Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence’s reconnaissance in the Hauran would have been of great significance, I thought, for this was the area in which the last action of the campaign would be fought. Yet strangely, none of his superiors seem to have been aware of it. Moreover, a geographical report written by Lawrence himself on 15 December, for the benefit of future armoured-car operations, lists all the sites he had seen on his Yarmuk-Minifir operation, but none of those he supposedly visited with Talal, except a brief reference to Wadi Meddan, which might well have been supplied by an informant. It is the last act of the drama – the 300-mile ride to Aqaba – though, which casts the most profound shadows of doubt over the alleged incident at Dara’a. According to his testimony, Lawrence had arrived in Azraq on the 12th with five bullet wounds and a broken toe. At Dara’a a week later he had been thrashed severely. The annals of penal institutions hold numerous records of men who collapsed with heart-failure after thirty or forty strokes of the lash. Lawrence, who lost count after the first twenty, must have suffered at least this many. He had also been beaten in the face with a slipper, bitten, pierced with a bayonet, kicked hard enough to injure a rib, raped repeatedly, and received two vicious slashes directly to the groin which alone would have caused his testicles to swell so badly that he would have been unable to ride. How was it possible, then, for a man so badly battered to have made, within three days, the most distinguished camel-ride of his career, covering eighty-six miles a day? Clearly, it is not possible. Either Lawrence was exaggerating about the ride, exaggerating about the extent of the treatment he received from the Turks, or the Dara’a incident did not happen at all.

  Captain L. H. Gilman, who served on the Hedgehog Mission, told Lawrence’s biographer John Mack that Lawrence had not mentioned a word about the Dara’a incident either to himself or any other officer who served in Arabia: yet he had no doubt that it happened: ‘Lawrence was far too gallant and honourable a man to invent this experience,’ he wrote; ‘there would have been no point in it.’16 Lawrence’s official biographer, Jeremy Wilson, has echoed Gilman’s words, writing that ‘those who doubt that the event took place at this time are accusing Lawrence of an elaborate and pointless lie’.17 Unfortunately, it is a proven fact that Lawrence did tell elaborate and, in some cases, pointless lies. His pre-war substitution of ‘camel-bells’ for ‘mule-bells’, for example, was demonstrably pointless (and it is inconceivable that someone with Lawrence’s photographic memory should have forgotten or got muddled up). His claim to have crossed Sinai in forty-nine hours was certainly a lie – whether it was pointless or not is open to speculation. His ability to make up and sustain an intricately constructed untruth is evident from the story he was later to tell John Bruce, explaining his need to be flogged – a story which he kept up for a staggering thirteen years. Neither Wilson nor Mack disputed that Lawrence lied to Bruce, yet, paradoxically, both state that they found no evidence that Lawrence was a liar: as if lies told to a poorly educated working-class youth somehow did not count. Certainly, Lawrence could be gallant and honourable – he tried desperately all his life to live up to Sarah’s image of him as the immaculate white knight – but some emotions are stronger than honourable desires. Bernard Shaw called him ‘an actor’and noted that he was ‘no monster of veracity’, while Ronald Storrs, who knew him fairly intimately, said that his shortcomings were well known to his colleagues (presumably not Gilman) but were discounted because they were balanced by his brilliance. This seems to me perfectly normal: in the end none of us is an ‘immaculate white knight’, none of us is absolutely honourable or perfectly truthful. To expect this of Lawrence is to make him into a superman – an idea which he himself ridiculed. Even Achilles had a vulnerable heel: why should we expect Lawrence to be any better than Achilles? It may be that his compulsion to ‘elaborate’ was the shadow side of an otherwise ‘honourable’ man. Even Liddell Hart, who considered him a military genius, admitted that he had been too gullible with Lawrence’s testimony, and Lawrence actually criticized Hart for accepting everything he said without question, just as he mocked others whose praise for his good qualities was not tempered by a little ‘salt’. Moreover, his propensity for ‘elaboration’ is confirmed by his own admission: he confessed in his introduction