Lawrence of Arabia: The Man Behind the Myth (Complete Autobiographical Works, Memoirs & Letters) E-Book
T.E. Lawrence
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
"Lawrence of Arabia: The Man Behind the Myth" is an essential compilation that meticulously chronicles T. E. Lawrence's multifaceted identity as a soldier, writer, and intellectual. Through his poignant autobiographical works, memoirs, and extensive letters, readers are afforded a rare glimpse into both the personal tribulations and the geopolitical tumult of the early 20th century. The literary style is marked by Lawrence's poetic prose and keen psychological insight, reflecting his complex relationship with the Arab people and his role in the fractious World War I landscape, thereby situating this work at the confluence of historical documentation and literary expression. T. E. Lawrence, also known for his seminal work "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," was shaped by a background deeply embedded in the study of archaeology, history, and diverse cultures. His experiences in the Arab Revolt not only solidified his reputation as a military strategist but also led him to grapple with questions of identity and legacy. The tensions between his public persona and private self defined his later writings, as he sought to demystify the myths surrounding his life and contributions. This compilation is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the intricacies of Lawrence's life and the broader implications of colonialism in the Middle East. Scholars and enthusiasts alike will find value in this nuanced portrayal that deftly bridges autobiographical storytelling with critical historical analysis, unearthing the man behind the legend. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Lawrence of Arabia: The Man Behind the Myth (Complete Autobiographical Works, Memoirs & Letters)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together T. E. Lawrence’s principal autobiographical writings and personal correspondence to present a sustained, first-hand portrait of the man often reduced to a legend. Rather than retelling exploits from a distance, it assembles the author’s own voices across war narrative, reflective essay, barracks memoir, and letters. The purpose is to allow readers to trace his self-understanding as it develops in differing circumstances and registers, and to place celebrated episodes within a broader life of work, thought, and private struggle. It is, by design, an immersion in Lawrence’s own words, not a retrospective biography or interpretive commentary.
The volume includes Four major components. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s account of his wartime involvement with the Arab Revolt during the First World War, written after the events it describes. The Evolution of a Revolt is an early post-war article that distills strategic observations from that experience. The Mint records his later service in the ranks, capturing daily life and institutional pressures from the inside. The Letters (1915–1935) span two decades of correspondence and offer an intimate, contemporaneous record of his concerns, friendships, and working methods. Together, these texts frame both public action and private reflection across a formative period.
The genres represented are varied yet complementary. Seven Pillars of Wisdom reads as a long-form autobiographical narrative, blending field observation and reflective analysis. The Evolution of a Revolt is a concise essay, part memoir and part strategic exposition. The Mint is a barracks memoir attentive to routines, speech, and the feel of institutional life. The letters belong to the epistolary tradition, moving from practical matters to literary craft, from policy to personal mood. The shifts in mode—from expansive narrative to compressed essay, from crafted memoir to off-the-cuff correspondence—allow readers to hear Lawrence think aloud as well as to watch him shape history into prose.
Across these forms, certain themes recur. There is the tension between public role and private conscience, the question of duty amid shifting alliances, and the ethical pressure of command in irregular conditions. Cultural encounter—its possibilities and misunderstandings—threads through the wartime narrative and resurfaces in later reflections. The costs of fame and the appeal of anonymity form a counterpoint between the high visibility of war and the deliberately ordinary life described thereafter. Above all, the works return to self-scrutiny: motives are examined, methods questioned, and experience reworked in language that seeks precision while acknowledging ambiguity.
Stylistically, Lawrence’s prose is notable for its visual clarity, rhythmic control, and a habit of fusing concrete detail with meditative turns. He writes with an eye for landscape and texture, then pivots to ideas about movement, morale, and the moral weight of decisions. The longer narrative builds by juxtaposition—scene, reflection, and characterization arranged as a mosaic rather than a linear chronicle. The essay compresses his thinking into a few salient principles. The barracks memoir pares language to the bone, echoing the constraints it depicts. The letters range widely in tone, but even at their most casual they show a craftsman attentive to cadence and exactness.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom sets the collection’s scale and stakes. It follows Lawrence’s work with Arab forces during the First World War and explores the demands of coalition warfare across difficult terrain and political complexity. The text balances movement and pause: travel, negotiation, and preparation sit beside interior reckoning. Without rehearsing outcomes, the narrative emphasizes planning, improvisation, and the interpersonal fabric that makes action possible. Notably, it treats landscape and culture as active presences rather than mere backdrops. The book’s endurance owes as much to this careful, self-aware construction as to the events themselves, foregrounding character and consequence over spectacle.
The Evolution of a Revolt condenses the wartime experience into an analytical sketch. It clarifies how certain methods emerged from circumstance and what, in Lawrence’s view, enabled or constrained effectiveness. The article is less concerned with memoiristic color than with extracting principles and limits from practice. It offers readers a bridge between the vivid narrative of the larger book and the considered, post-war effort to understand what happened and why. In this way, it shows Lawrence as both participant and theorist, testing the portability of lessons learned on the ground without reducing them to formula or erasing the contingencies that shaped them.
