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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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The solution—a brilliant one—was to limit the readership to those who were either friends (like Hogarth) or admirers (like Storrs and Allenby), and who would not rush to write long, disputatious letters to the Times.** Lawrence often had contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he wanted to prevent Seven Pillars of Wisdomfrom becoming a collector’s item; on the other, by making almost every copy of the subscribers’ edition different in some way—with variations in binding, and in the number and placement of the illustrations—he inevitably produced a limited edition that would keep bibliophiles busy and puzzled for decades.

In early to mid-1923, Lawrence was still waiting for Shaw’s long-promised suggestions and corrections to the 1922 proof, and still circulating copies to those who had served with him and whom he respected for their comments. Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future Field Marshal) wrote back encouragingly, and the Hardys expressed their admiration. All this ought to have cheered Lawrence up, but failed to do so. He was weary of the book, sick of the Army (“A black core … of animality”), “brooding” on his own sense of dissatisfaction, unable to sleep more than an hour a night, and existing on one meal a day, usually breakfast; and although he was living in a hut with twenty-one other soldiers and a corporal, he felt as lonely as he had been in the attic on Barton Street in London. In an effort to keep his mind occupied, and produce an income beyond the army’s two shillings nine pence a day, he asked Cape about the possibility of doing some translation from the French, estimating that he could probably produce about 2,000 words a day—a figure that was seriously overoptimistic. Cape proposed that he should translate J. C. Mardrus’s 4,000-page Mille et Une Nuits (The Arabian Nights),a formidable task. In preparation for this, Lawrence agreed to translate a French novel, Le Gigantesque,about a giant sequoia tree, a book he came to dislike more and more as he translated it. He persisted with it, however—it was eventually published by Cape as The Forest Giant—but the effect was to deter Lawrence from taking on anything as challenging as Mille et Une Nuits.He took instead a French novel about fishes (even stranger than a novel about a tree), a book which he thought (correctly) English readers might not take to. When he was not translating, he and his friends worked on his cottage, repairing and altering it to his taste. He carved in the lintel over the front door of Clouds Hill two words from Herodotus best translated as “I don’t care,” or perhaps more to the point, “I couldn’t care less.”*

When the Shaws were persuaded to visit Lawrence in his cottage, as the Hardys and E. M. Forster did, Bernard Shaw remarked, perceptively, that Lawrence’s pretense of living “humbly with his comrades” as “a tanker-ranker” was misleading, and that surrounded by his army friends at Clouds Hill “he looked very much like Colonel Lawrence with several aides-de-camp.”

Soon after meeting Lawrence, Shaw described him as “a grown-up boy,” and there is an element of truth to this: both as regards Lawrence, many of whose interests and tastes (motorcycles, for example, or the tiny, cozy cottage, with sleeping bags coyly marked Meumand Tuam)remained boyish, and who scrupulously avoided any of the adult entanglements of love, marriage, and domesticity; and as regards Shaw’s own relationship to him, which was that of an exasperated father. Lawrence had not only adopted Shaw’s name as his own, but found in the name of the village where the Shaws lived, Ayot Saint Lawrence, a kind of portent. Lawrence’s visits to the Shaws throughout 1922 and 1923 had made him, to all intents and purposes, almost a member of the family, and also gave him the unusual opportunity of sharing in the creation of one of Shaw’s best plays, Saint Joan.His visits were curtailed when one of his fellow privates borrowed his motorcycle and crashed it, but he soon managed to acquire another Brough, and in the meantime remained in constant correspondence with both Shaws.

