Yet putting paid to all that had occurred so as to no longer have to think about it may well have been a matter of personal survival. What’s sadly evident in many of Lawrence’s postwar letters to friends, as well as in comments he made to his contemporary biographers, is that he suffered from many of the symptoms of what was known at the time as “shell shock,” and what is today referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Over the remainder of his life, Lawrence suffered from recurrent nightmares, endured severe bouts of depression—several of which included the contemplation of suicide—and gradually cut himself off from many of his former friends amid an intense desire to be alone.
He may have been particularly primed for this continuing torment by his own actions on the battlefield. As a boy, he had been obsessed with the tales of King Arthur’s court and the chivalric code, had dreamed of leading a heroic life. In the reality of war, however, Lawrence had seen men blown to bits, often by his own handiwork, had left wounded behind to die, and had ordered prisoners to be killed. Just as any thoughtful person before or after him, what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.
Also indicative of Lawrence’s craving for anonymity were the circumstances of the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In 1922, he had handprinted just eight copies of his wartime memoir for close friends, but as word of the book spread, Lawrence was urged to release it publicly. His compromise was to produce a slightly abridged two-hundred-copy run of Seven Pillars in 1926, along with a vastly shorter mass-market version, Revolt in the Desert. The books might have made Lawrence wealthy, but he donated all royalties from the hugely successful Revolt in the Desert to an RAF charity, and refused to publish another edition of Seven Pillars during his lifetime.
While publicly denigrating his work as a trifle, Lawrence confided to a friend the secret hope that his memoir might join the canon of the very best of English literature. In this, he was to be disappointed. In truth, Seven Pillars is a fabulously uneven book, its occasional soaring lyricism and startling psychological insights all too often subsumed by long disquisitions on topography and a riot of local place names and fleeting characters likely to leave the reader struggling. Despite the glowing and insistent plaudits of many—certainly Lawrence deserves great credit for being one of the first modern writers to present an unflinching look at the grotesqueness of war—Seven Pillars remains one of those books that, as even an admiring critic acknowledges, “is more often praised than read.”
After his first attempt at disappearing into the RAF as “Airman Ross” failed—he was quickly unmasked by the British press—Lawrence joined the Royal Tank Corps under the name of T. E. Shaw, then quietly transferred back into the RAF in 1925. For the next decade, he occupied a succession of lowly positions within the air corps—for nearly a year he served as a simple base clerk at a remote RAF base in India—while also engaging his mechanical bent with work on a new generation of high-speed military rescue boats. In 1929, he bought a tiny cottage in rural Dorset, Clouds Hill, just a mile from the Bovington Camp where he had served in the Tank Corps, and this became his refuge from a still-clamoring public and press. While he continued to write—in 1928, Lawrence penned an account of his postwar military service, The Mint, followed by a translation of Homer’s Odyssey—the bulk of his time was devoted to his decidedly prosaic military duties, with off hours spent riding his beloved Brough motorcycle through the English countryside or voraciously reading at Clouds Hill. Despite the assertion of some biographers that this period in Lawrence’s life was also highly productive and interesting, it is hard to escape the image of a sad and reclusive man, his circle of friends and acquaintances steadily dwindling to a mere handful, and many of these only maintained by the occasional quick note from Lawrence explaining why he couldn’t see them. “Please apologize humbly for me to Mrs. S.F. [Newcombe],” he wrote Stewart Newcombe in February 1929, after apparently failing to show for a scheduled visit. “Something has gone wrong with the works, and I can’t wind myself up to meet people.”
One who insisted on a face-to-face meeting was Faisal Hussein. During a state visit to England in 1925, the now king of Iraq and Lawrence attended a luncheon at a politician’s estate. It proved a rather awkward gathering, with the two old comrades in arms seeming to have little to say to each other, and Lawrence discomfited by their host’s constant invocation of “the good old days.” “I’ve changed,” Lawrence wrote his confidante, Charlotte Shaw, afterward, “and the Lawrence who used to go about and be friendly and familiar with that sort of people is dead. He’s worse than dead. He is a stranger I once knew.”
During another state visit, in 1933, King Faisal had to lean on his contacts in the British military to all but order “Private Shaw” to a meeting.
By early 1935, Lawrence resolved to leave the RAF, even as he dreaded the long and unstructured days that lay ahead of him. His apprehensions proved quite accurate. As he wrote to a friend on May 6 from Clouds Hill, just two months into his retirement, “at present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die. Let’s hope that will not be my continuing state.”
It would not be. Precisely a week later, on the morning of May 13, Lawrence rode his motorcycle to Bovington Camp to send a telegram. On his return, just a few hundred yards from Clouds Hill, he swerved to avoid two bicycling boys on the narrow road. Clipping the back tire of one of the bicycles, he lost control of the motorcycle and crashed, striking his head on the asphalt. Suffering from massive brain injuries, Lawrence lingered in a coma at the Bovington Camp hospital for six days, before finally dying early on the morning of May 19, 1935. He was forty-six.