The Mint marks an intentional pivot in subject and stance. Here the focus is institutional routine, not wartime maneuver: training grounds, discipline, friendships, and frictions that define life in uniform at the lowest level. The prose is stripped, immediate, and attentive to speech patterns, bodies, and the texture of days. Its interest lies in exposure rather than display—how systems shape individuals, how anonymity can both protect and abrade, how reputation shadows even when uninvited. The contrast with the earlier narrative is deliberate and illuminating, revealing a writer who seeks not a single persona but a truthful register for different kinds of experience.
The Letters (1915–1935) place the public texts in a living chronology. Written to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances across two decades, they capture the immediacy of decision-making, the drafting of projects, the strain and solace of daily life, and the changing concerns of a post-war world. Shifts in tone—from practical to playful, guarded to candid—reveal a mind responsive to audience and occasion. They also document the labor behind the books: research, revision, and the fits and starts of composition. Read alongside the narratives and essay, the letters add context and counterpoint, complicating any single, settled picture of their author.
Considered as a whole, these works show a writer wrestling with representation: how to tell experience without distorting it, how to honor collaborators and contexts, how to balance analysis with the felt weight of events. The collection invites readers to see continuity across sharp contrasts—the strategist and the private, the public figure and the self-effacing craftsman. It also makes plain how Lawrence revisited his past, seeking clearer language and fairer balance while acknowledging limits. The result is less a monument than a conversation across time among his own texts, each testing and refining the others’ claims.
The enduring significance of this body of work lies in its combined historical immediacy and literary ambition. For students of the First World War and its aftermath, it offers primary perspectives across theaters and institutions. For readers of prose, it displays an unusual range: panoramic narrative, concentrated argument, lived-in memoir, and revealing correspondence. The collection also speaks to broader questions—leadership under uncertainty, the ethics of alliance, the burden of recognition, and the uses of language in shaping memory. Its value is cumulative; the texts correct, illuminate, and deepen one another, rewarding both linear reading and selective return.
This introduction invites a reading attentive to voice, context, and the interplay among forms. Begin anywhere—narrative, essay, memoir, or letter—and the others will shed light on what you find. What emerges is not a dismantled myth so much as a rebalanced portrait: a writer-practitioner who thought carefully about action, a public figure who sought privacy, and an artist who made prose carry both world and conscience. By gathering these works together, the collection offers the fullest available self-portrait in Lawrence’s own modes, allowing readers to encounter the man behind the myth on the terms he set for himself.
Author Biography
Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935), widely known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a British archaeologist, soldier, and writer whose life intersected the making of the modern Middle East and the literature of war and travel. Trained as a historian and field archaeologist before World War I, he became a liaison officer with the Arab Revolt and later the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a hybrid of memoir, ethnography, and campaign narrative. His combination of scholarship, unconventional warfare, and self-conscious prose made him one of the most discussed figures of the early twentieth century, generating both admiration and sustained controversy.
Lawrence’s formal education culminated at the University of Oxford in the late 1900s, where he read history and developed a lasting fascination with medieval warfare and architecture. As an undergraduate he walked across parts of Ottoman Syria to study castles, work that informed his thesis and sharpened his skills in surveying and languages. Early professional mentors included the archaeologists D. G. Hogarth and C. Leonard Woolley, under whose guidance he worked on excavations at Carchemish on the Euphrates in the early 1910s. This blend of fieldwork, textual study, and immersion in Arabic-speaking communities shaped both his analytic habits and literary voice.
With the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence’s regional knowledge brought him to British intelligence in Cairo. In 1916 he became liaison to forces aligned with the Hashemite-led Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Operating largely with the army of Emir Faisal, he helped plan and execute operations that prized mobility and local initiative, including raids on the Hejaz Railway and campaigns that opened the route to Aqaba and, later, Damascus. His wartime dispatches and later recollections emphasize negotiation, coalition-building, and the difficulty of reconciling British policy with Arab aspirations, themes that would preoccupy him long after the armistice.
After the war, Lawrence participated in the post-Ottoman settlement, advising at discussions connected to the Paris Peace Conference and later working in the early 1920s at the Colonial Office on Middle Eastern affairs. He also began composing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, revising it repeatedly and issuing a limited subscription edition in the mid-1920s. An abridgment, Revolt in the Desert, reached a wider audience soon after. Critics praised the book’s descriptive power and psychological candor while disputing certain claims and emphases. Lawrence himself presented the narrative as a partial, crafted account, inviting debate about the relationship between history, memory, and literary art.
