Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

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I travelled to Dara’a from Amman in a nondescript saloon with two Syrians and my friend Stephen White. Dara’a station, we discovered, was still standing, a large two-storey building of grey flint, jutting out like an iceberg from a market-place aboil with crowds. The whole railway yard, indeed, was a relic from the First World War. A rusting locomotive stood, disintegrating almost visibly, on a track by the engine-shed. I climbed up to the cab and found an engraved plate which read: A. Borsig. Berlin-Tegel 1914.This was evidently one of the German engines shipped by sea from Europe at the beginning of the war. There were other engines, of different patterns, in a similar state of trauma, sidings full of rolling stock of the same vintage – box-wagons, water-tanks, guards’ vans – even beautifully built passenger-wagons which were obviously now used as toilets. We introduced ourselves to the station-master, who was assiduously playing cards with a group of employees. He knew of Lawrence of Arabia, he said, but he had no idea where it was that Lawrence was supposed to have been tortured, or even if the story was true. The railway here still functioned, he told us – there were two trains a week between Damascus and Amman.

We had Seven Pillarswith us, and tried to reconstruct Lawrence’s movements in Dara’a on 20 November 1917 – eighty years before. In 1917 the serailor Government House had stood south of the railway line, in the centre of Dara’a town, where Lawrence was arrested. At first sight it would seem logical that this was where his ordeal took place. Although he does not say so specifically, Lawrence does mention that after the beating he was taken to a lean-to building behindthe Government House to have his wounds washed and dressed. He also says, though, that he was marched acrossthe railway to reach the Bey’s house, which must mean that it lay on the northern side of the railway, and thus could not have been the official serail.We crossed the tracks by the engine-shop, evidently a popular crossing-point for local people, and counted six lines, precisely as Lawrence had described. We turned left at a convenient hole in the fence, down a street of weary-looking palms, then right and into a square, where there stood a two-storey stone building. The building, which was large and detached, looked as if it belonged to the right era, and I noticed that some of the ground floor area was occupied by houses or shops with private doors. This would be consistent with Lawrence’s description in the Oxford version, which mentions that the Bey’s house comprised two storeys with a shop beneath. Had we discovered the place in which Lawrence had suffered the most devastating experience of his life? The details seemed remarkably accurate, even after eighty years. Yet it is perfectly possible that Lawrence picked up the geographical layout of the town not in November 1917, but in September 1918 when he stayed there for two days after it had fallen to British and Arab forces. An examination of his actual description raises some disturbing questions.

First, in the 1935 version, Lawrence writes that he entered Dara’a with a man called Faris who had been specially engaged for the Hauran reconnaissance. Yet in the Oxford text he gives his companion’s name as Mijbil – a Biashr, whom he had recruited months earlier. Why was it necessary for him to change the man’s name and conceal this fact, and why, for that matter, does he change the name of the Bey from Hajim to Nahi? Lawrence gives various reasons for changing names in Seven Pillars,but the most convincing is the one he gave Hubert Young, whose name he changes at one point in the text to ‘Sabin’. When Young objected that ‘it may perhaps be said that you put me under a false name … because you knew you were telling lies about me’, Lawrence answered, ‘But that iswhy I have put you under a false name.’ ¹³Secondly, many details of the flogging are not credible. The whip could not conceivably have had a point finer than that of a pencil. If Lawrence was not recognized, how could the soldier who arrested him possibly know that the Bey wanted him? What was the content of ‘the long report’ the soldier gave to his superior in Turkish, about a man he had merely picked up on the street whose name and origin he did not yet know? Lawrence might possibly have been mistaken for a Circassian from a distance when dressed in local costume, but how likely is it that he would consistently be taken for one when stripped naked?

These quibbles may be pedantic, and they do not prove that Lawrence invented the Dara a incident, but put together they suggest, at least, a certain current of dishonesty in his account.

