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Lawrence: Fresh Look at Warrior of Desert

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By Janet Maslin

• Nov. 21, 2010

Michael Korda’s long, sometimes secondhand but finally satisfying book about T. E. Lawrence starts in a strange way. He opens “Hero” in 1917, when Lawrence, an Englishman leading an Arab guerrilla force and using military tactics that proved to have enduring impact, devises the bold strategic move of attacking the port city of Aqaba, on the Red Sea, by approaching it from an unexpected direction. In the monumental film biography of Lawrence that Mr. Korda does his best not to mention, this is the very famous “Aqaba — from the land!” moment.

The success of this strategic Aqaba coup would establish Lawrence’s legend. It was a pivotal part of his story, and for that reason may seem like a logical starting point. But it is also an oft-described, hashed-over and heavily analyzed event in military history, to the point where Mr. Korda relies transparently and heavily on the work of Lawrence’s many other biographers. And he too often simply quotes or paraphrases Lawrence’s own classic book about his desert military experiences, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

Why start “Hero” with what will turn out to be Mr. Korda’s least original contributions to a latter-day understanding of Lawrence and his reputation? Perhaps because of the title conceit. Although the sensible raison d’être for “Hero” is that there has not been a major Lawrence biography in years (there have been Lawrence-related books but no full-fledged portrait), Mr. Korda seems to want a catchier hook. So he repeatedly stamps this biography with the idea of Lawrence as a classically heroic figure.

Calling Lawrence a hero means trotting out the Joseph Campbell archetypes, bringing up Napoleon, Ajax, Ulysses and Achilles, and using the word “hero” as often as possible. It means finding heroic implications in Lawrence’s reading of William Morris’s “Sigurd the Volsung,” a “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem.” But as “Hero” later acknowledges, Lawrence was much too complicated and self-contradictory to fit any one-word label. And if he has to be given one, in light of his ambivalent yet attention-seeking attitudes about being famous, it makes almost as much sense to simply call him a star.

After the Aqaba opening, “Hero” goes back to the history of the Lawrence family, which Mr. Korda, in one of his more assured and comfortable moments, says gives the lie to Tolstoy’s famous pronouncement about happy families being all alike. (“The Lawrences constituted a very happy family,” he writes, “but one that hardly resembled anyone else’s.”) It then follows the young T. E. Lawrence, called Ned, to Carchemish, the Hittite dig where he spent several happy years, made himself conversant with Arab life and culture, and had the closest thing to a love affair that he would ever experience. Even in this part of the book the familiar voices of biographers like John E. Mack (who took a psychiatric look at Lawrence), Richard Aldington (who took a nastily debunking one) and those seeking a covert homosexual subtext in Lawrence’s story are echoed in Mr. Korda’s prose.

But the strength of “Hero” lies in its ability to analyze Lawrence’s accomplishments and to add something meaningful to the larger body of Lawrence lore . It is here that Mr. Korda’s full affinity for his subject shows. Like seemingly everyone with an attachment to Lawrence, he formed an intense one and formed it early. Mr. Korda joined the Royal Air Force in the 1950s (as Lawrence had joined it under an assumed name after he became world famous) and rode a motorcycle for 50 years, seduced by the allure of Lawrence’s dashing example.

Mr. Korda writes with authority about the disputes among the various camps of Lawrence biographers and scholars; about the lasting impact of Lawrence’s ideas for creating post-World War I borders in the Middle East (not perfect, but respectful of religious, ethnic and cultural differences in ways that the actual creation of Iraq, Syria and other parts of the region were not); and especially about the merits of Lawrence’s writing and the bizarrely complicated publishing history that Lawrence created for his magnum opus. In all these areas, his commentary is sagacious and valuable.

As an illustrious editor in his own right, Mr. Korda is in a fine position to assess Lawrence’s savvy instincts about keeping “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” scarce; about publishing the abridged, “boy-scout” version that was “Revolt in the Desert” (Mr. Korda deems it the more readable of the two); about dicier literary projects like “The Mint”; and about soliciting advice from literary friends like George Bernard Shaw, who was more than happy to dish it out. “Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo,” Shaw once wrote to Lawrence, who was not only a Shaw protégé but, Korda says, also a model for his “Saint Joan.”

Most important, Mr. Korda makes himself a credible authority on some of the most egregious misconceptions that surround Lawrence’s story. He is particularly dismissive of the idea that postwar Lawrence, variously known as T. E. Ross and T. E. Shaw, lived a monastic and friendless life. If anything, he sees Lawrence as an adroit networker with many powerful friends and a remarkable ability to gain access to world leaders. He thinks the romantic allure of Lawrence’s accomplishments should not obscure the great foresight, planning abilities and meticulousness for which he should be equally famous.

As for Lawrence’s military importance in the Arab Revolt and his direct communication lines to Edmund Allenby, the British commander in the Middle East, Mr. Korda ably puts that in perspective too. It is as if, he writes, “an acting major commanding a small force of guerrillas behind enemy lines had direct access to Eisenhower whenever he pleased in the second half of 1944.” And yet, to a man with Lawrence’s heroic aspirations, such access never seemed overreaching or abnormal.

The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

By Michael Korda

Illustrated. 762 pages. Harper. $36.

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T.E. Lawrence

T.E. Lawrence was a British military officer who took part in the Great Arab Revolt and later wrote the memoir 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.'

Who Was T.E. Lawrence?

T.E. Lawrence served in the British military, becoming involved in Middle Eastern affairs and playing a key role in the Great Arab Revolt. He was a staunch advocate for Arab independence and later pursued a private life, changing his name. Author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and inspiration for Lawrence of Arabia , he died on May 19, 1935.

'Lawrence of Arabia'

Born on August 16, 1888, in Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales, Thomas Edward Lawrence became an expert in Arab affairs as a junior archaeologist in Carchemish on the Euphrates River from 1911 to 1914, working for the British Museum on archaeological excavations. After the start of World War I, he entered British intelligence.

Lawrence joined Amir Faisal al Husayn's revolt against the Turks as political liaison officer, leading a guerilla campaign that harassed the Turks behind their lines. After a major victory at Aqaba—a port city on the southern coast of what is now Jordan—Lawrence's forces supported British General Allenby's campaign to capture Jerusalem.

In 1917, Lawrence was captured at Dar'a and tortured and sexually abused, leaving emotional scars that never healed. By 1918, Lawrence had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of Bath by King George V, but politely refused the medals in support of Arab independence.

Spiritually and physically exhausted, and uncomfortable with his fame, Lawrence returned to England and began diligently working on an account of his adventures .

'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' and Later Years

His book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom , was published shortly thereafter, becoming known for its vivid descriptions of the incredible breadth and variety of Lawrence's activities in Arabia. The work garnered international fame for Lawrence, who was aptly dubbed "Lawrence of Arabia."

After the war, Lawrence joined the Royal Air Force under an assumed name, T.E. Shaw (in his quest for anonymity, he had his name officially changed).

Death and 'Lawrence of Arabia'

Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident on May 19, 1935, in Clouds Hill, Dorset, England.

A film based on his life, Lawrence of Arabia , directed by David Lean and starring Peter O'Toole, was released in 1962. The film won seven Academy Awards, including the Oscar for best picture.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Thomas Edward Lawrence
• Birth date: August 16, 1888
• Birth City: Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Best Known For: T.E. Lawrence was a British military officer who took part in the Great Arab Revolt and later wrote the memoir 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.'
• Politics and Government
• World War I
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• Astrological Sign: Leo
• City of Oxford High School for Boys
• Interesting Facts
• T.E. Lawrence was only 5'5" tall—possibly the result of a bout of mumps in childhood, thought by some to have stunted his growth.
• Death date: May 19, 1935
• Death City: Clouds Hill, Dorset, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom
• All men dream; but not equally.

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Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence Hardcover – January 1, 1989

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• Print length 1188 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Atheneum
• Publication date January 1, 1989
• Dimensions 6.25 x 2.5 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0689119348
• ISBN-13 978-0689119347
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atheneum (January 1, 1989)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1188 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0689119348
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0689119347
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.75 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 2.5 x 9.25 inches
• #22,644 in Engineering (Books)
• #28,979 in Military History (Books)
• #30,786 in World History (Books)

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T. E. Lawrence Society

About Lawrence

A brief biography of t. e. lawrence (1888-1935), august 16 1888.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born at Tremadog, in North Wales. He was the second of five boys to be born to Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, and Sarah Junner.

In the mid 1880s, Lawrence’s father had left behind his wife, Edith, and four daughters at the family estate in County Westmeath, Ireland, to set up home with Sarah, who was the family’s governess. Thomas Chapman was never divorced from Edith, and the stigma that surrounded living out of wedlock at the time caused Thomas and Sarah to move many times over the next few years to avoid detection. Lawrence was an assumed name. Their first child, Montague Robert (Bob), was born in Dublin in 1885.

The port of Porthmadog in North Wales was the landing point for the ferry from Ireland, and it was in a rented house in nearby Tremadog that Thomas Edward (Ned) was born.

The Lawrences continued to move around as more sons arrived. William George (Will) was born in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, in 1889. The family lived in Dinard, on the coast of Brittany, France, from 1891, moving temporarily to St Helier, Jersey, for the birth of Frank Helier in 1893. In 1894 they returned to England to live in the New Forest.

In 1896 the family moved to Oxford so that the boys could attend the fee-paying City of Oxford High School, which had recently been opened, primarily to serve the needs of the sons of University lecturers. A fifth son, Arnold Walter, was born in 1900. Although Lawrence’s parents were devout Christians, they were ‘living in sin’ as it would have been called at the time. Yet there is ample evidence that they were a happy, united family. They were regular worshippers at St Aldate’s Church where an evangelical brand of Christianity was practised. During his boyhood, Lawrence became increasingly absorbed in the medieval world, and began to undertake a series of ambitious bicycle journeys around England, Wales and France to further his studies.

Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. In summer 1909, he undertook an arduous 1,000-mile walking tour of Syria to study Crusader castles for his thesis, The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the XIIth Century .

Lawrence was awarded a Senior Demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford. Under the influence of David Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, he spent four seasons working as an archaeologist on the British Museum’s excavations of the Hittite city of Carchemish, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. It was at Carchemish that he met Dahoum, a young Arab boy working as an assistant on the site, who became his great friend and is widely assumed to be the ‘S.A.’  in Lawrence’s dedication in Seven Pillars of Wisdom . In January 1914, Lawrence and his fellow archaeologist Leonard Woolley assisted in a survey of the Sinai Desert funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund, publishing their findings as The Wilderness of Zin .

Lawrence left Carchemish for the last time in June 1914. Following the outbreak of war, he spent a short time working in London in the Geographical Section of the War Office. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and moved to Cairo where he worked in the Military Intelligence Department. In 1915, Lawrence learned of the deaths of his brothers Frank, killed in action in France on May 9, and Will, missing in action in an observation plane over France on October 23 and presumed dead. In April 1916,  Lawrence went to Basra in Mesopotamia to take part in negotiations for the release of Allied soldiers besieged in Kut.

From October 1916, Lawrence worked as Liaison Officer to the Emir Feisal,  whose Arab irregular troops became engaged in a series of guerrilla operations against the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire, known as the Arab Revolt. It was these turbulent two years which provided the material for his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom and were the basis for his eventual fame as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Lawrence’s involvement in the Arab Revolt came to an end with the fall of Damascus in October 1918. He returned to England and commenced lobbying politicians to fulfil promises for independence made to the Arabs.

Along with Emir Feisal, Lawrence attended the Paris Peace Conference which resulted in the Arabs being denied the freedom to the lands over which they had fought. He wrote the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom . It was in this year that the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ legend was created by an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who presented an ‘illustrated travelogue’ to huge audiences, first in New York, then in London and finally worldwide.

After his first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was lost at Reading Station in November 1919, Lawrence spent the first weeks of the year rewriting the book from memory while ensconced in the attic of the architect Herbert Baker’s office in Barton Street, London.

Winston Churchill approached Lawrence and, despite his initial reluctance, he accepted an appointment as Adviser on Arab Affairs at the Colonial Office. Lawrence attended a new peace conference in Cairo, which resulted in the establishment of the map of the Middle East which largely remains to this day.

By summer 1922, Lawrence had completed a third draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom – the so-called Oxford Text. In August he enlisted in the ranks of the RAF under the assumed name of John Hume Ross. It was his early service in the training depot at Uxbridge which provided much of the material for his book The Mint , which was not to be publicly available until 1955. It was in late 1922 that Lawrence embarked on his passion for Brough Superior motorcycles which provided him not just with transport, but with a mental escape.

In January, Lawrence was discharged from the RAF after his real identity was revealed in the press. In March he enlisted in the Tank Corps in Bovington, Dorset, as a private soldier under the assumed name of Thomas Edward Shaw. It was while here that he continued to establish many important friendships including that of Thomas Hardy who lived nearby in Dorchester. Lawrence took a lease on a semi-derelict cottage near Bovington Camp – Clouds Hill – which was to become his refuge and, following its purchase, eventually his home. During this year he made his translation of Adrien Le Corbeau’s Le Gigantesque ( Forest Giant ).

Lawrence spent much of his free time during these years preparing the Subscribers’ Edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom , which enabled him to indulge his passion for fine printed books. Offered at a price of 30 guineas, each copy was individually bound for the subscriber. The text of this version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the one best known throughout the world today. However, the effort exhausted him. He was also deeply unhappy in the Tank Corps. Following pressure on the government from his friends, concerned about his health, in 1925 he was readmitted to the RAF, stationed at Cranwell.

The Subscribers’ Edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom appeared at the end of 1926, followed in March 1927 by Revolt in the Desert , an abridged version made available to the general public. In late 1926 he was posted to Karachi, which was then part of India, and then Miranshah near the Afghan border. During this time he completed The Mint and began translating Homer’s Odyssey .

In January, Lawrence returned to England following press stories that he had been involved in an insurrection in Afghanistan. He was stationed at RAF Cattewater (later Mount Batten) in Plymouth, from where he resumed his friendships with artists, politicians and writers. During the summer, he acted as personal assistant to his commanding officer, Wing Commander Sydney Smith, during the preparations for the prestigious Schneider Trophy seaplane race over the Solent.

Lawrence started work on the development of high-speed rescue boats for the RAF, after witnessing the fatal crash of an RAF flying boat in Plymouth Sound. It was this work that occupied most of his final years in the RAF, taking him to postings in Hythe, Southampton and Bridlington. 1932 saw the publication of his translation of the Odyssey .

February 1935

Lawrence retired from the RAF and cycled from his last posting in Bridlington to Clouds Hill.

May 13 1935

Lawrence fell from his Brough Superior motorcycle when he was in collision with two boys on bicycles on the road between Bovington Camp and Clouds Hill. He never regained consciousness.

May 19 1935

Lawrence died as a result of his injuries.

May 21 1935

Lawrence was buried at Moreton, Dorset. His funeral was attended by a large crowd including Winston Churchill, writers and artists including Augustus John, Eric Kennington and Siegfried Sassoon, and friends from his service days. Lawrence’s mother Sarah and brother Bob were travelling along the Yangtze river on their return from China, where Bob had been working as a medical missionary, when they received the news of his death; his brother Arnold was the only family member present at the funeral.

