Arnold sensibly resisted attempts to make his brother a religious symbol or a martyr, but the impulse was already there to turn Lawrence into many things he had never been. He has been celebrated as an antiwar figure, although Lawrence’s feelings about war were ambivalent, to say the least. He has been made the hero of a novel portraying him as a thwarted homosexual who welcomes his own death, though nobody could have fought harder to be asexual than Lawrence, and there is no evidence that he wanted to die. He has been attacked as a total fraud and liar by one biographer, though the release of hitherto secret government files had by 1975 proved that Lawrence did everything he claimed to have done (and kept meticulous records), and that, if anything, he underplayed the importance of his role in the war and as Churchill’s adviser on Middle Eastern affairs after the peace. He has been blamed by the Arabs for the existence of Israel, and criticized by the Israelis as pro-Arab. Insurgents such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara have claimed to follow his methods of guerrilla warfare; but anti-insurgency fighters, such as the United States Army today, also claim to use his tactics. He sometimes gets a bad press as a sadist because of the killing of Turkish and German prisoners after the Arabs discovered the massacre of Arab civilians in Tafas, in 1918, and as a masochist because of the whippings meted out to him by John Bruce. He is criticized as an imperialist who wanted the new Arab states to be within the British Empire, and as an anti-imperialist who disliked Britain’s rule over India.

Lawrence as a religious cultfigure, with a pilgrim‘ s cape and sand running through his fingers. In the background, various mystical symbols. Painting by Herbert Gurschner, an Austrian-born religious artist, 1934.

Given the secrecy in which much of his life was passed, it is hardly surprising that some people refused to believe he was dead at all, and that according to persistent rumors he was recovering from his injuries in Tangiers, and would return whenever England was in danger. There were numerous “sightings” of him, usually in Arab dress, in the Middle East.

As the years passed, and the heroes of the Great War slipped from the public memory, Lawrence became one of the few people who couldbe remembered from that terrible war—a stand-in, as it were, for all the others. He had not been one of the young officers who had gone to their death unflinchingly, leading their platoons over the top into German machine gun fire; nor had he been one of the legion of faceless men, the PBI or “poor bloody infantry,” slogging through the mud and barbed wire. He was, in a curious way, classless; he had belonged to no regiment; he had fought according to his own rules; he was free from the cant and the naive patriotic enthusiasm that began to ring false to people in the 1930s; and he became, like Nelson, a pillar on which British patriotism rested, eccentric, perhaps, but undeniably a hero.

Even World War II did nothing to shake Lawrence’s reputation. On the contrary, his tactics were followed to the letter very successfully by the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) in Libya in 1941 and 1942: Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas their Bible, and Lawrence their patron saint. No less an authority than Field Marshal Rommel said, “The LRDG caused us more damage than any other unit of their size,” praise from the enemy that would not have surprised Lawrence. His influence remained strong: his old friend and admirer A. P. Wavell was in command of the Middle East; and Lawrence inspired a number of bold imitators, chief among them Major-General Orde Wingate, DSO and two bars—the son of General Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdarof the Egyptian army who had recommended Lawrence for the “immediate award” of the Victoria Cross in 1917. Unorthodox, courageous, and a born leader, Orde Wingate applied Lawrence’s techniques, both in the Middle East and in Burma, with great success, becoming, like Lawrence, a great favorite of Churchill’s. Most military figures from World War I seemed irrelevant during World War II, but Lawrence’s reputation remained unscathed.

Lawrence’s literary reputation grew steadily. After his death Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas at last published in normal book form, using the text from the subscribers’ edition rather than preferred “Oxford version” of 1922; it sold more than 60,000 copies in the first year and went on to become a steady seller in English on both sides of the Atlantic, and in many other languages. (The Mintwas not published until 1955, and then it appeared in two versions: one expurgated and the other in a limited edition, with the barracks language intact.) The immense task of publishing Lawrence’s letters proceeded, and these won him perhaps even more praise than his books, for the sheer quantity and the quality of his correspondence was extraordinary. He was the subject, as well, of much careful scholarship. With both his flanks—military and literary—secure, Lawrence might have continued as a respected English hero, except that it would not have been in character for him to do that, dead or alive.

The great crisis in Lawrence’s reputation was caused by the publication in 1955 of Richard Aldington’s controversial Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry.Aldington had set out to write a conventional, admiring biography of Lawrence, at the suggestion of his publisher, but as he researched the book he discovered that he neither liked nor trusted Lawrence, and came to the conclusion that Lawrence had systematically twisted the facts to create his own legend.

Aldington’s book virtually destroyed his own health and his career as a writer. He was an odd choice for the thankless task of debunking Lawrence. He was not an investigative journalist, and he was far from being a mere crank; he was a respected, if minor, war poet, a novelist, a translator, a fairly successful biographer (of Voltaire, the duke of Wellington, and D. H. Lawrence), and a friend of such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. A whole book has been written about Aldington’s attempt to deconstruct Lawrence’s legend—an attempt that began as a perfectly conventional exercise in biography rather than a deliberate attack on one of Britain’s greatest heroes. Aldington, a prickly, quarrelsome, difficult character, may not even have realized that when he set out to write about Lawrence he had a chip on his shoulder—not just because Lawrence had achieved, it seemed almost effortlessly, the fame that eluded Aldington himself, but also because Aldington had served through some of the worst fighting on the western front, rising from the ranks to become a commissioned officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment. Aldington had been gassed and shell-shocked, and his experience of war made him contemptuous of Lawrence’s role in what Lawrence himself described as “a sideshow of a sideshow"; he remarked disparagingly to a friend, “These potty little skirmishes and sabotage raids which Hart and Lawrence call battles are somewhat belly-aching to one who did the Somme, Vimy, Loos, etc.” Not only did it seem to Aldington that Lawrence had had an easy war of it compared with those who fought in the trenches, but Lawrence had been rewarded with fame beyond even his own imagination, with decorations and honors that he had treated contemptuously and with the friendship of great and powerful figures. In short, whether Aldington realized it or not, his book about Lawrence was spoiled by his own envy of his subject from the very beginning; and the more deeply Aldington delved into Lawrence’s life, the more bitter he became.

Aldington was one of those people who take everything literally—even his admirers do not credit him with a sense of proportion (or a sense of humor)—and the tone of his book about Lawrence was, from page 1, that of a man in a rage; it was a sustained 448-page rant, in which he at tacked everything about Lawrence, apparently determined to blow up the legend once and for all. Much of it is minor stuff; partly, this is the fault of Lowell Thomas and Lawrence’s other early biographers—his friends Robert Graves, the poet and novelist; and B. H. Liddell Hart, the military historian and theorist—who had written panegyrics to Lawrence without any serious effort at independent research or objectivity. Sooner or later, somebody was bound to come along and correct the balance.