In the British Museum’s Manuscripts Department, I turned to the pocket diaries which had shed some light on the Sinai trip, hoping that they would solve the enigma of Dara’a. Searching for the entry of 20 November, I discovered to my surprise that the page had been torn out. This was remarkable, for it was the only missing page in either of the two diaries for 1917 and 1918. At the bottom of the previous page, for 14 November, Lawrence’s entry read ‘Kasr [Azraq]’ and then, added in another pencil, ‘To the Hauran’. This suggested that he had been in Azraq on the night of the 14th and had left for the Hauran subsequently – it was impossible to say when, because of the missing page. I noticed that the pages had been numbered in Lawrence’s handwriting, but this must have been afterthe removal of this page, since the numbers ran on as if no page was missing. This and the addition of ‘To the Hauran’ at the base of the previous page suggested strongly that it was Lawrence himself who had torn it out. What possible motive could he have had for ripping a page out of his diary, I wondered? Two answers immediately sprang to mind. First, that Lawrence had been so disgusted and ashamed of what had happened at Dara a that he could not bear to re-read his diary entries. Second, that he had been covering up for something. In the first case, I thought, if Lawrence had been so disgusted by his treatment at the hands of the Turks he need not have made an entry in the diary at all: customarily, anyway, he entered little more than the place in which he spent the night. Consistently, then, the missing sheet would have included the names of the places he visited with Talal, and would have read simply ‘Dara’a’ for the night of 20 November. If this was so, there would seem to be little that could have disgusted him later. I also asked myself why, if Lawrence had truly wished to forget the incident, he should have brought it to light in the first place. If he had kept quiet, no one else need ever have known. A more logical conclusion was that he was notat the places he claimed to have visited between 14 and 22 November, and that he had removed the page to conceal that fact. The missing page covered six days: the next entry is 22 November, when Lawrence was ‘back’ in Azraq. The question was, did he leave Azraq at all?

The journey to Dara’a and back, allowing time for hospitality with Talal’s family and an entire day at Dara’a, would have amounted to at least five days – perhaps five and a half. This would give a departure date from Azraq of 17 November at the very latest. Since it is certain that Lawrence returned to Azraq from the Yarmuk-Minifir mission on the 12th, his stay would have amounted to just five nights. Yet, turning to his Seven Pillarsdescription of his time at Azraq, I found strong hints that he was there for a far longer period. He ‘established himself in the southern gate-tower, he wrote, and settled down to have a ‘few days’ repose’ until the guests started coming in. When those few days were over, the guests began arriving ‘all day and every day’: ‘we sat down to enjoy these dregs of Autumn – the alternate days of rain and shine’ after which ‘at last the world turned solidly to rain’. Visitors were converted ‘very slowly’ to the Hashemite cause; ‘in these slow nights we were secure against the world.’ ¹⁴Taken together, these references indicated that Lawrence remained at Azraq for at least a week – probably longer. A letter sent to his parents on 14 December reads: ‘I wrote to you last from [Azraq], about the time we blew up Jamal Pasha [actually the 14th November] and let him slip away from us. After that I stayed for ten days or so there and then rode down to [Aqaba]in three days: good going: tell Arnie: none of his old horses would do so much as my old camel.’ ¹⁵If, indeed, he had stayed at Azraq from 12 to 22 November, it would have added up to exactly eleven days.

Lawrence’s reconnaissance in the Hauran would have been of great significance, I thought, for this was the area in which the last action of the campaign would be fought. Yet strangely, none of his superiors seem to have been aware of it. Moreover, a geographical report written by Lawrence himself on 15 December, for the benefit of future armoured-car operations, lists all the sites he had seen on his Yarmuk-Minifir operation, but none of those he supposedly visited with Talal, except a brief reference to Wadi Meddan, which might well have been supplied by an informant. It is the last act of the drama – the 300-mile ride to Aqaba – though, which casts the most profound shadows of doubt over the alleged incident at Dara’a. According to his testimony, Lawrence had arrived in Azraq on the 12th with five bullet wounds and a broken toe. At Dara’a a week later he had been thrashed severely. The annals of penal institutions hold numerous records of men who collapsed with heart-failure after thirty or forty strokes of the lash. Lawrence, who lost count after the first twenty, must have suffered at least this many. He had also been beaten in the face with a slipper, bitten, pierced with a bayonet, kicked hard enough to injure a rib, raped repeatedly, and received two vicious slashes directly to the groin which alone would have caused his testicles to swell so badly that he would have been unable to ride. How was it possible, then, for a man so badly battered to have made, within three days, the most distinguished camel-ride of his career, covering eighty-six miles a day? Clearly, it is not possible. Either Lawrence was exaggerating about the ride, exaggerating about the extent of the treatment he received from the Turks, or the Dara’a incident did not happen at all.

