Hero

by Michael Korda

  Among the letters of praise he received was one from his friend Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, recently promoted to marshal of the Royal Air Force. Trenchard was writing to his most unusual airman to say that he couldn’t put down his copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (bound in RAF-blue leather), and that he had insured it and left it in his will to his little son. “When I opened your letter,” Lawrence replied, “I gasped, expecting something of ill-omen. However, all’s well…. There is no local press, and I arouse no interest in the camp.” He dropped a quick hint in his reply that there was to be “another ‘life’ of me this autumn, written by a friend, the poet Robert Graves,” a piece of news which must have made Trenchard sigh. One after the other, the books had flowed out: first Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia, then Lawrence’s own books, and now Robert Graves’s biography.** Each one made headline news; there was no reason to suppose that Graves’s would be an exception; and the last thing Trenchard wanted was to have Lawrence in the news again.

  It would be a stretch to say that Lawrence was happy in his self-imposed “exile,” as he called it, but he was relentlessly busy. At no point in his life did he write more letters. He spent nearly six months transforming his “notes” on his service at RAF Uxbridge and at Cranwell into a finished handwritten manuscript of The Mint, which he sent to Edward Garnett with instructions that it must not be published until 1950. He also accepted an American publisher’s offer of £800 to make a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, a task for which he felt himself particularly well suited, since he had handled Bronze Age weapons as an archaeologist and had fought in a war close to that of the Greeks and the Trojans. He wrote to Eddie Marsh, thanking “Winston for his gorgeous letter,” and adding, no doubt for Churchill’s eyes, in an aside that sounds like a passage from Greenmantle: “The most dangerous point is Afghanistan…. The clash is bound to come, I think…. Do you know, if I’d known as much about the British Government in 1917, as I do now, I could have got enough of them [the people of the Middle East] behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia?”

  To Trenchard, who was in part responsible for defending Iraq, and for preventing incursions into Trans-Jordan, Lawrence wrote in detail proposing a whole new policy for the Middle East. With his old self-confidence he also mentioned ibn Saud, whose advance was threatening Feisal and worrying Trenchard: “The fellow you need to influence is Feisal el Dueish…. If I were at Ur, my instinct would be to walk without notice into his headquarters. He’d not likely kill an unarmed, solitary man … and in two days guesting I could give him horizons beyond the Brethren [ibn Saud’s Wahhabi fundamentalist warriors]…. Such performances require a manner to carry them off. I’ve done it four times, or is it five? A windy business … Beduin on camels will make a meal of any civilized camel-corps: or of infantry in the open: or of cavalry anyhow. Nor does a static line of defence avail. You need an elastic defence, in depth of at least 100 miles. Explored tracks for cars, threading this belt, approved landing grounds,sited pill-boxes of blockhouses, occupied occasionally and then fed and linked by armoured cars, and supervised from the air….1 could defend all E. Transjordan with a fist-full of armoured cars, and trained crews.”

  Since this was being written from his bunk by the RAF equivalent of a private to the RAF equivalent of a five-star general, it is fairly remarkable stuff, all the more so since it still remains good advice for dealing with desert raiders and insurgents, and indeed forms the basis for current strategy regarding similar enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan more than ninety years later. Trenchard certainly took it seriously, and recognized that Lawrence knew what he was talking about. He also knew that it would require a man with Lawrence’s special courage to walk into an enemy leader’s tent alone and unarmed, risking his life on the Muslim tradition of hospitality toward a guest.

