Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

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The ‘Agayl suggested that he had fallen asleep in the saddle during the night and tumbled off, hitting his head on a rock, or even that he had been the victim of a grudge-killing. It was clear that Gasim was lost, and that the ‘Agayl – to whom he was merely a bad-tempered stranger – were not prepared to go back and look for him. Lawrence realized that the onus fell on him. He considered ordering one of his servants to go back on his camel, but realized that such a shirking of his duty would always be remembered. He begged half a skin of water from the ‘Agayl – the last water they had – and turned his camel silently, forcing her back along the line of camel-riders and into the desert beyond, cursing his need to live up to Bedu ideals. Within twenty minutes the caravan was out of sight, and the terrible loneliness of the desert descended on him. The only sign that humans had ever survived in this void was a pattern of threshing-pits across the flints of the desert floor, where in the past the Fajr Bedu had worked grain from the wild grass samh.The pits were tiny pools of sand like eyes in the stony waste, and Lawrence urged his camel across them deliberately so as to leave some trace of his outward journey. He rode on for an hour and a half through a series of mirages which cast ghostly sparklers of light and haze, and sighted at last a tiny dark blemish on the desert’s surface. This was Gasim. When Lawrence approached, he saw that the man was blundering about in confusion, half blinded by the sun, his arms held out and his mouth gaping. Lawrence couched his camel and Gasim snatched the water-skin from him, spilling the precious liquid down his shirt in his eagerness to drink. Lawrence sat him on the camel’s rump, then mounted himself and set off on a compass-bearing, hoping desperately that he could now find the caravan. He traced the tracks he had left on the threshing-floors, and Gasim clung on behind the saddle, blubbering. Within an hour, though, he spotted a black bubble in the distance, which gradually split and swelled, resolving into the forms of three camel-riders. For an anxious moment, Lawrence wondered if it was the enemy. Then, suddenly, he recognized Auda and two of Sharif Nasir’s ‘Agayl, who had come back to search for him. Lawrence yelled sneers at them for abandoning a man in the desert. Auda replied that Gasim was not worth the price of a camel: Lawrence interrupted him. ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ he said. Gasim claimed to have dismounted to urinate and lost the caravan in the darkness, but Lawrence suspected that he had actually halted and gone to sleep. Soon they caught up with Sharif Nasir and Nasib al-Bakri. While the Sharif appreciated Lawrence’s act of courage, Nasib was angry that he had endangered his own life and Auda’s – and consequently the entire mission – for the sake of a single worthless man.

The rescue of Gasim was Lawrence’s most courageous single deed, and did much to enhance his reputation after the war. Though he apparently tried to play down the heroism of the act in Seven Pillars,by portraying his irritation that the duty of rescuing the man fell on him, the fact that it occupies an entire chapter is significant. There is no mention of Gasim in any official reports, but in an article in The Timeswritten in 1918, Lawrence claimed that ‘many of his party’ were lost in crossing al-Houl – a claim less indicative of success than of failure. According to the Seven Pillarsaccount, at least one man waslost in al-Houl, a slave of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s whom nobody went back for, since he was believed to know the country well. His mummified corpse was discovered weeks later. Although the rescue of Gasim has the characteristics of one of Lawrence’s departures into fantasy, in this case we have solid evidence, from his diary entry for 24 May 1917, that he actually didgo back to look for him, for that evening Sharif Nasir apparently beat ‘Ali and Othman – Lawrence’s newly acquired servants – for allowing him to return alone. He also wrote in his diary that he ‘wasted two hours and a half looking for Gasim, which has been taken by some to suggest that the rescue attempt actually failed. Lawrence was precise in his choice of words, and a master of linguistic nuances: is it likely that he would have chosen to write ‘wasted’ if he had really returned with the lost man? If Gasim was indeed rescued, why does his name not appear again in the text of Seven Pillarswhen he was Lawrence’s servant, and the party a relatively small one? The absence of his name following the incident is considered the most convincing evidence that Lawrence’s heroic rescue attempt was a failure.

