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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Collected Works of T. E. Lawrence, often referred to as Lawrence of Arabia, is a compendium that encapsulates the multifaceted genius of its author. This anthology presents not only the captivating accounts of Lawrence's experiences during the Arab Revolt but also his poetic reflections, philosophical musings, and historical insights. The literary style is characterized by its vivid imagery, incisive prose, and an almost lyrical quality that transcends mere recounting of events, offering a profound exploration of identity, conflict, and the geopolitical landscape of early 20th-century Arabia. Lawrence's narrative oscillates between the personal and the political, reflecting the turbulent era and his complex role within it. T. E. Lawrence was not merely a soldier but a polymath whose diverse interests spanned archaeology, literature, and the complexities of colonial politics. His extensive background in academia and the Middle East, coupled with an insatiable curiosity about different cultures, shaped his worldview and fostered a deep-seated empathy for the Arab cause. Literature often served as a refuge for him, allowing for artistic expression that was as enlightening as it was radical. This collected works serves as an essential gateway for both historians and literature enthusiasts alike. Lawrence's writings illuminate the human condition against the backdrop of war, making his insights eternally relevant. Readers are invited to delve into this rich tapestry of history and emotion, where adventure and introspection collide to create a timeless narrative. 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: 2023
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The Collected Works of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Bringing together the principal writings and translations of T. E. Lawrence, this volume offers a concentrated portrait of a singular twentieth-century author. It is not a miscellany assembled for novelty, but a considered gathering of core works that define his literary achievement: the war narrative and meditation Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the barracks chronicle The Mint, the analytical essay The Evolution of a Revolt, two major translations, and a substantial run of letters. Read together, they show a writer moving between witness, analysis, and re-creation, and they allow readers to trace the development of his voice from wartime experience into reflective maturity.
This collection spans genres and text types, illustrating Lawrence’s range. It includes an extended memoir of the Arab Revolt shaped by reportage and introspection; a sequence of compact observational sketches from service after the war; an early post-war article distilling lessons from irregular conflict; two translations that demonstrate his ear for cadence and idiom; and letters written between 1915 and 1935. The result joins narrative, essay, translation, and correspondence. Each form imposes different constraints, from the long arc of a book-length account to the pressure of a page, a paragraph, or a single line, revealing how he calibrated tone to purpose.
Across these varied forms, certain concerns recur and bind the works into a coherent whole. Lawrence tests the ethics of action and representation: how to describe war without glamorizing it; how to honor allies while acknowledging difference; how to balance personal responsibility with collective aims. He is preoccupied with language as both tool and trial, favoring clear, tensile prose that can bear the weight of lived experience. Landscape is not backdrop but participant. Leadership is examined as practice, not posture. As a corpus, these writings endure because they fuse exact observation with moral inquiry, refusing simplification while seeking intelligible order.
The long central narrative recounts his part in the Arab Revolt during the First World War, but its significance exceeds any single campaign. It blends detailed field observation with reflective passages on culture, politics, and the costs of alliance. The tone is at once immediate and deliberative, attentive to the human texture of decision and doubt. Without disclosing more than initial premise, it is fair to say that the book treats revolt as a phenomenon of minds, logistics, and geography as much as arms. Its strength lies in the interplay of incident, analysis, and a scrupulous effort to do justice to others.
The companion work from the post-war period turns away from deserts and diplomacy to the interior world of a training depot. Composed as a sequence of short, sharply observed pieces, it records the routines, humour, fatigue, and pressures of service life. The language is pared and physical, often focusing on the body, timekeeping, and rank. Written in the 1920s and first published after Lawrence’s death, it offers a counterpoint to his wartime narrative: not strategy and policy, but anonymity, discipline, and the forging of a collective. In its restraint and candour, it deepens the portrait of the writer as observer.
The early post-war article included here steps back from narrative to consider the structure of a successful insurrectionary campaign. Drawing on experience, it argues for flexibility, economy, and the intelligent use of local strengths. Rather than laying down fixed rules, it proposes a way of thinking about irregular warfare that privileges mobility, surprise, and a distributed effort. The prose is compact and lucid, very much the register of a reflective practitioner writing for readers concerned with method. Together with the larger memoir, it allows us to see how Lawrence translated events into ideas without diluting their complexity.
Translation forms a vital strand in Lawrence’s literary practice, and the two renderings gathered here show the same discipline applied to borrowed material. In approaching an ancient epic and a modern French work, he treats translation as a creative responsibility to tone, movement, and sense. The goal is not ornament, but a living English that carries across mood and meaning. His versions avoid pedantry while respecting structure, attentive to cadence and image. That he turned to translation at moments of personal transition is notable: it offered both a demanding craft and a way of thinking about how stories travel between worlds.
