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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 50 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

The result was a masterpiece. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director; it made (and continues to make) a fortune; and it appears constantly on lists drawn up by various bodies of the best movies of all time, and as number one on lists of the best epic pictures of all time. The director Steven Spielberg called it “a miracle,” and so it is.

It is not,however, either the full story of Lawrence’s life or a completely accurate account of the two years he spent fighting with the Arabs. Arnold Lawrence remarked, “I should not have recognized my own brother,” when he saw the picture, and most people who had known Lawrence were horrified by it, even Lowell Thomas, which in his case was a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence scholars feel even more strongly about it, and there exists a Web site on which each key scene of the film is compared with the reality of what happened. Still, even if this is a worthy endeavor, it misses the point. What Spiegel and Lean set out to do, after all, was to produce entertainment,as well as a film that would make money worldwide for Columbia—hence Spiegel’s original choice of Brando for the role of Lawrence. As with George C. Scott’s portrayal of General George Patton, the object was to produce, not a faithful docudrama that would educate the audience, but a hit picture. O’Toole, like Charles Laughton as Henry VIII or Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, was an actor playing a role, not any more like the real Lawrence than Shakespeare’s Henry V necessarily resembles the historical soldier-king. Lawrence of Arabiacan be enjoyed for itself—criticizing it for its inaccuracy is like arguing that Gone with the Winddoes not provide the depth of information and historical objectivity of Ken Burns’s television documentary on the Civil War: each has its merits, but the one is not a substitute for the other.

Other portrayals of Lawrence on the stage or screen have not added much. The respected British playwright Terence Rattigan wrote Ross,for which John Mills was cast in the title role, but it tended to explore Lawrence’s alleged homosexuality, to such a degree that Sam Spiegel attempted to have it suppressed. (Knowing Spiegel, though, one could guess that he was probably trying to appease Columbia Pictures and get publicity for his own film, rather than expressing outrage.) A made-for-television film about Lawrence at the Paris Peace Conference starred Ralph Fiennes, but was a rather wooden docudrama about how the Arabs were treated by the Allies—just the kind of issue Spiegel and Lean were determined to avoid—though it has to be said that Fiennes at least lookedmore like Lawrence than Peter O’Toole did.

Perhaps the one thing that Richard Aldington’s book and David Lean’s film have in common is that they have raised the level of scholarship on the subject of Lawrence, as Lawrence’s admirers pored over his letters and manuscripts in search of ways to refute Aldington’s unflattering portrait and Peter O’Toole’s heroic portrayal. The release of British government documents in the 1960s and 1970s has, in the skillful and determined hands of Jeremy Wilson, the authorized biographer of Lawrence and certainly the leading scholar of the subject, provided a much clearer view of just how great Lawrence’s accomplishments were in the war, and how meticulous he was in describing all of it. The publication by Jeremy Wilson of four expertly edited volumes of Lawrence’s correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw has also dramatically enriched our knowledge of what Lawrence was thinking and doing from 1922 to 1935, and also arouses, in any objective reader, considerable sympathy for him. Lawrence’s account to Charlotte of what happened to him at Deraa, for example, makes it hard to accept the view that he invented the episode.

There are probably more people who know ofLawrence today than ever. At least two major biographies have appeared: one by Jeremy Wilson (1989), which is authoritative and formidably documented; and a psychological study by John E. Mack, MD* (1976), who was a professor at Harvard Medical School and a psychoanalyst. But people seldom know all that much aboutLawrence, and many still see him, in their mind’s eye, as Peter O’Toole, much the way people still think of Captain Bligh as Charles Laughton. Mack’s book, whatever its merits, demonstrates the dangers of psychoanalyzing the dead, who after all cannot speak for themselves, and also the fact that Lawrence has, since his death, been taken over by numerous groups and turned into a gay hero, an anti-imperialist hero, or, even more improbably, a hero who betrayed the Arabs and encouraged increased Jewish immigration in Palestine. The fact is that Lawrence defies simplification and refuses to be pigeonholed, in death as he did in life. It is his complexity—his curious mixture of shyness and vainglory, of heroism on the grand scale and self-doubt about his own feats, of political sophistication and occasional naпvetй—that makes him special. He was a hero, a scholar, a diplomat, a brilliant writer, endowed with enormous courage and capable of reckless self-sacrifice, and behind the facade that Lowell Thomas and the newspapers built up around him, also the kindest, gentlest, and most loyal of friends, and that rare Englishman with no class prejudices of any kind, as at ease in a barracks as he was in Buckingham Palace, in the desert, or at Versailles.

