The power of the Lawrence legend was more than mere public curiosity about a wartime hero. He was, in simple terms, a hero who fitted perfectly with the temper of his times and possessed qualities which appealed to people of widely different backgrounds and attitudes. But first, he fulfilled a deeply felt national need to have at least one outstanding individual hero from a war which had been fought by the masses. At the same time as he had to represent those masses, this hero had to display the recognisable features which fitted traditional concepts of personal heroism. During and after the conflict there had been a strange ambivalence towards modern war which was most clearly seen in the early 1920s when war memorials were appearing across the country. Many included statues or bronze-cast figures which either showed modern soldiers, clothed and equipped for the trenches with steel helmets, capes and packs like the gunners on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner or else armoured knights from the chivalric past, like the figure on the Cavalry Memorial nearby in Hyde Park. An extreme but fascinating example of this genre is at Sledmere, Sir Mark Sykes’s Yorkshire estate village, where the memorial includes mock-medieval brasses of Crusaders — perhaps an allusion to Sir Mark’s work in the Middle East. The armoured knight, used by propagandists on both sides, embodied the traditional martial virtues of courage, service and personal honour.
In essence, Lawrence belonged to this older strain of heroism. The point was made by Lowell Thomas when he described the lives of Lawrence’s brother officers. ‘Each man had his own task and went his own way. Each was a free-lance and conducted himself with much the same freedom as did knights of old.’ A similar comparison was drawn by Winterton in his articles in Blackwood’s, when he likened desert campaigning to schoolboy escapades or Elizabethan adventures. The warriors were free agents. This was a world and an age away from the commonplace experience of the First World War battlefield where soldiers fought as part of a vast machine which set their goals, dictated their tactics and minutely regulated every aspect of their lives. Moreover, as Lowell Thomas, Lawrence and others would demonstrate, the desert war was one of continual incident. By contrast, everyday life in the trenches was marked by extended periods of inactivity and boredom.
The desert battleground was, as Lawrence admitted, a clean landscape where fighting men moved freely rather than having to scurry about or hide in holes. This, and the fact that the individual still counted, must have had enormous appeal to those generations which had come to manhood before and during the war. They had been weaned on the adventure stories of G.A. Henty and the Boys’ Own Paper or the verses of Kipling and Newbolt, in which heroes fought on the open hillsides of India, the wastes of the Sudan or the South African veldt. If there was any ideal of war for the pre-1914 generations, this was it and it closely matched the experience of Lawrence. Furthermore, between 1914 and 1918, nearly every soldier measured his achievement in terms of day-to-day survival or a small share in the defence or capture of some sector of the line often known just by its map reference. Even without Lowell Thomas’s hyperbole, Lawrence could have claimed that he had helped liberate a people. Unlike those who stuck it out in the trenches, his cause had been clear and he could look back and see real gains from his exertions.
So, paradoxically, the hero who emerged from the First World War and captured public imagination was a man who was a stranger to the common experience of modern war, although, as he made clear, he knew its horrors. An essentially romantic warrior, his deeds belonged to another age. He wore flowing Arab robes while most men wore khaki, and he rode rather than ran or crawled across the battlefield. He was his own master, not another’s pawn. To cross the desert with Lawrence was to take a flight of fancy and forget the reality of modern war. It was an indulgence which, from the 1920s onwards, many were pleased to enjoy. Yet, as C.E. Edmonds (C.E. Carrington), who had seen service on the Western Front, remarked in a short posthumous biography of Lawrence in 1935, he was ‘the archetype of the Lost Generation’ and like them had passed the post-war years in ‘cynical retirement’.
Among the generals of the First World War, no Wellington emerged to command public respect and admiration. The walrusmoustached, rotund, florid generals (Lawrence called them ‘red soldiers’) like Haig lacked charisma and were collectively unattractive to a post-war generation which distrusted their attitudes and loathed the brutal militarism they appeared to represent. Lionised during the war by government propaganda, such men shrank during the interwar years when they were mocked as Blimps and the poverty of their strategic thinking was exposed by younger officers like Liddell Hart. Lawrence had little time for them or any professional officer. ‘They do their best,’ he told Liddell Hart, ‘not their fault it’s such a rotten best.’
