The Dangerous Book of Heroes (28 page)

General Allenby and Prince Faisal met for the first time in Damascus, with Lawrence as interpreter. Following his instructions from London, Allenby informed Faisal that all Syria except Lebanon was to be his, but under “the security of France” and with a French liaison officer. Faisal replied that he would not accept French security or a French liaison officer, nor would he recognize French authority over Syria and Lebanon. The Arabs did not trust the French at all. Faisal wanted complete independence for Arabia, if necessary secured by Britain but by no other country.

Before the fighting was even over, the politicians had moved in; British and French governments had reached an agreement to divide northern Arabia. Lawrence and Faisal had known of the discussions, but neither could believe such an agreement would actually happen. Lawrence refused to work with any French liaison officer. Instead, he asked Allenby for leave in Britain. Two of his brothers had been killed fighting on the western front, and he was very tired. He also realized that the next round would be fought at the peace conference, and he wanted to be there.

He returned to Britain in October 1918, a colonel with a Distinguished Service Order, Companion of the Order of the Bath, and a recommendation by Allenby for a knighthood. At a private investiture at Buckingham Palace, Lawrence politely refused the knighthood from King George V and informed the king: “Your cabinet is an awful set of crooks.” He advised His Majesty that the British government
was about to betray the Arabs and that he, Lawrence, would be supporting Prince Faisal, not His Majesty's government. Now one of the most famous figures of the war, he angered many with his refusal of a knighthood, however honorable his reasons. There was certainly some of Lawrence's peculiar masochism in the refusal, yet he was correct that the future of Arabia was in the hands of bureaucrats who cared little for its people.

At the peace conference in Paris, Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others supported Arab independence. Against French wishes, Prince Faisal was also there representing Sharif Husayn, but they were out-maneuvered by clever politicians. France was given a mandate for Lebanon, and in November 1919 the British army was withdrawn from Syria. The French invaded Syria in the spring of 1920.

It was as if the Arabs had never fought, as if the British army had fought so that France could take over part of the Ottoman Empire. There had been a small French unit fighting under Allenby in the liberation of Arabia, but they were irrelevant to the outcome. The Middle East was immediately destabilized, and violence flared.

Winston Churchill, appointed colonial secretary, called a conference at Cairo in 1921 to sort out the mess. He appointed Lawrence Britain's “Adviser on Arab Affairs” Gertrude Bell and Ronald Storrs were also there. Many problems were solved by the conference, but several remained, particularly that of the French in Syria and the warring tribes of Arabia. The tribes had fought one another even while they fought the Turks during the revolt, and now they continued under different banners of tribe and religion. For Britain, it meant another war in Syria, when French forces joined the Nazis in the Second World War.

 

When the dust had settled, a John Ross applied to join the RAF in 1922 as an aircraftman. He was refused but returned with a letter from the Air Ministry stating who he was and that he should be admitted. The accepting officer was W. E. Johns, author of the Biggles novels, and Ross was T. E. Lawrence. It was typical of that oddly quixotic, romantic man to use a false name. After all, Lawrence itself was an alias chosen by his father. The fiction also protected Lawrence
from the press, who hounded him long after he had left public life. He was accepted into the RAF, the authorities believing that he wanted material for a book.

“Honestly, I couldn't tell you why I joined up,” Lawrence wrote to author and friend Robert Graves. He admitted that he didn't understand many of the decisions he made.

He served in the ranks of the RAF, then the army under the name of Shaw, then the RAF again for almost the rest of his life. While there he completed, published, and revised his great work,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
which Churchill called “one of the greatest books I have ever read.” Of his two other books,
Revolt in the Desert
is a précis of
Seven Pillars,
while
The Mint
is about his life as an RAF recruit. Lawrence continued to live his double existence, serving humbly in the ranks but at the same time moving in the circles of power of his famous friends—Robert Graves, Sir Winston Churchill, King Faisal, George Bernard Shaw, Nancy Astor, Sir Edward Elgar, and others.

