The Tank Corps was in several ways a disappointment to him. With certain exceptions, the senior officers and N.C.O.s whom he found at the depot seemed to him too military-minded and too little mechanically-minded to be suitable for training a technical corps. Button-cleaners were the most advanced form of mechanical tool that they could understand, and he carried away from his two years’ experience a profound impression of the waste of time and intelligence. It is only fair to add that there has been a marked change for the better since then, in the Tank Corps.
If the conditions during his service were depressing to his real military sense, he found compensations elsewhere. Some of his most restful hours were spent in Thomas Hardy’s Dorset home. He also created a home of his own there, a cottage in which he intends to settle down when his service in the Air Force is finished. It lies in an oasis of rhododendrons on the bleak moorland that no reader of The Return of the Native can forget.
His one extravagance is motor-cycling, and here he has always had luxurious tastes—because of his love of speed, not of comfort. The man who rides or drives at thirty miles an hour moves too fast to appreciate details, yet too slow to gain a sense of the whole as one does at sixty. Travel faster still, at eighty or ninety, and instead of travelling uphill and down dale, one has a sense of moulding the hills and dales. To T.E. this sensation of supreme speed is entirely exhilarating, because it seems to free the spirit from the bondage of human weakness, and also, I think, because it suggests the power to overcome impediments that nature and human nature place in the way of all achievement.
Such speed as T.E. desires—an ability to do ninety to a hundred miles an hour on any open stretch—costs money to secure. He has diminished the expense by favour of George Brough, the manufacturer of the Brough-Superior motor-cycle. Almost every year he has thus obtained the use of a new demonstration model at small cost to himself, save for petrol and oil—which is a considerable item. For both the horse-power and T.E.’s mileage are high. He averages from four to six hundred miles a week; if duty prevents him from going out one week he usually makes it up at the next opportunity, for the joy of motoring becomes keener with abstinence, although it never palls.
“To explain the lure of speed you would have to explain human nature; but it is easier understood than explained. All men in all ages have beggared themselves for fast horses or camels or ships or cars or bikes or aeroplanes: all men have strained themselves dry to run or walk or swim faster. Speed is the second oldest animal craving in our nature, and our generation is fortunate in being able to indulge it more cheaply and generally than our ancestors. every natural man cultivates the speed that appeals to him. I have a motor-bike income.”
But he scoffs at those of his friends who indulge their love of speed at the wheel of a car, an unresponsive and insensate vehicle compared with a motor-cycle, to which, in his opinion, only a motor-boat is superior. He admits, however, the advantages of a car in wet weather as one grows older, and says that if rich enough he would go touring with both, exchanging to the car when it rained and leaving the chauffeur to bring on the motor-cycle.
Air Force uniform, with its puttees for the calves and easily unhooked high collar, seems to him an ideal kit for motor-cycling under normal conditions, and for this reason he often travels in uniform rather than in plain clothes.
This practice sometimes produces embarrassments. I have heard from several quarters a delightful story that when, some years ago, Feisal was staying at a house in London, T.E. called on him, only to be refused admittance and then pushed down the steps by the butler, aghast at this mere “Tommy’s” impertinence; whereupon Feisal, hearing the commotion, came out and gave the butler a second, and worse shock, by embracing the disreputable intruder. When I asked T.E. about this episode recently, he said that he had no recollection of it, but admitted that he had frequently been kept waiting on a friend’s doorstep with the door shut in his face while an unbelieving servant made inquiries within. The “Air Force blue” uniform also lends itself to a different form of misunderstanding. I remember that when T.E. came round the north coast of Cornwall a few years ago in my car we had difficulty, as well as entertainment, in persuading one or two hotel-keepers that he was not “the chauffeur.”
When at Bovington, he used to make frequent trips to London on his motor-cycle—the undulating but straight stretch across the downs from Blandford to Salisbury was his favourite speed-track; he rarely crossed it without coming close to the hundred mark. He never grew tired of revisiting Corfe Castle; more recently the town walls of Southampton, unique in England, have been a constant attraction during his Air Force service in the neighbourhood. On many of these trips he took a soldier-companion on the pillion—it gave him an animate as well as an inanimate object to study and savour.
After he had completed a year’s service in the Army without spoiling his conduct-sheet, he passed the news indirectly to Trenchard in the hope that he would be readmitted to the Air Force. But no sign came, and T.E. was reluctant to force the issue, imagining that the objection might lie with Trenchard himself. Then he received from Lord Thomson, the Air Minister in the new Labour Government, a proposal that he should complete the unfinished history of the Air Force in the War.
T.E. did not view the task with relish—“the History was an appalling job which had killed Raleigh and daunted Hogarth“—and he found difficulty in picturing himself as the compiler of an Official History. Nevertheless, he was willing to consider it as a passport towards his purpose, and accordingly, offered to undertake it and even to do it without fee, if the authorities would agree to allow him back into the Air Force when the book was completed. This, he calculated, would take two years. But the Air Ministry were unwilling to concede the point, and his proposal fell through.
