Part 3 (2/2)

For T. E. Lawrence, this home stay was imposed by forces beyond his control. Although the Ottoman Empire had not joined in the August rush to war, expectations in London were that it soon might-and probably on the side of the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If that came to pa.s.s, the mapping expedition of southern Palestine that Lawrence and Leonard Woolley had recently partic.i.p.ated in could be of great military importance. Under orders from Kitchener himself, the two young archaeologists were told to forgo any thought of enlisting until they had completed their report. So as others his age trooped off to boot camp that August, Lawrence shuttled between his Polstead Road cottage and the archives of the Ashmolean Museum, feverishly putting the final touches on The Wilderness of Zin.

If Lawrence was mindful of the report's significance, his comparative la.s.situde infected him with a growing sense of desperation. In early September, he and Woolley contacted Stewart Newcombe, their supervisor on the Palestine expedition and now a ranking officer in military intelligence, seeking his help in landing positions there. Newcombe advised patience. Should Turkey enter the war on Germany's side, he explained, their services as Near East experts would be urgently needed, and arranging their appointment would only be hampered if in the meantime they threw themselves into the maw of the military bureaucracy.

That advice didn't sit at all well with Lawrence. Surely adding to his gloom was that in those opening days the war did seem headed for the early conclusion that most predicted-except with the wrong side winning.

In provoking the conflict, German strategy had been predicated on an extremely bold, even reckless scheme. The plan was to only lightly defend its eastern frontier and cede ground against Russia's advancing armies, while launching a ma.s.sive offensive against the French and British armies to the west in hopes of knocking those countries out of the war before they could fully mobilize. With that front thus closed down, the Germans could then turn their full attention to the Russians.

By the beginning of September, it appeared as if the Germans might succeed beyond their wildest dreams. On the Western Front, their armies had swept through neutral Belgium and then turned south, scattering the disorganized French and British forces before them. They now stood on the banks of the Marne River, just thirty miles from Paris. The surprise had come on the Eastern Front, where rather than simply employing defensive stalling tactics as planned, a vastly outnumbered German army had leapt to the attack; it had already annihilated one blundering Russian invasion force, and was about to destroy another. ”Home by Christmas” suddenly seemed a conservative slogan, and for the soldiers of the Triple Entente-Great Britain, France, and Russia-a haunting one.

But then in the second week of September the tide abruptly turned. In the engagement that would become known as the ”miracle of the Marne,” the British and French checked the German advance and began slowly to push them back through the French countryside. This war was not going to be the ”short, cleansing thunderstorm” the German chancellor had so confidently predicted; instead, after six weeks of combat, as many as half a million men were already dead, and stalemate was setting in.

For Lawrence, to be holed up in the leafy confines of Oxford at such a time, poring over a half-inch-to-the-mile map of an empty desert a thousand miles from the nearest battlefield, must have felt a terribly painful academic exercise. What's more, he surely reasoned, the reversal of fortunes in France meant his purgatory was likely to continue; if the Turks hadn't come into the war when it appeared Germany was running the table, why do so now when the Germans were retreating?

”I am writing a learned work on Moses and his wanderings,” he acidly wrote to a friend in Lebanon on September 18. ”I have a horrible fear that the Turks do not intend to go to war.”

IF LAWRENCE HADN'T appreciated the warning signs in the runup to war, William Yale, overseeing the construction of the Standard Oil road in southern Palestine, missed them completely. In fact, just as a telegram delivered to an Oklahoma oilfield had presaged his being dispatched to the Near East, so a second telegram to his remote construction camp in the Palestinian desert nearly a year later informed him of the war's outbreak.

With all work on the road project brought to an immediate stop, Yale hurried back to Jerusalem that August. He found a city in tumult. Among the sizable expatriate community of Europeans and Americans, most families were already packing up for the journey home. Leaving ahead of them in answer to their governments' general mobilization calls were the French and German men of fighting age (the British wouldn't initiate a draft until early 1916).

”We went down to the railroad station to see them off,” Yale remembered. ”Like young collegians on their way to a football game they shouted, cheered, and sang. As the train for Jaffa pulled out of the yards, the Germans in one car sang enthusiastically Deutschland ber alles, while the Frenchmen in another car sang just as l.u.s.tily, La Ma.r.s.eillaise. The friends of yesterday were off on their great adventure.”

