Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  In his letter, Lawrence correctly described al Qadir as a Muslim fanatic who resented Faisal’s dependence on Britain. After his flight from el Azraq on 4 November 1917, he had ridden into Dera where, three days later, he revealed details of Lawrence’s mission to the Turco-German authorities. Cavalry patrols immediately began to comb the countryside close to the Dera–Haifa line, and only good luck and a gap in the cordon allowed Lawrence and his party to escape. Then, on 20 November, Lawrence went intelligence-gathering in Dera.

  I went into Dera in disguise to spy out the defences, was caught, and identified by Hajim Bey, the governor, by virtue of Abdul al Qadir’s description of me. (I learned all about his treachery from Hajim’s conversation and from my guards.) Hajim was an ardent paederast and took a fancy to me. So he kept me under guard till night, and then tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed with some difficulty. Hajim sent me to hospital, and I escaped before dawn, being not as hurt as he thought. He was so ashamed of the muddle he had made that he hushed the whole thing up, and never reported my capture and escape.

  Three significant points emerge from this narrative: Hajim knew that his captive was Major Lawrence (he had been promoted after Aqaba), a British intelligence officer, whom he cross-examined, and having neglected to place a guard over such a valuable prisoner, successfully hid his blunder from his Turkish and German colleagues. Lawrence too covered up the affair, which was less understandable since, however humiliating his experience, he had discovered evidence of al Qadir’s treachery at a time when Clayton was anxious about a spy among Faisal’s advisers. It was odd that Lawrence, an officer with a high sense of professionalism, chose not to be debriefed after an encounter which must have yielded valuable intelligence. Interestingly, Meinertzhagen, who was on Allenby’s intelligence staff at the time, was convinced that Lawrence’s story was false.5

  Lawrence wrote two further, more elaborate accounts of his misadventures in the 1922 and 1926 versions of the Seven Pillars, and referred to them in conversations with Meinertzhagen and Robert Graves and in correspondence with Mrs Bernard Shaw and E.M. Forster.6 Each account contained significant variations of detail. These and the sheer implausibility of the tale have led three biographers to dismiss it as a creation of his imagination. Others have taken Lawrence at his word and interpreted what happened as a trauma which radically altered his personality and view of the world. The authorised biography follows this line and suggests that Lawrence’s enlistment of a bodyguard after his return from Aqaba was an insurance against being captured again. If this was so, then Lawrence soon forgot his fears, for a few months after he claimed that he had entered Amman disguised as a prostitute and in search of intelligence. Dera had clearly not dampened his recklessness.

  There is no direct corroborative evidence to support Lawrence’s version of his misfortunes in Dera. The Turks did torture British agents; the brave Sarah Aaronsohn shot herself rather than endure further torment and sexual abuse after her capture in October 1917. British intelligence officers, like Woolley and Newcombe, who were taken prisoner during undercover operations in August and November 1917, fared much better. Newcombe was eventually transferred to the excellent Pera Palace Hotel in Constantinople where Townshend of Kut was being kept. By contrast many of the British and Indian other–ranks taken at Kut endured wanton neglect and rough usage. At Afium Qarahisar POW camp prisoners were bastinadoed (where the victims were beaten on the soles of their feet) when they protested against the outrages of the commandant, a naval officer and homosexual sadist, who was removed early in 1917 and later hanged as a war criminal by the Allies.7 Whatever Lawrence may have said to the contrary, the Ottoman government was not completely insensitive to the brutality of its underlings, although remedial action tended to follow protests from German and Austrian officers, who had also vainly tried to stop the Armenian massacres. Turkish conscripts were commonly disciplined by the bastinado, the traditional Ottoman torture which Lawrence was spared. If, as he claimed, he had been identified as a British officer, his treatment was exceptional.

  As to Lawrence’s precise whereabouts after his hurried withdrawal from the Yarmuk valley, the evidence is, not surprisingly, vague. Beduin riders occasionally carried messages from el Azraq to Aqaba, from where they were relayed by wireless to Cairo. On 11 November, French intelligence heard that Lawrence was still at el Azraq with Sharif Nasir who had left Aqaba five days earlier. It was believed that they might head northwards, possibly to the outskirts of Damascus. Five days later, GHQ intelligence received a report which indicated that Lawrence and Nasir were about to attack the railway line between Damascus and Aleppo.8 Nowhere in his narratives does Lawrence mention Nasir.

