Part 31

The humour of the controversy lies in the siding of Lawrence himself with the critics of whom ‘B.’ disposes so crushingly. What is called ‘serious military significance’ is part of the whole modern theory of War, the seeking out and destroying by one side of the organized military forces of another—a theory which he rejected as futile and barbarous almost from the start. What Lawrence wanted, rather, was to achieve serious _political_ significance for the Revolt by whatever means lay readiest to his hand. Actual fighting, as opposed to pin-pricking raids and demolitions, was a luxury that he indulged the Arabs in merely to save their self-respect. They could not have thought freedom honourably won without it. The capture of Akaba is a clear instance of an operation that, though it affected the more conventional war at Gaza and Beersheba, had in itself serious political rather than serious military significance. It was only by an accident that the Turkish battalion happened to bar the way at Aba el Lissan and invite destruction. The rest of the operation was more like a chess problem; white to play and mate in three moves.

This is not the place, and it probably is not the time to weigh up Lawrence’s strategy and tactics during the Arab Revolt. Of the strategy he makes no secret whatever. It lies in _Revolt in the Desert_ open for anyone who can use a map intelligently. The _Seven Pillars_ gives yet fuller details; the first number of the _Army Quarterly_ (1920) contains a long article by him on the subject of irregular war—a summary of the results of his sick-bed theorizing in Emir Abdulla’s camp in March 1917. The obvious comment to be made on his strategy is that it enabled the Arab Revolt in the sphere of politics, as in the sphere of war, to assume a much larger share of influence and attention than its material importance justified. B.’s letter just quoted, had it compared the Arabs’ resources in arms and equipment, as well as in men, with those of the Turkish forces opposed to them, would have made the point still clearer. Lawrence would probably take this judgment as the highest praise, for we find him throughout insisting, with a repetition that conveys the painfulness of his problem, upon the extreme economy of means necessary. The material and military assistance that the Arabs could themselves provide, with all the goodwill in the world, was small. Nor might it be helped out by large borrowing of material and military resources from the Allies without a proportionate political debt when the fighting was over. Lawrence would therefore be proud to think that he made his little go such a long way—even the total of ten million pounds and the score or so of British casualties that the Arab Revolt cost Great Britain was a flea-bite compared with, for instance, the monthly cost of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in lives and cash-and that politically he made so much ado out of what had begun as little or nothing.

From the point of view of tactics, his conduct is far less clear. A casual reading of his books might lead one to suppose that he fought his battles with bluff and crimson banners for main argument; or even that the hypnotic effect that his presence seems to have had on the Arabs extended to the enemy, who were fascinated into stupidity—that the moon herself came under the influence and consented to open one of the more difficult gates to Akaba for him. But actually his tactics were, I believe, thought out with the same care and artifice, not to say humour, as his general strategic principles. And his reasons for slurring over the ways and means of fighting are connected with the political relations between the Syrian Government and the French in 1919 when he first wrote his book. Both sides were preparing for armed struggle in Syria and it looks as if Lawrence set himself to contribute nothing in the form of a manual of warfare that could be used in this struggle. His late re-draftings of the book at a time when the danger had become less acute only modified the literary style without adding (or taking away) much of the content. He had to select the materials to be used with great severity. His two active years provided enough for ten books of the size to which he limited himself—his memory was uncomfortably clear and full—so that wherever possible he sacrificed the details of the fighting.

He mentions, for instance, no more than three or four armoured-car actions in which he took part; but it seems that he fought at least fifty, enough to evolve a whole system and scheme of battle for them. (Readers of _Revolt in the Desert_ will have found no more than two or three occasions mentioned on which Lawrence was wounded, against the four or five mentioned in the _Seven Pillars_; but the total number was nine times, including the occasion of Minifer when he had five bullet grazes, cuts from flying boiler-plate and a broken toe.) Nor is adequate mention made in either book of the numerous engagements in which he tempered his body-guard into a real fighting weapon. We can only gather, from casual allusions, that he did not leave the tactics of the desert as he found them.

He based his strategy on an exhaustive study of the geography of his area; of the Turkish Army; of the nature of the Bedouin tribes and their distribution. So he based his desert tactics on a study of the raiding parties of the Arabs. As we have seen, one of his first actions on being posted as military adviser to Feisal was to accompany a raid on the Turkish force attacking Rabegh. And he continued this self-education, in the school of Auda and Zaal and Nasir, until after the occupation of Akaba. Only by graduating in this Bedouin school could he win the experience and prestige that would allow him to modify its traditions.

