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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

His interest in the RAF, however, was unfeigned, and he was a good friend of Air Marshal Geoffrey Salmond and Air Chief Marshal Trenchard, both of whom admired him and were sympathetic to his desire to get into the RAF. Lawrence could easily have joined as a wing commander (the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel), and no doubt even have learned to fly, but that was never his intention. Writing to Trenchard immediately after his return from the Middle East, Lawrence made it clear that he wanted to serve in the ranks, and warned Trenchard that he did not think he could pass the physical examination. He also suggested that he wanted to write a book about “the beginning” of the RAF, and that such a book could be written only “from the ground,” not from the viewpoint of an officer.

Lawrence did succeed in writing a worm’s-eye view of recruit training “from the ground up,” but The Mint,which would not be published until 1955, long after his death, is hardly the full portrait of the RAF that Trenchard had wanted. It seems reasonable to guess that Lawrence’s suggestion of using his experiences as a recruit as the material for a book was at least in part intended to make the otherwise inexplicable wish of a famous, decorated former lieutenant-colonel to serve in the ranks as an aircraftman second class (AC2) under an assumed name seem more plausible. Gathering material for a book about the RAF no doubt sounded sensible enough to Trenchard, particularly since Seven Pillars of Wisdom,though by no means finished, was already being talked about as a major literary work; it was more sensible at any rate than Lawrence’s desire to shed his identity and vanish into anonymity.

Much has been made by some biographers of service in the ranks of the RAF as the equivalent of a secular monastery, and of Lawrence as seeking an expiation of sorts there, but that seems far-fetched. The only thing Lawrence had to expiate was his failure to abrogate the Sykes-Picot agreement, and he felt he had emerged from that with “clean hands” after the creation of Trans-Jordan and Iraq. The truth seems to be that Lawrence had simply reached a dead end on his return to Britain at the end of 1921. He had no wish to be a civil servant, or an academician; like his father,and surely in imitation of his father’s example, Lawrence held an old-fashioned gentleman’s view that working for a living was beneath him; he had run through what money he had and faced a lot more work on Seven Pillars of Wisdom.All these considerations contributed to his feeling of being trapped, and Lawrence, when trapped, nearly always chose to cut the Gordian knot by means of a single, sudden, startling major decision, rather than a series of small compromises. He even offered to join Colonel Percy Fawcett’s Amazon expedition in search of the “Lost City of Z,” which ended in the disappearance of Fawcett and his party. It is possible that the return to the Middle East had disturbed Lawrence’s equilibrium, as had the continuous and exhausting revision of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,which forced him to reread obsessively his account of the incident at Deraa, so that far from putting such matters to rest, he was constantly reliving his worst moments of grief, shame, and guilt.

Then too, Lawrence had lost faith in himself, and felt a need for some kind of structure to replace it. He had had, perhaps, too much freedom since the taking of Aqaba, and wanted to exchange it for an orderly, disciplined routine, in which he would not have to be responsible for other people and, above all, would no longer have to give orders. He was willing, even eager, to takeorders, but not to give them anymore; his orders had led too many men to their deaths—a few of them men he loved—or had killed civilians, some of them guilty of no greater crime than having bought a ticket on one of the trains he destroyed. Lawrence had a lifetime’s worth of such responsibility, and the chief attraction of serving in the ranks was that he would never have to give an order to anyone again. Certainly most of these conditions could have been met in a monastery, but Lawrence does not appear to have had any religious convictions, let alone a vocation. All those morning prayers and Bible readings in Polstead Road had had the opposite effect to what his mother intended.

There was a tendency among Lawrence’s contemporaries to see his decision to shed his rank and join the RAF as a form of penance, but he always denied that. His service in the RAF, once he was past recruit training, would prove to be the happiest time of his life, with the exception of the years he spent before the war in Carchemish.

For nearly ten months Lawrence had been instrumental in making kings, creating countries, and drawing the borders of new nations and territories; he was almost as legendary a figure in peacetime as he had been in the war. But it was, at the same time, exactly the way this role appealed to his vanity, his thirst for fame and praise, his need to be at the center of things, his ability to move and influence even the most powerful of men, that he distrusted most in himself. Lawrence never underrated his powers, but “Colonel Lawrence” the kingmaker appalled him almost as much as “Colonel Lawrence” the war hero.

