Bayonets he scornfully rejected with the memorandum (to General Headquarters!) that they were ‘unintelligent masses of steel, generally fatal to the fools behind them.’ He might have added that the Turk, a good man with the bayonet, would have welcomed this choice of weapons. Machine-guns, except when armoured, were less suited for his battles than automatics because their longer bursts of fire did not make up for their greater weight and cumbersomeness. There is one recorded case of a British machine-gun sergeant, in France, picking up his weapon and using it like a rifle, but he was a giant. When it came to a choice between Lewis and Hotchkiss automatic rifles, he preferred the Hotchkiss, because it was not so easily jammed by mud and sand; but the files of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force Headquarter Office were full of his demands for quantities of either or both. The battle of Tafileh is a neat example, though not, one gathers, his first, of what is technically known as ‘attack by infiltration,’ with automatic rifles to the fore. Lawrence seems, before this, to have reduced his gun-crews to two men and a gun. His body-guard of forty-eight men had in one fight with a Turkish cavalry regiment (place and date unfortunately are not available) twenty-one automatics. He himself carried an ‘air-Lewis’ (borrowed from the Air Force) in a bucket on his camel-saddle. He once said that if he could get control of an arms-factory to make him Hotchkiss guns he would supersede the use of the rifle in war. A pleasant gift to civilization!
Lawrence’s attitude to war, by the way, seems to be that he has no stronger objection to war, as war, than to the human race as the human race; but he does not like wars in which the individual is swallowed up in the mass. He commented to me once on the anti-war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, who had the misfortune to serve, on the Western Front, in divisions that were accustomed to lose the equivalent of their full strength every four or five months, that had Sassoon been serving with him in Arabia he would have written in a completely different vein. That is very likely true. On the other hand, Lawrence’s revolt in the desert was a form of fighting so unlike ‘civilized’ war, and so romantically appealing, that it is perhaps fortunate that Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and the other poets who got badly involved in the war were all infantrymen in France.
Lawrence’s use of heavy machine-guns (Vickers’), in the armoured cars, developed from the first experimental raids after Akaba until he could use them in combined operations of camelry, armoured cars and aeroplanes. He was also able to improve on the regulation uses of high explosive as laid down in the Manual of Field-Engineering. He discovered how to fire electric mines along the telegraph wires and how to introduce petards into the fire-boxes of railway locomotives by ‘salting’ their wood-fuel piles with infernal contraptions that would escape the notice of the firemen. But so strongly was he moved by a sense of what we may call the ‘literary style’ of the epical romance in which he found himself a leading character—a ‘many-wiled Odysseus’ let us say—that he always saw his own scientific ingenuities as things alien and incongruous in the Arab setting. We are therefore left with only shadowy clues as to their importance and effectiveness in the campaign.
XXXI
In August 1922 Lawrence, having finally renounced the use of that name, enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He did all the usual duties of a man in the lowest grade of the Force and steadfastly refused promotion. For six months he raised no suspicion at all about his identity. He got on well with the men, though he was very raw and clumsy at the new life. Unfortunately an officer recognized him and sold the information for thirty pounds to a daily paper, with the result that there was an unwelcome publicity-stunt made of it and the suspicion then arose among the men that Lawrence was an Air Force spy! The Secretary of State for Air feared that questions might be asked in the House of Commons as to what he was doing there under an assumed name, so he judged it necessary to dismiss him in February 1923. This was most disappointing to Lawrence, who had got through the first hardship and bitterness of his recruit’s training, with a stainless character, only to be thrown out.
He had been stationed at Uxbridge, where his knowledge of photography seems to have put him into a section of photographic specialists. He disguised his previous history with half-truths, accounting, for instance, for his too accurate rifle-shooting at the range by saying that he had done some big-game shooting (perhaps he meant by ‘big-game’ some of the staff-officers on the train derailed at Minifer). He accurately informed the recruiting officer that he had previously served in no regiment, and so framed his explanations that apparently they noted down that he was interned by the Turks during the greater part of the War. At Uxbridge he nearly outdid himself in self-effacing efficiency. He was chosen as one of the squad to rehearse arms-drill for the Cenotaph ceremony at Armistice. He was unwilling to take part in it for fear of being recognized; fortunately his height saved him. He was rejected for not being five-foot-eight.
I am sure, by the way, that Lawrence would not, if he could, ‘by taking thought add a cubit’ (even an inch or two) ‘to his stature.’ Height is rarely useful to a man except in crowds and in games (both of which Lawrence avoids) and makes him conspicuous. I remember his saying once of an official: ‘Six-foot-three; and yet has brains’: being six-foot-two myself I uncomfortably wondered at what height upward Lawrence regards normal intelligence as usually ending.
At Uxbridge, on the first Commanding Officer’s Hut-inspection, the Wing-Commander was asking all the recruits personal questions. He noticed a few unusual books in Lawrence’s locker (where they were quite in order) and said: ‘Do you read that sort of thing? What were you in civil life?’
‘Nothing special, sir.’
‘What were you doing last?’