The international Society for everyone with an interest in the life of T. E. Lawrence

Upcoming events, hay-on-wye weekend, t e lawrence 17th biennial symposium, raf museum hendon.

World War I: 100 Years Later

A Smithsonian magazine special report

The True Story of Lawrence of Arabia

His daring raids in World War I made him a legend. But in the Middle East today, the desert warrior’s legacy is written in sand

Scott Anderson

Sipping tea and chain-smoking L&M cigarettes in his reception tent in Mudowarra, Sheik Khaled Suleiman al-Atoun waves a hand to the outside, in a generally northern direction. “Lawrence came here, you know?” he says. “Several times. The biggest time was in January of 1918. He and other British soldiers came in armored cars and attacked the Turkish garrison here, but the Turks were too strong and they had to retreat.” He pulls on his cigarette, before adding with a tinge of civic pride: “Yes, the British had a very hard time here.”

While the sheik was quite correct about the resiliency of the Turkish garrison in Mudowarra—the isolated outpost held out until the final days of World War I—the legendary T.E. Lawrence’s “biggest time” there was open to debate. In Lawrence’s own telling, that incident occurred in September 1917, when he and his Arab followers attacked a troop train just south of town, destroying a locomotive and killing some 70 Turkish soldiers.

The southernmost town in Jordan, Mudowarra was once connected to the outside world by means of that railroad. One of the great civil-engineering projects of the early 20th century, the Hejaz Railway was an attempt by the Ottoman sultan to propel his empire into modernity and knit together his far-flung realm.

By 1914, the only remaining gap in the line was located in the mountains of southern Turkey. When that tunneling work was finished, it would have been theoretically possible to travel from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople all the way to the Arabian city of Medina, 1,800 miles distant, without ever touching the ground. Instead, the Hejaz Railway fell victim to World War I. For nearly two years, British demolition teams, working with their Arab rebel allies, methodically attacked its bridges and isolated depots, quite rightly perceiving the railroad as the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman enemy, the supply line linking its isolated garrisons to the Turkish heartland.

One of the most prolific of the British attackers was a young army officer named T.E. Lawrence. By his count, Lawrence personally blew up 79 bridges along the railway, becoming so adept that he perfected a technique of leaving a bridge “scientifically shattered”—ruined but still standing. Turkish crews then faced the time-consuming task of dismantling the wreckage before repairs could begin.

By war’s end, damage to the railway was so extensive that much of it was abandoned. In Jordan today, the line runs only from the capital city of Amman to a point 40 miles north of Mudowarra, where a modern spur veers off to the west. Around Mudowarra, all that is left is the raised berm and gravel of the rail bed, along with remnants of culverts and station houses destroyed nearly a century ago. This trail of desolation stretches south 600 miles to the Saudi Arabian city of Medina; in the Arabian Desert there still sit several of the war-mangled train cars, stranded and slowly rusting away.

One who laments the loss is Sheik al-Atoun, Mudowarra’s leading citizen and a tribal leader in southern Jordan. As one of his sons, a boy of about 10, constantly refills our teacups in the reception tent, the sheik describes Mudowarra as a poor and remote area. “If the railway still existed,” he says, “it would be very different. We would be connected, both economically and politically to north and south. Instead, there is no development here, and Mudowarra has always stayed a small place.”

The sheik was aware of a certain irony in his complaint, given that his grandfather worked alongside T.E. Lawrence in sabotaging the railroad. “Of course, at that time,” al-Atoun says ruefully, “my grandfather thought that these destructions were a temporary matter because of the war. But they actually became permanent.”

Today, T.E. Lawrence remains one of the most iconic figures of the early 20th century. His life has been the subject of at least three movies—including one considered a masterpiece—over 70 biographies, several plays and innumerable articles, monographs and dissertations. His wartime memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom , translated into more than a dozen languages, remains in print nearly a full century after its first publication. As Gen. Edmund Allenby, chief British commander in the Middle East during World War I, noted, Lawrence was first among equals: “There is no other man I know,” he asserted, “who could have achieved what Lawrence did.”

Part of the enduring fascination has to do with the sheer improbability of Lawrence’s tale, of an unassuming young Briton who found himself the champion of a downtrodden people, thrust into events that changed the course of history. Added to this is the poignancy of his journey, so masterfully rendered in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia , of a man trapped by divided loyalties, torn between serving the empire whose uniform he wore and being true to those fighting and dying alongside him. It is this struggle that raises the Lawrence saga to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, as it ultimately ended badly for all concerned: for Lawrence, for the Arabs, for Britain, in the slow uncoiling of history, for the Western world at large. Loosely cloaked about the figure of T.E. Lawrence there lingers the wistful specter of what might have been if only he had been listened to.

For the past several years, Sheik al-Atoun has assisted archaeologists from Bristol University in England who are conducting an extensive survey of the war in Jordan, the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). One of the Bristol researchers, John Winterburn, recently discovered a forgotten British Army camp in the desert 18 miles from Mudowarra; untouched for nearly a century—Winterburn even collected old gin bottles—the find was touted in the British press as the discovery of “Lawrence’s Lost Camp.”

“We do know that Lawrence was at that camp,” Winterburn says, sitting at a Bristol University café. “But, as best we can tell, he probably stayed only a day or two. But all the men who were there much longer, none of them were Lawrence, so it becomes ‘Lawrence’s camp.’”

For most travelers, Highway 15, Jordan’s main north-south thoroughfare, offers a dull drive through a largely featureless desert connecting Amman to more interesting places: the ruins at Petra, the Red Sea beaches of Aqaba.

To GARP co-director Nicholas Saunders, however, Highway 15 is a treasure trove. “Most people have no idea that they’re traveling through one of the best-preserved battlefields in the world,” he explains, “that all around them are reminders of the pivotal role this region played in World War I.”

Saunders is at his desk in his cluttered office at Bristol, where scattered amid the stacks of papers and books are relics from his own explorations along Highway 15: bullet casings, cast-iron tent rings. Since 2006, Saunders has headed up some 20 GARP digs in southern Jordan, excavating everything from Turkish Army encampments and trenchworks, to Arab rebel campsites and old British Royal Flying Corps airstrips. What unites these disparate sites—indeed what led to their creation—is the single-track railway that runs alongside Highway 15 for some 250 miles: the old Hejaz Railway.

As first articulated by T.E. Lawrence, the goal wasn’t to permanently sever the Turks’ southern lifeline, but rather to keep it barely functioning. The Turks would have to constantly devote resources to its repair, while their garrisons, receiving just enough supplies to survive, would be stranded. Indications of this strategy are everywhere evident along Highway 15; while many of the original small bridges and culverts that the Ottomans constructed to navigate the region’s seasonal waterways are still in place—instantly recognizable by their ornate stonework arches—many more are of modern, steel-beam construction, denoting where the originals were blown up during the war.

The GARP expeditions have produced an unintended consequence. Jordan’s archaeological sites have long been plundered by looters—and this has now extended to World War I sites. Fueled by the folkloric memory of how Turkish forces and Arab rebels often traveled with large amounts of gold coins—Lawrence himself doled out tens of thousands of English pounds’ worth of gold in payments to his followers—locals quickly descend on any newly discovered Arab Revolt site with spades in hand to start digging.

“So of course, we’re part of the problem,” Saunders says. “The locals see all these rich foreigners digging away,” Saunders adds wryly, “on our hands and knees all day in the hot sun, and they think to themselves, ‘No way. No way are they doing this for some old bits of metal; they’re here to find the gold.’”

As a result, GARP archaeologists remain on a site until satisfied that they’ve found everything of interest, and then, with the Jordanian government’s permission, take everything with them when closing down the site. From past experience, they know they’re likely to discover only mounds of turned earth upon their return.

Set amid rolling brown hills given over to groves of orange and pistachio trees, the village of Karkamis has the soporific feel of many rural towns in southern Turkey. On its slightly rundown main street, shopkeepers gaze vacantly out at deserted sidewalks, while in a tiny, tree-shaded plaza, idled men play dominoes or cards.

If this seems a peculiar setting for the place where a young Lawrence first came to his appreciation of the Arab world, the answer actually lies about a mile east of the village. There, on a promontory above a ford of the Euphrates sits the ruins of the ancient city of Carchemish. While human habitation on that hilltop dates back at least 5,000 years, it was a desire to unlock the secrets of the Hittites, a civilization that reached its apogee in the 11th century B.C., that first brought a 22-year-old Lawrence here in 1911.

Even before Carchemish, there were signs that the world might well hear of T.E. Lawrence in some capacity. Born in 1888, the second of five boys in an upper-middle-class British family, his almost-paralyzing shyness masked a brilliant mind and a ferocious independent streak.

For his history thesis at Oxford, Lawrence resolved to study the Crusader castles of Syria, alone and on foot and at the height of the brutal Middle East summer. It was a 1,200-mile walk that carried him into villages that had never seen a European before—certainly not an unaccompanied European who, at 5-foot-4, looked to be all of 15—and it marked the beginning of his fascination with the East. “I will have such difficulty in becoming English again,” Lawrence wrote home amid his journey, sounding much like any modern college student on a junior year abroad; the difference in Lawrence’s case was that this appraisal proved quite accurate.

The transformation was confirmed when, after graduating from Oxford, he wheedled his way onto a British Museum-sponsored archaeological expedition decamping for Carchemish. As the junior assistant on that dig, and one of only two Westerners permanently on-site, Lawrence saw to his scientific duties—primarily photographing and inventorying the finds—but developed an even keener interest in understanding how Arab society worked.

Learning Arabic, he took to quizzing members of the local work crew on their family histories, on the region’s complex clan and tribal affiliations, and often visited the laborers in their homes to glimpse their lives up close. To the degree that these workmen had dealt with Westerners before, it had been in the master-servant form; to meet someone who took a genuine interest in their culture, joined to Lawrence’s very un-Western tolerance for hardship and hard work, drew them to the young Briton as a kindred spirit. “The foreigners come out here always to teach,” he wrote his parents from Carchemish, “whereas they had much better learn.”

The dig in northern Syria, originally funded for one year, stretched into four. He wrote a friend in 1913, extolling his comfortable life in Carchemish, that he intended to remain as long as the funding lasted and then go on to “another and another nice thing.” That plan abruptly ended with the onset of World War I in August 1914, and Lawrence, back in England on leave, was destined never to see Carchemish again.

From his time in Syria, Lawrence had developed a clear, if simplistic, view of the Ottoman Empire—admiration for the free-spirited Arab, disgust at the corruption and inefficiency of their Turkish overseers—and looked forward to the day when the Ottoman “yoke” might be cast aside. That opportunity, and the chance for Lawrence to play a role, arrived when Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Because of his experience in the region, Lawrence was dispatched to Egypt, the British base of operations for the upcoming campaign against the Turks, as a second lieutenant in military intelligence.

Despite the fact that he and other members of the intelligence branch urged that Britain forge alliances with Arab groups ready to revolt against the Turks, the generals in Cairo seemed intent on fighting the same conventional frontal assault war that had already proved so disastrous in Europe. The most immediate result was the Gallipoli fiasco of 1915, in which the British Commonwealth suffered nearly a quarter-million casualties before finally conceding failure. Making it all the more painful for the deskbound Lawrence was the death in quick succession of two of his brothers on the Western Front. “They were both younger than I am,” he wrote a friend, “and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo.”

It wasn’t until October 1916, two years after his arrival in Egypt, that Lawrence would find himself catapulted to his destiny.

To approach the Arabian peninsula by sea is to invite one of the more unsettling of natural phenomena, that moment when the sea-cooled air abruptly collides with that coming off the desert, when the temperature can jump by 20, even 30, degrees in a matter of seconds. Probably no one described this better than T.E. Lawrence, who, when recounting his approach to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah on the morning of October 16, 1916, wrote, “the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.”

His presence there had come about almost by chance. Four months earlier, and after protracted secret negotiations with British authorities in Cairo, Emir Hussein, ruler of the Hejaz region of central Arabia, had launched an Arab revolt against the Turks. Initially matters had gone well. Catching the Turks by surprise, Hussein’s rebels seized the holy city of Mecca along with Jeddah, but there the rebellion had foundered. By October, the Turks remained in firm control of the Arabian interior, including the city of Medina, and appeared poised to crush the rebels. When Lawrence learned that a friend in Cairo was being dispatched to Arabia to gauge the crisis, he arranged a temporary leave from his desk job to tag along.

Over the course of that ten-day visit, Lawrence managed to fully insinuate himself in the Arab rebel cause, and to win the confidence of Hussein’s chief battlefield commander, his third son, Faisal. In short order, Lawrence was appointed the British Army’s temporary liaison to Faisal, a posting that soon became permanent.

Having used his time in Carchemish to study the clan and tribal structure of Arab society, Lawrence intuitively grasped the delicate negotiating process necessary to win tribal leaders over to the rebel cause. What’s more, waging war in early 20th-century Arabia revolved around the same primal issues—where an army on the move might find water and forage for its animals—as the wars of 14th-century Europe that Lawrence had so thoroughly studied at Oxford. Very quickly, Faisal came to regard the young British officer as one of his most trusted advisers, as Lawrence, donning the robes of an Arab sheik, assumed a position of honor in tribal strategy sessions. With British naval help, the Arabs captured a succession of Turkish-held towns along the Red Sea coast, while Lawrence organized guerrilla raids against the inland Hejaz Railway.

But Faisal’s young liaison officer also harbored a guilty secret. From his time in Cairo, Lawrence was aware of the extravagant promises the British government had made to Hussein in order to raise the Arab Revolt: full independence for virtually the entire Arab world. What Lawrence also knew was that just months after cementing that deal with Hussein, Britain had entered into a secret compact with its chief ally in the war, France. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the future independent Arab nation was to be relegated to the wastelands of Arabia, while all the regions of value—Iraq, greater Syria—were to be allocated to the imperial spheres of Britain and France. As Lawrence recruited ever more tribes to the cause of future Arab independence, he became increasingly conscience-stricken by the “dead letter” promises he was making, and finally reached a breaking point. His first act of sedition—and by most any standards, a treasonous one—was to inform Faisal of the existence of Sykes-Picot. His second would lead to the greatest triumph of his career: the capture of Aqaba.

By the early spring of 1917, talk of a joint British-French amphibious landing at the small fishing port of Aqaba gained great currency among the Allied leadership in Cairo. Aqaba was both the Turkish enemy’s last outpost on the Red Sea and a natural gateway—at least so it appeared on a map—to the southern reaches of Syria, the heartland of the Arab world.

Modern Aqaba is a sprawling city of 140,000, its dense downtown giving way to new subdivisions, shopping malls and office complexes steadily expanding over its foothills. If King Abdullah II of Jordan has his way, the expansion won’t slow anytime soon. Reflecting the king’s vision for converting his nation’s only seaport into a world-class economic and tourist destination, the empty land south of town has been laced with modern roads. But those roads lead to nowhere in particular, while tattered billboards advertise the condominium complexes and industrial parks allegedly to come.

Those in search of “old Aqaba” will be disappointed. This consists of a tiny stone fort near the oceanfront promenade, and, next to it, a dusty four-room museum. Dominating the small plaza in front of the museum is perhaps Aqaba’s most peculiar landmark, a 430-foot flagpole—the second-highest free-standing flagpole in the world, according to the local tourism bureau. It was at just about this spot that, on the morning of July 6, 1917, Lawrence and his exultant rebel followers would sweep through the streets to take a “victory bath” in the sea.