  It had not yet occurred to the powers that be in Drigh Road that AC1 Shaw (he had just been promoted to aircraftman first class, an automatic promotion which gave him no privileges, authority, or pleasure, but which he could not refuse) was in regular correspondence with Trenchard, Churchill, and Buchan about matters of state, or with Lionel Curtis about plans for transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states, or with the future Field Marshal the Earl Wavell about the future of tank warfare. Lawrence registered the death of friends: Hogarth, who, ironically, had been writing an entry on Lawrence for the Encyclopaedia Britannica when he died (“Hogarth is part, a great part, of Oxford, the concrete thing for which Oxford stood in my mind”); Thomas Hardy (“That day we reached Damascus,” he wrote to Mrs. Hardy, “I cried, against all my control, for the triumphant thing achieved at last, fitly: and so the passing of T. H. touches me”); Gertrude Bell (“Gertrude was not a good judge of men or situations…. But depth and strength of emotion—Oh Lord, yes … A wonderful person. Not very like a woman, you know: they make much of her concern in dress:—but the results! She reminded me in one dress, of a blue jay. Her clothes and colours were always wrong”).

  Lawrence never left the depot itself—he described it as “a sort of voluntary permanent C.B.” (“C.B.” stands for a military punishment, “confined to barracks.”) Unfortunately, that did not protect him. The air officer commanding the RAF in India was Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, an old friend and admirer of Lawrence’s since 1916. It was part of Salmond’s duty to inspect every RAF station in India once a year—of course, his visit required prodigious preparation on the part of all the airmen—and following his inspection of Drigh Road Depot, he asked the commanding officer, Wing Commander Reginald Bone, CBE, DSO, “By the way, how’s Shaw getting along?” Bone was puzzled. “Shaw? Shaw?” he replied. “I do not think we have here any officer of that name.”

  Air Marshal Salmond had dropped what is known in the RAF as a “clanger,” or outside it as a “brick.” Fortunately, he did not pursue the matter, but Bone kept an eye open for the mysterious AC1 Shaw and in time discovered that he was virtually the only person at Drigh Road not already in on the secret that AC1 Shaw was T. E. Lawrence.*

  Bone was annoyed not to have been informed that one of his clerks was Lawrence of Arabia, and his natural tendency to take it out on Lawrence may have been increased by the fact that he had read and disliked Robert Graves’s Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure. He sought out Lawrence, and as Lawrence put it in a letter to Trenchard’s private secretary, Wing Commander T. B. Marson, another old friend, he “trod heavily on my harmless, if unattractive face.”

  Salmond quickly intervened to put a stop to this, presumably at the request of Trenchard, but the effect was that Bone was further embarrassed, and began to suspect that Lawrence was spying on him. Either because he had been informed by the camp post office, or because he had simply guessed correctly, he asked his adjutant to find out whether Lawrence was communicating with headquarters. The adjutant, who might have proceeded with tact in view of the fact that the inquiry involved private letters between Airman Shaw and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Trenchard, was, in Lawrence’s words, “bull-honest,” and simply demanded to see the letters. Lawrence obediently showed him, among others, his latest letter from Trenchard, and another from Salmond, and so he “was sent for, cursed, and condemned to go up-country as a Bolshevik.” This attack caused Salmond to reappear and read Bone the riot act, but it did not make Bone any happier to have such a well-connected airman on his station. Lawrence had mentioned in his last letter to Trenchard that he had been offered “$100,000 for a seven week lecture in the United States,” and that he had turned down an offer of £5,000 for one of the five copies of the Oxford edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom* That Airman Shaw was turning down offers amounting to many times more than a wing commander would make in a whole service career can hardly have sweetened Bone’s feeling about him.

  Matters could hardly be expected to go on like this for long—Lawrence’s presence was not only irritating his commanding officer, but also beginning to divide the officers: some thought he should be le
ft alone, and others sided with Bone. This was certainly “contrary to the maintenance of good order and discipline,” though the fault in this instance seems to have been more that of Bone than of Lawrence. Still, Lawrence was certainly an upsetting presence to several of his commanding officers; he was in battle, and he was a master of what we would label passive-aggressive behavior. (It is called “dumb insolence” in the British armed services, and is a chargeable offense.) Lawrence also had vast reserves of connections, patience, and unconcealed mental superiority to draw on in any struggle with authority, as well as the most important quality of all: innocence. There was no rule in King’s Regulations that a marshal of the Royal Air Force and chief of the air staff might not write private letters to an airman, nor that the airman should not reply to such letters; still less was there any requirement that the airman should share their contents with his commanding officer. Bone was on shaky ground, but it is always easy for a commanding officer to make trouble for a mere airman. As Lawrence had discovered at Farnborough, strict kit inspections and extra guard duty were the least he could expect.

