In his visit to the East in 1921, treaty-making, he did return by air as had been prophesied, and found a crowd still waiting at the aerodrome to greet him with ‘Aurans at last!’ A friend of mine was talking to him shortly afterwards, at Jerusalem, when an Arab came up and saluted. It was a member of the body-guard, ‘an awful-looking scoundrel with love-locks and a sash-full of weapons.’ Lawrence asked if he was doing anything important now. The man, trembling with pleasure at seeing Lawrence, answered, ‘No, lord, nothing important.’ ‘Then you must go to Basra and enrol in the service of Lord Feisal, who will want your services and the services of the rest.’
Lawrence met Foch at Paris. It is related that Foch remarked in a friendly way to Lawrence, ‘I suppose now that there will soon be war in Syria between my country and your Arabs? Will you be leading their armies?’ ‘No,’ Lawrence answered, ‘unless you promise to lead the French armies in person. Then I should enjoy it.’ The old Marshal wagged his finger at Lawrence. ‘My young friend, if you think that I am going to sacrifice the reputation that I have so carefully compiled on the Western Front by fighting you on your own ground and under conditions imposed by yourself, you are very much mistaken.’ Asked whether this story was true, Lawrence has replied that ‘the event has faded from my retentive memory,’ which can mean anything that anyone likes it to mean.
One more story (out of its place but recalled by this discussion of international affairs):
When Lawrence was working up from Akaba into Syria he once took a mobile hospital with him on a raid. All the stretcher-camels were, for economy of transport, loaded up with dynamite. The Royal Army Medical Corps Headquarters in Palestine got to hear of this and telegraphed expecting that the Arab Army would in future observe the Geneva Convention which insists that the transport devoted to fighting shall be kept distinct from that devoted to medical work. Lawrence on his next raid therefore left both hospital and doctor behind. The Medical Headquarters again protested, and Lawrence replied that transport could not be wasted on non-combatants. This enraged the Surgeon-General, who tried to catch Lawrence by wiring a peremptory request to know how Lawrence proposed, in the absence of his medical officer, to dispose of his wounded. Lawrence then replied tersely, ‘Will shoot all cases too hurt to ride off.’ This closed the argument.
XXX
Lawrence wrote his great history of the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. or seven out of ten books of it, between February and June, 1919, in Paris. He did the present beginning of the introduction in six hours in the Handley-Page aeroplane, on his way from Paris to collect his belongings in Cairo: the rhythm of it is affected, he says, by the slow ‘munch, munch, munch’ of the great Rolls-Royce engines. In London he wrote an eighth book, but had all the eight stolen from him about Christmas 1919 while changing trains at Reading. Only the introduction and the drafts of two books remained.
He has never imagined a political motive for the theft, but his friends have. They even whisper darkly that one day the lost text may reappear in certain official archives. Lawrence himself hopes it will not: he had destroyed most of his war-time notes as he went along and when he began again the weary task of rewriting the quarter of a million words he could not quite trust his memory. However, Colonel Dawnay, who saw both texts, tells me that one chapter at least that he read more carefully than others in the original seems to be the same, word for word and almost comma for comma, in the second version. Lawrence still had two skeleton-diaries and some rough route-sheets, but little else.
This second writing was done in less than three months at the rate of some four to five thousand words a day. But Lawrence, immoderate as usual, did not keep to a daily ration. He did it in long sittings and probably set up a world’s literary record by writing Book VI in twenty-four hours between sunrise and sunrise without a pause. Book VI was about 34,000 words in length! ‘Naturally the style was careless,’ he says. But it served as a basis for a careful literary rewriting; which is the Seven Pillars as it was finally published. He wrote it in London, Jiddah and Amman in 1921, again in London in 1922, in the Royal Tank Corps near Dorchester in 1923 and 1924, and in the Royal Air Force at Cranwell in 1925 and 1926. He checked the historical accuracy with the help of all available official documents and his British friends who had served with the Arab army.
Lawrence does nothing by halves and not only set about making the book a history of the Arab Revolt which the Arabs themselves would never write, but one that he would not be ashamed of as literature. For this last ambition he secured the advice of two of the best-known English writers and taught himself with their help to write professionally.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is, beyond dispute, a great book: though there is such a thing as a book being too well written, too much a part of literature. Lawrence himself realizes this and was once, indeed, on the point of throwing it into the Thames at Hammersmith. It should somehow, one feels, have been a little more casual, for the nervous strain of its ideal of faultlessness is oppressive. Lawrence charges himself with ‘literary priggishness,’ but that is unfair. His aim was, all the time, simplicity of style and statement and this he achieved in the most expert way. He has, somewhere, confessed to a general mistrust of experts and it may be that he should have carried it further, and dispensed with expert advice in literary matters too. (Possibly, though, in actual practice he did; he was always a difficult pupil.) On the whole I prefer the earliest surviving version, the so-called Oxford text, to the final printed book which was the version that I first read consecutively. This is a physical rather than a critical reaction. The earlier version is 330,000 words long instead of 280,000 and the greater looseness of the writing makes it easier to read. From a critical point of view no doubt the revised version is better. It is impossible that a man like Lawrence would spend four years on polishing the text without improving it, but the nervous rigor that the revised book gave me has seemingly dulled my critical judgment. I may add that Lawrence had foreseen the effect that the book would have on me and refrained for many years from letting me see it.