Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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Lawrence proposed to move north and destroy another eighty miles of railway line north of Maan, thereby isolating it like Medina; but first he and Dawnay sailed to Egypt, to meet with Allenby, only to learn to their dismay that, on the vague promise that “twenty thousand tribesmen” would come to their support, the British were proposing to advance on Salt again. Lawrence was infuriated that Allenby’s staff was dealing with the Arabs directly, instead of going through him, and he was right. The promised tribesmen did not appear, having been bought off by a higher bid from the Turks. The subsequent British attack against the well-prepared Turkish defense failed, and the British were obliged to retreat back to the Jordan valley.

Lawrence was neither surprised nor completely displeased. He felt this experience would teach Allenby’s staff a lesson—that communications with the Arab tribesmen were best left in his hands—and would reinforce the importance of Feisal as the one Arab leader the staff could trust. As for Allenby, he decided to make a virtue of necessity, and made plans to attack the Turks up the coast, while keeping their attention fixed on Salt and Amman.

While he was in Egypt Lawrence took advantage of the moment by persuading Allenby to give him 2,000 riding camels, which were made available by the imminent disbanding of the Imperial Camel Brigade and which would hugely improve the mobility of Feisal’s army. Lawrence also received a commitment to make more aircraft available to bomb Turkish strongholds and destroy their communications. By May 1918 Lawrence was already a master of “combined operations,” as they would become known in the next world war, involving irregular camel-mounted tribesmen and horsemen, armored cars operating far out in the desert, regular infantry, artillery, and “ground attack” aircraft. He was, in fact, one of the first to use aircraft to support ground attacks directly, with the enthusiastic help of Brigadier-General Geoffrey Salmond, commander of the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East.

From May through July the war in what is now Jordan went on in a steady succession of raids, train and bridge demolitions, and hit-and-run attacks against the Turks. While Allenby prepared for his big offensive—for he, like Lawrence, was determined to take Damascus in 1918—Lawrence continued to put his life at risk to keep the Turks on the defensive to the east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Much of this action was small-scale but desperate fighting. He wrote about one example with unusual frankness in Seven Pillars of Wisdom:“When combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand, I used to turn myself in. The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat…. Anyway I had not the instinct to sell my life dearly, and to avoid the indignity of trying not to be killed and failing, rode straight for the enemy to end the business, in all the exhilaration of that last and terrific and most glad pain of death.” In this case, it turned out that the “enemy” were friendly tribesmen: they had donned the clothes of Turks whose post they had rushed, and at the last minute they recognized “Lurens.” It is interesting that Lawrence was able to write so clinically about his revulsion at being touched, as well as the fact that he “felt fear, disgust, boredom, but anger very seldom,” or that “Only once or twice, when I was alone and lost heart in the desert, and had no audience, did I break down.” Lawrence apparently felt no revulsion at killing, except when he had to execute a friend. Long ago, he had set out to cut a notch in the stock of hisrifle for every Turk he shot, but he gave up after the fourth, either because he thought the notches boastful, or because this count no longer mattered to him—after all, he killed far more Turks with dynamite.

It is also interesting to note his awareness of the extent to which his courage required an “audience,” which is something most men would not have admitted, and which perhaps explains the breakdown of his will at Deraa. Not many men can be this objective about their courage, or admit that they have areas of disabling fear. Every hero fears something,however unlikely or irrational, and Lawrence was no exception: he would rather have been killed than physically touched in any way by another human being. It is hardly surprising to learn that less than four years later Bernard Shaw would base the character of Saint Joan in part on Lawrence; indeed Sir Michael Holroyd writes in his biography of Shaw: “To some degree Seven Pillars of Wisdommay be read as a cross-referring work to Saint Joan:the two chronicles, Stanley Weintraub [a Shaw scholar] has suggested, providing a parallel between the saintly Maid and the ascetic Prince of the desert.” Even Shaw’s physical description of Joan in the play bears a startling resemblance to Lawrence’s face: “an uncommon face: eyes very far apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people, a long, well-shaped nose with wide nostrils, a short upper lip, a resolute but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin.” This is a perfect description of Lawrence’s face in Augustus John’s famous 1919 portrait, so much so that it reads like something of a private joke between Shaw and Lawrence, perhaps in payment for a number of suggestions Lawrence offered Shaw about the play.*