His enlistment in the RAF ended in 1935, and Lawrence retired to his Dorsetshire cottage, Clouds Hill. He wrote: “My losing the RAF numbs me so I haven't much feeling to spare for a while. In fact I find myself
wishing all the time that my own curtain would fall. It seems as if I had finished now.” His great friend King Faisal had already “finished,” dead at only fifty.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

On May 13, returning on his 1,000-cc Brough motorbike to Clouds Hill from the Bovington village post office, Lawrence swerved on the brow of a hill to avoid two boys riding bicycles. He clipped the back wheel of one, crashed, and flew over the handlebars. He hit the road headfirst, cracked his skull, and died six days later without regaining consciousness.

T. E. Lawrence is buried in the Moreton Church graveyard in Dorset. Ronald Storrs, Sir Winston Churchill, and many other friends attended his simple funeral. King George V sent a message to Lawrence's only surviving brother, saying, “Your brother's name will live in history.” A memorial service was held at Saint Paul's Cathedral, where there is a small bust of Lawrence, while in the simple church of Saint Martin in Wareham, Dorset, there is a striking stone effigy of Lawrence in the Arab robes of a Hashemite prince.

There are few famous heroes of the First World War, but Lawrence of Arabia was certainly one. Like Richard Burton before him, he was a man in love with exoticism, and mysterious ancient Arabia captured his imagination. British archives released in the 1960s and 1970s confirmed the importance of Lawrence's work in Arabia. If anything, his
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
underplays his contribution to the Arab Revolt. Lawrence was one of the few who saw the future in independent Arab nations. He was an outsider, a romantic dreamer in many ways, yet a man who could see beyond the details to the great sweep of history.

Recommended

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
by T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia
by Michael Asher

Film:
Lawrence of Arabia,
directed by David Lean. There are inaccuracies, but it captures brilliantly the Arab Revolt and the enigma of Lawrence

Clouds Hill Cottage, National Trust, Dorset, U.K.

V
ictorian soldiers such as Charles Napier and Garnet Wolseley risked their lives for their country—and personal glory. Their courage in the face of enemy fire is made greater when you consider the rudimentary state of medicine and surgery at the time.

Battlefield hospitals were brutal in the first half of the nineteenth century. Surgeons did not wash their hands and operated in blood-and pus-stained clothes. If a knife or sponge was dropped, it was merely dipped in bloody water before being used again. Ether, an early anesthetic, wasn't used in surgery until 1842. Opium and chloroform were both known, but neither was in common use. Even London hospitals were places of squalor. They had no lavatories, just chamber pots under the beds. The windows were boarded up, as fresh air was believed to bring illness.

It would not be until the late 1860s that Joseph Lister cut the rate of deaths from postoperative infection by making his surgeons wash their hands. He also used a spray of carbolic acid to kill germs, even though at that time they could not be seen with the rudimentary microscopes.

Antibiotics were also unknown until the twentieth century and not mass-produced until after World War II. Up to that point, fever and infection were treated with cold cloths, sulphur or sulphurous acid, mustard on the skin, and occasionally mustard-and-salt enemas.

As a result, even light wounds could rot and corrupt a limb. Amputation was extremely common, and surgeons competed for speed with a saw, trying to remove and seal the limb before the patient died from blood loss. The patient would then be very fortunate not to get one of the “surgical fevers”—pyemia or gangrene, which killed almost half of those who had lived through surgery.

In short, it was a different, harder world, where even measles and croup killed tens of thousands of children and a wounded soldier needed more than luck to survive. Being wounded meant certain agony, likely infection, and a good chance of dying in a dirty barracks hospital.

 

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820. Her parents were wealthy and their honeymoon in Italy lasted for four years. She was named after her Italian birthplace, an innovation at the time. They returned home to a new and very grand house in Hampshire. Florence and her elder sister, Parthenope, were taught by a governess before their father took it upon himself to teach them Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, history, and philosophy. From the start, Florence found the lessons easier than her sister did.

When she was sixteen, Florence's life changed. She always kept private notes of her thoughts and experiences, and on one of them she wrote: “On February 7th 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service.” Always a woman with an intense inner world, she would later record that she had heard voices at four times in her life.

