by Max Boot
What they found was that the Arabs had been successful in driving the Turks out of the holy city of Mecca and, with the help of the Royal Navy, in seizing several Red Sea ports, including Jeddah, where they now landed. But more than fifteen thousand Turkish troops were still deployed around Medina.8 The rebellion was “standing still,” Lawrence noted, “which, with an irregular war, was the prelude to disaster.” He believed the problem was a lack of the right kind of leadership—the kind needed to “set the desert on fire.”9 The titular head of the revolt was Sharif Hussein, emir of Mecca, who aspired to be “King of the Arabs,” but he was too old to take an active part in military operations. Lawrence was unimpressed by his sons Abdullah, Ali, and Zeid. He pinned his hopes on another son, Feisal, whose forces were operating far from the sea in an area seldom visited by Europeans.
To meet Feisal, Lawrence set out on a camel accompanied by a couple of guides, the first of many such journeys he would undertake over the next two years. It was also the first time during the war that he donned Arab clothes so “that I might present a proper silhouette in the dark upon my camel.”10 Lawrence found that the “long monotony of camel pacing” tired his “unaccustomed muscles” and “the pestilent beating of the Arabian sun” blistered his skin and made his eyes ache.11 (Sunglasses were not yet commonly available.)12 All he had to eat en route—typical of the fare he would consume during the revolt—was unleavened bread dough cooked over a fire, “moistened with liquid butter,” and “scooped up like damp sawdust in pressed pellets with the fingers.”13
Lawrence was exhausted by the time he reached Feisal on October 23, 1916, but he was elated to find that he “was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to fully glory.”14 The shy, “supercerebral”15 twenty-eight-year-old English archaeologist forged a lasting friendship with the “hot-tempered, proud and impatient” thirty-one-year-old descendant of the Prophet whom he judged to be “far more imposing personally than any of his brothers”: “A popular idol, and ambitious; full of dreams and the capacity to realize them.”16 So firm was their personal bond that Feisal persuaded the British authorities to send Lawrence back after a short sojourn in Cairo to act as his adviser. He would stay for the rest of the war.
LAWRENCE’S CHALLENGE WAS to utilize up to fifty thousand Bedouin tribesmen effectively.17 They were a “tough looking crowd” who went “about bristling with cartridge-belts, and fire off their rifles when they can.” “As for their physical condition,” Lawrence wrote, “I doubt whether men were ever harder.”18 But like all nomadic raiders going back to the days of Akkad, they had no discipline or cohesion. “One company of Turks firmly entrenched in open country could have defied the entire army of them; and a pitched battle, with its casualties, would have ended the war by sheer horror,” Lawrence wrote.19
Other British officers had made similar observations and had concluded that the Arabs were useless as a fighting force. Many wanted to send British regulars to push the Turks out of Arabia. This Lawrence adamantly opposed, because he thought that the Arabs would be demoralized by the presence of large numbers of Christian troops. More than his fellow advisers, he understood the Arabs and identified with them. He was in favor of sending British weapons and British advisers, but he wanted the bulk of the fighting to be left to the Bedouin utilizing their age-old methods. “Arabs were artists in sniping,” he noted; “their real sphere is guerrilla warfare.”20 “In mass,” he explained, “they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline, nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks.”21
He determined to eschew a “war of contact” in favor of a “war of detachment” focusing on the chief Ottoman vulnerability—the Hejaz railway running from Anatolia down the Arabian Peninsula, which was used to keep Turkish forces in the region supplied. The Arabs, Lawrence vowed, would be “a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas,” and they would be as hard to defeat as “eating soup with a knife.”22
Lawrence took an active hand in raids against the railway, notwithstanding his lack of formal military training. “In military theory,” he noted, he was “tolerably read.” At Oxford he had studied authors such as Clausewitz and Jomini, but his “interest had been abstract, concerned with the theory and philosophy of warfare.”23 Now in Arabia he had to learn small-unit tactics on the fly, or rather on the camel ride.