Throughout the first seven months of 1922 Lawrence was like a man who has painted himself into a corner. For a while he stayed on at the Colonial Office, unwillingly, as Winston Churchill’s “adviser"—Churchill was as reluctant to let him go as Lawrence was determined to leave—while at the same time he labored diligently, but without pleasure, on the seemingly endless task of revising Seven Pillars of Wisdom.As with all the other problems the book presented, he had devised an extraordinarily difficult way of ensuring that it would not be lost or stolen again. Instead of having the pages typed as he rewrote them, he sent them in batches to the Oxford Times,where, he had discovered, the printers could set them in columns of newspaper type more cheaply than the cost of a typist. However, he rendered his life and that of his printers more difficult by sending them unnumbered, random pages, so there was no chance of anybody’s reading the book consecutively, and by leaving the most controversial sections of the book until last. That way, when the entire book was set in type, he could put the sheets in the right order himself, number them by hand, add the front matter, and have them bound into five sets of proofs. He would laboriously correct the copies, thus creating the first and most valuable of the many versions and editions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.He may have looked increasingly hungry and shabby—not surprisingly, since he had to use the Westminster public baths to wash, and he worked through every night on a diet of chocolate bars and mugs of tea. He wrote later that he haunted the Duke of York’s Steps at lunchtime to catch friends making their way from the War Office to their club on Pall Mall, in hopes of being invited to lunch—a sad glimpse of what his life must have been like in the first half of 1922.

Still, Lawrence did not have a totally reclusive life during this period in London. He was involved constantly with painters, publishers, poets, printers, and writers, and seems rather to have enjoyed the air of mystery that hung around him even then. One of his acquaintances, Sydney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and a kind of literary and artistic gadfly, took him, quite by chance, to pick up George Bernard Shaw’s portrait by Augustus John from Shaw’s London home. It was thus, casually, in March 1922, that Lawrence met Shaw, who, together with his wife Charlotte, would play an important role in Lawrence’s life over the next thirteen years. It would be incorrect to say that Shaw was at the height of his fame—his fame burned at a bright, steady level from before the turn of the century to his death in 1951, and burns on even today, more than half a century later, and nobody ever gloried more in his own fame. Lawrence’s fame was equally bright, though he, unlike Shaw, was dismayed by it. In any case, a first contact was made that Lawrence would pursue diligently, in a campaign as carefully planned and executed as any of his military campaigns. The resulting friendship was one of most extraordinary and literarily productive of the twentieth century.

Churchill finally gave in and allowed Lawrence “to leave the payroll of the Colonial Office on July 1st, while retaining him as an honorary advisor.” Churchill had known about Lawrence’s desire to join the ranks since January, and while he was sympathetic, it was hardly something he understood at heart, having lived on a firm basis of late Victorian class distinction as a grandson of one duke and cousin of another. Trenchard had in any case consulted him, as well as his own secretary of state, about Lawrence’s wish to join the RAF, and with a more tolerant view of human behavior, had expressed his willingness to accept Lawrence as a recruit. Churchill was considerably more skeptical about “Colonel Lawrence’s”chance of slipping into the RAF unnoticed, but he was willing to let Lawrence try. Trenchard went so far as to give Lawrence a privilege to which no other airman was entitled—at any time, if and when he chose to, he could leave the RAF, no questions asked and no obstacles placed in his way. Thus Lawrence was entitled to enter the RAF under a name of his own choosing, and to leave it if at any time he decided it had been a mistake; Trenchard could hardly have been fairer or more generous, as Lawrence gratefully recognized.

Lawrence dramatized his entrance into the RAF in writing The Mint,with its famous opening lines: “God this is awful. Hesitating for two hours up and down a filthy street, lips and hands and knees tremulously out of control, my heart pounding in fear of that little door through which I must go in order to join up. Try sitting for a moment in the churchyard? That’s caused it. The nearest lavatory, now …. A penny; which leaves me fifteen. Buck up, old seat-wiper: I can’t tip you and I’m urgent. Won by a short head….One reason that taught me I wasn’t a man of action was this routine melting of the bowels before a crisis. However, now we end it. I’m going straight up and in.”