Seeking anonymity and a different rhythm of life, Lawrence re-enlisted under assumed names, briefly in the Royal Tank Corps and then, for most of the 1920s and early 1930s, in the Royal Air Force. Experiences from training depots and barracks informed The Mint, a stark portrait of service life published posthumously. He also pursued literary translation, notably rendering The Odyssey into flexible modern English in 1932. Scholarship from his student years reappeared as Crusader Castles after his death, linking his academic beginnings to his mature prose. Across genres, he favored exact description, rhythmic sentences, and a reflective stance toward loyalty and power.
Publicly, Lawrence argued that Britain owed obligations to wartime Arab partners and criticized imperial arrangements that, in his view, discounted local agency. These convictions inform the moral architecture of Seven Pillars, whose scenes of alliance, bargaining, and disillusion explore the costs of revolt and the ambiguities of victory. In service correspondence he also supported practical reforms—among them the development of fast rescue boats for the RAF—reflecting a pragmatic bent alongside broader ethical concerns. His writing returns to themes of honor, restraint, cultural translation, and the burdens of fame, balancing admiration for desert lifeways with skepticism about romantic mythmaking.
In the mid-1930s Lawrence left the RAF and retired to a small retreat in Dorset, where he continued to revise texts and correspond. He died in 1935 from injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash near his home. Posthumous editions expanded access to his work, including The Mint and the scholarly assemblage of Crusader Castles. His reputation has since oscillated between heroization and critique, shaped in part by popular retellings, notably David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Today, historians and readers treat Seven Pillars as a major document of the First World War and cross-cultural encounter, studied alongside contemporary scholarship.
Historical Context
Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) wrote across a historical hinge: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War’s remaking of the Middle East, and Britain’s unsettled interwar decades. The writings gathered here—memoir, article, reportage, and letters—span 1915 to 1935, moving from wartime intelligence and insurgency to postwar statecraft and the textures of barracks life. They are shaped by the same forces: imperial policy from Cairo and London, rising Arab nationalism, new technologies of mobility and communication, and a modern mass media that fashioned and contested his public image. Each work reads the same century’s turmoil from a different vantage yet shares a common historical ground.
The late Ottoman world framed Lawrence’s early experiences. The Young Turk Revolution (1908) sought to centralize an empire stretching from Anatolia through Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Hejaz. In the same period, the Berlin–Baghdad Railway advanced German influence, while the Hejaz Railway (1900–1908) tied Damascus to Medina, transforming tribal and pilgrimage economies Lawrence later traversed. Ottoman reforms collided with Arabist currents in Damascus, Mecca, and Cairo. When the empire sided with the Central Powers in late 1914, the fate of its Arab provinces became a strategic focus for Britain and France, foreshadowing secret diplomacy, wartime insurgency, and postwar mandates that Lawrence would document and contest.
Before the war, Lawrence’s archaeological fieldwork supplied regional knowledge and networks that recur in his prose. Between 1911 and 1914 he excavated at Carchemish on the Euphrates, near Jerablus (then Ottoman Syria), under D. G. Hogarth and with Leonard Woolley for the British Museum. His 1909 walking survey of Crusader castles in Syria and Palestine, prepared through Oxford’s Jesus College, trained him in mapping, endurance, and the politics of local patronage. These Edwardian encounters with villages, tribal intermediaries, and Ottoman officials grounded the later wartime narrative’s ethnographic detail and informed his letters’ measured judgments about the interplay of archaeology, empire, and the region’s living communities.
War redirected those skills into intelligence. After the Ottoman entry in November 1914, Britain fortified Egypt and the Suez Canal. In December 1915 the Arab Bureau formed in Cairo under Sir Gilbert Clayton, with Ronald Storrs and Hogarth among its leading figures. Lawrence moved through this milieu of codework, mapping, and press liaison, where wartime narratives were drafted as carefully as operations. Cairo linked to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the Sinai and Palestine campaigns and to the Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yenbo. The bureaucracy’s memoranda and briefings, later echoed in his articles and letters, framed insurgency as both practical craft and political instrument.
The Arab Revolt emerged from the Hussein–McMahon correspondence of 1915–1916, which raised expectations of postwar Arab autonomy. On 10 June 1916, Sharif Hussein of Mecca began the revolt against Ottoman garrisons in the Hejaz. Lawrence’s liaison with Hussein’s son, Emir Faisal, began after their October 1916 meeting near Wadi Safra north of Yenbo. From coastal bases to inland encampments, Lawrence mediated British gold and guns, advice and aerial support, to coalition forces of tribes and sharifian regulars. Letters from this period continually contend with the gap between promises made in Cairo and London and the shifting realities on the ground from Ma‘an to Wadi Rum.
