I walked out of the lobby into yellow sunlight and a swell of traffic, and trudged around the perimeter of the Ezbekiyya Gardens, which stood directly opposite the hotel. They had been closed to the public ever since a girl had been raped there in broad daylight, Khalid had informed me. Through the railings, the gardens looked faded and unkempt, but on 15 December 1914, when T. E. Lawrence took up his quarters in the Grand Continental, they were the showpiece of the city, bursting with exotic shrubs such as Australian beefwood, Madagascan flame and Cuban royal palm. Lawrence found Cairo very much alive. Though war with Turkey had been declared two months earlier, the news had done nothing to diminish the appeal of its winter season, and the frenzied circuit of receptions, masked balls, dinner parties, picnics, gymkhanas, race meetings and tennis parties went on unabated. The high points of the season were the glittering galas orchestrated at the Sultan Hussain Kamil’s Abdin Palace, and at the British Residency at Qasr ad-Dubbara, where Sir Hugh Mc-Mahon had recently succeeded Lord Kitchener as British Agent. There were other gaieties and amusements aplenty for the gentleman with time on his hands. He might play a round of golf or even some polo at the Khedivial Sporting Club on Zamalek island, sip coffee at two piastres a cup at Groppi’s or the Cafй Egyptien, quaff Bass ale at the Savoy Buffet, ogle the prohibited but no less
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Imminent war had lent a certain dash to the figures of British officers residing in elegant hotels such as the Continental and Shepheard’s, and eligible subalterns were much in demand among wintering dйbutantes. After dark, dozens of stiff-backed young men in tailored uniforms and highly polished Sam Browne belts and boots, with forage-caps worn at the regulation angle, would float like peacocks through Ezbekiyya. Second-Lieutenant Lawrence did not appear to belong among these magnificent editions of British manhood. Small, long-haired, dishevelled, he was so far from possessing a military bearing that he rarely looked at anyone directly in the eye. Indeed, he claimed that he would not even recognize his own mother if she arrived unexpectedly, and had perfected the art of talking for twenty minutes without revealing that he had no idea whom he was talking to. Certainly, he did not emulate the sartorial style of his military peers. His trousers were slack and unpressed, his buttons unpolished, his pockets usually undone, his Sam Browne belt, if worn at all, was worn loose and dangling. He often wore the insignia of different ranks on either shoulder-strap, so that it was impossible to tell at any given moment whether he was a humble Second-Lieutenant or an unlikely-looking Lieutenant-Colonel. His cap was worn askew, with his straw-coloured hair protruding from beneath, and was not even graced with a badge – the ultimate snub to military convention, and the visible expression of his conviction that he was a ‘civilian in uniform’. In place of carefully bulled boots he wore patent-leather evening shoes, and a blood red tie instead of a khaki one. His future commanding officer in the Hejaz, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Joyce, would later write of his first encounter with Lawrence that he recalled only ‘the intense desire on my part to tell him to get his hair cut and that his uniform and dirty buttons sadly needed the attention of his batman’. 1His lack of cap-badge led him into difficulties for which he seemed to have a bizarre relish. Once, while attempting to cash a cheque at Messrs Cox and Co. in Cairo, for instance, the manager inquired as to his unit. ‘Haven’t got one,’ Lawrence replied, without elaborating. The manager then had the Army List brought. ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ Lawrence told him, ‘my name is not on it, but I shouldlike to have my cheque cashed.’ Finally, as Lawrence refused to produce any references, the manager regretted that he would have to cable to Britain before he could cash the cheque. 2
Lawrence tended to saunter rather than march, and ignored all salutes given to him as assiduously as he ignored his superior officers, speaking to everyone, whether senior or junior in rank, in the same matter-of-fact, studious, eccentric, pedantic Oxford tones. He gave the impression, carefully cultivated, in fact, of being a misplaced and absent-minded Oxford don who had somehow drifted into military uniform, and actually referred to the Intelligence Department as ‘the faculty’. He made no secret of his disdain for regular army officers, for red-tape military bureaucrats and for public-school hunting-shooting-and-fishing hearties, though he still took a certain snobbish pride in telling his mother that he was working alongside ‘Lord Anglesey, Lord Hartington and Prince Alexander of Battenburg’. 3
His eccentric appearance belied his incisive mind, however, and he vowed to end incompetence. Put in charge of all maps supplied to GHQ, by the Survey of Egypt, he determined to go through map-production like a dose of salts. The topography of many theatres of the war was little known, and place-names were spelled in a wild variety of different ways, many of them bearing little relation to the way they were pronounced by natives. Although Lawrence knew that there was no foolproof system of transliterating Arabic, and would later take great pride in spelling Arabic names ‘anyhow’, he recognized that a consistent scheme must be developed which bore some resemblance to the actual pronunciation. He lost no time in criticizing the Survey’s transliteration system to the Director of the Reproduction Office, W. H. Crosthwaite, who had himself invented it. He similarly affronted W. M. Logan, Director of the Map Compilation Office, who objected strongly to being bossed about by this impudent little upstart. Ernest Dowson, Director of the Survey, recalled, however, that ‘it was not only the pompous, the inefficient and the pretentious whose cooperation Lawrence’s ways tended to alienate. Many men of sense and ability were repelled by the impudence, freakishness and frivolity he trailed so provocatively.’ 4Cairo was very far in spirit from Carchemish, where Lawrence had been one of only two Europeans in a vast area, a sort of unofficial consul, a local employer and a man of great consequence. He was suddenly aware, perhaps, that the game he was playing here was a much bigger one, and with his instinctive feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, he was seeking desperately to establish himself in a position. He stood aloof from the social whirl, and was definitely not one of those to be found decorating the bar-stools in the Continentaclass="underline" he was not teetotal, he said, but merely lacked the sociability to enjoy a cosy drink. He had always felt ill at ease with the Egyptians, but his few forays into the streets now convinced him that they actually hated their British overlords. ‘Cairo is unutterable things,’ he wrote after settling in. ‘I took a day off last month and went and looked at it: no more: – and to think that – this folly apart – one might have been living on that mound in the bend in the Euphrates, in a clean place, with decent people not far off. I wonder if one will ever settle down again and take an interest in proper things.’ 5