In fact, Lawrence’s entry into the RAF had been carefully choreographed well in advance, and there was no chance at all that he would be rejected. The overdrawn description of his fear before entering the RAF recruiting office, at 4 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, makes artistic sense, since in writing it Lawrence chose to portray himself as everyman, a generic narrator, rather than as a former lieutenant-colonel and war hero. As a result, The Mintsometimes reads more like fiction than a memoir, or than the piece of documentary reporting that Lawrence had in mind.One reason why it fails as reporting is that the most important fact of all is largely missing: the narrator is not an anonymous, terrified civilian trying to sign up for seven years of service and five years in the reserve but Lawrence of Arabia posing as an airman. The fact that Lawrence had an escape clause from the RAF is not mentioned either. Even the looseness of his bowels “before a crisis” seems unreal—nowhere in Seven Pillars of Wisdomdoes he mention this problem, even though he is often in situations that would terrify anyone.

From the beginning it was clear that Lawrence would be no ordinary recruit. Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, replied to his letter asking to join the RAF in the ranks, on January 11, 1922: “With regard to your personal point, I understand it fully, and you too, I think. I am prepared to do all you ask me, if you will tell me for how long you want to join, but I am afraid I could not do it without mentioning it to Winston and my own Secretary of State, and then, whether it could be kept secret I do not know…. What country do you want to serve in, and how? I would make things as easy as anything.” As Lawrence’s release from the Colonial Office approached, he was invited to have dinner and spend the night at Trenchard’s house in Barnet, outside London, to talk things over; and Trenchard made one more appeal to Lawrence to join as an officer, which Lawrence declined.

Trenchard approached the task of getting the most famous man in Britain into the RAF as an ordinary aircraftman with his usual common sense.Lawrence came up with the name John Hume Ross himself. He wanted a short name, and when his youngest brother Arnold mentioned a friend of their mother’s, Mrs.Ross, he chose that. On August 14 Trenchard had Lawrence come to see him at the Air Ministry, and introduced him to Air Vice-Marshal Oliver Swann,the member of the Air Council for Personnel,who was to make the final arrangements.Swann was something less than a willing accomplice.Trenchard might enjoy breaking his own regulations, but Swann lived by them and was “considerably embarrassed” at the “secrecy and subterfuge.” He “disliked the whole business,” and particularly resented the letters he received from Lawrence, which expressed a breezy familiarity and equality that Swann considered inappropriate, and also told Swann a good deal more than he wanted to know about a recruit’s life in the ranks. Swann soon came to dread Lawrence’s letters.He would comment later, with the asperity of a man determined to set matters straight at last: “One would think from [his] letters that I was a close correspondent of Lawrence’s, possibly even a friend of his. But as a matter of fact …1 disliked the whole business….I discouraged communication with or from him.”

Swann’s orders left him in no position to argue, however. Trenchard’s memorandum to him was simple and clear-cut:

It is hereby approved that Colonel T. E. Lawrence be permitted to join the Royal Air Force as an aircraft-hand under the alias ofJohn Hume Ross

AC2 No. 352087He is taking this step to learn what is the life of an airman. On receipt of any communication from him through any channel, asking for his release, orders are to be issued for his discharge forthwith without formality.H. TrenchardCASO. SwannAMP 16.8.22 Since this was dated only two days after Swann was introduced to Lawrence by Trenchard, it is apparently a written confirmation of what had been discussed at their meeting. Swann, a meticulous bureaucrat and a stickler for regulations, could not have been pleased that, apart from the hugger-mugger of slipping “Colonel T. E. Lawrence” into the ranks, something which Swann rightly feared might backfire on them all, Lawrence not only was given the right to opt out of service in the RAF but could do so at any time without going through the correctchannels—i.e., from Lawrence to his sergeant, from his sergeant to his flight commander, from the flight commander to the station commander via the station adjutant, and from there on to the Air Ministry in London. Furthermore, Swann was to be the onlyperson in the RAF, apart from Trenchard himself, who knew that AC2 No. 352087 Ross, J. H., was in fact T. E. Lawrence—so Swann was in the uncomfortable position of having to conceal the truth from his subordinates. Lawrence may have felt that this was great fun, and Trenchard may have shared that feeling, but Swann did not, and was anxious to get Lawrence off his hands as quickly as possible. It could not have made him any happier to know that Lawrence was intending to write a book about his time in the air force, a book in which Swann and his subordinates might expect to appear.

Swann nevertheless arranged for Lawrence to present himself at the RAF recruiting office in Henrietta Street at 10:30 a.m. on August 22. (The date was later altered to August 30, at Lawrence’s request, probably because he needed more time to complete the corrections on the proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom)Lawrence was to ask for Flight Lieutenant Dexter, who would interview him and help him fill out the necessary forms. Dexter had been warned that “Ross” was entering the RAF “specially,” but under no circumstances was Lawrence to tell Dexter who he really was.

