Those who are critical of Lawrence have argued that he exaggerated the incident, or even invented it altogether. But the episode was not improbable—the brutality of the Turks toward their subject races was a known fact, and the practice of anal rape, while by no means restricted to the Turkish soldiery and their officers, was a recognized peril of becoming a prisoner of the Turks in World War I, as in the many earlier Balkan wars—nor was it uncommon; indeed it remains one of the dangers of warfare in the Middle East. Lawrence, given his small size, pale skin, apparent youth, and seemingly delicate body, would have looked like an obvious victim for this kind of treatment (some of the portraits painted of him after the war emphasize the androgynous quality of his features, particularly the lips); indeed it had almost happened to him earlier, before the war, when he and Dahoum were arrested as deserters and imprisoned.
Bearing in mind that no pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdomwere more often revised by Lawrence than those describing the incident at Deraa, or subjected to more criticism and soul-searching by his many literary advisers, including Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster, the reader will have to decide whether they carry conviction or not. There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident—on the contrary, it seems more like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918, and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.
He himself put it best, in 1924, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, who by then had become a kind of alternative mother figure: “About that night, I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, & wrestled for days with myself-respect. … For fear of being hurt, or rather, to earn five minutes’ respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession which we are all born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living & the exercise of my not-contemptible wits & talents.
“You may call this morbid: but think of the offense, and the intensity of my brooding over it for three years. It will hang about me while I live, & afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying ‘Unclean, unclean!’ ”
Considering that the Shaws had what used to be known as un mariage blanc—that is, they were legally married and lived together as man and wife, but Charlotte remained celibate—perhaps nobody could have been better suited to understand Lawrence’s mortification and shame than she, who had all her life refused to have sex, or even to contemplate the possibility of childbirth. In this revulsion toward sex, she and Lawrence were very much alike, except that he had been violated, had given in under the pressure of pain, and had even felt, the ultimate horror, “a delicious warmth, probably sexual … flooding through me … a fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame.”
In short, he had not only been humiliated, tortured, and brutally raped, but to his horror had felt a sexual excitement that made his torturers mock him and filled him with shame. The ultimate abasement is not to be violated, after all, but to enjoybeing violated, and Lawrence had discovered in himself at Deraa just what he had been at such pains all his life to avoid admitting.
Whole books have been written putting Lawrence posthumously on the analyst’s couch, but it is hardly necessary to be a professional psychoanalyst to glean from Lawrence’s description of the incident at Deraa and his later explanation to Charlotte Shaw—they were equally frank about their lives to each other—a fair understanding of what happened, and some sense of why Lawrence felt he had to atone for it. He had failed tolive up to his own standards, impossibly high as they might be—by giving in to pain and fear, by submitting himself to rape as an escape from the pain, and by discovering that despite himself he felt a forbidden sexual excitement that he could not conceal from his torturers.
Those who have doubted the story point out that the governor of Deraa, Hacim Bey, though brutal, was a notorious womanizer, and that if he really knew he had Lawrence in his hands, he would never have dared to let him go. But neither of these things is necessarily so. The bey, as we have seen, could have been one of at least two other Turkish officers in Deraa, and the phrase “I know all about you” could have meant many things. The bey, whoever he was, may have meant, “I know all about what kind of man you are, and what you like, so stop fighting against it"; indeed this is far more likely than that he knew the man standing stripped before him was Major T. E. Lawrence, CB. A Turkish officer who had such a notorious figure as Lawrence in his hands and let him escape would have been court-martialed and shot; besides, there was a substantial reward on Lawrence’s head.
Lawrence limped to safety, still suffering from the toe he had broken while destroying the train; rode back to Azrak; concealed his wounds and what had happened to him; and returned to Aqaba, where “he seemed like a wraith, so white and remote … and crept away into a tent,” and where he learned that Allenby, ahead of schedule, had given the British people what Lloyd George wanted for them as a Christmas present: Jerusalem.
Allenby had not yet entered Jerusalem, however, and he wanted Lawrence to be there when he did.
Years before, in 1898, Kaiser William II had visited Jerusalem, and had caused the Jaffa Gate to be enlarged so that he could ride into the city, in his glittering full uniform. At the time, a wit at the Foreign Office had remarked, “A better man than he entered the city on foot,” and this thought must have occurred to Sir Mark Sykes, ever the imperial stage manager, who telegraphed Allenby from London with the advice todismount, or get out of his automobile, and enter Jerusalem humbly on foot. Very likely Allenby, no mean stage manager himself, had already reached the same conclusion.
The Turks had abandoned Jerusalem, and for many, including Lawrence himself, the taking of the city by British and Commonwealth troops was “the most memorable event of the war.” Allenby, with an unfailing genius for the big event, was determined to make the most of his capture of the Holy City, and left orders at Aqaba that Lawrence was to join him at once. Lawrence, not unnaturally, supposed that Allenby was going to give him hell for his failure at Yarmuk, but an airplane had been sent for him, and he was flown directly to Allenby’s headquarters in the field, north of Gaza, still barefoot and in white robes. To his surprise, the interview with Allenby went better than he had imagined—the breakthrough at Gaza and Beersheba and the fall of Jerusalem had pleased Allenby so much that he didn’t seem to mind about the bridge at Tell el Shehab. He had wanted the Turks to the east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River to be harassed, preoccupied, and disorganized as he advanced from Beersheba, so that he could not be attacked on his right from the desert, and God knows Lawrence had achieved this, and with fewer than 100 armed men.
As a sign of his regard, Allenby insisted that Lawrence should be present as part of his staff when he entered the city, so Lawrence borrowed bits and pieces of uniform from the other staff officers, and resplendent with red staff collar tabs and a major’s crown on each shoulder, he walked behind Allenby on December 11, through the Jaffa Gate and into Jerusalem.