*“Evolution of a Revolt,” T. E. Lawrence, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal.October, 1920, p. 8.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Solitary in the Ranks”

On August 30, 1922, Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence, CB, DSO, enlisted in the ranks of the Royal Air Force as a recruit, under an assumed name.

Joining the RAF “in the ranks” was not a hasty decision on Lawrence’s part, unusual as it seemed to most people. There was a long tradition in Victorian and Edwardian Britain of officers and gentlemen enlisting in the ranks, but usually to expunge some sort of social or military disgrace—the “gentleman ranker” is a constant figure in Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads:“He’s out on active service, wiping something off a slate—And he’s left a lot of little things behind him.”

In this, as in every other way, Lawrence was, of course, an exception to the rule. He had the education and upbringing of a gentleman, but illegitimacy was a bar to full membership in the “ruling class,”** something about which he feigned indifference but to which he was, in fact,very sensitive. He had done nothing disgraceful, and he was rapidly becoming Britain’s most famous war hero. His experience as a boy soldier might have helped him make up his mind, although he may have supposed that service in the ranks of the infant RAF would be very different from serving in the old prewar British army—though if this was the case he would shortly be disappointed.

The exigencies of battle on the western front had eventually made it necessary to commission a large number of “other ranks” (the British equivalent of American “enlisted men”) and NCOs during the war, but the social gulf between officers and men remained wide, and once the war was over, it became unbridgeable again. Those who joined the armed services in the ranks in peacetime did so largely because they had failed in the civilian world, or because they were running away from something—they tended to be a rough and touchy lot, often bearing emotional scars inflicted by the British class system, and suspicious of anybody whose speech, bearing, and behavior seemed “posh.”

This was true even in the RAF, despite Air Chief Marshal Trenchard’s desire to recruit and train future skilled “technicians,” who could be trusted to look after the intricacies of aircraft and aircraft engines. “Airmen” got the same kind of rough treatment as recruits did in the older services: “square bashing,” the universal phrase for parade ground drill; endless (and often pointless) polishing and cleaning; fatigue duty, much of it intended to be exhausting and loathsome; and constant petty harassment from officers and NCOs. At just over five feet five inches and 130 pounds, and at the age of thirty-three, Lawrence was not by any stretch of the imagination a typical recruit; and given his well-educated speech and his gentlemanly manners he could hardly have expected to fit in easily with his fellow recruits, or to “muck in with his mates” on Saturday nights at the local pub. All barracks contain one or two odd specimens,* and men who clearly have a secret to hide, but Lawrence was odder than most.

His interest in the RAF, however, was unfeigned, and he was a good friend of Air Marshal Geoffrey Salmond and Air Chief Marshal Trenchard, both of whom admired him and were sympathetic to his desire to get into the RAF. Lawrence could easily have joined as a wing commander (the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel), and no doubt even have learned to fly, but that was never his intention. Writing to Trenchard immediately after his return from the Middle East, Lawrence made it clear that he wanted to serve in the ranks, and warned Trenchard that he did not think he could pass the physical examination. He also suggested that he wanted to write a book about “the beginning” of the RAF, and that such a book could be written only “from the ground,” not from the viewpoint of an officer.

Lawrence did succeed in writing a worm’s-eye view of recruit training “from the ground up,” but The Mint,which would not be published until 1955, long after his death, is hardly the full portrait of the RAF that Trenchard had wanted. It seems reasonable to guess that Lawrence’s suggestion of using his experiences as a recruit as the material for a book was at least in part intended to make the otherwise inexplicable wish of a famous, decorated former lieutenant-colonel to serve in the ranks as an aircraftman second class (AC2) under an assumed name seem more plausible. Gathering material for a book about the RAF no doubt sounded sensible enough to Trenchard, particularly since Seven Pillars of Wisdom,though by no means finished, was already being talked about as a major literary work; it was more sensible at any rate than Lawrence’s desire to shed his identity and vanish into anonymity.

Much has been made by some biographers of service in the ranks of the RAF as the equivalent of a secular monastery, and of Lawrence as seeking an expiation of sorts there, but that seems far-fetched. The only thing Lawrence had to expiate was his failure to abrogate the Sykes-Picot agreement, and he felt he had emerged from that with “clean hands” after the creation of Trans-Jordan and Iraq. The truth seems to be that Lawrence had simply reached a dead end on his return to Britain at the end of 1921. He had no wish to be a civil servant, or an academician; like his father,and surely in imitation of his father’s example, Lawrence held an old-fashioned gentleman’s view that working for a living was beneath him; he had run through what money he had and faced a lot more work on Seven Pillars of Wisdom.All these considerations contributed to his feeling of being trapped, and Lawrence, when trapped, nearly always chose to cut the Gordian knot by means of a single, sudden, startling major decision, rather than a series of small compromises. He even offered to join Colonel Percy Fawcett’s Amazon expedition in search of the “Lost City of Z,” which ended in the disappearance of Fawcett and his party. It is possible that the return to the Middle East had disturbed Lawrence’s equilibrium, as had the continuous and exhausting revision of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,which forced him to reread obsessively his account of the incident at Deraa, so that far from putting such matters to rest, he was constantly reliving his worst moments of grief, shame, and guilt.

Then too, Lawrence had lost faith in himself, and felt a need for some kind of structure to replace it. He had had, perhaps, too much freedom since the taking of Aqaba, and wanted to exchange it for an orderly, disciplined routine, in which he would not have to be responsible for other people and, above all, would no longer have to give orders. He was willing, even eager, to takeorders, but not to give them anymore; his orders had led too many men to their deaths—a few of them men he loved—or had killed civilians, some of them guilty of no greater crime than having bought a ticket on one of the trains he destroyed. Lawrence had a lifetime’s worth of such responsibility, and the chief attraction of serving in the ranks was that he would never have to give an order to anyone again. Certainly most of these conditions could have been met in a monastery, but Lawrence does not appear to have had any religious convictions, let alone a vocation. All those morning prayers and Bible readings in Polstead Road had had the opposite effect to what his mother intended.

There was a tendency among Lawrence’s contemporaries to see his decision to shed his rank and join the RAF as a form of penance, but he always denied that. His service in the RAF, once he was past recruit training, would prove to be the happiest time of his life, with the exception of the years he spent before the war in Carchemish.

For nearly ten months Lawrence had been instrumental in making kings, creating countries, and drawing the borders of new nations and territories; he was almost as legendary a figure in peacetime as he had been in the war. But it was, at the same time, exactly the way this role appealed to his vanity, his thirst for fame and praise, his need to be at the center of things, his ability to move and influence even the most powerful of men, that he distrusted most in himself. Lawrence never underrated his powers, but “Colonel Lawrence” the kingmaker appalled him almost as much as “Colonel Lawrence” the war hero.