By odd happenstance, Lawrence had visited Aqaba just a few months before the war began. From that firsthand experience, Lawrence knew that the “gateway” into Syria was actually through a winding, 20-mile-long mountain gorge that the Turks had laced with trenchworks and forts designed to annihilate any force advancing up from the coast.

Lawrence also perceived a political trap. If the British and French took control of Aqaba, they could effectively bottle up their Arab allies and contain their rebellion to Arabia. That done, whenever the two European imperial powers did manage to push into Syria—promised to the French under Sykes-Picot—they could renege on the promises made to Hussein with a clearer conscience.

Since any advance inland from Aqaba would be murderous, Lawrence’s solution was to first take the gorge and then the port. And to thwart his own nation’s imperial designs, he simply kept his plan to himself. On the day he set out from the Arabian coast, embarking on a 600-mile camel trek through the desert to fall on Aqaba from behind, not one of Lawrence’s fellow British officers knew where he was headed or what he intended to do when he got there. Accompanying him were a mere 45 rebels. On their journey, a two-month ordeal that would take them across one of the world’s harshest landscapes, each of the men started with only water and a 45-pound sack of flour as provisions.

Forming the dramatic centerpiece of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the moment when Lawrence and his rebel band launch their surprise attack on Aqaba from behind. Led by a triumphant white-robed Peter O’Toole, the rebels bear down on the stunned Turks.

In reality, the crucial battle for Aqaba occurred 40 miles to the north, in the “lost” wadi of Aba el Lissan. It was there, with the hellish two-month trek through the desert completed and Aqaba almost in his grasp, that Lawrence learned a Turkish relief force was marching in his direction. Even if his rebel army–swelled to nearly 1,000 with recruits—continued on to Aqaba, Lawrence reasoned, this enemy column would soon catch up; there was no choice but to destroy it first.

They found the Turks camping in Aba el Lissan on the night of July 1, 1917, and what ensued there was less a battle than a massacre. The Turkish force of 550 soldiers was virtually wiped out at the cost of two Arab dead. With the path cleared, Lawrence and his men rushed on for Aqaba, the Turkish garrison there surrendering after barely firing a shot.

Clad in worn sandals and lifting the hem of his robe to avoid the snag of thornbushes, Abu Enad Daraoush picks his way over the hillside. To the untrained eye, the wadi of Aba el Lissan is indistinguishable from a thousand other windswept valleys in southern Jordan, but Daraoush, a 48-year-old farmer and shepherd, knows its secrets. Reaching a rock outcropping, he points out a feature on the level ground below: five or six circles of cleared earth, each about ten feet across and delineated by rings of large boulders. Resembling oversized fire pits, the circles are the traces of a Turkish Army encampment, where soldiers had cleared the earth and pitched their distinctive round tents. In 2014, that camp is nearly a century old—97 years old, to be precise.

Daraoush and the other villagers of Aba el Lissan have collected military detritus here—bullets, uniform buttons, metal bits from horse harnesses—enough to know that the Turkish force was sizable. They also know it ended badly for the Turks. From the rock outcropping, Daraoush points to the wadi basin, perhaps 200 feet away. “Down there we found the bodies,” he says. “Not complete bodies, but bones. When I was a boy, I used to take them to school to show my friends.” Daraoush gazes up at the enclosing ridgelines. “This is a place where many, many Turks died.”

As Daraoush and I walk across the battlefield, he laughs lightly. “Now that you are here, perhaps you can finally show us where the gold is buried.”

It is meant as a joke, but one with a slight edge to it. While a Turkish force often carried a small quantity of gold, during Lawrence’s two years at the battlefront, his caravans frequently included several camels used to haul nothing but gold coins to pay his recruits. As a result, the urban—or rather, rural—myth was spawned, holding that sacks of stashed gold are likely to be found wherever the two warring sides collided.

Aba el Lissan has been virtually stripped bare of any remnants of war by scavengers. In this impoverished corner of Jordan, the smallest piece of metal has value for scrap. In over an hour of scouring the land, I found only a Turkish bullet casing and the top of an old British Army rations can stenciled with the words, “punch here.”

Toward the end of our walk, Daraoush leads me to one particular gold-hunter hole set away from the others. With a tinge of embarrassment, he offers that “a neighbor” had dug the hole a year or two earlier in search of booty, but instead had found the skeleton of a buried Turkish soldier. “He had been placed on his side, with his hands folded under his head,” Daraoush says. “It was like he was sleeping.” He pointed to the hole. “So we just buried him back up. What else was there to do?”

While the Aqaba campaign is considered one of the greatest military feats of the early 20th century—it is still studied in military colleges today— Lawrence soon followed it with a masterstroke of even greater consequence. Racing to Cairo to inform the British high command of what he had achieved, he discovered that the previous British commander in chief, never a strong supporter of the Arab Revolt, had been dismissed following two failed frontal attacks against the Turks. His replacement, a mere two weeks into the job when an emaciated and barefoot Lawrence was summoned to his office, was a cavalry general named Edmund Allenby.

Rather lost in Lawrence’s electrifying news from Aqaba was any thought as to why the junior officer hadn’t informed his superiors of his scheme, let alone of its possible political consequences. Instead, with his newfound celebrity, Lawrence saw the opportunity to win over the green Allenby with a tantalizing prospect.

During their slog across the desert, Lawrence had, with only two escorts, conducted a remarkable reconnaissance mission across enemy-held Syria. There, he told Allenby, he had determined that huge numbers of Syrian Arabs were ready to join the rebels. Lawrence also vastly exaggerated both the strength and capability of those rebels already under arms to paint an enticing picture of a military juggernaut—the British advancing up the Palestine coast, as the Arabs took the fight to the Syrian interior. As Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars : “Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”

But Allenby bought it, promising to give the rebels all the aid he could and consider them equal partners. From now on, in Lawrence’s estimation, the British Army and Arab rebels would be joined at the hip, the French relegated to the margins. If the rebels reached Damascus first, they might be able to wrest Syria from the French altogether. Or so Lawrence hoped.

After our tea in his reception tent, Sheik al-Atoun takes me in his old four-wheel drive Toyota up to a promontory overlooking Mudowarra. Along for the adventure are five of his young sons and nephews, standing in the Toyota’s open bed and trying—with limited success—to avoid being pitched about during the bucking ride. Ringing the hilltop are remnants of the trenchworks from which the Turks had repeatedly repelled British attacks on the town. “Even with their armored cars and airplanes, they had great problems,” the sheik says. “The Turks here were very brave fighters.”

Al-Atoun’s words hint at the complicated emotions the legacy of World War I and the Arab Revolt stir in this part of the Arab world: pride at having cast off their Ottoman overseers after 400 years of rule, a lingering sadness at what took its place. The sheik points to a cluster of whitewashed homes perhaps ten miles away.

“That is Saudi Arabia. I have family and many friends there, but if I wish to visit them—or they to visit me—I must have a visa and go through customs. Why? We are one people, the Arabs, and we should be one nation, but instead we have been divided into—what, 22?—different countries. This is wrong. We should all be together.”

Quite understandably, Sheik al-Atoun blames the situation on the peace imposed by the European imperial powers at the end of World War I, a peace that T.E. Lawrence tried mightily to forestall.

Despite punching through the Turkish line in southern Palestine and taking Jerusalem in December 1917, the British Army ground to a halt as Allenby’s troops were siphoned off for the Western Front. Operating from the Arabs’ new headquarters in Aqaba, Lawrence continued to lead raids against the railway and into the hill country west of the Dead Sea, but this was hardly the grand, paralyzing offensive he had outlined to Allenby. The desultory nature of the war continued through the summer of 1918.

But something had happened to Lawrence in the interim. In November 1917, while conducting a secret reconnaissance mission into the strategic railway town of Deraa, he was briefly captured by the Turks, then subjected to torture—and, by most all evidence, rape—at the hands of the local Turkish governor. Managing to escape back to rebel lines, a far more hardened, even merciless, Lawrence began to emerge.

While Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia dealt obliquely with Lawrence’s Deraa ordeal, one aspect it captured exquisitely was his gradual unhinging in the field. In some battles, Lawrence ordered his followers to take no prisoners, or administered coups de grâce to men too badly wounded to be carried. In others, he took nearly suicidal risks. He attacked a Turkish troop train despite being so short of weapons that some of his men could only throw rocks at the enemy. If this was rooted in the trauma at Deraa, it seems he was at least as much driven by the desperate belief that if the Arabs could reach Damascus first, then the lies and guilty secrets he had harbored since coming to Arabia might somehow be set right.

On every road leading out of the ramshackle Jordanian border town of Ramtha there occurs a curious phenomenon: three- and four-story mansions set amid manicured and walled gardens. “The smugglers,” explains the owner of a tiny refreshment shop on Ramtha’s main street. He points down the road to the border crossing with Syria, a half-mile away. “The frontier has been officially closed for a year and a half now, so there’s a lot of money to be made. They move everything across—guns, drugs, cooking oil, whatever you can imagine.”

Six miles across that border stands the Syrian town of Deraa, the site where today’s Syrian civil war started and where Turkish forces briefly imprisoned Lawrence. Now, by all accounts, Deraa is a shattered shell of itself, its streets in ruins, the vast majority of its population gone. Many have ended up in the sprawling Jordanian refugee camp of Zaatari north of Amman—or here, in Ramtha.

“All the shops here are run by the Syrians now,” the Ramtha shopkeeper said, gesturing out at the commercial thoroughfare. “They have completely taken over.” His complaints about the newcomers echo those one hears about immigrants everywhere in the world: that they take away jobs from the locals, that they have caused rents to skyrocket. “I don’t know how much worse it can get,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, “but I know it won’t get better until the war there ends.”

Fifteen miles to the west of Ramtha lie the ancient Graeco-Roman ruins of Umm Qays, situated on a rocky promontory. On a clear day it is possible to see as far north as the Golan Heights and the Sea of Galilee. In the closing days of World War I, it was not these distant spots that made Umm Qays vitally strategic, but rather the sinuous Yarmouk Valley lying directly below.

When General Allenby launched his offensive against the Turks in Palestine in late September 1918, the engagement quickly turned into a rout. Virtually the only escape left open to the Turks was up through the Yarmouk, to the railway at Deraa. But awaiting the Turks once they climbed out of the valley were T.E. Lawrence and thousands of Arab rebel soldiers. One year after Deraa, Lawrence returned to the place of his torments and now he would exact a terrible revenge.

At one time, the 2,000-year-old stone fortress of Azraq rose out of the eastern Jordan desert like an apparition, a 60-foot-high monolith. The upper floors and battlements collapsed in a massive earthquake in 1927, but the structure is still impressive enough to draw the occasional tourist bus from Amman, 50 miles to the west. The first place these tourists are led is to a small garret above the still-intact south tower, a space that guides refer to simply as “the Lawrence room.”

It is a low-ceilinged chamber, cool and vaguely damp, with stone floors and narrow windows that give a view onto the surrounding desert. It has the feel of a place of refuge and, in fact, Lawrence recuperated here after his ordeal in Deraa, 60 miles northwest. It is also where, at the climactic moment of World War I in the Middle East, he plotted the Arab Army’s all-out assault on Turkish forces in inland Syria.

That attack was to be coordinated with Allenby’s sweep north through Palestine. It was Lawrence’s mission to cut off the Turks’ retreat at their most vulnerable spot: the railroad juncture of Deraa. Early on the morning of September 19, 1918, Lawrence and his followers began slipping out of Azraq castle, bound for the town where Lawrence had been tortured.

On September 27, after coming upon the village of Tafas, where the fleeing Turks had massacred many residents, Lawrence ordered his men to give “no quarter.” Throughout that day, the rebels picked apart a retreating column of 4,000, slaughtering all they found, but as Lawrence doubled back that afternoon, he discovered one unit had missed the command and taken 250 Turks and Germans captive. “We turned our Hotchkiss [machine gun] on the prisoners,” he noted in his battlefield report, “and made an end of them.” Lawrence was even more explicit about his actions that day in Seven Pillars . “In a madness born of the horror of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake our agony.”

Racing on to Damascus, Lawrence swiftly set up a provisional Arab government, with Faisal at its head. But when Allenby reached Damascus two days later, he summoned Lawrence and Faisal to the Victoria Hotel to inform them that, as outlined by Sykes-Picot, the city was to be placed under French administration. No sooner had a defeated Faisal left the room than Lawrence begged Allenby to be relieved of his command.

But Lawrence wasn’t finished fighting just yet. With the war in Europe drawing to a close, he hurried to London to begin lining up support for the Arab cause at the upcoming Paris Peace Conference. Acting as Faisal’s personal agent, he frantically lobbied prime ministers and presidents to uphold the promises made to the Arabs and to prevent a peace imposed along the lines laid out in Sykes-Picot. By that scheme, “Greater” Syria was to be divided into four political entities—Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria—with the British taking the first two, the French the latter. As for Iraq, Britain had planned to annex only the oil-rich southern section, but with more oil discovered in the north, they now wanted the whole thing.

Lawrence sought allies wherever he could find them. Surely the most remarkable was Chaim Weizmann, head of the English Zionist Federation. In January 1919, on the eve of the peace conference, Lawrence had engineered an agreement between Faisal and Weizmann. In return for Zionist support of a Faisal-led Syria, Faisal would support increased Jewish emigration into Palestine, tacitly recognizing a future Jewish state in the region. The pact was soon scuttled by the French.

But the most poignant what-might-have-been involved the Americans. Suspicious of the imperialist schemes of his European partners in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson sent a fact-finding commission to the Middle East. For three months, the King-Crane Commission toured Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and what they heard was unequivocal: The vast majority of every ethnic and religious group wanted independence or, barring that, American administration. Wilson, however, had far more interest in telling other nations how they should behave than in adding to American responsibilities. When the commission returned to Paris with its inconvenient finding, the report was simply locked away in a vault.

Lawrence’s efforts produced a cruel irony. At the same time that he was becoming a matinee idol in Britain, courtesy of a fanciful lecture show of his exploits delivered by American journalist Lowell Thomas, he was increasingly regarded by senior British officials as the enemy within, the malcontent who stood in the way of victorious Britain and France dividing the spoils of war. In the end, the obstreperous lieutenant colonel was effectively barred from the peace conference and prevented any further contact with Faisal. That accomplished, the path to imperial concord—and betrayal—was clear.

The repercussions were swift in coming. Within the year, most all of the Middle East was aflame as the Arab world, enraged at seeing their Ottoman masters replaced by European ones, rebelled. Lawrence was particularly prescient about Iraq. In 1919, he had predicted full-scale revolt against British rule there by March 1920—“If we don’t mend our ways.” The result of the uprising in May 1920 was some 10,000 dead, including 1,000 British soldiers and administrators.

Tasked to clean up the debacle was the new British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, who turned for help to the man whose warnings had been spurned: T.E. Lawrence. At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Lawrence helped to redress some of the wrongs. In the near future, Faisal, deposed by the French in Syria, would be placed on a new throne in British-controlled Iraq. Out of the British buffer state of Transjordan, the nation of Jordan would be created, with Faisal’s brother, Abdullah, at its head.

