It was fortunate that Lawrence finished his labors when he did. In the spring of 1926, coming to the aid of a man whose car had been involved in an accident, he offered to start the engine and the man neglected to retard the ignition. The starting handle flew back sharply, breaking Lawrence’s right arm and dislocating his wrist. Showing no sign of pain or shock, he calmly asked the driver to adjust the ignition, cranked the engine again with his left hand, then drove his motorcycle back to Cranwell. In Flight Sergeant Pugh’s words, “with his right arm dangling and shifting gears with his foot, [he] got his bus** home, and parked without a word to a soul of the pain he was suffering.” The medical officer was away, and it was the next day before he could see Lawrence, who still did not complain. “That is a man!” Pugh commented admiringly. Although Lawrence recovered from this injury, later photographs often show him clearly nursing his left arm and wrist, and it seems safe to say that it gave him pain for the rest of his life.
By 1926 it was clear that Lawrence’s posting to Cranwell would soon have to end. One reason for this was RAF policy, which required that an airman must eventually be posted overseas—to India or Egypt for a period of five years, or to Iraq for two years (because of its vile climate). It would be impossible to send Lawrence to Egypt, where his presence would surely have a political effect—after all, he had been offered the post of British high commissioner in Cairo to succeed Allenby, and he was known to be in favor of greater independence for Egypt. Posting him to Iraq would be even more difficult; his friend Feisal was its king, and Lawrence’s presence there would cause consternation, besides stimulating the Sunni tribesmen to who knew what dreams of war and plunder. Nobody had forgotten how the tribes had ridden in from the desert crying “Aurens, Aurens” and firing off their rifles to greet him in Amman in 1921. That left only India, which was not an attractive proposition for Lawrence: he had done the government of India out of its ambition to occupy and control Iraq, and for that and other reasons was disliked by Indian officials, some of whom still bitterly resented the opinions he had expressed about them during his visit to Baghdad in 1916.
Trenchard offered Lawrence a chance to stay in Britain, but Lawrence was more realistic; the publication of Revolt in the Desert, of which 40,000 words would first be serialized in the Daily Telegraph (which had paid £2,000, or about the equivalent of $160,000 in today’s money), and the release of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to the subscribers would make him headline news again, all the more so because Revolt in the Desert would be published in America at the same time. “It is good of you to give me the option of going overseas or staying at home,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “but I volunteered to go, deliberately, for the reason that I am publishing a book (about myself in Arabia) on March 3, 1927: and experience taught me in Farnborough in 1922 that neither good-will on the part of those above me, nor correct behaviour on my part can prevent my being a nuisance in any camp where the daily press can get at me…. Overseas they will be harmless, and therefore I must go overseas for a while and dodge them.”
It was already clear that Seven Pillars of Wisdom would be oversubscribed: the list of subscribers included, among writers alone, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Hugh Walpole; and among other notable figures it included King George V (Lawrence contrived to return the check for the king’s copy and make him a present of the book).** Lawrence declined to give the usual two copies to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Museum Library, as was required for copyright purposes, having already donated the original manuscript to the Bodleian. This was an infringement of the U.K. Copyright Act, but being Lawrence he got away with it.
His last weeks in England were spoiled by another serious motorcycle accident, in which his latest Brough was badly damaged, but Lawrence sustained only a cut on his knee. He had to rent out his cottage, collect the books he wanted to take with him, and make his good-byes to the Shaws and the Hardys. The farewell to Hardy was a sad moment for them both. Hardy was eighty-six, and neither of them expected he would live to see Lawrence’s return. They stood on the porch at Max Gate in the cold weather, talking, and Lawrence finally sent Hardy into the house to get a shawl to wrap around his neck and chest. While Hardy was inside, Lawrence pushed his motorcycle quietly down to the road, started it up, and drove away, to spare Hardy the pain of saying farewell, and to spare his own feelings too, for he loved Hardy deeply. He sent his mother’s copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to his brother Arnold, to look after it until she returned to England; and he wrote to her in China, chiding her gently for staying there despite the danger, and warning her and Bob of the futility of “endeavours to influence the national life of another people by one’s own,” a reflection not only of his dislike of Christian missionaries, but of his own experience with the Bedouin.
