Golden Warrior, The
The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia
Lawrence James
Copyright © 2008 by Lawrence James
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
James, Lawrence, 1943-
The golden warrior : the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia/Lawrence James.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9781602393547
1. Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888-1935. 2. World War, 1914-1918—Campaigns—Middle East. 3. Great Britain. Army—Biography. 4. Soldiers—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Middle East—History—1914—1923. I. Title.
DSG8.4.L45J36 2008 940.4’15092—dc22
[B]
2008018862
Printed in the United States of America
For Andrew and Cherry
Lawrence James was born in Bath in 1943 and brought up in Weston-super-Mare. He secured a first in History and English at York University and subsequently undertook an M.Litt. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied medieval history. After a career as a schoolmaster at Merchant Taylors’ and Sedbergh schools, he became a full-time writer in 1985 and is the author of Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India; Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby; The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of Wellington; Warrior Race: A History of the British at War; and the acclaimed Rise and Fall of the British Empire. He writes occasional pieces and reviews for various newspapers and is a contributor to the new Dictionary of National Biography.
He lives with his wife (a former headmistress of St Leonard’s School) in a village in North Fife. They have two sons. His pastimes include bird watching and the exercise and maintenance of a Newfoundland dog.
‘An excellent, strong, and balanced biography ... This is surely the definitive assembly of the facts: from now on, it will all be assessment, interpretation and art’ Jan Morris, Spectator
‘The most accomplished life of Lawrence yet written’ Observer
‘The author of this admirable new biography rightly concerns himself as much with the legend of T. E. Lawrence as with the actual achievements ... His approach is brusque, unsentimental, and pretty conclusive’ Financial Times
‘Lawrence James has managed to present a new and fascinating angle on T. E. Lawrence, and has even succeeded in finding new material which sheds yet more light on a man who, one suspects, set out on purpose to become an enigma’ Sunday Telegraph
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Preface to the Revised Edition
PART ONE - FROM BIRTH TO MANHOOD
I - Ancestry and Inheritance
II - Boyhood and Schooling, 1888‒1907
III - Oxford and the Orient, 1907–1910
IV - Wandering Scholar: The Middle East, 1910–1913
V - For King and Country, 1914
PART TWO - INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
I - War and Duty
II - Men and Ideas
III - A Secret War
IV - Adventures in Blunderland: Iraq, April 1916
PART THREE - WITH THE ARABS AT AQABA
I - A Man of Destiny
II - Lawrence and the Arabs
III - Triumph at Aqaba
PART FOUR - THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
I - The Railway War
II - A Covert Operation
III - Dera: Degradation or Deception?
IV - Betrayal
V - War’s Mischances: November 1917—July 1918
VI - Damascus: Flawed Triumph
PART FIVE - THE LEGEND OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
I - Achievement
II - The Making of the Legend, 1918—1935
III - Living with a Legend
PART SIX - MAKI.NG THE BEST OF IT
I - Diplomat, 1918-1919
II - Kingmaker, 1919-1922
III - Man of Letters
IV - Gentleman Ranker, 1922-1935
V - Death of a Hero
PART SEVEN - THE BUBBLE REPUTATION
I - Orthodoxy and Revisionism: 1935—1955
II - The Legend Reborn: 1956-1995
EPILOGUE - Lawrence and the Modern Middle East
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index
Illustrations
For King and Empire (Merton College, Oxford)
Eagle on the Crescent
Ready for action
Desert raiders
Brothers-in-arms
Deutschland über Allah
Intruder
Robes for a Prince
The terrible Turk
The Sultan’s Arabs
Intelligence briefing
Turkey’s lifeline
A lifeline destroyed
Master of Damascus (Rolls-Royce plc)
Sir Ronald Storrs (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Lord Lloyd of Dolobron (National Portrait Gallery, London
Medina falls
Warriors turned peacemakers
Lawrence at Miramshah (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Man of letters (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Death of a hero (Daily Sketch)
Sleeping Galahad (Tate Gallery, London)
Photographs are from the Imperial War Museum, London, except
where otherwise identified.