Gone forever, though, was the notion of a unified Arab nation. Vanished also was Lawrence’s spirit for the fight, or desire for leadership. As his collaboration with Churchill drew to an end, he legally changed his name and petitioned to re-enlist in the British military as a private. As he explained to a friend, he never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again.

On a country lane in the southwestern English county of Dorset sits a two-story cottage surrounded by rhododendron bushes. It is a tiny place, less than 700 square feet, consisting of two small rooms on each floor connected by a steep and rickety staircase, redolent with the smell of leather and old books. Curiously, it has neither a kitchen nor a toilet. Known as Clouds Hill, it was the last home of T.E. Lawrence. Not that this was how he was known to his neighbors; he was Pvt. T.E. Shaw, a reclusive serviceman rarely seen except when riding his beloved Brough motorcycle through the countryside.

After rejoining the British military in 1921, Lawrence spent most of the next 14 years in lowly military positions in bases scattered about Britain. While stationed in Dorset in 1929, he bought Clouds Hill as a place to go in refuge, to read and listen to music. In walking through the claustrophobic cottage, however, it is hard to escape the image of a broken and lonely man.

Along with the disappointment of seeing his dream for the Arab world slip away, the postwar Lawrence clearly suffered from what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder; throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, he suffered bouts of depression, cutting off contact with all but a handful of old friends. In 1935, at the age of 46, he decided to retire from the military—the only “family” he had known for 20 years—but this was a decision that also filled him with a certain dread, unsure of how he would fill his unregimented days. As he wrote to a friend on May 6, 1935, as he was settling into Clouds Hill permanently: “At present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die. Let’s hope that will not be my continuing state.”

It would not be. Precisely a week later, Lawrence had a fatal motorcycle accident near Clouds Hill. At his passing, Winston Churchill eulogized, “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.”

In the Arab world, memory of Lawrence is far more mixed; indeed, the changing view of him there underscores the lingering bitterness still felt over the peace imposed nearly a century ago. That becomes clear when I ask Sheik al-Atoun in his reception tent in Mudowarra how Lawrence is regarded today. At first, he tries to tactfully skirt the question:

“Some people think he was really trying to help the Arabs,” he replies, “but others think it was all a trick, that Lawrence was actually working for the British Empire all along.” When I press for his opinion, the sheik grows slightly discomfited. “May I speak frankly? Maybe some of the very old ones still believe he was a friend of the Arabs, but almost everyone else, we know the truth. Even my grandfather, before he died, he believed he had been tricked.”

It was a comment that seemed to encapsulate the ultimate tragedy of both Lawrence and the Middle East —but there is a far more graphic illustration of that tragedy. It is to be found at Carchemish.

It was at Carchemish that Lawrence first came to despise the despotism of Ottoman Turkey, and to imagine an independent Arab nation with Syria at its heart; today, of course, Turkey is a democracy while Syria is in the grips of an unspeakably savage civil war. Karkamis, where the town’s sleepiness gives way to a tinge of menace, sits at the very dividing line between those two realities.

The hilltop sprawl of Hittite ruins is now a Turkish police post, off-limits to visitors, while at the base of that hill a 15-foot-high concrete wall topped with concertina wire has recently been erected. On the other side of that wall, in the Syrian town of Jarabulus, fly the black-and-white war flags of a rebel group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, an Islamic fundamentalist faction so murderous and extreme it has been disavowed by its former umbrella organization, al-Qaeda. In Karkamis’ grim little park, idle Syrian men who managed to escape tell of family and friends being butchered at the hands of ISIS, of how Jarabulus has become a ghost town.

A Syrian refugee in his mid-40s, unwilling even to disclose his name, tells me that he had planned to escape with his family six months earlier when, on the eve of their departure, ISIS had grabbed his teenage son. “I sent my wife and younger children on to Lebanon,” he says, “but I stayed behind to try and get my son back.”

He points to a teenager in blue jeans and a red T-shirt sitting on a brick wall a few feet away, gazing up at the canopy of trees with a placid, faraway smile. “That’s him,” he says. “After six days, I managed to get him back, but the terrorists had already destroyed him.” The father taps a forefinger against his own temple, the universal gesture to indicate a person gone mad. “That’s all he does now, smile that way.”

From the Turkish side could be heard the call to jihad wafting from the ISIS’s loudspeakers. Somewhere over that wall, a half-mile from the Carchemish ruins, sits Lawrence’s old research station, a former licorice storehouse that he lovingly repaired and converted into a comfortable home. Now, it is a place that no Westerner will likely see for a very long time to come.

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Scott Anderson | READ MORE

Scott Anderson is a former war correspondent and the author of seven books including The Man who Tried to Save the World , Triage , War Zones and his acclaimed biography Lawrence in Arabia , which won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. Anderson is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine , Esquire , GQ , Men's Journal and Vanity Fair . Photo by Robert Clark.

Biography Online

T.E. Lawrence Biography

His life and adventures have become popularised – most famously in the film starring Peter O’Toole – Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

“I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time… We shall never see his like again. His name will live in history. It will live in the annals of war… It will live in the legends of Arabia.”

– Winston Churchill on T.E. Lawrence

Short Biography of T.E.Lawrence

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesoses of their 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 dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

– T.E.Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

At an early age, his family moved to Polstead Road, Oxford , where he attended the local Oxford high school for boys. In 1907, he went up to Oxford University, studying at Jesus College.

From an early age, Lawrence was fascinated with the culture of medieval knights and ancient chivalry. He most probably nursed ambitions to follow in the footsteps of these ancient heroes. As a young boy, he loved to travel around English churches, making etchings of notable figures. During his university time, he travelled extensively around France on bicycle; in particular, visiting the Crusader temples and castles which fascinated him.

After graduating with a first class bachelors degree, Lawrence began studying medieval pottery at Magdalen College, but given a chance to become an archaeologist in the Middle East, Lawrence jumped at the opportunity and sailed for Beirut in 1910.

In the Middle East, Lawrence continued his studies of languages; he learnt languages easily and could speak fluently French, German, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Turkish and Syriac.

Important influences for Lawrence during his time in the Middle East included the Arabist and archaeologist – Gertrude Bell, and D.G. Hogarth of the British Museum in Jerablus.

When war broke out in 1914, Lawrence had one a unique first-hand knowledge of Arabic culture in the region. This was to prove of vital importance as the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany, and so became Britain’s enemy.

In 1914, Lawrence helped to map the Negev Desert which might be used by the Ottoman Empire. It was surveyed under a smokescreen of ‘archaeology’ but was actually a purely military exercise.

At the start of the war, Lawrence was posted to Cairo where he worked for British Intelligence in the Middle East.

The Arab Bureau of the Foreign Office was aware that an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire would help the British war effort with minimal cost. In Lawrence, the Foreign Office felt they had the ideal individual to try and unite the various Arabic tribes. Lawrence seemed naturally at home with Arabic culture.

“Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. “

– T.E.Lawrence

The main leader of the Arabs was Emir Faisal, son of Sheriff Hussein of Mecca, whom Lawrence was able to make an alliance. Under Lawrence’s leadership, they began a classic guerrilla campaign – successfully attacking Ottoman supply lines – especially the Hejaz railway running through the desert from Medina.

The troops Lawrence worked with were often a disparate band; it was a complex network of alliances and different tribes. They were also relatively lightly armed, relying on speed and surprise and avoiding full frontal confrontation with a superior enemy. They did prove successful in upsetting the Ottoman army in the region.

In 1917, Lawrence directed an attack on the strategic port of Aqaba. From the rear, the city was lightly defended because the Ottomans didn’t feel it realistic for an army to cross the barren desert. Lawrence initiated the attack without even informing his superiors. Lawrence was given a free hand by his commander General Sir Edmund Allenby. Allenby was full of praise for Lawrence.

“There is no other man I know who could have achieved what Lawrence did. As for taking undue credit for himself, my own personal experience with Lawrence is that he was utterly unconcerned whether any kudos was awarded him or not.”

– Edmund Allenby, commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force to Lowell Thomas.

Lawrence led a small force travelling on camel and picking up volunteers along the way. The attack was a great success but, after capturing the city, there was no way to communicate the victory. Lawrence undertook the mission himself and rode all the way back to British Command to tell Allenby in person.

The victory was a major morale boost for the Allies and propelled Lawrence into an important position. He had the confidence of the Arab leader Emir Faisal and also the British. In fact, this dual loyalty to both the British Empire and the Arabs were to prove a testing dilemma for Lawrence.

In 1918, Lawrence was involved in the capture of Damascus in Syria. He helped to install Faisal as King of a provisional Arab government. But, this was to prove short-lived as French forces brought the provisional government to an end in 1920. The British French plan later split up Arabia in two with a line. This later created the states of Syria and Iraq.

Lawrence was appalled at what appeared to be the broken promises of the British. He had worked with the Arab revolt with promises of a free Arab state, but now, the allies seemed to go back on their promise. Using his newly gained fame, Lawrence tried with mixed success to change British policy towards Arab independence. For a time, Lawrence served Winston Churchill in the colonial office.

The new era in Palestine. The arrival at the 1920 Cairo Conference of Sir Herbert Samuel, H.B.M. high commissioner, etc. Col. Lawrence, Emir Abdullah, Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond and Sir Wyndham Deedes. 

Lawrence’s deeds were popularised by war correspondents such as Lowell Thomas. His story made him a romantic military hero – adopting a foreign culture to lead poorly equipped locals against a much more powerful occupier. However, Lawrence disliked the attention, fame and publicity that the newspapers gave him.

“To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail.”

Letter (1 April 1935); published in The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (1988) , edited by Malcolm Brown.

In 1922, Lawrence enlisted in the RAF under a false name, but after being exposed, he changed his name again before spending time in a remote base in India.

Throughout his life, Lawrence was a prolific writer. These included his famous short works on guerrilla warfare. His Seven Pillars of Wisdom is read even now by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1927, he published Revolt in the Desert to help pay off the debt from Seven Pillars. Lawrence took no income from the sale of the book but put it into a trust run by his friend, D.G.Hogarth. The Revolt in the Desert was a bestseller and earned for Lawrence more unwelcome publicity. He also corresponded to many of the leading intellectuals of the day such as George Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves , and John Buchan.

Even after his death, Lawrence managed to have far-reaching consequences. His head injuries were treated by neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns. Cairns was profoundly influenced by the seemingly unnecessary loss of life. He made further research into the use of crash helmets, and through this research, the use of crash helmets for motorcyclists became compulsory saving the lives of many motorcyclists.

Lawrence was buried at Moreton Church, Dorset. His funeral was attended by Winston Churchill. A stone effigy of Lawrence was placed in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Lawrence was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath, the DSO. But, in October 1918, refused to be made a Knight Commander of the British Empire. He was always modest about his achievements

“I’ve been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I’m quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I’m one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.”

T.E.Lawrence

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of T.E. Lawrence”, Oxford, UK  www.biographyonline.net , 1st Feb 2010. Last updated 22 February 2018.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

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Bibliography: Books and Book Reviews on T.E. Lawrence

The format for this bibliography has been created to underscore the continuing interest in T.E. Lawrence over the last nine decades, as well as the changing critiques of the man and of his biographers. We have also included links to a number of book reviews. The bibliography illustrates that while there remains keen interest in Lawrence, there has been a remarkable lack of material on Thomas, with the notable exception of the Archives and Special Collections at the James A. Cannavino Library at Marist College, the major resource of information for this exhibit.

In the course of our research we uncovered the remarkable bibliographic collection of Philip O’Brien, T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography , and in many cases where our information differed from his we deferred. We appreciate additions or corrections to any of our materials; please contact info@ [remove this text] cliohistory.org .

1924: Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia . 

1927: Lowell Thomas, The Boys’ Life of Colonel Lawrence.

1927: Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs.

1927: E. V. Timms (as "David Roseler"), Lawrence, Prince of Mecca , Australia Cornstalk Publishing Company, Sydney 1927, Octavo, original cloth, dust jacket, (228pp.), Frontispiece Illustration by Edgar A Holloway.

1930: Gurney Slade , In Lawrence’s Bodyguard . A work of fiction.

1934: B.H. Liddell Hart, Colonel Lawrence, the Man Behind the Legend.

1934: B.H. Liddell Hart, ‘T.E. Lawrence’  In Arabia and After.

1935: Reginald. H. Kiernan, Lawrence of Arabia.

1935 : Edward Robinson, Lawrence: The Story of His Life . With an introductory note by A. W. Lawrence.

1936 : Vyvyan Richards, Portrait of T.E. Lawrence .

1937 : Seldon Rodman, Lawrence , The Last Crusade. A dramatic-narrative poem.

1937 : A. W. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence By His Friends.

1938:  R. R. Graves and B. H. Liddell Hart, T.E. Lawrence To His Biographer, Robert Graves and T.E. Lawrence To His Biographer , Liddell Hart . Two volumes.

Review : December 28, 1938, T.E. Lawrence to his Biographers, “Books of the Times,” Charles Poore, New York Times. ( Abstract )

Review : August 25, 1963, T.E. Lawrence to his Biographers , “Once There Was a Hero, Now Only His Legend Remains,” George Steiner, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1938: David Garnett, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence. Reflective collection of writings and interviews on Lawrence by the people who knew him best.

Review : March 10, 1939, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence , “Books of the Times,” Charles Poore, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1939 : Vyvyan Richards, T.E. Lawrence .

1940: William F. Burbidge, The Mysterious A.C.2, A Biographical Sketch of Lawrence of Arabia.

1940: Clare Sydney Smith, The Golden Reign. The Story of My Friendship with “Lawrence of Arabia” . Republished 2004 with introduction by Malcolm Brown.

1946: Edward Robinson , Lawrence the Rebel.

1954: A.W. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence By His Friends. Second edition.

1955: Richard Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, a Biographical Enquiry .

Review : October 2, 1955, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry , “A Hero Challenged,” Carlos Baker, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1955: Flora Armitage, The Desert and the Stars: A Biography of Lawrence of Arabia. Illustrated with photographs.

Review : September 4, 1955, The Desert and the Stars , “To Glory and Back,” Selden Rodman, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1959 : John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years, 1908 to 1958.

1959: Jean Beraud Villars, T.E. Lawrence Or the Search for the Absolute . US publication date.

Review : March 15, 1959, T.E. Lawrence Or the Search for the Absolute , “The Mystery of the Man,” D. W. Brogan, New York Times. ( Abstract )

1961 : Anthony Nutting, Lawrence of Arabia. The Man and the Motive.

Review : December 31, 1961, Lawrence of Arabia. The Man and the Motive , “Political Motivations Wrapped in a Personal Enigma,” Stanlely Weintraub, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1962 : Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia, with a new introduction by the author. Third edition.

1963:   Stanley Weintraub , Private Shaw and Public Shaw. A Dual Portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and G.B.S .

1963 : David Garnett, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence . Revised edition with a new forward by B.H. Liddell Hart.

1963 : Victoria Ocampo, T.E. (Lawrence of Arabia). First published in Argentina, 1942.

1964: Vyvyan Richards, Portrait of T.E. Lawrence . First American edition.

1966: Suleiman Mousa, T.E. Lawrence: An Arab View .

1969: Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia.