Lawrence was untainted by any connection with the old military caste. Slightly built, short and with almost virginal features, he was the physical antithesis of the old-style bullish general. Unlike them, as Liddell Hart insisted, he was an instinctive soldier who used his brains to save his men’s lives rather than unthinkingly squander them as Haig had done. Lawrence belonged to a military tradition, but it was a distant one which embraced men of ideas and letters like Raleigh or Sir Philip Sidney for whom soldiering was a part but not the whole of their existence.
Throughout the war Lawrence, like millions of others, had been a civilian in arms who had tenaciously clung to his independence of habit and thought. Like many young men of his intellectual background, he filled his spare time with re-reading his favourite classics, symbolic links with his pre-war life as well as sheet-anchors of former civilised values. The figure who emerges from Robert Graves’s and Liddell Hart’s biographies is a rebellious anti-militarist. According to Graves, Lawrence ‘is very much hated by government officials, regular soldiers, old-fashioned political experts and such like’. ‘To those who were solidly buttressed by dignity and orthodoxy,’ Liddell Hart wrote, ‘the idea of a temporary second-lieutenant indulging in military criticisms and sitting in judgement was revolting.’
Lawrence, a young man, was on the side of youth and against the oppressive, fuddy-duddy generation of boneheads who had mishandled the war and were, during the 1920s, set upon reimposing pre-war ideas and conventions. His attitudes would have been applauded by many former junior officers and other-ranks who had found themselves and their lives in the hands of the military dullards of the type he had twitted. Moreover a new generation, growing up and coming of age during the 1920s and 1930s, approved Lawrence’s individualism and rejection of worn-out men and stale ideas. Graves placed him very firmly on the side of youth and approvingly retold a Lawrentian anecdote in which the young man clashed with that patrician embodiment of the old order, Curzon. Lawrence’s use of the expression ‘fed up’ in an official telegram had irritated the Foreign Secretary, who asked an underling its meaning. ‘I believe, my lord, that it is equivalent of disgruntled’ was the answer. ‘Ah,’ said Curzon, ‘I suppose it is a term in use among the middle classes. ‘He then begged an explanation of Lawrence’s phrase ‘carry on’. (This has all the hallmarks of one of those self-mocking tales which Curzon made up about himself; still, as recounted by Graves, it vindicated Lawrence as ‘the common man’, a creature which the Marquess would have found incomprehensible.)
Turkey’s lifeline: Rolling stock on the Damascus-Medina line guarded by German troops, 1918.
A lifeline destroyed: Damaged station and wagons, Ghadir al Haj, 1918, a picture possibly taken by Lawrence after a raid.
Master of Damascus: Lawrence is driven through Damascus in a Rolls Royce; British other ranks and Damascenes, wearing traditional fezes, watch his progress, October 1918.
Sir Ronald Storrs: Proconsul and aesthete who befriended Lawrence in Cairo and became a life-long admirer.
Lord Lloyd of Dolobron: Imperialist and Tory MP, he joined Military Intelligence in Cairo with Lawrence in 1914 where they became close friends.
Medina falls, February 1919: Taken after the final surrender of Fakhri Pasha, this pic
ture shows Major Henry Garland (far left), the Emirs Ali and Abdullah, the future King of Jordan, (fifth and sixth from left) and Arab and Turkish officers.
Warriors turned peacemakers: The Amir Faisal (centre), Nuri al Said (second left), Captain Pisani, the commander of the Algerian artillery battery attached to the Arabs during 1917 and 1918 (behind Faisal) and Lawrence; Paris 1919. Faisal’s negro slave stands respectfully back from the rest.
Gentleman ranker: Lawrence poses at the RAF base, Miramshah, North-West Frontier, India, 1928.