Among the pallbearers at his funeral were his old friends Ronald Storrs and Stewart Newcombe, while those in attendance included Winston Churchill and the poet Siegfried Sassoon. For the occasion, King George V sent a message to Lawrence’s surviving younger brother, Arnold. “Your brother’s name will live in history, and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country.”
Churchill’s eulogy was rather more loquacious: “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.”
It’s easy to read in Churchill’s last sentence an allusion to the new danger that by 1935 was already building over Europe: the rise of Nazi Germany. If Churchill imagined, however, that a living Lawrence might have played a signal role in meeting that danger, he was surely mistaken. As Lawrence himself had been trying to tell the world for many years, the blue-eyed “warrior of the desert” had passed from the scene long before, lost to the first great cataclysm of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
The broad scope of this book required research in some twenty different governmental archives or private collections on three continents. It would have been an utterly impossible task without the very able group of historians and researchers who assisted me in various aspects. These include Tara Fitzgerald, Claire Flack, Lars Luedicke, Frederic Maxwell, Andrea Minarcek, Kevin Morrow, Eamonn O’Neill, and Anna Van Lenten. Of these I must especially thank Kevin Morrow, who not only undertook research trips to California and Israel on my behalf, but also oversaw the collection, organization, and translation of both French and German archive material; I’m sure I would still be quite at sea with this project without his help.
I would also like to thank the curators and administrators of the various archives and private collections that I sought assistance from over the course of this project, all of whom were unfailingly helpful and generous with both their time and advice. While these are just a fraction of all those who helped me, I’d particularly like to thank Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford; Liz Gray, David P
feiffer, and Eric Van Slander at the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marion Freudenthal and Ilonit Levy at the NILI Museum, Zichron Yaakov; Alex Rankin at Boston University; Carol Leadenham at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and Lynsey Robertson at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge University. I must also single out Howard Diamond and the staff of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who made it something of a personal crusade to pinpoint when a sandstorm was likely to have struck Beersheva in early January 1914.
While it was my intention in this book to consult original source material as much as possible, there are two authors to whom I feel especially indebted. My research on Curt Prüfer would have taken infinitely longer—and, in fact, would have still been incomplete—without the pioneering work of Professor Donald McKale at Clemson University, and his two seminal books, Curt Prüfer and War by Revolution. I also want to thank Professor McKale for taking the time to read an early version of the book, and for his very helpful comments. Second, the author of any book in which T. E. Lawrence is a significant presence must acknowledge the trailblazing achievements of Jeremy Wilson in his authorized biography, Lawrence of Arabia. While I respectfully disagree with Mr. Wilson on several aspects of Lawrence’s actions in Arabia, I am deeply indebted to the astounding amount of scholarly research he has done on Lawrence, which has greatly aided all of us who have followed in his wake.
I also benefited from a small group of advance readers on this project, some of whom read for historical accuracy and others for more stylistic concerns. In the first category, in addition to Donald McKale, I want to sincerely thank Roberto Mazza at Northern Illinois University and Thomas Goltz at Montana State University, both of whom were extremely generous with their time and deeply insightful with their suggestions. In the latter category, I wish to thank my friends Michael Fields, Wilson Van Law, and Seth McDowell for valiantly struggling through a problematic early draft of the book, and most especially Frances Shaw, who, without complaint, suffered through several more. Also in this category I must include my wonderful agent and dear friend, Sloan Harris, at International Creative Management Partners, a man who always knows how to ride that delicate line of simultaneously providing encouragement and cracking the whip.
Finally, while I can’t recall this being the case for any other book I’ve written, I still remember the precise moment when the genesis of this one occurred: during a dinner conversation with my very good friend and editor, Bill Thomas, in the winter of 2008. I think we both instantly knew this was the book I needed to write—in fact, had been working toward writing for most of my journalistic career—and even if I have occasionally cursed Bill’s name since then whilst in the midst of writing or research difficulties, I’m eternally grateful for the enthusiasm, patience, and diligence he’s shown these past years in bringing the idea to fruition. I would also like to thank all the staff of Doubleday for tolerating my semi-permanent presence in their offices for several months while finishing the book’s fact-checking and copyediting, especially Melissa Danaczko and Coralie Hunter for their unstinting helpfulness in dealing with both my researching idiosyncrasies and computer illiteracy.
And last, I want to thank all the friends and family members who have been so tolerant of my canceled meetings, unreturned phone calls, and general absence of the past five years. With the book now done, I propose to be a much more attentive friend and relative going forward.