Review : March 21, 1970, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia , “Man and Legend,” Thomas Lask, New York Times . ( Abstract )

1972: Frank Clements, T.E. Lawrence, A Reader’s Guide.

1973 : Peter Mansfield,  Lawrence and His Legacy .

1973 : Zeine N. Zeine, The Emergence of Arab Nationalism: With a Background Study of Arab-Turkish Relations in the Near East.

1974: Jeffrey Meyers, T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography .

1975:   Stanley Weintraub and Rodelle Weintraub, Lawrence of Arabia, The Literary Impulse.

1975: Peter Brent, T.E. Lawrence.

1976: Richard Perceval Graves, Lawrence of Arabia and His World .

1976: John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of  T.E. Lawrence .

Review : March 21, 1976, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence , Paul Zweig , New York Times. ( Abstract )

1977 : Desmond Stewart, T.E. Lawrence.

Review : September 29, 1977, T.E. Lawrence , “Rigging the Lawrence Case,” Nigel Dennis, The New York Review of Books.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/sep/29/rigging-the-lawrence-case/

Reply to “Rigging the Lawrence Case,” Desmond Stewart, The New York Review of Books.

Review : November 4, 1977, T.E. Lawrence , “Books: Seven Pillars of Fiction?”, Thomas Lask, New York Times . ( Abstract )

Review : November 6, 1977, T.E. Lawrence , “A Humbug Exalted,” Hugh Trevor-Roper, New York Times. ( Abstract )

1977 : H. Montgomery Hyde, Solitary in the Ranks: Lawrence of Arabia as Airman and Private Soldier.

1977 : Paul J. Marriott, The Young Lawrence of Arabia .

1978 : Stephen E. Tabachnick , T.E. Lawrence.

1978 : H.V.F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell.

1985 : Michael Yardley: Backing into the Limelight. A Biography of T.E. Lawrence.

Review : December 31, 1987, Backing into the Limelight , “A biography: T.E. Lawrence,” National Review .

1986:  Charles Blackmore: In the Footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia.

1987: Victoria Carchidi, Creation Out of the Void: The Making of a Hero, an Epic, a World: T.E. Lawrence , doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

1987: Rodney Legg , Lawrence of Arabia in Dorset.

1988: Stephen E. Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson , Images of Lawrence.

1988 :  Malcolm Brown and Julia Cave, A Touch of Genius. The Life of T.E. Lawrence.

1989 : Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence.

1989 : Ronald D. Knight, T.E. Lawrence: His Orders, Decorations, and Medals .

1990 : Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: the Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence.

1990: Lawrence James,  The Golden Warrior : The life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia

1991 : M.D. Allen, The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia .

1991 : Rashid Khalidi, editor, The Origins of Arab Nationalism .

1992: Sidney Sugarman, A Garland of Legends: “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Arab Revolt.”

1993 : Robin Bidwell, editor, The Diary Kept by T.E. Lawrence While Travelling in Arabia During 1911.

1993 : Harold Orlans, Lawrence of Arabia, Strange Man of Letters . The Literary Criticism and Correspondence of T.E. Lawrence.

Review : 1996, Lawrence of Arabia, Strange Man of Letters , “T.E. Lawrence’s Criticism,” Stephen E. Tabachnick, English Literature in Transition, 39:1.

1993 : Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements .

1995:  Joel Hodson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend

1995: Richard Knowles, introduction: Cats and Landladies’ Husbands, T.E. Lawrence in Bridlington.

1995: Renee and Andre Guillaume, An Introduction and Notes. T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom , in French.

Review : Spring 2001, An Introduction and Notes. T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom , “Modern History and Politics,” Harold E. Raugh, Jr., Middle East Journal.

1996 : Paul Marriott and Yvonne Argent, The Last Days of T.E. Lawrence:  A Leaf in the Wind .

1996 : Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia.

1997: Jonathan Rutherford: Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire. Chapter on Lawrence.

1997: Peter Hogan : Australians of Arabia… and Lawrence. Monograph.

1997 : J. N. Lockman, Parallel Captures. Lord Jim and Lawrence of Arabia .

1997: Jean Loup Julien. Chroniques de L’Histoire, Lawrence d’Arabie.

1997: Lucien Poirier , T.E. Lawrence, Stra te ge.

1997 : A. G. Prys-Jones, A Memory of T.E. Lawrence.

1998: Christophe Leclerc, Avec T.E. Lawrence en Arabie. La Mission militaire francaise au Hedjaz 1916-1920 .

1998: Fred D. Crawford, Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia : A Cautionary Tale .

Review: October 1, 2000, Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale , Harold E. Raugh Jr., Middle East Journal .

1999: D. G. Thom: Portrait of a Mind-Suicide. A self-relational study of T.E. Lawrence with constant reference to Kierkegaard.

1999:   Michael Asher, Lawrence, The Uncrowned King of Arabia.

Review : October 19, 1999, Lawrence : The Uncrowned King of Arabia , “Shifting Sand Beneath a Heroic Image,” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/19/books/books-of-the-times-shifting-sand-beneath-a-heroic-image.html?scp=21&sq=T.+E.+Lawrence&st=nyt

1999: Steven Charles Caton , Lawrence of Arabia, A Film's Anthropology.

Review : June 30, 2000, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology , Felicity Collins, La Trobe University, Screening the Past .

http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/lawrence-of-arabia-a-films-anthropology/

1999 : Efraim Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 .

Review : December 1, 1999, Empires of the Sand , “Romantic Notions of Mideast History Challenged,” Richard Bernstein, New York Times .

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/01/books/books-of-the-times-romantic-notions-of-mideast-history-challenged.html?emc=eta1

2000 : Paul Tunbridge, With Lawrence in the Royal Air Force. 

http://www.maartenschild.com/lawrence/

Review: M. J. Evans, The Royal Air Force Air Power , Autumn 2000, p. 139 Vol. 3 # 3.      

http://www.airpowerstudies.co.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/aprvol3no3.pdf

2000: Philip O’Brien, T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography . Revised and expanded edition.

2001: Andrew Norman, T.E. LAWRENCE. Unravelling the Enigma, revised and updated 2008.

2002:   Phillip Knightley, Introduction to reprint Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia , 1924.

2002:   Charles M. Stang, editor, The Waking Dream of T.E. Lawrence: Essays on His Life, Literature and Legacy.

2002: Harold Orlans, T.E. Lawrence. Biography of a Broken Hero .

2002 : Hamilton, Jill (Duchess of Hamilton). First to Damascus: The Story of the Australian Light Horse and Lawrence of Arabia.

Website: “Australians of Arabia,” http://australiansofarabia.wordpress.com/about/

2002: Anthony Bruce, The Last Crusade. The Palestine Campaign in the First World War.

2003: Malcolm Brown. T.E. Lawrence.

Review : March 22, 2005, T.E. Lawrence , “T.E. Lawrence. Book Review,” The Historian .

2003: Richard Knowles, Precious Caskets: the friendship of T.E. Lawrence & William McCance.

2004: Stephen E. Tabachnick, Lawrence of Arabia An Encyclopedia.

2004: Clare Sydney Smith,  The Golden Reign. The Story of My Friendship with Lawrence of Arabia . Introduction by Malcolm Brown.

2005: Malcolm Brown, Lawrence of Arabia: the Life, the Legend.

2005: Malcolm Brown, T. E. Lawrence in War and Peace: An Anthology of the Military Writings of Lawrence of Arabia.

Exhibition, Imperial War Museum, London: http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/54/Lawrence/index.htm

2005: Rodney Legg, Lawrence of Dorset: from Arabia to Clouds Hill.

2005: James Nicholson, The Hejaz Railway.

Review : January 2007, The Hejaz Railway , Jeremy Wilson, T.E. Lawrence Studies.

http://www.telawrencestudies.org/telawrencestudies/reviews/hejaz_railway.htm

2006: James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire. T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s Secret War in Arabia 1916-1918.

Review : February 29, 2008, Setting the Desert on Fire , “James Barr’s ‘Desert’ probes Lawrence of Arabia’s claims,” John Hartl, Seattle Times .

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2004246799_lawrence02.html

Review : April 2009, Setting the Desert on Fire , Major Jennifer Clark, The Army Lawyer .

http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/AL-2009.html

2007: Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

2007 : Catalogue for Australian War Memorial website exhibit: Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse.

https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/lawrence

2007 : Adrian Greaves, Lawrence of Arabia, Mirage of a Desert War.

2007 : Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said ’ s Orientalism .

Review : Winter 2009, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said ’ s Orientalism , “Deconstructing Edward Said,” A.J. Caschetta, Middle East Quarterly .

http://www.meforum.org/2069/defending-the-west

2008: Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East.

Review : August 10, 2008, Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East, “Meddle East,” Alex von Tunzelmann, New York Times .

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Von-Tunzelmann-t.html?_r=1

Review : June 2009, Rory Miller, King’s College London, Reviews in History .

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/764#header

2008: Philip O’Brien, Supplement to T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography.

2008: Guy Penaud, Le Tour de France de Lawrence d'Arabie.

2008: Andrew R.B. Simpson, Another Life: Lawrence after Arabia .

2008 : David Murphy, The Arab Revolt 1916-1918: Lawrence Sets Arabia Ablaze .

2009: David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East .

2009: John C. Hulsman, To Begin the World Over Again: Lawrence of Arabia from Damascus to Baghdad .

2010 : Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Review : November 22, 2010, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. “Lawrence: Fresh Look at Lawrence of the Desert,” Janet Maslin, New York Times .

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/books/22book.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Review: December 24, 2010, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. “Arabian Knight,” Ben MacIntyre, New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/books/review/Macintyre-t.html?ref=review

Review : January 3, 2011, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia , Cmdr. Youssef Aboul-Enein, Small Wars Journal .

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/01/book-review-herolawrence-of-ar/index.php

2011 : James J. Schneider, Guerrilla Leader: T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt.

2011 : Joseph Berton, T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, An Illustrated Guide.

2013 : Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.

  Review : August 1, 2013, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. "What Would Lawrence of Arabia Say Today?" Tom Ashbrook, On Point , National Public Radio.

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/07/31/lawrence-middle-east

 Review : August 8, 2013, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. "Who Was T.E. Lawrence?" by Alex Von Tunzelmann, The New York Times .

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/books/review/lawrence-in-arabia-by-scott-anderson.html?_r=0

2015 : Anthony Sattin, The Young T.E. Lawrence .

Review: January 28, 2015, The Young T.E. Lawrence . Michael Dirda, The Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-the-young-te-lawrence-by-anthony-sattin/2015/01/28/895bb644-a34b-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html

2015 : John Johnson Allen, T.E. Lawrence and the Red Sea Patrol .

2015 : Dr. Andrew Norman, Lawrence of Arabia’s Clouds Hill .

2015 : Dick Benson-Gyles, The Boy in the Mask: The Hidden World of Lawrence of Arabia .

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The Real T.E. Lawrence

The Lawrence corpus—as we may call it—began to be formed almost immediately after the end of the war. It can be said to begin with the popular show which Lowell Thomas put on in 1919 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and which he called “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” Five years later, in 1924, Thomas published With Lawrence in Arabia , which also proved to be highly popular, and which made Lawrence a familiar name and a thrilling legend to many more than could have seen the Covent Garden spectacle. Though this was not known at the time, it appears that Lawrence helped Thomas both with his show and his book. Two other works published before World War II were, in their turn, heavily indebted to Lawrence’s help and inspiration. They spread the story of his wartime activities in a version which he approved, magnifying the significance of his adventures in the war against the Ottomans, and extolling the originality of his military tactics and doctrine. These books were Lawrence and the Arabs by Robert Graves, which came out in 1927, and “ T.E. Lawrence”: In Arabia and After by B. H. Lid-dell Hart. These two books, written in the one case by a poet and man of letters, and in the other by a notable and influential writer on military topics, would be respectfully received in circles whom Lowell Thomas’s productions may not have impressed. Again, after his death, Lawrence’s brother, Arnold, edited a symposium, T.E. Lawrence and his Friends (1937), in which contributors drawn from various walks of life combined to present an impressive picture of a many-sided, indeed a universal, genius.

But, of course, the most powerful by far of all the accounts which served to establish the received version of Lawrence’s life and activities were his own writings: Revolt in the Desert , an abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom , published in 1927; and Seven Pillars itself, which was first issued in a small “subscribers’” edition in 1926, and in a trade edition in 1935, immediately after his death. Both works were instant best-sellers in English and other languages, and Seven Pillars indeed continues to sell steadily, to judge by the frequency of its reprints. To these two works we may add Lawrence’s Letters , published in 1938, which were selected and edited by the well-known writer, David Garnett. Together with Seven Pillars , the Letters served firmly to establish in the public mind Lawrence’s persona very much as he himself wished to have it established: a brave and heroic spirit who had championed a downtrodden nationality, and led it brilliantly and victoriously against its oppressors, only to be let down and double-crossed by his own government—a government which, out of greed and cowardice, defaulted on promises solemnly given to the Arabs. This tormented spirit, therefore, out of shame and remorse, gave up a brilliant career, enlisted as a private in the Royal Air Force, and spent the rest of his life in menial and humdrum obscurity, managing, nonetheless, to produce a literary and historical masterpiece.

This, we might say, was Lawrence by Lawrence and his friends. The veracity of all this literature in depicting Lawrence’s character, activities, and significance was generally, not to say universally, accepted. This remained the case until the appearance in 1955 of Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry . The most important, indeed practically the only, new source which Aldington had at his disposal consisted of a number of letters which Lawrence had addressed to Mrs. Bernard Shaw, which had become available at the British Museum, and in which he disclosed that he had been born out of wedlock, and described the devastating effect which the discovery of this fact had had on his life. Aldington put a great deal of weight on Lawrence’s illegitimacy (which, though it had been mentioned in print in one or two places, was not then generally known) and on Lawrence’s reaction to it, in order to account for Lawrence’s public and private conduct.

Such an explanation of Lawrence and his activities was also favored by Anthony Nutting, who served as principal adviser to Sam Spiegel during the production of the film, Lawrence of Arabia . In his Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive published in 1961, Nutting took the line that Lawrence’s bastardy gave him an assertive personality, and made him want to prove that he was as good as, if not better than, those born in wedlock—hence his vision of himself as a messiah destined to lead the Arabs to salvation. To this psychohistory (as we may now call it) Nutting added another ingredient. In November 1917, Lawrence—according to his own account—was arrested while on a reconnaissance mission in Deraa, then under Ottoman control, and taken to the Ottoman commander. What exactly happened before he was set free the following morning Lawrence left somewhat vague, but he hinted that apart from being savagely beaten, he was also sexually assaulted by, or on the orders of, the commander. This incident left Lawrence—so Nutting argued—a “rabid masochist.” His sense of mission was lost “and his motors were henceforth driven by an unvarnished ambition and lust for power.”

The explanations which Aldington and Nutting put before us are highly speculative. They depend entirely, in the first place, on Lawrence’s own unsubstantiated assertions; but even if we knew, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Lawrence’s reactions to his illegitimacy were as he described them, and that he was really arrested, beaten, and sexually assaulted in Deraa, it would still be impossible for us to link these occurrences to his military and political activities. To do so we would require specific evidence showing, for example, that the events of Deraa governed Lawrence’s decisions in the conduct of a particular battle, or that the shame of his illegitimacy led him to adopt a particular line in a political negotiation. And such evidence is, of necessity, impossible to obtain. But it is not only Nutting’s and Aldington’s accounts which these considerations render doubtful and shaky, it is the whole enterprise of psychohistory.

