The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy Page B

unified Arab nation. Vanished also was Lawrence’s spirit for the fight, or desire for leadership. As his collaboration with Churchill drew to an end, he legally changed his name and petitioned to reenlist in the British military as a private. As he explained to a friend, he never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again.
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    On a country lane in the southwestern English county of Dorset sits a two-story cottage surrounded by rhododendron bushes. It is a tiny place, less than 700 square feet, consisting of two small rooms on each floor connected by a steep and rickety staircase, redolent with the smell of leather and old books. Curiously, it has neither a kitchen nor a toilet. Known as Clouds Hill, it was the last home of T. E. Lawrence. Not that this was how he was known to his neighbors; he was Private T. E. Shaw, a reclusive serviceman rarely seen except when riding his beloved Brough motorcycle through the countryside.
    After rejoining the British military in 1921, Lawrence spent most of the next 14 years in lowly military positions in bases scattered about Britain. While stationed in Dorset in 1929, he bought Clouds Hill as a place to go in refuge, to read and listen to music. In walking through the claustrophobic cottage, however, it is hard to escape the image of a broken and lonely man.
    Along with the disappointment of seeing his dream for the Arab world slip away, the postwar Lawrence clearly suffered from what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder; throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, he suffered bouts of depression, cutting off contact with all but a handful of old friends. In 1935, at the age of 46, he decided to retire from the military—the only “family” he had known for 20 years—but this was a decision that also filled him with a certain dread, unsure of how he would fill his unregimented days. As he wrote to a friend on May 6, 1935, as he was settling into Clouds Hill permanently: “At present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die. Let’s hope that will not be my continuing state.”
    It would not be. Precisely a week later, Lawrence had a fatal motorcycle accident near Clouds Hill. At his passing, Winston Churchill eulogized, “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.”
    In the Arab world, memory of Lawrence is far more mixed; indeed, the changing view of him there underscores the lingering bitterness still felt over the peace imposed nearly a century ago. That becomes clear when I ask Sheik al-Atoun in his reception tent in Mudowarra how Lawrence is regarded today. At first, he tries to tactfully skirt the question.
    â€œSome people think he was really trying to help the Arabs,” he replies, “but others think it was all a trick, that Lawrence was actually working for the British Empire all along.” When I press for his opinion, the sheik grows slightly discomfited. “May I speak frankly? Maybe some of the very old ones still believe he was a friend of the Arabs, but almost everyone else, we know the truth. Even my grandfather, before he died, he believed he had been tricked.”
    It was a comment that seemed to encapsulate the ultimate tragedy of both Lawrence and the Middle East—but there is a far more graphic illustration of that tragedy. It is to be found at Carchemish.
    It was at Carchemish that Lawrence first came to despise the despotism of Ottoman Turkey and to imagine an independent Arab nation with Syria at its heart; today, of course, Turkey is a democracy while Syria is in the grips of an unspeakably savage civil war. Karkamis, where the town’s sleepiness gives way to a tinge of menace, sits at the very dividing line between those two realities.
    The hilltop sprawl of Hittite ruins is now a Turkish