The failure to take Amman had consequences. As the bloody stalemate on the western front showed no sign of ending, and the war in the Middle East seemed to have slipped into a similar stalemate, the British government, which had anticipated a surrender by the Turks, began once more to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace. Aubrey Herbert, Sir Mark Sykes’s protйgй in the Arab Bureau, met in neutral Switzerland with Mehmet Talat Pasha, one of the triumvirate who governed Turkey, and the man who had carried out the Armenian genocide. That the British government was willing to negotiate with the most ruthless of the Turkish leaders shows to what extent the fortunes of war had suddenly shifted in Turkey’s favor. The Bolshevik government had been quick to sign a peace treaty with Turkey, freeing it from any further threat to the east and north; the United States had not declared war on the Ottoman Empire; and the French, while anticipating their share of the empire, had made only a minimal contribution to the war in the Middle East—just enough to stake their claim at the peace conference. When it came to Turkey, the British were on their own. They held Basra, Baghdad, and oil-rich Mosul, and Turkey might have been willing to give up the area that is now Iraq in exchange for peace—and a free hand to deal with the Arabs.

Inevitably the news of these negotiations made its way rapidly to the Middle East, further discouraging the Arabs’ confidence in Britain. As a result Feisal’s off-again, on-again secret negotiations with Jemal Pasha grew more intense and specific. If the British were willing to sell out the Arabs and negotiate with Turkey, why should the Arabs not seek the best terms they could get from the Turks? Lawrence seems to have been involved in the correspondence between Feisal and Jemal, or so Jeremy Wilson believes, arguing that “As contacts between the two sides were inevitable, it seemed best to know what was going on,” and that Lawrence hoped in fact to control the correspondence. Given Lawrence’s natural gift for duplicity and his close relationship with Feisal, it was perhaps inevitable for Lawrence to have become involved. In fact, he seems to have been alarmed both by the generosity of the terms Jemal was willing to offer and by Feisal’s interest in them, and he took the extreme step of securing a copy of Jemal’s latest letter “without Feisal’s knowledge,” and passed the information on to Clayton in Cairo.

Lawrence was also involved in an even more delicate matter: Feisal’s reaction to the Balfour Declaration, which was almost more troubling to the Arab leadership than the Sykes-Picot agreement. Nowhere were the words of the declaration parsed with more attention than in the Middle East, where the deliberately ambiguous phrase “a national home for the Jewish people,” so carefully crafted by Balfour and the cabinet* to steer a middle course between the Zionists’ aspirations and the Arabs’ fears, raised more questions than they had in London. In June Clayton arranged a meeting between Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Feisal “at Arab Headquarters.” Clayton had stressed that “It is important that [Lawrence] should be present” at the interview, but Lawrence was up-country with Nasir, so Joyce took his place.

No two men could have been more polite, or more careful to guard their real ambitions from each other, than Feisal and Weizmann (who combined an “almost feminine charm … with a feline deadliness of attack”). But behind their diplomatic discussions about respect for the holy places of other monotheistic faiths, and the benefits that Jewish scientific, industrial, and agricultural knowledge, as well as capital, might bring to a new Arab state, it was apparent that what Hussein and his sons wanted was the maximum Jewish investment with the minimum number of Jewish settlers. Feisal’s goodwill toward the idea of a “Jewish national home” was dependent on his father’s getting everything he had been promised in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915. The implementation of the Balfour Declaration would, in the eyes of the Arab leadership, therefore depend on whether the Sykes-Picot agreement was dropped or enforced. Hussein and his sons were anything but unsophisticated—they were very much aware of European and, more important, American sensitivity on the subject of Jews, a sensitivity which, being Semites themselves, they did not share. They were therefore carefully gracious about an event that they hoped would never happen, or, if it did happen, would take place under Arab political control. Lawrence would later meet with Weizmann in Jerusalem, and would conclude very realistically that whatever he said, Weizmann and his followers wanted a Jewish state, though Lawrence thought it might not happen for another fifty years. (Lawrence was off by twenty years, but he could hardly have predicted the effect the Holocaust would have on the creation of Israel.) Since the Zionists would come “under British colours,” Lawrence was guardedly in favor of them, if only because he thought they might bring Jewish capital into Syria, and thereby thwart French business ambitions.