Occasionally, Public Shaw launched a Jovian taunt at Private Shaw: “I have written another magnificent play. When I finish a play, I write another: I don’t sit down gloating in a spectacular manner over how the old one is to astonish the world. Yah!” Nevertheless, Charlotte sent Lawrence the draft acting script of Saint Joan,and Lawrence responded– boldly—with a long, detailed letter of suggestions to the great man. He answered via Charlotte, though he must have been aware that she would show the letter to her husband. He did not comment on the way Shaw had made use of his character and career in creating the part of Saint Joan herself. Like Lawrence, Joan had fought a powerful army to place a king “upon the throne of a nation-state"; like Joan, Lawrence had succeeded against the odds, and had then been dismissed (as she was martyred); like Joan, Lawrence combined unearthly courage with the ability to inspire men to follow him, and invented unorthodox military tactics that confounded the professionals; like Joan’s, Lawrence’s small size, humility, and modesty, whether real or feigned, did not prevent him from being the center of all attention wherever he went; and like Joan, he adopted a costume that separated him from his own countrymen—he went barefoot, in the robes of an Arab, and she wore the armor of a man. Even Joan’s way of expressing herself in the play resembles Lawrence’s—Shaw was nothing if not observant in pursuit of a character. In the words of Michael Holroyd, Shaw’s biographer, “With their missionary zeal to mould the world to their personal convictions, Joan and Lawrence were two small homeless figures elected by the Zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” The comparison intrigued Shaw from his first meeting with Lawrence and gave him the key to creating a Shavian heroine who was at once saintly and proud, modern and medieval, as well as a deeply androgynous figure.

Lawrence was courageous enough to criticize one scene as “adequate” and another as “intolerable.” But on the whole he liked the play, and he praised the fifth act as “pure genius,” though several people have felt that Saint Joanwould have ended better without it (among these were Lawrence Langner and the Theater Guild, producers of the play in New York, who were afraid the audience members would miss their last train home). Lawrence pointed out that Shaw “doesn’t know how men who have fought together stand in relation to one another,” and gave him some sensible suggestions. Once the play had opened, Lawrence went to see it in London, and wrote to Charlotte of Sybil Thorndyke’s performance as Joan, “There isn’t as much strength in Joan … as I had gathered in reading her,” but added that since he had made the role and the text his, in his mind, “there was a little resentment at having others’ interpretations thrust on my established ones.”

Although Lawrence never enjoyed his years in the army as a private, one senses, in 1923 and 1924, not so much a softening of his attitude as an increasingly busy social and intellectual life that kept his mind off it. He was often in London, and was once even invited to a dinner to celebrate Armistice Day, given by Air Chief Marshal Trenchard. Lawrence accepted provisionally:

I’d like to very much: but there are two difficulties already in my view:

It is Armistice day, and I do not know if leave will be given.

I have a decent suit, but no dress clothes at all.The leave I will ask for….The clothes are beyond my power to provide: and I fear that Lady Trenchard might not approve a lounge suit at dinner….Please ask her before you reply. In the event, Lawrence attended the dinner at the Army and Navy Club in uniform, surely the only private soldier in the British army to be dining that evening with the equivalent of a four-star general. Again and again, there are instances of Trenchard’s breaking the rules for Lawrence. He called General Chetwode, the army adjutant-general, to arrange for special leave for Lawrence, and called again, in a rage, because Lawrence, who was on the defaulters’ list for having missed a parade in order to accept an invitation to tea from Thomas Hardy, was unable to meet him at the Air Ministry. Despite Lawrence’s complaints, there was no lack of powerful friends smoothing his path, and no hesitation on his part in asking them to do so.

Nor was there a lack of glamorous job offers. Sydney Cockerell tried to persuade Lawrence to accept the post of professor of English literature at Tokyo University, a position of some prestige; and Trenchard gave him a chance to complete the official history of the Royal Flying Corps in the 1914-1918 war, since the author of the first volume, Sir Walter Raleigh,had died leaving four or five volumes to go. Hogarth had given the job a try, but he was suffering from “all sorts of minor ailments,” as well as diabetes, and the air war was no great interest of his. Here, surely, was a job Lawrence could do superbly—and without having to leave England—but he turned it down, because he did not want the responsibility, and offered it instead to Robert Graves, who, with a wife, children, and a mistress, was in great need of money. But Graves also declined what Lawrence described as “a three-year job, worth Ј600-Ј800 a year,” an optimistic guess, since the completion of the official RFC history would, in fact, take another twelve years.

