Lawrence shone as a youth neither in studies nor in games, and both as a youth and man he had a magnificent faculty for silence. By blood and genius he was a soldier. But duty was the supreme law of life for him; and at the bidding of what he deemed to be duty, he surrendered a soldier’s career and entered the Indian Civil Service. His silent energy, his strong brain, his passion for work, his chivalrous loyalty to righteousness, quickly assured him a great career. He was above the middle height, strongly built, with an eager, forward gait. His massive head gave him a sort of kingly look—the forehead broad, the eyes deep-set and grey, but with a gleam in them as of a sword-blade. The firm lips had a saddened curve; the face was ploughed deep with furrows of thought and work. His voice, when his feelings were aroused, had a singular resonance and timbre, and his whole aspect was that of silent, half-melancholy simplicity and strength. But Lawrence was exactly the man for a great crisis. He had a kingly faculty for choosing fit instruments. He saw with perfect clearness every detail of the visible landscape; but he had also that subtler vision—which only great poets and great statesmen possess—of the tendencies and forces which underlie external facts and determine their flow. The Celtic element in him, perhaps, gave Lawrence that rare and subtle faculty; but by virtue of his Scottish strain he was essentially a man of action. He could grasp a great purpose with a hand of steel, and hold it unshaken through all the shocks of conflict and adversity. Lawrence, it may be added, was pre-eminently fortunate in his officers. Partly by the attraction which draws like to like, and partly by his own rare genius for choosing fit instruments, he had gathered round him a group of splendid soldiers and administrators, all in the prime of life. Nicholson, for example, was only thirty-five; Edwardes and Neville Chamberlain only thirty-seven. The general average of age, indeed, on Lawrence’s staff was much below that of India in general. All the energy of youth, in brief, was in Lawrence’s men; all the sagacity of ripest statesmanship was in Lawrence himself.