  The Arab Bureau received a letter from Lawrence on 26 November, which had been written twelve days before, in which he said he was ‘very well and cheerful’. On the same day Lawrence had written to his mother. On 29 November, Hogarth said that he had had news of Lawrence’s movements up to the 20th and knew his plans.9 ‘So far as I can judge he will be safe,’ he told his wife, adding that Lawrence had requested supplies of potted meat and milk chocolate. 10 So, as far as his superiors were concerned, Lawrence was out of danger by 20 November. The surviving wireless messages from Aqaba to Cairo offer nothing on Lawrence’s whereabouts. Joyce was up country on 17–18 November and his signals between 16 and 26 November contain no mention of Lawrence. On 24 November, Lieutenant Wood returned and his routine report that he and Lawrence had derailed a train on the 7th was relayed to Cairo. Lawrence finally surfaces, officially, on 3 December, when Joyce requested an aircraft to fly him to HQ.11 Lawrence’s own skeletal field diary has nothing entered for the days in question.

  A second version of the Dera episode was delivered by Lawrence to Meinertzhagen in a Paris hotel room on 20 July 1919. Lawrence alleged that he had been taken, stripped, bound and ‘then sodomised by the Governor’s servants’. Afterwards he was flogged. This story concluded a general confession of Lawrence’s private misfortunes, including his illegitimacy. While Lawrence was bathing, Meinertzhagen had been struck by the red weals across his ribs, which were explained away as being the result of an accident in el Azraq when he had been dragged over barbed wire. According to The Mint, these weals were commented on by the RAF doctors when Lawrence underwent his medical in August 1922. Whether they had been suffered in November 1917 or when he revisited el Azraq in September 1918 Lawrence did not say. All this is very strange since ‘weal’ is used rather than ‘scar’ or ‘cicatrix’ and therefore, in both instances, suggests recent origin. Furthermore, Meinertzhagen later confided to Malcolm Muggeridge that Lawrence had been unscarred in 1919.12

  Even odder was Lawrence’s admission that he dreaded knowledge of his experience at Dera ever becoming public and that he would never publish a true account of what had actually happened. And yet he had made a statement to Stirling in June 1919, to Meinertzhagen a month later, and produced a fuller version which was circulated amongst friends and former colleagues during 1922 and 1923 when he was seeking critical advice on the first Seven Pillars draft. Once subscription copies became available, and copies were deposited in the British Museum and Bodleian Library, anyone could discover the truth. They did and rumours of his capture and torture appeared in the press.13

  The 1922 version of Dera contained much embellishment and much that was inexplicable.14 Suffering from a broken toe, Lawrence had hobbled into town, a journey which was ‘exquisitely painful’. He had gone in search of low–grade intelligence about the town’s layout and the possible existence of some secret means of access which could later be used by a raiding party. This was an extraordinary mission since a good topographical description of the town appears in the 1911 Army Handbook for Syria and additional data could have been collected from native spies and aerial photographs, as Lawrence well knew. He did stumble on the hidden way into Dera, which he had originally been seeking, but he seemed to have forgotten about it, for it played no part in his plans to blockade and take Dera in
September 1918.

  Disguised in ragged native clothes, Lawrence and an Arab companion were stopped by a Turkish sergeant who hauled Lawrence off, saying that the Bey wished to see him. Taken to a barrack hut, Lawrence presented himself to the ‘fleshy’ officer as Ahmed ibn Bagr, a Quneitra Circassian, and therefore, as he mistakenly imagined, not liable for conscription. The officer accused Lawrence of being a deserter and had him taken to the guard room where he heard from the soldiers that he would fulfil ‘the Bey’s pleasure’ that evening.