In contrast to the frenzied activity around him, the American oilman suddenly found he had little to do. With the United States staying out of the war, Socony headquarters ordered Yale to remain in Palestine, figuring he could at least watch over the company's soon-to-arrive oil drilling equipment until they decided on their next move. But even this caretaker task was soon mooted. Invoking a state-of-emergency decree, the Ottoman government requisitioned the incoming fleet of Standard Oil trucks as soon as they were unloaded at the Jaffa docks. Shortly afterward, the British navy stopped the freighter bringing most of Socony's piping and drilling machinery to Palestine and diverted all of it to an impoundment lot in Egypt.

With the community of foreigners in Jerusalem now reduced to a handful, Yale pa.s.sed his time that late summer by playing tennis and canasta, and engaging in long, obsessive discussions with his fellow expatriates about what might come next in world events. A special focus of these discussions was trying to read the tea leaves of regional politics, sifting for clues as to whether or not the Young Turks in Constantinople would take their country into the fray. For a young man given to action, this imposed quietude was maddening, and Yale grew increasingly anxious for something to do.

But the old admonishment to be careful what you wish for soon found application when Yale was asked to play minder to a dozen unruly American oil workers. The men, most from Texas or Oklahoma, had been part of the intended work crew at the Kornub drilling site, and had been aboard the same freighter that the British diverted to Egypt. With time on their hands and money in their pockets, the oil workers proceeded to cut such a scandalous swath through the streets of Cairo-no mean feat in that libertine city-that the local Socony office had sent telegrams to headquarters urging that they be returned to the United States. Instead, 26 Broadway decided to forward the men to Yale, perhaps hoping that a stint in the Holy Land might serve to reacquaint them with their Christian virtues.

If so, that hope was misplaced. If anything, the opportunity to tread the land of Jesus seemed to spur the oilmen to even more outrageous public behavior. In observing this, as well as their office's rapidly dwindling cash reserves-the war in Europe had brought a temporary halt to international money transfers-Yale and his supervisor decided that a neat solution to both problems lay in withholding the men's pay and instead placing them on five-dollar-a-week allowances. Sensitive to the workers' disappointment with this arrangement, on allowance day Yale took to disbursing the money with one hand while holding a loaded six-shooter in the other.

But his troublesome charges also served a very useful function. In constant contact with Jerusalem's most unsavory residents, the oilmen were like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine, the first recipients of every dark rumor floating through the city-and with the spreading war in Europe, those rumors were turning exceedingly dark. It was precisely at tense times like these that the rich mosaic of the Ottoman world-a mosaic composed of a myriad of religious and tribal and ethnic groups-could quite easily become a grim counterimage of itself, a place where the various communities drew protectively inward, and where ancient feuds and suspicions and jealousies exploded into violence. Not surprisingly, this danger was greatest in the most ”mixed” corners of the empire, and with its melange of Arab and Turk and Armenian, of Muslim and Jew and Christian, all living cheek by jowl, there was no more cosmopolitan city in the Near East than Jerusalem.

By the end of August, stories were floating in from the countryside of Muslim vigilante armies forming, of Jews and Armenians being attacked, and while most of these tales proved false, they fed the ever-thickening air of tension. In the Old City, shopkeepers were raising prices and h.o.a.rding their wares, ever more convinced that Constantinople would soon enter the war. What was still not at all clear, though, was which side it might join, and another fault line formed between those hoping for the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia and those desiring the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

On September 8, the sense of menace took more personal form for Yale and the other foreigners remaining in the city. Taking advantage of the chaos in Europe, the Young Turk government announced an end to the Capitulations, the humiliating concessions extracted by Western powers over the previous four centuries that largely exempted foreigners from Ottoman law. Yale noticed the effect immediately. Previously obsequious local officials became haughty, demanding. On Jerusalem's narrow sidewalks, residents no longer automatically stepped to the street at the approach of a Western ”white man.” On one occasion, when Yale and a couple of other foreign residents were visiting the Mount of Olives, a group of young boys pelted them with stones. To Yale, Jerusalem more and more felt like a pile of tinder in search of a match.

FOR OTHERS IN Palestine, the revoking of the Capitulations took on far more ominous import than a little stone-throwing. Left particularly vulnerable were the tens of thousands of Jewish emigres who had come into the region over the previous thirty years.