to Seven Pillars that he often concealed the truth even in his official reports, and acknowledged elsewhere that he had a talent for deceit. Those who deny that he lied, therefore, are contradicting his own words and postulating a character which Lawrence himself refuted. He was a gifted intelligence officer – a member of a profession which almost by definition deals in lies, propaganda, and half-truths. Many have expressed incredulity that Lawrence’s colleagues – among them men of the highest intellect and ability – could possibly have been misled by his ‘elaborations’, yet Lawrence himself, as a new recruit to the Map Department, boasted gleefully that such men were only too easily to be deceived by esoteric knowledge confidently declared. Just like others, the great and mighty believed only what suited them, neither were they themselves always paragons of truth: Richard Meinertzhagen, a highly respected senior intelligence officer at GHQ, for instance, who was credited with devising the ruse which led the Turks to believe that Allenby was going for Gaza instead of Beersheba, was later discovered to have deliberately forged entries in his own diaries. Lying brilliantly to the Turks was one thing, but lying to his own was not allowed. It is clear that Lawrence was so confident that he would be believed that he was prepared to ‘elaborate’ even when there were witnesses who could testify to the contrary. When Hubert Young asked him to alter what he had written about him on the grounds that the correct account might appear some day, Lawrence simply replied: ‘Oh no it won’t.’18

  If the Dara’a incident was invented, then the ‘point’ lies not in the rational but in the unconscious mind. Lawrence was a masochist with a homosexual nature, who had from a very early age fantasized about being dominated by other men, especially in the ranks of the army. As he wrote repeatedly, the degradation of such a life appealed to him, for in the ranks one became a ‘beast’ – fed, clothed and watered and constantly available to be used by others. It is, perhaps, significant that in the 1935 version of Seven Pillars, Lawrence’s page titles to the Dara’a incident parody recruit-training in the army. The page on which he describes his arrest by the Turks, for instance, is entitled ‘A Turkish Conscript’ and the subsequent pages describing his ordeal, are entitled ‘Recruit’s Training’, ‘Further Lessons’ and finally ‘Passing Out’. At the age of seventeen Lawrence had tried to realize this fantasy by joining the Royal Garrison Artillery, and in 1912 the fantasy was extended when he was arrested as a deserter at Khalfati and possibly beaten by the Turks.19 It is significant that Lawrence mentions the Khalfati incident in relation to his alleged torture and rape at Dara’a, for the key to Dara’a may lie here. Dara’a may have been an elaboration of what happened at Khalfati, relived and magnified by Lawrence in his imagination over many years. The positioning of the Dara’a incident immediately after the failure at Yarmuk is also significant. Lawrence had been terrified of failure all his life and was mortified to have let down Allenby, whom he saw as a father-figure. It is not insignificant that in his description of his meeting with Allenby a few weeks later, he evokes the fantasy of standing before the Bey: ‘It was strange to stand before the tower with [Allenby],’ he wrote, ‘listening to his proclamation, and to think how a few days before I had stood before Hajim listening to his words. How seldom we paid so sharply and so soon for our fears. We would have been by now, not in Jerusalem but in Haifa or Damascus or Aleppo, had I not shrunk in October from the danger of a general rising… By my failure I had fettered the unknowing English and dishonoured the unknowing Arabs.’20 The humiliation he brought on himself by inventing the Dara’a trauma may have been an expiation of his self-adopted failure – not only his failure to blow the bridge, but to raise the revolt in Syria as he had originally promised Allenby. The same pattern may be traced in at least two of the mysterious incidents of his lif
e: the attack by a tribesman in Syria during his 1909 walk, and the shooting of Hamed the Moor. Both followed a sequence of private failure and public expiation by apparent violence, a pattern which had its origin in Lawrence’s early childhood, when his mother’s beatings became a means of expiating his ‘improper’ thoughts. It is perhaps no coincidence that in revealing the apparent trauma at Dara’a he should use precisely the same terminology – ‘the circle of my integrity’ – which he employed when talking of his mother’s physical threat.

