With Lawrence in Arabia

by Lowell Thomas

At the end of the campaign, when Lawrence returned to Europe and left Marshall behind in Arabia, the colonel wrote asking his tent-mate to ship his things from Akaba to Cairo. Lawrence neither drank nor smoked but was inordinately fond of chocolate, and there were dozens of empty tins piled in the corner of his tent, together with books, bits of theodolites, a camel-saddle, cartridge-drums, and odds and ends from machine-guns. In one of the empty chocolate-tins the major found the French decoration which Pisani had presented. He put it in his own bag, and when Lawrence came to meet Emir Feisal and the Arab delegates at Marseilles, Major Marshall “pulled his leg” by making another speech reminding the colonel of his splendid work for France, and then represented him with the Croix de Guerre with palms.

When the Duke of Connaught visited Palestine to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem on General Allenby, he intended to present a decoration to Lawrence as well. The young leader of the Arabian forces happened at the time to be out “in the blue,” busily blowing up Turkish trains. Aëroplanes were sent to scour the desert for him. Messages were dropped on various Arab camps requesting any one who saw Shereef Lawrence to tell him to report to Jerusalem. One fine day Lawrence came strolling in on foot through the Turkish lines, to show his indifference of the enemy. In the meantime the ceremony in Jerusalem had already taken place, and the Duke of Connaught had gone to Egypt. Knowing Lawrence’s peculiar aversion to the acceptance of medals or military honors of any kind, his associates of the intelligence staff succeeded in seducing him to Cairo only by inventing some other plausible pretext. Upon his arrival, a subaltern who was not acquainted with Lawrence’s eccentricities inadvertently tipped him off to the fine affair that was to be staged for his benefit. Without stopping to pick up his uniform and kit at Shepheard’s Hotel, Lawrence hurried out to the headquarters of the Flying Corps at Helipolis, an oasis a few miles from Cairo, jumped into an aëroplane, and taxied back to Arabia.

Not only did he care nothing for decorations, but he avoided wearing what ribbons he possessed. Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, in his exploits of “The Secret Corps,” says of him: “Colonel Lawrence was given the Companionship of the Bath for his services. He was actually recommended for the Victoria Cross, but was not granted that supreme decoration because there had never been a senior officer witness of his exploits—a lame enough excuse, seeing that there was ample proof in a dozen ways that those exploits had well and truly been carried out.” As a matter of fact, although Lawrence was posted for the “C. B.,” he never attended any ceremony in connection with receiving it, and he asked his friends to sidetrack the recommendation for the Victoria Cross. He also stood aside when he had an opportunity to become a general at the time when his force was actually the right wing of Allenby’s army and when he was practically filling the rôle of a lieutenant-general. He even declined knighthood. When I asked him why he didn’t want to be knighted, he replied: “Well, if I become a knight my tailor will hear about it and double my bills. I have trouble enough paying them as it is.”

So far as I know there was only one thing that Lawrence wanted out of the war, and that was something that he didn’t get. I asked him once if there was anything to be bought with money that he couldn’t afford but would like to have. His answer, which he gave unhesitatingly, showed how human and simple he is. He replied, “I should like to have a Rolls-Royce car with enough tires and petrol to last me all my life.” The particular car that he would have liked to have had was the Rolls-Royce tender called the “Blue Mist” which he used during some of his railway demolition raids around Damascus. But after the war it was overhauled and became Allenby’s personal car at the Residency in Cairo.

Lawrence has often been criticized for refusing the various honors offered him. But the truth of the matter is that he did not decline them merely to be eccentric. For instance, before the war he was presented with the Order of the Medjidieh by the sultan of Turkey for having saved the lives of some of the Germans at work on the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway when the natives were going to mob them. Then, shortly before the outbreak of the Arabian Revolution, while still a subordinate in Cairo, he received and accepted a number of decorations including the Legion of Honor. But he refused the rewards offered to him for what he had accomplished in Arabia because he had realized from the very beginning that the Allies, once victory was secured, would find it difficult not only to satisfy the claims of the Arabs, but even to fulfil their obligations to the Hedjaz leaders. He realized full well that the French were determined to have Syria, and he knew all along that they would never agree to the Arabs’ even keeping Damascus. Lawrence therefore felt that he did not care to accept anything in return for having conducted a campaign based on promises which the Allies could not fulfil to the extent to which he believed they ought to be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have felt differently had he known that his friend Emir Feisal would be crowned king in Bagdad after losing the Syrian throne, which Lawrence foresaw he would never be allowed to occupy for long. But at the end of the war no one dreamed that Feisal was going to be the founder of a new dynasty in the city of Harun al Rashid after first being driven out of Damascus by the French.

The only honor that Lawrence accepted was one perhaps more dear to his heart than any other, a fellowship at All Souls’ College, Oxford. This fellowship is awarded to men of exceptional scholastic attainments. There are only a score or so of them, usually men past the prime of life who are completing important historical, literary, or scientific works. For example, Lord Curzon is a fellow at All Souls. The distinction is an unusual one. It carries with it a modest honorarium and attractive quarters at the college, a delightful place for a distinguished scholar to retire. There is no prescribed work that goes with it, and Lawrence once told me that there were but three requirements for a fellowship at All Souls: to be a good dresser, to be adept at small conversation, and to be a good judge of port. And then he added: “My clothes are an abomination; as a parlor conversationalist I am hopeless, and I never drink. So how I came to receive this honor is a mystery to me.”

After his election to All Souls, Lawrence divided his time between the college, the home of a friend in Westminster known as “the house with the green door,” and a bungalow that he built for himself in Epping Forest. The porter at All Souls said they never knew when to expect him, that when he was in residence he rarely dined with the other fellows, and that the light in his studio usually burned all night. No doubt he was busy on his Arabian book. But he did the most of his writing at the “house with the green door,” where he occupied a bare room that had been an architect’s office. One of his friends had given him a fur-lined aviator’s costume, and in the dead of winter when the cold in London is decidedly penetrating he would sit in that bleak room in his fur-lined suit writing the inside story of his experiences in far-off Araby.

On his frequent trips to Oxford he would carry his manuscript in a little black bag like those used by London bank-messengers. On one such occasion, after he had gone through the gate to the platform at Paddington Station, he put the bag down for a moment and walked over to the news-stand for a paper. When he returned, the bag was gone. It not only contained the only copy of his two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript, which he had written entirely in longhand, but it also contained the journal that he had kept faithfully through the desert campaign and many valuable original historical documents that can never be replaced. I saw him a few days later, and in telling me about the theft of the bag he referred to it jokingly and merely said: “I’ve been saved a lot of trouble, and after all it’s a good thing the bag was stolen. The world is simply spared another war book.” The bag and its contents were never seen or heard of again. Lawrence’s theory was that they were probably thrown into the Thames by the disappointed thief, who had hoped for a better haul. But his friends finally prevailed upon him to rewrite the book; and this time, in order to find solitude, away from the curious admirers who were constantly disturbing him at All Souls, and a solitude that carried with it a means of keeping body and soul together, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under the name of “Private Ross.” Even there he was unable to conceal his identity, and some one, for a consideration, tipped off a London newspaper, with the result that once more he found himself drawn into the lime-light. A few weeks previous he had agreed to sell the publication rights for a large sum, but when this unexpected publicity appeared he turned down the contract, left the Air Force, called on the various London editors imploring them to allow him to live in peace and print nothing more about him, and then vanished again.