Guerrilla warfare in the Hejaz turned on mobility and selective shock rather than occupation. Raids on the Hejaz Railway—bridges, culverts, and trains between Medina and Damascus—undermined Ottoman logistics, while armored cars, explosives, and aerial reconnaissance represented the war’s technological frontier. The seizure of Aqaba on 6 July 1917, opening a Red Sea supply route to the north, exemplified a strategy of indirect approach supporting General Edmund Allenby’s advance in Palestine. The interplay between irregular forces and formal armies, and the coordination among camel columns, naval guns, and nascent airpower, made the campaign a modern laboratory whose lessons echo across the memoir, the analytical article, and later correspondence.
The war’s end brought a reckoning. Arab forces entered Damascus on 1 October 1918 alongside Allied columns, and an Arab administration briefly took shape under Faisal. Yet the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917) had already complicated promises of unity. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 entertained the King–Crane Commission’s findings for Syria, but the San Remo settlement (April 1920) assigned French and British mandates. After the Battle of Maysalun (24 July 1920), French forces expelled Faisal from Damascus. The conflict between wartime ideals and diplomatic partitions forms the persistent historical backdrop for Lawrence’s postwar critiques and his reconsiderations of method, motive, and consequence.
The 1921 Cairo Conference, chaired by Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office, became the hinge between revolt and mandate politics. Advisers including Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and Sir Percy Cox crafted a settlement installing Faisal as King of Iraq (Baghdad, August 1921) and Abdullah as Emir of Transjordan (Amman, 1921). Britain pursued cost-limited control through treaty arrangements and air policing, granting local elites constrained autonomy. This architecture—with its compromises over borders, tribal levies, and financial subsidies—pervades Lawrence’s writings after 1919. Whether in memoir reframing the revolt, in analytical essays, or in letters to officials and friends, the question is consistent: what durable polity could match wartime aspirations?
Inter-Arab rivalries sharpened the postwar settlement. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s Najdi expansion toppled Hashemite rule in the Hejaz in 1924–1925; Mecca fell in 1924 and Jeddah capitulated in December 1925. Britain recognized Ibn Saud through the Treaty of Jeddah (1927), and by 1932 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed. Meanwhile, Hashemite thrones persisted in Iraq and Transjordan under British tutelage. Lawrence’s wartime ties to the Hijaz and his later counsel during the 1920–1921 settlements meant he watched this reordering with acute interest. Across his letters and retrospective prose, the Hejaz’s eclipse becomes a measure of the fragility and contingency of all postwar arrangements.
The making of his texts belongs to the same history. After advising Faisal in Paris in 1919, Lawrence began drafting his wartime account; a manuscript was famously lost at Reading station that year, forcing a rewrite from memory. A limited “Oxford text” circulated privately in 1922, followed by the 1926 subscribers’ edition and the abridged Revolt in the Desert (1927) for a broader public. An early postwar article distilled the revolt’s principles for military readers. The publication trail reflects interwar print culture—subscription finance, libel anxieties, and strategic self-censorship—just as his correspondence records the pressures of accuracy, loyalty, and the ever-present risk of politicizing narrative.
Media transformed the man into a symbol. Lowell Thomas’s illustrated lectures in London and New York (1919–1920) helped fix “Lawrence of Arabia” in the public imagination, blending genuine reportage with theatrical exoticism. The notoriety complicated his postwar life and informed choices of anonymity. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1922 as “John Hume Ross,” was exposed and discharged in early 1923, then entered the Royal Tank Corps at Bovington as “T. E. Shaw,” a name he adopted by deed poll in 1927. Rejoining the RAF in 1925, he sought obscurity in the ranks even as his published and private writings were pursued by the press.
The interwar British home front—industrial unrest, the 1926 General Strike, debates over class and discipline—forms the social milieu of his service narratives. The Mint, composed from barracks experience at RAF Cranwell in 1925–1926, stands within a broader moment of documentary realism that treated work, speech, and the body as historical evidence. Because it rendered rankers’ talk and customs without euphemism, it met censorship and was published only posthumously in the 1950s. The social scenery—canteens, inspections, petty hierarchies—appears again in letters to literary friends, setting the egalitarian ethos of the ranks against the condescensions of an officer class he had renounced.
Technology threads his career from railway sabotage to air-sea rescue. The Royal Flying Corps’ wartime reconnaissance over the Hejaz anticipated the RAF’s doctrine of imperial “air control” in Iraq and Transjordan during the 1920s. Later, at RAF Mount Batten near Plymouth and through connections with Hubert Scott-Paine’s British Power Boat Company at Hythe, Lawrence championed high-speed marine craft for seaplane tenders and rescue. Wireless, engines, and hull design recur in his late letters with the same specificity he once gave to explosives and rails. His oeuvre thereby tracks the century’s shift: mobility and communication as decisive levers of force, governance, and humanitarian response.
