Lawrence himself was anxious to get away from Drigh Road, because he had good reason to believe that some of the officers there were gunning for him. He was always concerned about keeping his record clean, and he knew that nothing was easier for an officer than finding a reason to put an airman under arrest for a minor or imaginary crime, and thus leave a black mark on his record. He wrote to Trenchard, explaining why he had applied to Salmond for a posting “up-country,” as the unruly mountainous region of the Northwest Frontier was then called, on what is now the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “A conversation between an officer and a civilian in a club after dinner was improperly repeated to me…. However this one was reported to have sworn he ‘had me taped’ and was ‘laying to jump on me’ when he got the chance …. So I’m going to run away to a squadron. They are small and officers mix with airmen, and aren’t as likely to misjudge a fellow. I told Salmond I had private reasons. Don’t think me a funk. At worst it’s only overcautious.”

Salmond sent Lawrence about as far away from Karachi as he could, to RAF Fort Miranshah, in Waziristan, where Lawrence arrived in August 1928. “We are only 26 all told,” he wrote, “with 5 officers, and we sit with 700 Indian Scouts (half-regulars) in a brick and earth fort behind barbed wire complete with searchlights and machine guns.” It would have been hard—perhaps impossible—for Salmond to find a more remote posting for Lawrence, but there were hidden dangers. Miranshah, a forward airfield of Number 20 Squadron, was less than ten miles away from the border between British India and Afghanistan—although the line was not only porous but meaningless to the local tribesmen, whose only loyalty was to their faith, clan, and tribe, and who raided impartially on both sides of the border. Afghanistan had been in a state of turmoil since time immemorial. “The graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan was the gateway to India, and the locus of the “great game,” in which, for more than a century, the British and the Russians had been vying with each other to control the country by bribery, secret intelligence missions, and occasional armed intervention. British and Russian agents traveled through the rough, mountainous, dangerous country in the guise of mountain climbers, botanists, or geographers, seeking out potentially friendly warlords and tribal leaders, drawing up maps, and gathering such political intelligence as could be gleaned from the bloodthirsty chaos that passed for politics in Afghanistan. In 1843, after invading the country and taking Kabul, its capital, an entire British army was defeated and slaughtered between Kabul and Gandamack. The only survivor was Dr. William Brydon, a regimental surgeon, who escaped captivity and rode to the gates of Jelalabad on a mule with the news of the disaster—the subject of a famous painting by Lady Butler. Nobody questioned the ferocity of the Afghan tribes or their determination to resist infidel foreigners in their country, but the British nevertheless fought two subsequent wars in Afghanistan, without achieving a clear-cut victory.

Shortly after Lawrence’s arrival at Miranshah, a number of the Afghan tribes staged a rebellion against King Amanullah, who had been attempting to modernize the country by introducing reforms such as schools for girls, the abandonment of the burkafor women,* and much else. The women of his court were even seen playing tennis in the gardens of the royal palace in Kabul, shamelessly wearing European tennis clothes. The result was a widespread and growing civil war, in the course of which Amanullah lost his throne. The first successor was the unlettered son of a water carrier; the next was Amanullah’s sinister, cold-blooded former war minister and ambassador to France. It does not seem to have occurred to either Trenchard or Salmond that Lawrence’s presence on the border might attract attention or cause trouble.

At first, life at Miranshah suited Lawrence. His duties as the commanding officer’s orderly room clerk were not demanding; he got along well with the airmen and the small group of officers; and since this was a working flying station, with aircraft landing and taking off, he felt himself to be back in the real RAF. He wrote a prodigious number of letters, many of them to Trenchard, who had read the manuscript of The Mint—it shocked him but did not prevent him from extending Lawrence’s service in the RAF to 1935 before he retired as chief of the air staff. Indeed a small book on how to wage war against an insurgency could be put together from Lawrence’s letters to Trenchard from Miranshah. Interestingly, both Trenchard, at the top of the RAF, and Lawrence, at its bottom, agreed that a policy of bombing tribal villages to enforce peace was more likely to do harm than good, by stirring up fierce resentment about civilian casualties.** However, such bombing was the whole purpose of the airfield at Miranshah.

At Miranshah there was little secrecy about the fact that AC1 Shaw was Lawrence—everybody knew it, and nobody cared much. “I think that the spectacle of a semi-public character contented in their ranks,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “does tend to increase their self-respect and contentment.” Flight Lieutenant Angell, the commanding officer, liked Lawrence, who never showed him a letter without having first prepared a reply for his signature. The pace of life was leisurely, with plenty of native servants to do the cleaning and polishing, even for the airmen. Lawrence worked hard on his translation of the Odyssey,despite his irreverence toward its author and its characters. “Very bookish, this house-bred man,” Lawrence wrote of Homer, and went on: “only the central family stands out, consistently and pitilessly drawn—the sly, cattish wife, that cold-blooded egoist Odysseus, and the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus. It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer’s heroes and examplars.”

Lawrence did not feel oppressed by the fact that nobody was allowed beyond the barbed wire during the day, or out of the fort at night, since he had no desire to see Waziristan. Nor was he bothered by the fact that the airmen slept with their rifles chained to a rack beside their beds, in case of a sudden attack. He went around bareheaded, to demonstrate that it was not necessary to wear a pith helmet, and often wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up instead of his tunic. He was cheerful, hardworking, and fit; he had his books, his gramophone, and his records; he was not even disturbed by the news that somebody had bought the film rights to Revolt in the Desert,which almost guaranteed a lot of unwelcome publicity about who would play Lawrence in the film. He did not expect to return to Britain before 1930, at the earliest.

Unfortunately, by the beginning of December 1928, new rumors about Lawrence were making headlines in London. The Daily Newsreported that he was learning Pashtu in preparation for entering Afghanistan, either in support of or against King Amanullah. A few days later, even more sensationally, The Empire Newsrevealed that Lawrence had already entered Afghanistan, met with the beleaguered king, “and then disappeared into ‘the wild hills of Afghanistan’ disguised as ‘a holy man’ or ‘pilgrim,’ “ to raise the tribes in the king’s support. In India, feelings ran high against Lawrence as a British arch-imperialist trying to add Afghanistan to the empire. A genuine holy man, Karam Shah, was attacked and badly beaten by a mob in Lahore when the rumor spread that he was Lawrence in disguise. In London, anti-imperialists in the Labour Party burned Lawrence in effigy during a demonstration held on Tower Hill.

The government of India was taken by surprise, since the Air Ministry had never informed it that Lawrence was serving there. On January 3, 1929, Sir Francis Humphreys, the British minister in Kabul, cabled Sir Denis Bray, foreign secretary of the government of India in Delhi, to point out that the presence of Lawrence as an airman on the border of Afghanistan created “ineradicable suspicion in the minds of the Afghan Government that he is scheming against them in some mysterious way.” The Soviet, French, and Turkish ministers in Kabul were quick to spread these rumors, and in Moscow the Soviet newspapers carried stories that were soon spread around the world by left-wing newspapers, accusing Lawrence of being an imperialist agent responsible for the unrest in Afghanistan. Under the circumstances, Humphreys felt, the sooner Lawrence was moved as far away from Afghanistan as possible, the better. Air Vice-Marshal Salmond stoutly dismissed all this as “stupid,” but in London the foreign secretary, alarmed by the spread of these stories, ruled that “Lawrence’s presence anywhere in India under present conditions is very inconvenient,” a superb piece of British understatement.