Although Lawrence still shrank from the prospect of letting people read Seven Pillars of Wisdom,he had made the important step of putting its financing in the hands of Robin Buxton, a friendly banker, who as Major Buxton had led an Imperial Camel Corps unit of 300 men in support of Lawrence during the latter part of the war. Buxton was a rare type—an unflappable banker, endowed with energy, common sense, and a real affection for Lawrence; and Lawrence seems to have put together a “brain trust,” consisting of Alan Dawnay, Hogarth, and Lionel Curtis, to advise him on how many copies to print and what to charge. He was, as usual, an infuriatingly difficult author. He wrote to Buxton: “I’d rather the few copies: I had rather one copy at Ј3,000 than 10 at Ј300, or 30 at Ј100 or 300 at Ј10….1 hate the whole idea of spreading copies of the beastly book.” All this, of course, was still based on the notion that the whole job could be done for Ј3,000, which was hopelessly optimistic. At the same time, Lawrence decided that for moral reasons he should not make any money from the book, and gave up any claim to royalties. His choice of using the Oxford University Press to set the type was thwarted when it backed out, fearing the libel problems in the text. Lawrence eventually settled on hiring his own printer, an American named Manning Pike recommended by the artist Eric Kennington. Although this was his first attempt to design and set a book, Pike was a craftsman-artist after Lawrence’s heart. Still, Pike soon became a martyr to Lawrence’s cranky ideas about typography, a legacy of his passionate admiration for William Morris. Lawrence cut and changed the text to make paragraphs end on a page, to eliminate “rivers” of white space in the type, and to eliminate “orphans” (small pieces of text at the end of a paragraph). Lawrence’s interest in typographical design soon became obsessive, and without a publisher like Cape or an editor like Garnett to control expenses, he began altering his text merely for the sake of its appearance on the page—Pike was, after all, in no position to contradict him. “The business will be done as crazily as you feared,” Lawrence wrote to Shaw, and he was not exaggerating. Shaw’s own ideas about spelling, punctuation, and typesetting were at least as cranky as Lawrence’s, but his business sense was far sounder; he squeezed the maximum amount from his publishers, and was horrified that Lawrence proposed to forgo any profit from his book. Leaving his brain trust to find the necessary number of subscribers, Lawrence proceeded to have plates made of the illustrations and pay for the typesetting equipment Pike needed. He went through at least one more nerve-shredding round of revising the text, and then did so again as Pike began to produce proof sheets. This time he was aided, or perhaps hampered, by Shaw’s detailed suggestions and advice (followed shortly by Charlotte’s somewhat more timidly expressed ones), which finally arrived like a bombshell two years after Lawrence had first sent him the book:

Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo….I invented my own system of punctuation, and then compared it with the punctuation of the Bible, and found that the authors of the revised version had been driven to the same usage, though their practice is not quite consistent all through. The Bible bars the dash, which is the great refuge of those who are too lazy to punctuate….1 never use it when I can possibly substitute a colon; and I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces. As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rough rules for you.When a sentence contains more than one statement, with different nominatives, or even with the same nominative repeated for the sake of emphasizing some discontinuity between the statements, the statements should be separated by a semicolon when the relation between them is expressed by a conjunction. When there is no conjunction, or other modifying word, and the two statements areplaced baldly in dramatic apposition, use a colon. Thus, Luruns said nothing; but he thought the more. Luruns could not speak: he was drunk. Luruns, like Napoleon, was out of place and a failure as a subaltern; yet when he could exasperate his officers by being a faultless private he could behave himself as such. Luruns, like Napoleon, could see a hostile city not only as a military objective but as a stage for a coup de thйвtre: he was a born actor.You will see that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.But by far the most urgent of my corrections—so important that you had better swallow them literally with what wry faces you cannot control—are those which concern your libels. I spent fifteen years of my life writing criticisms of sensitive living people, and thereby acquired a very cultivated sense of what I might say and what I might not say. All criticisms are technically libels; but there is the blow below the belt, the impertinence, the indulgence of dislike, the expression of personal contempt, and of course the imputation of dishonesty or unchastity which are not and should not be privileged; as well as the genuine criticism, the amusing good humored banter, and (curiously) the obvious “vulgar abuse” which are privileged. I have weeded out your reckless sallies as carefully as I can.Then there is the more general criticism about that first chapter. That it should come out and leave the book to begin with chapter two, which is the real thing and very fine at that, I have no doubt whatever. You will see my note on the subject.I must close up now, as Charlotte wants to make up her packet to you. E. M. Forster too had written to Lawrence in detail, criticizing the elaborate style, which Lawrence toned down considerably now that publishing the book was a realistic prospect. It was a moment that was at once stimulating and deeply depressing for Lawrence, as if he were at once summoning up from the past and finally burying the experiences of two years of war, six years after it had ended. He had carried the burden of Seven Pillars of Wisdomfor so long that it must have seemed to him impossible to put it down.