Though Aldington relied heavily on the facts of Lawrence’s birth, and on Lawrence’s supposed reaction to these facts, his book is by no means concerned only with this issue. Aldington also casts a cold and critical glance over the public events in which Lawrence was involved; and though he did not have at his disposal the documents which have become available with the opening of the archives in the 1960’s, he was yet able to throw legitimate doubt on a great many of the incidents connected with the Arab revolt and its aftermath as Lawrence and his friends had depicted them. His book was received with great animosity and indignation. It is said that efforts were made to persuade the publishers to suppress it, and that one of Lawrence’s friends wanted to give Aldington a public thrashing. Sir Ronald Storrs, whose voice in the chorus was particularly noticeable, denounced Aldington in a BBC broadcast as a mean and contemptible cad, traducing and maligning a hero who was “a touchstone and a standard of reality.” Storrs—and others—also took great exception to Aldington’s revealing to the world at large the fact of Lawrence’s illegitimate birth, particularly when his mother was still alive.

It is undoubtedly very praiseworthy to preserve and defend the privacy of public figures—and it was, of course, entirely because of his public activities that Lawrence attracted so much attention. But it must be said that Lawrence himself was the first to tincture public affairs with his own private passions, thus inaugurating the dangerous and pernicious fashion which so many of his biographers—and detractors—were to follow.

In the course of expatiating over Aldington’s unspeakable malice, Storrs, with haughty contempt, remarked: “To what purpose has this been done? . . . What can be the gratification in attempting to destroy a famous name—an inspiration to youth all over the free world?” Storrs’s exalted language in referring to Lawrence as “an inspiration to youth all over the free world” is by no means exceptional. Lawrence seems to have attracted, from the time when his career became generally—albeit inaccurately—known, this kind of extravagant hyperbole. Perhaps the best example of this exaggeration occurs in a sermon preached by the Reverend L.B. Cross, Chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford (Lawrence’s own college), at a memorial service held shortly after his death. The sermon drew parallels between Lawrence and Jesus. In both cases, the preacher declared, the period of preparation for their life’s work lasted three years; both, again, received similar treatment from society; both were ascetic, and both felt the need to humble themselves before others.

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Some thirteen years after the appearance of Aldington’s book, such solemn and high-flown sentiments as those expressed by Storrs and Cross came to be viewed in an ironical light as a result of revelations which first appeared in 1968 in the London Sunday Times , and which were then substantially incorporated in a book published in 1969 and written by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson (the original authors of the articles), The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia . According to these revelations, for twelve years, from 1923 to 1935, Lawrence induced a young Scotsman, John Bruce, to give him periodic beatings. These beatings were administered at the orders of a nonexistent uncle, conveyed in letters which Lawrence gave to Bruce—letters which in reality he himself had written. But Bruce, it would seem, was not the only one whom Lawrence persuaded to give him beatings. At least two others were also involved, while a third, “a service companion” (as John E. Mack calls him in his recent biography, of which more below), was asked by Lawrence to witness the beatings, at the request of the mythical uncle, in order that he might report to him on Lawrence’s reactions. According to this observer the beatings were administered with a metal whip on the bare buttocks, and Lawrence required the beatings to be “severe enough to produce a seminal emission.”

These beatings and the bizarre arrangements associated with them had become known to Lawrence’s family and friends immediately after his death. We learn from The Secret Lives that Mrs. Bernard Shaw interviewed Bruce in 1935 in a solicitor’s office and asked him to refrain from publishing what he knew. As in the case of the facts relating to his birth, this attempt to protect Lawrence’s privacy is natural and entirely laudable. On such matters the only seemly thing for those involved is absolute silence. But some might find surprising that his brother and literary executor, Professor Arnold Lawrence, should describe Lawrence’s practices in a manner such that uninstructed readers—already fed on Thomas, Graves, Liddell Hart, and Seven Pillars —would inevitably be persuaded that Colonel Lawrence was indeed a superhuman being. In a piece published in 1937, Professor Lawrence referred in cryptic words to his brother’s craving for flagellation, declaring that his “subjection of the body was achieved by methods advocated by the saints whose lives he had read.”

The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia originated in John Bruce’s story, which the Sunday Times purchased from him, but the authors’ aim was decidedly more ambitious than the investigation of possibly scabrous revelations. Two years before Bruce’s story appeared, British official records relating to World War I were opened to the public, and Knightley and Simpson thought to take advantage of this to examine Lawrence’s role in war and politics. It cannot be said that this part of their book is a success. The British records are extremely voluminous and scattered, generated as they had been in a great many departments and agencies, and it is clear from The Secret Lives that the authors did not examine them with the necessary meticulousness—or perhaps did not have the time or leisure to examine, ponder, and make sense of this difficult material. Their account, therefore, of Lawrence’s public career—which, after all, is the only reason for any interest in him—is uncritical and unsatisfactory. Here, the authors take for granted certain received ideas about British policies during and after the war; they are too ready to assume that the British broke promises and behaved shabbily toward the Arabs; and they have a tendency to pounce on a document and wrench it out of context simply because it seems to make a sensational revelation. Knightley and Simpson were privileged to have access to one source, namely, the collection of Lawrence’s letters and papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which is closed to the public until the year 2000. The conditions of their access to the collection are not clear, but the authors do say that apart from giving permission to quote letters, and some amendment of material which originally appeared in the Sunday Times , Professor Arnold Lawrence gave no assistance in the writing of the book. This would seem to imply that Professor Lawrence wished to keep his distance from The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia .

This manifestly is not the case with the longest and most comprehensive biography of Lawrence to appear so far, A Prince of Our Disorder , 1 which came out in 1976. Its author, John E. Mack, refers to and often quotes copiously from the Bodleian Library material and acknowledges Professor Lawrence’s help at many points in his narrative. But this is not to say that Mack’s work is the official or authorized biography. Such a work is now in preparation and has been entrusted to J. M. Wilson. Mack is by profession a psychiatrist, but his biography of Lawrence is by no means a psychohistory, though he does on occasion have recourse to a psychoanalytical explanation of his hero’s character and some of his activities. These explanations are not very convincing, but it is not by them that his work has to be judged. Like any other biography, its merits depend on the author’s ability to show that he has used all the available evidence, and that he has made use of this evidence persuasively and cogently—that, in short, he has painted a lifelike picture.

Mack’s book is very long—over five hundred pages of text and footnotes. And, in keeping perhaps with its length, it bears a grandiose title: a prince Mack proclaims Lawrence to be, a prince of our disorder. The appellation Mack takes from an essay on Lawrence by Irving Howe which purports to investigate the “problem of heroism.” The portentous metaphor is no doubt meant to indicate that Lawrence’s life and doings are emblems and exemplars of the human condition. This seems to be Mack’s belief, for he tells us that Lawrence’s case is particularly important to the “psychologically minded biographer,” because “to a varying degree we all share some of his characteristics.” Compared to the magniloquence of the title, the cautious and elastic qualifications at first sight disappoint, let down. But in truth it was prudent of Mack to retreat from the wide claim made by his title, for after all it is not true that Lawrence’s “disorder” afflicts all of humanity: we do not all, as adults, feel ourselves to be deceivers because we were deceived as children—if indeed this is what happened to Lawrence, as Mack obscurely claims; we are not all flagellants; nor are we all compelled, as again Mack says Lawrence was compelled, to live out the demands of our inner life in the public domain.

Mack is not the only writer to endow Lawrence and his misadventures with a universal, a cosmic, significance. A recent work, Lawrence of Arabia: The Literary Impulse by Stanley and Rodelle Weintraub (1975), claims that to dismiss Lawrence (as Herbert Read had done) as “an uneasy adventurer,” “an Oxford graduate with a civilian and supercilious lack of discipline,” “a mind not great with thought, but tortured by some restless spirit that drives it out into the desert, to physical folly and self-immolation,” is to dismiss not so much Lawrence as the 20th century. To identify the 20th century—such as it is—with these particular characteristics smacks of the extravagance to which so many writers on the subject of Lawrence are driven.

In keeping with his view of Lawrence as an exemplar and an archetype, Mack adopts toward his hero a solemn and reverential tone. With meticulous detail he chronicles the events of Lawrence’s infancy and childhood: how he was breastfed for at least a year; how early in his second year he had to be rescued from a high window ledge, which he had reached by climbing over a sewing machine; how as a child he ate chiefly porridge and bananas, while as an undergraduate he liked cakes and fruits; and how on a walking tour in Brittany he carried two pairs of socks and wore one pair. Mack goes to great trouble in order to guide us through the adventures of the boy Lawrence, dressed in his blue-and-white striped jerseys, expatiating on the excitement, humor, and sense of delightful mischief which he inspired in his playmates; he has even tracked down and recorded the testimony of “the only girl to my knowledge to pass under the city of Oxford in a punt with Lawrence.” This hagiographical style—as it may fairly be called—is the outcome of Mack’s clear conviction that by 1914 (when Lawrence was twenty-six years old) his subject had proved himself to be an “unusual, versatile, and reasonably well-balanced genius.” It has to be said that, unless it is seen with the eyes of faith, the material which Mack puts before us warrants no such judgment. At twenty-six Lawrence had shown himself to be a lively, spirited, and intelligent young archeologist—but one who, whatever his promise, had yet to make his mark. And he was assuredly not the only young man of promise in his generation, nor the only such young man subsequently to make his mark.

As it happened, he made his mark not in archeology but in war and politics and, as has been said earlier, it is what he did in this sphere which entitles him to our notice. This Mack in part explicitly recognizes when he says that the years 1917-18—the two years of Lawrence’s participation in the Arab revolt in the Hijaz, led by Sharif Hussein, against the Ottoman Turks—were the most critical of Lawrence’s life, and the two hundred pages and more which the book devotes to the period 1914-22 also constitute an implicit acknowledgment of this. But these pages, which are the core of the book, are also what is least satisfactory in it. For extensive as are the sources which Mack has used, they are not nearly extensive enough. Between 1916 and 1922 Lawrence was involved in a complex web of war, politics, and diplomacy. For a biographer to give an accurate and intelligible account of his role, he would have to place this role in its proper historical context—and this requires studying and digesting and working into his own narrative the evidence disclosed by the voluminous records which the Sharifian revolt and its aftermath generated in British—and to a lesser extent, in French—archives. No biographer of Lawrence could have done this before 1966, simply because the records were not then available. Knightley and Simpson were the first to explore the new material, but theirs was a hurried and perfunctory foray. It cannot be said that Mack has improved on them to any extent. His footnotes, it is true, do refer here and there to various volumes of Foreign Office and Cabinet documents, but those who know how rich and extensive the public archives of this period are will also know that Mack has, regrettably, done no more than scratch their surface.

This failure to consult and take into account the available evidence, and the reliance on authors who either did not have access to this evidence or who, like George Antonius, are so suspect as to be worthless, have made Mack’s historical judgment uncritical and unreliable. If he had attended to the evidence he would, for instance, not have unquestioningly accepted Lawrence’s false assertion the the British authorities in Cairo heard of the Sykes-Picot agreement—which embodied Anglo-French arrangements about the postwar fate of Ottoman territories—only in 1917. The truth is that these authorities knew of the provisions of the agreement as soon as it was signed, and furthermore had been kept regularly informed of the progress of the negotiations. Again, Mack uncritically accepts Lawrence’s version of the Sharifian revolt and its achievements, saying, for example, that the capture of Aqaba in July 1917—in which Lawrence played a major role—ended the war in Hijaz, made Sinai secure for the British, and provided them with “a vital seaport.” The truth is that the capture of Aqaba did not end the war in the Hijaz, where Medina remained under Ottoman occupation until January 1919 and where hostilities between Sharif Hussein and Ibn Saud were continually threatening; that Sinai had ceased to be threatened by the Ottomans quite a while before the Sharifian revolt (and that if it had been under Ottoman threat, it was not the Sharifian occupation of Aqaba which would have removed this threat); and that Aqaba, an insignificant hamlet on the Red Sea, neither was (nor could have been) a vital seaport for the provisioning of British armies advancing to attack the Ottomans up the Mediterranean coast.

Mack also entertains the bizarre idea that half of General Townshend’s force (which the Ottomans besieged and forced to surrender at Kut in Mesopotamia in April 1916) was Arab; however, it is well known that if Arabs fought at all in Mesopotamia, they did so on the side of the Ottomans, or simply to harass and despoil British troops. On this elementary mistake Mack erects a heavy structure of sententious disapproval. The war in Mesopotamia, he tells us, shows “the futility, and ultimately the terrible danger, for all the population involved, of a Western power’s pursuing its national politics on foreign soil with utter disregard for the nature and political aspirations of the local population.” Even if the events which have elicited this comment did actually take place, the comment itself remains eccentric and highly-strung. For, after all, war is not a monopoly of the West. Again, absolutely no warrant exists for the belief that “a local population” pursuing its own “political aspirations” will not suffer disaster; likewise, no warrant exists for denying that a “local population” may derive great benefits from rule by a foreign power—even though such a power is, of course, primarily intent on securing its own interests. It is because such conjunctions are continually arising that Clio may be called an ironic muse: history is not a morality tale in which elevated motives always lead to good results and low motives to bad results.

Mack seems a stranger to this, the oldest and most common worldly wisdom. Hence his ready acceptance of the slick and simplistic cant of the age, and his unconcealed and ready admiration for holy humbugs like Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjöld, to liken Lawrence to whom (he must believe) will elevate his hero in our estimation. The conjunction of these various influences—namely, the neglect of the evidence from the official archives, reliance on the conclusions of in different writers, uncritical acceptance of modish slogans and shibboleths—means that situations and episodes which must be at the center of any study of Lawrence are treated inadequately and unsatisfactorily. Thus, for instance, chapter 10 deals with the Hijaz under the Ottomans before and after the outbreak of war, and with the secret Sharifian negotiations with the British; it presents us with a simple story of Arabs yearning for national independence having to contend with Turkish oppression on the one hand and European “colonialist” greed on the other. This simple story is in its simplicity quite deceptive. For the relations between the Ottoman state and its Arabic-speaking subjects cannot be described merely as those between oppressor and oppressed. The Ottoman state was an Islamic state, and Islamic loyalty was a strong bond between rulers and ruled. Apart from the Sharif in the Hijaz (and the small number of Ottoman Arab officers who joined him), the Arabic-speaking provinces remained, in spite of the great wartime hardships, faithful to the empire until the end.

The Sharif, it is true, claimed to be the standard-bearer of Arabism, but this was a mere claim pro domo , unwise for the historian to accept as the reality. The reality, rather, was that the Sharif, like many of his predecessors in this post, was tempted to play the overmighty subject, and to exploit the remoteness of the Ottoman state from the Hijaz and the emergency of war. He was, in fact, one power among many in the Arabian Peninsula, the rival and sometimes bitter enemy of fellow Arab rulers. The affair of the deserting Ottoman officers who joined the Sharif is scarcely less complicated. These officers, moved by ideological passions, were the counterpart of the Young Turk officers, the authors of the coup d’état of July 1908 against the Ottoman Sultan. Together with the Young Turks, they may be considered an ominous manifestation of a new style of Middle Eastern politics which has since become quite familiar.