It is worth noting that even though Lawrence wanted the Arabs to win, and hoped by getting to Damascus first to invalidate the Sykes-Picot agreement, he never forgot that he was a British officer first and foremost, and like many intelligence agents and diplomats before and since he was adept at not letting the right hand know what the left hand was doing. In the end, it was the conflict between his loyalty to Clayton and Hogarth and his loyalty to Feisal and the Arabs that had the most traumatic effect on his character. No man ever tried harder to serve two masters than Lawrence, or punished himself more severely for failing.

On both sides, British and Turkish, there was a certain degree of betrayal in the air. Jemal Pasha, for example, not only was in correspondence with Feisal but sent him a personal emissary in the person of “Mohammed Said, Abd el Kader’s brother in Damascus.” Mohammed Said was the man who was so careless with his automatic pistol as to have killed three friends accidentally. Abd el Kader was the man who had deserted from Lawrence’s force on the way to destroy the bridge over the Yarmuk, and whom Lawrence suspected of having betrayed his mission to the Turks, and of having been responsible for his being picked up shortly afterward at Deraa. Lawrence regarded both brothers as dangerous enemies, and cannot have been pleased to discover that Mohammed Said, of all people, was having secret discussions with Feisal.

The possibility of the Arabs’ changing sides was in the end precluded by two things: the first was King Hussein’s old-fashioned, honorable (and, as it turned out, unreciprocated) scruples about betraying his British ally; the second was the determination of Allenby, who was not nicknamed “the bull” for nothing, to attack again on the grandest possible scale in September. When Lawrence and Dawnay met with Allenby in July, they learned that he wanted them to keep the Turks’ attention focused on Deraa and the Jordan valley while he attacked along the coast toward the end of September—almost the exact opposite of what he had done at Gaza and Beersheba.

Lawrence came up with a number of ways to do this, none of which made him popular with the staff at Aqaba. In particular, Young, who was working night and day to organize a supply line for the Arab regulars as they advanced, was now told to change his plan in favor of Lawrence’s Bedouin irregulars. “Relations between Lawrence and ourselves,” Young wrote, “became for the moment a trifle strained, and the sight of the little man reading Morte d’Arthur* in a corner of the mess tent with an impish smile on his face was not consoling.” No doubt the “impish grin” was partly at Young’s expense—Young was busy drawing up a full tactical plan, with stop lines and exact times, for the benefit of irregulars none of whom had ever owned a watch, and who, if they found good grazing, were as likely as not to stop for a day or two and let the camels eat their fill. Young had changed his original opinion of Lawrence—"Lawrence,” he wrote, “could certainly not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount. No amount of pomp and circumstance would have won him the position he gained among Arabs if he had not established himself by sheer force of personality as a born leader and shown himself to be a greater dare-devil than any of his followers.” Lawrence, for his part, had come to admire Young’s dogged effort to deal fairly with the Arabs, his bravery under fire and while laying explosive charges, and his orderly mind; but this is not to say that there was a bond of friendship between Lawrence and his “understudy.”

No doubt it was galling for Young to see Lawrence calmly reading Morte d’Arthurwhile he himself struggled to load onto baggage camels in an orderly way drinking water; forage; and separate rations for the Arab regulars, the British armored car crews, the French gunners, the Egyptian machine gunners, and a unit of Nepalese Gurkhas (all of whom had different tastes in food, in addition to deep religious prejudice against beef on the part of the Gurkhas and against pork on the part of the Arabs and Egyptians). Young was under pressure because Allenby had moved the date of his attack forward by two weeks, and wanted the Arab army to attack “no later than September 16th.” This meant that Young had to prepare two convoys of 600 camels each to carry the army’s supplies “to Aba’l Issan,* seventy miles north of Akaba,” where 450 of the baggage camels would have to be resaddled to serve as riding camels, with saddles that had not yet arrived from Egypt, and then move everything forward to form a permanent base at Azrak. Lawrence’s indifference to all this was not just a pose to irritate Young, though it certainly achieved that effect. Lawrence received his orders straight from Allenby, so he knew that what Allenby really wanted was a demonstration at the right time—Allenby joked that if “three men and a boy with pistols” turned up at Deraa on September 16, they might be enough—rather than a carefully prepared textbook attack that arrived too late.

