Further on a Serdi, riding away on his camel, overtook me hobbling up the road towards Nisib. To him I explained that I had business there, and was already footsore. He had pity, and mounted me behind him on his bony camel, to which I clung the rest of the way, learning the feelings of my name saint on his gridiron. The tribe’s tents were just in front of the village, where I found Mijbil and Daher, very anxious about me, and curious to learn how I had fared. Daher had been up to Deraa in the night, and knew by the lack of rumour that the truth about me had not been discovered. I told them a merry tale of bribery and trickery, which they promised devoutly to keep to themselves, laughing aloud at the simplicity of the Turks.
We rested there the night, during which time I managed to get along towards the village, and to see the great stone bridge to the north of it, one of the most important in this neighbourhood. Then we took horse, and rode very gently and carefully towards Azrak, without incident, except that on the Giaan el Khunna a raiding party of Wuld Ali let us and our horses go unplundered, when they heard who I was.
This was an unexpected generosity, for the Wuld Ali were not yet of our fellowship; and their action revived me a little. I was feeling very ill, as though some part of me had gone dead that night in Deraa, leaving me maimed, imperfect, only half-myself. It could not have been the defilement, for no one ever held the body in less honour than I did myself: probably it had been the breaking of the spirit by that frenzied nerve-shattering pain which had degraded me to beast-level when it made me grovel to it; and which had journeyed with me since, a fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame.
When allowance is made for Lawrence’s post-Victorian avoidance of certain words, and for his dislike of the subject of sex in the first place, this is certainly one of the most horrifying descriptions of torture and male rape ever written, made even more horrifying by the knowledge that Lawrence, as so many of those who knew him confirm, hated being touched by anyone, under any circumstances. Even a friendly handshake, a pat on the back, or an affectionate embrace was torture to him, and here he was stripped naked, beaten savagely, fondled, kissed, and eventually buggered, to use the word he avoided using himself, all of it taking place in the shadow of the knowledge that if the bey’s words meant what Lawrence supposed they meant, he would be hanged at the end of it all.
Those who are critical of Lawrence have argued that he exaggerated the incident, or even invented it altogether. But the episode was not improbable—the brutality of the Turks toward their subject races was a known fact, and the practice of anal rape, while by no means restricted to the Turkish soldiery and their officers, was a recognized peril of becoming a prisoner of the Turks in World War I, as in the many earlier Balkan wars—nor was it uncommon; indeed it remains one of the dangers of warfare in the Middle East. Lawrence, given his small size, pale skin, apparent youth, and seemingly delicate body, would have looked like an obvious victim for this kind of treatment (some of the portraits painted of him after the war emphasize the androgynous quality of his features, particularly the lips); indeed it had almost happened to him earlier, before the war, when he and Dahoum were arrested as deserters and imprisoned.
Bearing in mind that no pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom were more often revised by Lawrence than those describing the incident at Deraa, or subjected to more criticism and soul-searching by his many literary advisers, including Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster, the reader will have to decide whether they carry conviction or not. There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident—on the contrary, it seems more like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918, and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.
He himself put it best, in 1924, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, who by then had become a kind of alternative mother figure: “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, & wrestled for days with myself-respect. … 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 which we are all born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living & the exercise of my not-contemptible wits & talents.
“You may call this morbid: but think of the offense, and the intensity of my brooding over it for three years. It will hang about me while I live, & afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying ‘Unclean, unclean!’ ”
Considering that the Shaws had what used to be known as un mariage blanc—that is, they were legally married and lived together as man and wife, but Charlotte remained celibate—perhaps nobody could have been better suited to understand Lawrence’s mortification and shame than she, who had all her life refused to have sex, or even to contemplate the possibility of childbirth. In this revulsion toward sex, she and Lawrence were very much alike, except that he had been violated, had given in under the pressure of pain, and had even felt, the ultimate horror, “a delicious warmth, probably sexual … flooding through me … a fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame.”
In short, he had not only been humiliated, tortured, and brutally raped, but to his horror had felt a sexual excitement that made his torturers mock him and filled him with shame. The ultimate abasement is not to be violated, after all, but to enjoy being violated, and Lawrence had discovered in himself at Deraa just what he had been at such pains all his life to avoid admitting.
Whole books have been written putting Lawrence posthumously on the analyst’s couch, but it is hardly necessary to be a professional psychoanalyst to glean from Lawrence’s description of the incident at Deraa and his later explanation to Charlotte Shaw—they were equally frank about their lives to each other—a fair understanding of what happened, and some sense of why Lawrence felt he had to atone for it. He had failed tolive up to his own standards, impossibly high as they might be—by giving in to pain and fear, by submitting himself to rape as an escape from the pain, and by discovering that despite himself he felt a forbidden sexual excitement that he could not conceal from his torturers.