Most had come in two successive waves. The first, of which the Aaronsohn family had been a part, had been an exodus out of central and southeastern Europe in the 1880s. This was followed by a second aliyah (literally ”ascent” in Hebrew) in the early 1900s, mainly composed of Russian Jews escaping a new round of czarist political persecution and state-sanctioned pogroms. Although culturally these groups were very different-most of the first-wave emigres tended to be religious and socially conservative, while many in the second were secular socialists-what they shared was that under the terms of the Capitulations many remained citizens of their birthplace.

That arrangement had historically worked to the benefit of both the emigres and the Western powers. With it, the Jews had recourse to the protection of their former homelands, just as those foreign governments were given legal pretext to meddle in Ottoman affairs under the guise of tending to their transplanted citizens. While this bizarre system gave rise to a number of paradoxes, surely none was more grotesque than the spectacle of czarist Russia stoutly defending the rights and well-being of its Jewish citizens in Palestine, while systematically brutalizing that same religious minority inside Russia. With the revoking of the Capitulations, all this was coming to an end. Additionally, if Turkey did finally join the war, at least one portion of this Jewish community was likely headed for an unpleasant future; with thousands of the first-wave emigres still holding Austro-Hungarian pa.s.sports, and thousands from the second holding Russian ones, one group or the other was going to end up being cla.s.sified as ”belligerent nationals.” As had already happened to countless innocent civilians across the breadth of Europe, the losers in this lottery could then be subject to deportation or internment.

In all this, most of the residents of Zichron Yaakov, including the Aaronsohn family, actually benefited from a different paradox. These Romanian Jews had come to Palestine after being effectively barred from citizens.h.i.+p in an independent Romania. By default, they thus remained citizens of Romania's preindependence master, namely the Ottoman Empire. Unlike other Jews in Palestine, then, Aaron Aaronsohn and other Zichron residents could look upon the revocation of the Capitulations with a measure of equanimity, perhaps even a touch of schadenfreude.

That sentiment was extremely short-lived, however, for the very next day, September 9, Constantinople announced a general mobilization of its armed forces. Under the curious rationale that this was necessary to ”preserve Ottoman neutrality,” the mobilization called for male citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to show up for military conscription. Worse, this edict extended to most all citizens-traditionally, Jews and a number of Christian sects had been exempt-and the regime was further rescinding the age-old system whereby the affluent could escape service by payment of a special bedel, or tax.

Aaron Aaronsohn was sufficiently acquainted with the Ottoman way of governance to know that this last clause meant nothing of the sort-it simply meant that obtaining an exemption now would entail paying more bribes to more officials-but the mobilization deeply worried the agronomist on a broader level. As recent events in Europe ill.u.s.trated, an army called up almost always meant an army going to war; once the machinery and bureaucracy of war had been set in motion and popular hysteria properly ginned up, there was simply no easy way to shut it all down again. Ever since the outbreak of the European conflict, Aaronsohn had heard a rash of conflicting rumors from his friends in the Ottoman military and political hierarchy over what Constantinople might do, and this cloudiness was exacerbated by the vague picture to be gleaned of what was occurring in Europe. In the face of such uncertainty, Aaronsohn, like most of the Jewish residents of Palestine, simply clung to the hope that reason might yet prevail and the war be avoided.

Interestingly, it appears his apprehensions had less to do with which side Turkey might join than with the act of joining itself. Part of this may have stemmed from a common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades-no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer-but it was also born of a particular feature of Ottoman war-making. In the event of conflict, both military and civilian authorities would suddenly have license to embark on a wholesale requisitioning spree-”pillaging” might be a more apt term-as they grabbed up whatever they deemed necessary for the war effort. While this campaign was sure to affect Arab and Jewish villages alike, it would naturally be more zealous in those modern or prosperous places that had more to offer-places like Zichron Yaakov and Athlit, for example. Already by mid-September 1914, the Aaronsohn family and their neighbors in Zichron began hiding away whatever they had of value, braced for the ruinous arrival of the requisition officer.

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 4, 1914, Curt Prfer was in a room of the Hotel Germania in Constantinople meeting with a burly, blond-haired German man in his thirties named Robert Mors. Until recently, Mors had been a policeman in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, and their main topic of conversation that afternoon was how they might destroy the British administration in Egypt through a campaign of bombings, a.s.sa.s.sinations, and Islamic insurrection. The two men even bandied about ideas on how best to blow up the Suez Ca.n.a.l.