Because there was intelligence that the Turks were planning a raid on Abu el Lissal, which would badly disrupt Lawrence’s attack on Deraa, Lawrence and Dawnay had arranged to “borrow” two companies of the remaining battalion of the disbanded Imperial Camel Brigade (“on the condition that they should avoid casualties”), march them from Suez to Aqaba across the Sinai (no mean feat to begin with), and from there send them on to attack the watering station at Mudawara again, then make “a long stride” north to Amman, to “destroy the bridge and tunnel there, and then return to Palestine.” This was a tall order for British soldiers, many of them yeoman cavalry, who were not born to the camel or the desert. Lawrence went down to Aqaba to greet them on their arrival, and as they gathered around a blazing campfire, he gave them a rousing speech, which impressed even so hardened an imperial adventurer as Colonel Stirling, the author of Safety Last,who called it “the straightest talk I have ever heard.” Lawrence told them there was no need to worry about the Turks, but to keep in mind that they were entering “a part of Arabia where no white man had ever set foot,” and had every need to worry about the Bedouin, who were “none too friendly,” and would certainly think that the British troops had come to take their grazing grounds. They were “to turn the other cheek,” and avoid any kind of friction.

Lawrence rode with them the next day through Wadi Itm to Rumm. This was just as well, since several of the tribesmen took the opportunity of sniping at the British, even though they were allies. He was moved by riding in the company of British soldiers, a novel experience which filled him with “homesickness, making him feel an outcast.”

Once he had calmed the Howeitat at Rumm, who rumbled with discontent and anger at the presence of infidel soldiers, he rode back to Aqaba, then flew to Jefer to meet with that sinister old chieftain Nuri Shaalan and the Ruawalla sheikhs, whose goodwill he needed to reach Deraa. He settled their doubts with another rousing speech, this time “emphasizing the mystical enchantment of sacrifice for freedom,” then flew back to Guweira, and from there to Aqaba, racked by guilt at having once again persuaded men to risk their lives in the knowledge that they would probably only exchange living under Ottoman rule for life in a French colony.

The news that the 300 troopers of the Imperial Camel Brigade, under Major Buxton, had retaken Mudawara, together with 150 Turkish prisoners, for a loss of seven of their own killed and ten wounded, cheered him up, and he joined them at Jefer, where they were encamped, this time riding in his Rolls-Royce tender Blue Mist,* with an armored car as an escort. From there they moved north, Lawrence riding far ahead of Buxton’s troopers to “smooth the way” for them among the tribesmen, going all the way to Azrak, then returning to Beir to rejoin the troopers. Being among them again gave Lawrence “a mixed sense of ease and unease.” He felt at home among these big men from the rural shires of Britain, but at the same time was conscious of being, in their eyes, both a legendary hero and an oddity. He was afflicted with what Liddell Hart describes as not merely the usual self-doubt, but a growing “distaste for himself,” inevitable in one who accused himself of play-acting among his own admiring countrymen.

A few days later they reached Muaggar, only fifteen miles southeast of Amman, and within easy reach of the railway bridge and tunnel. Here they were discovered by a Turkish airplane. There were Turkish mule-mounted infantrymen near the bridge, and Lawrence, mindful of the fact that he and Dawnay had promised to avoid casualties among the Imperial Camel Brigade, seven of whose troopers had already been killed, decided to send them back to Azrak. They left enough evidence behind them of fires, “empty meat-tins,” and crisscrossing armored car tracks to make the Turks fear that Amman would be attacked.