Violence and conscience belong equally to the context. The pursuit actions in late 1918 around Deraa and Tafas, the reprisals and routs of a collapsing army, and the recurring spectacle of atrocity in the Ottoman theater stamped a generation’s moral vocabulary. Postwar Britain wrestled with shell-shock, remembrance, and the ethics of irregular war. Lawrence’s writings treat these as historical problems more than confessions: they weigh discipline and fury, promises and expediency, and ask what price victory exacts from both victor and victim. That a man who had wielded terror in guerrilla war chose anonymity in peace is itself a social fact his texts repeatedly test.
Geography and ethnography knit the corpus together. From Cairo and Jerusalem to Akaba, Wadi Rum, Ma‘an, Damascus, Amman, Jeddah, Baghdad, and the Persian Gulf, the place-names anchor networks of tribes and towns: Howeitat under Auda Abu Tayi, the Ruwalla, Bani Sakhr, and urban elites in Damascus and Mecca. Arabic, learned among workmen at Carchemish and in wartime camps, inflects names and nuances across the texts. The same landscapes—desert tracks, stations on the Hejaz Railway, caravan wells—serve archaeology, warfighting, statecraft, and reminiscence in turn. The letters in particular show the durability of these ties, carrying news and favors between former comrades and new officials.
The closing years set the seal on both life and archive. After service at Cranwell, India, and Mount Batten, Lawrence left the RAF in early 1935 and retired to Clouds Hill, near Bovington in Dorset. On 13 May 1935 he crashed his Brough Superior motorcycle on a country road and died on 19 May at Bovington Camp hospital. His brother A. W. Lawrence administered the literary estate; David Garnett edited a first major selection of letters in 1938, while The Mint appeared posthumously in 1955. The editorial afterlife—cuts, restorations, and annotations—forms part of the historical context in which readers meet all his works.
The legacy loops back to the currents that shaped him. Military writers such as B. H. Liddell Hart read his campaigns as a grammar of insurgency and the “indirect approach.” David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) amplified the myth, while scholars, notably Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), interrogated its cultural politics. In policy debates over mandates, oil, borders, and air control—then and later—his letters and analyses became quarry for argument. Across the collection, the same problems recur: how empires end, how nations begin, how technologies alter power, and how narrative mediates both memory and responsibility. That shared context binds these disparate writings into a single historical conversation.
Synopsis (Selection)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence’s memoir recounts his service as a British liaison during the Arab Revolt (1916–1918), tracing guerrilla campaigns with Emir Faisal’s forces from the Hejaz toward Damascus. It blends operational narrative with reflections on leadership, culture, and the political stakes of revolt.
The Evolution of a Revolt (Early Post-war Article of T. E. Lawrence)
This post-war article distills the strategy of the Arab Revolt, advocating dispersed, highly mobile operations that target communications and morale over territorial control. Lawrence outlines principles of irregular warfare and critiques conventional military doctrine.
The Mint
A stark, diaristic portrait of enlisted life in the RAF and Army under assumed names, focused on drills, fatigue, barracks routine, and the forging of group identity. It examines class, anonymity, and institutional discipline with unvarnished detail.
Letters (1915 - 1935)
Spanning the war through the mid-1930s, these letters cover operations, policy debates, literary work, and personal affairs, revealing Lawrence’s private assessments of allies, officials, and events. The correspondence traces his evolving views on politics, fame, and service.
Lawrence of Arabia: The Man Behind the Myth (Complete Autobiographical Works, Memoirs & Letters)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
To S.A.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near and saw you waiting: When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart:
Into his quietness.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage ours for the moment Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind worms grew fat upon
Your substance.
Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a menory of you. But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow
Of your gift.
Mr Geoffrey Dawson persuaded All Souls College to give me leisure, in 1919-1920, to write about the Arab Revolt. Sir Herbert Baker let me live and work in his Westminster houses.
The book so written passed in 1921 into proof; where it was fortunate in the friends who criticized it. Particularly it owes its thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw for countless suggestions of great value and diversity: and for all the present semicolons.
It does not pretend to be impartial. I was fighting for my hand, upon my own midden. Please take it as a personal narrative piece out of memory. I could not make proper notes: indeed it would have been a breach of my duty to the Arabs if I had picked such flowers while they fought. My superior officers, Wilson, Joyce, Dawnay, Newcombe and Davenport could each tell a like tale. The same is true of Stirling, Young, Lloyd and Maynard: of Buxton and Winterton: of Ross, Stent and Siddons: of Peake, Homby, Scott-Higgins and Garland: of Wordie, Bennett and MacIndoe: of Bassett, Scott, Goslett, Wood and Gray: of Hinde, Spence and Bright: of Brodie and Pascoe, Gilman and Grisenthwaite, Greenhill, Dowsett and Wade: of Henderson, Leeson, Makins and Nunan.
And there were many other leaders or lonely fighters to whom this self-regardant picture is not fair. It is still less fair, of course, like all war-stories, to the un-named rank and file: who miss their share of credit, as they must do, until they can write the despatches.
