T. E, Lawrence
214
THE YPRES TIMES
By Captain Raymond Savage.
THERE is no need for me to write of Colonel Lawrence's war-time exploits. They
have been told often and again by various people and posterity will judge of their
value and greatness.
It is of Lawrence, the man, that I would write for old comrades of the Great War.
I was attached to Lord Allenby's staff in Palestine and, meeting Lawrence many times,
was always duly impressed by the modesty and humanity of this great little man.
There may have been, and indeed it would seem impossible that it should not be so,
an element of vanity about him, but it was a vanity not of self but of achievement.
He welded the Arab tribes together in such a magical manner that in some ways
it may be claimed that his success was the breaking point as far as the Central Powers
were concerned. He told me that upon the occasion when he was actually captured,
but mercifully unrecognised, he had only one fear as he was lashed with a hide whip
by the Turks, and that was that he might in his anguish cry out in English. Then his
death would have been a slow matter of weeks or months and not of a moment. His
detachment and personal bravery were quite amazing, and yet there was a softness
in his character which made him seem at times almost ethereal. Those who really knew
him loved him in the very best sense of the word, and yet curiously enough, and in some
unexplainable way, he does not seem to have left us entirely.
His attitude in refusing all honours and decorations after the War was an attitude
of rectitude. It was no grandiloquent gesture, but a deep conviction that as his beloved
Arabs had been let down by the Allies, he could in no way accept any honours from
those whom he considered had basely broken their word. It cannot be often enough
repeated, and I can personally vouch for the fact as I have been his personal agent
ever since he began writing, that he refused to accept for himself one penny out of the
huge sums that were received from the sales of his book Revolt in the Desert. Every
penny went to the Royal Air Force Memorial Fund. He steadfastly refused to profit
by one farthing from his Arab campaign, and told me that he never intended doing so.
There are many living to-day who have benefited by his extraordinary kindness, and
it is a shocking thing that many so-called friends tried immediately after his death
to profit in mean and petty ways.
There are those who think that he posed, that he was vain and that he sought
publicity. This is utterly untrue, and again, only those who knew him intimately realised
that he genuinely wished to hide his identity, and that he thought in all innocence that
by changing his name he could vanish into oblivion. He just could not realise that any
attempt to suppress his identity would lead to greater mystery j and that he would be
all the more sought after.
He is gone. His personal friends have lost a trusty loyal friend, and the Nation
a great and honoured figure. At his funeral there was only one floral tribute a little
posy of violets and lilies of the valley from a young girl who wrote on a card To
T. E. L., who should sleep among the Kings." Little did she realise the significance of
her simple devoted action.
T. E. sleeps, as he would have wished, in the little Dorset Churchyard, but his
memory is enshrined in the hearts of his grateful fellow men throughout the four quarters
of the world.
R. S.