Maps drawn by John Gilkes
All Arabic and Turkish place-names are as rendered in the current Times Atlas.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant to meet my expenses when I undertook research in Paris. I would also like to thank Mr Toby Buchan, Dr John Charmley, Air Marshal Sir Edward Chilton, KBE, CB, Dr Martin Edmonds, Mr Michael Ffinch, Professor M.R.D. Foot, Professor John Gaskin, Mr Michael Hodges, Dr Jeffrey Keith, Mr Phillip Knightley, Mrs Hilary Laurie, Mr Andrew Lownie, Mr and Mrs Christopher Rathbone, Dr Ken Robertson, Mr Jeffrey Richards, Mrs Laura Ridings, M. and Mme. Serge Soudaplatoff, Mr David Vernon-Jones, Mr and Mrs Andrew Williams, Mr and Mrs Philip Williams, and Mr Vivian Williams for advice, suggestions and assistance. I am especially grateful to Dr Maarten Schild for his kindness in sharing with me his clinical and historical knowledge and insights into Lawrence’s behaviour and for presenting his information in such an agreeable and often humorous form. Thanks are due to my wife, Mary, and sons, Edward and Henry, for their good humour and assistance.
Special thanks are also due to Mr Sam Clayton for permission to consult and quote the papers of his father, Sir Gilbert Clayton, and to his sister, Mrs Patricia Marshall, for their hospitality and answers to my questions about Lawrence. Likewise, I would like to thank Mrs William Roberts and her son, Mr John Roberts, for their generosity and sharing with me their recollections of Lawrence.
I am also indebted to Miss Gillian Grant and her staff at the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s Colleg
e, Oxford; to Mrs Lesley Forbes and the staff of the Sudan Archive at the University of Durham; to Miss Elizabeth Bennett and the staff of the Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge; to Mr Roderick Suddaby and the staff of the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; and the staff of St Andrews University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Metropolitan Police Archives, the Public Record Office, the Ministry of Defence, the India Office Library, Le Service pour l‘Histoire de l’ Armée de la Terre and Dorsetshire County Constabulary. All have shown great generosity of spirit and time, and their help has been invaluable.
I acknowledge with thanks Lady Lloyd and The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College in the University of Cambridge for permission to use and quote from the papers of the first Lord Lloyd; Durham University Library for the Wingate Papers and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust for passages from Lawrence’s published and unpublished letters. At no stage in the preparation of this book have I received assistance from the Trust or the Lawrence family.
Quotations from the Crown-copyright records of India Office Records and the Public Records appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Preface
Every generation has its own heroes. Lawrence filled this role for the 1920s and 1930s. He was not only a courageous warrior, but an intellectual whose self-questioning and literary talents set him apart from the more conventional war hero. He was the right man for the times. The survivors of the First World War and the generation which followed were stunned by the mass slaughter of the Western Front. By contrast, Lawrence emerged the hero of a struggle which could be romanticised without any sense of guilt. The Arab campaign had been waged far away in exotic surroundings and, above all, it had been a war in which the individual could still dominate the battlefield.
Lawrence has continued to fascinate. Although behind-the-lines operations managed by men of derring-do were more plentiful in the Second World War, no Lawrence emerged. Field-Marshal Montgomery and Admiral Mountbatten commanded public attention but they never captured the public’s imagination, although both were showmen and, unlike Lawrence, did not suffer qualms about courting public adulation.
Long before he died, people spoke about the ‘Lawrence legend’, and in 1962 this became fixed in the British and American national consciousness by David Lean’s film, Lawrence of Arabia, Crammed with dramatic incident, with dazzling footage of desert and a Bruckneresque score, the film entertains and reassures. Like the ancient ballad or the epic poem, it recreates history as it ought to have been rather than as it was.
While the film Lawrence entranced audiences, his historical counterpart was being found wanting. In 1955, Richard Aldington’s biography broke a twenty-year tradition of Lawrentian hagiography by arguing that its subject was a sham and that his reputation had been artificially preserved by a coterie of admirers. To judge by the roars of rage provoked by the book, Aldington had damaged his target, although his attack was only the prelude to a broader assault on the values and myth figures of the previous generation which would be undertaken by writers and intellectuals during the late 1950s and 1960s. It was open season for such as Lawrence who, as an intelligence officer, had done all he could to protect and extend British imperial power in the Middle East. How he did so and how he understated the part played by the Arabs in their own emancipation were revealed by Professor Suleiman Mousa and by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson, whose biographies appeared in 1966 and 1969.
Lawrence still had his champions who challenged the findings of the ‘revisionists’. The most formidable was John Mack, an American psychologist who had been allowed free access to closed files of Lawrence’s papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Mack’s biography (1976) sought to rehabilitate Lawrence and invest him with a fresh significance that would be relevant for late twentieth-century man. Following a line first suggested by Christopher Isherwood, Mack proposed that Lawrence’s inner turmoil and contradictions somehow reflected in microcosm those of his generation. Not only did he illuminate a pandemic of modern neuroses which, Dr Mack asserted, had yet to run its course, he was a hero of non-war fit to join an American liberal pantheon alongside such figures as Gandhi. So, in twenty years, Lawrence became in turn, mountebank, Hollywood super-hero, imperialist manipulator, neurotic, and pacifist.