He sailed for India on December 7, 1926, on board the Derbyshire, an antiquated, squalid troopship, packed with 1,200 officers and men, as well as a number of their wives and children, in conditions that shocked him. “I have been surprised at the badness of our accommodation,” he wrote to Charlotte, “and the clotted misery … on board.” Conditions were so bad that Lawrence wrote a letter of complaint about them to his friend Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, knowing that Marsh would pass it on. This became something of a habit with Lawrence—throughout his life in the RAF he made behind-the-scenes efforts to improve the lives of servicemen by bringing problems to the attention of those with the power to change things for the better. He persuaded Trenchard to drop many of the small regulations that plagued airmen’s lives unnecessarily—reducing the number of kit inspections to one a month, for example, as well as allowing airmen to unbutton the top two buttons of their greatcoat (unlike soldiers), removing the silly “swagger sticks” they were supposed to carry when in walking-out uniform, and abolishing the requirement to wear a polished bayonet for church parades. Lawrence wrote detailed letters about anything that seemed to him unfair, antiquated, or just plain silly, and in a surprising number of cases won his point, substantially improving the life of “other ranks.” Churchill was serving at the time as chancellor of the exchequer, and had already made the disastrous decision to return the pound to the gold standard, which many economists would later decide was the starting point of the great worldwide Depression; but at Lawrence’s behest he paused long enough to inquire into the conditions of shipping British service personnel and their families. Lawrence had an uncanny knack for bringing to the attention of those in high office conditions about which they would not normally have been informed, and getting them to do something. This was perhaps the only aspect of his fame that he found useful. His correspondence is full of injustices he wants corrected, or idiotic regulations he wants abolished. He served as a discreet and entirely unofficial equivalent of what is now called an ombudsman, and was responsible for a surprising number of commonsense reforms, including the abolition of puttees for airmen and their replacement with trousers, and the replacement of the tunic with a high collar clasped tightly around the neck by a more comfortable tunic with lapels, worn over a shirt and tie. These interventions were seldom, if ever, for his own benefit; nor did he mention them to his fellow airmen. He was always a master of the skillfully handled suggestion that allowed other people to take the credit, just as Bernard Shaw re-created him in the role of the omniscient, omnipotent Private Meek in Too True to Be Good.
As it happens, the conditions of life on board the Derbyshire were shocking, though not unusual, and in describing them Lawrence provided unflinching descriptions of squalor and filth: the account of his experience as “Married Quarters sentry” is so painful as to be almost unreadable. His friend and admirer John Buchan said after reading it that it took “the breath away by its sheer brutality.” Buchan considered Lawrence’s power of depicting squalor uncanny, and said there was nothing in The Mint to equal it.
Swish swish the water goes against the walls of the ship, sounds nearer. Where on earth is that splas
hing. I tittup along the alley and peep into the lavatory space, at a moment when no woman is there. It’s awash with a foul drainage. Tactless posting a sentry over the wives’ defaecations, I think. Tactless and useless all our duties aboard.
Hullo here’s the Orderly Officer visiting. May as well tell him. The grimy-folded face, the hard jaw, toil-hardened hands, bowed and ungainly figure. An ex-naval warrant, I’ll bet. No gentleman. He strides boldly to the latrine: “Excuse me” unshyly to two shrinking women. “God,” he jerked out, “with shit—where’s the trap?” He pulled off his tunic and threw it at me to hold, and with a plumber’s quick glance strode over to the far side, bent down, and ripped out a grating. Gazed for a moment, while the ordure rippled over his boots. Up his right sleeve, baring a forearm hairy as a mastiff’s grey leg, knotted with veins, and a gnarled hand: thrust it deep in, groped, pulled out a moist white bundle. “Open that port” and out it splashed into the night. “You’d think they’d have had some other place for their sanitary towels. Bloody awful show, not having anything fixed up.” He shook his sleeve down as it was over his slowly-drying arm, and huddled on his tunic, while the released liquid gurgled contentedly down its reopened drain.
The voyage from Southampton to Karachi took a month, and was sheer hell—"Wave upon wave of the smell of stabled humanity,” as Lawrence put it, so awful that even India, which he disliked on sight, seemed to be a deliverance. He was sent to the RAF depot on Drigh Road, seven miles outside Karachi, “a dry hole, on the edge of the Sind desert, which desert is a waste of land and sandstone,” a place of endless dust and dust storms, indeed, where dust seemed like a fifth element, covering everything, including the food. He was assigned as a clerk in the Engine Repair Section, where aircraft engines were given their regularly scheduled overhaul—easy work. The tropical workday at that time ran from 7:30 A.M. to 1 p.m., after which he had the rest of the day off. He spent most of his day in overalls; there was no PT; there were few parades; and his greatest problems were the lack of hot water to bathe in, and sheer boredom. Being on the edge of a desert filled him with both loathing and nostalgia—in the evenings, he could hear the noise of camel bells in the distance as a caravan made its way down Drigh Road. He did not leave the depot to go into Karachi; he had no curiosity about India at all. He spent his spare time sitting on his bunk reading the fifth volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, The Great Crisis; writing letters; brushing up his Greek; and listening to classical music on the gramophone in his barracks, which he shared with fourteen other airmen.
In February, the pictures he had commissioned at such great expense for the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom—oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, pastels, and woodcuts—were collected by Eric Kennington and put on display for the public at the Leicester Gallery, in London. Bernard Shaw contributed the preface to the catalog, declaiming, in his usual no-holds-barred style, “The limelight of history follows the authentic hero as the theatre limelight follows the prima ballerina assoluta. It soon concentrated its whitest radiance on Colonel Lawrence, alias Lurens Bey, alias Prince of Damascus, the mystery man, the wonder man,” and calling Seven Pillars of Wisdom “a masterpiece.” The gallery was packed for the two weeks of the show, with a long line of people waiting each day to get in. Although nobody but the subscribers could read the book, it was already creating a sensation. People eager to read it offered small fortunes in the classified ads of the newspapers for an opportunity to borrow one of the copies.
