In the eyes of the world the hero had eclipsed the man. Without seeming to have desired it, Lawrence had reached a virtual apotheosis—it was as if the real person had been swallowed by the legend. Not only Bernard Shaw believed that if Britain had a Valhalla, Lawrence belonged in it. The immense success of his books, the mystery that surrounded him, his puzzling disappearance at the very moment when the English-speaking world was focused on his achievements—all this represented something of a miraculous feat itself. Not only had he managed to escape the press, but in India his presence went unnoticed. Unlike Uxbridge, Farnborough, Bovington, and Cranwell, the RAF depot in Karachi was a place where he remained for the moment merely AC2 Shaw, an ordinary airman meticulously keeping track of engine parts and attracting little or no attention.

Of course no legendary hero successfully disappears forever, as Lawrence surely knew better than anyone else. However modestly AC2 Shaw behaved, however carefully he did his job as a clerk, however quietly he kept to himself, there were still occasional signs that he was no ordinary airman. At Cranwell, the telegraph boy had been astounded by the number of telegrams he had to deliver every day to AC2 Shaw (at the time, ordinary people received a telegram only if there was a death in the family), as well as by the fact that Shaw always tipped him a shilling. At Drigh Road everybody was equally astounded by the number of letters and packages that AC2 Shaw received; books, gramophone records, gift boxes of food, manuscripts, play scripts, envelopes full of press clippings. Shaw spent most of his meager pay buying stamps to answer this constant stream of mail.

Among the letters of praise he received was one from his friend Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, recently promoted to marshal of the Royal Air Force. Trenchard was writing to his most unusual airman to say that he couldn’t put down his copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom(bound in RAF-blue leather), and that he had insured it and left it in his will to his little son. “When I opened your letter,” Lawrence replied, “I gasped, expecting something of ill-omen. However, all’s well…. There is no local press, and I arouse no interest in the camp.” He dropped a quick hint in his reply that there was to be “another ‘life’ of me this autumn, written by a friend, the poet Robert Graves,” a piece of news which must have made Trenchard sigh. One after the other, the books had flowed out: first Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia,then Lawrence’s own books, and now Robert Graves’s biography.** Each one made headline news; there was no reason to suppose that Graves’s would be an exception; and the last thing Trenchard wanted was to have Lawrence in the news again.

It would be a stretch to say that Lawrence was happy in his self-imposed “exile,” as he called it, but he was relentlessly busy. At no point in his life did he write more letters. He spent nearly six months transforming his “notes” on his service at RAF Uxbridge and at Cranwell into a finished handwritten manuscript of The Mint,which he sent to Edward Garnett with instructions that it must not be published until 1950. He also accepted an American publisher’s offer of Ј800 to make a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey,a task for which he felt himself particularly well suited, since he had handled Bronze Age weapons as an archaeologist and had fought in a war close to that of the Greeks and the Trojans. He wrote to Eddie Marsh, thanking “Winston for his gorgeous letter,” and adding, no doubt for Churchill’s eyes, in an aside that sounds like a passage from Greenmantle:“The most dangerous point is Afghanistan…. The clash is bound to come, I think…. Do you know, if I’d known as much about the British Government in 1917, as I do now, I could have got enough of them [the people of the Middle East] behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia?”

To Trenchard, who was in part responsible for defending Iraq, and for preventing incursions into Trans-Jordan, Lawrence wrote in detail proposing a whole new policy for the Middle East. With his old self-confidence he also mentioned ibn Saud, whose advance was threatening Feisal and worrying Trenchard: “The fellow you need to influence is Feisal el Dueish…. If I were at Ur, my instinct would be to walk without notice into his headquarters. He’d not likely kill an unarmed, solitary man … and in two days guesting I could give him horizons beyond the Brethren [ibn Saud’s Wahhabi fundamentalist warriors]…. Such performances require a manner to carry them off. I’ve done it four times, or is it five? A windy business … Beduin on camels will make a meal of any civilized camel-corps: or of infantry in the open: or of cavalry anyhow. Nor does a static line of defence avail. You need an elastic defence, in depth of at least 100 miles. Explored tracks for cars, threading this belt, approved landing grounds,sited pill-boxes of blockhouses, occupied occasionally and then fed and linked by armoured cars, and supervised from the air….1 could defend all E. Transjordan with a fist-full of armoured cars, and trained crews.”

Since this was being written from his bunk by the RAF equivalent of a private to the RAF equivalent of a five-star general, it is fairly remarkable stuff, all the more so since it still remains good advice for dealing with desert raiders and insurgents, and indeed forms the basis for current strategy regarding similar enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan more than ninety years later. Trenchard certainly took it seriously, and recognized that Lawrence knew what he was talking about. He also knew that it would require a man with Lawrence’s special courage to walk into an enemy leader’s tent alone and unarmed, risking his life on the Muslim tradition of hospitality toward a guest.

It had not yet occurred to the powers that be in Drigh Road that AC1 Shaw (he had just been promoted to aircraftman first class, an automatic promotion which gave him no privileges, authority, or pleasure, but which he could not refuse) was in regular correspondence with Trenchard, Churchill, and Buchan about matters of state, or with Lionel Curtis about plans for transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states, or with the future Field Marshal the Earl Wavell about the future of tank warfare. Lawrence registered the death of friends: Hogarth, who, ironically, had been writing an entry on Lawrence for the Encyclopaedia Britannicawhen he died (“Hogarth is part, a great part, of Oxford, the concrete thing for which Oxford stood in my mind”); Thomas Hardy (“That day we reached Damascus,” he wrote to Mrs. Hardy, “I cried, against all my control, for the triumphant thing achieved at last, fitly: and so the passing of T. H. touches me”); Gertrude Bell (“Gertrude was not a good judge of men or situations…. But depth and strength of emotion—Oh Lord, yes … A wonderful person. Not very like a woman, you know: they make much of her concern in dress:—but the results! She reminded me in one dress, of a blue jay. Her clothes and colours were always wrong”).

Lawrence never left the depot itself—he described it as “a sort of voluntary permanent C.B.” (“C.B.” stands for a military punishment, “confined to barracks.”) Unfortunately, that did not protect him. The air officer commanding the RAF in India was Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, an old friend and admirer of Lawrence’s since 1916. It was part of Salmond’s duty to inspect every RAF station in India once a year—of course, his visit required prodigious preparation on the part of all the airmen—and following his inspection of Drigh Road Depot, he asked the commanding officer, Wing Commander Reginald Bone, CBE, DSO, “By the way, how’s Shaw getting along?” Bone was puzzled. “Shaw? Shaw?” he replied. “I do not think we have here any officer of that name.”