It was soon apparent that there would be no shortage of subscribers—indeed, Lawrence would have trouble keeping the number down to the limit he wanted to set—and also that the entire project was going to prove far more costly than he had supposed. The extraordinary workload he had heaped upon himself, on top of a soldier’s normal day, would have broken the health of a far stronger man, and there is ample proof that he was sinking deeper into depression. It is no accident that he had written confidingly to Charlotte Shaw a kind of de profundis,explaining his experience at Deraa:

I’m always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender…. About that night I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things…. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from the pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter. What he did notpoint out was that in the description of the incident in Seven Pillars of Wisdomit is quite clear that the real horror was notthe pain, but the fact that he experienced pleasure at the pain; that his sexual “surrender” was as “unforgivable” in his mind as it would be for a woman experiencing pleasure from a gang rape. He certainly never mentioned that he had gone to considerable trouble and some expense to reproduce the moment, whenever the need overcame him. Jock Bruce was still in his hut at Bovington, and among the soldiers he invited to his cottage.

Lawrence’s misery continued. He appealed once more to be allowed back into the RAF, but even a change in government did not help; the Conservative secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, was adamantly opposed to having Lawrence back in the RAF. Hoare, who had known Lawrence well in Palestine and Jordan, feared the inevitable publicity, and may also have resented the direct appeal that Shaw made to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin over Hoare’s head, which suggested that Lawrence might take his cause to the newspapers. John Buchan put in a good word for Lawrence with Baldwin as well, but to no avail. Baldwin, a man who combined extreme political shrewdness with genuine indolence, must have felt besieged by Lawrence’s friends, but true to form, he listened politely and did nothing.

To Buchan, Lawrence at least offered an explanation of a kind, writing to thank him for talking to Baldwin: “I don’t know by what right I made that appeal to you on Sunday…. They often ask ‘Why the R.A.F.?’ and I don’t know. Only I have tried it and liked it as much after trying it as I did before. The difference between Army & Air is that between earth & air: no less.” Even Lawrence’s pal at Bovington, Corporal Dixon, thought he was crazy on the subject of the air force, as did the sinister Bruce, but it made no difference; “I can’t get the longing for it out of my mind,” he wrote Buchan, and that was true. Lawrence’s yearning for the RAF was not a matter of reason.

Meanwhile, Manning Pike was slipping far behind with his typesetting—Lawrence had committed his book to a man who was not only inexperienced but subject to “fits of extreme depression,” and on top of that “had an unhappy marriage.” Lawrence, sunk in depression himself, was obliged to cheer Pike up. At the same time, Buxton, Lawrence’s banker, was reluctant to increase his overdraft. In the end, there seemed no other way out but for Lawrence to resign himself to staying in the Royal Tank Corps, and sell the rights to an abridged version of Seven Pillars of Wisdomto finance the printing of the subscribers’ edition. Cape, despite Lawrence’s earlier decision to withdraw from his agreement to the abridged version, offered Lawrence a comparatively modest advance of Ј3,000; and with whatever misgivings, Lawrence accepted it, and agreed to publication in 1927, giving himself enough time (and money) to complete the limited edition. Most, if not all, of the abridgment had already been made by Garnett, but of course it would now have to be redone in view of the changes Lawrence had made in the text of the complete book.

Lawrence might have continued to serve in the RTC and work on the two different versions of his book, however unhappily, but in May 1925 Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabiawas at last published in Britain. It had been a huge success in the United States, and became one again in Britain, reviving curiosity about Lawrence at just the moment when he felt most defeated. The same old exaggerations, told in the jocular voice of an American pitchman, were made more unbearable for Lawrence because he had given Thomas so many of his stories and anecdotes in the first place. Overwhelmed, Lawrence wrote a plaintive letter to Edward Garnett, describing his book as “muck,” and adding that this “gloomy view of it deepens each time I have to wade through it…. I’m no bloody good on earth. So I’m going to quit … [and] bequeath you my notes on recruit life in the recruits’ camp of the R.A.F.”