Notes
While I have drawn from a very wide variety of archival and secondary materials in this book, a few sources specifically related to the book’s principal subjects proved especially valuable. As far as archival material is concerned, these are the diaries of Aaron Aaronsohn (NILI Museum and Archives, Israel); the diaries of Curt Prüfer (Hoover Institution, Stanford University); the unpublished memoir of William Yale (Boston University); and the World War I–era records of the British Foreign and War Offices (National Archives, Kew, England). Since some of those records were declassified within the past decade, for certain aspects of the book I had the opportunity to draw on material not previously available.
In addition, I am indebted to Donald McKale for his biography Curt Prüfer: German Diplomat from the Kaiser to Hitler, which is one of the few sources of material for Curt Prüfer’s early life. With regard to T. E. Lawrence, John Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence is the most incisive psychological portrait ever drawn of the man. Most of all, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jeremy Wilson and his authorized biography, Lawrence of Arabia; due to Wilson’s exhaustive research, his work remains the starting point for all serious Lawrence scholarship.
I also relied on a number of other primary and secondary materials for historical background on specific aspects in the book—for example, prewar Germany—and I have noted in corresponding endnotes those sources that I found particularly useful.
Abbreviations Used in Notes
BU—William Yale Papers, Boston University.
GLLD—George Lloyd Papers, Churchill College.
HO—Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
MSP—Mark Sykes Papers, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College.
NARA—National Archives (U.S.).
PAAA—Political Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes).
PRO—National Archives (formerly Public Records Office) (UK):
PRO-ADM—Admiralty Records.
PRO-CAB—British Cabinet Records.
PRO-KV—Security Service Records.
PRO-FO—Foreign Office Records.
PRO-WO—War Office Records.
SADD—Sudan Archives, University of Durham.
UNH—William Yale Collection, University of New Hampshire.
UT—T. E. Lawrence Collection, University of Texas.
YU—William Yale Collection, Yale University.
ZY—NILI Museum and Archives, Zichron Ya’aqov, Israel.
Introduction
1 On the morning: Lawrence’s official rank at this time was actually lieutenant colonel, but several weeks earlier he had been temporarily given full colonel status so as to facilitate his speedy return to Great Britain. As a result, from October 1918 onward, he was frequently referred to in official correspondence as “Colonel Lawrence.”
2 “I have some presents”: Lawrence to Liddell Hart, notes on interview of July 29, 1933, p. 2; UT Folder 1, File 1.
3 As a boy: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 562.
4 In subsequent years: Lord Stamfordham, King’s Private Secretary, to Lawrence (Shaw), January 1 and 17, 1928: A. W. Lawrence, Letters to T. E. Lawrence, pp. 184–86. See also Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, pp. 392–93, and Churchill in A. W. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), 193–94.
5 “a sideshow”: Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 274.
Chapter 1: Playboys in the Holy Land
1 “I consider this new crisis”: Djemal Pasha, quoted in Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War, p. 19.
2 By dawn, the winds: Yale, It Takes So Long, chapter 1, p. 10; BU Box 7, Folder 7.
3 Now that the khamsin had passed: Yale wrote several different, and slightly conflicting, accounts of his first meeting with T. E. Lawrence, including in his memoir, It Takes So Long. The most detailed, and the source for most information here, is his article “T. E. Lawrence: Scholar, Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat” (undated, but presumably written shortly after Lawrence’s 1935 death); BU Box 6, Folder 1.
4 The previous day: Yale, The Reminiscences of William Yale, p. 7; Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, 1973.
5 Fluent in Arabic: McKale, War by Revolution, p. 22, n. 18.
Chapter 2: A Very Unusual Type
1 A Very Unusual Type: Many of the details on T. E. Lawrence’s childhood and early years are drawn from the two most definitive books on the topic, John Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder, and Jeremy Wilson’s Lawrence of Arabia
; William Yale provided information about his childhood and youth in the “Prelude” to It Takes So Long, his unpublished memoir. For this period in Curt Prüfer’s life, Donald McKale’s Curt Prüfer is almost quite literally the only source available, his material drawn from interviews he conducted with Prüfer’s son, Olaf, since deceased.
2 “Can you make room”: Hogarth to Petrie, July 10, 1911, as cited by Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, p. 85.
3 “I think it time”: Lawrence, The Home Letters, p. 23.
4 “We had a very happy childhood”: Robert Lawrence quoted in A. W. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence by His Friends (1954 edition), p. 31.
5 There, the couple assumed: The genesis of the Lawrence family name was actually a good deal more complicated, for as T. E. Lawrence learned from his mother in 1919, she too had been born illegitimate. The name appearing on her birth certificate was Sarah Junner, and she had only adopted the Lawrence surname, that of her presumed father, as a teenager. This casualness with surnames might also help explain the apparent ease with which T. E. later assumed aliases of his own, trading in Thomas Edward Lawrence for John Hume Ross, and then Ross for Thomas Edward Shaw.
6 “You can imagine”: Thomas (Chapman) Lawrence (undated); Bodleian MS Eng C 6740.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 71