Those who have doubted the story point out that the governor of Deraa, Hacim Bey, though brutal, was a notorious womanizer, and that if he really knew he had Lawrence in his hands, he would never have dared to let him go. But neither of these things is necessarily so. The bey, as we have seen, could have been one of at least two other Turkish officers in Deraa, and the phrase “I know all about you” could have meant many things. The bey, whoever he was, may have meant, “I know all about what kind of man you are, and what you like, so stop fighting against it"; indeed this is far more likely than that he knew the man standing stripped before him was Major T. E. Lawrence, CB. A Turkish officer who had such a notorious figure as Lawrence in his hands and let him escape would have been court-martialed and shot; besides, there was a substantial reward on Lawrence’s head.
Lawrence limped to safety, still suffering from the toe he had broken while destroying the train; rode back to Azrak; concealed his wounds and what had happened to him; and returned to Aqaba, where “he seemed like a wraith, so white and remote … and crept away into a tent,” and where he learned that Allenby, ahead of schedule, had given the British people what Lloyd George wanted for them as a Christmas present: Jerusalem.
Allenby had not yet entered Jerusalem, however, and he wanted Lawrence to be there when he did.
Years before, in 1898, Kaiser William II had visited Jerusalem, and had caused the Jaffa Gate to be enlarged so th
at he could ride into the city, in his glittering full uniform. At the time, a wit at the Foreign Office had remarked, “A better man than he entered the city on foot,” and this thought must have occurred to Sir Mark Sykes, ever the imperial stage manager, who telegraphed Allenby from London with the advice todismount, or get out of his automobile, and enter Jerusalem humbly on foot. Very likely Allenby, no mean stage manager himself, had already reached the same conclusion.
The Turks had abandoned Jerusalem, and for many, including Lawrence himself, the taking of the city by British and Commonwealth troops was “the most memorable event of the war.” Allenby, with an unfailing genius for the big event, was determined to make the most of his capture of the Holy City, and left orders at Aqaba that Lawrence was to join him at once. Lawrence, not unnaturally, supposed that Allenby was going to give him hell for his failure at Yarmuk, but an airplane had been sent for him, and he was flown directly to Allenby’s headquarters in the field, north of Gaza, still barefoot and in white robes. To his surprise, the interview with Allenby went better than he had imagined—the breakthrough at Gaza and Beersheba and the fall of Jerusalem had pleased Allenby so much that he didn’t seem to mind about the bridge at Tell el Shehab. He had wanted the Turks to the east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River to be harassed, preoccupied, and disorganized as he advanced from Beersheba, so that he could not be attacked on his right from the desert, and God knows Lawrence had achieved this, and with fewer than 100 armed men.
As a sign of his regard, Allenby insisted that Lawrence should be present as part of his staff when he entered the city, so Lawrence borrowed bits and pieces of uniform from the other staff officers, and resplendent with red staff collar tabs and a major’s crown on each shoulder, he walked behind Allenby on December 11, through the Jaffa Gate and into Jerusalem.
Sykes had originally hoped to write Allenby’s proclamation to the inhabitants of Jerusalem himself, and as a new convert to Zionism he wanted to include a few rousing words about the Balfour Declaration; but after due deliberation by the cabinet, Lord Curzon was asked to draft a more cautious message, merely promising to safeguard “all institutions holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims,” and declaring martial law. Within hours after the city was taken, the pattern of the future was clear: the Ashkenazi Jews were exultant that Allenby had entered the city “on the Maccabean feast of Hanukah,” though this timing had been wholly unintentional; the Arabs complained not only about that, but about their suspicion that the Jews were attempting to “corner the market” in small change; and Picot protested that the right of the French to have their soldiers, and theirs alone, guard the Holy Sepulcher was being ignored. Lawrence wrote his first letter home in more than a month to tell his family that he had been in Jerusalem, adding that he was now “an Emir of sorts, and have to live up to the title,” and that the French government “had stuck another medal” onto him. This medal was a second Croix de Guerre, which he was trying to avoid accepting, no doubt in part because it would surely have involved being kissed on both cheeks by Picot.
Storrs, who had missed the official entry, arrived to take up his surprising new duties as “the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate,” with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. It was in this capacity that Storrs first met Lowell Thomas, the brash American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and inventor of the travelogue. Thomas was a former gold miner, short-order cook, and newspaper reporter with a gift for gab, who had studied for a master’s degree at Princeton, where he also taught, of all things, oratory, and who had been sent by Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton, to make a film that would drum up Americans’ enthusiasm for the war and for their new allies, now that the United States had joined it—an early and groundbreaking attempt at a propaganda film. Thomas, his wife, and the cameraman Harry Chase set off for Europe, but one look at the western front was enough to convince them that nothing there was likely to serve their purpose, or to convince the American public that it was a good idea to send their sons to the war. They went on to Italy, but that was not much better—Italy was locked in battle with the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in circumstances that were almost as grim as the western front, and that would be described perfectly after the war, from firsthand experience, by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. There, however, Thomas learned about General Sir Edmund Allenby’s campaign against the Turks in Palestine, which sounded like more promising material for a film, and particularly for an American public to whom biblical place names—Jerusalem, Gaza, Beersheba, Galilee, Bethlehem—still had more resonance than Verdun, the Somme, or Passchendaele.
