Little did young Lawrence dream, when he was studying Hittite ruins, that it was his destiny to play a major rôle in building a new empire, instead of piecing together, for a scholar’s thesis, the fragments of a dead-and-buried kingdom. Captain Tuohy has tersely said in his brief note in “The Secret Corps,” for “romantic adventure his career has probably been unexampled in this or in any other war.”
This twenty-eight-year-old poet and scholar had started across the Arabian Desert in February, 1916, to raise an army, accompanied by only three companions. I do not know of a more helpless task than this that has been essayed during the last thousand years. They at first had no money, no means of transportation except a few camels, and no means of communication except camel-riders. They were trying to raise and equip an army in a country which has no manufacturing interests, which produces very little food and less water. In many parts of Arabia water-holes are a five days’ camel trek apart. They had no laws to help them, and they were trying to raise an army among the nomadic Bedouin tribes that had been separated from one another by blood-feuds for hundreds of years. They were trying to unify a people who quarrel over the possession of the water-holes and pasture-lands of Arabia, and war with one another for the possession of camels; a people who, when they meet one another in the desert, usually substitute volleys of pot-shots for the conventional rules of Oriental courtesy.
In habit, instinct, and mental outlook Europe is utterly at variance with Asia, and it is rarely, only once in hundreds of years, that there comes forward some brilliant Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Latin who. possessing an understanding that transcends race, religion, and tradition, can adopt the Eastern temperament at will. Such men were Marco Polo, the Venetian, and General Charles Gordon. Such a man is Thomas Edward Lawrence, the modern Arabian knight.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 31