The difficulty with books about Lawrence is that most of them start with a definite thesis or fixed idea, or are aimed, whether consciously or unconsciously, either at correcting the wilder misstatements in Lowell Thomas’s book (in the case of the earlier biographies like those of Graves and Liddell Hart), or at expunging the misleading portraits of Lawrence produced by David Lean and Aldington. The result is that while every fact, however minor, has now been examined, and psychoanalytical explanations have been provided for every facet of his character, the real Lawrence—and those qualities which made him a hero, a military genius, a gifted diplomat, the friend of so many people, and the author of one of the best and most ambitious great books ever written about war—has tended to disappear under the weighty accumulation of facts and the biographical disputes. Clearly, Lawrence had, throughout his life, an amazing capacity to inspire devotion, passionate friendship, fierce loyalty, and intense admiration, even from those who saw his faults as clearly as he himself did; and this is the Lawrence that needs to be re-created if we are to understand him and his remarkable hold on the imagination of people even three-quarters of a century after his death.

Then too, history has brought Lawrence back into the minds of those who are concerned with events in the Middle East. Not only did Lawrence introduce the Arabs to a new kind of warfare; his determination to “give them,” as he saw it, an Arab state and his definition (and vision) of what that state should be are still at the center of every diplomatic dispute, war, insurrection, and political revolution throughout this vast area. Lawrence cannot be held responsible for the mess in the Middle East, any more than he was solely responsible for the Arab Revolt, which had already broken out before he arrived in Jidda, but everybody from Allenby down seems to agree that the revolt would never have succeeded to the extent it did without his vision and energy, and certainly he did his best throughout 1917-1918 and from 1919 to 1922 to give the Arabs the state they wanted. This, after all (despite lengthy Freudian explanations for his behavior), rather than his illegitimacy or the incident at Deraa,was the great moral crisis of his lifetime, which drove him to give up his name, his rank, and his decorations and join the RAF as a recruit under an assumed name.

Lawrence was at least partly responsible for the creation of present-day Iraq (with all its ethnic and religious contradictions) and Jordan, and he played a substantial role in the creation of Palestine as a separate entity. The British and French division of the immense Turkish empire that extended north and south from Syria to Yemen and east and west from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf—an area from which Lawrence had played a major, and admittedly flamboyant, role in driving out the Turks—was the primary guilt that Lawrence bore, and that explains much of his life from 1922 to his death in 1935.

He was partly instrumental in the creation of not one but threeMiddle Eastern kingdoms. Only one of these, Jordan, survives today in its original form; but much of the map of the Middle East was drawn by Lawrence, quite literally, as we have seen; and if he could not give the Arabs what they most wanted—a “greater Syria"—he at any rate helped to give them the states that now exist there, and, for better or worse, the dream of a larger, united Arab nation, which for a brief time led to the union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic, and which is still the motivating force behind much of the unrest and violence of Arab nationalism. Lawrence himself foresaw only too clearly what the price would be if the Allies failed to give the Arabs what they wanted—and had been promised—and the long-term consequences of letting the French take Lebanon and Syria as mandates—in effect, colonies—and letting the British take Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. He did his best to persuade a reluctant Feisal to accept the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, but he understood that this acceptance was dependent on the Arabs’ getting a meaningful state, and was unlikely to be achieved in the long run if the Middle East was carved up into small and mutually hostile units, under French or British colonial administration.

As it turned out, the brutal carving up of the Turkish empire was complicated by the fact that the great oil reserves were in the most backward areas, on the eastern fringe of the Middle East. These would have the effect of transforming remote desert “kingdoms” and “principalities” into oil-rich powers, while leaving the more highly developed, better educated, and more populous parts of the area—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon—impoverished. British and French policy (as strongly as each differed from the other) ensured that there would be no unitary Arab state as a major power in which oil revenues might be used to improve the lives of ordinary Arabs, and thwarted just those ambitions which Lawrence had been at such pains to arouse, and which led Lowell Thomas, with his usual touch of hyperbole, to describe Lawrence as “the George Washington of a United States of Arabia.” Alas, after the Peace Conference, and the creation of Jordan and Iraq, Lawrence—knowing that he had done his best for the Arabs and that it was not good enough, and broken by shame and guilt at his own failure—resigned from public life and signed up as an airman, and the United States of Arabia was never born, with consequences that we are still facing today.

