One may sympathize with their feeling, even if one despises their feebleness. T.E.’s scrupulous correctness can be devastating. I shall not easily forget how once, when he was with me in uniform, at a country hotel, a somewhat “bouncing” person, an officer who had newly joined his station, recognized him and tried to improve the opportunity by displaying a patronizing familiarity. At his intrusion T.E. rose to attention and to all his conversational gambits replied with a chilling deference that even the hardened intruder could not long withstand. The incident was highly entertaining, and instructive, to the observer.
The Schneider Cup Race, and the attention it drew, inevitably gave an opportunity to those who resented T.E.’s normally invisible presence. The Italian Air Minister, General Balbo, was the unconscious prime cause of the cloudburst. An R.A.F. working party was put on to clean the slipway for the British machines, but the Italian one was left slippery with green scum. Balbo, who knew T.E. of old, came up to ask his aid. T.E., as careless of formality as Balbo when a job was to be done, promptly secured a party of aircraftmen to clean the Italian slipway. But neither the conversation nor the intervention had passed unnoticed.
Then on the day of the race, various political personages, prominent members of the late Government, noticed him, and paused for a talk. They could scarcely have done otherwise in view of past association.
But a few days later the storm broke. T.E. was served a sentence of expulsion from the Air Force—by the original arrangement, his contract of service could be terminated at any time on either party’s initiative. Various influential friends, however, pleaded his cause, to which Trenchard himself was not unwilling to listen. Still more effective, perchance, was the dropping of a hint in Foreign Office quarters that if T.E. was discharged from the Air Force he might take the opportunity of paying a visit to Iraq.
The sequel, after a few anxious days, was that on September 30th—a fateful anniversary—he had a fresh interview with Trenchard, who told him that a reprieve would be granted on certain conditions. They were that, henceforth, he was strictly confined to the routine duties of an ordinary aircraft hand; that he did not fly; that he never went out of the country, even to Ireland; that he neither visited nor spoke to any “great men.” Upon asking for examples, the names of Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Birken-head, Sir Philip Sassoon, and Lady Astor were mentioned—all members of the political party then in opposition. When he inquired if Bernard Shaw came among the forbidden great, he was told “No.” Bernard Shaw, when told of the exclusion from this category, seemed slightly hurt!
T.E. accepted these hard conditions rather than leave his cherished service, although feeling that the Air Force was acting uneconomically in neglecting to get more than a daily three and sevenpence worth of work out of him.
Its loss was at least his monetary gain. The enforced abstention from intelligent work for the Air Force enabled him to continue, if still in fits and starts, a prose translation of the Odyssey, which had been commissioned from an American source and afforded him far higher rate of pay than he has ever received for an original piece of literature.
He had originally hoped to deliver it by the end of 1929, but had laid it aside for his Schneider Cup work with no regrets—“I’d rather do R.A.F. stuff than private work, that’s the truth of it; and so I gladly let everything slide when they press me.” But now, shut out from mechanics, he returned to the classics. He had leeway to make up. Although that Christmastide he “sat in a lukewarm office and slaved at Homer,” the work was still short of half-way when 1950 arrived. At the end of that year he had afresh to record—“I’m working at the Odyssey like a tiger, in great hope of finishing it next spring; it takes all my nights and half-days, and I have promised myself to have no holiday till it is over. Barring business interruptions, it should be over in April: and then for a lazy summer, with full pocket and no liabilities.” if he grew weary in the labour, he at least found that reading the Greek so carefully was good mental exercise. Six months later he was writing—“I have that Odyssey to finish by September, and no heart for it.”