T. E. S. Cranwell, 15.8.26
Introductory Chapter
The story which follows was first written out in Paris during the Peace Conference, from notes jotted daily on the march, strengthened by some reports sent to my chiefs in Cairo. Afterwards, in the autumn of 1919, this first draft and some of the notes were lost. It seemed to me historically needful to reproduce the tale, as perhaps no one but myself in Feisal's army had thought of writing down at the time what we felt, what we hoped, what we tried. So it was built again with heavy repugnance in London in the winter of 1919-20 from memory and my surviving notes. The record of events was not dulled in me and perhaps few actual mistakes crept in--except in details of dates or numbers--but the outlines and significance of things had lost edge in the haze of new interests.
Dates and places are correct, so far as my notes preserved them: but the personal names are not. Since the adventure some of those who worked with me have buried themselves in the shallow grave of public duty. Free use has been made of their names. Others still possess themselves, and here keep their secrecy. Sometimes one man carried various names. This may hide individuality and make the book a scatter of featureless puppets, rather than a group of living people: but once good is told of a man, and again evil, and some would not thank me for either blame or praise.
This isolated picture throwing the main light upon myself is unfair to my British colleagues. Especially I am most sorry that I have not told what the non-commissioned of us did. They were but wonderful, especially when it is taken into account that they had not the motive, the imaginative vision of the end, which sustained officers. Unfortunately my concern was limited to this end, and the book is just a designed procession of Arab freedom from Mecca to Damascus. It is intended to rationalize the campaign, that everyone may see how natural the success was and how inevitable, how little dependent on direction or brain, how much less on the outside assistance of the few British. It was an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia.
My proper share was a minor one, but because of a fluent pen, a free speech, and a certain adroitess of brain, I took upon myself, as I describe it, a mock primacy. In reality I never had any office among the Arabs: was never in charge of the British mission with them. Wilson, Joyce, Newcombe, Dawnay and Davenport were all over my head. I flattered myself that I was too young, not that they had more heart or mind in the work, I did my best. Wilson, Newcombe, Dawnay, Davenport, Buxton, Marshall, Stirling, Young, Maynard, Ross, Scott, Winterton, Lloyd, Wordie, Siddons, Goslett, Stent Henderson, Spence, Gilman, Garland, Brodie, Makins, Nunan, Leeson, Hornby, Peake, Scott-Higgins, Ramsay, Wood, Hinde, Bright, MacIndoe, Greenhill, Grisenthwaite, Dowsett, Bennett, Wade, Gray, Pascoe and the others also did their best.
It would be impertinent in me to praise them. When I wish to say ill of one outside our number, I do it: though there is less of this than was in my diary, since the passage of time seems to have bleached out men's stains. When I wish to praise outsiders, I do it: bur our family affairs are our own. We did what we set out to do, and have the satisfaction of that knowledge. The others have liberty some day to put on record their story, one parallel to mine but not mentioning more of me than I of them, for each of us did his job by himself and as he pleased, hardly seeing his friends.
In these pages the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it. It is a narrative of daily life, mean happenings, little people. Here are no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples. It is filled with trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from which some day a man may make history, and partly for the pleasure it gave me to recall the fellowship of the revolt. We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The moral freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up in ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
All men dream: but nor equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses oftheir minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore! a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant.
I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. 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. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.
We were three years over this effort and I have had to hold back many things which may not yet be said. Even so, parts of this book will be new to nearly all who see it, and many will look for familiar things and not find them. Once I reported fully to my chiefs, but learnt that they were rewarding me on my own evidence. This was not as it should be. Honours may be necessary in a professional army, as so many emphatic mentions in despatches, and by enlisting we had put ourselves, willingly or not, in the position of regular soldiers.
For my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing. The Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. In our two years' partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.
It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber. It was an immodest presumption: it is not yet: clear if I succeeded: but it is clear that I had no shadow of leave to engage the Arabs, unknowing, in such hazard. I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.
The dismissal of Sir Henry McMahon confirmed my belief in our essential insincerity: but I could not so explain myself to General Wingate while the war lasted, since I was nominally under his orders, and he did not seem sensible of how false his own standing was. The only thing remaining was to refuse rewards for being a successful trickster and, to prevent this unpleasantness arising, I began in my reports to conceal the true stories of things, and to persuade the few Arabs who knew to an equal reticence. In this book also, for the last time, I mean to be my own judge of what to say.
Introduction. Foundations of Revolt
Chapter I
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.
As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible--they have lost the world--and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.
The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.
Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it licence in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body. The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level, subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat, in a climate as racking as can be conceived. We had no shut places to be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man in all things lived candidly with man.
The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies--a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.
I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her war. If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own, and pass among them without evident friction, neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence. Since I was their fellow, I will not be their apologist or advocate. To-day in my old garments, I could play the bystander, obedient to the sensibilities of our theatre . . . but it is more honest to record that these ideas and actions then passed naturally. What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.
Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it.[1q] When there was reason and desire to punish we wrote our lesson with gun or whip immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of courts and gaols.
Of course our rewards and pleasures were as suddenly sweeping as our troubles; but, to me in particular, they bulked less large. Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers terrible: a death in life. When the march or labour ended I had no energy to record sensation, nor while it lasted any leisure to see the spiritual loveliness which sometimes came upon us by the way. In my notes, the cruel rather than the beautiful found place. We no doubt enjoyed more the rare moments of peace and forgetfulness; but I remember more the agony, the terrors, and the mistakes. Our life is not summed up in what I have written (there are things not to be repeated in cold blood for very shame); but what I have written was in and of our life. Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race.
A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.
In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.
Chapter II
A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point. There was a language called Arabic; and in it lay the test. It was the current tongue of Syria and Palestine, of Mesopotamia, and of the great peninsula called Arabia on the map. Before the Moslem conquest, these areas were inhabited by diverse peoples, speaking languages of the Arabic family. We called them Semitic, but (as with most scientific terms) incorrectly. However, Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac were related tongues; and indications of common influences in the past, or even of a common origin, were strengthened by our knowledge that the appearances and customs of the present Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia, while as varied as a field--full of poppies, had an equal and essential likeness. We might with perfect propriety call them cousins--and cousins certainly, if sadly, aware of their own relationship.
The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough parallelogram. The northern side ran from Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean, across Mesopotamia eastward to the Tigris. The south side was the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Muscat. On the west it was bounded by the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea to Aden. On the east by the Tigris, and the Persian Gulf to Muscat. This square of land, as large as India, formed the homeland of our Semites, in which no foreign race had kept a permanent footing, though Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and Franks had variously tried. All had in the end been broken, and their scattered elements drowned in the strong characteristics of the Semitic race. Semites had sometimes pushed outside this area, and themselves been drowned in the outer world. Egypt, Algiers, Morocco, Malta, Sicily, Spain, Cilicia and France absorbed and obliterated Semitic colonies. Only in Tripoli of Africa, and in the everlasting miracle of Jewry, had distant Semites kept some of their identity and force.
The origin of these peoples was an academic question; but for the understanding of their revolt their present social and political differences were important, and could only be grasped by looking at their geography. This continent of theirs fell into certain great regions, whose gross physical diversities imposed varying habits on the dwellers in them. On the west the parallelogram was framed, from Alexandretta to Aden, by a mountain belt, called (in the north) Syria, and thence progressively southward called Palestine, Midian, Hejaz, and lastly Yemen. It had an average height of perhaps three thousand feet, with peaks of ten to twelve thousand feet. It faced west, was well watered with rain and cloud from the sea, and in general was fully peopled.
Another range of inhabited hills, facing the Indian Ocean, was the south edge of the parallelogram. The eastern frontier was at first an alluvial plain called Mesopotamia, but south of Basra a level littoral, called Kuweit, and Hasa, to Gattar. Much of this plain was peopled. These inhabited hills and plains framed a gulf of thirsty desert, in whose heart was an archipelago of watered and populous oases called Kasim and Aridh. In this group of oases lay the true centre of Arabia, the preserve of its native spirit, and its most conscious individuality. The desert lapped it round and kept it pure of contact.
The desert which performed this great function around the oases, and so made the character of Arabia, varied in nature. South of the oases it appeared to be a pathless sea of sand, stretching nearly to the populous escarpment of the Indian Ocean shore, shutting it out from Arabian history, and from all influence on Arabian morals and politics. Hadhramaut, as they called this southern coast, formed part of the history of the Dutch Indies; and its thought swayed Java rather than Arabia. To the west of the oases, between them and the Hejaz hills, was the Nejd desert, an area of gravel and lava, with little sand in it. To the east of these oases, between them and Kuweit, spread a similar expanse of gravel, but with some great stretches of soft sand, making the road difficult. To the north of the oases lay a belt of sand, and then an immense gravel and lava plain, filling up everything between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where Mesopotamia began. The practicability of this northern desert for men and motor-cars enabled the Arab revolt to win its ready success.
The hills of the west and the plains of the east were the parts of Arabia always most populous and active. In particular on the west, the mountains of Syria and Palestine, of Hejaz and Yemen, entered time and again into the current of our European life. Ethically, these fertile healthy hills were in Europe, not in Asia, just as the Arabs looked always to the Mediterranean, not to the Indian Ocean, for their cultural sympathies, for their enterprises, and particularly for their expansions, since the migration problem was the greatest and most complex force in Arabia, and general to it, however it might vary in the different Arabic districts.
