But the resolve palled after his return to Clouds’ Hill, where the strain of leisure became greater as it released the activity of his mind. In a letter to Eric Kennington early in May, he wrote “Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do puzzle me and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it. That’s the feeling.”
If he could not solve the puzzle, he might ease the strain by recourse to a familiar outlet—his motorcycle. That tried friend still lay there, mutely appealing: he answered the call. And thus his last call came. On the morning of Monday, May 13th, he rode into Bovington Camp to send a telegram: on the way back he was seen to swerve suddenly in passing a couple of boys who were cycling the same way and the next moment the motorcycle was “twisting and turning over and over again along the road.” The only independent witness declared that T.E. had just passed “a black car” before his swerve to avoid the boys, but these were certain they had not passed any car—a conflict of evidence which gave a Enal tinge of mystery to the accident. T.E. lay in the road, unconscious, his face covered with blood. He was picked up by an army lorry which happened to come along, and taken to the military hospital—which might seem a final touch of irony. But no effort was spared by those in charge during the days that followed, “and meantime a vast public hung in anxiety on the news that filtered through a cordon of privacy.
For six days he lay unconscious, kept alive when most of his functions had stopped by a vitality that amazed the doctors. On the seventh, he passed.
And thus, on a Sunday, there dawned for him the “great Sunday that goes on and on.”
THE MAN OF REFLECTION
IN attempting to sum up T.E. as a man—his personal achievement—there is something to be added to what has emerged in the course of this book. The idea I have formed of his character is, inevitably, no more than what I could see by the dim light that is one man’s understanding of another. But what I saw looked more like gold and less like brass the closer I came. Contact with many who are acclaimed by the world as great men produces disillusionment, or at least a consciousness of the limitations that encompass their powers. The same is true of a close study of their careers. In contrast, lengthening acquaintance with T.E. brought explanation of certain reservations I earlier made, while closer study of his career served to enlarge my appreciation of his achievement, personal and public.
There is a passage in the Book of Proverbs which might have been coined for him—“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”
For this he lived. He was essentially a “Crusader,” dedicated to the pursuit of an ideal. It began with the dream of freeing a race from bondage: it became, as his reflection developed, a philosophical crusade. Although formal religion did not touch him, I have come to view him as a man driven by an intense religious urge—in the deeper sense.
Through the pursuit his power grew. In dealing with men he had what Stirling has aptly described as an “uncanny ability to sense their feelings . . . ; to probe behind their minds and to uncover the well-springs of their actions.” it was uncanny. I have never known a man who seemed to have such power to read one’s thoughts. Deception seemed a vain indulgence—and only the stupid attempted it. Happily for them, sympathy was blended with his insight, so that he was filled with understanding. Only when he looked inward was his sight less sure, and his attitude unforgiving.
He knew others: himself he did not know. He saw too many facets to see himself whole. And his senses were an impediment to his mind, thus creating a drag on his spirit. Nevertheless, his wisdom kept pace with his knowledge well enough to restrain him from the abuse of his power, and to guide him in using it, as far as he would use it, for others’ benefit. If his humanity baffled him, he came nearer to fulfiling that passage in Proverbs than any man I have met or studied.
A study of history, past and in the making, seems to suggest that most of mankind’s troubles are man-made, and arise from the compound effect of decisions taken without knowledge, ambitions uncontrolled by wisdom, and judgments that lack understanding. Their ceaseless repetition is the grimmest jest that destiny plays on the human race. Men who are helped to authority by their knowledge continually make decisions on questions beyond their knowledge. Ambition to maintain their authority forbids them from admitting the limits of their knowledge, and calling upon the knowledge that is available in other men. Ambition to extend the bounds of their authority leads them to a frustration of others’ opportunity and an interference with others’ liberty that, with monotonous persistency, injures themselves or their successors on the rebound.
The fate of mankind in all ages has been the plaything of petty personal ambitions. The blend of wisdom with knowledge would restrain men from contributing to this endless cycle of folly, but only understanding can guide them towards positive progress.
T.E., by contrast, was rare among men of influence in adjusting his opinions to his knowledge. He was rarer still in avoiding abuse of the power that knowledge brings, in freeing himself from the desires that commonly divert this power into channels harmful to other men’s gifts and growth. Understanding was the explanation, the sympathetic understanding of other men and the more critical if less complete understanding of his own nature—the deficiency here was in synthesis rather than in analysis. There was less dust on his window-panes than on those of any other man I have known.
