The Air Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk from the recruiting office, and Lawrence immediately went there to give Air Vice-Marshal Swann the bad news. Swann sent him back to the recruiting office in the company of a messenger from the Air Ministry bearing a black dispatch case with a copy of Trenchard’s memo to Swann in it. Johns therefore became aware that it was now his job to get “Ross” into the RAF, and also that “Ross” was in fact Lawrence of Arabia. The secret, which Trenchard and Lawrence had hoped to keep for as long as possible, was already out, in the span of a few hours.
A further “stumbling block”* still awaited Lawrence: the medical examination. The RAF doctors were not impressed by Lawrence’s physique, and at five feet six inches (they made him an inch taller than he actually was) and 130 pounds he seemed slightly too small for the RAF; he was also a few years too old. They were curious about his scars, too. He explained away the bayonet wounds between his ribs as barbed-wire scars, but the scars on his buttocks were harder to explain. “Hullo, what the hell’s those marks? Punishment?” one of the doctors asked.
“No, Sir, more like persuasion, Sir, I think,” Lawrence replied, not yet aware that for an aircraftman a clever or flip reply to an officer’s question is always a bad idea—a lesson he would learn the hard way over the next few months.
The doctors, despite encouragement from Johns, eventually rejected Lawrence because his teeth failed to meet the RAF standard—a glance at the dental chart in Lawrence’s RAF medical records does indeed reveal an amazing number of fillings and at least two bridges to replace missing teeth, perhaps more of a comment on the standards of British dental care at the time and the national passion for chocolate than on Lawrence. (Lawrence’s dental chart shows seven teeth missing, and twelve teeth with significant decay, despite the notation that his “Oral Hygiene” was “Good.”)
While Dexter shepherded Lawrence through filling out his application to join the RAF and took care of the standard education test—Lawrence could manage the essay, of course, but not the “square roots … and decimals"—Johns went off to explain his predicament to his commanding officer, who called the personnel office at the Air Ministry to ask what to do. When he had replaced the receiver he told Johns to get “Lawrence of Arabia” into the air force, or “you’ll get your bowler hat.” This was RAF slang for being dismissed from the service. Johns resourcefully found a civilian doctor who was willing to sign the medical form. Johns then signed the form himself, and “Ross” was officially declared fit for service in the RAF. His medical form rather modestly limits the “marks” on his body to “Scars both buttocks,” overlooking the bayonet wounds on the ribs and a number of bullet scars; notes that he has perfect eyesight, as one would expect of such an expert shot as Lawrence; and gives his age as twenty-eight, whereas he was thirty-four.
Any pretense of secrecy vanished when Johns telephoned his opposite number, Flight Lieutenant Nelson, at RAF Uxbridge, the recruit training center, about fifteen miles from the center of London, “to warn him of who was on his way, for by this time Lawrence was making it clear that he had no time for junior officers.” Johns took Lawrence to the station and chatted with him while he waited for the next train to Uxbridge.
They did not part friends. Johns remarked that Lawrence left him “with the memory of a cold, clammy handshake.”
Lawrence left this slightly farcical episode out of The Mint, when he came to write it, and gives the impression that the medical examination at the recruiting office in London went more or less normally, and that the two RAF doctors were eager to pass him as fit. He may also have invented the description of his arrival at Uxbridge, in which he is one of six recruits who are met by a sergeant and marched from the railway station into camp. His description of his first night in the recruits’ hut at Uxbridge rings true enough, however, to anyone who has entered the British armed forces. His fellow recruits were noisy, swore constantly, and smelled of beer, tobacco, and sweat.
Lawrence must also have been disoriented by this sudden immersion into lower-class life. He had a remarkable ability to get on with people who were very different from himself, but these had so far been Arabs and Bedouin tribesmen, foreigners rather than his own fellow countrymen of a different background. He was well brought up, fastidious, brilliantly educated, an ex-officer, however idiosyncratic, and a man whose quiet voice and unmistakable accent identified him immediately as a gentleman. He was also a man who hated to be touched, so he had a natural fear of barracks roughhousing—fistfights, towel-slappings, and all the normal physical horseplay of young men trying hard not to show they were afraid they might not prove tough enough for the rigors of recruit training, since the first weeks of training consisted of a deliberately harsh winnowing-out process, intended to eliminate those who were weak, rebellious, or unamenable to discipline, or who simply lacked esprit de corps.
