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THE STRAND MAGAZINE. 52 Cairo excited by his costume in the streets of the Holy City, for he was always engrossed in his own thoughts hundreds of miles or hundreds of centuries away. In Arabia he was never known to wear anything except the native costume. Occasionally, when he went to Cairo or Jerusalem to make a report to General Allenby, he wore the uniform of a British officer, but even after he attained the rank of colonel he preferred the uniform of second lieutenant, usually without insignia of any kind. I have seen him in the streets of without belt, and with unpolished boots-negligence next to high treason in the British Army. To my know ledge he was the only British officer in the war who so com- pletely disregarded all the little precisions and military formalities for which the British are famous. Lawrence rarely saluted, and when he did it was simply with a wave of the hand, as though he were saying, "Halloa, old man," to a pal. I have never seen him stand to attention, and doubt if he would have done so in the presence of all the Allied rulers. He has never saluted anyone senior to him, even including his commander-in-chief, but he would always ack- nowledge salutes of soldiers. He espe- cially disliked the title of colonel. From general to private, he was known as plain "Lawrence." Many times when we were trekking across the desert he told me that he thoroughly disliked war and everything that savoured of the military, and that as soon as the war was over he intended to leave the Army and go back to archæology. Lawrence was no parlour conversa- tionalist. He never said anything to any- one unless it was necessary to give instruc- tions, or ask advice, or answer some direct question. Even in the heat of the Arabian campaign he sought solitude. Frequently I found him in his tent reading an archæo- logical quarterly when the rest of the camp was worked up to fever pitch over the plan of attack for the night. He was SO shy that when General Storrs or some other Digitized by Google a officer tried to compliment him on one of his wild expeditions into the desert, he would get red as a schoolgirl and look down at his feet. Although he had been cited for nearly every decoration that the British and French Governments had to offer, he sedulously ran away from them by camel, aeroplane, or any available method of swift transportation. The Duke of Connaught came out to Pales- tine to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem on General Allenby. He intended to give a decoration to Lawrence as well. The young leader of the Arabian army happened at the time to be out in the "blue" on secret expedition blowing up Turkish trains ; so General Allenby sent a fleet of aero- planes across the Dead Sea into the desert to find him. Messages were dropped from the 'planes on every Arab camp over which they flew, requesting that if anyone saw Sherif Lawrence he should ask him to report to Jeru- salem at once. So one fine day Lawrence came strolling in on foot through the Turkish lines, to show his utter scorn of the enemy. In the meantime the ceremony in Jerusalem had already taken place and the Duke of Con- naught had gone to Egypt. Knowing Lawrence's pe- culiar aversion to the acceptance of medals or military honours of any kind, the British officials succeeded in getting him down to Cairo only by inventing some plausible pretext. Upon his ar- rival, a subaltern who was not acquainted with Lawrence's eccentricities inadvertently tipped him off to the fine affair that was to be staged for his benefit. Without stopping to pick up his uniform and kit at Shepheard's Hotel, Lawrence hurried to the Headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps at the oasis of Heliopolis a few miles from Cairo, jumped into an aeroplane, and taxied back to Arabia. Little did Lawrence dream when he was studying Hittite ruins that it was his destiny to build a new empire instead of piecing together, for a scholar's thesis, the fragments of a dead-and buried kingdom. Yet he gained the confidence of the Sherif of MR. LOWELL THOMAS, THE AUTHOR OF THIS NARRATIVE, WHOSE ILLUSTRATED "TRAVELOGUES " ON THE ARABIAN AND PALESTINE CAMPAIGNS DREW GREAT CROWDS AT COVENT GARDEN OPERA HOUSE, THE ALBERT HALL, AND ELSEWHERE. Original from CORNELL UNIVERSITY