[5] Mrs. Lawrence had written: ‘Ned has been in the Hejaz fighting with the Arabs against the Turks for the last year and more. He has been doing wonderful things, blowing up trains, bridges, etc., and killing Turks by the hundred. He has had all sorts of decorations, which he ignores. He says that if any private letters are sent giving his rank and honours he will return them unopened.’ ...

‘Your mind has evidently moved far since 1914. That is a privilege you have won by being kept out of the mist for so long. You’ll find the rest of us aged undergraduates, possibly still unconscious of our unfitting grey hair. For that reason I cannot follow or return your steps. A house with no action entailed, quiet, and liberty to think and abstain as one wills—yes, I think abstention, the leaving everything alone and watching the others still going past, is what I would choose to-day, if things ceased driving me. This may be only the reaction from four years’ opportunism, and is not worth trying to resolve into terms of geography and employment.

‘Of course the ideal is that of the “lords who are” still “certainly expected,”[6] but the certainty is not for us, I’m afraid. Also for very few would the joy be so perfect as to be silent. Those words peace, silence, rest, and the others take on a vividness in the midst of noise and worry and weariness like a lighted window in the dark. Yet what on earth is the good of a lighted window? and perhaps it is only because one is overborne and tired. You know when one marches across an interminable plain a hill (which is still the worst hill on earth) is a banquet, and after searing heat cold water takes on a quality (what would they have said without this word before?) impossible in the eyes of a fen-farmer. Probably I’m only a sensitized film, turned black or white by the objects projected on me: and if so what hope is there that next week or year, or to-morrow, can be prepared for to-day?

[6] A reference to a previous letter of his own from Cairo in 1915: ‘You know Coleridge’s description of the heavenly bodies in The Ancient Mariner. “Lords that are certainly expected” ... etc. I don’t want to be a lord or a heavenly body, but I think that one end of my orbit should be in a printing-shed with you. Shall we begin by printing Apuleius’ Golden Ass, my present stand-by?’

‘This is an idiot letter, and amounts to nothing except a cry for a further change, which is idiocy, for I change my abode every day, and my job every two days, and my language every three days, and still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front, and I hate being back and I don’t like responsibility, and I don’t obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet like a purge and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to.

‘You want apparently some vivid colouring of an Arab costume, or of a flying Turk, and we have it all, for that is part or the mise-en-scène or the successful raider, and hitherto I am that. My bodyguard of fifty Arab tribesmen, picked riders from the young men of the deserts, are more splendid than a tulip garden, and we ride like lunatics and with our Beduin pounce on unsuspecting Turks and destroy them in heaps: and it is all very gory and nasty after we close grips. I love the preparation, and the journey, and loathe the physical fighting. Disguises, and prices on one’s head, and fancy exploits are all part of the pose: how to reconcile it with the Oxford pose I know not. Were we flamboyant there?

‘If you reply—you will perceive I have matting of the brain—and your thoughts are in control, please tell me of B—, and if possible W—. The latter was the man for all these things, because he would take a baresark beery pleasure in physical outputs....

‘L.’

XXIV

The plan that Lawrence had in mind for Buxton’s camel-corps was this: it would start from the Suez Canal, across Sinai to Akaba, arriving on the second of August. The next step was from Akaba through the passes to Rumm. From Rumm it would make a raid on Mudowwara which was still holding out after having been threatened for over a year, and destroy the Turkish water-supply, thereby completing the strangle-hold on Medina. From Mudowwara it would go by the old Jefer and Bair route to Kissir on the railway, three miles south of Amman, to destroy the big bridge and tunnel which the British cavalry and camel raid had left undamaged: this would delay the Turkish relief of Maan for three weeks, by which time Allenby’s offensive would be beginning. The camel-corps would then be back on Allenby’s front by way of Tafileh and Beersheba on August the thirtieth.