In anticipation of full British control of Palestine in the near future, as well as to allay the fears already being expressed by the Muslim and Christian communities of Palestine over the Balfour Declaration, Sykes and Weizmann had decided that a Zionist committee should be dispatched to the region as soon as possible to take stock of the situation. Sykes in particular was anxious that this committee include an American delegation, figuring that its presence would be viewed as tacit acceptance by President Wilson of both the Balfour Declaration and future British control of Palestine. But a rather daunting obstacle stood in the way. The United States had only declared war on Germany, and Wilson had made it clear he had no intention of becoming entangled in any affairs regarding the Ottoman Empire; thus it was highly doubtful that his administration would sanction an American delegation. This gave rise to Aaronsohn’s sub rosa mission to the United States: to get American Zionist leaders to bring pressure on the Wilson government, not only to openly endorse the Balfour Declaration, but to reverse course and declare war on Turkey.
But when Aaronsohn arrived in the United States he received some crushing news. At the Zionist Federation office in New York on December 1, he was handed a cable from his youngest brother, Sam, newly arrived in Cairo. Nearly two full months after the event, Aaronsohn finally learned of the destruction of his NILI spy ring by the Turks. His brother’s cable also told of the death of their sister Sarah, their father, Ephraim, and of the execution of Naaman Belkind.
“The sacrifice is accomplished,” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary that night. “I knew that we still had to face the greatest misfortune, but it is one thing to fear it, and another to know that all hope is lost. Poor father, poor Sarati .… Her loss is the most cruel.”
The news surely added a new layer of resentment in his feelings for Weizmann and the other Zionist leaders in Europe who sought to curb his influence. For two years, Aaronsohn and those closest to him had risked their lives for the Zionist cause—and many had now paid the ultimate price—while those in London and Paris went about their meetings and pamphleteering. That contrast was exquisitely underscored on December 2. Just a day after Aaronsohn received the sad news from Athlit, members of the English Zionist Federation gathered at London’s Albert Hall for a gala celebration marking the one-month anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
IT’S UNLIKELY THAT any writer ever recounted his or her own torture in more exacting, even loving, detail.
By Lawrence’s account, it began on the morning of November 20. Several days earlier, he had left Azraq with his three escorts to survey the countryside around the vital railway town of Deraa. He now wanted a firsthand look at Deraa’s rail complex itself. The only way to do that was brazenly, so that morning Lawrence and one of his escorts had ridden to an isolated stretch of railway several miles north of town and dismounted from their camels; on foot and in Arab dress, they had then begun simply walking the rails into Deraa.
All was going well until, passing a Turkish army encampment, the pair drew the notice of a suspicious sergeant. The officer collared Lawrence, announcing that “the Bey [chief] wants you,” but for some reason allowed his companion to continue on.
For the rest of that day, Lawrence was held in a guardroom awaiting his audience with the bey and parrying suspicions that he was a Turkish army deserter. He did so by claiming to be a Circassian, a mountain people of the northern Caucasus who were exempt from conscription and known for their fair complexions and light-colored eyes. In the evening, guards came to take him to the bey’s rooms, a man Lawrence would identify as “Nahi” in Seven Pillars, but whose actual name was Hajim Muhittin, the Deraa district governor.
It became clear this meeting was intended to be of a sexual nature when Hajim dismissed the guard detail and wrestled Lawrence onto his bed. When he managed to wriggle free, the governor summoned the guards, who pinioned Lawrence to the bed and began tearing away his clothes. Hajim’s pawing began anew, until Lawrence kneed him in the groin.
With his naked victim again pinned to the bed by the guards, a furious Hajim now fell on Lawrence in a frenzy of both ardor and rage, kissing and spitting on him, biting into his neck until it drew blood, finally lifting up a fold of skin on his chest to skewer him with a bayonet. As Lawrence would recount, the bey then ordered the guards “to take me out and teach me everything.”