Captain L. H. Gilman, who served on the Hedgehog Mission, told Lawrence’s biographer John Mack that Lawrence had not mentioned a word about the Dara’a incident either to himself or any other officer who served in Arabia: yet he had no doubt that it happened: ‘Lawrence was far too gallant and honourable a man to invent this experience,’ he wrote; ‘there would have been no point in it.’ ¹⁶Lawrence’s official biographer, Jeremy Wilson, has echoed Gilman’s words, writing that ‘those who doubt that the event took place at this time are accusing Lawrence of an elaborate and pointless lie’. ¹⁷Unfortunately, it is a proven fact that Lawrence didtell elaborate and, in some cases, pointless lies. His pre-war substitution of ‘camel-bells’ for ‘mule-bells’, for example, was demonstrably pointless (and it is inconceivable that someone with Lawrence’s photographic memory should have forgotten or got muddled up). His claim to have crossed Sinai in forty-nine hours was certainly a lie – whether it was pointless or not is open to speculation. His ability to make up and sustain an intricately constructed untruth is evident from the story he was later to tell John Bruce, explaining his need to be flogged – a story which he kept up for a staggering thirteen years. Neither Wilson nor Mack disputed that Lawrence lied to Bruce, yet, paradoxically, both state that they found no evidence that Lawrence was a liar: as if lies told to a poorly educated working-class youth somehow did not count. Certainly, Lawrence could be gallant and honourable – he tried desperately all his life to live up to Sarah’s image of him as the immaculate white knight – but some emotions are stronger than honourable desires. Bernard Shaw called him ‘an actor’and noted that he was ‘no monster of veracity’, while Ronald Storrs, who knew him fairly intimately, said that his shortcomings were well known to his colleagues (presumably not Gilman) but were discounted because they were balanced by his brilliance. This seems to me perfectly normal: in the end none of us is an ‘immaculate white knight’, none of us is absolutely honourable or perfectly truthful. To expect this of Lawrence is to make him into a superman – an idea which he himself ridiculed. Even Achilles had a vulnerable heel: why should we expect Lawrence to be any better than Achilles? It may be that his compulsion to ‘elaborate’ was the shadow side of an otherwise ‘honourable’ man. Even Liddell Hart, who considered him a military genius, admitted that he had been too gullible with Lawrence’s testimony, and Lawrence actually criticized Hart for accepting everything he said without question, just as he mocked others whose praise for his good qualities was not tempered by a little ‘salt’. Moreover, his propensity for ‘elaboration’ is confirmed by his own admission: he confessed in his introduction to Seven Pillarsthat he often concealed the truth even in his official reports, and acknowledged elsewhere that he had a talent for deceit. Those who deny that he lied, therefore, are contradicting his own words and postulating a character which Lawrence himself refuted. He was a gifted intelligence officer – a member of a profession which almost by definition deals in lies, propaganda, and half-truths. Many have expressed incredulity that Lawrence’s colleagues – among them men of the highest intellect and ability – could possibly have been misled by his ‘elaborations’, yet Lawrence himself, as a new recruit to the Map Department, boasted gleefully that such men were only too easily to be deceived by esoteric knowledge confidently declared. Just like others, the great and mighty believed only what suited them, neither were they themselves always paragons of truth: Richard Meinertzhagen, a highly respected senior intelligence officer at GHQ, for instance, who was credited with devising the ruse which led the Turks to believe that Allenby was going for Gaza instead of Beersheba, was later discovered to have deliberately forged entries in his own diaries. Lying brilliantly to the Turks was one thing, but lying to his own was not allowed. It is clear that Lawrence was so confident that he would be believed that he was prepared to ‘elaborate’ even when there were witnesses who could testify to the contrary. When Hubert Young asked him to alter what he had written about him on the grounds that the correct account might appear some day, Lawrence simply replied: ‘Oh no it won’t.’ ¹⁸