Leaving his explosives buried at Azrak for future use, Lawrence raced back across the desert to Abu el Lissal to put out a blazing row between King Hussein in Mecca and the officers of the Arab army in the field. This particular tempest in a teacup had been caused by the fact that Jaafar had received a British decoration and had been referred to as “the general commanding the Arab Northern Army,” and King Hussein had thereupon announced in the official Mecca newspaper that no such rank existed. As a result of this insult, all the senior officers of the Arab army resigned, as did Feisal himself after receiving a “vitriolic” message from his father. The fact that most of these ranks were bogus in the first place did not reduce the tension between Abu el Lissal and Mecca. Feisal was styled a lieutenant-general and corps commander by the British, even though on a good day, counting regulars and Bedouin irregulars together, he seldom commanded more than the equivalent of a division; Jaafar Pasha was styled a major-general, although the number of his regulars seldom exceeded that of a brigade; and everyone else was ranked accordingly. It was an army with a disproportionate number of senior officers, and hardly any trained junior officers or NCOs. Lawrence, who had a certain respect for Hussein’s stubborn defense of his own prerogatives as a self-made king, and who was privy to both codes, adopted the novel technique of editing and altering Hussein’s messages to his son, simply eliminating any paragraphs that would offend Feisal, thus saving honor and, more important, avoiding the disintegration of Feisal’s army. Feisal very likely saw through this stratagem, but was wise enough not to question it. The episode also shows the degree to which Lawrence was involved in the politics and the differing ambitions of the sharifian family. For better or worse, he was not only Feisal’s military adviser, but his friend, political counselor, and confidant, the young Thomas а Becket to the young Henry II, with the addition of all the danger of being a foreigner and an unbeliever. Lawrence could play the role of courtier in an eastern court perfectly: as he himself put it, “I could flatter as well as flutter.” His position and his safety depended on Feisal’s trust. He never lost it, and he sacrificed what would have been, to anyone else, a comfortable and well-rewarded career, with every prospect of a knighthood or better, to secure thrones for Feisal and for Feisal’s older brother Abdulla.*

In the meantime, his objective was to get the Arab army and Feisal to Damascus before the British reached it. By the first week of September, “the desert had become a military highway, dotted with northern-moving columns that headed steadily for Azrak.” Lawrence, who rode past the long columns in his Rolls-Royce, had achieved a kind of double deception:the Turks believed that he was aiming for Amman, reinforced it accordingly, and even sent a column farther south to recapture Tafileh; the British believed that he was obeying Allenby’s orders to take Deraa and destroy the vital railroad junction. In fact, Lawrence had begun moving the bulk of the Arab forces away from Medina and the Hejaz, and from Aqaba and the sea, moving north unseen in the desert that only they could cross, toward Damascus. “The climax of the preaching of years had come, and a united country was straining towards its historic capital,” Lawrence wrote, something of an overstatement.

In the meantime, every Turkish soldier sent toward Amman weakened the forces that faced Allenby in the north, and every raid, smashed railway line, or smashed bridge to the south and east kept the Turks looking in the wrong direction. Allenby was a master of bluff—he had used it to persuade the Turks that he would attack Gaza, instead of moving to his right and enveloping Beersheba, and now he used Lawrence to persuade them that the crucial blow was coming from the east side of the Dead Sea toward Amman. Lawrence had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and countless hours in securing the cooperation, or at least the temporary neutrality, of the tribes from Aqaba to Damascus. In Liddell Hart’s words, “He had removed the obstructions and paved the way,” and this was already something of a miracle. His exact plans were unclear, even to his staff and his superiors. Essentially, he would play cat and mouse with the Turks, hitting them where they least expected; then retreating back into the desert, hoping to destroy the railway junction at Deraa; then moving north from there to take Damascus. But “it was ever [his] habit, while studying alternatives, to keep the stages in solution.” In other words, his plans would remain flexible, and he would exploit opportunities as they arose, having secured a firm base deep in the desert at Azrak.

Ignoring the warning of Frederick the Great—"He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing"—the Turks attempted to defend everything, in a huge arc from Medina to Maan to the Mediterranean, more than 300 miles long. Reacting violently to every pinprick on the periphery, the Turks were unable to maintain their lines of communication from one day to the next, thanks to Lawrence’s constant sabotage of their railway tracks and bridges.

Allenby compounded their confusion west of the Dead Sea by “creating dust columns with mule-drawn sleighs moving eastward by day, while troop columns marched [back] westward by night,” and by marching battalions toward the Jordan valley by day, then marching them back at night, so the Turks had the impression that Allenby’s whole army—"12,000 sabres, 57,000 rifles, and 540 guns"*—was methodically moving, unit by unit, toward the east. Fifteen thousand dummy horses made of canvas “filled the vacant horse lines in the interior,” forcing the enemy to conclude that the British were preparing to attack in force to the east and take Jericho. Lawrence contributed by buying up all the forage he could find east of the Dead Sea, paying in gold even as the price soared, hiding from nobody the fact that he was buying it to support the British cavalrymen when they crossed the Jordan and advanced northwest toward Damascus.

