Lawrence’s Seven Pillarswas never intended purely as a historical document: it was, he would tell Charlotte Shaw later, ‘a survey of myself to Feb 1920 … people who read it will know me better than I know myself.’ 21His true self was, he said, ‘a beast’ and the book was ‘its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at’. 22It was, in other words, a public confession of all the secret repressions, obsessions and desires which he had been unable to express to anyone before. The description of his beating at Dara’a shows an abnormal fascination with physical suffering: his lingering over the colour and texture of his wounds, and the detailed description of the instrument of torture – the Circassian whip – is typical of masochistic reveries, as Lyn Cowan has written: ‘in masochistic fantasy the instrument is usually replete with distinctive detail, numinous with beauty and ugliness and fear which create and preserve just the right sensation…’: ‘Even in the barest and most common beating fantasies, we can hear the sharp hymn of the holy thyrsus as it slices down the supplicant’s back.’ 23That Lawrence deliberately courted public humiliation is beyond doubt: ‘I long for people to look down on me and despise me,’ he later wrote;’… I want to dirty myself outwardly, so that my person may properly reflect the dirtiness which it conceals …’ 24His need to display his suffering is evident in many other passages in the book, and especially in his exaggeration of the number of injuries and bullet-wounds he received. He claimed to have over sixty scars from injuries sustained in Arab service, yet it has been proved conclusively by J. N. Lockman that he had very few scars after the war: to have sustained sixty wounds in a world without antibiotics, anyway, would – as Lockman points out – have required either superhuman powers of resistance or incredible good luck. 25Lockman has also shown that the testimony of Richard Meinertzhagen, who claimed to have seen scars on Lawrence’s back while bathing in 1919, was fabricated. In any case, Lawrence does not state that he was beaten on his back,and if his description of the wounds he received is to be believed then he could only have been beaten on his buttocks: it is impossible for a human being to see his back except with the aid of a mirror. Lockman has demonstrated that though Lawrence later had scars on his front and posterior which seem consistent with the Dara a story, these probably originated in the post-war period and were voluntarily inflicted. 26We may never know for certain whether or not Lawrence was captured and tortured by the Turks, but the weight of evidence – the missing page, the breakdown in the dating sequence, the long period which he seems to have spent at Azraq, and the lack of relevant scars – suggests, to me anyway, that the Dara’a incident was true only in the sense that it deliberately revealed the unseen Lawrence lurking in the shadows. As the emotional climax of Seven Pillars,it was the ultimate expression of his reverse exhibitionism – for as he told Charlotte Shaw coyly: ‘I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, wrestled for days with my self-respect.’ 27It was, perhaps, his final declaration to the world of his conviction – with him since childhood – that he was ‘untouchable’ and ‘unclean’: at last, after years of aloofness, T. E. Lawrence found an opportunity of saying to posterity: ‘This is Thomas Lawrence. This is me.’
Once back in Aqaba, Lawrence wrote, he occupied himself mostly with recruiting a personal bodyguard for his protection, suggesting that this was a direct result of his torture at Dara’a. There was a price on his head and he needed ‘hard riders and hard livers’ who would vow loyalty to himself personally. He wrote that he built up a large private army of ninety men, mercenaries, cut-throats, outlaws and bandits from thirty different clans of every tribe in Syria and north Arabia. Many of them were blood enemies, and there would have been murder among them every day had it not been for Lawrence’s restraining hand. Because his rides were so ferocious and painful, every man with him was a picked rider, all mounted upon his own specially chosen camels. They would ride all day and all night at Lawrence’s whim, and fought like devils. He paid them Ј 6a month: this was the standard rate for a man and a camel, but they actually profited far more than other camelry because they did not have to provide their own animals, which would have foundered under Lawrence’s hard going. The camels were all provided from Lawrence’s own carefully selected stable, and his bodyguard cost three times as much as any unit in the army, but did three times the amount of work. These lads dressed in bright colours deliberately to contrast with the pure white Lawrence himself wore, and had the kind of espritwhich came from the shared hardship and suffering they endured out of loyalty to him. They took pleasure in subordination, he said, and enjoyed degrading their own bodies so as to throw into relief the freedom of their minds – an emotion suspiciously reminiscent of Lawrence’s own masochistic desire for degradation. Of his ninety followers, almost fifty of them Agayl, two-thirds died nobly in his service.
