Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (81 page)

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.
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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 Mint
was 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.”

Lawrence also attracted the attention of the drill adjutant, Breese, a former regimental sergeant major of the Brigade of Guards, for whom drill was the equivalent of a religion, and who was responsible for the training of all the recruits once they had been separated into squads. Breese lived and breathed drill, and because he was an ex-Guardsman perfection was the only standard he knew. He announced to each new batch of recruits that any of them could come “and see him privately about any worries they had,” and Lawrence unwisely chose to take this literally and avail himself of the privilege. He thus broke two of the most important rules of surviving as a recruit: first, keep out of sight of officers as much as possible; and second, approach an officer only through your own NCO, and with the NCO’s approval. Breese, who had no idea who Ross was, asked him if he had “woman troubles,” the usual reason for an airman’s asking to see the drill adjutant, and was unpleasantly surprised when Ross indignantly denied it, and said “that what he wanted was a room where he could do some writing undisturbed.” On his cot at night, Lawrence had been writing the notes that would become the first part of
The Mint,
and not surprisingly he found it difficult to concentrate in a crowded, noisy hut. Breese, taken aback, replied that with 1,100 recruits in the depot it was impossible to provide each of them with a study, but that he could use the NAAFI writing room whenever he liked, on his time off. Apart from the oddness of the request, something about Lawrence’s manner—a kind of lofty sense of superiority and entitlement, just one step short of insolence, and clearly inappropriate to a mere recruit—may have put Breese on his guard, and made him decide to keep his eye on AC2 Ross.

The result was an unwelcome torrent of kit inspections for Lawrence. Breese claims to have admonished him for being untidy and “consistently dirty,
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for being insubordinate to his hut sergeant, for refusing to obey an order about his kit, and for being consistently late on parade,” although this seems unlikely, given the fact that Lawrence was on “the crack drill squad,” as Jeremy Wilson points out, and also eager to please. When Breese asked Lawrence why he was late for one parade, Lawrence replied “that he had always felt a little tired in the early morning.” If so, this is the kind of clever or smart-alecky remark that might have won him the admiration of his hut mates but was bound to infuriate an officer. Breese put him up on charges several times and finally tried to have him dismissed from the RAF for insubordination, but at that point Breese was sharply warned that Ross would have to stay.

Once, when a senior officer was inspecting the hut and noticed a copy of
Niels Lyhne,
a novel by the Danish novelist J. P. Jacobsen, “in the original” among Lawrence’s possessions, he asked Lawrence why on earth he had joined the air force. Lawrence replied, “I think I had a mental breakdown, Sir.” This reply immediately got him put up on a charge, though it later turned out that the officer was merely interested in the presence among the recruits of a man with such an unusual level of education.
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The cumulative effect of such incidents led to exactly what Air Vice-Marshal Swann had been afraid of. First of all, it was necessary to tell Breese who “Ross” really was and warn him off; then, to Breese’s fury, Swann responded to a plea from Lawrence, spared him the last four weeks at Uxbridge, and packed him off to RAF Farnborough to be trained as a photographer, without having completed his drill course. Even thirty-two years later Breese was still fulminating about what a poor recruit “Lawrence of Arabia” had been, and regretting that, because of the interference of higher authorities, he had not been able to get Lawrence discharged from the service.

The liberal use of profanity in
The Mint,
and the description of Bonham-Carter, made it impossible to publish even decades after Lawrence’s death, and it therefore received altogether unmerited notoriety as a “banned book.” Most readers nowadays will be unlikely to find even the unexpurgated edition particularly shocking.
The Mint
is, in fact, an odd little book. The first two-thirds are about the horrors of recruit training; the last third (which Lawrence added later) is about the joys of serving on an RAF station with aircraft, and “how different, how humane” by comparison life was at the RAF Cadet College, Cranwell, when Lawrence was there three years later as an aircraft-hand. Just as his description of life at RAF Uxbridge seems too “savage” (to use his own word), so his description of life at Cranwell seems too idyllic. The book has long passages of praise to Trenchard, which Lawrence wrote knowing very well that Trenchard would be among the first to read the manuscript. “There are twenty-thousand airmen better than us between [Squad 5] and Trenchard, the pinnacle and our exemplar: but the awe of him surely encompasses us. The driving energy is his, and he drives furiously. We are content, imagining that he knows his road.” This reads uncomfortably, and improbably; unless the RAF has changed a lot since 1923, it seems unlikely that recruits would sit around the stove in their hut until late in the night swapping stories in “laughing admiration” and hero-worship of Trenchard. The hallmark of the British serviceman has always been a mocking and cynical disdain for those at the top, and the passages on Trenchard in
The Mint
merely read as if Lawrence hoped to balance out the scenes at Uxbridge, which Trenchard would certainly hate, by flattering him from time to time.

There is also a passage that still has the power to shock. While Lawrence is on parade at Cranwell to mark the death of Queen Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII, he remembers a visit he once made to her, when he was a famous and decorated war hero. She was not “a Saint, a Paragon,” as the chaplain now describes her, he thinks, but “an unfortunate, a long-suffering doll.” Lawrence recalls her as a “mummified thing, the bird-like head cocked on one side, not artfully but by disease, the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face … her bony fingers, clashing in the tunnel of their rings.” This is one of the few times in the book when he refers to his previous life as the other persona he has left behind, “Colonel Lawrence,” and it is surely the cruelest passage in
The Mint.
Even today, when the attitude toward the British royal family has changed, it seems out of place, like an attack on the wrong person.

Enlistment in the RAF had not been the only thing on Lawrence’s mind in 1922. He was as determined to storm the literary world as he had been to enter the RAF, and he was probably the only person to whom it would have seemed that the two ambitions were not contradictory. He had sent one set of the corrected galley proofs of
Seven
Pillars of Wisdom
run off by the Oxford newspaper printers to Edward Garnett, a gifted editor who had worked closely with Joseph Conrad and championed the work of D. H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford, and John Galsworthy. Garnett was now working as a consultant for the new publishing house of Jonathan Cape. He was a sensitive and gifted reader, with a sure touch for literary quality and a first-class sales instinct (a rare combination); he was good at building careers too, and played an important role in the lives of his authors. Garnett at once wanted to publish the book, but Lawrence shied away, writing to say that Garnett was the first person to read the book—but adding that his friend the artist Eric Kennington was already reading it. He accepted Garnett’s handwritten list of notes, suggestions, and corrections, thus setting in motion an elaborate and long-drawn-out process of mutual seduction, as Garnett attempted to steer him to Cape. Garnett’s praise of the book was enormously welcome to Lawrence, who—as the author of a 300,000-word book on which he had spent four years of his life—thirsted for recognition and praise. He revealed to Garnett that he had already received a sizable offer, sight unseen, from an American publisher for an abridged version of 120,000 words, but had said, “Nothing doing"—although the idea of an abridged, “boy’s own” version of the book in fact intrigued him. Eventually, with much patient nudging and help from Garnett, he would produce such a version: the enormously successful
Revolt in the Desert.
Lawrence, despite his protestations of naïveté, had devised an extraordinarily successful way of dealing with book publishers: allowing them to read his book on the condition that they couldn’t publish it. Similarly, he would later create a tidal wave of publicity for
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
among the public at large by ensuring that it was a book everyone wanted to read, but nobody could buy. Certainly his correspondence with Garnett is remarkably shrewd; he demonstrates a practical knowledge of book publishing economics while at the same time insisting that the book isn’t for sale.