Unhappily, Swann was the wrong man for planning this kind of transaction, and not at all suited for the role of Figaro. As Lawrence entered the recruiting office he was intercepted, as Swann should have guessed, by Sergeant Major Gee, who was not about to allow a seedy-looking prospective recruit to say which officer he wanted to see. Instead of taking Lawrence into Dexter’s office, Gee took him straight to Flying Officer W. E. Johns, the chief interviewing officer, who was not in on the secret, and who did not like the look of Lawrence any more than the sergeant major did. Indeed Gee, who was standing behind Lawrence, made a signal to Johns to indicate that he suspected the recruit might be a man running away from the police: such fugitives often tried to join one of the armed services in a hurry, under an assumed name, to avoid prosecution. Johns, who kept in his desk drawer an up-to-date stack of photographs of men wanted by the police, was by no means an ordinary RAF officer. He would become the author of the hugely successful “Biggles” books, ninety-eight of them, about a fictional RAF pilot hero, which remained a mainstay of boys’ reading material in Britain well into the 1950s. He edited the serious aviation magazine Flyingbut was forced out of his job by the government when he became an outspoken opponent of appeasement in the 1930s. He was not a man easily imposed on; nor was Sergeant Major Gee.

According to Johns, he questioned “Ross” sharply, and quickly ascertained that he had no copy of his birth certificate, and no references from previous employers. One might have thought the man who had traveled more than 300 miles across the desert behind enemy lines in 1917 would have provided himself with the necessary documents, or that Air Vice-Marshal Swann would have made sure he had them. Possibly Dexter had been warned not to ask for them, but Johns sent Lawrence packing to obtain these documents, and in the meantime he and the sergeant major examined the photographs from Scotland Yard and determined that “Ross” was not a wanted man. Johns was no fool, and he was thorough—he put in a call to Somerset House (the central registry of births and deaths) and discovered that no John Hume Ross had been born on the date given to him by Lawrence. When Lawrence returned later in the day with a sheaf of papers, Johns quickly realized that they were forged, and had Sergeant Major Gee show him firmly out the door.

The Air Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk from the recruiting office, and Lawrence immediately went there to give Air Vice-Marshal Swann the bad news. Swann sent him back to the recruiting office in the company of a messenger from the Air Ministry bearing a black dispatch case with a copy of Trenchard’s memo to Swann in it. Johns therefore became aware that it was now his job to get “Ross” into the RAF, and also that “Ross” was in fact Lawrence of Arabia. The secret, which Trenchard and Lawrence had hoped to keep for as long as possible, was already out, in the span of a few hours.

A further “stumbling block”* still awaited Lawrence: the medical examination. The RAF doctors were not impressed by Lawrence’s physique, and at five feet six inches (they made him an inch taller than he actually was) and 130 pounds he seemed slightly too small for the RAF; he was also a few years too old. They were curious about his scars, too. He explained away the bayonet wounds between his ribs as barbed-wire scars, but the scars on his buttocks were harder to explain. “Hullo, what the hell’s those marks? Punishment?” one of the doctors asked.

“No, Sir, more like persuasion, Sir, I think,” Lawrence replied, not yet aware that for an aircraftman a clever or flip reply to an officer’s question is always a bad idea—a lesson he would learn the hard way over the next few months.

The doctors, despite encouragement from Johns, eventually rejected Lawrence because his teeth failed to meet the RAF standard—a glance at the dental chart in Lawrence’s RAF medical records does indeed reveal an amazing number of fillings and at least two bridges to replace missing teeth, perhaps more of a comment on the standards of British dental care at the time and the national passion for chocolate than on Lawrence. (Lawrence’s dental chart shows seven teeth missing, and twelve teeth with significant decay, despite the notation that his “Oral Hygiene” was “Good.”)

While Dexter shepherded Lawrence through filling out his application to join the RAF and took care of the standard education test—Lawrence could manage the essay, of course, but not the “square roots … and decimals"—Johns went off to explain his predicament to his commanding officer, who called the personnel office at the Air Ministry to ask what to do. When he had replaced the receiver he told Johns to get “Lawrence of Arabia” into the air force, or “you’ll get your bowler hat.” This was RAF slang for being dismissed from the service. Johns resourcefully found a civilian doctor who was willing to sign the medical form. Johns then signed the form himself, and “Ross” was officially declared fit for service in the RAF. His medical form rather modestly limits the “marks” on his body to “Scars both buttocks,” overlooking the bayonet wounds on the ribs and a number of bullet scars; notes that he has perfect eyesight, as one would expect of such an expert shot as Lawrence; and gives his age as twenty-eight, whereas he was thirty-four.