Now, it is the case that ‘Gasim’ is not referred to by this single name after Lawrence had supposedly brought him out of the desert, but three weeks after the incident, he does refer to a man called ‘Gasim ash-Shimit’ in a tale he tells in an attempt to parody Auda’s epic style of rhetoric. This tale, it is true, is set at Wejh before the Aqaba expedition, but the important question is whether ‘Gasim ash-Shimt’ and the Gasim of the rescue story are the same man. First of all, the name: ‘ash-Shimt’ means ‘he who rejoices in another’s misfortune’; it is not a family name, nor is it kunya –a name defining the named person in relation to someone else, such as ‘the father of so-and-so’. It is clearly a nickname, and as such it certainly seems to evoke the character of Gasim as Lawrence described him. It so happens that in Seven Pillarsthere are two references to an Arab Lawrence simply calls ‘The Shimt’ following the incident in al-Houl – the first at the battle of Aba 1-Lissan, about a month later, when Lawrence, searching for Auda on the battlefield, asks ‘The Shimt’ where his horsemen have gone. The second reference is indirect: in his description of the Mudowwara raid which took place the following September, Lawrence notes that ‘The Shimt’s boy – a very dashing fellow’ ¹⁵had been killed in the attack. If’ The Shimt’ and Lawrence’s Gasim are the same man, then it seems probable that Lawrence did indeed bring Gasim out of the desert and save his life. Moreover, the phrase ‘wasted two and a half hours looking for Gasim’ does not, in the English idiom, necessarily mean that the rescue attempt was abortive – it could indicate only that Lawrence was annoyed because Gasim had needlessly wasted time and energy by his incompetence: throughout the trek to Aqaba his diary entries frequently express his impatience to get on. Finally, Lawrence also wrote in his diary the phrase ‘not worth a camel’s price’ – which he said later was spoken by Auda, and to which he is supposed to have replied, ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ Such comments smack of deliberate admonishment to someone who has done a stupid thing – such as going to sleep in the desert when the rest of the caravan is moving on: they are scarcely the kind of remarks likely to be made about a comrade – no matter how disagreeable – who has just been lost. The balance of evidence seems to me to suggest that Lawrence did return alone into al-Houl and save the life of Gasim – a remarkable act of bravery for a man who was terrified of being hurt.

That night was a terrible one: the party had no water, and could neither drink nor bake bread. Instead, they lay tossing and turning sleeplessly on the desert floor with thirst and hunger pangs tearing at them: ‘Tonight worst yet in my experience,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary. ¹⁶When the day dawned, however, they found themselves in the great Wadi Sirhan, and knew that they had crossed al-Houl: the terror of thirst lay behind them, the ordeal was over. They struck camp at first light and by eight o’clock they had arrived at the well of Arfaja, an eighteen-foot shaft containing cream-coloured muddy water which both stank and tasted horrible. Nevertheless, it was all there was, and a blessing after the waterless waste behind them, and they drank until their stomachs swelled. They dumped their baggage, watered the camels, drove them out into the grazing and sat down to enjoy a well-deserved respite after the strain of crossing the ‘Devil’s Anvil’. They had not been resting more than a few minutes, though, when they were startled by the cry of ‘Raiders! Raiders!’ and Lawrence saw a wedge of Bedu cantering towards the wells on fast camels with rifles in their hands. At once he and Nasir mustered the ‘Agayl, who fell on their bellies with cocked rifles behind their baggage, ready to defend the camp. Za’al Abu Tayyi rushed for his camel and rode bravely towards the interlopers, who, seeing organized resistance, turned and retreated into the desert. They had not gone far, however. That evening, Lawrence and his men were sitting around the fire being served with coffee in turn by an ‘Agayli called Assaf. Suddenly a fusillade of shots rapped out of the darkness, hitting the coffee-server – the only man standing – who was mortally wounded and died only minutes later. Lawrence’s men doused the flames at once and rolled into the dunes, located the position of the enemy from the flashes of their rifles, and shot back with such concentrated fire that the raiders gave up and disappeared into the night: ‘Tonight we were shot into,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary; ‘an [‘Agayli] killed just after giving men coffee.’ ¹⁷

