The guards stretched him over a wooden bench, and one of them brought a Circassian whip: ‘a thong of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver) down to a hard point finer than a pencil’. 8The corporal lashed him brutally. Lawrence was shocked by the pain, and though he had resolved to number the blows, lost count after twenty. He writhed and twisted, but the Turks were holding him tightly, kneeling on his legs and grasping his wrists. When the corporal was tired, the others took turns to beat him, and in the intervals between new series, raped him repeatedly. Often, they would pull his head round to see the wounds: ‘a hard white ridge like a railway, darkening slowly to crimson leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke’. 9At last, Lawrence began to scream in Arabic, and when he was completely broken, they ceased, and he found himself lying on his back on the floor. The corporal kicked him with a hobnailed boot to get him up, damaging one of his ribs, but Lawrence grinned at him idly, ‘for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me’. 10The corporal slashed him twice in the testicles with the whip, and when he gained consciousness again, he was being raped by one guard while the others spread his legs. At this point, the Bey called, but when Lawrence was carried to him, sobbing and begging for mercy, the Turk rejected him as being too torn and bloody for his attentions. The guards carried him to a lean-to behind the Government House, where his wounds were washed and bandaged. One of the guards, who spoke with a Druse accent, whispered that the door of the next room was not locked. In the morning, he discovered that the next room was a dispensary, and found a suit of shoddy clothes hanging on the door. He put these on, climbed out of a window, and staggered out into the street, eventually making the rendezvous with Halim at Nisib, from where they rode slowly back to Azraq by horse. The only unexpected occurrence on the return journey was that a party of Wuld ‘Ali raiders, who were not yet converted to the Hashemite cause, allowed them to go unmolested. The consideration of these raiders, given as if he deserved homage, Lawrence wrote, momentarily allowed him to carry the burden which the passing days confirmed: ‘how in [Dara’a] that night the citadel of my integrityhad been irrevocably lost’ 11(italics mine). Lawrence arrived back in Azraq on 22 November, two days after his ordeal, and the following day made an affectionate farewell with Sharif’Ali, kissing and exchanging clothes just as he had done with Dahoum. He then rode for Aqaba, making the town by the 25th, having covered almost 300 miles by camel in only three and a half days.
This is the version of events Lawrence recorded in the final text of Seven Pillars.Certainly, if he had been captured, tortured and allowed to escape, such knowledge should have been reported to Military Intelligence, especially if, as he later maintained, he had been recognized. Yet, like the other mysterious incidents of his career – such as the shooting of Hamed the Moor – this one does not rear its head in any official report. There are no witnesses, no relevant diary entries, and no corroborating accounts whatsoever. Even the soldiers stationed in Dara’a, who were known to be mostly Arabs in Ottoman service, heard no rumour of the event. If Lawrence had not mentioned it himself, then it would have remained completely unknown to history. It was only in 1919, well after the end of the war, when he was already writing Seven Pillars,that the Dara’a drama emerged. In a letter to Frank Stirling, a former colleague from the ‘Hedgehog’ operation, who was by then serving as Chief Political Officer in Cairo, Lawrence used it to discredit the Algerian Emir Mohammad Sa’id by casting aspersions on his brother ‘Abd al-Qadir, whom he claimed had defected to the Turks, ruined the Yarmuk bridge mission, and brought about Lawrence’s capture at Dara’a by describing him to the Bey, whose real name was Hajim rather than the ‘Nahi’ used in Seven Pillars.Hajim, who was an ‘ardent pederast’, had taken a fancy to him, he told Stirling, and when he refused the Bey’s advances he had been ‘put in hospital’ by his guards. He had escaped before dawn, he said, being not as badly hurt as Hajim thought. Lawrence maintained that the Bey had ‘hushed up’ the capture, having made such a muddle of it – and Lawrence had arrived back at Azraq ‘very annoyed’ with ‘Abd al-Qadir, whose treachery, he said, he had learned all about from the Bey and his guards. In the original letter, this last line is interposed as an afterthought in the middle of another sentence, as if it had suddenly occurred to Lawrence that Stirling might wonder how he knew for certain that it was ‘Abd al-Qadir’s description which had led to his being identified. He does not, however, indicate how he knew that Hajim had ‘hushed up’ the incident. Moreover, this account differs from the Seven Pillarsversion, in which Lawrence was clearly not recognized: although some ambiguity is suggested by the sentence, ‘You must understand that I know.’ Lawrence concludes that ‘It was evidently a chance shot’ – thus severing any connection with a description which ‘Abd al-Qadir might or might not have given – and this is confirmed when Lawrence notes that his companion, Halim, who entered Dara’a that night, probably in search of him, knew by the lack of rumour that the truth of Lawrence’s identity had not been discovered. We have only Lawrence’s word for it that it was ‘Abd al-Qadir who ‘shopped’ him to the Turks, and the story of treachery was very much postfactum.On 13 November, he had written Joyce that the Algerian had deserted ‘out of fear’ rather than defected to the Turks, and was then still sitting at Salkhad among the Druses – a friendly force. If this was so, then it is unlikely that ‘Abd al-Qadir could have ruined the Yarmuk raid, which had already taken place. There is no independent evidence that ‘Abd al-Qadir ever joined the Turks – he was anti-French and anti-Christian, certainly, but a fanatic Arab nationalist: the Turks may have wooed him, but Lawrence’s assertion that he actually went over to them is unconfirmed. At the end of the campaign ‘Abd al-Qadir and his brother Mohammad Sa’id had declared a government in the name of the Hashemites, and had tried to murder Lawrence personally in Damascus town hall when he objected. Lawrence had ordered them arrested and intended to have them shot, but Feisal arrived and spared them. ‘Abd al-Qadir himself was killed by Feisal’s guards in November 1917, but his brother, Mohammad Sa’id, a pan-Islamist, continued to cause problems for the Hashemites. Lawrence’s letter to Stirling was written to provide evidence for the arrest of Mohammad Sa’id, which Feisal had demanded: ‘I very much regret that Mohammad Sa’id has been given so much rope,’ Lawrence wrote; ‘Feisal has asked several times for his internment. He is the only real pan-Islamist in Damascus, and in his insanity is capable of any crime against us.’ 12Lawrence’s first revelation of his torture at Dara’a thus has a clear political motive.