The early return of the Conservative Government brought an early and unexpected turn for the better in his personal prospects. For, as a result of John Buchan’s intercession at Downing Street, the political objections to his re-enlistment were smoothed away, and in August, 1925, he was transferred from the Tank Corps to the Air Force for the remainder of his engagement—seven years active and five on the reserve from March, 1923. This solution not only gratified his desire, but tickled his sense of humour, since he was back in the Air Force far quicker than if his own offer had been accepted, and without the labour of writing the History.
To add to his pleasure, he was sent to a station which went far towards fulfilling his conception of what Air Force life should be. This was Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, where the new Cadet College for the Air Force had been established. Here he was “an aircraft-hand (general purpose unskilled man) in B. Flight. Each Flight had half a dozen training machines for the cadets to learn lying: and three or four instructors, and a dozen or fifteen airmen (one-third fitters, one-third riggers, one-third aircraft-hands) to look after the machines. We did anything there was to do.” The one threat of trouble arose not from his superiors but from his fellows. At this enlistment there was no secret about his identity, and the other aircraftsmen were divided between curiosity and suspicion. Was he an official spy?
One can understand such doubts, as well as their sublime irony. They were as natural in these humble aircraftsmen as the perplexity which leads men of higher position and ambition to ask—“Why does he waste his talents in this way?” No one can hope to approach an understanding of T.E.’s choice until he has himself reflected long on a philosophy of life. The drab mind instinctively seeks a colourful explanation of the simple—hence the immense popular appeal of Secret Service tales, that romanticize the often sordid and petty realities of spying and conspiracy. The aircraft-hands who pictured T.E. as the spy of authority were no more gullible than the official heads abroad who pictured him as the spy of British imperialism. It is a delicious breakfast-table dish to read some inspired report in the foreign press, that he is engineering a vast conspiracy in the depths of Asia, when one knows that he is scrubbing a barrack-room in the depths of rural Engla
nd.
At Cranwell, T.E.’s irresistible naturalness soon overcame the doubts and the diffidence of his fellows. He has a knack of getting on with such men, because he genuinely likes them instead of merely tolerating them. In consequence his “leg-pulling” humour was not only accepted with a good grace, but became a means of pulling them together and pulling them along, so that he became an asset whose value both officers and N.C.O.s have freely acknowledged.
Now as an airman of the lowest grade, he exercised the same power of “command” by pure radiation of personality, as he had formerly, when adviser, nominally, to the Arab forces. Thus, in a different sphere, he gave one more proof that to work through men is more potent than to stand over them. The achievement is hardly more remarkable than its admission, by those who held the titular authority. It is a light on the progress that would be attainable if only the other leaders of mankind would free themselves from personal ambition— the rock on which most human efforts split and crumble.
T.E. found as much pleasure in straightening out the clerical work of his “Flight” office at Cranwell as another would find in administering a department or a dominion, and more than he himself had found in running the Arab campaign. In his spare time he completed the final revision of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. For recreation, he sipped the varied company that his collection of friends offered—with friends, as with food and drink, he thinks that the flavour can best be appreciated by a taste and is drowned by a repast.
His motor-cycle continued to be his means of access to the outer world, and the frequency of his excursions was assured by the opportunities that the Great North Road offered. On one run from Durham to Cranwell he averaged 54 m.p.h., his record run, I believe. From these excursions he usually came back laden with good things for his roommates to eat—he was as generous in spending his own scanty means in this as he was adept in “scrounging” more substantial articles for their comfort. His disarming impudence in such foraging would assuredly have won him the respect of Sherman’s famous “bummers” who went “marching through Georgia.”
It was during this time at Cranwell that he had his two narrowest escapes from serious accident since he had become T. E. Shaw. One night, bringing back sausages for supper, he struck a patch of ice in the dark at 45 m.p.h.—and the next moment found himself lying on one of the grass borders of the road with his cycle, when he found it, on the other. The second mishap was when riding up Highgate Hill; he skidded on the wet tramlines and sheared one side of his motorcycle. Yet the only time he hurt himself seriously, was when swinging the starting handle of a car that he came upon by the wayside. The driver forgot to retard the ignition, and the result was a back fire that broke T.E.’s arm. He rode back to camp with his arm dangling, waited until next morning to get the arm set, and then refused to go into hospital while it was mending.
In December, 1926, he was sent out to India. He was anxious “to dodge the publicity that would follow when Revolt in the Desert appeared.” He travelled in the troopship Devonshire and on arrival went to the Drigh Road depot of the Air Force at Karachi. Here he remained during most of his time in India, and judging by some of his letters, he found life far less attractive than at Cranwell. One reason was that he found that his pay did not go so far as in England towards providing the type of amenities he liked. The greater reason was the restriction on his freedom of movement. To the Indian Government his presence, if known, was likely to be an embarrassment, because of the wild rumours it might generate, and as Indian officialdom viewed him as the arch-disturber of their war-time policy, he deemed it wise to avoid cause for complaint. In consequence he was voluntarily “confined to barracks” throughout his time in India. By contrast with the tedium of life at Karachi, it was a relief when, after eighteen months, he was posted to the frontier. He spent a week-end, only, at Peshawar, and then went on to join, a flight at Miranshah Fort, an isolated frontier post that to’ the ordinary man would have seemed more like a sentence of confinement. He used to call himself “aircraft-hand adjutant”! it is my impression that this two-year spell in India during which he never went out of camp except occasionally when lying, retarded rather than hastened his recovery from the mind strain of the past. Bodily, he was never sick, nor did he feel the heat. While in India he extended his service to do the five reserve years on the active list.