If the Dara’a incident was invented, then the ‘point’ lies not in the rational but in the unconscious mind. Lawrence was a masochist with a homosexual nature, who had from a very early age fantasized about being dominated by other men, especially in the ranks of the army. As he wrote repeatedly, the degradation of such a life appealed to him, for in the ranks one became a ‘beast’ – fed, clothed and watered and constantly available to be used by others. It is, perhaps, significant that in the 1935 version of Seven Pillars,Lawrence’s page titles to the Dara’a incident parody recruit-training in the army. The page on which he describes his arrest by the Turks, for instance, is entitled ‘A Turkish Conscript’ and the subsequent pages describing his ordeal, are entitled ‘Recruit’s Training’, ‘Further Lessons’ and finally ‘Passing Out’. At the age of seventeen Lawrence had tried to realize this fantasy by joining the Royal Garrison Artillery, and in 1912 the fantasy was extended when he was arrested as a deserter at Khalfati and possibly beaten by the Turks. ¹⁹It is significant that Lawrence mentions the Khalfati incident in relation to his alleged torture and rape at Dara’a, for the key to Dara’a may lie here. Dara’a may have been an elaboration of what happened at Khalfati, relived and magnified by Lawrence in his imagination over many years. The positioning of the Dara’a incident immediately after the failure at Yarmuk is also significant. Lawrence had been terrified of failure all his life and was mortified to have let down Allenby, whom he saw as a father-figure. It is not insignificant that in his description of his meeting with Allenby a few weeks later, he evokes the fantasy of standing before the Bey: ‘It was strange to stand before the tower with [Allenby],’ he wrote, ‘listening to his proclamation, and to think how a few days before I had stood before Hajim listening to his words. How seldom we paid so sharply and so soon for our fears.We would have been by now, not in Jerusalem but in Haifa or Damascus or Aleppo, had I not shrunk in October from the danger of a general rising… By my failure I had fettered the unknowing English and dishonoured the unknowing Arabs.’ ²⁰The humiliation he brought on himself by inventing the Dara’a trauma may have been an expiation of his self-adopted failure – not only his failure to blow the bridge, but to raise the revolt in Syria as he had originally promised Allenby. The same pattern may be traced in at least two of the mysterious incidents of his life: the attack by a tribesman in Syria during his 1909 walk, and the shooting of Hamed the Moor. Both followed a sequence of private failure and public expiation by apparent violence, a pattern which had its origin in Lawrence’s early childhood, when his mother’s beatings became a means of expiating his ‘improper’ thoughts. It is perhaps no coincidence that in revealing the apparent trauma at Dara’a he should use precisely the same terminology – ‘the circle of my integrity’ – which he employed when talking of his mother’s physical threat.

Lawrence’s Seven Pillarswas never intended purely as a historical document: it was, he would tell Charlotte Shaw later, ‘a survey of myself to Feb 1920 … people who read it will know me better than I know myself.’ ²¹His true self was, he said, ‘a beast’ and the book was ‘its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at’. ²²It was, in other words, a public confession of all the secret repressions, obsessions and desires which he had been unable to express to anyone before. The description of his beating at Dara’a shows an abnormal fascination with physical suffering: his lingering over the colour and texture of his wounds, and the detailed description of the instrument of torture – the Circassian whip – is typical of masochistic reveries, as Lyn Cowan has written: ‘in masochistic fantasy the instrument is usually replete with distinctive detail, numinous with beauty and ugliness and fear which create and preserve just the right sensation…’: ‘Even in the barest and most common beating fantasies, we can hear the sharp hymn of the holy thyrsus as it slices down the supplicant’s back.’ ²³That Lawrence deliberately courted public humiliation is beyond doubt: ‘I long for people to look down on me and despise me,’ he later wrote;’… I want to dirty myself outwardly, so that my person may properly reflect the dirtiness which it conceals …’ ²⁴His need to display his suffering is evident in many other passages in the book, and especially in his exaggeration of the number of injuries and bullet-wounds he received. He claimed to have over sixty scars from injuries sustained in Arab service, yet it has been proved conclusively by J. N. Lockman that he had very few scars after the war: to have sustained sixty wounds in a world without antibiotics, anyway, would – as Lockman points out – have required either superhuman powers of resistance or incredible good luck. ²⁵Lockman has also shown that the testimony of Richard Meinertzhagen, who claimed to have seen scars on Lawrence’s back while bathing in 1919, was fabricated. In any case, Lawrence does not state that he was beaten on his back,and if his description of the wounds he received is to be believed then he could only have been beaten on his buttocks: it is impossible for a human being to see his back except with the aid of a mirror. Lockman has demonstrated that though Lawrence later had scars on his front and posterior which seem consistent with the Dara a story, these probably originated in the post-war period and were voluntarily inflicted. ²⁶We may never know for certain whether or not Lawrence was captured and tortured by the Turks, but the weight of evidence – the missing page, the breakdown in the dating sequence, the long period which he seems to have spent at Azraq, and the lack of relevant scars – suggests, to me anyway, that the Dara’a incident was true only in the sense that it deliberately revealed the unseen Lawrence lurking in the shadows. As the emotional climax of Seven Pillars,it was the ultimate expression of his reverse exhibitionism – for as he told Charlotte Shaw coyly: ‘I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, wrestled for days with my self-respect.’ ²⁷It was, perhaps, his final declaration to the world of his conviction – with him since childhood – that he was ‘untouchable’ and ‘unclean’: at last, after years of aloofness, T. E. Lawrence found an opportunity of saying to posterity: ‘This is Thomas Lawrence. This is me.’