It was finished soon after. The last lap had been obstructed by a fresh call to do real service for the air—and the sea! For two years he had been striving through various channels to interest the Air Ministry in the need for, and possibility of, new types of motor-boats, suited to attend seaplanes—to race out to their rescue when in trouble, rescue the crews, and buoy up the machines before they sank. In this campaign, his technical knowledge and new-found enthusiasm were equal assets, and at last, early in 1931, they bore fruit. Experimental boats were produced by contractors, and T.E. was employed to test that which had been designed by Scott-Paine. In the process, T.E. acquired an extensive knowledge of the coast of England. As a result of the trials, a large batch was ordered. They can travel 30 m.p.h., twice the speed of the old boats; they are excellent in a rough sea, carry a normal crew of two men, have a glass-roofed cabin fitted for stretchers, and the stern is designed to slide under and hold up the wings of a sinking seaplane. The comprehensiveness, simplicity and accessibility of the internal fittings have been thought out with astonishing calculation and common sense—or, rather, they would be astonishing, if one did not know that T.E. was partly responsible.
The Air Ministry, too, showed a most creditable sagacity—as well as humanity—in detailing him to watch over the building of these new speed boats, and then to test and tune them before delivering them to their stations.
One had long felt that the way to reconcile T.E.’s reviving desire for real service with his sustained refusal to accept any rank, was to employ him in an independent job, where graded authority was out of place. Even in the hierarchically minded services, the principle has long been recognized that Chaplains should hold no actual rank. T.E. might have been tacitly accepted, as he essentially served, in the role of “Chaplain Extraordinary” to the Air Force—working among the members instead of preaching to them from a pulpit, he was a greater spiritual force than the whole board of Chaplains, in raising the standard of decency, fair play and unselfish comradeship. His inspiration again might have been utilized in the development of the Auxiliary Air Force.
But it was perhaps less of a wrench to tradition to recognize that the hierarchical principle has no relation to those of mechanical engineering, and that rank confers no superior authority over a refractory carburettor. The fact that speed-boats were an extraneous element in the Air Force made it easier to stretch the service rule that ability is linked to rank. In reaching this sensible solution of the problem of T.E.’s employment the credit was largely due to Sir Geoffrey Salmond, his ever-ready helper in the Arab Campaign.
The work caused T.E. to transfer his base to Southampton Water, and from here he made long sea-excursions to the East coast and Scotland in delivering the boats, as they were built, to their future stations—“I have web feet now, and live on the water.” in this work he has continued, save for one unfortunate break in the autumn of 1932, when a Sunday paper published a story of his new activities. It shook the Air. Ministry authorities so severely that it temporarily shook him from his niche. They have a fear of publicity that is palpable except to the Admiralty or the War Office, and in connection with “Aircraftman Shaw” it is morbidly acute. It has long blinded them to the psychological value of “Colonel Lawrence’s” choice of their service, and also to the obvious answer to any Parliamentary critics that no other service has succeeded in saving the taxpayer’s pocket by securing a mechanical expert for the pay of an aircraft hand.
Happily, Geoffrey Salmond’s good sense soon restored T.E. to his chosen work, and one of Salmond’s last acts before his untimely death was to promise T.E. the means of experiment for further progress, a promise duly fulfilled by his brother, Sir John Salmond. If the direct purpose is to provide still more prompt first aid to seaplanes, the results may have an important indirect bearing on future security against a submarine campaign.
It marks a change in T
.E. that he should be so keen to achieve the goal of this experiment. A few years ago, his sole ambition seemed to be that of lasting out his engagement, which comes to an end in 1935; and he doubted whether he could do it, saying that he felt old and found the life increasingly hard. But since then, I have marked a rejuvenation, both of body and spirit. He recognizes it himself. By his own judgment, it was the exaltation of writing the Seven Pillars of Wisdom even more than the strain of the war that brought him perilously close to the border line. Gradually, he has come back, becoming “more human” in the process. Whether it be true as he suggests, that “virtue has gone out” of him, to my eyes wisdom seems more firmly established on her seven pillars.