In the north (Syria) the birth rate was low in the cities and the death rate high, because of the insanitary conditions and the hectic life led by the majority. Consequently the surplus peasantry found openings in the towns, and were there swallowed up. In the Lebanon, where sanitation had been improved, a greater exodus of youth took place to America each year, threatening (for the first time since Greek days) to change the outlook of an entire district.
In Yemen the solution was different. There was no foreign trade, and no massed industries to accumulate population in unhealthy places. The towns were just market towns, as clean and simple as ordinary villages. Therefore the population slowly increased; the scale of living was brought down very low; and a congestion of numbers was generally felt. They could not emigrate overseas; for the Sudan was even worse country than Arabia, and the few tribes which did venture across were compelled to modify their manner of life and their Semitic culture profoundly, in order to exist. They could not move northward along the hills; for these were barred by the holy town of Mecca and its port Jidda: an alien belt, continually reinforced by strangers from India and Java and Bokhara and Africa, very strong in vitality, violently hostile to the Semitic consciousness, and maintained despite economics and geography and climate by the artificial factor of a world-religion. The congestion of Yemen, therefore, becoming extreme, found its only relief in the east, by forcing the weaker aggregations of its border down and down the slopes of the hills along the Widian, the half-waste district of the great water-bearing valleys of Bisha, Dawasir, Ranya and Taraba, which ran out towards the deserts of Nejd. These weaker clans had continually to exchange good springs and fertile palms for poorer springs and scantier palms, till at last they reached an area where a proper agricultural life became impossible. They then began to eke out their precarious husbandry by breeding sheep and camels, and in time came to depend more and more on these herds for their living.
Finally, under a last impulse from the straining population behind them, the border people (now almost wholly pastoral), were flung out of the furthest crazy oasis into the untrodden wilderness as nomads. This process, to be watched to-day with individual families and tribes to whose marches an exact name and date might be put, must have been going on since the first day of full settlement of Yemen. The Widian below Mecca and Taif are crowded with the memories and place-names of half a hundred tribes which have gone from there, and may be found to-day in Nejd, in Jebel Sham-mar, in the Hamad, even on the frontiers of Syria and Mesopotamia. There was the source of migration, the factory of nomads, the springing of the gulf-stream of desert wanderers.
For the people of the desert were as little static as the people of the hills. The economic life of the desert was based on the supply of camels, which were best bred on the rigorous upland pastures with their strong nutritive thorns. By this industry the Bedouins lived; and it in turn moulded their life, apportioned the tribal areas, and kept the clans revolving through their rote of spring, summer and winter pasturages, as the herds cropped the scanty growths of each in turn. The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt determined the population which the deserts could support, and regulated strictly their standard of living. So the desert likewise overpeopled itself upon occasion; and then there were heavings and thrustings of the crowded tribes as they elbowed themselves by natural courses towards the light. They might not go south towards the inhospitable sand or sea. They could not turn west; for there the steep hills of Hejaz were thickly lined by mountain peoples taking full advantage of their defensiveness. Sometimes they went towards the central oases of Aridh and Kasim, and, if the tribes looking for new homes were strong and vigorous, might succeed in occupying parts of them. If, however, the desert had not this strength, its peoples were pushed gradually north, up between Medina of the Hejaz and Kasim of Nejd, till they found themselves at the fork of two roads. They could strike eastward, by Wadi Rumh or Jebel Sham-mar, to follow eventually the Batn to Shamiya, where they would become riverine Arabs of the Lower Euphrates; or they could climb, by slow degrees, the ladder of western oases--Henakiya, Kheibar, Teima, Jauf, and the Sirhan--till fate saw them nearing Jebel Druse, in Syria, or watering their herds about Tadmor of the northern desert, on their way to Aleppo or Assyria.
Nor then did the pressure cease: the inexorable trend northward continued. The tribes found themselves driven to the very edge of cultivation in Syria or Mesopotamia. Opportunity and their bellies persuaded them of the advantages of possessing goats, and then of possessing sheep; and lastly they began to sow, if only a little barley for their animals. They were now no longer Bedouin, and began to suffer like the villagers from the ravages of the nomads behind. Insensibly, they made common cause with the peasants already on the soil, and found out that they, too, were peasantry. So we see clans, born in the highlands of Yemen, thrust by stronger clans into the desert, where, unwillingly, they became nomad to keep themselves alive. We see them wandering, every year moving a little further north or a little further east as chance has sent them down one or other of the well-roads of the wilderness, till finally this pressure drives them from the desert again into the sown, with the like unwillingness of their first shrinking experiment in nomad life. This was the circulation which kept vigour in the Semitic body. There were few, if indeed there was a single northern Semite, whose ancestors had not at some dark age passed through the desert. The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, was on each of them in his degree.
Chapter III
If tribesman and townsman in Arabic-speaking Asia were not different races, but just men in different social and economic stages, a family resemblance might be expected in the working of their minds, and so it was only reasonable that common elements should appear in the product of all these peoples. In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.