Mack’s pages are innocent of these and similar complexities; nor do they convey to us a sense of the international context in which the Sharifian rebellion took place—of the traditional great-power connections and rivalries in the Middle East, or of the need of the powers (entirely as legitimate as that of the Sharif) to secure and preserve for themselves a strong position in the area. And what has been said about the deficiencies of Mack’s account of the background of the Sharifian rebellion holds equally true of his perfunctory chapters dealing with the Paris Peace Conference and with Lawrence at the Colonial Office. The Peace Conference was a negotiation. The duty of the historian is to set out the interests of the various parties and describe how the bargaining proceeded, not to make question-begging and sentimental assertions such as that “Lawrence was one of the few voices of conscience” in Paris—as though the Sharifian interest had some transcendental merit denied to other interests, and as though the upholders of these other interests were conscienceless, rapacious sharks. Similarly, the policy which Lawrence supported and applied at the Colonial Office was, like any other policy, based on a medley of calculations and miscalculations; it is far from clear that its consequences were so excellent that his biographer must complacently endorse Lawrence’s view that his part of “the Middle East job” was “on the whole, well done.”

There is, of course, one other aspect of Lawrence’s public life which a biographer must take into account, namely his military activities in the Hijaz and Trans-Jordan. For it is these which became the foundation of his renown, not to say his legend. That he was resourceful and imaginative in leading Bedouin guerrillas, that he showed endurance and bravery in his activity, cannot be gainsaid. But the claims which he, and others on his behalf, made go much further than this. Liddell Hart, and now Mack, speak as though it were Lawrence who had invented the technique of guerrilla warfare. Mack, for instance, claims that Lawrence was “decades ahead of his time and his government” in understanding the actualities of guerrilla warfare. This is an absurd exaggeration since, as is well known and as has been extensively documented anew in Walter Laqueur’s recent book on the subject, both the practice and the theory of guerrilla warfare are appreciably older than Lawrence. Lawrence himself spoke as though he had invented a bloodless way of winning battles. In the introductory chapter to Seven Pillars , he boldly affirms that the defeat of the Ottoman empire “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.” This exorbitant gasconade, worthy of Tartarin or Falstaff, is particularly piquant coming from someone who so much disliked professional soldiers.

This estimate of the efficiency of guerrilla warfare—which the long and difficult war between the Allies and the Ottomans serves to show up for the empty boast that it is—was combined with a doctrine which Lawrence held, at any rate in his early days in the Hijaz. He seems to have believed that what was going on in the Hijaz was much more than a fronde among often dissident tribesmen—a fronde being shrewdly made use of by an ambitious magnate. In a dispatch from the Hijaz of October 1916, Lawrence wrote:

The Bedouin of the Hijaz is not, outwardly, a vehicle for abstract or altruistic ideas. Yet again and again I have heard from them about acts of the early Arabs or things that the Sharif and his sons have said, which contain nearly all that the exalted Arab patriot would wish. They intend to restore the Sheria, to revive the Arabic language, and to rebuild the prosperity of the country. They believe that by liberating the Hijaz they are vindicating the rights of all Arabs to a national political existence. . . .

The sequel was to show that these were far-fetched ideas, that the Bedouins remained what they ever had been—simply nomads who lived, whenever they could, by exaction and plunder. Lawrence’s doctrine about them justifies us in calling him the Che Guevara of the Arab revolt; but, fortunately for him, he did not have to pay the price which Guevara paid for his fancies about the Bolivian peasants.

The doctrine also indicates that Lawrence in Arabia held simple and uncritical views on politics, views commonly described as “radical,” or “anti-imperialist.” Thus, in the introductory chapter of Seven Pillars , he declares that British soldiers, “young, clean, delightful fellows” were sent “to the worst of deaths, not to win the war, but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.” This is no more than the Hobsonian-Leninist notion that it is “capitalism” which causes war. These “anti-imperialist” sentiments remained with Lawrence after he enlisted as a private in the Royal Air Force. While serving in India, he informed Mrs. Shaw that “no native troops are loyal to their foreign masters: or rather, only those who had no self-respect would be loyal.” This harsh verdict on the rank-and-file of the Indian army was an ideologue’s verdict, both presumptuous and unjust: the Indian army under its British officers remained to the end in its overwhelming majority faithful to the British crown, and its men, whose lives were molded and given significance by loyalty to their regiments, are not to be dismissed, with injurious ignorance, as shifty and despicable traitors.

But whatever Lawrence’s activities in the war and its aftermath, their actual import and significance is dwarfed by the retrospective account of his doings which he provided in Seven Pillars , and by the immense influence which this writing has exercised. For many years, Lawrence’s friends and admirers pitched the merits of his writings very high indeed. To take one example, the Times Literary Supplement has recently revealed that it was Lawrence’s patron and friend, D.G. Hogarth, who anonymously reviewed in its pages Revolt in the Desert when it appeared in 1927. Hogarth, we find, ends his review by affirming that “the book leaves from first to last an impression of absolute truth.” Hogarth, who was as deeply involved in the Arab revolt as Lawrence himself, should have known better. It was this kind of glorification, repeated over the years ad nauseam , which no doubt led Aldington to speak somewhat unkindly of what he called the Lawrence Bureau.

Lawrence’s most recent admirers have been more circumspect, less sweeping and categorical, in their praises. In their book mentioned above, the Weintraubs explain that though Lawrence “exaggerated and even invented some of the details in his narrative,” this only serves to establish “his flair as a writer.” Lawrence, they tell us, was simply engaged in “transmuting autobiographical chronicle into legend”; and, “despite its confessed inexactitude and subjectivity, it is ,” they insist, “a work of history—a work which has the poetry of history.” Mack, for his part, advances a number of explanations for what he describes as “distortions and partial truths” in Seven Pillars . He tells us in one place that their purpose is either embellishment “for dramatic purposes,” or the protection of other people. In another place he claims that “the distortions and inaccuracies result from Lawrence’s need to elevate the tale to epic proportions and to make himself a contemporary legendary figure.” Again, he explains that Lawrence’s “tendency to fictionalize his experiences, to turn his life into a legend, was most prominent when Lawrence was feeling particularly troubled in his self-regard. At these times,” Mack’s diagnosis runs, “he would give way to an unconscious need to create a fictional self, drawn on lines of childish heroism, to replace the troubled self he was experiencing.” In yet another passage, Mack invites us to consider Lawrence’s literary labors as so many attempts to overcome the “continuing effects of traumatic experiences.” Since these writings were meant to reach the public, Mack also invites us to look upon Lawrence as a benefactor—albeit an unwitting one—of the cause of mental health: “He would be glad, I am sure,” Mack solemnly opines, “if his public self-exposure could contribute to human understanding and to the relief of suffering. He would, I am quite certain, want others to benefit from any knowledge or insights gained from studying and analyzing the struggles he could not resolve altogether for himself.”

On the face of it, Seven Pillars is simply the account of a wartime episode. It requires some ingenuity to turn it into a myth, or a neurotic’s confession requiring the analyst’s transformative logic, to unlock its esoteric meaning and unveil its hidden significance. But whatever the analyst’s skill, it is difficult to see Seven Pillars as a myth, like Gilgamesh or Prometheus or Oedipus. And if the book is a piece of self-exposure, the maunderings of a neurotic on his psychoanalyst’s couch, it is not clear why it should benefit humanity at large: at the most the benefit will accrue to the patient himself and to his doctor. All this laborious huffing and puffing, in short, sounds uncommonly like apologetics—which are necessary, since the fact cannot be got over that at certain points, some of them crucial, Seven Pillars is knowingly and deliberately untruthful. Lawrence, for instance, knew that Faysal, third son of the Sharif of Mecca, whose champion he became, was a timid, perhaps even a cowardly, man in battle, and lacking in judgment, and yet he portrayed him in Seven Pillars as a heroic figure, “the leader who would bring the Arab revolt to full glory.” He chose to disguise the truth because—as he later told Liddell Hart—it was “the only way to get the British to support the Arabs—physical courage is an essential demand of the typical British officer.” This may have been a necessary—albeit questionable—proceeding when Lawrence was acting as Faysal’s champion. To perpetuate the deception in a work later composed at leisure is to take advantage of the reader’s good faith. But perhaps the most flagrant example of this abuse is Lawrence’s account of the fall of Damascus. The reader of Seven Pillars is led to believe that the city was captured by Faysal’s forces, when the truth was—as Lawrence well knew—that on Allen-by’s orders all Allied forces were forbidden to enter Damascus, only Faysal’s being allowed to do so, and thus—falsely—to claim its capture.

Lawrence’s book, we may then fairly say, is a corrupt work, which deliberately sets out to induce in its readers—by means of falsehoods—feelings of admiration, pity, indignation, and guilt, in respect of events which in reality do not possess that tragic quality for which such emotions are appropriate. The political and military events in which Lawrence was mixed up, and which in his fashion he later recounted, involved conflicting interests and ambitions, no single one of which was, however, particularly righteous or signally elevated. Seven Pillars pretends to the contrary, and by transforming the mediocre and the shady into noble and exalted beings, the book is not only corrupt but also corrupting—corrupting in a manner particularly familiar to the modern age, when political causes have come to be endowed with transcendental significance, to warrant the greatest sacrifices and justify the most heinous crimes. This kind of corruption may properly be called romantic, since it rests on yearning for a harmonious or paradisaical existence to be established or regained by means of political action.

Evidence of such romanticism is abundant in Lawrence’s writings. Consider, for instance, the dedicatory poem which stands at the beginning of Seven Pillars . It is not known for sure to whom the poem is dedicated, but such evidence as exists points to Dahoum, a donkey boy who was employed on the diggings at Jerablus, and with whom Lawrence established a close relationship. But whatever the identity of the person to whom the poem (and the book) is dedicated, the poem itself is clearly erotic. It begins: “I loved you,” and its third stanza constitutes a typically romantic amalgam in which love and death are simultaneously and nostalgically evoked:

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our   brief wage ours for the moment Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape,   and blind worms grew fat upon Your substance.

Not only is this love poem—memorial of a private relationship—made to stand at the head of a book dealing with public events, but it is also itself made to affirm that the writer’s actions in war and politics were motivated by a desire to give pleasure to the loved one. The first stanza reads:

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.

We may add that the poem, as it figures in Seven Pillars , was amended and toned down by Robert Graves, and that Lawrence’s original version—as Knightley and Simpson show in their book—was palpably more explicit. It is all very peculiar.

Equally peculiar is the fact that while Lawrence’s biographers have speculated a great deal on the identity of the person to whom it is dedicated, they have seldom paused to consider the significance of what the bare text of the poem so revealingly discloses about Lawrence’s attitude to politics and public affairs. The poem, and other statements by Lawrence, indicate that he was perhaps homosexually inclined. Mack quotes a passage from some unpublished notes made for a projected autobiography in which Lawrence declares: “I take no pleasure in women. I have never thought twice or even once of the shape of a woman: but men’s bodies, in repose or in movement—especially the former, appeal to me directly and very generally.” Side by side with this disgust for the female sex went hatred for generation and childbirth which, he told Mrs. Bernard Shaw, was “so sorry and squalid an accident . . . if fathers and mothers took thought before bringing children into this misery of a world, only the monsters among them would dare to go through with it.” Such an outlook, so much at variance with the common experience of mankind, has for its corollary a view of politics in which are entirely absent those aims usually held to justify political activity—namely, the preservation and perpetuation of a human group. Hence perhaps Lawrence’s occasionally wild and nihilistic outbursts, such as this one which occurs toward the end of Seven Pillars : “To the clear-sighted, failure was the only goal. We must believe, through and through, that there was no victory except to go down in death fighting and crying for failure itself”.

In the dedicatory poem which inaugurates Seven Pillars , Lawrence boasts that “I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.” Here the self, by a sheer exercise of will, claims to master the world. In The Mint , which consists of sketches describing his life as an enlisted man in the Royal Air Force, Lawrence’s attitude is the very opposite. The self is now wholly mastered by the world, governed by abject fear which, however, is perhaps as pleasurable as absolute domination: les extrêmes se touchent . He writes: “The root-trouble is fear: fear of failing, fear of breaking down.” And: “My soul, always looking for some fear to salt its existence, was wondering what seven whole years of servitude would do against the hasty stubbornness which had hitherto buttressed my values.” Having, in his search for a superhuman harmony, attempted (and failed) to soar to the heights, he would now seek the ineffable by immersing himself in a bovine existence where “unquestioned life is a harmony”: “here are men so healthy that they don’t chop up their meat into mince for easy digestion by the mind: and who are thereby intact as we are thereby diseased.” Therefore, deliberately, now preferring his world “backwards in the mirror,” Lawrence abandoned himself to the “urge downwards, in pursuit of the safety which can’t fall further.” It did not work: qui veut faire l’ange , as Pascal said, fait la bête; but not vice versa.

Lawrence’s record, then, shows bravery in war, a great capacity for physical endurance, ingenuity as a guerrilla leader, and later some literary talent. But it also shows that he was self-centered, mercurial, and violently unstable. In his concluding chapter Mack notes that Lawrence “sought new possibilities for the self.” But this cannot redound to his praise, as Mack evidently means it to do. For these possibilities and the quest for them can be mischievous and even catastrophic. So in Lawrence’s case they have proved to be—not only in his own restless and unhappy life, but also in the example which he set, and which his legend (which he took such care to put together and to promote) made immensely popular. Mack’s further verdict, that Lawrence was a civilizing force, cannot therefore stand. The cause of Arab nationalism which he embraced (and which he falsely claimed to have been double-crossed and betrayed by his country) was not more virtuous or worthy than any similar cause. Why a foreigner should so fervently embrace it, and what it has contributed to civilization, are both quite obscure. Lawrence, on the other hand, promoted a pernicious confusion between public and private, he looked to politics for a spiritual satisfaction which it cannot possibly provide, and he invested it with an impossibly transcendental significance. In doing so, he pandered to some of the most dangerous elements to be found in the modern Western mentality. His influence and his cult, here at their most extensive and enduring, we may judge to be not civilizing, but destructive.

1 Little, Brown, 561 pp., $15.00.

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T. E. Lawrence – The True Lawrence of Arabia

“All men dream : but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their 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 dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

When the life story of British Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence made it to the silver screen in 1962, under the direction of David Lean, starring Peter O’Toole as the main character, it was hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made, a prestigious reputation which it still holds to this day.

But what about the real person behind the movie? Today we explore the story of the man who went to war and became known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Early Years

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on August 16, 1888, in the village of Tremadog, in north Wales. He was the second son of Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet, and was born out of wedlock after his father left his wife and four daughters and ran away with the governess, Sarah Junner. When Sarah became pregnant, the couple fled Ireland, where Chapman lived with his first family, and relocated to Wales, where they adopted the surname Lawrence and soon gave birth to their first son. Afterward came Thomas (or Ned as the family called him), followed by three other sons, although the couple never married because Chapman never attempted to divorce his wife.

Young Ned lived a nomadic lifestyle for most of his early childhood, as the family moved around from place to place until 1896 when they finally settled in Oxford. That was where he went to school and also attended an Anglican youth organization called the Church Lads’ Brigade, at the insistence of his devout mother. She hoped that her sons would follow some kind of holy calling in life, but this didn’t really jive with Ned’s budding thirst for learning and adventure.

