Lawrence’s reconnaissance in the Hauran would have been of great significance, I thought, for this was the area in which the last action of the campaign would be fought. Yet strangely, none of his superiors seem to have been aware of it. Moreover, a geographical report written by Lawrence himself on 15 December, for the benefit of future armoured-car operations, lists all the sites he had seen on his Yarmuk-Minifir operation, but none of those he supposedly visited with Talal, except a brief reference to Wadi Meddan, which might well have been supplied by an informant. It is the last act of the drama – the 300-mile ride to Aqaba – though, which casts the most profound shadows of doubt over the alleged incident at Dara’a. According to his testimony, Lawrence had arrived in Azraq on the 12th with five bullet wounds and a broken toe. At Dara’a a week later he had been thrashed severely. The annals of penal institutions hold numerous records of men who collapsed with heart-failure after thirty or forty strokes of the lash. Lawrence, who lost count after the first twenty, must have suffered at least this many. He had also been beaten in the face with a slipper, bitten, pierced with a bayonet, kicked hard enough to injure a rib, raped repeatedly, and received two vicious slashes directly to the groin which alone would have caused his testicles to swell so badly that he would have been unable to ride. How was it possible, then, for a man so badly battered to have made, within three days, the most distinguished camel-ride of his career, covering eighty-six miles a day? Clearly, it is not possible. Either Lawrence was exaggerating about the ride, exaggerating about the extent of the treatment he received from the Turks, or the Dara’a incident did not happen at all.
Captain L. H. Gilman, who served on the Hedgehog Mission, told Lawrence’s biographer John Mack that Lawrence had not mentioned a word about the Dara’a incident either to himself or any other officer who served in Arabia: yet he had no doubt that it happened: ‘Lawrence was far too gallant and honourable a man to invent this experience,’ he wrote; ‘there would have been no point in it.’ 16Lawrence’s official biographer, Jeremy Wilson, has echoed Gilman’s words, writing that ‘those who doubt that the event took place at this time are accusing Lawrence of an elaborate and pointless lie’. 17Unfortunately, it is a proven fact that Lawrence didtell elaborate and, in some cases, pointless lies. His pre-war substitution of ‘camel-bells’ for ‘mule-bells’, for example, was demonstrably pointless (and it is inconceivable that someone with Lawrence’s photographic memory should have forgotten or got muddled up). His claim to have crossed Sinai in forty-nine hours was certainly a lie – whether it was pointless or not is open to speculation. His ability to make up and sustain an intricately constructed untruth is evident from the story he was later to tell John Bruce, explaining his need to be flogged – a story which he kept up for a staggering thirteen years. Neither Wilson nor Mack disputed that Lawrence lied to Bruce, yet, paradoxically, both state that they found no evidence that Lawrence was a liar: as if lies told to a poorly educated working-class youth somehow did not count. Certainly, Lawrence could be gallant and honourable – he tried desperately all his life to live up to Sarah’s image of him as the immaculate white knight – but some emotions are stronger than honourable desires. Bernard Shaw called him ‘an actor’and noted that he was ‘no monster of veracity’, while Ronald Storrs, who knew him fairly intimately, said that his shortcomings were well known to his colleagues (presumably not Gilman) but were discounted because they were balanced by his brilliance. This seems to me perfectly normaclass="underline" in the end none of us is an ‘immaculate white knight’, none of us is absolutely honourable or perfectly truthful. To expect this of Lawrence is to make him into a superman – an idea which he himself ridiculed. Even Achilles had a vulnerable heeclass="underline" why should we expect Lawrence to be any better than Achilles? It may be that his compulsion to ‘elaborate’ was the shadow side of an otherwise ‘honourable’ man. Even Liddell Hart, who considered him a military genius, admitted that he had been too gullible with Lawrence’s testimony, and Lawrence actually criticized Hart for accepting everything he said without question, just as he mocked others whose praise for his good qualities was not tempered by a little ‘salt’. Moreover, his propensity for ‘elaboration’ is confirmed by his own admission: he confessed in his introduction to