There is, therefore, every reason to examine objectively and clearly what Lawrence attempted to do, and to treat him not as an interesting neurotic with profound oedipal problems (though this may be true), but as both a visionary and a warrior; as a man who not only wrote an epic but lived one; and as a politician and diplomat, indeed a maker of nations, whose failure to get the Arabs what they had been promised had profound consequences for the world today, consequences that have not been played out yet, and whose outcome nobody can predict.

Few people have risen so high so quickly, or have voluntarily given up not only honors but power, and done so without regret or bitterness. Fewer still have been so famous and tried so hard to live obscurely. Lawrence found in the end peace of a kind in friendships, in literature, and in an unexpected gift for marine craftsmanship and engineering which has seldom been fully acknowledged, but to which many airmen in World War II would owe their lives.

However many books there have been about Lawrence, his is still a story worth telling, a life that needs to be described without prejudice and without a fixed agenda: a military “triumph,” as he himself called it with a combination of pride, bitterness, and irony; an extraordinary and heroic epic; and a political failure whose importance we can only begin to reckon today as we pick among the ruins of Lawrence’s hopes for the Middle East in search of a way forward.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence himself described his own genius best.

All men dream: but not equally.Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of theirMinds wake in the day to find that it wasvanity; but the dreamers of the day aredangerous men, for they may act their dreamwith open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. * Perhaps the most popular film the author’s Uncle Alex and his father ever made was That Hamilton Woman,starring Laurence olivier as Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady hamilton. Winston Churchill screened it innumerable times (it never failed to move him to tears), and took a print to Moscow as a gift to Stalin. As a result it was the only British film seen during World War ii by Soviet audiences, and extended Nelson’s heroic reputation to russia.

* Leslie howard, whose original name was Leslie howard Steiner, was the son of an english-Jewish mother, Lillian Blumberg, and a hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner.

* Although Mack’s book on Lawrence is in many respects fascinating—he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for it in 1977—it suffered retroactively from his subsequent notoriety as a believer in and proselytizer for the personal stories of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have returned to tell the tale.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE“Who Is This Extraordinary Pip-Squeak?”

5 “a most excellent dinner”:Lawrence, Letters, Garnett (ed.), 206.

6 “an odd gnome”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,174.

6 “Who is this extraordinary pip-squeak?”: Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 127.

8 “Into friendship with T. E. Lawrence”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

8 “The first of us was Ronald Storrs”:Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 37.Hereafter abbreviated SP.

9 “revolverpractice on deck”:Storrs, Orientations,200.

9 “quite intolerable to the Staff”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

9 “But when at last we anchored”:Ibid., 47.

10 “Till now we have defended”:Brown and Cave, Touch of Genius, 55.

11 “Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

11 “a holiday and a joy-ride”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

12 “like water, or permeating oil”:Ibid., 37.

13 “incoherent and spasmodic”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

13 “None of us realized”:Ibid.

14 “a yellow silk kuffiya”:Ibid., 201.

15 “When Abdallah quoted”:Ibid., 221.

15 “was short, strong”:Lawrence, SP, 48, 49.

17 “Meeting today: Wilson”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

18 “took a great fancy”:Lawrence, SP, 59. 18 “force of character”: Ibid.

18 “prophet”:Ibid., 60.

18 ” staggered”:Ibid., 59.

18 “waving grateful hands”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

22 Zeid, still a “beardless” young man: Lawrence, SP, 60.

25 “shelters of branches and palm leaves”:Ibid., 64.

26 “two inches thick”:Ibid., 68.

28 “dinner to the examiners to celebrate it”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 67.

28 “astonishingly wide”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 75.

28 “schoolboy stuff”:Ibid., 128.

30 “a garrulous old man”:Lawrence, SP, 70.

30 “had been beaten out of Kheif”:Ibid.

32 “standing framed between the posts”:Ibid., 75.

32 “almost regal in appearance”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 312.

33 “Ifelt at the glance”:Lawrence, SP, 75-76. 33 “which were twisting slowly”: Ibid., 76.

33 “And do you like our place”:Ibid.

33 “like a sword into their midst”:Ibid.

36 “a desperate measure”:Ibid., 77.

37 “if their villages were spared”:Ibid., 78.

38 “They hunger… for desolate lands”:Ibid.

39 “view with favour the establishment”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 117.