His Englishing of the Odyssey seeks directness without flattening the poem’s breadth. The emphasis is on narrative momentum, clarity of scene, and a register that can shift from the homely to the elevated as the story requires. Rather than chasing archaism or novelty for its own sake, the translation works to make the epic’s episodes intelligible and swift-moving, while keeping the frame intact. Readers will find an ear tuned to action and dialogue, and a respect for the poem’s architecture. In this, the translator’s sensibility aligns with the memoirist’s: a preference for clean lines and decisive pacing.
The Forest Giant, very different in scale and provenance from Homer, reveals another facet of Lawrence’s approach to prose in translation. Here the task is not to carry over a hexameter narrative, but to reproduce a modern author’s atmosphere and rhythm in English. The result highlights his sensitivity to cadence, image, and the unobtrusive shaping of paragraphs. If the Odyssey tests speed and breadth, this work tests tonal accuracy and restraint. Together, the two translations show a translator intent on fidelity to effect as much as to word, extending his engagement with style beyond the boundaries of his own subject matter.
The letters, spanning the years 1915 to 1935, supply a running commentary on the life of the writer and the making of the works. Practical matters of service, reading, friendship, travel, and publishing sit alongside reflections on craft and responsibility. The voice is measured but unguarded enough to reveal preoccupations and changes of mind. They situate the books in time without reducing them to mere documents, and they reveal the effort required to match experience with the right words. Read in conjunction with the other texts, the correspondence shows a mind continuously testing what can and cannot be said.
Stylistically, Lawrence is marked by compression, concrete diction, and an alertness to rhythm. He prefers nouns and verbs that carry weight, images that fix a scene without ostentation, and paragraphs that move by clear stages. Ethically, he resists self-exculpation, allowing difficulty and ambivalence to remain visible. Historically, he occupies a vantage where empire, revolt, and modernity collide, and he writes from that pressure without turning it into formula. As a whole, these works remain significant because they yoke experience to form: memoir as inquiry, essay as clarification, translation as renewal, letters as the ongoing negotiation between life and art.
This collection is designed to be read either sequentially or by interest. One may begin with the large canvas of the wartime narrative, take the measure of post-war service through the barracks sketches, test the framework in the analytical article, and then turn to the translations and letters for resonance and counterpoint. However arranged, the works keep speaking to one another. Together they map the reach of a writer widely known as Lawrence of Arabia, but encountered here as a craftsman of English prose and an exacting reader of human conduct. They invite patience, attention, and an openness to complexity.
Author Biography
Thomas Edward Lawrence, widely known as T. E. Lawrence or “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a British archaeologist, soldier, and writer active in the early twentieth century. He gained international renown for his role as a liaison during the Arab Revolt in the First World War and for his masterwork, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His life bridged scholarship and irregular warfare, and his prose helped shape modern narratives about the Middle East and empire. At once participant and observer, he combined practical field experience with reflective, often self-critical analysis, leaving a legacy that crosses military history, travel writing, and literary modernism.
Lawrence was educated in Oxford, where his historical interests focused on medieval Europe and the Levant. At university he studied history and wrote a thesis on crusader military architecture, research that involved extensive travel and first-hand observation. He was influenced by classical and medieval sources, the aesthetic of Romantic archaeology, and the tutelage of established Near Eastern scholars. D. G. Hogarth, a prominent archaeologist and museum curator, became a key mentor. This scholarly grounding, coupled with a gift for languages and fieldwork, prepared him for a career that initially promised academic distinction but ultimately drew him into the geopolitics of the Middle East.
Before the First World War, Lawrence worked on British Museum excavations at Carchemish on the Euphrates, collaborating with figures who would later be notable in Near Eastern archaeology. He undertook long journeys through Syria and Palestine, visiting and sketching fortifications that informed his understanding of crusader castles. These years honed his observational powers, map-reading, and logistical skills, and introduced him deeply to Arabic language and customs. He cultivated wide acquaintances among local communities, experiences that later shaped his ability to navigate tribal landscapes. The combination of archaeological method and cultural immersion proved decisive when wartime circumstances demanded both scholarship and practical intelligence.