Exactly what these modifications were is nowhere explained, though they seem to have achieved a greater unity of purpose among the members of the raiding party, at the more critical moments before and after the attack, without impairing the self-reliance and self-sufficiency of any individual. His English companions knew the difference between an Arab raid when he was present and one when he was not present; but they were not professional soldiers, nor students of war, so could not put their finger on the precise points of difference. And he himself, except in the battle fought north of Tafileh, withholds any account of himself in command. This battle proves what we knew already, that he relied on automatic rifles and not on ordinary rifles. The rapid-fire exercise, with an ordinary rifle, of fifteen to thirty aimed shots a minute, saved the British Expeditionary Force at the first battle of Ypres in face of enormously superior machine-gun fire; but it was only perfected by years of intense musketry training. The Bedouin Arabs would never have had the patience to master it and in any case it would have been of little use to them in camel-fighting.

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?’

‘Working in an architect’s office, sir.’ (This was true enough. Sir Herbert Baker had lent a room of his office in Barton Street for Lawrence to write Seven Pillars in.)

‘Why did you join the Air Force?’

‘I think I must have had a mental break-down, sir.’

‘What! What! Sergeant-Major, take this man’s name; gross impertinence!’

The next day Lawrence was ‘up’ and was able to explain that the Wing-commander had misunderstood him.

At school in Uxbridge—the Royal Air Force makes much of education—the master, a civilian, asked the recruits to write a confidential first essay, for his eye alone, giving details of previous education. As he was obviously a decent and sincere man, Lawrence wrote truthfully that he had got scholarships and exhibitions from the age of thirteen onwards, which had helped to pay school and university bills until he had taken honours in history and been elected to a research-fellowship in political theory. That later events arising out of the War had constrained him to enlist and that he found himself over-educated for his present part in life. The master respected the confidence and instead of lessons gave Lawrence books to read in school hours and a quiet place to sit in.

A month after being dismissed from the Air Force he re-enlisted, with War-Office permission, in the Royal Tank Corps. He had got a qualified assurance that if he served without incident for a while in the Army, his return to the Air Force might be considered. He remained in it for more than two years, stationed near Dorchester. He found life rough but made many friends among the soldiers and was fortunate to be near Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hardy, to whom I had the satisfaction of introducing him.

It happened more than once that journalists and celebrity hunters would break in on Mr. Hardy’s quiet and meeting there a little figure in clumsy khaki with a quiet, almost filial regard for the old poet, would not give him a second glance. Whereas, as Mrs. Hardy has told me, ‘they would have given their ears, almost, for a conversation with him had they known who he was.’

Lawrence was never without a Brough-Superior racing motor-bicycle. Each year he used to wheedle a next year’s model from the makers—and ride it to death—to report on it. He nicknamed his machines ‘Boanerges’ (sons of thunder) and they carried him well. He had five of them in four years and rode 100,000 miles on them, making only two insurance claims (for superficial damage to the machine after skids) and hurting nobody. The greatest pleasure of his recent life has been speed on the road. The bicycle would do a hundred miles an hour, but he is not, he says, a racing man. The first time that he really let Boanerges the Third go, in the early dawn on a long stretch of road near Winchester, he was curious to see the speed-dial make two complete revolutions. It did, and broke with a scream, so he flattered himself that he covered an unknown number of miles beyond the hundred an hour. But this was not his daily practice.

He wrote to me in a letter:

‘It’s usually my satisfaction to purr along gently about 60 m.p.h. drinking in the air and the general view. I lose detail even at such moderate speeds but gain comprehension. When I open out a little more, as for instance across Salisbury Plain at 80 or so, I feel the earth moulding herself under me. It is _me_ piling up this hill, hollowing this valley, stretching out this level place. Almost the earth comes alive, heaving and tossing on each side like a sea. That’s a thing that the slow coach will never feel. It is the reward of speed. I could write you pages on the lustfulness of moving swiftly.’

He had at least one serious conflict with authority in the Royal Tank Corps, when he was brought up on the charge of insubordination towards a corporal. (Probably more. But none of them seem to have had unfortunate sequels, for when he left the Tank Corps his character-sheet was free of major entries.)

Of this occasion a comrade, Private Palmer, writes:

‘The corporal was a Scotsman of the old school, an ex-officer, overbearing, with a wonderful idea of his own importance. T.E. used to rag him unmercifully. The corporal had a habit of laying the dust in the hut with a bowl of water sprinkled on the floor. This performance annoyed T.E. and everybody else, so one day T.E. got up early and swamped the hut with I forget now how many bowls of water. We all paddled. Later a man in the hut received a few days “Confined to Barracks” unfairly, through the Corporal. T.E. simply slung the corporal’s suit-case into the sanitary bin.’