  Lawrence’s Seven Pillars was never intended purely as a historical document: it was, he would tell Charlotte Shaw later, ‘a survey of myself to Feb 1920 … people who read it will know me better than I know myself.’21 His true self was, he said, ‘a beast’ and the book was ‘its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at’.22 It was, in other words, a public confession of all the secret repressions, obsessions and desires which he had been unable to express to anyone before. The description of his beating at Dara’a shows an abnormal fascination with physical suffering: his lingering over the colour and texture of his wounds, and the detailed description of the instrument of torture – the Circassian whip – is typical of masochistic reveries, as Lyn Cowan has written: ‘in masochistic fantasy the instrument is usually replete with distinctive detail, numinous with beauty and ugliness and fear which create and preserve just the right sensation…’: ‘Even in the barest and most common beating fantasies, we can hear the sharp hymn of the holy thyrsus as it slices down the supplicant’s back.’23 That Lawrence deliberately courted public humiliation is beyond doubt: ‘I long for people to look down on me and despise me,’ he later wrote;’… I want to dirty myself outwardly, so that my person may properly reflect the dirtiness which it conceals …’24 His need to display his suffering is evident in many other passages in the book, and especially in his exaggeration of the number of injuries and bullet-wounds he received. He claimed to have over sixty scars from injuries sustained in Arab service, yet it has been proved conclusively by J. N. Lockman that he had very few scars after the war: to have sustained sixty wounds in a world without antibiotics, anyway, would – as Lockman points out – have required either superhuman powers of resistance or incredible good luck.25 Lockman has also shown that the testimony of Richard Meinertzhagen, who claimed to have seen scars on Lawrence’s back while bathing in 1919, was fabricated. In any case, Lawrence does not state that he was beaten on his back, and if his description of the wounds he received is to be believed then he could only have been beaten on his buttocks: it is impossible for a human being to see his back except with the aid of a mirror. Lockman has demonstrated that though Lawrence later had scars on his front and posterior which seem consistent with the Dara a story, these probably originated in the post-war period and were voluntarily inflicted.26 We may never know for certain whether or not Lawrence was captured and tortured by the Turks, but the weight of evidence – the missing page, the breakdown in the dating sequence, the long period which he seems to have spent at Azraq, and the lack of relevant scars – suggests, to me anyway, that the Dara’a incident was true only in the sense that it deliberately revealed the unseen Lawrence lurking in the shadows. As the emotional climax of Seven Pillars, it was the ultimate expression of his reverse exhibitionism – for as he told Charlotte Shaw coyly: ‘I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, wrestled for days with my self-respect.’27 It was, perhaps, his final declaration to the world of his conviction – with him since childhood – that he was ‘untouchable’ and ‘unclean’: at last, after years of aloofness, T. E. Lawrence found an opportunity of saying to posterity: ‘This is Thomas Lawrence. This is me.’

  Once back in Aqaba, Lawrence wrote, he occupied himself mostly with recruiting a personal bodyguard for his protection, suggesting that this was a direct result of his torture at Dara’a. There was a price on his head and he needed ‘hard riders and hard livers’ who would vow loyalty to himself personally. He wrote that he built up a large private army of ninety men, mercenaries, cut-throats, outlaws and bandits from thirty different clans of every tribe in Syria and north Arabia. Many of them were blood enemies, and there would have been murder among them every day had it not been for Lawrence’s restraining hand. Because his rides were so ferocious and painful, every man with him was a picked rider, all mounted upon his own specially chosen camels. They would ride all day and all night at Lawrence’s whim, and fought like devils. He paid them £6 a month: this was the standard rate for a man and a camel, but they actually profited far more than other camelry because they did not have to provide their own animals, which would have foundered under Lawrence’s hard going. The camels were all provided from Lawrence’s own carefully selected stable, and his bodyguard cost three times as much as any unit in the army, but did three times the amount of work. These lads dressed in bright colours deliberately to contrast with the pure white Lawrence himself wore, and had the kind of esprit which came from the shared hardship and suffering they endured out of loyalty to him. They took pleasure in subordination, he said, and enjoyed degrading their own bodies so as to throw into relief the freedom of their minds – an emotion suspiciously reminiscent of Lawrence’s own masochistic desire for degradation. Of his ninety followers, almost fifty of them Agayl, two-thirds died nobly in his service.