Their meeting was remarkable on both a personal and political level. Just a month earlier, Prfer had been scratching out a modest living delivering lectures on Oriental languages in Munich; now he was a key operative in an intelligence mission so secretive that its existence was known to probably fewer than three dozen people in the world. That's because the ultimate purpose of this mission was to bring the still-neutral Ottoman Empire into the war, and among those with no inkling of Prfer's activities in Constantinople could be included virtually the entire Young Turk political leaders.h.i.+p. Credit for this peculiar set of circ.u.mstances belonged to Prfer's old mentor, Max von Oppenheim, and to one of the stranger diplomatic accords ever put to paper.

As the war clouds had thickened over Europe during that long summer of 1914, a clear majority of the thirty or so senior members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the junta that controlled the empire, wanted to stay clear of the coming European firestorm. A small faction, however, had energetically sought to form an alliance with the Triple Entente, while another, led by thirty-two-year-old war minister Enver Pasha, tried to do the same with the Central Powers. Enver won out. In a case of exquisitely poor timing, he had signed a mutual defense treaty with Germany on the afternoon of August 2, just hours before Germany declared war on Russia and the conflict began.

Except, as it turned out, Enver Pasha had conducted these negotiations without ever consulting most of his CUP colleagues; indeed, at the time of the accord's signing, only three or four of Enver's closest confederates were aware of it. Even more astounding, Enver continued to withhold this information from the rest of the Turkish government throughout the first weeks of the war. As the young war minister told his impatient German allies, he needed more time to lay the groundwork before dropping this little surprise on his ministerial colleagues. To that end, a precipitating event, something that might turn both the nation and the rest of the Young Turk leaders.h.i.+p away from the prevailing neutralist sentiment, could prove very handy.

Enver had come to the right people for, as neutral Belgium had recently learned, precipitating events was something of a German specialty. To help out his secret Turkish ally, Kaiser Wilhelm II could think of no better guide than Max von Oppenheim and his preachings on pan-Islamic revolt. If Islamic insurrection could be fostered in the various Muslim territories controlled by the British-and most especially in that land Britain had stolen from Constantinople, Egypt-surely it would be obvious to both the leaders.h.i.+p and populace of the Ottoman Empire that they needed to come into the war.

But if the ultimate goal was to bring Turkey in, at least some in the German high command that autumn saw an upside to it remaining neutral just a bit longer. So long as it did, the Ottoman Empire could serve as the ideal launch pad for German destabilization efforts, a kind of Trojan horse from which to carry out attacks on the surrounding British colonies with very little risk of repercussion. That neutrality could also serve as a convenient s.h.i.+eld while Germany laid the groundwork for the most important military operation to be conducted in the region, an a.s.sault on the Suez Ca.n.a.l. In mid-August, the kaiser signed a secret directive calling for the creation of the Nachrichtenstelle fr den Orient (Intelligence Bureau for the East), to be based in Constantinople and to serve as the central clearinghouse for Germany's subversion campaigns in the Near East. The director of that bureau was to be Max von Oppenheim. Among Oppenheim's first acts upon a.s.suming the post was to put out an offer of employment to his former protege, Curt Prfer.

Oppenheim's confidence in his apprentice was certainly deserved. No sooner had he checked into the Hotel Germania on the evening of September 3 than Prfer set to work. Early the next morning, he met with one of Enver Pasha's chief lieutenants, a young Turkish staff officer named Omar Fawzi Bey, and together they worked up a whole list of prospective projects to strike at British Egypt: hiring Bedouin tribesmen to attack isolated British garrisons along the Suez Ca.n.a.l; sneaking so-called komitadji units of underground fighters into the country to foment Islamic insurrection; launching a terror campaign of targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations and indiscriminate bombings. Even if he remained dubious of some of the more novel schemes put forward by Fawzi Bey and his confederates-one involved scuttling a cement-laden freighter at the narrowest point of the Suez Ca.n.a.l-Prfer appreciated the enthusiasm and creative thinking that went into them.