That is the Lawrence (or Shaw) one knew. But there was always a Lawrence (and Shaw) who remained elusive. His actions were so baffling sometimes, and his attitudes so variable, as to be exasperating even to friends familiar with his ways—how much more provoking must they have been to men of prejudice! But when one was tempted to accuse him of being unreasonable the echo of his own comment on the Arabs came in answer—“Their minds work just as ours do, but on different premises. There is nothing unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inscrutable in the Arabs.” T.E. could not have played the Arab so well unless he had made his mind Arab. And the Arab in him survived, even though it faded.
So did the actor. He had been too long, for the sake of a cause, “an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months without rest, and for an anxious stake.” On his art great issues had depended, and to it was largely due his extraordinary success in handling Arabs’ and others—soldiers, civil servants, and politicians. What diversity of type and purpose there was among these human elements in the Arab problem—only by suiting his appeal to each had he been able to harness such a team to his end. After playing so many parts for so long, how could he shed the habit of acting? Doubtless, the gift was inborn. Probably, the circumstances of his early life had developed it. In boyhood he had been painfully self-conscious, and even when achievement had removed cause for it he remained too conscious of fate’s first injustice. This was an addition to the usual buffets suffered by those who are aloof from the herd, and from which sensitive individuals are apt to seek a shield in pose and pretension.
What man, or woman, does not act—in their contacts with others? The difference is only one of degree. If the tendency was greater than normal in T.E., it was not only from capacity, but because necessity forced its cultivation. And his own awareness of it made it more difficult to discard. Rather, it egged him on, as he confessed, to “embark on little wanton problems of conduct, observing the impact of this or that approach on my hearers, treating fellow men as so many targets for intellectual ingenuity, until I could hardly tell my own self where the leg-pulling began or ended.” His fundamental honesty made this uncomfortable for him. And all his activities likewise, “They were intensely conscious efforts, with my detached self always eyeing the performance from the wings in criticism.” One may say of him that his worst failure was his inability to become natural. It was reduced, and its dangers redressed, by his quickness of self-perception. The recoil, however, was to
o quick for his comfort. It was far easier for friends to overlook his faults than for him. “I was a standing court-martial on myself.” All motives are mixed, as none saw more clearly than he. Charitable to others, he was hard on himself—too ready to exaggerate the less worthy elements in the mixture.
That acute self-perception and excessively sharp recoil may explain much. The more one came to appreciate his wisdom the more surprising seemed his failure to free himself from trivial inconsistencies. One wondered that a man so powerful in reason could take refuge in small irrationalities. That a man so truthful was apt to indulge in needless mystification. That a man so honest was prone to little deceits of a harmless kind; also to self-justification, even though he affected to disregard it and certainly despised it. His self-depreciation, like his rejection of distinctions, had a vein of vanity.
The further one probed the more one realized the immensity of his knowledge; yet one noted a knack, conscious or not, of circling round the gaps; and of masking the movement by producing some rare fragment of knowledge that was likely to have a surprise effect. One noted, too, that he was less ready to make a direct acknowledgment of ignorance over a specific point than to admit a more general limitation. Then there was his chameleon-like tendency to adapt himself to his surroundings; and one sometimes caught him saying different things to different people. Few of us are devoid of this tendency, and in some measure it may be a practical necessity. If it was more marked in him than was to be expected that may have been because his standards and his stature made him more of a mark; perhaps also the tendency is inherent in the indirect approach which he so effectively applied.
Inconsistency also marked his attitude to public acclaim. Perhaps one may come near to an explanation thus—he saw its falsity, felt its glow, despised himself for feeling pleasure, found pleasure in abasement, saw falsity in his feeling—circular motion along an endless coil. He had a genuine distaste for publicity, not only, I think, because it was contrary to his sense of values, but because it clashed with his self-veiling tendency. Yet it attracted as well as amused him. Also he found momentary pleasure in exercising its attraction. The frankness with which he uncovered many aspects of himself was accompanied by intermittent coyness in concealing others—like a woman hiding her ankles while exposing her bosom. Perhaps in far more than normal measure he was both masculine and feminine.
So powerfully charged with contrasting currents, there was continuous war within him.—“reason strong enough to win, but not strong enough to annihilate the vanquished, or refrain from liking them better.” Yet there was also a wonderful blend, in the depths below the level of consciousness, so that in the content and in the effect the good vastly predominated. His faults were near the surface, his virtues profound. In contrast to one’s experience with others, the deeper one penetrated the more difficult it became to gauge his limits—until one was forced to admit that here was a man bigger in personality and intellect than any other one had known. His greatness can be judged to some extent by his works, if examined, and by the impression he made on others, in close contact.