  Claiming to be a Circassian was a remarkably inept move. It might explain his fair skin for Circassians were Caucasian Muslims who had been allowed to settle in Syria and Palestine after the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish war. There was, however, the problem of the Circassian accent which Lawrence could not have faked. Circassians in 1917 would have spoken in their native Karbadian and whatever Turkish and Arabic they used would have been delivered in a thick accent, which would have been unmistakable to–Lawrence’s captors. 15 If somehow Lawrence had tricked the Turkish soldiers and their officer, he could not have sustained the masquerade when he was confronted by the pleasure-seeking Bey.

  Lawrence claimed that he was bundled across Dera to the Bey’s residence and taken to his bedroom. The Bey, a stout figure, whom Lawrence thought another Circassian (actually he was an Anatolian Turk) was waiting in his night shirt. He assaulted, wrestled with, fondled and finally propositioned his imagined Circassian prisoner. Lawrence shied away, a sentry was summoned, and he was stripped. Fondled again, Lawrence kneed his tormentor in the groin ‘when he got beastly’. The full guard was called and Lawrence was pinioned. The Bey then hit him, kissed him and scratched his ribs with a bayonet point. ‘You must understand that I know all about you, and it would be easier if you do as I wish,’ the Bey warned. Lawrence was obdurate and the Bey commanded his men to remove him and ‘teach me till I prayed to be brought back’.

  What did the Bey know? Naked, Lawrence was plainly a European; his clean-shaven face was, like those of his countrymen in the region, brick red, in contrast to the rest of his body which would have been pallid. Moreover, it may be assumed that a close examination of his body would have revealed that he was not a Muslim, for, given the date of his birth, it is highly unlikely that he would have been circumcised. Be that as it may, there is nothing in this account of Lawrence’s tribulations which even hints at what he had stated three years before. In the earlier version the Bey instantly recognised him as Major Lawrence from al Qadir’s description and began a formal interrogation, which would have been normal in the circumstances.

  Lawrence was then flogged for over ten minutes with a riding whip. Semi-conscious, he was then kicked by a corporal. Worse followed. His legs were prised apart ‘while a third astride my back rode me like a horse’. The Bey recalled him, but disdained the bleeding, broken figure which the guards presented. He was sent away and taken to an Armenian dresser for treatment. His escort tried to comfort him, ‘saying that men must suffer their officers’ wishes or pay for it’. Before they departed, another told Lawrence ‘in a Druze accent’ (Druzes were exempt from military service) that the dispensary door was unlocked. At sunrise and through this door, Lawrence escaped dressed in a suit of European clothes he had found in the dispensary and returned to el Azraq.

  This was not the whole truth. In March 1924, while telling Mrs Bernard Shaw his reactions to her husband’s latest play, St Joan, Lawrence admitted that, like the heroine, he had broken under torture. ‘I’m always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender.’ To alleviate his ordeal, he offered up ‘the only possession we come into the world with–our bodily integrity’ and so made himself unfit for the company of decent men. This can only mean that Lawrence succumbed to the Bey’s importuning. A confession along these lines may have been Lawrence’s intention when he told Bernard Shaw that he had not written the truth. Shaw was not keen to know it: ‘I forbore to ask him what actually happened.’16 Lawrence may have been more explicit to Meinertzhagen who, shortly after his friend’s death, wrote, ‘The Dera incident is false. T.E.L. would have recalled the book if possible; therefore now I loathed the unlimited edition published after his death.’17

  Lawrence’s accounts of what befell him in Dera are open to many challenges. Fearful that someone might seek out Hajim Muhittin Bey and ask for his account of what happened that night, Lawrence changed his name to Naji in the 1926 version of the Seven Pillars. The real Hajim died, undisturbed by enquirers and unaware of his notoriety, in 1965 at Smyrna (Izmir). His brother officer, Ismet Karadoyen, denied that he had ever been a homosexual, as did his family when confronted with the Dera story. To contradict the picture drawn by Lawrence, Hajim’s son produced his father’s Dera diary which was a saga of determined womanising.18 Moreover, Hajim was a patriot, and even if it had been possible in a small garrison town to keep secret the capture of an important British officer, it would have been out of character for him to keep his prize for sexual indulgence. On the other hand, custom, if not the law of the mosque, tolerated the active homosexual and invested his activities with qualities of virility and manliness. The experience of American prisons indicates that many homosexual rapists are heterosexuals with an urge to dominate and humiliate their victims. Still, on balance, Hajim Bey appears not to have been the sort of man to perpetrate the outrages alleged against him.