Legends survive because they are continually being re-examined, reinterpreted and retold; there is Malory’s Arthur as well as Tennyson’s, Hollywood’s and the Romano-British warlord of the archaeologist and historian. What is important is that Lawrence, like Arthur, lies at the heart of a legend that seems set to enjoy some sort of universality and endurance.
It is possible to distinguish two Lawrences, one a historic figure and the other a creature of mythology. The separation of the two is difficult, not least because Lawrence was, in part, the creator of his own myth, which he carefully founded on history. He hoped that posterity would remember him as an artist: to that end, he made his own life into a work of art.
In this book, I have tried to unravel the threads of the legend and to separate the authentic from the fanciful. Since what Lawrence became was solely the consequence of what he did and what he said he had done during the First World War, I have concentrated on a reconstruction and analysis of the events in which he involved himself. For reasons which became clear during the narrative, I have been deliberately cautious about accepting without question his own words and have turned to other sources, some hitherto unknown or little used. I have also devoted much space to that other aspect of Lawrence which demands investigation, his legend. Here and elsewhere, I have endeavoured to place Lawrence within the context of his times and drawn attention to the activities of others who worked with him but whose efforts have too often been overlooked. The result, I hope, has been to offer a new perspective on Lawrence as a figure from history and a historical phenomenon. Whether his stature has been enhanced or diminished is for my readers to judge.
St Andrews, All Souls’ Day, 1989
Preface to the Revised Edition
In the light of new evidence and suggestions made after the first publication of this study, I have made a series of amendments. The most extensive are in those sections covering the campaign against the Damascus-Medina railway, operations before and after the capture of Damascus, and the investigation of the Dera episode and the wider question of Lawrence’s sexuality. I have also added new chapters which outline Lawrence’s posthumous treatment by biographers, dramatists and film-makers. Here I have drawn attention to the hitherto little-known attempts by those who saw themselves as Lawrence’s champions to stifle criticism and uphold what was, in effect, a biographical orthodoxy.
When the original edition of this book was being printed, Jeremy Wilson’s Lawrence of Arabia appeared, a life which, at its inception, received the blessing of Lawrence’s literary executor, his youngest and only surviving brother, Professor Arnold Lawrence. In approach and technique it was a very different book from mine and, having read it, I feel no compulsion to revise my judgements. Wilson draws more heavily upon contemporary documentation, largely official, in the belief that it holds the key to historical truth. I am unconvinced; like other papers deliberately left for posterity to examine, those compiled by government servants are equally as likely to persuade or mislead as to enlighten. ‘Economy with the truth’ was not an invention of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary. At the same time as treating official files as touchstones of historical accuracy, Wilson dismisses such private sources as autobiographies and oral reminiscences as unreliable on the grounds that what they reveal does not always coincide with the contemporary official version of events. Moreover, not only do old people forget, they frequently apply hindsight and invention to their memoirs. This is indeed so, but it does not automatically follow that everything they have to say is false.
Wilson’s rigour with sources is, however, fitful. For instance, he suggests that the surviving typewritten copy of Colonel Richard Mein
ertzhagen’s diary was doctored by its author and is, therefore, unreliable throughout. And yet the colonel’s word is taken at face value when he claimed that Lawrence was working on the first draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the spring of 1919 when the two men were attending the Versailles Conference. Here, Meinertzhagen confirms Lawrence’s own testimony; on those occasions when he does not or when he is brusquely candid about his friend, Wilson ignores his evidence. I have chosen to admit the observations of Meinertzhagen, Lord Vansittart, Lord Trenchard and many others who encountered Lawrence, knew him intimately, and committed their impressions to paper. These observations, not always favourable, or for that matter, charitable, deserve consideration; history is not just about what actually happened but what people imagined was happening. Moreover, biography is not merely a recital of an individual’s thoughts and actions, it is also an examination of his relations with humanity at large and how it responded to him.
Most important of all, and this is perhaps the deepest gulf between myself and Wilson, is my reluctance to believe unquestionably everything that Lawrence ever said or wrote. For reasons which become clear, I am convinced that Lawrence was, at heart, a creative artist who, like the medieval troubadours he so admired, wanted to entertain and enthral. He was not a compulsive liar, but a man who saw the truth as raw material which could be transformed by his genius. In consequence, I have approached almost everything which Lawrence said about himself and the events he was involved in with extreme caution. This scepticism was adopted not to catch Lawrence out, but to help illuminate what he thought of himself, his niche in history, his literary reputation, and the fabrication of what has turned out to be one of the most compelling and durable legends of the twentieth century.
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