Private Palmer has very kindly given me further amusing if slight details of Lawrence’s life in the Tank Corps:

‘He did the normal work of a private soldier even to receiving “three days confined to barracks” for leaving overalls on his bed. After “passing off the square” he did fatigues. That is how I met him. We began talking about Thomas Hardy. I was employed in the quartermaster’s stores and T.E. joined me there. He did his work well; he had to mark recruits’ kits with their numbers, fit them with clothing, boots, etc. In the afternoons sometimes, we used to solve cross-word puzzles together. Generally, however, T.E. would work on sections of the _Seven Pillars_. He did correcting, etc., in the Quartermaster’s office, of an evening, and sometimes early morning.

‘One day I “pulled his leg” and he beat me with a slipper—after a struggle, mind you. The Quartermaster walked in and wanted to know whether the store was a gymnasium. “No, sir,” said T.E., “I’m sorry; I was only correcting Private Palmer with this slipper!” The Quartermaster laughed and said “Carry on!”

‘When rumours started in the camp as to who he was, it was amusing to see the troops studying photographs of him in the _Daily_ ... and comparing them with the original. “It’s not him!” “I bet you a dollar it is him”; these were the sort of remarks that passed between the troops. T.E. appeared to be indifferent as to what they thought and said about him. This stage of excitement soon passed and he was treated as one of ourselves again. The tradespeople were more polite to him, however.

‘His recreations were gramophone music—he loved the Bach concerto for two violins in D minor—and Brough-riding. Most Sundays he used to take me, pillion, to breakfast at Corfe: order breakfast first and look at the castle while it was being prepared: he never tired of the castle. Sometimes he took me to cathedrals—Salisbury, Winchester, Wells. Of course we passed everything we met on the road: T.E. couldn’t resist a race.

‘His passing from the Tank Corps made a nine-days’ wonder: I was bombarded with questions. As the people who knew him are scattered now, his name has passed into the legend stage. Strangely enough, he is remembered, not for anything he did during the War, but for his performances on that wonderful motor-cycle.’

That ‘T.E. couldn’t resist a race’ seems to me a misinterpretation of motive. He is not of a competitive nature, but dislikes other people’s dust. And he never took the machine out on a dry road without letting it out, all out, at least once for every hundred miles that he rode. Just to keep the two of them from getting sluggish.

In August 1925, through the intercession of a highly-placed friend with the Prime Minister, he was re-transferred to the R.A.F., his ambition for the last two years, and in December 1926 was sent overseas to the Indian frontier, where he now is. He wrote to me some months ago:

‘If old P— asks you again why I am in the R.A.F., tell him that it is simply because I _like_ the R.A.F. The being cared for, the rails of conduct, the impossibility of doing irregular things, are easements. The companionship of “shop,” the enforced routine of simple labour, the occasional leisures are actively pleasant. While my health lasts I’ll keep in it. I did not like the Army much, but the R.A.F. is as different from the Army as the air is from the earth. In the Army the person is at a discount: the combined movement, the body of men, is the ideal. In the R.A.F. there are no combined movements: its drill is a joke except when some selected squad is specially trained for a tattoo or a ceremony. The airman is brought up to despise the army. “Soldier” is our chief insult and word of derision.’

I hope that these quotations will not be considered tactless; but will take the risk. He wrote to me a year or two ago in the same strain:

‘You were in the regular infantry, so the chances are that you have rather a cock-eyed view of the life we lead in the R.A.F. Our ideal is the skilled mechanic at his bench or machine. Our job is the conquest of the air, our element. That’s a more than large enough effort to comprehend all our intelligence. We grudge every routine duty, such as are invented for soldiers to keep them out of mischief, and perform our parades deliberately ill, lest we lose our edges and become degraded into parts of a machine. In the Army the men belong to the machine. In the R.A.F. the machines, upon earth, belong to the men; as in the air they belong to the officers. So the men have the more of them. Drill in the Air Force is punitive, in the eyes of men and officers alike. Whenever the public see a detachment of airmen on a “B-S” (ceremonial) parade, they should realize that these, their very expensive servants, are being temporarily misemployed—as though Cabinet ministers should hump coal in office-hours.’

Sergeant Pugh, of his Flight at Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, has written me a letter about Shaw in the R.A.F., which I print as it stands:

‘ARRIVAL AT CRANWELL

‘As far as my mind takes me back, it was in the first week of Sept. 1925 that he came to the camp, and although many had heard of his “carryings-on”, few had seen him. He was met with all kinds of looks (suspicious): was he finding out who’s who and what’s what of the R.A.F.? Is that why he was discharged previously? (amazement): we had heard he was a man with a terrible scowl of harshness, etc., etc. (wrath): he is some ex-service guy pulling our legs; and yet! you know his carriage, slight, mild, unassuming, why did he set the camp alive in excitement just to see him?

FIRST FATIGUE. (I was taking names.)