Man of letters: Lawrence reading on his camp bed, Miramshah. The chained rifles behind are a reminder that he was stationed in a region which was a perpetual war-zone.
Death of a hero: Lawrence’s death was headline news. Here the familiar icon of him in Arab robes, first used by Lowell Thomas, shares space with that of gentleman ranker astride his Brough ‘Superior’ motor bike.
Sleeping Galahad: Lawrence’s friend, Eric Kennington, carved this memorial which was originally intended for Salisbury Cathedral. After disagreements between the Bishop, Dean and Lawrence’s brother Arnold, the figure was placed in Wareham Church, Dorset, where it remains. Kennington deliberately imitated the style and pose of the carved effigies and brasses of medieval warriors which, as a boy, Lawrence had studied and whose legendary deeds he hoped to emulate.
Lawrence was not only a figure with which an impatient and rebellious younger generation could identify, he was also used as the example of the Victorian and Edwardian manly virtues which the old wanted the young to emulate. He appears in this role in Lowell Thomas’s The Boy’s Life of Colonel Lawrence, which appeared in Britain and America in 1927, and two ripping yarns for schoolboys by Gurney Slade (Stephen Bartlett), In Lawrence’s Bodyguard (1930) and Led by Lawrence (1934). In the first, Slade imagined that he would be the first of many since ‘By his exploits Lawrence has delivered himself into the hands of fiction writers for all time, and by weaving a few of the incidents of his campaign into the plot of a boys’ book, I am only one of the forerunners of a mighty horde.’ This legion of authors never materialised; boys’ tastes changed and, while Biggles held his ground, the comic adventure paper superseded the older Hentyesque genre which Slade practised.
In fact Lawrence has a walk-on part in In Lawrence’s Bodyguard, which runs true to the usual pattern with the adventures of Irwin Baxter, captain of the First Fifteen at Garchester, who, like Lawrence, is an archaeologist working in the Middle East. During the war he uses his skills as an Arabist in various ways and ends up among the tribesmen of Faisal’s and then Lawrence’s bodyguard. Lawrence himself is an idealised cipher.
The fame of Lawrence had now flown through all Arabia. From military adviser he had now evolved into the recognised military head of the Revolt. The army had now had time to test his character thoroughly, and it was to their liking. Unselfish, generous to a rare degree, careless of his own life, but extremely careful of his followers’, he seemed to them to be possessed of all the virtues of the ideal Arab.
This description probably coincided more or less exactly with the public’s knowledge of Lawrence’s character and deeds. Robert Graves noticed that in some quarters there was a haziness about his identity. When Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert appeared in the bookshops, some customers mistook it for a sequel to Son of the Sheik. Ethel M. Dell’s pulp-fiction desert romances enjoyed great popularity, as did their filmed versions starring Valentino, so confusion was inevitable. The popularity of Valentino’s desert films may have contributed accidentally to Lawrence’s continued fame and vice versa.
The public appetite for Lawrence books stayed strong. Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia was a British and American bestseller, as was Lawrence’s own Revolt in the Desert. Within eight years this had been translated into a dozen languages including Russian, Icelandic and Lettish. The Seven Pillars, which appeared within two months of Lawrence’s death in May 1935, sold well and editions in eight other languages were published within four years.
The simple explanation for these high sales was a universal desire to be entertained by a collection of exciting adventures in a distant land. Their central character also exerted an equally strong fascination, thanks in large part to his post-war behaviour. In 1922, the public was astonished by his enlistment in the RAF, although this could easily be explained in terms with which many war veterans would have sympathised. As Robert Graves had written in his biography, Lawrence had been keen to shed ‘the mask of a popular hero’ and become one of a crowd, in his case among ordinary servicemen. Such anonymity gave Lawrence the chance for undisturbed selfdiscovery and the fulfilment of private literary ambitions which had been interrupted by the war. The choice of a barrack hut may have been unusual, but Lawrence’s sentiments would have been understood by many who, after the trauma of war, wished to return to a secluded, tranquil and normal life. For them, like Lawrence, the war had been an aberration to be forgotten.