She could not act on it immediately. Her mother was intent on launching her daughters into London society, but the house needed to be renovated first, so in September 1837 the Nightingales departed for the Continent while the work was done. Florence loved the experience. She danced at balls and visited romantic Italian cities. When the family returned to England in 1839, her mother arranged to have the girls presented to Queen Victoria, who was just a year older than Florence. Florence's mother was pleased that her intelligent daughter had become such a beautiful and demure young lady. Clearly marriage would soon follow, and Florence could live properly and have daughters of her own.

Instead, Nightingale threw herself into the study of mathematics. Her mother was appalled, of course. Young men were not likely to pursue a “mathematical girl.”

In the 1840s there was great poverty in England, in both the slums
of the major cities and the countryside, where a single bad crop could mean starvation. The Nightingales spent their summers in a second home in Derbyshire, and there she met some of the poorest laborers. In a first sign of what would become her life's work, she went out of her way to take them food and clothes, even medicine when she could get it. There was no system of benefits for the poor at that time. If a working man fell ill or was injured, his family went hungry until he recovered or died.

Nightingale also nursed an orphaned baby and her own grandmother. She had found her purpose, her vocation, at last, and she refused an offer of marriage to pursue it. She wanted proper training in a London hospital, but that was unheard of for a young woman of her social class.

In 1845, Dr. Fowler of Salisbury Infirmary visited her parents. Taking the opportunity, Nightingale asked him to train her as a nurse. It was the first her parents had heard of her ambition, and they were outraged. In embarrassment at the storm his visit had brought, the doctor left without agreeing to her request.

Nightingale was an unmarried daughter with no rights over her own life. Her mother forced her to continue with social engagements, and her less intelligent sister never lost a chance to show her jealous resentment. Nightingale did her best to study on her own, visiting foreign hospitals when she traveled and reading anything medical that she could find. She made a point of stopping at the Kaiserswerth hospital in Germany on one trip and found the nurses there similar to nuns in their outlook and vocation, even their dress.

Nightingale was thirty-two before her career finally began. A wealthy friend of hers, Elizabeth Herbert, put her name forward for a position running a new nursing home opening in London—the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness. As Nightingale wrote in her private letters, it was the second time she heard a voice instructing her. She accepted the position despite the dismay of her family.

From the start, Nightingale introduced changes that were remarkable for the day. She insisted on clean rooms and sheets and that her
patients be warm and well fed. She even put flowers in the nursing home. At the same time she collected statistical information, always looking for ways to improve the care of patients.

She was fearless in the face of both authority and disease, even to the point of taking over a ward in a London hospital during a cholera epidemic. In just a year she made her nursing home unique for its gentle care.

In 1854, Nightingale's life changed again. In March the Crimean War broke out between Britain and Russia. Conditions on the Crimean Peninsula were appalling, and disease and exposure were taking as many lives as the actual fighting. Cholera was a particular killer, though at that time no one understood how it was spread. After the battle of Alma, wounded men were laid on filthy straw without opium or chloroform or even splints for broken bones.

In the primitive troop hospital at Scutari (now Üsküdar) in Turkey, the main building was filled with a thousand sick or wounded men. When news came of another thousand on their way, the senior medical officer converted an artillery barracks to hold them. Dirty and bare, with no beds, kitchen, or medical supplies, it was little more than a huge hall in which to put the dying. Delirious soldiers lay in their own filth, untended and unable even to get a drink of water in oppressive heat. The stench of rotting flesh, the screaming and misery, can only be imagined.

The Times
brought the situation to the eyes of the public, shaming the minister for war, Sidney Herbert. Good nurses were desperately needed, and he knew Nightingale through his wife and liked her. He wrote her an impassioned letter, offering to pay for her to go to Scutari with a group of nurses. For the third time in her life, Nightingale heard a voice telling her to go.