For a man who had been imprisoned by the Turks, tortured, raped, and wounded countless times, Lawrence ’s reaction to his hut mates at Uxbridge is strangely prim: “ As they swiftly stripped for sleep a reek of body fought with beer and tobacco for the mastery of the room …. The horseplay turned to a rough-house: snatching of trousers, and smacks with the flat of hard hands, followed by clumsy steeplechases over the obstacle of beds which tipped or tilted…. Our hut-refuge was become libertine, brutal, loud-voiced, unwashed.”
Of course war and danger have a certain intoxicating glamour—certainly they did to Lawrence — whereas the prospect of weeks of sodden misery in a crowded hut full of noisy young recruits does not. Hardened as Lawrence was to danger, pain, and death, he had never been to an English boarding school, an experience that might as well have been designed to create a hard, self-protective shell against the small, daily abrasions of communal living, occasional physical violence, and unwelcome intimacy. In fact, Lawrence’s description of life at Uxbridge often sounds like that of a new boy away at school for the first time; for example, he notes, with alarm, that “there had been a rumour of that sinful misery, forced games,” and that “breakfast and dinner were sickening, but ample.”
The next day, Lawrence was once more ordered to write an essay on his birthplace (which he had not seen since he was six weeks old); was submitted to fierce questioning about where he had been during the war (he came up with a story about being interned as an enemy alien in Smyrna, by the Turks); then, after waiting for two hours with forty or fifty other men (good training for the methods of the British armed services, which are usually described as, “Hurry up, and wait!”), he was sworn in at last, and became, officially, “AC2 Ross.”
He describes his hut mates as a blacksmith from Glasgow (who fails his test job), two barmen, a former captain of the King’s Royal Rifles, two seamen, a naval “Marconi operator,” a Great Western Railway machinist, lorry drivers, clerks, photographers, mechanics, “a fair microcosm of unemployed England.” Lawrence sums up this mixed bag accurately enough, pointing out that they are not the “unemployable,” the bottom of the barrel, but merely those who have lost their jobs, or their way, or had financial or woman trouble of one kind or another. At the same time, it is not Kipling’s army, or the French Foreign Legion; most of the men in Lawrence’s hut have a trade of some kind, and hope to pursue it, or something similar to it, once they have finished the twelve weeks of “square bashing” (drill), “bull” (polishing and shining their kit and their surroundings until their boots, their brass, and the barracks floor gleam like mirrors), and fatigue duties, mostly filthy, demeaning, and back-breaking hard labor, all intended to teach the raw recruit that his time and his body belong to the RAF. Not surprisingly, given his age and background, Lawrence was at first slow at drill, hated PT (physical training), and had no skill at turning his brown, lusterless boots into glossy black ones that shone like patent leather.* But like most people he found that there were others far less competent than himself, and that once the recruits in his hut were uniformed and put into the training program, their camaraderie, gruff sympat
hy, occasional good advice, and commitment to one another made the training program more bearable. There were no winners or losers; it was not a competitive effort and so there was no personal gain in being better turned out than the man next to you; the entire purpose of the program was to perfect the unit, not the individual, and to turn your “flight” (as a company is called in the RAF) into a gleaming, responsive, perfectly drilled body of men on the parade ground.