Lawrence’s RAF career was carefully charted by the press. It was an essential part of an artificial air of mystery which hung about him. Lowell Thomas had explained his urge for anonymity in terms of modesty, but this did not satisfy either newspapermen or their readers. Robert Graves had aroused their curiosity about the secret Lawrence by intriguing references to his wartime Military Intelligence activities and Lowell Thomas had mentioned his cunning disguises and escapades as a spy. These details added a new dimension to Lawrence and his legend at a time when popular fiction and the cinema were exploiting the public’s taste for secret-service adventures. Among the most successful was John Buchan’s sequence of Hannay novels, written between 1908 and 1934, in which one of the heroes, Sandy Clanroyden, although based on Aubrey Herbert, shared distinct features with Lawrence.
Like every convincing thriller-writer, Buchan contrived plots that were immediately recognisable to his audience, with incidents and backgrounds adapted from contemporary events. Just after the war, his heroes squared up to the Bolsheviks and in The House of Four Winds (1935) the plot revolves around a thinly disguised neo-Fascist youth movement in a central European country, recalling the contemporary Iron Guard in Roumania. Throughout the world of thriller fiction, plucky secret agents, who had learned their trade during the war, played new gambits in a modern version of the ‘Great Game’ to preserve Britain and her empire. In the public imagination, Lawrence appeared a living example of such a figure and the power of his reputation fuelled speculation that his humble aircraftman’s uniform was just another disguise of Britain’s masterspy.
Reality appeared to be imitating fiction when, in 1928, Lawrence was posted to Miramshah, an outpost on the North-West Frontier in the heart of the empire’s most turbulent province. The coincidence was too much for the popular press, which exploited it to the full with a sheaf of sensational but utterly unfounded reports during the autumn and winter of 1928–9. The Evening News opened the sequence with the revelation that Lawrence, masquerading as a messianic holy man, was on the track of Bolshevik conspirators in the volatile city of Amritsar. Next, other papers revealed how, still using the same cover, he had cropped up over the border in Afghanistan where he was organising tribal resistance to the pro-Soviet, reforming Amir, Amanullah. There had been much recent unrest in Afghanistan and this story, which the Empire News validated with the eyewitness reports of a bogus missionary, was taken seriously by the world’s press. Government denials could not stop the political ruckus. On 6 February 1929, Shapurji Saklatvala, the Communist MP for Battersea North and leading activist in the League Against Imperialism, asked Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary, whether he would refute the charges against Lawrence which had been made by the Afghan government. By then Lawrence had been ordered back from India at the suggestion of the embarrassed British Minister in Kabul. At his disembarkation at Southampton, he was faced by hordes of pressmen, photographers and newsreel cameramen.
For a few weeks he was the bogeyman of the left. Saklatvala, sure that he had uncovered an agent of imperia
list oppression, presided over a meeting at Tower Hill where Lawrence was burned in effigy. Further vexation waited for Lawrence. After he had visited the House of Commons to explain his innocence to the Labour MPs Jimmy Maxton and Ernest Thurtle, some newspapers trumped up the story that he had joined or was about to join the Labour Party, something as far from his mind as spying in the bazaars of Amritsar.
There was a bizarre sequel to the Afghan farrago. The Soviet government, realising its propaganda potential, produced a film, Visitor from Mecca, which was shown in Moscow cinemas at the end of 1930. The film’s hero, a young Russian engineer, is working on a rail tunnel which will link Russia and Gulistan (presumably Afghanistan) and unite their peoples in friendship. He is hampered by the machinations of the decadent British Resident, who controls the country’s ruler and represents imperialism, and an Arab holy man who stands for religious obscurantism and reaction. In the end the forces of progress triumph: the Resident is assassinated and the holy man is revealed to be Lawrence wearing a false beard.9
Golden Warrior, The Page 41