashemite cause; ‘in these slow nights we were secure against the world.’14 Taken together, these references indicated that Lawrence remained at Azraq for at least a week – probably longer. A letter sent to his parents on 14 December reads: ‘I wrote to you last from [Azraq], about the time we blew up Jamal Pasha [actually the 14th November] and let him slip away from us. After that I stayed for ten days or so there and then rode down to [Aqaba] in three days: good going: tell Arnie: none of his old horses would do so much as my old camel.’15 If, indeed, he had stayed at Azraq from 12 to 22 November, it would have added up to exactly eleven days.