Any pretense of secrecy vanished when Johns telephoned his opposite number, Flight Lieutenant Nelson, at RAF Uxbridge, the recruit training center, about fifteen miles from the center of London, “to warn him of who was on his way, for by this time Lawrence was making it clear that he had no time for junior officers.” Johns took Lawrence to the station and chatted with him while he waited for the next train to Uxbridge.

They did not part friends. Johns remarked that Lawrence left him “with the memory of a cold, clammy handshake.”

Lawrence left this slightly farcical episode out of The Mint,when he came to write it, and gives the impression that the medical examination at the recruiting office in London went more or less normally, and that the two RAF doctors were eager to pass him as fit. He may also have invented the description of his arrival at Uxbridge, in which he is one of six recruits who are met by a sergeant and marched from the railway station into camp. His description of his first night in the recruits’ hut at Uxbridge rings true enough, however, to anyone who has entered the British armed forces. His fellow recruits were noisy, swore constantly, and smelled of beer, tobacco, and sweat.

Lawrence must also have been disoriented by this sudden immersion into lower-class life. He had a remarkable ability to get on with people who were very different from himself, but these had so far been Arabs and Bedouin tribesmen, foreigners rather than his own fellow countrymen of a different background. He was well brought up, fastidious, brilliantly educated, an ex-officer, however idiosyncratic, and a man whose quiet voice and unmistakable accent identified him immediately as a gentleman. He was also a man who hated to be touched, so he had a natural fear of barracks roughhousing—fistfights, towel-slappings, and all the normal physical horseplay of young men trying hard not to show they were afraid they might not prove tough enough for the rigors of recruit training, since the first weeks of training consisted of a deliberately harsh winnowing-out process, intended to eliminate those who were weak, rebellious, or unamenable to discipline, or who simply lacked esprit de corps.

For a man who had been imprisoned by the Turks, tortured, raped, and wounded countless times, Lawrence ’s reaction to his hut mates at Uxbridge is strangely prim: “ As they swiftly stripped for sleep a reek of body fought with beer and tobacco for the mastery of the room …. The horseplay turned to a rough-house: snatching of trousers, and smacks with the flat of hard hands, followed by clumsy steeplechases over the obstacle of beds which tipped or tilted…. Our hut-refuge was become libertine, brutal, loud-voiced, unwashed.”

Of course war and danger have a certain intoxicating glamour—certainly they did to Lawrence – whereas the prospect of weeks of sodden misery in a crowded hut full of noisy young recruits does not. Hardened as Lawrence was to danger, pain, and death, he had never been to an English boarding school, an experience that might as well have been designed to create a hard, self-protective shell against the small, daily abrasions of communal living, occasional physical violence, and unwelcome intimacy. In fact, Lawrence’s description of life at Uxbridge often sounds like that of a new boy away at school for the first time; for example, he notes, with alarm, that “there had been a rumour of that sinful misery, forced games,” and that “breakfast and dinner were sickening, but ample.”

The next day, Lawrence was once more ordered to write an essay on his birthplace (which he had not seen since he was six weeks old); was submitted to fierce questioning about where he had been during the war (he came up with a story about being interned as an enemy alien in Smyrna, by the Turks); then, after waiting for two hours with forty or fifty other men (good training for the methods of the British armed services, which are usually described as, “Hurry up, and wait!”), he was sworn in at last, and became, officially, “AC2 Ross.”

