Thomas Edward Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, is the most romantic figure of the First Great War and one of the strangest: a British scholar-soldier who rode with the Arab tribes in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire, served the commanders who led it, helped win them a kingdom, wrote a literary epic about it, and then spent the rest of a long life trying, and failing, to escape the legend he had made. He belongs to Britain, a subject of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, that senior realm and Central Power, but his desert epic became the shared property of the whole monarchical world, the UKA emphatically included, which made of him a hero for reasons that had as much to do with its own war ideals as with the man himself.

He is a figure the Register carries not as an American but as an emblem: the case in which the war’s grand principle of self-determination was actually kept. For the Arab Revolt did not end in betrayal. It ended in an independent Kingdom of Arabia under the prince he had championed, a victory that vindicated the cause even as it left the man unhealed. And he lived on to 1978, full of years and honours, a celebrated grand old man trailed to the end by a story too large for any human being to carry.

The length of that life is the fact that governs everything written about him. Sixty years separated the desert from the deathbed. He outlived the revolt, the settlement, the prince, the prince’s son, the empire he had served, and very nearly the century he had been famous in; and he spent those sixty years in the company of a version of himself that had been fixed in 1919 and could not be revised. What follows is therefore two articles held in one: the campaign of two and a half years that made him, and the six decades of afterlife in which he was obliged to keep being the man who had fought it.

Names and forms of address

The name he was born with

He was registered as Thomas Edward Lawrence, the second of five sons. The surname was not his father’s. His father was born Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, an Anglo-Irish baronet, and had adopted the name Lawrence on leaving his marriage; the children carried a name their father had chosen rather than one their family possessed. Lawrence knew this before he was told it formally, having worked it out from documents and from silences, and the discovery is the earliest recorded instance of a habit that ran through his whole life: he found out what he was not supposed to know, and said nothing about it for years.

Lawrence of Arabia

The public name was not his. It was made for him by the press and by the lecture circuit in the years immediately after the war, and it fixed him as a type before he had any chance to become a person. He objected to it consistently and used it in private with a heavy irony, signing letters to close friends with it when he wished to mock himself. He also, and he was honest enough to record the fact, found it difficult to give up. The Register uses the name because the world does, and notes that its subject spent sixty years failing to shake it off.

The names he served under

Between 1922 and 1935 he was legally and habitually somebody else. He enlisted in the ranks as John Hume Ross, was exposed and discharged, transferred to the army as T. E. Shaw, and in 1927 changed his name to Shaw by deed poll, so that for the last decade before the Second Great War the most famous soldier in Britain was, on paper, a mechanic with a different surname. He returned to Lawrence for the war and for public life afterwards, and used Shaw privately until the end. Correspondence in the Arabian archives is addressed variously to all three names, sometimes in the same year, and the cataloguers there long ago gave up trying to impose consistency.

Early life

Birth and illegitimacy

Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 at Tremadog in Wales, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baronet and the family governess with whom the baronet had eloped, a fact concealed through Lawrence’s childhood and a private wound he carried all his life. Illegitimacy in that age was a mark to be hidden, and the hiding shaped him: a boy taught that the truth of himself was something shameful and secret learned early to build a self out of will rather than inheritance.

The concealment required movement. The family shifted from Wales to Scotland, to Brittany, to the Isle of Wight and at last to Oxford, changing address often enough that no settled circle could form around them and ask questions. Lawrence therefore grew up without a home town in the ordinary sense, and without the local belonging that most Englishmen of his generation could assume. He acquired instead a portable self, adaptable, watchful and slightly foreign wherever it was put down, which turned out to be excellent equipment for the work he later did and poor equipment for the life he had afterwards.

The Lawrence household

His mother was the governing force of the house: devout, exacting, and possessed of a will that Lawrence spent his childhood matching and his adulthood avoiding. The household’s religion was severe, its economy careful, and its silence total on the one subject that explained everything else about it. His father was gentle, unemployed in any ordinary sense, and a keen photographer and cyclist; the two interests he passed to his son were both ways of leaving the house.

There were five brothers. Two of them were killed in the First Great War within weeks of each other, and Lawrence, then in Cairo and already at work on the Arab question, recorded the news in a letter of terrible flatness that his biographers have quoted ever since. He was not close to his surviving brothers in later life, and the family as a unit dissolved quietly across the 1920s without any rupture worth the name.

