I travelled to Dara’a from Amman in a nondescript saloon with two Syrians and my friend Stephen White. Dara’a station, we discovered, was still standing, a large two-storey building of grey flint, jutting out like an iceberg from a market-place aboil with crowds. The whole railway yard, indeed, was a relic from the First World War. A rusting locomotive stood, disintegrating almost visibly, on a track by the engine-shed. I climbed up to the cab and found an engraved plate which read: A. Borsig. Berlin-Tegel 1914.This was evidently one of the German engines shipped by sea from Europe at the beginning of the war. There were other engines, of different patterns, in a similar state of trauma, sidings full of rolling stock of the same vintage – box-wagons, water-tanks, guards’ vans – even beautifully built passenger-wagons which were obviously now used as toilets. We introduced ourselves to the station-master, who was assiduously playing cards with a group of employees. He knew of Lawrence of Arabia, he said, but he had no idea where it was that Lawrence was supposed to have been tortured, or even if the story was true. The railway here still functioned, he told us – there were two trains a week between Damascus and Amman.
We had Seven Pillarswith us, and tried to reconstruct Lawrence’s movements in Dara’a on 20 November 1917 – eighty years before. In 1917 the serailor Government House had stood south of the railway line, in the centre of Dara’a town, where Lawrence was arrested. At first sight it would seem logical that this was where his ordeal took place. Although he does not say so specifically, Lawrence does mention that after the beating he was taken to a lean-to building behindthe Government House to have his wounds washed and dressed. He also says, though, that he was marched acrossthe railway to reach the Bey’s house, which must mean that it lay on the northern side of the railway, and thus could not have been the official serail.We crossed the tracks by the engine-shop, evidently a popular crossing-point for local people, and counted six lines, precisely as Lawrence had described. We turned left at a convenient hole in the fence, down a street of weary-looking palms, then right and into a square, where there stood a two-storey stone building. The building, which was large and detached, looked as if it belonged to the right era, and I noticed that some of the ground floor area was occupied by houses or shops with private doors. This would be consistent with Lawrence’s description in the Oxford version, which mentions that the Bey’s house comprised two storeys with a shop beneath. Had we discovered the place in which Lawrence had suffered the most devastating experience of his life? The details seemed remarkably accurate, even after eighty years. Yet it is perfectly possible that Lawrence picked up the geographical layout of the town not in November 1917, but in September 1918 when he stayed there for two days after it had fallen to British and Arab forces. An examination of his actual description raises some disturbing questions.
First, in the 1935 version, Lawrence writes that he entered Dara’a with a man called Faris who had been specially engaged for the Hauran reconnaissance. Yet in the Oxford text he gives his companion’s name as Mijbil – a Biashr, whom he had recruited months earlier. Why was it necessary for him to change the man’s name and conceal this fact, and why, for that matter, does he change the name of the Bey from Hajim to Nahi? Lawrence gives various reasons for changing names in Seven Pillars,but the most convincing is the one he gave Hubert Young, whose name he changes at one point in the text to ‘Sabin’. When Young objected that ‘it may perhaps be said that you put me under a false name … because you knew you were telling lies about me’, Lawrence answered, ‘But that iswhy I have put you under a false name.’ 13Secondly, many details of the flogging are not credible. The whip could not conceivably have had a point finer than that of a pencil. If Lawrence was not recognized, how could the soldier who arrested him possibly know that the Bey wanted him? What was the content of ‘the long report’ the soldier gave to his superior in Turkish, about a man he had merely picked up on the street whose name and origin he did not yet know? Lawrence might possibly have been mistaken for a Circassian from a distance when dressed in local costume, but how likely is it that he would consistently be taken for one when stripped naked?
These quibbles may be pedantic, and they do not prove that Lawrence invented the Dara a incident, but put together they suggest, at least, a certain current of dishonesty in his account.
In the British Museum’s Manuscripts Department, I turned to the pocket diaries which had shed some light on the Sinai trip, hoping that they would solve the enigma of Dara’a. Searching for the entry of 20 November, I discovered to my surprise that the page had been torn out. This was remarkable, for it was the only missing page in either of the two diaries for 1917 and 1918. At the bottom of the previous page, for 14 November, Lawrence’s entry read ‘Kasr [Azraq]’ and then, added in another pencil, ‘To the Hauran’. This suggested that he had been in Azraq on the night of the 14th and had left for the Hauran subsequently – it was impossible to say when, because of the missing page. I noticed that the pages had been numbered in Lawrence’s handwriting, but this must have been afterthe removal of this page, since the numbers ran on as if no page was missing. This and the addition of ‘To the Hauran’ at the base of the previous page suggested strongly that it was Lawrence himself who had torn it out. What possible motive could he have had for ripping a page out of his diary, I wondered? Two answers immediately sprang to mind. First, that Lawrence had been so disgusted and ashamed of what had happened at Dara a that he could not bear to re-read his diary entries. Second, that he had been covering up for something. In the first case, I thought, if Lawrence had been so disgusted by his treatment at the hands of the Turks he need not have made an entry in the diary at alclass="underline" customarily, anyway, he entered little more than the place in which he spent the night. Consistently, then, the missing sheet would have included the names of the places he visited with Talal, and would have read simply ‘Dara’a’ for the night of 20 November. If this was so, there would seem to be little that could have disgusted him later. I also asked myself why, if Lawrence had truly wished to forget the incident, he should have brought it to light in the first place. If he had kept quiet, no one else need ever have known. A more logical conclusion was that he was notat the places he claimed to have visited between 14 and 22 November, and that he had removed the page to conceal that fact. The missing page covered six days: the next entry is 22 November, when Lawrence was ‘back’ in Azraq. The question was, did he leave Azraq at all?
The journey to Dara’a and back, allowing time for hospitality with Talal’s family and an entire day at Dara’a, would have amounted to at least five days – perhaps five and a half. This would give a departure date from Azraq of 17 November at the very latest. Since it is certain that Lawrence returned to Azraq from the Yarmuk-Minifir mission on the 12th, his stay would have amounted to just five nights. Yet, turning to his Seven Pillarsdescription of his time at Azraq, I found strong hints that he was there for a far longer period. He ‘established himself in the southern gate-tower, he wrote, and settled down to have a ‘few days’ repose’ until the guests started coming in. When those few days were over, the guests began arriving ‘all day and every day’: ‘we sat down to enjoy these dregs of Autumn – the alternate days of rain and shine’ after which ‘at last the world turned solidly to rain’. Visitors were converted ‘very slowly’ to the Hashemite cause; ‘in these slow nights we were secure against the world.’ 14Taken together, these references indicated that Lawrence remained at Azraq for at least a week – probably longer. A letter sent to his parents on 14 December reads: ‘I wrote to you last from [Azraq], about the time we blew up Jamal Pasha [actually the 14th November] and let him slip away from us. After that I stayed for ten days or so there and then rode down to [Aqaba]in three days: good going: tell Arnie: none of his old horses would do so much as my old camel.’ 15If, indeed, he had stayed at Azraq from 12 to 22 November, it would have added up to exactly eleven days.