  The friction between the officers at Drigh Road on the subject of Lawrence is illustrated by the adjutant, Squadron Leader W. M. M. Hurley, who had been sent to ask Lawrence whether he was writing letters to headquarters. After getting to know Lawrence, Hurley offered him the use of the typewriter in the orderly room on Thursdays (a day off, in the relaxed working conditions of the British armed services in India), and soon got to know him even better. Hurley did not agree with the commanding officer’s opinion about Lawrence at all. He admired Lawrence’s scrupulously correct attitude toward his officers, and the fact that no matter how upset he was at the many small forms of military persecution he was subjected to, he never raised his voice. Hurley remarked too on Lawrence’s appearance: “his head was everything, a noble feature indeed with a lofty forehead, very soft blue eyes and a strong chin. His body was small and wiry and must have framed a splendid constitution, when we consider the trials and the actual brutality which had been part of his share in the Arabic campaign.”

  Now and again the old Lawrence broke through the barriers behind which Airman Shaw had imprisoned him. On one occasion, when the officers were carrying out their annual pistol course on the firing range, Lawrence happened to be range orderly. At the end of the day, when only the adjutant, the NCO in charge of the station’s armory, and Lawrence were left behind, Lawrence “suddenly and quietly … picked up a pistol and put six ‘bulls’ on the target,” shooting far beyond the ability of any of the officers. On another occasion, when air routes from Karachi to Britain were being discussed by a survey party of the RAF, high political officers from the government of India, and the British resident in the Persian Gulf, AC1 Shaw was hurriedly brought into the meeting from the Engine Repair Section, in his overalls, to give his crisp opinion of the trustworthiness, character, and influence of the sheikhs along the route across Iraq and Trans-Jordan. He did so, with a precision and an air of authority that astonished (and silenced) officers and civilian authorities alike.

  Lawrence’s fellow airmen were impressed by his willingness to take on guard duties over holidays, when everybody else wanted to go out drinking, and by the vast number of books he collected, including “William Blake, Thomas Malory, Bunyan, Plato, and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” as well as his own copy of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “which he kept in a small tin box under his bunk.” He happily allowed Leading Aircraftman R. V. Jones, who had the bunk next to his, to borrow his own book; and Jones, who soon became a friend, later recalled that Lawrence, who had a gramophone and frequently received packages of classical records from Britain, also ordered the latest records of Sophie Tucker to appeal to the less highbrow taste of the airmen in his barracks.

  By the beginning of 1928 Lawrence’s mother and his brother Bob had left China, unable to continue their missionary work because of the hostility of the Chinese. Lawrence wrote to them, realistically, but without much sympathy: “I think probably there will be not much more missionary work done anywhere in the future. We used to think foreigners were black beetles, and coloured races were heathen: whereas now we respect and admire and study their beliefs and manners. It’s the revenge of the world upon the civilisation of Europe.” India, with its apparently subservient native masses and its small body of British rulers, made him feel this even more strongly. He was far ahead of his time in this, as in many of his other opinions, and once he was back in Britain he would unhesitatingly use his very considerable influence to change things to which he objected, such as the death penalty for cowardice. In the meantime, however, he was stuck in India, though even that did not prevent the London press from running fanciful and sensationalist stories about him. The Daily Express, for example, alleged that “instead of visiting Karachi … he goes when off-duty to the edge of the desert…. There he chats with the villagers, and joins in their profound Eastern meditations.” Lawrence wrote to his friend R. D. Blumenfeld, the editor, ridiculing this kind of thing. He did not speak any of the local languages, he protested, and had never practiced meditation; but these stories found their way back to India and may have made Wing Commander Bone more determined than ever to get rid of Lawrence.