Tensions between mother and son steadily rose as the years went on. Sometime during his childhood, Ned found out about his parents’ sordid past, and that he and his four brothers were all illegitimate, but he never attempted to confront his parents over it or make contact with his step-siblings. Lawrence claimed that his relationship with his mother was at its worst in 1905 when he ran away from home and enlisted as a boy soldier in the army until his father showed up and bought him out of service. However, historians have not been able to find any records of this happening, so either the army wasn’t very thorough when it came to keeping tabs on new recruits, or Lawrence was prone to exaggeration. As you will soon find out, this wasn’t Lawrence’s only claim that has been brought under scrutiny.

Either way, Ned found himself back home again, but he gained a modicum of independence when his parents agreed to build him a bungalow at the end of the garden, where he had some privacy and was free to pursue his true interests. It soon became pretty evident that the church was not one of them. Instead, he developed a taste for studying the past, but he preferred to get his dose of history al fresco, going out in the field instead of sticking his nose in dusty, old books. He became a keen cyclist, who liked to travel to castles and churches all over the country to take photographs and brass rubbings.

He took up cycling partly as a way of making up for his small stature. Unlike the lofty physique of actor Peter O’Toole, the real Lawrence was only 5’5″ tall and had quite a big head for his size. He felt pretty self-conscious about this his entire life, which is why he was always looking to build up his strength in order to compensate. Another way he kept fit was by avoiding all alcohol, tobacco, and meat, though he occasionally indulged in them whenever he wanted to abide by local customs.

When Ned ran out of castles to study in Britain, he traveled to France for two summers in order to see what they had to offer. In the summer of 1909, the 20-year-old Lawrence embarked on his most ambitious adventure yet – he went on a walking tour of the crusader castles in Syria which, back then, were mostly part of the Ottoman Empire. He walked over 1,600 kilometers during a three-month period, receiving firsthand exposure to the Arabic culture that would define his entire legacy.

Archaeology & War

When Lawrence wasn’t bicycling his way from castle to castle, he was studying medieval history at Jesus College, Oxford. He used the material and information he obtained in Ottoman Syria to write his thesis and he graduated with first-class honors in 1910. Now that he was finished with school, Lawrence needed a career. Ideally, something that combined historical studies with the exploration of landmarks in far-away locations. The choice seemed obvious. With his parents’ full support, Lawrence became a quantity surveyor… Just kidding, he became an archaeologist.

In 1911, he already had his first gig lined up, thanks to his mentor, British scholar David George Hogarth . As an established archaeologist, Hogarth was in charge of an expedition to Carchemish, set up by the British Museum, and he took Lawrence along for the ride. Located today on the border between Syria and Turkey, Carchemish was once an ancient settlement that acted both as an independent city-state and an important part of the Hittite Empire. Hogarth and his team spent the next three years excavating in the region, allowing Lawrence to witness firsthand the struggles present in the region. He formed a close friendship with a young Arab water boy named Dahoum , who then served as his assistant and traveling companion. Somewhat fittingly, his team’s biggest rival in the area wasn’t any of the locals, but the Germans, who were there building a railroad and kept butting heads with the English over land access.

At the start of 1914, tensions between nations were at an all-time high, as war loomed over the world. Lawrence was given a new assignment to explore the Negev Desert. Ostensibly, he was doing this at the behest of a British archaeological society called the Palestine Exploration Fund, trying to find a biblical location named the Wilderness of Zin. In reality, though, this was basically a spy mission, as the project was a smokescreen staged by the British military to allow Lawrence and his team to survey the Negev Desert and map out important features such as safe routes, water sources, etc. This information was considered of great strategic importance should war break out.

And, of course, as we all know, war did break out. Lawrence was back in England at the start of the First World War. He was keen to join in, but wasn’t sure where exactly his talents would best be employed. His uncertainty was resolved in the fall of 1914 when two important things happened. One – the Ottoman Empire officially joined the war; and two – Britain deposed the Egyptian leader Abbas II due to his Ottoman sympathies and declared Egypt a British protectorate . Shortly thereafter, Lawrence was summoned to work for a newly-formed intelligence unit headquartered in Cairo named the Arab Bureau.

As it turned out, Lawrence was good at his new job. He understood the history and the problems of the Arabs, he spoke their language fluently, and, most of all, he had a genuine interest in their fate. In his mind, the ideal outcome would have been for the Arab people to gain a true independence that allowed them to retain their identity and their culture. This wasn’t necessarily the vision shared by the British government, which was mainly looking after its own interests, but it wasn’t completely against it, either. Obviously, the worst-case scenario was for the Ottoman Empire to retain its hold over the Arab people and maintain its dominion in the region. Another unfavorable outcome, as far as the British officers at the Arab Bureau were concerned, was for France to gain concessions in the area following a victory in the war. Sure, France was their ally, but the feud between the two nations was a rivalry as old as time, so while they needed France to win, they didn’t want it to win…too much. Of course, Lawrence had no idea at the time that Britain and France were already discussing a secret treaty known as the Sykes -Picot Agreement to divide their spheres of influence in the region after the war. Therefore, Lawrence and his colleagues were busy dealing with intelligence and propaganda against their own ally in order to, in his own words, “ biff the French out of all hope of Syria.”

The biggest downside to Lawrence’s job was that it was done mainly behind a desk. Sure, he had no military training, but he was still eager to get out there and see some action. Some have speculated that he felt survivor’s guilt because he had a safe, cushy job during the war, while two of his brothers died in 1915 fighting on the Western Front, which was why he acted so reckless once he was actually out in the field. True or not, Lawrence would soon get his wish. He might have spent all of 1915 as a pencil pusher, but the following year would take a drastic turn.

Lawrence of Arabia Is Born

In June 1916, the Great Arab Revolt started – a military uprising of the Arab forces united against their common enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The leader of this army was Hussein bin Ali, a member of the Hashemite royal family and the Grand Sharif of Mecca, as well as the king of the newly self-proclaimed Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz. The British government played an important role, as it not only promised to supply the Arabs with weapons but also to recognize the single unified Arab state that would emerge if they defeated the Ottoman Empire. With that much skin in the game, the British were not just going to sit back and hope for the best. They wanted their own men to work closely with the Arab forces.

That’s where T. E. Lawrence came in. By October of that year, the Sharifian Army of King Hussein had achieved some initial success, but their resolve and morale had begun to falter as the enemy still had the strategic, numeric, and military superiority. Lawrence was sent in on a fact-finding mission to gather intelligence about how the war effort was going and, from this point on, you know most of what happens if you’ve seen the movie. First, he met with all of King Hussein’s sons. The sharif was already in his 60s by that point, so he wasn’t going to be the one leading boots on the ground. Lawrence concluded that Prince Faisal would be the one best suited to lead the revolt.

Following their little tête-à-tête, Lawrence sent a glowing report back to headquarters, which not only commended the efforts of the Arab army, but also discouraged the need for British troops. This might have not been entirely accurate, but it was music to the ears of his superiors, who wanted those soldiers for other frontlines, and, consequently, Faisal asked for Lawrence to be assigned to him permanently as a liaison officer – a request which was granted and, thus, Lawrence of Arabia was born.

Lawrence advised Faisal to delay his attempts to capture Medina in favor of strengthening Arab-controlled cities such as Yanbu and Jeddah, while at the same time carrying out regular raids on the Hejaz railway that traveled from Damascus to Medina in order to disturb Turkish supply lines. Strategically, it was sound, but not exactly thrilling. How about a new plan with some chest hair? A plan that was dangerous and reckless, not to mention that it went against the wishes of the British government? A plan such as, I don’t know, leading an assault on Aqaba?

 The Battle of Aqaba

Again, if you’ve seen the movie, this is like the first half of it, and that thing’s almost 4 hours long, so suffice to say that it was a crucial turning point not just for Lawrence’s legacy, but also for the Arab Revolt. In case you need a quick refresher, Aqaba was a coastal city located at the very northern tip of the Red Sea, nowadays situated in Jordan. It had great strategic value because it was surrounded by mountains on two sides and could have been used as a naval base for German submarines and minelayers in the Red Sea. Taking it from the front was almost impossible because the city was protected by a narrow gorge that would have funneled enemy ships into cannon range like lambs to the slaughter. The eastern flank, however, was not very well protected, mainly because the Turks were not expecting anyone to attack from that direction.

Lawrence thought that taking Aqaba would have been of great importance for his side, but especially for the Arabs, who would then be able to use it as a base for conducting raids on the Damascus-Medina railway. He actually went against his superiors to get this done. Of course, the British would have liked the city to be in friendly hands, but they kinda sorta promised it to the French, plus that they did not think that a small group of underequipped Arab fighters would be able to occupy the port.

And they probably would have been right, if not for one man – Auda Abu Tayeh. He was the leader of the Howeitat tribe and described by Lawrence as the “greatest fighting man in northern Arabia.” While Feisal might have been the spiritual leader who inspired the Arabs, Auda was the warrior general who fought alongside them and led them to victory. He was described as modest, honest, and kind-hearted to his guests, but a wild beast to his enemies. According to legend, Auda killed 75 Arabs by his own hand, and he never bothered to count the Turks because those would have been in the hundreds.

The Howeitat were regarded as the finest warriors in the desert, so it’s no surprise that both sides wanted them as allies and not enemies. At the start of the revolt, the Howeitat were, technically, on the payroll of the Ottoman Empire, but they weren’t on friendly terms, by any stretch of the imagination. But just like with Feisal, Lawrence both charmed and inspired Auda to fight for the Arab cause. And once Auda was in, he was in all the way, becoming the main military leader of the revolt and turning down multiple offers from the Turks to switch allegiances once more.

Unlike the movie, the real Arab force never crossed the impassable Nefud Desert in order to reach Aqaba for a simple reason – there was no need. That was just a bit of movie magic to add more drama. In reality, the army stayed on the road, by the edge of the desert, attacking several Turkish garrisons along the way.

When Lawrence first set off on this 1000-kilometer, two-month-long camel trek, he was accompanied by just 45 men. By the time he reached Aqaba in July 1917, that number swelled to at least 500, and maybe up to thousands, depending on who you ask. Many Arabs were ready to fight for the cause, especially when it was supported by key figures like Feisal and Auda.

Calling this the Battle of Aqaba is a bit disingenuous because the real fighting actually happened at Aba el Lissan , about 65 kilometers away, where the bulk of the Turkish forces was located. On July 1, the Arab army took them by surprise and decimated the enemy, killing around 300 soldiers and taking another 300 prisoners, while they only sustained two casualties. Afterward, when the Arabs stormed the city of Aqaba, the few soldiers still stationed there only fired a few shots before officially surrendering on July 6.

It was a huge victory for the revolt and for Lawrence, personally, but we should remember that he was still an amateur archeologist with no military training. He was merely roleplaying as a soldier and somehow had not gotten himself killed yet thanks to buffs in luck and charisma. Here’s a perfect example of that – during the battle, Lawrence did not take part in the initial charge. Why? Because he was thrown off his camel right as the fighting started. This alone was embarrassing enough, but when Lawrence got up, he noticed that the reason why he was thrown off was that, in all the excitement, he had accidentally shot the animal in the back of the head.

Life after the War

Following the success at Aqaba, the fact that Lawrence went against his orders was conveniently forgotten. His new boss, General Edmund Allenby , was a fan of Lawrence’s derring-do. Allenby had just been transferred from the French frontlines and, by comparison, the war in the Middle East was a lot more boring (for the British, at least). Therefore, he was inclined to grant several of Lawrence’s requests to help the Arab Revolt.

The most controversial aspect of Lawrence’s life happened soon after, on November 20, 1917, when he was captured by Turkish guards while in Daraa in disguise, and subjected to beatings, torture, and rape. Initially, scholars thought that this had a great psychological effect on Lawrence’s behavior, and made him more reckless and bloodthirsty, but nowadays some have gone the other way and claimed that the officer exaggerated the event in his book, and some even accused him of making the whole thing up.

Whether or not it happened, in the short term, Lawrence did not allow the traumatic event to get in the way of his plans. He continued to go on recon missions in disguise and he continued to lead raids on the railway. But these were mere distractions. As the strength of the Allied Powers kept growing, already he saw Britain and France making plans to divvy up the region after the war, plans that only tangentially included the local forces. He thought there was one more hope for the Arab people – if they controlled one of the major cities when it was all said and done, they would have a good bargaining chip during negotiations. He wanted them to take Damascus.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. Damascus did fall on October 1, 1918, and Lawrence entered the city triumphantly in a Rolls Royce. However, when he did so, he was greeted by Allied units who were already inside because it was the Australians who first captured the city, not the Arabs.

Pretty much what Lawrence expected to happen, happened. A lot of bureaucratic brouhaha between the various sides over who was in charge. The Arabs tried setting up a government but were forced by the Allies to accept French supervision. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s pleas fell on deaf ears, and when his superiors finally got tired of him, they promoted him to colonel and sent him back home to England. And, just like that, Lawrence of Arabia was gone.

Once the war was over and Allied forces left the Middle East, Faisal tried proclaiming himself king of the new Arab Kingdom of Syria, but none of the Allied Powers recognized his authority. Instead, following the San Remo Conference in 1920, they awarded the mandate of Syria to France. This led to the brief Franco-Syrian War, which didn’t actually involve Faisal himself, as he willingly surrendered, but one of his ministers who wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel. France easily won, dethroned Feisal, and established the French Mandate of Syria. Meanwhile, as a sort of consolation prize, the British made Feisal the King of Iraq, a position he held until his death in 1933.

Back in England, Lawrence got to work on writing his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom , about his experience during the Arab Revolt. He finished it in 1922, but it wasn’t published until 1926. He often expressed his shame at what he saw as a betrayal of the Arab people, and considered himself partly responsible for wearing a “ mantle of fraud ” throughout the military campaign for giving them hope when he knew the true intentions of his government. He kept trying to advocate on behalf of the Arab people for years after the war, working as a diplomat and advisor for Winston Churchill.

Lawrence experienced newfound fame during these years. During the war, his exploits had been kept strictly hush-hush, but now everything was out in the open. It was actually an American writer and broadcaster named Lowell Thomas who popularized his adventures and turned him into a household name.

Lawrence wasn’t too fond of being a celebrity, though. Once he finished writing his book, he tried joining the Royal Air Force under the assumed name of John Hume Ross . When he was discovered, he was discharged, but then enlisted in the tank corps, under yet another name, T. E. Shaw. After a few years, he was allowed to transfer back to the RAF, where he remained until shortly before his death. He was a fan of all high-speed machines – airplanes, motorcycles, powerboats, and worked on them all as an aircraftman and mechanic.

Lawrence had his own Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle which he dubbed “George V.” On May 13, 1935, he was riding his beloved George through Dorset, when he swerved suddenly to avoid two boys on bicycles. He lost control of the motorcycle and crashed. He died of head injuries six days later, on May 19, aged 46.

Lawrence had one last inadvertent effect on the world. One of the doctors who attended to him after the accident was an Australian man named Hugh Cairns , who went on to become a pioneering neurosurgeon. Following Lawrence’s death, Cairns was inspired to study head trauma on motorcycle accident victims, and his research led to the adoption of crash helmets.

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