42 “huge crags”:Lawrence, SP, 95.

42 “glassy sand mixed”:Ibid., 96.

43 “a salt wind”:Ibid.

43 “picturesque, rambling house”:Ibid., 97.

43 “travel-stained”:Ibid.

45 “cool and comfortable”:Ibid., 99.

45 spent his time reading Malory’sMorte d’Arthur: Ibid.

48 hope “to biff the French:”Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

49 was much against my grain”:Lawrence, SP, 103.

chapter twoAqaba, 1917: The Making of a Hero

51 “sacrament”:Lawrence, SP, 104.

53 “that invariable magnet of Arab good will”:Ibid., 112.

54 “to slip in and out”:Ibid., 114.

55 “Part of our booty”: Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,Vols. 10-12, 9 (2000).

56 “Twenty-Seven Articles”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 670.

56 “a magnificent bay camel”:Lawrence, SP, 117.

56 “as a mass they are notformidable”:Lawrence, Letters,Garnett (ed.), 217.

57 “Guerrilla warfare is what the regular armies”:Callwell, Small Wars, 105.

57 “old rubbish”:Lawrence, SP, 118.

58 “quiet, but in no other way mortified”:Ibid., 117.

58 “While all goes well”:Callwell, Small Wars, 66.

59 “and stamp out Feisal’s army”:Lawrence, SP, 121.

60 “the military art was one”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 370.

62 “It looked like a river of camels”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 349.

66 “Our men were not materials”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 211.

68 “a tall, strong figure”:Lawrence, SP, 229.

72 “feeling that this need not”:Ibid., 184.

72 “and gave him a few moments’ delay”:Ibid., 185.

73 “with the reckless equality”:Ibid., 188.

74 “suffering a bodily weakness”:Ibid., 191.

74 “woke out of a hot sleep”:Ibid., 192.

78 “The cold was intense”:Ibid., 212.

80 “I was about to take my leave”:Ibid., 229.

82 “venture… in the true Elizabethan tradition”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 143.

82 “to capture a trench”:Ibid.

83 “The weight is bearing me down now”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 406.

86 “surly… stranger from Maan”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 146.

90 “Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 410.

90 “Hideously green, unbearable”:Ibid.

91 “he was very old, livid”:Ibid., 413.

92 “quarrelling”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 154.

95 “A man who gives himself”:Lawrence, SP, 11

98 “Our hot bread”:Ibid., 323.

99 “By God indeed”:Ibid., 325.

100 “Work, work, where are words?”:Ibid., 328.

100 “when it became clear”:Ibid., 330.

101 “The dead men”:Ibid., 331.

109 He walked past the sleeping sentry: Ibid., 347.

110 “Allenby was physically large”:Ibid., 348.

110 “He [Lawrence] thinks himself”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 34.

110 “offering to hobble the enemy”:Lawrence, SP, 348.

112 “a bumptious young ass”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

112 Wingate praised Lawrence: Ibid., 424.

113 “Tell Mother”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 340.

chapter three“The Family Romance”

115 “To my sons”:Item MS English C6741, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, Thomas E. Lawrence Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Orlans, Harold, “Ways of Transgressors,” Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society,Vol. 6, 120-33.

120 Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman:See Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder,5-8; and Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,30-31, 941-944.

121 “the Vinegar Queen”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 4.

122 Sarah Lawrence:Ibid., 8-11; and Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,31-32, 942-943.

123 Sometime in 1885:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,943.

123 “so gay and pretty”:Journal of T. E. Lawrence Society,Vols. 10-12, 29.

123 “was the sort of woman”:Asher, Lawrence, 7.

124 “T. E. got his firm chin”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 33.

124 “No trust ever existed”:Ibid., 32.

128 “a real love match”:Ibid., 13.

129 “overpowering and terrifying”:Ibid., 8.

135 As in most English families: Ibid., 19.

135 “quiet authority”:Ibid., 13.

138 “he knew no fear”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 25.

Lawrence claimed to have overheard:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 27.

“a playground scuffle”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 27.

141 “was placed in the First Class”:Ibid.

141 Oxford was a good place: Ibid., 28.

144 His father—whose closest friend: Ibid., 30.

147 “a house telephone”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

152 “When… I suddenly went to Oxford”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 41.

chapter fourOxford, 1907-1910

155 “as if he descended”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 62.

157 “Quite frankly, for me”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 29.