What followed was an ordeal of horrific torture. Dragged into a nearby room, Lawrence was stretched over a bench where two of the guards “knelt on my ankles, bearing down on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists till they cracked, and then crushed them and my neck against the wood.” A short whip was then retrieved, and the four guards took turns lashing Lawrence on the back and buttocks scores, if not hundreds, of times. “At last when I was completely broken they seemed satisfied,” he recalled in Seven Pillars. “Somehow I found myself off the bench, lying on my back on the dirty floor, where I snuggled down, dazed, panting for breath, but vaguely comfortable.”
But his torment was not quite done and, in the telling, now took on a hallucinatory quality. Viciously kicked in the ribs by the officer in charge and ordered to stand, Lawrence instead smiled idly up at the man. At this effrontery, the officer “flung up his arm and hacked the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over screaming, or rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One [of the guards] giggled with amusement. A voice cried, ‘Shame, you’ve killed him.’ Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, when Lawrence was finally dragged back to Hajim’s quarters, “he now rejected me in haste, as a thing too torn and bloody for his bed.” His ordeal at last over, Lawrence was hauled out to the courtyard and dumped in a shed where an Armenian “dresser,” or male nurse, was summoned to wash and bandage him. Then his torturers simply walked away.
That they would do so was only the first in a remarkable—some would say highly improbable—sequence of events that would ultimately deliver Lawrence from his greatest tribulation. By his account, as dawn approached, he summoned the strength to get to his feet and explore his dreary surroundings. In the empty adjacent room, he found a “suit of shoddy clothes” hanging from a door. Managing to dress himself, he then climbed out a window to drop to the empty street outside. On unsteady feet, he proceeded to walk through the just-wakening town until at last he’d left it behind. Wheedling a ride from a passing camel-borne merchant, he finally came to the outlying village where he’d arranged to rendezvous with his Azraq companions. He found them there, their previous anxiety over his capture replaced by amazement at his escape.
“I told them a merry tale of bribery and trickery,” Lawrence recounted, “which they promised to keep to themselves, laughing aloud at the simplicity of the Turks.” That same afternoon, the group set out on horseback for the seventy-mile return to Azraq.
So, in brief, was Lawrence’s account of that awful day—in brief, because the story of his brutalization at Deraa would extend over five lurid and excruciating-to-read pages in Seven Pillars. Yet there is something in the sheer accumulation of such ghastly detail that serves to cloud the narrative, to make vague what really happened. In describing his wrists being twisted until they “cracked,” did Lawrence mean they were broken? And was he actually raped? There are several euphemistic clues to suggest so, but just as many to suggest the opposite. Even more puzzling are those lingering descriptions of his torture that take on a vaguely lascivious, voyeuristic quality. When he was lanced with the bayonet, for example, Lawrence noted that “the blood wavered down my side, and dripped to the front of my thigh. [Hajim] looked pleased and dabbled it over my stomach with his finger-tips.” Later, while being kicked in the ribs after his flogging, he would recall that “a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.”
Under the weight of such precise and overwhelming detail, many Lawrence biographers—most, in fact—have concluded that the incident at Deraa simpl
y could not have happened as he described, even that it didn’t occur at all. Put plainly, how could anyone subjected to the cruelties Lawrence claimed to have endured at Deraa been capable of escape? Even allowing for the fantastic string of good luck that brought him to that point, how did a man whose wrists had been “cracked” shortly before manage to climb out a window? Flogging so disrupts the central nervous system that many victims have difficulty even standing for several hours after receiving as few as thirty lashes; lashed exponentially more, how was Lawrence able to walk several miles through an enemy town unnoticed, then immediately set out on a seventy-mile horseback ride?