There is no more enticing image in Seven Pillarsthan that of Lawrence in his pure white Sharifian robes at the head of his own force of ninety hardened cut-throats, all of whom had sworn to serve him unto death, and many of whom did. Official biographer Jeremy Wilson cites the recruitment of this guard as the single major corroboration of the truth of the Dara’a incident: ‘As regards the timing of the incident,’ he writes, ‘it is worth noting that as soon as he returned to Akaba he recruited a personal bodyguard.’ 28Once again, the evidence – from Lawrence’s own records – is against him. In fact, he recruited a bodyguard as early as May 1917, for he apparently told ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ in June that he did not need servants but fighting men. In October, before the Yarmuk raid, he said, he had decided to give some of the ‘old bodyguard’ a rest, and recruited six new members: ‘Among my own preparations,’ he wrote in the Oxford version, ‘was the careful picking of my own bodyguard.’ 29He listed the new recruits as Mahmud, Aziz, Mustafa, Showak, Salem and Abd ar-Rahman. He dismissed two of the old guard, Mohammad and ‘Ali – who had been with him from Wejh – but retained the rest, including ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ (alias ‘Ali and Othman), Ahmad, Kreim, Rahail, Matar, Khidr and Mijbil, a total of fourteen men. At different times he also picked up Awwad and Daher, bringing the total to sixteen. Now, it so happens that Lawrence listed the names of his bodyguard in his pocket-diary in order to keep track of their wages, beginning in March 1918. Though the names and number vary slightly between March and September, there are never more than seventeen names on the list at any one time, and the average over the entire period comes to fourteen – precisely the same number he listed as forming his bodyguard in October 1917, beforethe alleged Dara’a incident. He might, of course, have changed the personnel if not the number, but many of the names recur again and again, and a significant number are traceable to his earlier bodyguard. Ahmad, Rahail, Mahmud, Mustafa, Abd ar-Rahman, Khidir, Mijbil, Salem, Awwad, Daher and Matar all feature in the March–September lists. Conspicuously absent from the lists are ‘Ali and Othman, the supposed models for ‘Farraj and Da’ud’, who were evidently not in Lawrence’s service in 1918 at all. It is true, of course, that some of these names are common among the Arabs, but even if the individuals were different, this does not alter the fact that the strength of Lawrence’s bodyguard remained essentially unchanged between October 1917 and September 1918, that is before and after the supposed torture at Dara’a – thus proving beyond doubt that it could not have been recruited as a direct result of any incident in November 1917. Certainly, it was not recruited first in January 1917, neither did it ever comprise ninety men, even by aggregation, but consistently averaged about fourteen. Coincidentally, a photograph of ‘Lawrence and his bodyguard’ taken at Aqaba in the summer of 1918 shows only fifteen men. Hubert Young, an Arabic speaker who served with Lawrence in 1918, noted that the bodyguard comprised ‘about 20’. 30As for the idea that Lawrence’s men were a tough crowd of bandits from all the tribes of Syria and Arabia, the provenance of many of them belies this claim. Mahmud, a ‘petulant lad’ of nineteen, was a peasant from Yarmuk, Matar a ‘parasite fellow’ of the Bani Hassan, Mijbil an ‘insignificant peasant’ old enough to be Lawrence’s father, Salem a camel-herder of the despised Shararat tribe, ‘Abd ar-Rahman a freed slave, Aziz a ‘shallow, rabbit-mouthed’ peasant from Tafas, Mustafa a deaf boy, Zayd an incompetent who was dismissed by Lawrence for failing to saddle a camel properly, and Rahail a Haurani peasant who burst into tears when the going got tough. Only Lawrence’s chief, Abdallah an-Nahabi (‘Abdallah ‘the Robber’), appears to meet his claim that his men were outlaws. None belonged to the major Bedu tribes of Arabia (Lawrence told the Sha’alans that he was too humble a man to have Rwalla guards) and few to the ‘Agayl – the vast majority were Syrian peasants who, because of old age, infirmity or incompetence, could not get employment elsewhere. As for dying in Lawrence’s service, there is hardly a name featuring in March 1918 which does not appear on the list for September. It is just possible that one or two may have been killed, but the number cannot have amounted to sixty – since the sum total of members of the bodyguard was never more than seventeen, and most, if not all, of these survived.