These chapters contain much that is of interest, I hope, even to readers of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and readers of Revolt in the Desert may be glad of a narrative that is continuous. Critics must remember that Shaw, when preparing the Seven Pillars for private circulation, had in mind an audience of not more than a couple of hundred people and that he consequently had greater freedom in his vocabulary than I have had; and could also assume a specialized knowledge of Eastern history, geography and politics in his audience that I am not permitted to assume.
I have tried to give a picture of an exasperatingly complex personality in the easiest possible terms. I have tried also to make a difficult story as clear as may be by a cutting-down of the characters that occur in it; mentioning by name only the outstanding ones and explaining the rest in such terms as ‘a member of the body-guard,’ ‘a British Staff-officer with Feisal,’ ‘a major-general,’ ‘a French colonel,’ ‘the chief of the Beni Sakhr,’ etc. (Geography has been similarly simplified; the maps have been designed so that few places occur on them that are not mentioned in that part of the story to which they refer, and few or no places are mentioned in the story that are not to be found on the maps.)
This is not the method of history, but history, which is the less readable the more historical it is, will not eventually be hindered by anything I have written. I have attempted a critical study of ‘Lawrence’—the popular verdict that he is the most remarkable living Englishman, though I dislike such verdicts, I am inclined to accept—rather than a general review of the Arab freedom movement and the part played by England and France in regard to it. And there has been a space-limit.
For information about Lawrence I am greatly indebted to Mrs. Fontana, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Mrs. Lawrence (his mother), Mrs. Kennington, Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, Colonel John Buchan, Colonel R. V. Buxton, Colonel Alan Dawnay, Mr. E. M. Forster, Mr. Philip Graves, Sir Robert Graves, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Mr. Cecil Jane, Mr. Eric Kennington, Mr. Arnold Lawrence (a younger brother), Sir Henry McMahon, Private Palmer of the Royal Tank Corps, Serjeant Pugh of the Royal Air Force, Mr. Vyvyan Richards, Lord Riddell, Mr. Siegfried Sassoon, Lord Stamfordham, the Dean of Winchester, Mr. C. Leonard Woolley, and others.
For permission to use copyright photographs, to The Times, the Imperial War Museum, the French Army Photographic Department, Major Goslett, Colonel R. V. Buxton, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Serjeant Pugh, Mr. Eric Kennington, and Aircraftman Shaw himself.
R. G.
August, 1927.
LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS
I
I write of him as Lawrence since I first knew him by that name, though, with the rest of his friends, I now usually address him as ‘T. E.’: his initials at least seem fixed and certain. In 1923 when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Tank Corps he took the name of ‘T. E. Shaw’: and has continued in that name in the Royal Air Force, confirming the alteration by Deed Poll. His enlistment in 1922 was in the name of ‘Ross’ and these two are not, he admits, his only efforts to ‘label himself suitably.’ He chose ‘Shaw’ and ‘Ross’ more or less at random from an Army List, though their shortness recommended them and probably also their late positions in the alphabet; troops sometimes get lined up in alphabetical order of names and Lawrence avoids the right of the line by instinct. He was tired of the name Lawrence,—and found it too long—particularly of the name ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ which had become a romantic catchword and a great nuisance to him. Hero worship seems not only to annoy Lawrence but, because of a genuine belief in his own fraudulence as its object, to make him feel physically unclean; and few who have heard or read of Lawrence of Arabia now mention the name without a superstitious wonder or fail to lose their heads if they happen to meet the man. A good enough excuse for discarding the name Lawrence was that it never had any proud family traditions for him. Mr. Lowell Thomas, who has written an inaccurate and sentimental account of Lawrence, links him up with the Northern Irish family of that name and with the famous Indian Mutiny hero ‘who tried to do his duty’: this is an invention and not a good one. ‘Lawrence’ began as a name of convenience like ‘Ross’ or ‘Shaw,’ and Lawrence was never of the tribe which does things because public duty is public duty. He acts in all things for his own best reasons, which though perhaps—I might say ‘certainly’—honourable are never either public or obvious. The Arabs addressed him as ‘Aurans’ or ‘Lurens,’ but his nickname among them was Emir Dinamit, or Prince Dynamite, for his explosive energy. Old Auda, the fighting chief of the Howeitat, used to called him ‘The World’s Imp,’ which is better still.