Footnotes

'A DAMNABLE JUDGEMENT UPON OUR OWN FLESH & BLOOD': Lawrence exults at the abolition of execution for cowardice: 'When your letter came I said Nunc dimittis...and the servant through whose faithfulness this great work had come about didn't seem to matter, he had done his duty: that was all./ Then the Lords gave me a fright. Lord Allenby too, whom I like and admire. Surely if I had been in London, able to see him, he would at least have kept silence – if not supported you./ Yet, doesn't it make you surer you were right, to see all the General Staff opposing you?/ In the end you downed the Lords, as you had downed the Government. I feel it is a blessed victory. The old state of law hurt me. It was such a damnable judgement upon our own flesh & blood./ There are 1000 other Service reforms which should be carried through, to make them abreast – in morality & decency – of normal public life and opinion. Perhaps you may do more, in your time: but this effort will have made you very marked, for the moment... I haven't really said thank you for all you did: because I feel that it was only your duty really. People who care anything at all about their countries don't like to see them fouling themselves./ Curse the Brass Hats: poor reptiles. They always swear that these things are necessary to discipline. A word in your ear – discipline itself is not necessary. We fight better without it. Yet being Englishmen we are born with it, and can no more lose it than our finger nails".

The Labour MP Ernest Thurtle was author of Military Discipline and Democracy (1920) and Shootings at Dawn (1929): 'In 1924 he introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty in such cases, and achieved his aim in 1930, a considerable personal triumph that did much to humanize military justice in Britain' (OBNB). Lawrence had written to him earlier that as a swerving airman he could not publicly endorse his campaign, suggesting instead he quote him in his former incarnation as Colonel Lawrence without asking permission. Seventy six years later the British Government were to pardon 306 men shot during the Great War for cowardice or desertion. This fine letter is published in The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett (1938).