ONE OF HIS lessons began at 7:50 a.m. on Monday, March 26, 1917, when he rode with thirty men from a desert camp to attack a railway station outside Medina. After a halt at midmorning at an oasis that “proved almost luxuriant with its thorn trees and grass,” they mounted again and rode for another couple of hours before camping for the night. At 5:35 a.m. the next day they were on the move again. On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 28, they finally reached their target—the railway station at Abu el Naam.
To scout out the enemy, they “lay like lizards in the long grass” atop the “glistening, yellow, sunburned” hills that ringed the station. The Turkish garrison, they saw, consisted of “390 infantry, and twenty-five goats.” On Thursday, March 29, they received Arab reinforcements—“300 men, two machine-guns, one mountain-gun, and one mountain howitzer.” Lawrence judged the Arabs, though now almost as numerous as the Turks, incapable of capturing the fortified station. Instead he decided to destroy the rail and telegraph lines.
He set off just before midnight with a small party to lay a mine on the tracks. Then Lawrence had to shimmy up a telegraph pole himself because the Bedouin “proved unable to climb.” He was so weak from a recent bout of dysentery and malaria that he lost his grip and fell sixteen feet to the ground, suffering “cuts and bruises.” He slept for an hour, then arrived back at camp at daybreak, rubbing “sand out of red rimmed aching eyes,” just in time to see the Arab artillery open fire on the station. “One lucky shell caught the front wagon of the train in the siding, and it took fire furiously,” he recorded. “This alarmed the locomotive, which uncoupled and went off southward. We watched her hungrily as she approached our mine, and when she was on it there came a soft cloud of dust and a report and she stood still.”
The train was derailed but managed to limp away, “going at foot pace, clanking horribly.” Lawrence had hoped to fire a machine gun at the locomotive, but the unreliable Arab machine gunners had left their assigned ambush point to join in a more general attack on the railway station that was soon called off. Lawrence summed up the results: “We had taken thirty prisoners, a mare, two camels, and some more sheep; and had killed and wounded seventy of the garrison, at a cost to ourselves of one man slightly hurt.”
It was not much of a battle in the conventional sense. The most Lawrence would say of it was that “we did not wholly fail.”24 But the cumulative effect of such actions was greater than their individual parts. For each raid forced the Turks to further concentrate their forces in a few entrenched garrisons, ceding the countryside to the Arabs. Before long it “dawned” on Lawrence “that we had won the Hejaz war”: “Out of every thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now free.”25 True, the Turks still held Medina, but so what? The Turkish garrison was trapped, and it was cheaper to keep it there than in a prisoner-of-war camp in Egypt. Lawrence counseled Feisal to make no further attempts to capture Medina but rather shift his focus to the Levant, where he could link up with a British army that was thrusting into Palestine from Egypt.
