The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (42 page)

Despite his satisfaction with this apparent achievement, Lawrence had a strong penitential streak. He served as an enlisted man, under assumed names, in the Tank Corps and the RAF. About his fame—the floodlights hit him fully when American newsman Lowell Thomas's touring film of Lawrence's exploits appeared shortly after the war—he took a famously Garbo of Arabia line. As Lowell Thomas said, “He had a genius for backing into the limelight.”
¹⁸
Celebrity was, in a way, the fulfillment of his boyhood dreams of being a hero, and he traded on it when he wanted to—but he also hated himself for such pride, wanted to be left alone and free, and was so guilt-ridden that he actually ordered regular beatings for himself. He left
the RAF in February 1935. In May he was dead. A motorcycle enthusiast, he was riding near his cottage when he had to swerve to avoid two young boys on bicycles. His injuries were fatal.

His massive memoir of the war,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, is regarded as a classic, if also an oddity and unreliable as history. It was intended as a work of literature—and has been employed as a textbook on guerrilla warfare. He was an extraordinary man, torn between a brilliant intelligence, a chivalric imagination, a weakness for posturing, a Christian conscience without Christian faith, and a strong adolescent streak. But most of all he was a British patriot who, though he had served a foreign race, knew that ultimately what mattered was the green, soggy ground of Old Blighty: “I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English.... All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.”
¹⁹
Yet it can rightly be said that Lawrence gave his own life for those very provinces. At Wareham Church in Dorset there is a carved memorial, a faux catafalque, of Lawrence recumbent in death, dressed in his Arab robes and headdress, hand clutching a dagger, an imitation, by the artist Eric Kennington, of the medieval effigies that so attracted Lawrence as a boy.

“He dealt as an Arab with the King's palace, as a Bedouin with the tribes, as a British officer with London. No one except Glubb knew everything that was going on.”

 

H
e was universally known as Glubb Pasha: a short, soft-spoken man of gentle demeanor (if occasional fiery temper), deep Christian faith, quiet courage, and adamant will. He, like Lawrence of Arabia, dedicated his life to the Arabs and to the British Empire. As commander of the Arab Legion, he led his Bedouin troops to the only decisive Arab victory ever inflicted on an Israeli army—putting him in the odd position of defending one British ally (Jordan) by fighting a British creation (Israel).

His mother, Frances Letitia Bagot, was witty, pious, and Anglo-Irish, while his father, Major-General Sir Frederic Manley Glubb (then a major and not yet knighted) was a stalwart, charming, gentlemanly fellow who in the Great War was chief engineer of the Second British Army. Their household had that typical British imperial flavor—they were all terribly well-mannered, with lips as stiff as starched shirts, but loving as well, and beneath their apparent conventionality, adventurous individualists to the core. Their daughter Gwenda became a race car driver and their son not
only led Arab armies—frequently dressed in Arab garb—but was the chief adviser to an Arabian king.

Glubb spent most of his boyhood in England, with some time abroad in Mauritius (which he loved, and where he learned French) and Switzerland. His education was at Cheltenham College (a typical public school of the time, full of muscular Christianity) and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. His goal was to become an officer of engineers like his father, but he almost enlisted in the Rifle Brigade instead, because his entrance exams coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. His father, however, convinced him that the army needed officers, so Glubb dutifully went to Woolwich. He would see war soon enough.

The two-year course at Woolwich was crammed into six months in order to get new officers to the front. It was an early lesson in hurry up and wait—Glubb graduated and then had to fidget for six months because he was too young for active service. In November 1915, he finally made it to France, where he was three times wounded and had to be evacuated—the worst injury coming on 21 August 1917 as he was riding a horse amidst shellfire (he didn't believe in taking cover, thinking it bad form in front of the men), and was blown from his saddle, shrapnel hitting him in the face so that “half my jaw, which had broken off, teeth and all . . . was floating around in my mouth.”
²
It was a gruesome wound, and in the days before antibiotics a potentially fatal one. The surgery and the recovery (including from infection) was unpleasant, to say the least. When it healed, his shortened jaw led to his eventual Bedouin nickname:
Abu Hunaik
, Father of the Little Jaw. Glubb recovered in time to rejoin the war. His father wanted to arrange a staff job for him, but Glubb insisted on returning to the front.

Like the fictional hero Bulldog Drummond—who found peace after the Great War “incredibly tedious”—Glubb blanched at the prospect of dull peacetime assignments. His salvation came when the War Office asked for volunteer officers to fight an insurgency in Mesopotamia. Glubb applied and was accepted. It was the decision that made his career.

He was employed on engineering assignments in the Mesopotamian hinterlands. Encouraged by Arab hospitality, he did reconnaissance among the Iraqi tribes, taught himself Arabic, and developed a lasting affection for the life of nomadic Arabs. His developing knowledge of the country attracted the attention of the RAF, which was charged with keeping the peace, because air power was the most economical way to do so. But air power, to be effective, required land-based scouts to provide intelligence on potential
targets. Glubb happily took this role, which kept him mounted on a stallion, riding through the desert, meeting with tribesmen: “Although these people were, in some ways, addicted to violence and bloodshed, although there were lice in their clothes and they ate with their hands, there was something about them which attracted me.”
³
That was the typical British attitude: up with warrior tribes and races, peoples grounded in courage and honor; down with pushy, calculating merchants, disputatious lawyers, and babbling, aspiring clerks. British standards were classical standards, because the British imperial ruling class was classically educated.