For somebody as individualistic as Lawrence, this was not easy to learn. Sticking it out must have required all of his admittedly formidable self-discipline, and this makes his effort to complete every part of his recruit training even more impressive. He wrote about it from time to time in some detail to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, under the mistaken impression that Swann wanted to know what the life of a recruit was like, or was interested in improving the training program. In fact, what Swann wanted most was not to hear from him at all.“I’m not very certain of myself,” Lawrence wrote to Swann, after his first few days, “for the crudities, which aren’t as bad as I expected, worry me far more than I expected: and physically I can only just scrape through the days….If I can get able to sleep, and to eat the food, and to go through the PT I’ll be all right. The present worry is 90 per cent nerves…. Please tell the C.A.S.[Trenchard] that I’m delighted and most grateful to him and to you for what you have done.Don’t bother to keep an eye on what happens to me.” It may be imagined with what dread the unfortunate Swann opened these long letters. He was convinced that no matter how well it was handled, Lawrence’s enlistment would blow up in his face, and at the same time his orders from Trenchard were precisely to “keep an eye on” Lawrence, something he could hardly do from his desk in London.
As it happened, the commanding officer of RAF Uxbridge, Wing Commander Ian Malcolm Bonham-Carter, CB, OBE, without knowing who Ross was, seems to have picked him out on sight as the wrong kind of airman.In The Mint, Lawrence reserves his harshest language for Bonham-Carter.It goes without saying that the worst thing a recruit can do is to attract the attention of the commanding officer in any way, but Lawrence succeeded in doing so almost immediately. It might have amused Bonham-Carter to know that he and “Ross” were both Companions of the Order of the Bath, but then again, probably not.In photographs Bonham-Carter is enormously good-looking, his uniform is perfectly tailored, and his expression is severe. He had a reputation as “a strict disciplinarian,” but as Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who had served with him, pointed out later—when The Mint was finally published—a disciplinarian was exactly the kind of man who was needed to run the recruit training depot. Bonham-Carter had been wounded in the war. He lost his left leg and the use of one arm, and sustained numerous other wounds, but often refused to wear a prosthetic limb, relying on crutches instead. It may be that Lawrence’s hesitancy at PT drew Bonham-Carter’s attention, for the commanding officer would drive over from his house to watch the recruits doing their physical training before breakfast at dawn, and would join in despite his wounds, doing the exercises as best he could while supporting himself against the cookhouse wall with one hand. Lawrence dismissed this as “theatrical swank"; decided that since Bonham-Carter was “always resentfully in pain,” he was determined that the recruits should at least be uncomfortable; and complained that his presence forced the PT instructor to drag out the exercise “to its uttermost minute.” Lawrence describes the commanding officer as “only the shards of a man,” but he may have been exaggerating for effect: Bonham-Carter not only did the same physical exercises as the recruits but drove his own two-seat sports car, continued to fly, and would go on to serve during World War II as “duty air commodore” in the Operations Room of RAF Fighter Command. In any case, when Lawrence’s turn came for duty as Bonham-Carter’s “headquarters runner,” the experience was so unpleasant that during a kit inspection of one of the huts Lawrence “found himself trembling with clenched fists,” repeating to himself, “I must hit him, I must,” but held himself back. He describes watching the commanding officer “pulled over on his face” when his two leashed dogs ran after a cat, and the airmen standing around “silently watching him struggle” to get back on his feet, but refusing to help, muttering, “ ‘Let the old cunt rot.’ “ Lawrence adds that at Bonham-Carter’s next command the airfield “was ringed with his men almost on their knees, praying he would crash.”
Lawrence also attracted the attention of the drill adjutant, Breese, a former regimental sergeant major of the Brigade of Guards, for whom drill was the equivalent of a religion, and who was responsible for the training of all the recruits once they had been separated into squads. Breese lived and breathed drill, and because he was an ex-Guardsman perfection was the only standard he knew. He announced to each new batch of recruits that any of them could come “and see him privately about any worries they had,” and Lawrence unwisely chose to take this literally and avail himself of the privilege. He thus broke two of the most important rules of surviving as a recruit: first, keep out of sight of officers as much as possible; and second, approach an officer only through your own NCO, and with the NCO’s approval. Breese, who had no idea who Ross was, asked him if he had “woman troubles,” the usual reason for an airman’s asking to see the drill adjutant, and was unpleasantly surprised when Ross indignantly denied it, and said “that what he wanted was a room where he could do some writing undisturbed.” On his cot at night, Lawrence had been writing the notes that would become the first part of The Mint, and not surprisingly he found it difficult to concentrate in a crowded, noisy hut. Breese, taken aback, replied that with 1,100 recruits in the depot it was impossible to provide each of them with a study, but that he could use the NAAFI writing room whenever he liked, on his time off. Apart from the oddness of the request, something about Lawrence’s manner—a kind of lofty sense of superiority and entitlement, just one step short of insolence, and clearly inappropriate to a mere recruit—may have put Breese on his guard, and made him decide to keep his eye on AC2 Ross.