With the official position of superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English Hospitals in Turkey, Nightingale was instantly famous. No woman had ever held such a post before, and her mother and sister were finally able to put aside their grievances and be proud of her. Nightingale scoured London for the best nurses to take to Turkey; she preferred solid, doughty old ladies to young ones. She
was later to regret the weight of some of them when a bed collapsed. Twenty-four nuns joined the party and accepted Nightingale's authority, bringing the total to thirty-eight. They all had to be trained to Nightingale's standards.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

In October 1854 the nurses left England for Paris to buy medical supplies. News had spread of their mission, and they were welcomed and well treated by French locals before moving on to the great port of Marseilles. Nightingale oversaw the purchases of everything she thought she might need before they sailed on October 27 to Malta and then Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

By November, after terrible gales, they reached Constantinople. The British ambassador sent Lord Napier to greet Nightingale and he was much taken with the handsome and dedicated woman who was still exhausted from seasickness. However, she could not rest. The battle of Balaklava had been fought, and the hospital was expecting a new rush of casualties at any moment.

The first sight of the hospital at Scutari was not impressive. Nightingale was used to dirt in hospitals, but she was not prepared to find
thousands of dying men, most of whom had diarrhea. What drains existed were blocked, and the smell of the hospital reached right out to sea. Nightingale later wrote that it should have had “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” written above its gate. Her most famous work had begun.

One of the reasons for the appalling state of the hospital was the lifeless hand of British bureaucracy. Even a request for a new shirt might be passed along to a dozen different officials, then lost or forgotten. Her foresight in buying her own supplies was rewarded. The doctors in Scutari had no medicine, dressings, or bandages. Amputation was the main treatment of wounds, and the mortality rate for such butcher's work was incredibly high.

Even so, her first reception was not a pleasant experience. Apart from the sounds and smells of the hospital, the doctors were hostile to the idea of a group of women interfering in their work. They gave Florence and her group of thirty-eight nurses just six small rooms, one of which had a body in it. The following morning the doctors made it clear that they would not allow women on the wards. Nightingale said nothing and put her nurses to work preparing and sorting the supplies she had brought.

On November 5 the battle of Inkerman took place and winter came in a sudden cold blast. Thousands more wounded began to arrive at the already overcrowded hospital. The doctors were overwhelmed and asked Nightingale if she would assist. It is a testament to her character that she made nothing of the small victory, just gathered her nurses and made her first tour of the hospital. “I have seen hell,” she said later.

She had funds, both from Sidney Herbert's government purse and a collection organized by
The Times
itself from its readers. She sent to Constantinople for whatever was needed, from operating tables to soap, clothes, food, and bedpans. In the meantime, she set about cleaning the filthy rooms. Two hundred men were hired to unblock the drains. Women were engaged to scrub and scour the floors, while Nightingale set the soldiers' wives to washing clothes and linen. She
believed that a clean hospital was a healthy one, though this was not at all common practice, either in Turkey or England.

As the hospital began to lose its worst grime, Nightingale had the nurses begin their work. At last there were medicines and dressings for the wounded. She also understood the importance of small things that the army would never have considered. She bought a screen to give privacy during operations, then held the hand of soldiers as they tried to bear amputation without anesthetic. She made a rule for her nurses that none of the soldiers should die alone. She worked as hard as anyone, staying up for twenty-four hours at a time to tend the men. She also wrote letters home for dying men who could not write.

Despite everything, the death toll went on rising. As well as a new outbreak of cholera, the men suffered from scurvy, a disease brought on by the soldiers' diet of biscuit and pork, without any vegetables. Even those with minor wounds were dying, and Nightingale became convinced the water supply was to blame. She set her workmen to dig up the pipes, and they discovered the dead body of a horse that had been washed into an inlet. All the water in the hospital had run past that diseased flesh. Years later, it was discovered that the Scutari hospital was built on an ancient cesspit, which meant that human waste seeped into the water supply. Florence Nightingale could never have made it completely safe without burning it down and starting again.

Even so, little by little, Nightingale turned Scutari from hell on earth into a quiet, clean hospital. Each night she would make a last tour of the wards, in a black dress and shawl and carrying a small lamp to guide her steps. It was during his time that she became known as “the Lady with the Lamp.”

Before she slept for a few hours, she wrote to Sidney Herbert in London, telling him everything she had done and all that still needed doing. She urged him to keep a better record of the wounded and dying, believing that statistics would aid future generations in fighting the same diseases. In this too she was ahead of her time.