158 At the time he met Richards:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 60.

159 His youngest brother, Arnold:Ibid., 67.

159 “I’m not a boy”:Ibid., 20.

159 “We could never be bothered”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 36.

160 “He is illuminated from inside”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 14.

160 She saw him as a beloved:Ibid., 64.

161 “worshipped Janet from afar”:Ibid., 66.

162 His mother vigorously denied:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 46.

162 One friend told of Lawrence’s:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

162 Lawrence’s nearly drowning:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 48.

162 A famous feat of Lawrence’s:Ibid., 49.

163 It was also clear to Lawrence:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 44.

166 In Doughty’s opinion:Ibid., 54.

167 “a lightweight suit”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 69.

167 “a revolver”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 62.

171 “From Dan we passed”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 97.

172 “quite cool”:Ibid., 89.

172 “Nothing in life is more exhilarating”:Churchill, Story of the Malakind Field Force, 172.

173 “a person with nothing”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 107.

174 “Sir John does not like”: Ibid., 109.

174 “village elders”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 74.

174 The robbery has caused:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 76.

175 he apologized for the bloodstain:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 74.

176 “a cry (if not from the housetops)”:Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 14.

176 “thinned to the bone”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 75.

177 “in no way diminished”:Ibid.

177 Lawrence did not seem:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 68.

177 “took a most brilliant First Class”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 68.

177 busy readingPetit Jehan: Lawrence, Home Letters,10.

178 “a research fellowship”:Wilson, Lawrence, 69.

178 “The two occupations fit into one another”:Ibid.

178 “The dangerous crises”:Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 8.

chapter fiveCarchemish: 1911-1914

181 “a man of action”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 20.

181 It comes as no surprise:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 102.

182 When Lawrence went up to Jesus College:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 21.

182 “a cynical and highly-educated baboon”:Ibid., 20.

182 “a boy of extraordinary”:Ibid., 30.

183 “the only man I had never”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 369.

184 “a dreary and desolate waste”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 71.

186 Lawrence sailed for Beirut:Ibid., 76.

187 “They were always talking”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 122.

187 “the spiritual side of his character”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 77-78.

188 “Lawrence seems to me”:Ibid., 78.

189 “sit down to it”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 130.

189 “archeological overseer”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 78.

190 “was flagrantly and evidently an exotic”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 137.

190 “Turkish & Greek”:Ibid.

190 “the Lejah, the lava no-man’s-land”:Ibid.

193 “admitted to six or seven murders”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

193 “set her before him”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 154.

194 Bell was disappointed:Wallach, Desert Queen, 93.

195 “stained [purple] with Tyrian die”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 51.

195 “Can you make room”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 85.

196 “beautifully built and remarkably handsome”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 97.

197 “an interesting character”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 173.

198 “I am very well”:Ibid., 176.

198 “efforts to educate himself”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 95.

199 Apparently impressed by Hogarth’s letters:Ibid., 92.

200 “I am not enthusiastic about Flecker”:Sherwood, No Golden Journey, 47.

202 “Great rumors of war”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 182.

203 Lawrence turned up for digging:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 84-85.

203 “was not an Oxonian”:Ibid., 85.

205 “such as Bedouin sheiks wear”:Ibid., 192.

205 He seems to have been reading:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 101.

208 “essential immaturity”:Ibid., 85.

208 “frail, pallid, silent”:Ibid., 81.

208 “when the police tried”:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 43.

209 “explicit promise”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 103.

210 Lawrence was using Dahoum:Ibid., 104.

211 Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum:Arnold Lawrence (ed.), T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, 89.

214 Lawrence notes in a letter home:Lawrence, Home Letters, 210.

215 “for the foreigner [this country]”:Ibid., 218.

216 He wrote to England for medical advice:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 107.

216 “a big garden”:Sherwood, No Golden Journey, 153.

216 “carelessly flung beneath a tree”:Ibid., 146.

217 “I feel very little the lack”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 230.

217 He wrote to his youngest brother, Arnold:Ibid., 226.

219 “Flecker, the admiral at Malta”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 85.

219 “gun-running” incident:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 118.

220 Although skeptics about Lawrence:Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 36.

221 “Buswari and his great enemy”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 254.

222 “running around with guns”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 946.

224 “a place where one eats lotos”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 161.

225 “couldn’t shoot the railway bridge”:Ibid., 255.

225 “a pleasant, healthy warmth”:Ibid.