The implausibilities grow in light of Lawrence’s subsequent actions. Just two days after returning to Azraq, he embarked on an arduous four-day camel ride to Aqaba. Once there, he made no mention of his Deraa ordeal to his British comrades. Questioned years later, several would recall that Lawrence had seemed preoccupied upon his return, one going so far as to say he was “pale and obviously distraught,” but none reported seeing any cuts or bruises on their colleague, or that he displayed any obvious signs of physical discomfort. Indeed, upon seeing his protégé less than three weeks after the Deraa incident, David Hogarth would write to his wife that Lawrence looked “fitter and better than when I last saw him.”
Casting further doubt on the Deraa story as rendered in Seven Pillars is the radically different first version that Lawrence provided nineteen months after the event. It was contained in a June 1919 letter to his army friend, Colonel Walter Stirling, and Lawrence backed into the account by way of listing the various betrayals of the Algerian turncoat, Abd el Kader. Not only had the Algerian sabotaged his Yarmuk bridge operation, Lawrence explained to Stirling, but he had been recognized by Hajim Muhittin, the Deraa governor, “by virtue of Abd el Kader’s description of me. (I learnt all about his treachery from Hajim’s conversation, and from my guards.) Hajim was an ardent pederast 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 after some difficulty. Hajim sent me to the 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. I got back to Azrak very annoyed with Abd el Kader.”
When measured against that in Seven Pillars, this account has the unique quality of being simultaneously both more and less plausible. Absent the gothic cruelties described in the book, perhaps a Lawrence “not as hurt as he thought” would have had the physical wherewithal to escape. On the other hand, if Hajim had truly recognized him—this at a time when there was a 20,000-Turkish-pound bounty on Lawrence’s head—it seems utterly absurd that he would leave such a prize unguarded in a hospital overnight. It’s also a bit hard to imagine that a chief topic of conversation among Lawrence’s captors as they set to abusing him would be of Abd el Kader’s role in unmasking him.
But despite all this, there are strong indications that something happened in Deraa. Many of those who knew Lawrence best would report a change in his personality, an even greater remoteness, dating from around that time. It was also soon afterward that he began organizing his personal bodyguard, a detail of some fifty or sixty elite warriors who from then on would be in his almost constant company.
And as it turns out, Lawrence gave yet a third account of what had occurred in Deraa, one that suggests his experience there was very different—and in some respects, a great deal worse—from that which he told Stirling or presented to the outside world. It came in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of writer George Bernard Shaw, in 1924.
Lawrence became close friends with the Shaws after the war, with Charlotte Shaw assuming a kind of mother-confessor role in his life, or, as Lawrence put it, “the solitary woman who lets me feel at ease with her in spite of it all.” Presumably in response to a question from Charlotte Shaw, he wrote, “About that night. I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book and wrestled for days with my self-respect, which wouldn’t, hasn’t let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with: our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgivable matter, an irrevocable position, and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living.… You may call this morbid, but think of the offence and the intensity of brooding over it for these years.”
While rendered with his trademark obliqueness, this account suggests an altogether different picture of Deraa: that Lawrence surrendered to his attacker’s advances in order to avoid being tortured—or at least to bring it to an end. If so, it not only might explain how he was able to escape—the physical torture being minimal—but why he would tell his Azraq companions “a merry tale” and swear them to secrecy, why he would make no mention of the episode to his British comrades in Aqaba, and why he would continue to dissemble about it forever after.
But if he escaped the worst of physical torture, it came at the price of a complex constellation of psychological ones. As any victim of rape or torture can attest, perhaps the most difficult aspect of the trauma to reconcile is not the pain or even the fear of the experience, but a profoundly felt, if utterly undeserved, sense of humiliation. Lawrence was apparently both raped and tortured. While potentially devastating to most anyone, in Lawrence’s case such a trial also cut to the very core of his self-image. Since childhood, he had honed in himself the credo of stoicism, the bedrock belief that he had the ability to endure most any suffering or hardship, but now that faith had deserted him at his most desperate and vulnerable moment. Possibly further added to this—especially if the theory that Lawrence was a severely repressed homosexual is given credence—was the element of sexual self-loathing the ordeal likely inspired. Had he given in out of fear of pain or death, he probably asked himself ever afterward, or because he was secretly drawn to the act? Little wonder, then, that someone enduring such a trauma might wish to adorn its memory with staggering violence, the kind of violence that offers an absolution of guilt by making all questions of will or resistance moot.