During the First World War, Lawrence served with British intelligence in Cairo and then as a liaison to the forces of the Arab Revolt aligned with the Allies. Working with Arab leaders, he supported guerrilla operations that targeted Ottoman communications, including raids on the Hejaz Railway, and assisted in campaigns that helped open routes across the region. The capture of Aqaba and the advance toward Damascus became emblematic episodes in his wartime narrative. After the armistice, he attended postwar discussions concerning the Middle East, where he expressed support for Arab self-determination. Public lectures and reportage soon amplified his fame, establishing the enduring “Lawrence of Arabia” image.
Lawrence’s literary reputation rests chiefly on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an expansive, reflective account of the revolt and his role in it. Rewritten multiple times after the war, the book appeared in a private subscribers’ edition in the mid-1920s and was lauded for its vivid prose, psychological candor, and ethnographic detail. He later authorized an abridgment, Revolt in the Desert, which brought the narrative to a wider audience. His prose often interrogates loyalty, leadership, and the moral ambiguities of imperial policy. Lawrence also produced a vigorous English translation of the Odyssey and left an unflinching portrait of service life in The Mint, published posthumously.
Briefly employed at the Colonial Office on Middle Eastern affairs, Lawrence soon sought anonymity, enlisting under assumed names in the ranks of the armed services. He spent periods in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Tank Corps, ultimately adopting the surname Shaw. He cultivated an austere private life centered on work, reading, and mechanical interests, notably high-speed boats connected with RAF needs. His Dorset retreat, Clouds Hill, became a place of writing and restoration. Despite public fascination, he kept a deliberate distance from celebrity, maintaining a disciplined correspondence with prominent contemporaries while resisting the simplifications that popular culture imposed on his complex experiences.
Lawrence died in the mid-1930s from injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash near his Dorset home. After his death, additional writings and letters appeared, bringing further nuance to his career and character. His reputation has undergone cycles of celebration and revision, informed by scholarship on the First World War, the mandates era, and the dynamics of biography and myth-making. The 1960s film Lawrence of Arabia introduced his story to new audiences, while historians have continued to test legend against documented record. Today, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is read as both war memoir and literary achievement, admired for its style and interrogated for its politics.
Historical Context
Thomas Edward Lawrence’s writings emerged from the hinge years between late Victorian empire and the troubled interwar order. His oeuvre spans eyewitness narrative, institutional portraiture, strategic reflection, translation, and an extensive correspondence. Across them course themes central to early twentieth‑century Britain: imperial policy and its unravelling, the professionalization of intelligence, modernist skepticism toward heroism, and the shock of mechanized modernity. The Great War’s Near Eastern theaters, the mandates system, and shifting Anglo‑Arab relations supplied the historical frame, while London’s lively print culture and fine‑press experiments shaped how his work reached readers. Together these currents gave his books a reach well beyond military memoir.
Born on 16 August 1888 at Tremadog, Caernarfonshire, and raised in Oxford, Lawrence absorbed a classical and medievalist education that would connect his later war narratives and translations. At Jesus College, Oxford, he wrote on Crusader castles in Syria and Palestine, completing fieldwork on foot in 1909. His studies led to archaeological work at Carchemish on the Euphrates (1911–1914) under the British Museum, alongside D. G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley. This training in languages, topography, and material culture prefigured his wartime intelligence methods, his sensitivity to place in narrative, and his later turn to Homeric translation as a disciplined craft of rendering cultures.
Prewar archaeology and Orientalist scholarship supplied techniques and networks that bridged into wartime service. British and French digs in Ottoman Syria functioned as research schools in mapping, logistics, and local mediation. Colleagues such as Gertrude Bell, Ronald Storrs, and Hogarth later staffed or advised the Arab Bureau in Cairo. Carchemish, Jerablus, Aleppo, and the Euphrates corridor taught Lawrence survey skills and an appreciation for tribal politics—competences that surface in his operational analyses and letters. The period’s travel literature, notably Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), also shaped his prose’s ethnographic density, while foreshadowing interwar debates about Orientalism and representation.
The First World War placed the Ottoman Arab provinces at the intersection of global and local struggles. From Cairo in 1914–1916, Lawrence contributed to intelligence assessments before moving to the Arab Revolt, launched by Sharif Hussein of Mecca in June 1916. Working with Hussein’s sons—Faisal and Abdullah—he supported operations along the Hejaz Railway, culminating in the capture of Aqaba on 6 July 1917 and a northward push toward Damascus, taken on 1 October 1918 in concert with General Edmund Allenby. These campaigns unfolded amid the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence (1915–1916), the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916), and the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917).