The result was an unwelcome torrent of kit inspections for Lawrence. Breese claims to have admonished him for being untidy and “consistently dirty,* for being insubordinate to his hut sergeant, for refusing to obey an order about his kit, and for being consistently late on parade,” although this seems unlikely, given the fact that Lawrence was on “the crack drill squad,” as Jeremy Wilson points out, and also eager to please. When Breese asked Lawrence why he was late for one parade, Lawrence replied “that he had always felt a little tired in the early morning.” If so, this is the kind of clever or smart-alecky remark that might have won him the admiration of his hut mates but was bound to infuriate an officer. Breese put him up on charges several times and finally tried to have him dismissed from the RAF for insubordination, but at that point Breese was sharply warned that Ross would have to stay.
Once, when a senior officer was inspecting the hut and noticed a copy of Niels Lyhne, a novel by the Danish novelist J. P. Jacobsen, “in the original” among Lawrence’s possessions, he asked Lawrence why on earth he had joined the air force. Lawrence replied, “I think I had a mental breakdown, Sir.” This reply immediately got him put up on a charge, though it later turned out that the officer was merely interested in the presence among the recruits of a man with such an unusual level of education.**
The cumulative effect of such incidents led to exactly what Air Vice-Marshal Swann had been afraid of. First of all, it was necessary to tell Breese who “Ross” really was and warn him off; then, to Breese’s fury, Swann responded to a plea from Lawrence, spared him the last four weeks at Uxbridge, and packed him off to RAF Farnborough to be trained as a photographer, without having completed his drill course. Even thirty-two years later Breese was still fulminating about what a poor recruit “Lawrence of Arabia” had been, and regretting that, because of the interference of higher authorities, he had not been able to get Lawrence discharged from the service.
The liberal use of profanity in The Mint, and the d
escription of Bonham-Carter, made it impossible to publish even decades after Lawrence’s death, and it therefore received altogether unmerited notoriety as a “banned book.” Most readers nowadays will be unlikely to find even the unexpurgated edition particularly shocking. The Mint is, in fact, an odd little book. The first two-thirds are about the horrors of recruit training; the last third (which Lawrence added later) is about the joys of serving on an RAF station with aircraft, and “how different, how humane” by comparison life was at the RAF Cadet College, Cranwell, when Lawrence was there three years later as an aircraft-hand. Just as his description of life at RAF Uxbridge seems too “savage” (to use his own word), so his description of life at Cranwell seems too idyllic. The book has long passages of praise to Trenchard, which Lawrence wrote knowing very well that Trenchard would be among the first to read the manuscript. “There are twenty-thousand airmen better than us between [Squad 5] and Trenchard, the pinnacle and our exemplar: but the awe of him surely encompasses us. The driving energy is his, and he drives furiously. We are content, imagining that he knows his road.” This reads uncomfortably, and improbably; unless the RAF has changed a lot since 1923, it seems unlikely that recruits would sit around the stove in their hut until late in the night swapping stories in “laughing admiration” and hero-worship of Trenchard. The hallmark of the British serviceman has always been a mocking and cynical disdain for those at the top, and the passages on Trenchard in The Mint merely read as if Lawrence hoped to balance out the scenes at Uxbridge, which Trenchard would certainly hate, by flattering him from time to time.
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