Thomas, who had the American go-getter’s ability to move like lightning when his interest (or self-interest) was aroused, quickly had himself accredited as a war correspondent; and he arrived in Jerusalem, with Harry Chase, in time to film Allenby’s entrance into the city—a worldwide scoop. Sometime later, he was buying dates on Christian Street when he saw a group of Arabs approaching. His “curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin, who stood out in sharp relief from his companions. He was wearing an agal, kuffieh, and aba such as are only worn by Near Eastern Potentates. In his belt was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of Mecca, insignia worn by the descendents of the Prophet. … It was not merely his costume, nor yet the dignity with which he carried his five feet three, marking him every inch a king or perhaps a caliph in disguise … [but] this young man was as blond as a Scandinavian, in whose veins flow Viking blood and the cool traditions of fiords and sagas. … My first thought as I glanced at his face was that he might be one of the younger apostles returned to life. His expression was serene, almost saintly, in its selflessness and repose.”
Wisely, Lowell Thomas sought out Storrs (“British successor to Pontius Pilate”), and asked him, “Who is this blue-eyed, fair-haired fellow wandering around the bazaars wearing the curved sword of—?”
Storrs did not even allow Thomas to finish his question. He opened the door to an adjoining room, where, “seated at the same table where Von Falkenhayn had worked out his unsuccessful plan for defeating Allenby, was the Bedouin prince, deeply absorbed in a ponderous tome on archeology. Introducing us the governor said, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia.’ ”
* to be fair, this was also true of Franklin D. roosevelt, and of course vastly more true of Stalin, whose sense of humor was directed at his terrified subordinates, and was distinctly cruel and sinister in tone.
* The lowest estimate for the number of Armenians murdered by the turks in 1915 is somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million.
* Stirling particularly admired Lawrence’s courage and toughness, and was a good judge of both. When told of the attempt on Stirling’s life, an Arab friend remarked incredulously, “Did they really think they could kill Colonel Stirling with only six shots?” (Safety Last, 243).
* Jemadar was the lowest commissioned rank in the indian army, the approximate equivalent of a lieutenant.
* Known as “Jemal the Lesser” to distinguish him from Jemal Pasha.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1918: Triumph and Tragedy
“Good news: Damascus salutes you.”
—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Two names had come to dominate Cairo,” Ronald Storrs wrote concerning the end of 1917: “Allenby, now striding like a giant up the Holy Land, and Lawrence, no longer a meteor in renown, but a fixed star.” It is worth noting that despite the failure of the attack on the bridge at Yarmuk and the incident at Deraa (about which Lawrence had told nobody except Clayton and Hogarth, both of whom seem to have received a strictly sanitized version of the story), Lawrence’s name was already being placed in conjunction with Allenby’s, as if they were partners, rather than a full general who was the commander in chief and a temporary major who was a guerrilla leader. Lowell Thomas was not the only person to recognize that Lawrence was a great story—perhaps the great story of the war in the Middle East—as well
as a genuine hero in a war in which individual acts of bravery were being submerged in the public’s mind by the sheer mass of combatants. People hungered for color, for a clearly defined personality, for a hint of chivalry and panache rather than the endless casualty lists and the sheerhorror of mechanized, muddy, anonymous death on a hitherto unimaginable scale. The desire for a hero was not limited to Great Britain—in Germany it would produce at about the same time the enduring cult of Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the famous Red Baron, the handsome, daring air ace, commander of the “Flying Circus,” with his bright red Fokker Triplane and his eighty victories.
Lawrence’s cult had started long before his arrival in Jerusalem; indeed it had its beginning among a much more critical group—his fellow soldiers. His flowing robes; his apparent indifference to fatigue, pain, and danger; his ability to lead desert Bedouin; and the fact that he appeared to be fighting a war of his own devising, with no orders from anybody except Allenby—all these gave Lawrence a legendary status well before the arrival of Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase. Lawrence had already mastered the art of seeking to avoid the limelight while actually backing into it—as his friend Bernard Shaw would write, years later: “When he was in the middle of the stage, with ten limelights blazing on him, everybody pointed to him and said: ‘See! He is hiding. He hates publicity.’ ”
Storrs had unwittingly introduced Lawrence to the man who would shortly make him perhaps the world’s first media celebrity and also the media’s victim. This is not the only thing that happened in Jerusalem. Lawrence gleefully records that at an indoor picnic luncheon after Allenby’s entrance into the city, François Georges-Picot announced to Allenby that he would set up a civil administration in Jerusalem, only to be fiercely snubbed by Allenby, who pointed out that the city was under military government until he himself decided otherwise. It was a bad day for Picot, who had been greeted everywhere on his way to Jerusalem (with the amiable Storrs as his traveling companion) as France’s high commissioner for Palestine, and was now reduced to the role of a mere political officer attached to the French mission. To his fury he had been placed next to Brigadier-General Clayton in the order of precedence of those following General Allenby into Jerusalem.
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Page 40