The center of this first, small storm of publicity meanwhile sat in the Drigh Road Depot, Karachi, keeping track of engine repairs as AC2 Shaw,almost as far removed from the limelight as it was possible to get. “I do wish, hourly, that our great Imperial heritage of the East would go the way of my private property …. However it’s no use starting on that sadness, since coming out here is my own (and unrepented) fault entirely,” he wrote to a friend. In March Revolt in the Desert was published; it sold, as Lawrence boasted to a friend, “Something over 40,000 copies in the first three weeks” in the United Kingdom alone, and would go on to sell 90,000 copies before Lawrence managed to get it withdrawn.** In America it was an even bigger success, selling more than 130,000 copies in the first weeks, and ensuring that Lawrence’s debts and overdraft from the production of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom would be wiped clean. With money pouring in, Lawrence, still determined not to make a profit, founded an anonymous charity fund to educate the children of disabled or deceased RAF officers. The RAF Benevolent Fund, created by Trenchard, provided the same for all ranks, but Lawrence felt that since the majority of pilots killed in action were officers in those days, his fund would fill a special niche. No doubt it would have surprised Lawrence’s fellow airmen in Room 2 of the barracks at the RAF Depot on Drigh Road, Karachi, not to speak of the officers there, that AC2 Shaw was sitting on his bunk, writing pad on his knees, giving away thousands of pounds; but as usual Lawrence was anxious to keep his benevolence, as well as his identity, to himself.
Through March and April the glowing reviews of Revolt in the Desert continued to arrive—Charlotte had thoughtfully subscribed to a clipping agency on Lawrence’s behalf. The only reviewer who seemed to dislike the book was Leonard Woolf, husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf; he chided Lawrence sternly for imitating Charles Doughty’s style (“so imitative … as to be near parody”), although even Woolf admitted to enjoying the book once he had overcome his irritation. It was typical of Lawrence’s ability to cross class lines that he heard about Woolf’s review from his old regimental sergeant major at Bovington Camp. Lawrence correctly pointed out to his friends that he had, for better or worse, created his own style. With this one exception, the reviews he received would have pleased any author. The Times Literary Supplement called the book “a great story, greatly written.” The Times called it “a masterpiece.” The Daily Telegraph described it as “one of the most stirring stories of our times.” From London came the flattering news that Eric Kennington had completed a new bust of Lawrence in gilt brass. A letter arrived from Allenby praising Lawrence for “a great work"; this was both a relief and a pleasure, given Lawrence’s admiration for his old chief. John Buchan—author of Greenmantle, and the future Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada—wrote to say that Lawrence was “the best living writer of English prose.”
Although self-doubt was ingrained in Lawrence’s nature, he could not help being pleased at the reception of his book, in both forms. He had accomplished exactly what he set out to do: to achieve fame as a writer while keeping the full text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom out of the public’s hands. As was so often the case, he had neatly managed to fulfill what would have seemed to anyone else contradictory ambitions. Of course Revolt in the Desert rekindled his fame throughout the English-speaking world, though this time his story was conveyed in his own words, rather than in those of Lowell Thomas. Like it or not, he was now perhaps the most famous man of his time: his face, half-shrouded by the white Arab headdress with the golden agal, was instantly recognizable to millions of people; his status as hero was such that, of all the millions of men who fought in what was coming to be called the Great War, Lawrence would eventually become the one remembered by most people.
In the eyes of the world the hero had eclipsed the man. Without seeming to have desired it, Lawrence had reached a virtual apotheosis—it was as if the real person had been swallowed by the legend. Not only Bernard Shaw believed that if Britain had a Valhalla, Lawrence belonged in it. The immense success of his books, the mystery that surrounded him, his puzzling disappearance at the very moment when the English-speaking world was focused on his achievements—all this represented something of a miraculous feat itself. Not only had he managed to escape the press, but in India his presence went unnoticed. Unlike Uxbridge, Farnborough, Bovington, and Cranwell, the RAF depot in Karachi was a place where he remained for the moment merely AC2 Shaw, an ordinary airman meticulously keeping track of engine parts
and attracting little or no attention.
Of course no legendary hero successfully disappears forever, as Lawrence surely knew better than anyone else. However modestly AC2 Shaw behaved, however carefully he did his job as a clerk, however quietly he kept to himself, there were still occasional signs that he was no ordinary airman. At Cranwell, the telegraph boy had been astounded by the number of telegrams he had to deliver every day to AC2 Shaw (at the time, ordinary people received a telegram only if there was a death in the family), as well as by the fact that Shaw always tipped him a shilling. At Drigh Road everybody was equally astounded by the number of letters and packages that AC2 Shaw received; books, gramophone records, gift boxes of food, manuscripts, play scripts, envelopes full of press clippings. Shaw spent most of his meager pay buying stamps to answer this constant stream of mail.
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