No other incident marred their welcome into Sirhan, and within two days they had located the camp of ‘Ali Abu Fitna, a Howaytat chief, where they were to remain for several days, feasting royally on Howaytat sheep. Auda left them here and rode off north to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan, the paramount chief of the powerful Rwalla, whose help, tacit or explicit, they would require if the operation were to be a success. Lawrence, Nasir and their patrol made slow progress along the wadi, which to Lawrence began to appear sinister – even actively evil – with its snakes, brackish wells, salt-marsh, stunted palms and barren bush. This view was a reflection of his inner state, for the further he moved into enemy territory the more the fear gripped him. He was also troubled by the job of recruiting levies, for as groups of Bedu appeared in his camp each night to swear allegiance to Feisal, he was obliged to reassure them that the Arabs were fighting for independence, not to further Allied objectives in the Near East. This had been easy in the Hejaz, which would almost certainly receive independence if the Allies were victorious, but Lawrence was less able to convince himself of the honesty of his preaching here in Syria: he was quite aware of the Sykes–Picot agreement, and that Britain and France intended to carve the region up between them afterwards. He despised Arab Nationalists like Nasib al-Bakri who believed in development and modernization: he had fallen in love with the ‘Old Syria’ and hated the thought of change: he wanted the East to remain the mystical, romantic land he had encountered in 1909, but without the oppressive government of the Ottoman Turks. He admired the Bedu and the semi-nomadic or tribal peasants such as Dahoum and Hammoudi – these were the ‘real’ Arabs. The ‘fat, greasy’ townsmen of Syria and Palestine were, he considered, of a different race, despite the fact that they were linguistically, culturally and racially homogenous. He perceived the East through a set of highly romanticized – and therefore ethnocentric – ideas. His idea of ‘self-determination’ was in reality determination by certain traditional and reactionary elements – the Bedu, the Hashemites, the conservative Sheikhs and Islamic elders – who represented his own romantic idea of what the East shouldbe like: not the ‘will of the people’, but the superimposition of a romantic structure of his own. That Lawrence believed in these ideas passionately, and believed that they were right for the Arabs, is beyond question: from early childhood he had seen himself always as the clever ‘elder brother’. It is similarly likely that his views changed as he moved into Syria: the wily intelligence officer who had at first accepted the realpolitikof sacrificing Arab priorities to those of the Allies became increasingly plagued by doubt. Though the guilt niggled at him more and more strongly, his chameleon-like quality never allowed him to abandon the pose of the tough, practical politician with his own side. War correspondent Lowell Thomas, who actually spoke to him only a few months later, reported his opinion that the British could never keep the ‘promises they had made to the Arabs, and that, in wartime, promises were made to be broken’. ¹⁸Lawrence made a great deal of his anguish in having to deceive the Arabs in Seven Pillars:no doubt this is part genuine, part ‘elaboration’. Beneath this role of martyrdom lies the stratum of Lawrence’s masochism – the constant need to be punished for mankind’s transgressions, and to be seen to be punished: ‘In the contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon of [masochistic] exhibitionism,’ Lyn Cowan has written, ‘the roles of masochist and martyr interchange in the same actor, their distinction almost obliterated in the spotlight’s glare.’ ¹⁹The fear and the hypocrisy, the divided loyalties, the divided soul, the sheer inertia of the heavy days in Sirhan, wandering from tent to tent, stuffing himself against his will with vast quantities of mutton and rice in order to placate his hosts, receiving delegations, exchanging pleasantries, telling lies: all this began to inflate his emotions to bursting point.