  There is no more enticing image in Seven Pillars than that of Lawrence in his pure white Sharifian robes at the head of his own force of ninety hardened cut-throats, all of whom had sworn to serve him unto death, and many of whom did. Official biographer Jeremy Wilson cites the recruitment of this guard as the single major corroboration of the truth of the Dara’a incident: ‘As regards the timing of the incident,’ he writes, ‘it is worth noting that as soon as he returned to Akaba he recruited a personal bodyguard.’28 Once again, the evidence – from Lawrence’s own records – is against him. In fact, he recruited a bodyguard as early as May 1917, for he apparently told ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ in June that he did not need servants but fighting men. In October, before the Yarmuk raid, he said, he had decided to give some of the ‘old bodyguard’ a rest, and recruited six new members: ‘Among my own preparations,’ he wrote in the Oxford version, ‘was the careful picking of my own bodyguard.’29 He listed the new recruits as Mahmud, Aziz, Mustafa, Showak, Salem and Abd ar-Rahman. He dismissed two of the old guard, Mohammad and ‘Ali – who had been with him from Wejh – but retained the rest, including ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ (alias ‘Ali and Othman), Ahmad, Kreim, Rahail, Matar, Khidr and Mijbil, a total of fourteen men. At different times he also picked up Awwad and Daher, bringing the total to sixteen. Now, it so happens that Lawrence listed the names of his bodyguard in his pocket-diary in order to keep track of their wages, beginning in March 1918. Though the names and number vary slightly between March and September, there are never more than seventeen names on the list at any one time, and the average over the entire period comes to fourteen – precisely the same number he listed as forming his bodyguard in October 1917, before the alleged Dara’a incident. He might, of course, have changed the personnel if not the number, but many of the names recur again and again, and a significant number are traceable to his earlier bodyguard. Ahmad, Rahail, Mahmud, Mustafa, Abd ar-Rahman, Khidir, Mijbil, Salem, Awwad, Daher and Matar all feature in the March–September lists. Conspicuously absent from the lists are ‘Ali and Othman, the supposed models for ‘Farraj and Da’ud’, who were evidently not in Lawrence’s service in 1918 at all. It is true, of course, that some of these names are common among the Arabs, but even if the individuals were different, this does not alter the fact that the strength of Lawrence’s bodyguard remained essentially unchanged between October 1917 and September 1918, that is before and after the supposed torture at Dara’a – thus proving beyond doubt that it could not have been recruited as a direct result of any incident in November 1917. Certainly, it was not recruited first in January 1917, neither did it ever compri
se ninety men, even by aggregation, but consistently averaged about fourteen. Coincidentally, a photograph of ‘Lawrence and his bodyguard’ taken at Aqaba in the summer of 1918 shows only fifteen men. Hubert Young, an Arabic speaker who served with Lawrence in 1918, noted that the bodyguard comprised ‘about 20’.30 As for the idea that Lawrence’s men were a tough crowd of bandits from all the tribes of Syria and Arabia, the provenance of many of them belies this claim. Mahmud, a ‘petulant lad’ of nineteen, was a peasant from Yarmuk, Matar a ‘parasite fellow’ of the Bani Hassan, Mijbil an ‘insignificant peasant’ old enough to be Lawrence’s father, Salem a camel-herder of the despised Shararat tribe, ‘Abd ar-Rahman a freed slave, Aziz a ‘shallow, rabbit-mouthed’ peasant from Tafas, Mustafa a deaf boy, Zayd an incompetent who was dismissed by Lawrence for failing to saddle a camel properly, and Rahail a Haurani peasant who burst into tears when the going got tough. Only Lawrence’s chief, Abdallah an-Nahabi (‘Abdallah ‘the Robber’), appears to meet his claim that his men were outlaws. None belonged to the major Bedu tribes of Arabia (Lawrence told the Sha’alans that he was too humble a man to have Rwalla guards) and few to the ‘Agayl – the vast majority were Syrian peasants who, because of old age, infirmity or incompetence, could not get employment elsewhere. As for dying in Lawrence’s service, there is hardly a name featuring in March 1918 which does not appear on the list for September. It is just possible that one or two may have been killed, but the number cannot have amounted to sixty – since the sum total of members of the bodyguard was never more than seventeen, and most, if not all, of these survived.