226 Already there had been protests:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 123-124.

227 “a pocket Hercules”:Lawrence to Edward Marsh, June 10, 1927. Lawrence, Letters,Garnett (ed.), 521.

228 By the end of August:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 126.

228 “the most beautiful town”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 441.

230 “You must not think of Ned”:Ibid., 447.

230 “was still in Ireland”:Ibid., 256.

231 “olive tree boles”:Ibid., 274.

232 “I cannot print with you”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 132.

232 “from west to east”:Ibid., 137.

234 “approach Kenyon”:Ibid.

234 “Hogarth concurs in the idea”:Ibid., 138.

235 “a picturesque little crusading town”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 281.

238 Newcombe was not dismayed:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 141.

238 “back to Mount Hor”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 286.

240 On March 21, Woolley and Lawrence:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 143-145.

240 A Circassian working for the Germans:Ibid., 144.

241 “the only piece of spying”:Ibid., 147.

241 More interesting still was the amount of information:Ibid.

chapter sixCairo: 1914-1916

248 “In Constantinople the seizure”:Randolph Churchill and Gilbert, Winston Churchill, 1914-1916,Vol. 3, 192.

248 “As the shadows of the night”:Churchill, The World Crisis,Vol. 1, 227.

250 COMMENCE HOSTILITIES: Geoffrey Miller, “Turkey Enters the War and British Actions.” December 1999, http://www.gwpda.org/naval/turk mill.htm.

251 “He’s running my entire department”:Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, 63.

251 “I want to talk to an officer”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 124.

252 “as an officer ideally suited”:Ibid., 126.

253 “Clayton stability”:Storrs, Orientations, 179.

254 “a youngster, 2nd Lt. Lawrence”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 154.

254 “Keep your eye on Afghanistan”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 300.

255 “in the office from morning”:Ibid., 301.

257 “bottle-washer and office boy”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 167.

257 He was well aware of events:Ibid., 169.

258 “pieced together”:Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 131.

259 Abdulla’s concern was that the Turkish government:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 164-165.

259 One son, Emir Feisal:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 72.

260 “It may be”:Wilson, Lawrence, 165.

264 “The assault I regret to say”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 721.

264 “You will never understand”:Ibid., 304.

265 “If I do die”:Ibid., 718.

267 “To the excellent and well-born”:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 167.

271 “a twenty-minute Parliamentary debate”:Storrs, Orientations, 229.

272 “a devout Roman Catholic”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 193.

273 “There is nothing so bad or so good”:Shaw, Man of Destiny, 87.

274 “every aspect of the Arab question”:Wilson, Lawrence, 235.

274 “bravura”:Ibid., 235.

275 Picot was a master of detail:Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 190.

279 It was hoped that a French zone:Ibid., 192.

280 “the imaginative advocate”:Lawrence, SP, 38.

281 “I’ve decided to go off alone”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 410.

282 “I have not written to you for ever”:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 110.

283 “I’m fed up, and fed up”:Ibid., 109.

283 The Arab Bulletin was a secret news sheet:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 242.

283 The only one of them:Lawrence, Letters from T. E. Lawrence to E. T. Leeds, 109.

283 “to put the Grand Duke Nicholas in touch with”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 242.

285 The British Force in Egypt and the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force:Ibid., 252.

286 “to biff the French out of Syria”:Knightley and Simpson, Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, 81.

288 “go free on parole”:Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 149.

289 Lawrence arrived to undergo a difficult interview:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 268-269.

289 Although Khalil was “extremely nice”:Ibid., 272.

290 “about 32 or 33, very keen & energetic”:Lawrence, Home Letters, 326.

291 “a German field mission led by Baron Othmar von Stotzingen”:Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 191.

292 “pronging playfully at strangers”:Storrs, Orientations, 188.

293 “Long before we met”:Ibid., 221.

chapter seven1917: “The Uncrowned King of Arabia”

297 if Clayton “thought”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 419.

297 “he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present”:Wavell, Palestine Campaigns, 96.

299 “an obstinate, narrow-minded”:Lawrence, SP, 351.

299 “gracious and venerable patriarch”:Storrs, Orientations, 213.

300 “as usual without obvious coherence”:Lawrence, SP, 352.

300 “half-naked”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 1079.

300 “in the third little turning to the left”:Ibid., 432.

302 “no spirit of treachery abroad”:Lawrence, SP, 353-355.

302 “Many men of sense and ability”:Arnold Lawrence (ed.), T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, 115.