From this theater emerged a distinctive theory of irregular war that underlies Lawrence’s early postwar reflections. Emphasizing mobility, economy of force, and psychological effects over territorial occupation, he treated railways, telegraphs, and depots as vulnerable nervous systems rather than prizes to hold. Coordinating tribal levies with British regulars and naval gunfire, he mapped insurgent action to political aims and supply constraints. The experience fed into his 1919–1920 analyses and later sections of his narrative, where logistics, climate, and morale are as important as battles. Such emphasis aligned with broader military debates after 1918, when staff schools reassessed doctrine in light of mechanization.
The diplomatic aftermath of victory gave his writings their moral and political tension. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Faisal’s delegation sought Arab self‑government while European powers bargained toward the mandates codified at San Remo in April 1920 and later at Sèvres. Britain assumed mandates in Iraq and Palestine (1920–1922), and the Cairo Conference of March 1921, chaired by Winston Churchill, installed Faisal as King of Iraq and Abdullah as Amir of Transjordan. Lawrence served as an adviser during these reorganizations. His accounts and letters repeatedly take measure of promises, secrecy, and realpolitik, converting war reportage into a meditation on settlement and betrayal.
Rapid celebrity complicated both his public and private writings. In 1919–1920, Lowell Thomas’s illustrated lectures introduced ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ to mass audiences in London and New York. Newspaper pursuit followed him into policy work and later enlistment, testing the Victorian ideal of modest service against modern publicity. The tension fed a persistent self‑effacing tone, grim humor, and guardedness visible in his letters and in the composition histories of major works. He sought to deflect attention through controlled publication, pseudonyms, and privacy at Clouds Hill in Dorset, even as he relied on metropolitan publishers and an elite circle of readers to finance elaborate editions.
Between 1922 and 1935 he entered enlisted life, first rejected from the Royal Air Force after exposure of his identity, then joining the Royal Tank Corps at Bovington Camp in 1923 under the name T. E. Shaw, reentering the RAF in 1925. Stations included Uxbridge, Cranwell, and Mount Batten near Plymouth. He worked with RAF Marine Craft on high‑speed rescue boats, reflecting Britain’s wider interwar fascination with design and speed. The barrack room, mess routines, and the dialect of rank and file provided matter for prose stripped of ornament. These years also furnished the quiet and income to revise earlier manuscripts and translate.
The making and remaking of his principal narrative illustrate the 1920s British book world. After mislaying a draft in 1919, he reconstructed Seven Pillars of Wisdom, producing a small private ‘Oxford text’ in 1922 for a few readers, followed by a sumptuous subscribers’ edition in 1926 with portraits and plates by artists such as Eric Kennington. To recover costs he authorized an abridgment, Revolt in the Desert, in 1927 through Jonathan Cape, while restricting general circulation of the full text. Fine‑press aesthetics, typographic experiment, and controlled scarcity merged with memoir, turning the book into a cultural object as well as a historical account.
His correspondence from 1915 to 1935 links war zones, chancelleries, and garrisons to the metropolitan salon. Letters from Cairo, Jidda, Aqaba, and Damascus record operational problems and policy misgivings; later ones from London, Cranwell, Mount Batten, and Clouds Hill reveal friendships with George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Payne‑Townshend, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, Geoffrey Dawson, and David Hogarth. The letters are a ledger of favors, introductions, and negotiations with editors and officials, while also registering the moods of postwar Britain: inflation, unemployment, the 1926 General Strike’s aftershocks, and public obsessions with celebrity and speed. They give cross‑references for nearly every later publication.
Interwar Britain renewed its classical inheritance through new translations and school reforms, and Lawrence’s version of the Odyssey (Oxford University Press, 1932) belongs to that moment. Rejecting both Victorian sonority and purely literal renderings, he sought a plain, tensile English suited to oral cadence. The translation, begun during RAF service at Cranwell, joins his lifelong interest in travel, exile, and homecoming with the practical discipline of line‑by‑line craft learned in archaeology and intelligence work. Debates with classicists about register and fidelity, and exchanges with publishers over typography and price, mirror the broader cultural struggle to make the ancient world modern and widely accessible.
His translation of a French work known in English as The Forest Giant reveals a different interwar current: Europe’s pastoral and ecological introspection after the battlefield clear‑cuts of 1914–1918. The book’s reverie on forests, time, and human scale chimed with French and British discussions of reforestation, rural revival, and the limits of industrial society. Lawrence used translation to test an ethical music distinct from martial narrative yet attentive to endurance, stewardship, and craft. Issued in the mid‑1920s–1930s milieu when he alternated names and roles, it shows how his linguistic interests were not antiquarian but engaged with contemporary continental thought about nature and civilization.
