Some stiff claims have been made for the effects of Lawrence’s treatment at Dara’a: ‘After the homosexual rape …’Jeremy Wilson writes, ‘the consummation of a marriage would have been utterly abhorrent to him. The incident had left him with an aversion to physical contact, which was noticed by many of his friends.’ 31It has also been said that the horrific experience warped his character for ever, giving him an obsession with cleanliness and bathing, and perhaps turning him into the full-blown masochist he became later. However, all these traits are manifest in Lawrence’s early life. He himself wrote that his aversion to physical contact was the result of a struggle he had endured in his youth –most probably with his mother. He displayed masochistic behaviour in his self-deprivation at an early age, frequently showed an inordinate concern with cleanliness and bathing in his letters home, and always seems to have preferred men to women. Even a cursory reading of Seven Pillarsshows an unmistakable approval and acceptance of the idea of homoerotic sex and a rejection and disgust for the heterosexual variety. As early as the second page of the main text, indeed, he commends the youths who reject the ‘raddled meat’ of women to ‘[slake] one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that by comparison seemed sexless and even pure …’ 32The ideology is clear. It is very difficult to see how, by any conceivable convolution of logic, the experience of homosexual rape could have created an aversion to heterosexuality and an apparent warm approval of the ‘purity’ of homosexuality, unless Lawrence had some predisposition to it. As for ‘warping him for ever’, Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnie, wrote that he ‘had always been a person of remarkable control and poise … Well, this all went on after the war and in addition he developed a tremendous zest for anything comic. He had obviously gone through tremendous difficulties and done so by seeing the funny side of them.’ 33If this does not sound like a man whose spirit had been shattered by horrific experiences during the war, then neither does the Lawrence who, in December 1917 – a month after the supposed torture at Daraa – joined Allenby at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate for his triumphal entry into the old city: ‘He was gay that day,’ wrote A. P. Wavell, who walked beside him at the procession, ‘with jests at his borrowed uniform and at the official appointment that had been loaned him for the ceremony – staff officer to Bertie Clayton. He said as usual little of himself, and barely mentioned that great ride to, and unlucky failure at, the Yarmuk valley bridge, from which he had just returned.’ 34
18. The Most Ghastly Material to Build into a Design
Tafilah and Tel ash-Shahm January-April 1918
Lawrence had arrived at GHQ expecting some sort of rebuke for his failure to carry the Yarmuk bridge, to find that Allenby had already moved on. The Gaza-Beersheba line had been breached, Jerusalem had fallen, and Sir Edmund’s thoughts were already encompassing the Dead Sea. When the EEF had gathered its strength, transport and supplies – by February 1918 – he planned to unleash it on Jericho. The Hashemite base at Aqaba was now behind his own lines. If the Arabs could take Tafilah, in the wheat-growing Belqa uplands on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, then they could link up again with the British right flank. Lawrence thought they could move even farther – as far as the north end of the Dead Sea – as long as Allenby could supply them through Jericho once it had fallen. The Arab base would then shift from Aqaba to Jericho, which would be defended by the Arab Northern Army under Ja’afar Pasha – now 3,000 strong. Considered indisciplined and inefficient, Ja’afar’s regulars had astonished everyone with their tenacity when, in October 1917, the Turks had finally mounted a sledgehammer attack against the Hashemite outpost at Wadi Musa, near Petra, in brigade strength. The regulars had numbered only 350: two companies of camel-corps, and two of mule-mounted infantry under the savagely competent Maulud al-Mukhlis. Yet they had proved once and for all that trained Arab troops could hold a position against superior numbers, and had thrown back the enemy so decisively that the Turks never attacked an entrenched force of Arab regulars again.