Withal, he retains that puckish humour whose attractive fragrance Auda labelled so aptly in calling him “the world’s imp.” Puck may not lie at the roots of his being but is never far below the surface. Thus, not long ago, when he reported for duty at a new station and was asked in stereotyped form for the name and address of his next of kin in case of accident, he replied—“Oh, report it to the Editor, Daily Mail—and mind you get a special rate!” Still more recently, when Feisal died, T.E. received a telephone warning that several reporters were on their way from London by train to interview him; he jumped on a train for London, passing theirs in the opposite direction, as the most effective way of evasion. To add zest to their pursuit, however, he left behind a false trail which led them to embark on an undesired, if short, sea-trip to the Isle of Wight.
His intention is still, when he completes his service, to settle down in his Wessex cottage, a hermitage with a window to the world, through which he can emerge whenever inclined to visit friends, concerts, theatres, or merely to take a sip of the London scene. As for work, his idea is to do translations—they can be done to time table—to pay for his luxuries, but otherwise to do nothing. He knows how to enjoy doing nothing, and thinks that he has freed himself from the need of activity to anaesthetize the sense of futility. It is left for the future to show.
He certainly diffuses an atmosphere of contentment such as I have rarely felt in meeting men of active intelligence, and never among those who are actively pursuing the bubbles of what the world calls success. That feeling has grown stronger at recent meetings with him, and it led me not long ago to challenge him with the direct question—“Are you really happy?” After a moment’s reflection, he replied, “At times. No one who thinks can be really happy.” He went on to say that he had learnt very early the truth that happiness lies within, not in externals, but had also learnt later that those who did not think could be happy, the kind he lived among now. With himself, he found that happiness was intermittent—it came in “absorption.”
That reflection would seem to bring in question his present intention for the future after 1935. But I wonder whether, in ascribing greater happiness to the unthinking, he has taken account of variations in the quality of happiness—or of the value of freedom from the desires that produce active unhappiness. He may also overrate the happiness of others by ignoring the contentment he diffuses among those who come in touch with him.
CHAPTER XXIII
POSTSCRIPT
T. E. SHAW, sometime Lawrence, and now for all time “Lawrence of Arabia,” passed into unconsciousness on May 13th, 1935. That afternoon, when riding back to his cottage on “Egdon Heath,” he shot over the handlebars of his motorcycle after a sudden swerve to avoid a butcher’s boy who was cycling that way. On the 19th, he died. It was, I imagine, the way he would have chosen to go: for on his motorcycle he seemed to find the outlet from harassing thought and sense of futility. Also it was an end foreseen.
One August evening in 1933 I tried in vain to keep up with him on a run to Otterbourne along the Wessex roads. My car was fast, but “George VII” was faster, and far quicker off the mark. The way T.E. shot through traffic led me to chide him about the risks he ran, to which he retorted with a humorous defence of its essential safety, helped by an immense power of acceleration. The argument ran on, but ended suddenly when, changing to a pensive note, he said that he knew it would “end in tragedy one day.”
About a year later we came back to spend an evening in that quiet garden at Otterbourne; this time he was in my car. On the way, our talk reverted to the question of safe driving; bantering me, he remarked that only on a motorcycle was the man in charge compelled to take a fair proportion of the risk. In a big car one could hit anything, save another car, with impunity, whereas on a motorcycle one was almost certain to be killed—which was a just penalty for carelessness. He said that he would like to see all cars fitted with a backward projection from the bumper, ending in a spearhead just in front of the driver’s chest—so, that, if he hit anything, the point would pierce him. If expressed extravagantly, the idea corresponded with what I knew of his personal attitude—he would try to avoid running over a hen even, although to swerve was a serious risk on such a heavy machine as he rode.
The first of those two conversations, not alone by the words but by the way they were said, seemed at the time a communicated vision. The second strengthened it by implanting the conviction that at the moment when an accident appeared inevitable he would throw away his own life on the chance of saving the other party. Thereafter I had remained in anticipation of the news that came to me over the telephone on that Monday afternoon in May.