His prose belongs to the modernist interrogation of authority as much as to imperial adventure. The fractured chronology, self‑doubt, and montage of documents answer to a generation that read Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, while the candid soldier’s voice converses with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Yet ethnographic patience and geographical exactness resist pure interiority. He balances the lyric and the logistical: lists of kit, train timetables, and rainfall sit beside meditations on fate. This hybrid aesthetic reflects the age’s pressure to make sense of industrial war’s abstraction without abandoning the individuality of landscapes and faces—a problem visible across his narrative, essays, and letters.
Technology’s promise and peril structure his interwar themes. The Royal Air Force stood for a new British instrument of reach, economy, and speed; its machines and routines fascinated him no less than railways had in the Hejaz. Motorcycles—especially the Brough Superior SS100—figure in correspondence as symbols of freedom and risk, and they culminate in tragedy when he crashed near Clouds Hill on 13 May 1935, dying on 19 May at Bovington. Work on high‑speed boats at Mount Batten aligned with wider experiments by designers such as Hubert Scott‑Paine. Across his writings, machines are neither fetish nor villain, but demanding disciplines that shape moral choices.
The imperial frame that enabled his wartime role also invited his later critique. Britain’s informal methods—subsidies, advisers, and the promise of protectorates—meet the hard limits of secret diplomacy and mandate governance in his accounts. Sykes–Picot, the Balfour Declaration, and bureaucratic inertia recur as facts to be faced rather than slogans. He admires Arab political talent, poetry, and hospitality while acknowledging the asymmetries of power and interests. In this he participates in a broader 1920s–1930s British debate about trusteeship and self‑determination, even as he refuses neat resolution. His mixed stance, recorded in letters and narrative alike, frames enduring discussions of Orientalism and agency.
Lawrence’s books were shaped by the era’s visual culture. Wartime photography, reconnaissance maps, and sketchbooks inflect his descriptive method, while the 1926 subscribers’ edition’s portraits and decorations by Eric Kennington, William Nicholson, Paul Nash, and others joined text to a gallery of faces—Faisal, Auda abu Tayi, and British officers—stabilizing memory in image. The materiality of paper, bindings, and type was no ornament: it signaled a claim to witness and a circle of patrons. This collaboration between author, artists, and printers paralleled official war art schemes and the fine‑press revival, embedding his history in the tactile aesthetics of interwar Britain.
Posthumous publication and curation consolidated the corpus and its legend. The Mint, drafted from 1922 onward, appeared in expurgated form in 1955 through Jonathan Cape, revealing the institutional textures he long kept private. Editions of the letters from 1930s onward opened the backstage of policy and publishing, while new texts and variants of Seven Pillars clarified its complicated genealogy. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern states shaped at the 1921 Cairo Conference—Transjordan, Iraq—pursued independent trajectories, with Iraq’s formal independence arriving in 1932 under Faisal I. The continuing scholarship keeps his work at the crossroads of military studies, Middle Eastern history, translation, and book history.
Synopsis (Selection)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence’s memoir of the Arab Revolt (1916–1918), recounting his liaison with Emir Feisal and Bedouin forces in a guerrilla campaign against the Ottoman Empire. It blends campaign narrative with portraits of Arab leaders, reflections on strategy, and the political ambiguities of wartime aims.
The Mint
A candid, episodic account of Lawrence’s postwar service under an assumed name in the RAF and Tank Corps. It depicts recruit training and barracks life in terse vignettes that probe class, discipline, camaraderie, and institutional routine.
The Evolution of a Revolt (Early Post-war Article of T. E. Lawrence)
An early postwar essay distilling principles of irregular warfare from the Arab Revolt. Lawrence emphasizes mobility, dispersion, surprise, psychological effect, and indigenous leadership over territorial occupation.
The Odyssey (translation)
A brisk prose translation of Homer’s epic of Odysseus’s long journey home after the Trojan War. Lawrence favors clear, swift storytelling and accessible diction while retaining the poem’s sequence of wanderings and divine interventions.
The Forest Giant (translation)
A translation of Adrien Le Corbeau’s meditation on forests and time, cast as a parable of human ambition versus the slow life of trees. It presents ecological and philosophical themes in lucid prose that stresses reverence for the natural world.
Letters (1915 - 1935)
A curated selection of correspondence spanning the war years through Lawrence’s later RAF service, publishing, and translation work. The letters capture his practical reports, literary judgments, self-critique, and views on politics, friendship, and travel.
The Collected Works of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
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
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.