At Agayla, many black tents were pitched in the wadi, and Lawrence was rejoined by Auda with Durzi ibn Dughmi of the Rwalla and a troop of his horsemen. This suggested a favourable response from Nuri ash-Sha alan, and the prospective assistance of the powerful Rwalla changed the situation dramatically. Now, even Damascus seemed open to them, and Nasib al-Bakri, eager to raise the revolt in Syria, began to argue for an attack to the north instead of the planned move on Aqaba. Sharif Nasir and Auda were swayed by his argument, but Lawrence was outraged. If the Hashemites attempted to raise the tribes of northern Syria at this juncture, and captured Damascus, he thought, then they would be totally isolated. The British Expeditionary Force still lay behind the Gaza-Beersheba line and would be physically incapable of supporting them. The insurrection in Damascus would easily be crushed and the Hashemite cause would fizzle out. Timing was crucial, because the tribes would not rise a second time. Meanwhile, Aqaba lay on the British flank in Palestine, and Lawrence was convinced that, in order to be fully acknowledged, the revolt must move in concert with the British advance. He feared al-Bakri, as he feared all sophisticated Arab townsmen, and in Seven Pillarsbranded him spitefully as a ‘fool’, a ‘rat’and ‘petty’. Nasib, who had been one of the founders of the Revolt, was certainly neither a fool nor a traitor to the cause of Arab Nationalism, but, like the Sharif ‘Abdallah whom Lawrence despised equally, he was capable of independent thought, and had no truck with Allied aspirations in his country. He was not gulled by Lawrence’s double-talk. Nasib was exactly the kind of supposedly ‘volatile and short-sighted’ Arab Lawrence and the British disliked: they felt more empathy for the conservative elements in Arab society, and in Seven PillarsLawrence tapped this traditional orientalist view of the essential congruency between the ‘honourable’ English ‘gentleman’ and the Bedui – a category into which he pressed those members of the Hashemite family of whom he approved, despite the fact that they had been raised in Istanbul. Thus, he indicated that while Nasib frowned on his heroic rescue of Gasim, Auda and Sharif Nasir – two of ‘nature’s gentlemen’ – fully understood. When the feasting in the Wadi Sirhan grew too much to bear, Nasib and his aide, Zaki Drubi, had retired, while Lawrence and Nasir had had the grace to honour their hosts by sticking the meal out to the end. In Lawrence’s writing a man’s ‘nobility’ is frequently defined by his table-manners and eating habits. By such rhetorical devices, he sought to demonstrate how the English and the ‘real Arabs’ – that is the Bedu – had more in common than either had with the ‘ignoble’, ‘petty’ and ‘treacherous’ town Arabs, even though these townsmen were the vast majority in the Arab world, and therefore, by another definition, might be considered ‘the real Arabs’. The ‘real Arabs’ did not, of course, exist – the idea was simply an ideological concept which was of great use to the colonialists, but was in reality nebulous: referring to the Bedu as ‘the real Arabs’ was in fact no more satisfactory than calling the British royal family ‘the real British’ and trying to forget the remaining millions of the population. In any case, it was not by honourable means that Lawrence got his way with al-Bakri. First, he went to see Auda and explained that, if they were to strike north through Rwalla territory, then it would be the Rwalla and not the Howaytat who received the credit and the bulk of the British gold. He spoke privately with Nasir, too, fanning the instinctive jealousy between the Hashemites – direct descendants of the Prophet – and the al-Bakris, who claimed descent – spuriously, Lawrence hinted – from the Prophet’s first Khalif, Abu Bakr as-Sadiq. Eventually he won them both over, and it was agreed that, after the recruitment was completed, Nasib should ride off to the Druse mountains to prepare the way for an eventual march on Damascus. Lawrence tried to make sure that he had insufficient funds to raise a proper revolt by persuading Auda and Nasir to ask for the Ј7,000 Feisal had given him to spend in Syria. The strain of this double-dealing, with holding to the course he had set himself at Wejh, with lying day after day to the Bedu recruits, play-acting the Bedui, now became too much to bear. Ever since they had started from Wejh, three weeks previously, Lawrence’s overwhelming fear had nagged at him, telling him constantly to move on towards the thing he feared most. The inertia of the movement in Wadi Sirhan had been agonizing for someone of his masochistic temperament, and at last, something inside him snapped: ‘Can’t stand it another day,’ he wrote in his pocket diary on 5 June. ‘Will ride N[orth] and chuck it.’ ²⁰

‘Chuck it’ clearly suggests that he had in mind a suicide-mission, and such a reaction would be in keeping with the ‘flight-forward’ tendency he had displayed so markedly even as a youth. Riding alone – or with a small escort – deep into Turkish-held lands was the psychological equivalent for Lawrence of diving through the ice into the frozen Cherwell: ‘a bodily wound would have been a grateful vent for my internal complexities,’ he wrote, ‘a mouth through which my troubles might have found relief.’ ²¹Before leaving, though, he scribbled a melodramatic note to Clayton in a journal he was to leave behind, suggesting that his motive was simply frustration at being expected to raise the Bedu on a fraud: ‘Clayton,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.’ ²²No doubt Lawrence thought the note would make a suitably noble epitaph, but his true motivation for this flight-forward is much more likely to have its origin in his unusual psychological make-up – his ‘internal complexities’ were less the martyrdom of ‘lying for the cause’ than the perennial pressure of overwhelming fear which had blighted all his days.

