This is a memoir of Lawrence’s part in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. It reads like an action novel, interspersed with penetrating insights as to the fundamental nature of man. Lawrence is a keen judge of character with a terrific eye for detail, both of his surroundings and of men in his company. This makes his prose flow in flowery, yet unpretentious, bursts. Lawrence was having the time of his life on the Arabian Peninsula and it showed. Even before the campaign started Lawrence had spent years in the Middle East, was fluent in many of the Arabic dialects, and was well versed in Bedouin and Turkish history. In Feisal, the aging Sherif of Mecca’s most competent and inspiring son, he found a face for the Arab insurrection- a modern prophet of the desert. The Bedouin were a hard, simple people given to Manichaean dichotomies and a strict code of honor, valor, and glory.
Lawrence’s memoir makes great sociology of the Arab people in general. The outdated facts sometime still reveal the most essential character. “The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim [a town]. In Kasim there was but little coffee hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical…. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbors’ beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers.” Lawrence was at his flowery best when describing the character of the men he fought with. In describing one minor sherif, “he feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.”
Life in the desert was an adventure; one saga after another. Lawrence had studied the military strategy and tactics of Clausewitz, Jomini, and Napoleon while at Oxford, but he relied as much on improvising by the seat of his pants as grand strategy. He was often hindered by his own British command or by the predilections of his Arab charges. They liked big noises. It was no matter that machine guns were rusty, cumbersome, and not ideal for mobile desert warfare. Of more tactical use were the mines and dynamite that he lined the Hejaz Railway, linking the Turkish garrison in Medina with supplies from the outside world. His aim was to never let the Turks assemble in mass, to never create a front, and, instead, make the Turks guard multiple flanks, stretching them at all points with hit and run maneuvers. This was guerrilla warfare in the desert, with probing, raiding, and individual valor taking the place of formations and fixed battle. It was not always a brutal war, however. Lawrence admitted that, “we felt sorry always for the men of the Turkish Army. The officers, volunteer and professional, had caused the war by their ambition- almost by their existence- and we wished they could receive not merely their proportionate deserts, but all that the conscripts had to suffer through their faults.”
Lawrence’s greatest hardships were desert rides spanning hundreds of miles on the back of a camel without food for days, in search of the next oasis to water himself and his ride. Often he would sleep in the saddle, sometimes drinking putrid water from wells poisoned by Turks, and occasionally was forced to kill one of his own mounts to eat the camel meat. Well, perhaps his greatest hardship was the time he was caught spying inside an Ottoman occupied village, had to feign being a Circassian conscript, and was brutally beaten by the Turkish officers when he did not yield to the sexual advances of the provincial Governor. For the rest of the war he was mostly able to avoid other contact with the Turks and their bullets, mainly being attacked by fleas, scorpions, and dysentery.
Lawrence’s greatest success, with Fiesal’s help, was uniting the disparate nomadic tribes in a spirit of national Arabness. “Fiesal brought nationality to their minds in a phrase, which set them thinking of Arab history and language; then he dropped into silence for a moment: for with these illiterate masters of the tongue words were lively, and they liked to savour each, unmingled, on the palate.” By the end of the war Lawrence had been campaigning among the Bedouin for over two years and his loyalties remained divided between the British and the Arab armies. He was never at comfort amongst either. After the capture of Damascus he asked leave from General Allenby as to not be part of the British betrayal of the Arabs, foretold in the Sykes-Picott agreement. “The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.”
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