Once back in Aqaba, Lawrence wrote, he occupied himself mostly with recruiting a personal bodyguard for his protection, suggesting that this was a direct result of his torture at Dara’a. There was a price on his head and he needed ‘hard riders and hard livers’ who would vow loyalty to himself personally. He wrote that he built up a large private army of ninety men, mercenaries, cut-throats, outlaws and bandits from thirty different clans of every tribe in Syria and north Arabia. Many of them were blood enemies, and there would have been murder among them every day had it not been for Lawrence’s restraining hand. Because his rides were so ferocious and painful, every man with him was a picked rider, all mounted upon his own specially chosen camels. They would ride all day and all night at Lawrence’s whim, and fought like devils. He paid them Ј 6a month: this was the standard rate for a man and a camel, but they actually profited far more than other camelry because they did not have to provide their own animals, which would have foundered under Lawrence’s hard going. The camels were all provided from Lawrence’s own carefully selected stable, and his bodyguard cost three times as much as any unit in the army, but did three times the amount of work. These lads dressed in bright colours deliberately to contrast with the pure white Lawrence himself wore, and had the kind of espritwhich came from the shared hardship and suffering they endured out of loyalty to him. They took pleasure in subordination, he said, and enjoyed degrading their own bodies so as to throw into relief the freedom of their minds – an emotion suspiciously reminiscent of Lawrence’s own masochistic desire for degradation. Of his ninety followers, almost fifty of them Agayl, two-thirds died nobly in his service.