At dawn on September 14, two days before Allenby’s attack was scheduled, the main body of the Arab forces, “about twelve hundred strong,” marched out of Azrak toward Umtaiye, “a great pit of rain water fifteen miles below Deraa and five miles east of the railway to Amman.” The day before, Lawrence had sent Captain Frederick Peake Pasha, commander of the newly formed Egyptian Camel Corps and an enthusiastic dynamiter, to break the railway near Amman; but Peake’s guides led him straight to a portion of the railway that was guarded by Arabs loyal to the Turks, and he was obliged to withdraw without accomplishing his mission. Had Lawrence been present, he might have won these Arabs over, or bribed them, but he was not. He did not blame Peake, but since he was determined to keep the Arab forces to their schedule he set off for Umtaiye across the desert in the Blue Mist; found a suitable bridge for demolition; then drove back and informed everybody that he would destroy the bridge himself, a “solo effort [which] would be rather amusing.” Young remarked that “it did not sound at all amusing. It sounded quite mad,” but then reflected that Lawrence’s madness had after all enabled him to take Aqaba, and might serve him as well here.

The next day, September 16, Lawrence set out for the railway near Jabir in a Rolls-Royce tender “crammed to the gunwale with gun-cotton [an explosive] and detonators.” He was accompanied by Colonel Joyce, ostensibly his commanding officer, but temporarily reduced to the role of an onlooker; and by Captain Lord Edward Winterton (the future sixth earl, and undersecretary of state for India), an officer from the disbanded Imperial Camel Corps, in a second tender, escorted by two armored cars. When they reached “the cover of the last ridge before the railway, Lawrence transferred himself and 150 lbs. of gun-cotton” to one of the armored cars, and drove straight to the bridge, while the other cars took on the Turkish redoubt protecting the bridge. After a brief firefight, in which two of the Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest surrendered, Lawrence set about the task of mining the bridge, fully justifying Wavell’s description of him as “a fastidious artist in demolitions.”

Despite his disappointment at being unable to remove, as a souvenir, a polished marble plaque with a florid inscription in Turkish, Lawrence proceeded to place his six charges “in the drainage holes of the span-drils … inserted zigzag, and with their explosion all the arches were scientifically shattered.” This demolition was all the more satisfying because it would leave “the skeleton of the bridge intact, but tottering,” so the enemy would “first have to tear down the wreckage before they could begin building a new bridge.” Lawrence was never one to rush the business of placing explosive charges, even under pressure, as he was here, since Winterton and Joyce were waving frantically to signal that enemy patrols were on the way.

After the demolition, he had a moment of dismay when one of the springs of his Rolls-Royce broke, stranding him about 300 yards from the ruined bridge. It was, Lawrence later remarked, the first and only time a Rolls-Royce had broken down in the desert, inconveniently just as the Turkish patrols arrived, leaving him in despair at losing both the car and his explosives kit; but Lawrence and the driver got out, and decided to “jack up the fallen end of the spring, and by scantling [planks] on the running-board wedge it into nearly its old position.” Rolls—the aptly named driver—and Lawrence managed to cut three pieces of wooden scantling to the right length—they had no saw, but Lawrence shot through each piece of wood with his pistol crosswise several times, until they could snap the end off each piece; then they jacked the car up, slipped the scantlings in to replace the spring, lashed them together with rope, and fastened them to the angle irons that held the running board. They then lowered the car back down onto the improvised spring, cranked the engine, and drove on.

Connoisseurs of Lawrence’s prose about machinery—he would later go on to write in great detail about engines, for example in the justly celebrated “User’s Guide and Notes to the 200 Class Royal Air Force Seaplane Tender"—will find a good example on page 720 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence notes that he and Rolls performed this emergency repair as several companies of Turkish infantry were approaching. Apart from his crystal-clear description of how to repair the Rolls-Royce—one almost feels that by following his instructions, one could do it oneself—the passage shows Lawrence’s interest in and aptitude for fine machinery. This was another trait that separated him from other Englishmen of his class and generation, who were mostly happy enough to leave such things to the lower classes: chauffeurs and mechanics. Lawrence loved using his hands, and inventing his own ways of making machines work better; this was unusual, in those days, for a scholar and literary man.