If a fitting end, it was a tragic waste—at least for his generation. It cut short a rest from service, and servitude, that had been hardly earned and keenly awaited. By making that rest permanent it left unsolved questions that perplexed him and his friends. For it came when he was floating in the trough of a wave.
So high was the wave that had carried him through the war and its aftermath—casting him in the ranks of the Air Force as it broke—that the fact of a second, and its height, is easy to miss. The later years of his service as an aircraftman saw a resurgence which, if unobtrusive, may itself carry further. He came perhaps to value it more. When I showed him what I had written in the previous chapter about his pervasive influence as “Chaplain’ Extraordinary” to the Air Force, he questioned its validity: but in a way that led me to surmise that the thought coincided with’his inner wish. That was confirmed when after his death I read in a letter he had written, just before it, to Robert Graves—“I have convinced myself that progress today is made not by the single genius, but by the common effort. . . . The genius raids, but the common people occupy and possess. Wherefore I stayed in the ranks and served to the best of my ability, much influencing my fellow airmen towards a pride in themselves and their inarticulate duty. I tried to make them see—with some success.”
In that self-submerging effort, self-rejuvenation came, producing a fresh effort towards concrete achievement—the development of speed-boats for the service, immediately, of the Air Force, and ultimately, of the Navy. He believed that such boats, equipped with torpedo-tubes and depth-charges, would make it impossible for another power to conduct a submarine campaign in the narrow seas against our shipping. A hostile battle-fleet would have a still poorer chance against such boats, for their own range of several hundred miles could be indefinitely extended by carrying them on oceangoing ships. I remember him, when showing me Scott-Paine’s record-breaking Miss Britain III, predicting that from it would be evolved the predominant naval weapon of tomorrow—for half the price of a 15-inch shell. In his vision of future naval warfare, a fleet would loose off several hundred of such craft, each carrying a torpedo and controlled by wireless. Only a direct hit could stop them, and no gun was likely to hit such targets—almost flush with the water and travelling at 60 miles an hour. But beyond this effect on naval warfare was the revolution foreshadowed in ship design; for he held that the basic idea of these speed-boats had a wider application, and that the ships of the future would likewise run over the surface of the sea instead of pushing through it.
Still more than in his Arabian phase, he viewed his own part as the creation of opportunity for others. To his powers of
influencing thought and action was due, he felt, the acceptance of the idea. He gave himself to the service of those who had the power of invention—to ease their path by turning the flank of entrenched conservatism.
Among the by-products of this new development was one that when first rumored caused some sensation. Late in 1933 stories appeared in the American Press that “Lawrence of Arabia” had been playing the part of a human target for aircraft dropping live bombs, whereupon certain London papers, dismissing the stories as fantastic, referred to them as an example of the too active transatlantic imagination. But they had a foundation in fact. Since July 1932 the Royal Air Force had been using unsinkable speed-boats, with armour over the crew and engines, as mobile targets for bombing practice. The bombs employed were the ordinary 10-lb. practice bombs of cast-iron with a smoke-compound filling, and they were dropped from as high as 15,000 feet down to under 1000 feet in diving bomb attacks. These practices took place off Bridlington on the North Sea coast, and here T.E. spent several months each summer. His connection with these armoured target-boats came through his service under the Boat Department of the Air Ministry, by whom he was employed “to consider design, to watch construction, and then to test, report and tune the finished articles.” Previously, the only mobile marine target had been the old battleship H.M.S. Centurion, which was expensive to run and limited in the practice it could provide. These drawbacks led the Director of Training to ask if the Boat Department could produce a towed or wireless-controlled target-boat. Whereupon, to tell the story as T.E. told it to me,
“We said, ‘Why not an armoured boat,’ and produced the required article in three or four months. Its design betrays the vices of haste, but they are cheap, safe, and afford wonderful practice. The finance people refuse the crews extra-pay, which we are pressing for—not that we think it dangerous, but damned uncomfortable! Hellish hot, smelly, and noisy. They wear ear-defenders, crash helmets and gas masks. Little else!”
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