But it was his fundamental goodness, less expected, which impressed itself still more as acquaintance extended. Such goodness, unlike the near-surface faults, does not lend itself to analysis. But we know it when we feel it—if responsive. So far as distinction is possible, one may say that his positive virtues embraced an intense kindliness, an unstinted generosity, an essential fairness, a compassion which was the truer for being free from sentimentality, a purity of motive so fine that it vomited at any flavour of impurity, a scrupulousness in honouring any promise even when merely an agent, a thirst for truth, and a high courage that could carry him on when the spirit quailed and the flesh weighed down. Negatively, his goodness lay in subduing the temptations to which his supercharged faculties and senses impelled him.
In that never ending struggle he suffered sorely. It was easier for others, who felt the outward radiation, to appreciate the predominance of his virtues. He was too conscious of the conflict within. And because of this also, he may have underrated, even while confessing, the pleasure he obtained “between the walls of living.” His life had more harmony than his thought. If this was a turmoil, it was travelling in a state of contentment—like a typhoon in the Pacific.
It may have been to the loss of the age he lived in that his sense of futility imposed too strong a check on his activity. I cannot see, if perhaps because of my own limitations of vision, any sufficient justification for the way he abstained from contributions to knowledge for which he was peculiarly fitted. His balance tipped too far on the negative side: perhaps because he took the sins of the world on himself in a too grand gesture of atonement: perhaps because of a tendency to adjust his philosophy to his inclination when the two did not fit yet did not directly clash.
But the loss to his age may be far outweighed in time to come if what he contributed to the current of thought—not least by living his ideas—continues its radiation. The message is more positive than the man.
THE MAN OF ACTION
No man has come so close to equal greatness in action and reflection. The perfect balance may be unattainable. T.E. himself came to this conclusion. His progress in the reflective sphere caused him to forgo the prizes that were within his reach as a man of action. Perhaps it is better so for the world.
Without the fullness of understanding he attained, his public achievement would have made him a public danger, of the Napoleonic order. On the other hand, without that understanding it is questionable whether his performance would have been so great, for his resources were far less and his circumstances more difficult than those of most men who have carved history with the sword. The legend that has grown up round his personality has obscured rather than enhanced the significance of his military achievement. What the Arab campaign meant to the course of the World War I have already brought out. What it means in the evolution of war is a question worth pondering.
There is an essential difference between the Arab campaign as it was guided by Lawrence and the normal irregular campaign of the past. It was waged against an enemy who, however backward in civilization, was as dependent as any Western State on the lifeline of modern civilization—the railway. An enemy, too, who had been compelled by the unmilitary march of progress to adopt the mechanical tools of modern warfare, and was thus bound to forfeit the value of his man-power, if his material became exhausted. Against this enemy, the Arab campaign was conducted on an applied theory which inverted the conventional military doctrine in such a way as to convert Arab weaknesses into strength and Turkish strength into a weakness.
At first glance the very completeness of this inversion would suggest that it widens the past gulf between regular and irregular warfare. But on reflection one can see that its success turned on new material conditions which are even more marked in modern regular warfare. No civilized nation can maintain itself long without the railway, or maintain war without munitions. What the Arabs did yesterday the Air Forces may do tomorrow. And in the same way—yet more swiftly. Mobile land forces such as tanks and motor guerrillas may share in the process.
Moreover, this new exploitation of the changed “biological” conditions of war may be coupled with a more calculated exploitation of the psychological conditions—to which Lawrence also showed the way. To disarm is more potent than to kill. And in this process of disarming, materially and mentally, the old concentration of force is likely to be replaced by an intangibly ubiquitous distribution of force—pressing everywhere yet assailable nowhere.
Here is the wider lesson that Lawrence’s campaign offers. And it is a supreme tribute to his military insight that in developing his theory of irregular warfare he was conscious of its application to all warfare—although he left this to the perception of those who could read between the lines.
To remove any doubts on this point I add an extract from a letter he wrote me in 1928.
“The logical system of Clausewitz is too complete
. It leads astray his disciples—those of them, at least, who would rather Eght with their arms than with their legs. There is, in studying the practice of all decent generals, a striking likeness between the principles on which they acted—and often a comic divergence between the principles they framed with their mouths. A surfeit of the hit school brings on an attack of the run method; and then the pendulum swings back. You, at present, are trying (with very little help from those whose business it is to think on their profession) to put the balance straight after the orgy of the late war. When you succeed (about 1945) your sheep will pass your bounds of discretion and have to be chivvied back by some later strategist. Back and forward we go.”
That letter is a further light not only on his military ideas but on his post-war career—on the withdrawal from activity which puzzled the world he lived in. A man of such historical sense could not fail to see the truth that underlies the cynical epigram—“History teaches us that we do not learn from history.” it helped him to quench his desire to contribute to what could only be another swing of the pendulum. And he thought in periods too long to make it a matter of much importance that for a time—hypothetically 1945—the pendulum might be near the mean.
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