There is another compelling reason to believe something deeply scarring occurred to Lawrence at Deraa, and something more along the lines of what he described to Charlotte Shaw than what he told Walter Stirling or wrote in Seven Pillars. In ten months, he would return to that railway town in Syria, and there Lawrence would commit some of his most brutal acts of the war, acts that would carry the very strong scent of vengeance.
ON THE EVENING of December 4, 1917, the leading citizenry of Beirut gathered for a banquet in honor of Djemal Pasha. “Every time I come to Beirut,” Djemal began his speech, “I observe that the inhabitants are very loyal. This has filled me with affection for them. I take this opportunity of offering them my thanks for their kindness towards me.”
It was a bold tack for the Syrian governor to take, since his relationship with the city had actually always been a contentious one. With Beirut long regarded as a crucible of Arab nationalism, Djemal had exiled hundreds of its citizens on the suspicion of disloyalty, and the surrounding Lebanon region had suffered disproportionately—many believed quite deliberately—in the famines that had ravaged wartime Syria. Then there was the matter of the twenty-five alleged anti-Turk conspirators, unmasked in the documents purloined from the shuttered French consulate, that Djemal had ordered hanged in the city’s Place des Canons in two separate mass executions. By the time of his banquet in December 1917, Place des Canons had already been dubbed Martyrs’ Square by Beirut’s residents, a name it officially carries today.
Not that any of the assembled notables were likely to quibble over Djemal’s generous words, considering that they had gathered that evening by way of farewell. After three tumultuous years, the volatile military man from the island of Lesbos was leaving his posts in Syria, and even if his departure was officially described as temporary, everyone in the banquet hall, including Djema
l, knew this was a fiction.
As part of a reorganization recently engineered by Enver Pasha, control of the Ottoman armies in Syria had been handed over to a new German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn. As a sop, Djemal had been named commander in chief of Syria and Western Arabia—a fine-sounding position, certainly, but more impressive if there’d been an actual army to go with it. “A sort of commander-in-chief second class,” observed Djemal’s private secretary, Falih Rifki. “The artillery, the machine guns, the rifles and the swords were put under the German’s orders, while Djemal Pasha’s share was that grand title to put over his signature.… It was like the honorary rank of pasha which we used to give to Bedouin sheikhs in the empty desert.”
If calculated to offend Djemal’s sense of honor, the move worked; resigning his various positions, he had announced his intention to return to Constantinople. To the degree that he blamed Enver for his downfall, Djemal appeared to exact some small revenge in his Beirut speech when he got around to mentioning the executions in the city’s Place des Canons, a bit of unpleasantry that still clearly rankled some of his listeners: “It is true that some time back I hanged certain Arabs,” he offered. “I did not do this of my own accord, but at the insistence of Enver Pasha.”
Djemal was leaving behind a record as contradictory as the man himself. While his public vow to conquer Egypt had led to fiasco in the Sinai, he could take some credit for his army’s two successful stands against the British at Gaza. He had overseen an array of ambitious modernization efforts across Syria—paved and widened city streets, electrification, new parks and mosques and municipal buildings—even as hundreds of thousands of his subjects, perhaps as many as a million, had died from starvation and disease. He had tried to ameliorate the suffering of the Armenians, at the same time that he gained a reputation as a persecutor of the region’s Jews. And while his hard-line approach had tamped down any rebellious ardor among Arab nationalists in Syria—in none of its provinces had there been a significant uprising during his tenure—his kinder, gentler approach toward King Hussein in the Hejaz had badly backfired.
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