His service in India was cut short by an indiscretion, despite his own precautions. “Aircraftman Shaw’s” presence on the frontier leaked into the American papers and produced lurid charges in the Russian papers that “Colonel Lawrence” was spying in Afghanistan, as the agent of British imperialism in a vast conspiracy against the Soviet. It is said that the Afghan Government issued a proclamation that, if seen, he was to be at once arrested; and then another, that he was to be shot on sight. Relations between the Afghan and the Indian Governments were so delicate at the time that, in deference, to repeated appeals from the British Minister in Kabul, Sir Francis Humphrys, T.E. was sent back to England early in 1929.
He was flown direct to the coast, where he embarked on the Rajputana. His quiet arrival home in February coincided with some amusing outbursts from friends of Russia. Members of the Independent Labour Party, particularly Mr. Thurtle, had just put challenging questions in Parliament about his supposed activities in Afghanistan. Mr. Saklatvala was prominent in a Communist demonstration, wherein T.E. was burnt in effigy on Tower Hill! These incidents were crowned by a contrasting joke the next month, when the “news” was announced that he had been received into the Independent Labour Party by Mr. Maxton. The foundation for this delightful report may have been the fact that, on his return, T.E. had strolled down to the House of Commons and presented himself to Thurtle and Maxton. If his visible presence convinced them that he was not spying in Afghanistan, he seems to have left them still mystified as to why any man, with freedom of choice, should elect to serve in the ranks.
While in London he saw Trenchard who asked him where he would like to go, and suggested Scotland as being well out of the way, but this sounded a chilly prospect to T.E., who much prefers heat to cold, and instead he was posted to Cattewater on Plymouth Sound, a flying-boat station. If it was far from London and from most of his friends, he found many compensations. When he had a few hours to spend outside the fenced camp, Lady Astor’s house offered a variety of company, although he could not resist teasing her with the suggestion that Cattewater had been named after her. Incidentally, the name, which had the military defect of rhyming with “backwater,” was subsequently changed to “Mountbatten.” I have heard that T. E. had a hand in “wangling” this change, which was suggested by his Commanding Officer. In doing so he put aside his own preference for the historic Danish flavour of the original name.
For he found at this station an atmosphere that approached his Air Force ideal, and a Commanding Officer, Sydney Smith, who won his enthusiastic regard. Now, for the first time since his enlistment, he began to be utilized in work that accorded more with his capacities, if not with his rank. The post of clerk in an air station office does not sound much, even though the particular clerk’s competence may elevate him in practice to the role of secretary. But in this case, it happened that the Commanding Officer was playing a prominent part in the arrangements for the Schneider Cup Race of 1929, wherein Britain, the holder, had to meet a formidable challenge from Italy, the late possessor. Thus T.E.’s role in turn received enlargement. Before long, his utility infiltrated itself into acceptance in its habitual way, so that he found himself acting as clerk to all the three Committees who shared the responsibility, Sydney Smith being the only member who was common to all three. These activities meant frequent motor runs to London and flights to Calshot, on the Solent, where the Schneider Cup course was laid out. He was even loaned the use of a privately owned light aeroplane.
The zest he developed in this work made perceptible cracks in the shell of his weariness. Only a few years before when a friend asked him why he did not use his knowledge of phot
ography and take up work in air survey, he had revealingly replied—“I feel like a beggar, starving in the gutter, who sees a loaf of bread on the other side of the road yet can’t be bothered to go and fetch it.” Now, in the summer of 1929, it began to seem that this inertia of self-determination was passing.
Unfortunately, there was also a new cloud rising on the horizon, with the advent of a new Air Minister, or, rather, the return of an old—Lord Thomson. Despite his gifts, and his proved readiness to risk his military prospects for a political conviction, he was one of the many who could not hope to understand T.E.’s attitude; even in adversity, he had been buoyed up by ambition. In a conversation soon after he came into office he showed a marked prejudice against T.E.’s retention in the Air Force. It was not a personal objection, but it was clear that annoyance at T.E.’s rejection of his original offer of the History had made him more susceptible to the adverse opinions which various officers had injected into him.
Trenchard had the vision to perceive the moral value of T.E.’s presence in the ranks of the new service he had striven so hard to create and maintain, and some of the best of his assistants shared his views. But smaller men, always apprehensive of what they cannot comprehend, disliked the idea of a critical intelligence in the ranks. Such men, unsure of themselves, become acutely uncomfortable in face of a subordinate who makes them feel inferior, and instinctively seek relief by charging him with indiscipline, or if that be impossible, suggesting that his presence is “bad for discipline.”
Lawrence of Arabia Page 41