  It is equally hard to believe the sequel to Lawrence’s capture. If the Seven Pillars is to be believed he managed by a sequence of forced camel rides to reach Aqaba on 26 November. This was undertaken without, it appears, any medical treatment beyond that applied by the dresser in Dera. And yet, within a fortnight, he had suffered a broken toe, minor flesh wounds, stabbing with a bayonet, pummelling and kicking, a flogging and homosexual rape. His superhuman resilience is all the more amazing for it occurred in a region where even the smallest wound turned septic unless it was treated quickly. Ordinary servicemen who suffered these sores were swiftly evacuated from the front and placed in hospitals where they were given a diet of fresh food.19 Somehow Lawrence recovered without treatment or convalescence and despite a gruelling camel ride from el Azraq to Aqaba which, he told his parents, took him an astonishing three days.

  His powers of recuperation verged on the miraculous. On 3 December he was fit enough to undertake a journey by air and six days later he took his place in the ceremonial parade held to mark the liberation of Jerusalem. Less than a week later, he met Hogarth who reported that he was ‘looking fitter and better than when I saw him last’.20 So, within three weeks of his ordeal at Dera, Lawrence was restored to health.

  The weight of circumstantial evidence together with the notes in the gunners’ war diary strongly suggest that Lawrence had fabricated the incident at Dera. Two explanations offer themselves. The tale was concocted to make a purely literary point, or Lawrence was making a coded, oblique statement about his own sexuality. Something like this had possibly happened to him, but at another time and in different circumstances, which he felt compelled to reveal to his friends and ultimately the public at large. The nature of his experience and its homoerotic overtones made such a task both risky and difficult, given the prevailing moral climate.

  In literary terms, the Dera episode vindicated observations Lawrence had made at the beginning of the Seven Pillars. Outlining the rottenness of the Ottoman system, Lawrence insists that sodomy was endemic among an officer class who used their authority to abuse their men. Dera proved what was, to say the least, a dubious point. ‘Incidents like these,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘made the thought of military service in the Turkish army a living death for the wholesome Arab peasants, and the consequences pursued the miserable victims all their after life, in revolting forms of sexual disease.’ The evidence for this assertion is thin: venereal diseases proliferated in all armies during the First World War and were probably worst in the Turkish army where medical services were inadequate. And
yet, the British medical authorities who dealt with Turkish POWs cited pellagra rather than venereal infections as the major ailment afflicting their charges.21

  The wicked men and their system were finally overthrown. Nemesis comes at the end of Lawrence’s saga when, in September 1918, the shattered Turkish army drags itself out of the provinces it has profaned. The reader can feel no pity for he knows that the retribution is well merited. He need not pause long over the fate of the captured Dera policemen who were turned over to the local Arabs, nor feel compassion for the former Dera garrison slaughtered as they ran for safety. Lawrence did not seek personal revenge for what he had allegedly suffered at Dera, but what he had endured there reinforces the feeling that the Turks were getting what they deserved.

  Incidentally, Lawrence was giving the lie to that commonplace of the British and Dominion soldier that ‘Johnny Turk’ was a game and honourable adversary. In doing so, he succumbed to that terrible lie of the twentieth century which insists that crimes can be committed by entire nations rather than individuals. By making this assumption, Lawrence justified, at least to himself, the treatment meted out to the defeated Turks in September 1918.

  Lawrence had much to say about homosexuality in the Seven Pillars which contains several unambiguous homoerotic passages. He analyses and expresses sympathy for Beduin homosexuality, applauding the warriors’ desire ‘to slake one another’s needs in their own clean bodies’. ‘Friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace’ struck Lawrence as the ‘sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls in one flaming effort.’ Other delights were indulged in, but Lawrence avoids explaining exactly what they involved. ‘Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely to any habit which promised physical pain or filth.’ It is of more than passing interest that Lawrence himself would follow their example during the later years of his life.