When he began to do service abroad he was confirmed in his sense of the significance of the image of the sword for he noticed how different nations found it necessary to have their now distinctive shapes. He would not bore us with what might be over-refinements of interpretation but a few illustrations of what he had in mind might make what was to come clearer. Had we ever remarked, for instance, on the difference of the shapes of swords favoured by two great opposing systems of the human spirit: the Christian and the Moslem, the cross and the crescent? If we had, we must have observed how like a cross, how like its Crusaders’ prototype was the European sword; and how like a new crescent moon slicing day from night was the shape of the scimitar. Only a few days before, flying to join us for Christmas, he had walked through the narrow streets of Damascus where the aeroplane had spent some hours, and had seen how the Arab aristocracy still moved in their purple shadows with a dagger, a miniature scimitar, dangling in a golden sheath like a new moon at their hips. There was no doubt in his own mind that the shape of the scimitar was inspired by the moon and this, like other Moslem practices, showed what a great tide from the moon swung in the spirit of Islam. Again it was significant that another moon-conscious people, the Japanese, also carried a slightly curved sword. For him, of course, there was no sword like the European. It was for him the least incomplete. It was shaped like a cross which in itself was for him a cardinal image of the complete spirit; a graphic illustration of the truth that life must be lived not merely horizontally but vertically as well. His own feeling was that the European sword was inspired by the sun. He said this because even as a child he had observed sword-light in the rays of the sun. Once on leave from the Army in India he had been climbing in the Himalayas at fifteen thousand feet on an unusually still and clear evening. The sky was silver-blue and speckled with the shadows of peaks on the horizon like an antique mirror. Just before the sunlight vanished below the purple rim it threw the image of a cross on the still air flashing like a great crusader’s sword over an immense black split in the far range. In Malaya too he was struck by the fact that the sword there was neither curved nor straight. Though pointed and two-edged it was shaped like a tongue of flame. The sound of its native name, Kriss, even re-echoed for him the hiss of the fire of the Malayan smith who fashioned it. He could go on at great length about these things for they had provoked his fancy for many years. However, to return to the sword. . . . Whether inspired by sun, moon or earthly fire the significant element common to all was the association with light. The sword was, he would suggest, one of the earliest images accessible to us of the light in man; his inborn weapon for conquering ignorance and darkness without. This, for him, was the meaning of the angel mounted with a flaming sword over the entrance to the Garden of an enchanted childhood to which there could be no return. He hoped he had said enough to give us some idea of what the image of the sword meant to him? But it was infinitely more than he could possibly say about the doll. The doll needed a woman not a man to speak for it, not because the image of the sword was superior to the image of the doll. It was, he believed, as old and went as deep into life. But it was singularly in women’s keeping, entrusted to their own especial care, and unfortunately between a woman’s and man’s awareness there seemed to have been always a tremendous gulf. Hitherto woman’s awareness of her especial values had not been encouraged by the world. Life had been lived predominantly on the male values. To revert to his basic image it had been dominated by the awareness of the sword. The other, the doll, had had to submit and to protect its own special values by blind instinct and intuition. Fortunately that was changing and in our own time the feminine values were emerging from age-old shadows. Men had begun to acknowledge their need of a woman conscious of her own special values. Yet the danger, as he saw it, was still lest man should set too great store by the symbol of the sword: that he should sacrifice life to the promotion of his own specialized awareness. We had only to reflect on the history of Europe to see how readily men had murdered one another for ideas to realize how far this male hubris could go. The danger to woman, he suspected, was in that she would sacrifice her own special awareness to her need of man and his sword. She tended to live her life through her men and children, bending them to her own dark unfulfilled mind, and preventing them, as she had been prevented herself, from living out their full specific lives. The balance between these two claims, Lawrence thought, had never been fairly struck and never could be so long as woman was just the annex to a specialized male need. Yet now he had a feeling that the need for the spirit of man for flesh and blood to live it out, and the need of the instant life of woman for sword-light to direct it were about to form a union. However, he was not there to philosophize or crystal-gaze on a stormy Christmas night. He hoped he had said enough to give us the general background of his state of mind on these things when the war came. It was now up to him to pass from the general to the particular.
He paused for quite a while and I got the feeling that, useful as his talk doubtless had been in order to give the climate of his story yet it had served also another purpose. It had served also to postpone the moment when he would inevitably have to pass from the general to the particular. My wife also, when we discussed it afterwards, had the same impression.
It started on the last day of February 1942 in the heart of Insulinda, Lawrence began slowly. He wondered whether any of us could still clearly recall the kind of moment that that was for us in the war? He himself had to prod his memory with a great effort of will to realize what a dark hour it had been and, since the darkness of the hour was relevant to the experience, he hoped we would forgive him if he went to some trouble to remind us of it.
In Europe, in North Africa, in Malaya and the Pacific the war had been a lengthening series of disasters for us and our friends. Pearl Harbour, the destruction of Prince of Wales and Repulse, the invasion of Malaya and the Philippines and the tidal sweep of the Japanese southwards, had come at a cruel and crucial hour for us. At that moment, like me, he had been pulled suddenly out of his regiment on the Libyan front. Because he spoke Japanese and had served in these parts he had been ordered to report to the South-East Asia Command which had been formed under Wavell to deal with the Japanese onslaught. So slight were our resources and so heavy the demands that he could find no aircraft to fly him to his destination. He was forced to make the journey in a cargo ship in a motley, slow-moving convoy. As a result, he had arrived at Wavell’s headquarters only the night after the fall of Singapore. Coming as he did straight from a front where we had just experienced our first victory in driving Rommel back beyond El Agheila, he was instantly struck by the feeling of hopelessness in the military air. It was not that our own people had lost heart, not that they doubted our final victory, nor had the courage to make a stand. But they all knew clearly that Insulinda could not be defended successfully against the Japanese, nor even held for us to gain time to organize our defences elsewhere.