Garnett took this as a suicide threat and, thoroughly alarmed, wrote to Shaw, who once again took the matter to Stanley Baldwin, and pointed out that the suicide of one of Britain’s most famous heroes because he had been refused permission to transfer from the army to the RAF would be a scandal. The last thing Baldwin wanted was a huge scandal—it was his fate to have to deal first with Lawrence and then with the far more embarrassing problem of King Edward VlII’s wish to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and make her his queen. As a result, in August 1925 Private T. E. Shaw rejoined the Royal Air Force at last as 338171 AC2 Shaw.

* An exception was made for the acknowledged illegitimate children of members of the royal family. King William IV’s nine illegitimate children received titles and were ranked in precedence above a marquess. All of them attended the king’s coronation in 1830, and one of them later became a favorite aide-de-camp to King William’s niece and successor, Queen Victoria.

* The author served in the RAF from 1951 to 1953, and recruit training then (at RAF Padgate) did not seem all that different from training in Lawrence’s time.

* Johns’s words. Since he was an accomplished writer of fiction, he may have overdra-matized his role, but his account reads convincingly enough.

* In the RAF, as in all the British armed services, this is a long, painstaking, timehonored process involving black Kiwi boot polish, the handle of a service spoon heated in hot water to just the right temperature, methylated spirits, spit, and many hours of elbow grease, with a polishing rag.

* This does not necessarily mean that Lawrence was physically dirty—unlike most of his fellow recruits he devoted much time and effort, and occasional small bribes, to seeking out ways to have a hot bath as often as possible.in the RAF “dirty“ can imply nothing worse than a speck of tarnish on a cap badge or a smudged fingerprint on the polished lid of a shoe polish can.

* Although Lawrence had a remarkable gift for languages, and according to his youngest brother, A. W. Lawrence, could pick up the gist of any language very quickly, there is no other evidence that he knew Danish well enough to read it. This may have been a case of gilding the lily, on the part of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who was a friend and contemporary of Wing Commander Bonham-Carter, and whose dyspeptic opinion of Lawrence—also expressed to this author, who edited Sholto Douglas’s memoir—was that “so far as the RAF was concerned, he was scarcely more than a nuisance,” deliberately creating difficulties for the junior officers under whom he served. (Sholto Douglas, Years of Command,New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, 144-145.)

* He was referring to the British Museum Library and to the New York Public Library.

* There are a number of conflicting accounts of the relationship between Lawrence and Bruce, among them that of John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who actually met Bruce while researching his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence in the 1970s; Jeremy Wilson’s much more cautious and skeptical take on Bruce in his biography of Lawrence; and the frankly sensation-alistic account given by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson in The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia,based on their series for the (London) Sunday Times.Bruce also wrote his own account, on which Knightley and Simpson based theirs. Even reduced to the bare minimum of what everyone accepts took place between Lawrence and Bruce, it is still a disturbing story.

* Lawrence sold the dagger to his friend Lionel Curtis, who donated it to All Souls College,where it still is.

† The “birch” was actually a bundle of twenty to twenty-four birch or elder twigs about twenty-eight to forty-eight inches in length, tied together at one end, the first six inches wrapped tightly with a strip of leather to form a handle, and was then in use as regulation punishment in British prisons. it was a big step up in severity from a schoolmaster’s cane, but several steps down from a cat-o’-nine-tails.

* The author owned a motorcycle from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty-six, including the two years he spent in the rAF. it was, in fact, reading about Lawrence as a boy (and hearing about him from the author’s uncle Sir Alexander Korda and from h. Montgomery hyde) that made him decide to buy a motorcycle and join the RAF.

* About $1 million in today’s money. A guinea was ₤1 and one shilling. Until the advent of decimal currency it was considered rather more respectable to charge in guineas than pounds—fashionable tailors, antique dealers, etc., always priced things in guineas. Thirty guineas was about the equivalent of $155 in the 1920s, or about $2,400 in today’s terms.