THE KEY TO moving north would be the capture of Aqaba, the last Turkish-held port on the Red Sea and the port closest to the Suez Canal. From there Feisal’s forces could be supplied as they moved into Syria. A more conventional officer would have planned an amphibious assault, but Lawrence rejected this approach because, while British troops “could take the beach,” they would be “as unfavorably placed as on a Gallipoli beach,” for
they would be “under observation and gun-fire from the coastal hills: and these granite hills, thousands of feet high, were impracticable for heavy troops.”26 Lawrence decided that Aqaba “would be best taken by Arab irregulars descending from the interior without naval help.” This would require a “long and difficult” trek to surprise the Turkish garrison from the rear—“an extreme example of a turning movement, since it involved a desert journey of six hundred miles to capture a trench within gunfire of our ships.”27
Lawrence did not bother consulting his superiors before he set off from the port of Wejh on May 9, 1917; he was, a fellow officer said, “a law unto himself.”28 He was accompanied by fewer than fifty Arabs. They brought with them the essential tools of their trade: four hundred pounds of gold that would be used to buy the allegiance of tribesmen and six camels loaded with explosives that would be used to destroy railroad tracks and bridges. Two months later, on July 6, Lawrence rode with two thousand Arabs into Aqaba “through a driving sand storm.”29 Another British adviser later commented that “Lawrence could certainly not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount.” He was so successful because he had “established himself by sheer force of personality as a born leader and shown himself to be a greater dare-devil than any of his followers,” able to “shoot straighter, ride harder, and eat and drink less.”30
In the course of his exploits Lawrence was constantly getting sick or wounded. By the end of the Aqaba expedition he was “burned crimson and very haggard” and weighed less than a hundred pounds.31 But even with a 20,000-pound bounty on his head, he was “absolutely without fear.”32 Sometimes he positively courted death, writing in June 1917, “I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way.” Later, in an early edition of his memoirs, he wrote that “a bodily wound would have been a grateful vent for my internal perplexities.”33
He was under great strain (“nerves going, and temper wearing thin”)34 not only from the demands of combat but also because he felt himself torn between two masters. The Arabs wanted independence, but Lawrence knew that Britain and France had concluded a secret treaty, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, to divide much of the Middle East between them. “We are calling them to fight for us on a lie,” Lawrence complained, “and I can’t stand it.”35
Adding to his anguish was an incident that occurred on the night of November 20–21, 1917. While on a solitary reconnaissance of Daraa, Syria, in his usual white Arabic robes, Lawrence was captured by Turkish troops and hauled before Hajim Bey, the local Turkish commander. An “ardent pederast,” the bey took a “fancy” to his captive who pretended to be a fair-skinned Circassian—one of the natives of the Caucasus forced by the tsar’s armies to relocate to the Middle East. When Lawrence resisted his advances, he recalled, the bey called over his men to beat him savagely and to “play unspeakably” with him, meaning, probably, to rape him. Afterwards Lawrence was “too torn and bloody” for the bey’s bed (his place was taken by a “crestfallen” corporal), so he was dumped in a makeshift prison. Less hurt than he appeared, he was able to run away, but he would never escape the trauma of what had transpired, especially because he later admitted to feeling a frisson of forbidden excitement during his ordeal—“a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.” For the rest of his life he would express shame that “the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.” He would subsequently find himself repelled by physical contact and unable to develop intimate ties with anyone.36
For the time being Lawrence kept quiet about his ordeal and went back to fighting the Turks. He did take care, however, to travel with more than two dozen Arab bodyguards—“a fine tough-looking band,” in the words of one British soldier, any one of whom “would have given his life for Lawrence.”37
By the end of 1917 the Anglo-Egyptian army under General Sir Edmund Allenby was breaking through Turkish defenses. Jerusalem fell on December 9. The next eleven months would be spent in driving the Turks out of the rest of the Levant, with the Arabs operating as a partisan adjunct on the right flank of the Allied advance. The campaign culminated on October 1, 1918, when the Allies entered Damascus down streets “aflame with joy and enthusiasm.”38
The Arabs under Lawrence’s guidance contributed to this victory by disrupting Turkish communications and tying down Turkish troops, making it impossible for Ottoman commanders to concentrate all of their 100,000 men in Palestine and Syria against Allenby’s 69,000. By the end the Bedouin irregulars were supplemented by British armored cars and aircraft as well as by 8,000 Arab regulars, mostly former Ottoman soldiers, but it was still primarily an unconventional fight—and a vicious one.39 The Arabs, enraged by Turkish atrocities, slaughtered Turkish prisoners on several occasions, and Lawrence was unwilling or unable to stop them.40