There was certainly method in Lawrence’s recklessness too. He guessed that Nasib al-Bakri would soon be visiting the principal Arab leaders around Damascus, and was terrified that he would goad them into rising too soon. As Feisal’s emissary, he believed he might be able to persuade them to hang fire until the time was ripe. He left Nabk some time on 5 June with two tribesmen, and rode at furious pace across the Syrian Desert to Burga, Seba Biar and ‘Ain al-Barida, near Palmyra, averaging more than forty miles a day. The going was too hard for Lawrence’s camel, which had foundered by 9 June, when he arrived at the tents of the Kawakiba ‘Anaza, pitched beneath the crags of the Tadmor hills. Lawrence’s objective here had been to compose the blood-feud between the Bishr – another section of the ‘Anaza – and the Howaytat, but he realized now that time was against him. Instead, he turned to the Kawakiba Sheikh, Dhami, whom he found ‘a good man’, and an ardent pro-Hashemite. Lawrence thought that Dhami would make a suitable middle-man between the Howaytat and the powerful ‘Anaza, and could provide men to destroy the railway bridges on the Orontes river when the time was right. Dhami not only gave Lawrence a replacement for his exhausted camel, but also helped him enrol thirty-five Bedu for an immediate attack on the railway at Raas Baalbek. Though Lawrence had no intention of cutting the line at this northern latitude, he reasoned that a small demolition would have untold propaganda value, not only suggesting to the Turks that an attack was imminent, but also exciting the local Arabs of the Metawila sect, whom Lawrence had first encountered years before at Nabatiyyeh. The Bedu brought up their camels and left almost at once, heading due west towards the Anti-Lebanon range, whose white peaks seemed to float insubstantially above the desert as they padded on. They skirted the mountains, and drove straight in to the railway, coming up on a plate-girder bridge which Lawrence blew with a four-pound charge. The effect on traffic, he wrote, was slight, but the alarm was tremendous. A report obtained by British Intelligence a month later made clear that the Turks believed the Metawila responsible for the assault, and claimed that they had ‘burned the station’ at Raas Baalbek. While this was an exaggeration, the threat of a Metawila insurrection was considered serious enough to divert no less than six battalions of Ottoman troops from the front line at Gaza – an incredibly profitable return on only four pounds of explosive.

Lawrence parted with the Kawakiba after the raid, and, having received Dhami’s promise to meet him at Bair with a force of tribesmen in a few days, he rode south with a small escort towards Damascus. At the village of al-Qabban, three miles outside the city, he met with ‘Ali Ridha Pasha ar-Rikabi, a covert Arab nationalist who was then mayor of Damascus, and whom Lawrence had once met at Carchemish. He warned ar-Rikabi not to take any action prematurely, though the Pasha replied that as he had only 500 Turkish gendarmes and three unarmed labour battalions in the city, he was in no position to do anything even though he might have wished to. Lawrence then rode south again, meeting Sa’ad ad-Din, Sheikh of the Leja, and Hussain al-‘Atrash, leader of the Druses, who informed him of the terms on which his people were prepared to rise against the Turks. Finally he rode to Azraq, an oasis standing on a lake where the Wadi Sirhan debouched into the Syrian desert, and where he hoped to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan of the Rwalla, and his son, Nawwaf. In 1927, the Arabist Carl Raswan, who lived among the Rwalla, heard a story that Nuri’s scouts had found Lawrence asleep in a wadi near Azraq, and had identified him as an Englishman. Nuri had by this time got wind of the Sykes-Picot agreement, revealed to the world by the Bolsheviks, who had just seized power in Russia. He was inclined to regard Lawrence as a dangerous spy, and debated whether to kill him or not. Though the Bedu considered it cowardly to kill a sleeping man, Nuri posted guards with instructions to shoot or capture him as soon as he made a move, to prevent him claiming daakhil –the Bedu right of protection, which could be gained by touching a tent-rope, spitting on a slave, or various other ploys. The guards watched him for three hours, and in that time Nuri decided to spare him. When he awoke the Emir called him into his tent, and slapped a fat file of documents in front of him, demanding to know which of the contradictory British promises was to be believed. Nuri was the most powerful Bedu chief in Syria, and Lawrence realized the success or failure of the Hashemites might depend on his answer. It was with some agony of mind, he said, that he told Nuri to trust the most recent of the contradictions. Lawrence said later that Nuri was inclined to sit on the fence: he did not wish to commit himself to the Hashemite cause, but was circumspect enough to countenance the possibility that they might defeat the Turks, in which case he ought to be on the winning side. For now, his support would remain tacit: ‘he is willing now to compromise himself to any extent short of open hostilities,’ Lawrence wrote in his journal, ‘pending the collection of his year’s food supply.’ ²³