There is no more enticing image in Seven Pillarsthan that of Lawrence in his pure white Sharifian robes at the head of his own force of ninety hardened cut-throats, all of whom had sworn to serve him unto death, and many of whom did. Official biographer Jeremy Wilson cites the recruitment of this guard as the single major corroboration of the truth of the Dara’a incident: ‘As regards the timing of the incident,’ he writes, ‘it is worth noting that as soon as he returned to Akaba he recruited a personal bodyguard.’ ²⁸Once again, the evidence – from Lawrence’s own records – is against him. In fact, he recruited a bodyguard as early as May 1917, for he apparently told ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ in June that he did not need servants but fighting men. In October, before the Yarmuk raid, he said, he had decided to give some of the ‘old bodyguard’ a rest, and recruited six new members: ‘Among my own preparations,’ he wrote in the Oxford version, ‘was the careful picking of my own bodyguard.’ ²⁹He listed the new recruits as Mahmud, Aziz, Mustafa, Showak, Salem and Abd ar-Rahman. He dismissed two of the old guard, Mohammad and ‘Ali – who had been with him from Wejh – but retained the rest, including ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ (alias ‘Ali and Othman), Ahmad, Kreim, Rahail, Matar, Khidr and Mijbil, a total of fourteen men. At different times he also picked up Awwad and Daher, bringing the total to sixteen. Now, it so happens that Lawrence listed the names of his bodyguard in his pocket-diary in order to keep track of their wages, beginning in March 1918. Though the names and number vary slightly between March and September, there are never more than seventeen names on the list at any one time, and the average over the entire period comes to fourteen – precisely the same number he listed as forming his bodyguard in October 1917, beforethe alleged Dara’a incident. He might, of course, have changed the personnel if not the number, but many of the names recur again and again, and a significant number are traceable to his earlier bodyguard. Ahmad, Rahail, Mahmud, Mustafa, Abd ar-Rahman, Khidir, Mijbil, Salem, Awwad, Daher and Matar all feature in the March–September lists. Conspicuously absent from the lists are ‘Ali and Othman, the supposed models for ‘Farraj and Da’ud’, who were evidently not in Lawrence’s service in 1918 at all. It is true, of course, that some of these names are common among the Arabs, but even if the individuals were different, this does not alter the fact that the strength of Lawrence’s bodyguard remained essentially unchanged between October 1917 and September 1918, that is before and after the supposed torture at Dara’a – thus proving beyond doubt that it could not have been recruited as a direct result of any incident in November 1917. Certainly, it was not recruited first in January 1917, neither did it ever comprise ninety men, even by aggregation, but consistently averaged about fourteen. Coincidentally, a photograph of ‘Lawrence and his bodyguard’ taken at Aqaba in the summer of 1918 shows only fifteen men. Hubert Young, an Arabic speaker who served with Lawrence in 1918, noted that the bodyguard comprised ‘about 20’. ³⁰As for the idea that Lawrence’s men were a tough crowd of bandits from all the tribes of Syria and Arabia, the provenance of many of them belies this claim. Mahmud, a ‘petulant lad’ of nineteen, was a peasant from Yarmuk, Matar a ‘parasite fellow’ of the Bani Hassan, Mijbil an ‘insignificant peasant’ old enough to be Lawrence’s father, Salem a camel-herder of the despised Shararat tribe, ‘Abd ar-Rahman a freed slave, Aziz a ‘shallow, rabbit-mouthed’ peasant from Tafas, Mustafa a deaf boy, Zayd an incompetent who was dismissed by Lawrence for failing to saddle a camel properly, and Rahail a Haurani peasant who burst into tears when the going got tough. Only Lawrence’s chief, Abdallah an-Nahabi (‘Abdallah ‘the Robber’), appears to meet his claim that his men were outlaws. None belonged to the major Bedu tribes of Arabia (Lawrence told the Sha’alans that he was too humble a man to have Rwalla guards) and few to the ‘Agayl – the vast majority were Syrian peasants who, because of old age, infirmity or incompetence, could not get employment elsewhere. As for dying in Lawrence’s service, there is hardly a name featuring in March 1918 which does not appear on the list for September. It is just possible that one or two may have been killed, but the number cannot have amounted to sixty – since the sum total of members of the bodyguard was never more than seventeen, and most, if not all, of these survived.

Some stiff claims have been made for the effects of Lawrence’s treatment at Dara’a: ‘After the homosexual rape …’Jeremy Wilson writes, ‘the consummation of a marriage would have been utterly abhorrent to him. The incident had left him with an aversion to physical contact, which was noticed by many of his friends.’ ³¹It has also been said that the horrific experience warped his character for ever, giving him an obsession with cleanliness and bathing, and perhaps turning him into the full-blown masochist he became later. However, all these traits are manifest in Lawrence’s early life. He himself wrote that his aversion to physical contact was the result of a struggle he had endured in his youth –most probably with his mother. He displayed masochistic behaviour in his self-deprivation at an early age, frequently showed an inordinate concern with cleanliness and bathing in his letters home, and always seems to have preferred men to women. Even a cursory reading of Seven Pillarsshows an unmistakable approval and acceptance of the idea of homoerotic sex and a rejection and disgust for the heterosexual variety. As early as the second page of the main text, indeed, he commends the youths who reject the ‘raddled meat’ of women to ‘[slake] one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that by comparison seemed sexless and even pure …’ ³²The ideology is clear. It is very difficult to see how, by any conceivable convolution of logic, the experience of homosexual rape could have created an aversion to heterosexuality and an apparent warm approval of the ‘purity’ of homosexuality, unless Lawrence had some predisposition to it. As for ‘warping him for ever’, Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnie, wrote that he ‘had always been a person of remarkable control and poise … Well, this all went on after the war and in addition he developed a tremendous zest for anything comic. He had obviously gone through tremendous difficulties and done so by seeing the funny side of them.’ ³³If this does not sound like a man whose spirit had been shattered by horrific experiences during the war, then neither does the Lawrence who, in December 1917 – a month after the supposed torture at Daraa – joined Allenby at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate for his triumphal entry into the old city: ‘He was gay that day,’ wrote A. P. Wavell, who walked beside him at the procession, ‘with jests at his borrowed uniform and at the official appointment that had been loaned him for the ceremony – staff officer to Bertie Clayton. He said as usual little of himself, and barely mentioned that great ride to, and unlucky failure at, the Yarmuk valley bridge, from which he had just returned.’ ³⁴