AFTER THE WAR Lawrence attended the Paris Peace Conference as an adviser to both the Arab and the British delegations. He caused a sensation by wearing an Arab headdress along with a colonel’s uniform. One American attendee described him as “the most interesting Briton alive . . . a Shelley-like person, and yet too virile to be a poet.”41
Lawrence came away deeply disillusioned after the French took Syria and Lebanon while the British helped themselves to Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan. He went on, however, to play an important role as an adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office in 1921 in remaking the map of the Middle East. In his dealings with Churchill, and in his memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he was then in the process of revising, he exaggerated the role played by his friend Feisal during the war, while glossing over the weakness of the Arabs and the extent of the British aid they received. He wanted to convey the impression that Britain owed the Arabs and especially the Hashemites a major debt that had to be repaid.42 Partly as a result of his machinations, Feisal was crowned the first king of Iraq, a new state cobbled together from three Ottoman provinces. His brother Abdullah was installed in Transjordan, yet another new state. Their father, Hussein, was left to rule the Hejaz until 1924 when he was defeated by Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia. Lawrence, who did not believe that the agendas of Arab nationalists and Zionists were incompatible, even used his influence with Feisal to persuade him to give up his family’s claims to Palestine, which, under the terms of a League of Nations resolution approved in 1922, became a “mandate” governed by Britain with the intention of turning it into a “Jewish National Home.”43
Feisal’s grandson would be overthrown and killed in Baghdad in 1958, but the state of Iraq still exists and the Hashemites still rule Jordan. Palestine, of course, was to be divided into Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Thus Lawrence may be said to have played an important role in creating the modern Middle East. Indeed, near the end of his life, he would cite his role in crafting the postwar settlement, “which still stands in every particular—if only other peace treaties did!” as being more important than what he “did in Arabia during the war.”44 The results of that settlement turned out, however, to be far more problematic than Lawrence had foreseen. As the historian David Fromkin pointed out in his magisterial history A Peace to End All Peace, by 1922, shortly after Lawrence had finished his work at the Colonial Office, “the Middle East had started along a road that was to lead to the endless wars (between Israel and her neighbors, among others, and between rival militias in Lebanon) and to the always-escalating acts of terrorism (hijacking, assassination, and random massacre) that have been a characteristic feature of international life in the 1970s and 1980s.”45 And in the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s.
ONCE HIS WORK at the Colonial Office was done, Lawrence sought to hide “out-of-sight,”46 but he found this increasingly hard to accomplish because of an enterprising showman named Lowell Thomas. A former Chicago newspaperman, Thomas had spent a few days with Lawrence in Aqaba in 1918. Out of this thin material he created a popular book and lecture, accompanied by a slideshow, on “Lawrence of Arabia.” His subject found Tho
mas’s presentation to be “silly and inaccurate,” but it played to packed houses from New York to London, month after month. Four million people were said to have viewed the show around the world,47 lured by a romantic tale of derring-do that offered a welcome respite from the aftermath of the mass slaughter of the trenches. To escape the public klieg light, “the Uncrowned King of Arabia,” as he was dubbed by Thomas,48 enlisted under an alias as a lowly airman in the Royal Air Force to serve, in his own words, as a “cog of the machine.”49 Later he legally changed his name to T. E. Shaw. “Damn the Press,” he fulminated, decrying intrusions into his privacy.50
In truth T.E.’s attitude to fame was ambivalent. While professing a passion for anonymity, he struck up high-profile friendships with literary giants such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, published a memoir, and sat for numerous portraits by leading artists. When his charade was discovered by the press in 1925, he had to leave the RAF temporarily and join the Royal Tank Corps, but, thanks to his friendship with the RAF chief of staff, he was allowed to rejoin the air force—“the nearest modern equivalent to going into a monastery in the Middle Ages,” he explained to a friend, the poet Robert Graves.51 Here he felt a sense of comradeship in the ranks with his fellow mechanist-“monks.” He had only just left the RAF and settled in a small cottage in Dorset when he died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 while hurtling at top speed down a country lane as he loved to do. Winston Churchill called his death at age forty-seven the greatest blow the British Empire had suffered in years. He told reporters, “In Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time.”52