Lawrence arrived back in Nabk on 17 June, having made a trek of 560 miles through enemy-held territory. He had blown a bridge and caused the Turks to move six battalions from the front, had met many of the principal leaders in the region, and had surveyed the prospective battlefields. It was a magnificent achievement – certainly one of the great intelligence-gathering missions of the war – and deserved the highest accolade. Yet if the northern ride is shrouded in uncertainty, Lawrence himself bears much of the blame for his incorrigible habit of self-mystification. In Seven Pillarshe alluded only fleetingly to the expedition: ‘the results,’ he said, ‘were incommensurate with the risks, and the act artistically unjustifiable, like the motive.’ ²⁴Vyvyan Richards suggested that there was a purely literary motive in Lawrence’s skating over the ride: to have described it in detail would have detracted from the action in the Aqaba mission, and produced an anticlimax. Several biographers have concluded that the story was a fabrication, and Nasib al-Bakri, speaking forty years after the event, told Suleiman Mousa that he was certain Lawrence had never left Wadi Sirhan even for a day, and accused him of ‘double-dealing, slander and dissemination of discord’. The tone of the denial, though, suggests strongly that Nasib’s memory was coloured with anger at Lawrence’s remarks about him in Seven Pillars. ²⁵ Nasib also reported that while Auda and Nasir had asked for the return of the Ј7,000 given to him by Feisal, on the grounds that their own funds had run out, he had refused to give it back. Nasir, he said, had revealed confidentially that Lawrence lay behind the demand, and they had pretended that Nasib had surrendered the money, whereas in fact he never returned a single pound. Against Nasib’s insistence that he never left camp, though, there is Lawrence’s diary, which, while the writing is often illegible and the entries sometimes incomprehensible, makes it clear beyond reasonable doubt that he did visit Raas Baalbek and the other places mentioned in his later report. Why, then, did he later tell Robert Graves: ‘in my report to Clayton… I gave a short account of my excursions from Nabk northward. It was part of the truth. During it some things happened, and I do not want the whole story to be made traceable…’ ²⁶Why, if the story was true, did Lawrence not wish it to be traceable, and what did he mean by his earlier statement that the motive was ‘unjustifiable’? There are two possible answers – or rather two complementary answers representing two levels of Lawrence’s psyche. First, on the rational level the purpose of the ride was to prime the Syrian tribes for a general revolt which would coincide with any British invasion of Palestine. The information Lawrence gathered at so much risk to his life provided a detailed report for G H Q showing the various groups of Syrian Arabs ready to strike. It was partly on the basis of this report that vast funds and resources were eventually assigned to the Arabs. However, the Syrian revolt was never to come off completely, and not even partially until the last days of the campaign. The master-plan which Lawrence conceived on this northern ride went askew because, when the time was ripe, he lost his nerve and failed to call a general uprising in Syria. His feelings of guilt over this failure are clearly expressed in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars,and may have prompted him to cut the details of his northern ride. The second reason probably lurked on the shadow side of his mind. That the ride had actually been initiated by his masochism – his need to ease tension by fleeing forwards – is clear from the note in his diary stating that he was going north to ‘chuck it’. Afterwards, he could not forget the fact that he had been moved by fear rather than the more chauvinistic brand of courage others expected. He was later awarded the Companionship of the Bath on the strength of his own report, and might have had the Victoria Cross had another officer been present. The idea that he should be rewarded for what, in his own eyes, amounted to ‘cowardice’ amused him acidly: ‘A bit of a handicap, is funk,’ he wrote, ‘to people of the VC class, in which reputation would put me! Of course, I know in myself I’m not a brave person: and am not sorry. Most brave people aren’t attractive.’ ²⁷The idea that cowardice and bravery were two aspects of the same quality occurred to him later, when he declared that a man who could run away was a potential VC. His attitude to bravery is summed up in a letter to Charlotte Shaw: ‘When a VC… passes an army guard-room the guard turn out and salute,’ he wrote; ‘the poor shy soldier wearing it isn’t thereby puffed up to believe himself brave. He convicts himself of fraudulence …’ ²⁸Lawrence’s low self-esteem; the feeling that he was ‘not a brave person’, that he was ‘fraudulent’; the notion that he had been driven forward by fear rather than some idealistic notion of ‘higher courage’ caused him to coil his bravest act within a labyrinth of conundrums which would make it almost impossible for posterity to discover its exact nature.

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