When not plotting with Fawzi Bey or Sheikh Shawish, an Egyptian firebrand hated and feared by the British, Prfer was in regular conference with the four or five other Nachrichtenstelle operatives who had already arrived in the Turkish capital. At these meetings, often also attended by the three or four German emba.s.sy officials clued to Oppenheim's scheme, ambitious plans were laid for sabotage and subversion campaigns throughout the Muslim world: in Egypt, in Russian Central Asia, in Afghanistan, even as far away as India.

It was at the conclusion of one such meeting on the afternoon of September 7 that Prfer was brought before the man who had made it all possible, Minister of War Enver Pasha. Small, extravagantly uniformed, and extraordinarily handsome-”the handsomest man in the Turkish army,” the New York Times gushed-Enver had piercing dark eyes and a dramatic mustache, upturned and waxed in the Prussian style. That was not coincidence. As the military liaison to Germany in the early 1910s, he had quickly a.s.sumed the manner and style of its military elite, and now fancied himself more Prussian than the Prussians. Although Curt Prfer was never much given to psychoa.n.a.lysis, the few words he scribbled into his diary that night in describing the thirty-two-year-old Enver-by four months Prfer's junior-offer one of the more incisive portraits of the man who was to practically single-handedly destroy the Ottoman Empire: ”A man of stone. A face immovable, well-formed, beautiful in the feminine sense. Groomed to the point of foppishness. Along with a streak of shocking hardness. 'We can be more cruel than the British.' The man wants something, but the something does not come.”

But of all the meetings he attended and the schemes he heard in those first few days in Constantinople, Prfer was most intrigued by the unique situation facing Robert Mors, the cas.h.i.+ered Alexandria policeman. Mors had happened to be out of Egypt when the war began and, not surprisingly in light of his German citizens.h.i.+p, been summarily dismissed from his post by the British authorities. But in one of those quaint touches of ”gentlemen's war” that still typified World War I in its early days, the British were granting Mors safe pa.s.sage back to Alexandria in order to collect his stranded family. To Prfer, this made Mors the ideal conduit for launching his subversion campaign. Given his status as a privileged European, Mors was also far more likely than a local to be able to secrete contraband articles among his personal possessions-and here Prfer was thinking of bomb-making components-and smuggle them into the country. To impress the former policeman on the importance of his mission, Prfer arranged an audience with Enver Pasha the day before Mors was to sail for Alexandria with bombing detonators hidden in his luggage. The Turkish war minister warmly thanked Mors for his service.

Even though the British quickly suspected some sort of pact had been struck between Enver and the German high command, they remained utterly in the dark as to the specifics. Their apprehensions grew, however, once Prfer and Oppenheim's other intelligence bureau operatives began showing up in Constantinople. ”Even without [Turkey joining the] war,” British amba.s.sador Louis Mallet cabled to London on September 15, ”German machinations are so various here that I should not be surprised if they managed to engineer some scheme against the Ca.n.a.l, either by means of a so-called neutral s.h.i.+p from [the] Syrian coast, or by agents on land.”

Against this were the constant a.s.surances the British amba.s.sador was given by Ottoman government officials. From the sultan and prime minister on down, Mallet heard the steady refrain that Turkey had no militarist intentions and only wished to stay out of the European conflict. While certainly some of these protesting senior officials were dissembling, others were not; incredibly, many still had no inkling of Enver's August 2 accord with Germany.

Mallet took his suspicions directly to Enver on October 5. Along with his other talents, however, Enver was a skilled liar. Not only did he deny any sinister intent behind the troop movements in Palestine but, according to Mallet, ”laughed at [the] idea of individual Germans undertaking irresponsible enterprises against [the] Ca.n.a.l or elsewhere.”

Except the Turkish war minister was about to get caught out. A few days prior to Mallet's meeting with Enver, Robert Mors had been arrested at Alexandria harbor with his bombing detonators. Facing possible execution under Egypt's martial law statutes, he soon told his interrogators all he knew of the German-Turkish plots against Egypt, as well as of his best-wishes audience with Enver Pasha on the eve of his voyage. Mors was especially expansive when it came to his relations.h.i.+p with Omar Fawzi Bey and Curt Prfer. For Prfer, the most d.a.m.ning part came when the foiled smuggler readily admitted that the detonators in his luggage had been intended for use with bombs being manufactured in Egypt. When asked how he knew that, Mors replied, ”Because once I found Sheikh Shawish sitting with Dr. Prfer in the latter's room at the Hotel Germania. They were copying in Arabic a recipe for making bombs.... [It] contained directions, a list of the component chemicals, and a sketch of a bomb in the right-hand bottom corner.”