He describes his hut mates as a blacksmith from Glasgow (who fails his test job), two barmen, a former captain of the King’s Royal Rifles, two seamen, a naval “Marconi operator,” a Great Western Railway machinist, lorry drivers, clerks, photographers, mechanics, “a fair microcosm of unemployed England.” Lawrence sums up this mixed bag accurately enough, pointing out that they are not the “unemployable,” the bottom of the barrel, but merely those who have lost their jobs, or their way, or had financial or woman trouble of one kind or another. At the same time, it is not Kipling’s army, or the French Foreign Legion; most of the men in Lawrence’s hut have a trade of some kind, and hope to pursue it, or something similar to it, once they have finished the twelve weeks of “square bashing” (drill), “bull” (polishing and shining their kit and their surroundings until their boots, their brass, and the barracks floor gleam like mirrors), and fatigue duties, mostly filthy, demeaning, and back-breaking hard labor, all intended to teach the raw recruit that his time and his body belong to the RAF. Not surprisingly, given his age and background, Lawrence was at first slow at drill, hated PT (physical training), and had no skill at turning his brown, lusterless boots into glossy black ones that shone like patent leather.* But like most people he found that there were others far less competent than himself, and that once the recruits in his hut were uniformed and put into the training program, their camaraderie, gruff sympathy, occasional good advice, and commitment to one another made the training program more bearable. There were no winners or losers; it was not a competitive effort and so there was no personal gain in being better turned out than the man next to you; the entire purpose of the program was to perfect the unit,not the individual, and to turn your “flight” (as a company is called in the RAF) into a gleaming, responsive, perfectly drilled body of men on the parade ground.

For somebody as individualistic as Lawrence, this was not easy to learn. Sticking it out must have required all of his admittedly formidable self-discipline, and this makes his effort to complete every part of his recruit training even more impressive. He wrote about it from time to time in some detail to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, under the mistaken impression that Swann wanted to know what the life of a recruit was like, or was interested in improving the training program. In fact, what Swann wanted most was not to hear from him at all.“I’m not very certain of myself,” Lawrence wrote to Swann, after his first few days, “for the crudities, which aren’t as bad as I expected, worry me far more than I expected: and physically I can only just scrape through the days….If I can get able to sleep, and to eat the food, and to go through the PT I’ll be all right. The present worry is 90 per cent nerves…. Please tell the C.A.S.[Trenchard] that I’m delighted and most grateful to him and to you for what you have done.Don’t bother to keep an eye on what happens to me.” It may be imagined with what dread the unfortunate Swann opened these long letters. He was convinced that no matter how well it was handled, Lawrence’s enlistment would blow up in his face, and at the same time his orders from Trenchard were precisely to “keep an eye on” Lawrence, something he could hardly do from his desk in London.

As it happened, the commanding officer of RAF Uxbridge, Wing Commander Ian Malcolm Bonham-Carter, CB, OBE, without knowing who Ross was, seems to have picked him out on sight as the wrong kind of airman.In The Mint,Lawrence reserves his harshest language for Bonham-Carter.It goes without saying that the worst thing a recruit can do is to attract the attention of the commanding officer in any way, but Lawrence succeeded in doing so almost immediately. It might have amused Bonham-Carter to know that he and “Ross” were both Companions of the Order of the Bath, but then again, probably not.In photographs Bonham-Carter is enormously good-looking, his uniform is perfectly tailored, and his expression is severe. He had a reputation as “a strict disciplinarian,” but as Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who had served with him, pointed out later—when The Mintwas finally published—a disciplinarian was exactly the kind of man who was needed to run the recruit training depot. Bonham-Carter had been wounded in the war. He lost his left leg and the use of one arm, and sustained numerous other wounds, but often refused to wear a prosthetic limb, relying on crutches instead. It may be that Lawrence’s hesitancy at PT drew Bonham-Carter’s attention, for the commanding officer would drive over from his house to watch the recruits doing their physical training before breakfast at dawn, and would join in despite his wounds, doing the exercises as best he could while supporting himself against the cookhouse wall with one hand. Lawrence dismissed this as “theatrical swank"; decided that since Bonham-Carter was “always resentfully in pain,” he was determined that the recruits should at least be uncomfortable; and complained that his presence forced the PT instructor to drag out the exercise “to its uttermost minute.” Lawrence describes the commanding officer as “only the shards of a man,” but he may have been exaggerating for effect: Bonham-Carter not only did the same physical exercises as the recruits but drove his own two-seat sports car, continued to fly, and would go on to serve during World War II as “duty air commodore” in the Operations Room of RAF Fighter Command. In any case, when Lawrence’s turn came for duty as Bonham-Carter’s “headquarters runner,” the experience was so unpleasant that during a kit inspection of one of the huts Lawrence “found himself trembling with clenched fists,” repeating to himself, “I must hit him, I must,” but held himself back. He describes watching the commanding officer “pulled over on his face” when his two leashed dogs ran after a cat, and the airmen standing around “silently watching him struggle” to get back on his feet, but refusing to help, muttering, “ ‘Let the old cunt rot.’ “ Lawrence adds that at Bonham-Carter’s next command the airfield “was ringed with his men almost on their knees, praying he would crash.”