* Lawrence was right to fear this. For example, when the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Revolt in the Desert,was published in 1927, Sir Arnold Wilson, former civil commissioner in iraq and Lawrence’s old antagonist, wrote that Lawrence was responsible for “the estrangement of Anglo-French relations in the Middle east … [and] helped induce [Britain] to adopt a policy which brought disaster to the people of Syria.” Wilson also accused Lawrence of condoning homosexuality, of imputing homosexuality falsely to the Bedouin, and of turning the Arab Bureau into “a cult of which Lawrence is the chief priest and Lowell Thomas the press agent.”(Wilson, “Revolt in the Desert,” Journal of the Central Asia Society,14, 1927.)

*This is from the tale about hippocleides,suitor of the princess Agarista. having drunk too much at dinner, hippocleides “disgraced himself by standing on his head and beating time [to the music] in the air with his legs (the Greeks wore short skirts).” (John Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder.) At this unseemly display Agarista’s father, angered, shouted, “You have danced away your wife!” to which hippocleides responded, “I don’t care.” Lawrence himself translated it as “Wyworri?” Note that there is a strong sexual element to the story, since Hippocleides had shocked his prospective father-in-law by exposing his genitals. This subtext may be read into the inscription; and Lawrence, and the better educated of his visitors, must surely have been aware of it. An alternative translation might be “I’ll do what I please, whatever you think of it,” which seems closer to Lawrence’s point of view.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Apotheosis

He is all adrift when it comes to fighting, and had not seen deaths in battle.—T. E. Lawrence, commenting on Homer,in the note to his translation ofthe Odyssey, 1932 Lawrence, like Homer’s Odysseus, was home again. On July 16, 1925, Trenchard signed the order approving Lawrence’s transfer from the army to the RAF for a period of five years of regular service and four years in the reserve. A week later Lawrence was ordered to report to RAF West Drayton for processing. All this was done far from the attention of the press. At West Drayton, he was immediately recognized. “A Flight-Sergeant came along …. ‘Hello, Ross,’ he greeted him, and was immediately corrected by a dynamo-switchboard attendant behind him who said: ‘Garn, that ain’t Ross … he ’s Colonel Lawrence.’ ”

After the usual medical examination, Lawrence was sent on to RAF Uxbridge in charge of a corporal. When he arrived there, on a Friday afternoon, nobody wanted to know anything about him, and nobody was willing to sign for him. He was “dragged in to the Headquarters Adjutant, the last hope. He glared. ‘What are you?’ I very stilly replied ‘Yesterday I was a Pte in the R.T.C.’ He snorted ‘Today?’ ‘I think I’m an A.C. twice in the R.A.F.’ Snort second. ‘Will you be in the Navy tomorrow?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said I. ‘I can’t sign for you. I don’t want you.’ ‘I don’t want anybody to sign for me.’ ‘Damned silly …who the hell are you?’ At this point my feeble patience broke. ‘If your name was Buggins, and I called you Bill …’ Then he yelled with joy, recognizing my names for him … and gave me tea.” (This from a long letter to one of Lawrence’s pals from Bovington, Private E. Palmer, nicknamed “Posh.”)

That night Lawrence was fully “kitted out,” and at long last exchanged the hated army khaki for the beloved RAF blue, carrying back to his hut “two kit bags, a set of equipment,** great coat, bayonet, like a plum tree too heavy with fruit.” Saturday he “squared” the camp tailors to alter his uniforms to the preferred tight fit and knife-edge creases. Sunday he spent “Blancoing” his webbing (it was issued in the same khaki color as the army’s but had to be altered to RAF blue with a product called blanco) and polishing his bayonet. On Monday he took the train for RAF Cranwell, home of the Royal Air Force Cadet College, where candidates for a regular commission were trained. This was the RAF equivalent of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Royal Naval Academy at Dartmouth. It was also a real aerodrome, where the cadets learned to fly. Like all airmen, Lawrence was really happy only with the comforting noise of engines revving up. Trenchard had chosen well. The commandant of the Air College was Air Commodore A. E. (“Biffy”) Borton, who had flown with the RFC in support of Lawrence in the desert, and later commanded the air force in Palestine. It was Biffy Borton who had flown the big Handley-Page bomber that so awed Lawrence’s tribesmen when it landed on a desert airstrip, and he instantly recognized Lawrence and sent for him. Lawrence was not only back in the air force; he was under the command of a man whom he liked and trusted, and who admired him. The gloom of the past two years lifted ever so slightly.