Seven Pillarsthat he often concealed the truth even in his official reports, and acknowledged elsewhere that he had a talent for deceit. Those who deny that he lied, therefore, are contradicting his own words and postulating a character which Lawrence himself refuted. He was a gifted intelligence officer – a member of a profession which almost by definition deals in lies, propaganda, and half-truths. Many have expressed incredulity that Lawrence’s colleagues – among them men of the highest intellect and ability – could possibly have been misled by his ‘elaborations’, yet Lawrence himself, as a new recruit to the Map Department, boasted gleefully that such men were only too easily to be deceived by esoteric knowledge confidently declared. Just like others, the great and mighty believed only what suited them, neither were they themselves always paragons of truth: Richard Meinertzhagen, a highly respected senior intelligence officer at GHQ, for instance, who was credited with devising the ruse which led the Turks to believe that Allenby was going for Gaza instead of Beersheba, was later discovered to have deliberately forged entries in his own diaries. Lying brilliantly to the Turks was one thing, but lying to his own was not allowed. It is clear that Lawrence was so confident that he would be believed that he was prepared to ‘elaborate’ even when there were witnesses who could testify to the contrary. When Hubert Young asked him to alter what he had written about him on the grounds that the correct account might appear some day, Lawrence simply replied: ‘Oh no it won’t.’ 18
If the Dara’a incident was invented, then the ‘point’ lies not in the rational but in the unconscious mind. Lawrence was a masochist with a homosexual nature, who had from a very early age fantasized about being dominated by other men, especially in the ranks of the army. As he wrote repeatedly, the degradation of such a life appealed to him, for in the ranks one became a ‘beast’ – fed, clothed and watered and constantly available to be used by others. It is, perhaps, significant that in the 1935 version of Seven Pillars,Lawrence’s page titles to the Dara’a incident parody recruit-training in the army. The page on which he describes his arrest by the Turks, for instance, is entitled ‘A Turkish Conscript’ and the subsequent pages describing his ordeal, are entitled ‘Recruit’s Training’, ‘Further Lessons’ and finally ‘Passing Out’. At the age of seventeen Lawrence had tried to realize this fantasy by joining the Royal Garrison Artillery, and in 1912 the fantasy was extended when he was arrested as a deserter at Khalfati and possibly beaten by the Turks. 19It is significant that Lawrence mentions the Khalfati incident in relation to his alleged torture and rape at Dara’a, for the key to Dara’a may lie here. Dara’a may have been an elaboration of what happened at Khalfati, relived and magnified by Lawrence in his imagination over many years. The positioning of the Dara’a incident immediately after the failure at Yarmuk is also significant. Lawrence had been terrified of failure all his life and was mortified to have let down Allenby, whom he saw as a father-figure. It is not insignificant that in his description of his meeting with Allenby a few weeks later, he evokes the fantasy of standing before the Bey: ‘It was strange to stand before the tower with [Allenby],’ he wrote, ‘listening to his proclamation, and to think how a few days before I had stood before Hajim listening to his words. How seldom we paid so sharply and so soon for our fears.We would have been by now, not in Jerusalem but in Haifa or Damascus or Aleppo, had I not shrunk in October from the danger of a general rising… By my failure I had fettered the unknowing English and dishonoured the unknowing Arabs.’ 20The humiliation he brought on himself by inventing the Dara’a trauma may have been an expiation of his self-adopted failure – not only his failure to blow the bridge, but to raise the revolt in Syria as he had originally promised Allenby. The same pattern may be traced in at least two of the mysterious incidents of his life: the attack by a tribesman in Syria during his 1909 walk, and the shooting of Hamed the Moor. Both followed a sequence of private failure and public expiation by apparent violence, a pattern which had its origin in Lawrence’s early childhood, when his mother’s beatings became a means of expiating his ‘improper’ thoughts. It is perhaps no coincidence that in revealing the apparent trauma at Dara’a he should use precisely the same terminology – ‘the circle of my integrity’ – which he employed when talking of his mother’s physical threat.