  Lawrence himself was anxious to get away from Drigh Road, because he had good reason to believe that some of the officers there were gunning for him. He was always concerned about keeping his record clean, and he knew that nothing was easier for an officer than finding a reason to put an airman under arrest for a minor or imaginary crime, and thus leave a black mark on his record. He wrote to Trenchard, explaining why he had applied to Salmond for a posting “up-country,” as the unruly mountainous region of the Northwest Frontier was then called, on what is now the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “A conversation between an officer and a civilian in a club after dinner was improperly repeated to me…. However this one was reported to have sworn he ‘had me taped’ and was ‘laying to jump on me’ when he got the chance …. So I’m going to run away to a squadron. They are small and officers mix with airmen, and aren’t as likely to misjudge a fellow. I told Salmond I had private reasons. Don’t think me a funk. At worst it’s only overcautious.”

  Salmond sent Lawrence about as far away from Karachi as he could, to RAF Fort Miranshah, in Waziristan, where Lawrence arrived in August 1928. “We are only 26 all told,” he wrote, “with 5 officers, and we sit with 700 Indian Scouts (half-regulars) in a brick and earth fort behind barbed wire complete with searchlights and machine guns.” It would have been hard—perhaps impossible—for Salmond to find a more remote posting for Lawrence, but there were hidden dangers. Miranshah, a forward airfield of Number 20 Squadron, was less than ten miles away from the border between British India and Afghanistan—although the line was not only porous but meaningless to the local tribesmen, whose only loyalty was to their faith, clan, and tribe, and who raided impartially on both sides of the border. Afghanistan had been in a state of turmoil since time immemorial. “The graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan was the gateway to India, and the locus of the “great game,” in which, for more than a century, the British and the Russians had been vying with each other to control the country by bribery, secret intelligence missions, and occasional armed intervention. British and Russian agents traveled through the rough, mountainous, dangerous country in the guise of mountain climbers, botanists, or geographers, seeking out potentially friendly warlords and tribal leaders, drawing up maps, and gathering such political intelligence as could be gleaned from the bloodthirsty chaos that passed for politics in Afghanistan. In 1843, after invading the country and taking Kabul, its capital, an entire British army was defeated and slaughtered between Kabul and Gandamack. The only survivor was Dr. William Brydon, a regimental surgeon, who escaped captivity and rode to the gates of Jelalabad on a mule with the news of the disaster—the subject of a famous painting by Lady Butler. Nobody questioned the ferocity of the Afghan tribes or their determina
tion to resist infidel foreigners in their country, but the British nevertheless fought two subsequent wars in Afghanistan, without achieving a clear-cut victory.

  Shortly after Lawrence’s arrival at Miranshah, a number of the Afghan tribes staged a rebellion against King Amanullah, who had been attempting to modernize the country by introducing reforms such as schools for girls, the abandonment of the burka for women,* and much else. The women of his court were even seen playing tennis in the gardens of the royal palace in Kabul, shamelessly wearing European tennis clothes. The result was a widespread and growing civil war, in the course of which Amanullah lost his throne. The first successor was the unlettered son of a water carrier; the next was Amanullah’s sinister, cold-blooded former war minister and ambassador to France. It does not seem to have occurred to either Trenchard or Salmond that Lawrence’s presence on the border might attract attention or cause trouble.

  At first, life at Miranshah suited Lawrence. His duties as the commanding officer’s orderly room clerk were not demanding; he got along well with the airmen and the small group of officers; and since this was a working flying station, with aircraft landing and taking off, he felt himself to be back in the real RAF. He wrote a prodigious number of letters, many of them to Trenchard, who had read the manuscript of The Mint—it shocked him but did not prevent him from extending Lawrence’s service in the RAF to 1935 before he retired as chief of the air staff. Indeed a small book on how to wage war against an insurgency could be put together from Lawrence’s letters to Trenchard from Miranshah. Interestingly, both Trenchard, at the top of the RAF, and Lawrence, at its bottom, agreed that a policy of bombing tribal villages to enforce peace was more likely to do harm than good, by stirring up fierce resentment about civilian casualties.** However, such bombing was the whole purpose of the airfield at Miranshah.