Lawrence later told Liddell Hart that he had served for six months: in other versions it was eight and three. Only one of these figures can be correct, and probably none is, and the ordeal lasted only a matter of days. In January 1906, Lawrence and a boy called H. E. Mather had attempted to paddle a canoe up the flooded Cherwell to Banbury, but had capsized near Islip. Sarah confirmed that in the Easter holidays that year, Ned and Will had tried again. If this is so, then Lawrence’s military service cannot have begun much before February or extended much after March 1906. There is no record of a T. E. Lawrence having served in the Artillery in 1905-6, and though he would presumably have taken an assumed name, no long absence was recalled by his school-friends or brothers. He was certainly in Oxford to take the Senior Locals examinations in May. Many biographers have concluded that the episode did not take place at all. After Lawrence’s death a painting by the Uranian artist Henry Scott Tuke, apparently showing Lawrence in army uniform, was found among his effects and claimed as evidence of his sojourn in Falmouth in 1906. Eric Kennington identified the cap badge in the picture as belonging to the Royal Garrison Artillery – rather remarkably, for it is badly smudged. Tuke was certainly living in Falmouth in 1906, and was fond of using young boys and soldiers as models. Lawrence later told an acquaintance that he had ‘often’ modelled for Tuke in his youth. Yet Tuke kept a register of his pictures, and this one was clearly recorded as having been painted in 1922 – a year, incidentally, in which Lawrence visited Cornwall. The picture is entitled Portrait of Gray and was eventually bought by a man named Gray. How it came into Lawrence’s possession is unclear, unless he himself was ‘Gray’. Did Lawrence actually meet Tuke in Oxford on a visit to his friend Charles Bell? Was his trip to Cornwall in 1922 made with the object of renewing a friendship he had first made as a seventeen-year-old gunner? As in so much of Lawrence’s life, all that can be said for certain about his early enlistment in the Royal Garrison Artillery is that his account of it is not the whole truth.

Lawrence confessed later that the sense of inadequacy he felt with other men led him to compensate with what he called ‘elaboration – the vice of amateurs’. In a world of bigger, more athletic, more physically powerful boys, his skills of ‘elaboration’ were a protective mechanism which gave him an aura of being much more than he appeared. Though he was capable of building a sustained edifice of falsehood, as he was later to do with John Bruce, his tendency was less to fabricate than to inflate the prosaic into something of an altogether more heroic order. His grand gesture of rebellion in running away to the army was spoiled by a quick and ignominious retreat, yet Lawrence salvaged his defeat by turning it into a darkly romantic tale – notably a tale involving elements of violence, suffering and degradation about which he fantasized. Fantasy, exaggeration, and distortion are tools of masochism, and one expression of Lawrence’s masochism was a running fantasy of self-degradation, of being bound for life to servitude as a ‘beast’ in the ranks, of working among the outcasts of many nations on the docks at Port Said: ‘There seemed a certainty in degradation,’ he wrote, ‘a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall.’¹ One early discovery he made about human beings was that almost everyone – even the erudite – will believe what they want to believe, and most want to believe the romantic rather than the prosaic. This was a great revelation to Lawrence, and it enabled him to hone his skills as a bluffer to the highest degree. ‘A reputation as a classical scholar is easily gained,’ he would boast to his mother from Beirut, having dropped a quote from Theocritus he had just acquired into the conversation, while visiting the American College.² As a young intelligence officer he would report with delight that ‘The War Office people are very easily to be deceived into a respect for special knowledge loudly declared.’ Lawrence’s ‘lily gilding’ was precisely that, for often he had no real reason to ‘elaborate’. Take two letters, for instance, both written in 1912, concerning the purchase of some camel-bells Lawrence later had on display at his house. The first, dated 18 February, is to James Elroy Flecker, the second, dated 20 March, is to his mother:

Today there came through the bazaar a long caravan of 100 mules of Baghdad, marching … to the boom of two huge iron bells swinging under the belly of the foremost … I went and bought the bells … And I marched home triumphant making the sound of a caravan from Baghdad …³

You will like my camel bells: I met a camel caravan coming swinging down the spice market in Aleppo to the booming of two huge iron cylinders under the belly of the foremost: and I stopped the line and bought the bells and walked back to the hotel making a noise like a caravan from Baghdad.⁴

The animals were either mules or camels, and at least one of the accounts is untrue: it is hardly likely that Lawrence could have forgotten in the space of a month what kind of animals they were. One might ask, ‘What does it matter if they were mules or camels?’ and this is precisely the point: whether they were mules or camels is supremely unimportant, and there is no conceivable motive for lying. One can only conclude that either Lawrence enjoyed misleading others, or he had a very uncommon conception of the truth. Indeed, his attitude to fact would be well demonstrated years later, when he advised Robert Graves that the best way of hiding the truth was by making mystifying, contradictory or misleading statements.⁵ Working with the Arabs during the war, he would admit that he did not tell the whole truth either to them or to his British masters, but designed a version of reality which suited himself. He would write that he himself often could not tell where his ‘leg-pulling’ began or ended, confess to having lied even in his official dispatches and reports, and would add: ‘I must have had some tendency, some aptitude, for deceit, or I would not have deceived men so well.’⁶ Ronald Storrs, who worked closely with him in Cairo during the war, would say that he could be ‘reckless in speech, irresponsible, misleading, tiresome, exasperating, maddening, stating as facts things which he knew nobody could or would accept – a street Arab as well as an Arab of Arabia’.⁷

His quick withdrawal from the Artillery in 1906 may have shattered his own illusion that he was the ‘hard man’ he craved to be, yet in another sense the gambit had been eminently successful. Sarah no longer tried to force her will on him, no longer had recourse to the stick. Any freedom he felt himself to possess in the following years began the moment he showed his mother that he was capable of separating himself from her. Long afterwards he wrote that seventeen was the age at which he found himself.⁸ The incident had disturbed the family’s smooth running, but the respectable faзade had to be maintained for the world. On his return the waves closed over him swiftly, and the episode was hushed up. In exchange for his silence, he got his wish to have his name put forward for a history scholarship, and sat the Senior Locals examinations that summer with a more peaceful mind.

He was also allowed to make the cycling tour around the Cфtes du Nord in France that he had long been planning with his friend Scroggs Beeson. To this end he ordered a new bicycle from the Morris Company – a specially designed lightweight model with racing drop-handlebars and a unique three-speed gear, which, he liked to say afterwards, had been made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands when he was just plain Mr William Henry Morris. Cycling was a relatively new phenomenon at the turn of the century. Though the rear chain-driven bicycle with pneumatic tyres had been invented before 1895, it remained an expensive luxury item until 1900, when it was first mass-produced. Thomas Lawrence had been an enthusiast even in the early 1890s when the family lived at Dinard in Brittany, and Ned had acquired his first bike as a schoolboy in 1901. Whether his special racing model of 1906 was actually made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands remains unknown. It is a typically Lawrentian story, and Nuffield emphatically denied it, though since he is known to have made bicycles in Oxford High Street until 1908, it is at least theoretically possible. Whatever the case, there is no more poignant symbol of Lawrence’s youth than his racing bicycle, which was later remembered vividly by his friends, almost as if it had been an extension of himself. Edward Leeds recalled how it would vanish surely and swiftly up the road, ‘almost before one had turned one’s back’, while Vyvyan Richards remembered with pleasure how the machine would ‘slide silently into the Iffley Road after midnight’. Lawrence was to make eight cycling trips to France and to cover several thousands of miles on this machine.