The British in Cairo showed considerable forbearance in the Mors incident, presumably in hopes that the more moderate elements in the Constantinople regime might yet rein in the adventurist Enver and keep Turkey out of the war. At his hastily held court-martial, Mors was sentenced to life in prison, while all mention of his meeting with the Turkish war minister was withheld from the public record. Cairo authorities were less forgiving of the man who had once lived in their midst. For his central role in the Mors affair, Curt Prfer was to soon have a British bounty on his head.

THE OLD War Office Building at the corner of Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall in central London is an imposing neo-baroque structure, a five-story monolith of white Portland stone with thirty-foot-high cupolas at each of its corners. Inside, it has the feel of a particularly elegant gentlemen's club, with marble staircases linking its floors, great crystal chandeliers, and mosaic-tiled hallways. In the more select of its nearly one thousand rooms, the walls are oak-paneled with niches cut out for marble fireplaces. In autumn 1914, this building was headquarters to Great Britain's Imperial General Staff, those seniormost officers tasked with overseeing their nation's war effort. It was also to this building that T. E. Lawrence, at last done with his Wilderness of Zin report, was dispatched in mid-October to take up his new position as a civilian cartographer in the General Staff's Geographical Section.

By then, ”Section” was rapidly becoming a misnomer, for within a week of Lawrence's arrival, the last of the office's military cartographers was s.h.i.+pped off to the battlefront in France, leaving just him and his immediate supervisor behind. Thus Lawrence quickly found himself doing the work of a half dozen men: organizing the various war-theater maps, adding new details as reports came in from the front, briefing senior commanders on those maps' salient features.

One might imagine that for a young man-Lawrence had just turned twenty-six-to be suddenly thrust into the very nerve center of his nation's military command, to be in daily conference with generals and admirals, would be a heady experience. But one would imagine wrong. To the contrary, Lawrence seemed to take a decidedly jaundiced view of his new surroundings, its denizens fresh grist for his mordant wit.

Part of his disdain may have stemmed from how much military culture resembled that of the English public school system of which he was a product: the endless bowing and sc.r.a.ping to authority; the rigidly defined hierarchical structure as denoted by the special ties worn by uppercla.s.smen and prefects in the schools, by the number of hash marks and pips on coatsleeves in the military; the special privileges bestowed or denied as a result. As Lawrence quipped to a friend shortly after arriving at the War Office, it appeared that the truly grand staircases of the building were reserved for the exclusive use of field marshals and ”charwomen,” or cleaning ladies.

His lack of awe probably also derived from the overall caliber of the building's occupants. With most active-service military officers now in France, the General Staff had been filled out with men brought up from the reserves or mustered out of retirement, and even to Lawrence's untrained eye it was clear many hadn't a clue of what they were supposed to be doing. As in any inst.i.tution, this sense of inadequacy was often masked by an aura of extreme self-importance: at the War Office, freshly minted colonels and generals were forever striding briskly down hallways, memos in hand, or calling urgent staff meetings, or sending one of the Boy Scout messenger boys up to the Geographical Section for the latest map of Battlefield X, to be supplied ten minutes ago.

One by-product of this climate of puffery, however, was that it led directly to Lawrence's being inducted into the military, the circ.u.mstances of which provided him with one of his favorite later anecdotes.

Shortly after starting at the General Staff, he was ushered into the august presence of General Henry Rawlinson. Rawlinson was about to leave London to take up command of British forces in Belgium, and Lawrence had been summoned to brief him on the newly updated Belgian field maps. Except, according to Lawrence, Rawlinson went apoplectic at the sight of his civilian dress, and bellowed, ”I want to talk to an officer!” Since the Geographical Section now consisted of just two men, Lawrence was immediately bundled off to the Army and Navy Store, there to get himself fitted out as a second lieutenant, while the paperwork for his ”commission” was hastily drawn up. The uniform wouldn't truly solve the problem, however; in the years ahead, Lawrence's disregard for military protocol, manifested both in a usually unkempt appearance and a relaxed manner that bordered on the insolent, would drive his superior officers to distraction time and again.

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