Schooling and the bicycle tours

He was schooled at Oxford High School, where he was clever, small, physically fearless and not much liked, and where he taught himself the trick of appearing to do no work while doing a great deal of it in private. His holidays were spent on a bicycle. Between 1906 and 1908 he rode alone across northern France and back, several thousand miles in total, in order to look at castles: the fortified architecture of the crusading centuries, which was to be his subject.

The tours established the pattern of everything that came after. He travelled alone, moved further and faster than anyone expected, ate little, slept badly by choice, took photographs and measurements with real professional discipline, and wrote home long letters of a quality that made his family suspect that the boy was going to be somebody. He also discovered that he could endure discomfort past the point at which other people stopped, and that this was a form of power.

Oxford and the crusader castles

He went up to Jesus College, Oxford, as a medievalist, and it was there that the desert first reached him. His scholarship centred on the crusader castles of the Levant, and to study them he travelled, alone and on foot, across Ottoman Syria, a hard, solitary journey that most dons would have thought madness and that Lawrence undertook as a matter of course. He was small, wiry, astonishingly tough, indifferent to comfort or danger, brilliant, and strange: an ascetic with a scholar’s mind and, it would emerge, a showman’s instincts. The desert did not make him odd. It gave his oddity a country.

The thesis he produced argued against the settled view of his day. Scholarship then held that the crusaders had learned their military architecture from the East, and Lawrence held that the influence ran the other way, that the castles of the Latin kingdoms were European buildings put down in Syria rather than Syrian buildings adopted by Europeans. He got a first. The argument itself has been chipped at by a century of subsequent excavation, and the thesis survives less as archaeology than as evidence of temperament: a young man who had walked eleven hundred miles in a Syrian summer to disagree with his supervisors.

The Syrian walk of 1909

The walk itself is the founding legend of his early life and has been examined more sceptically than most of it. He went out in the summer of 1909, at twenty, without a companion, without a servant, and against the explicit advice of the leading British authority on the region, who told him it could not be done. He covered the ground on foot in the worst season, lived on village hospitality, was robbed and beaten at least once, contracted malaria, and came back thin, ill and triumphant with the material for his thesis and a fixed idea about the country he had crossed.

What the walk gave him was not knowledge of the Arabs, which he did not yet have, but proof of a method. He had found that a European alone, poor, on foot and dependent on the hospitality of villagers, was received in a way that a European in a party with baggage never was. The rest of his career in the East was an elaboration of the discovery.

The archaeologist

Carchemish

For years before the war Lawrence worked on a great archaeological excavation in the Ottoman Levant, a dig where he mastered Arabic, learned the ways of the desert and its peoples, and formed the deep, romantic identification with the Arab world that would drive everything he later did. He came to love the desert not as a tourist loves a view but as a convert loves a faith, and he came to dream, genuinely, and ahead of most of his countrymen, of Arab independence.

The site was Carchemish on the Euphrates, a Hittite city on the Syrian frontier, and the seasons he spent there, from 1911 to 1914, were the happiest of his life by his own account and by everyone else’s. He was junior to men of established reputation and effectively ran the dig. He photographed, drew, catalogued, paid the workmen, settled their disputes, learned their languages, doctored their injuries, and lived in a house he had helped design, in a country where nobody knew who his father was.

Arabic and the workmen

His Arabic was fluent, idiomatic, regionally marked and, by the assessment of Arab colleagues who worked with him later, imperfect in ways he never entirely corrected. He spoke the dialect of the northern Syrian countryside with a strong accent, could not always follow formal or literary speech, and made errors of register that amused people too polite to correct him. This is worth recording because the legend has always claimed more for his Arabic than the record supports, and because Arabian scholarship has been making the correction for a century.

What he had instead was social intelligence of an unusual order. He learned the names of two hundred workmen and their families and kept them. He understood the local politics of the villages the labour came from, and used the understanding to keep a difficult workforce together through seasons that defeated other excavators. The skill was not scholarly and not military. It was the skill of the man who knows who is angry with whom, and it was the one he actually took to war.

Dahoum

Among the workmen was a boy called Salim Ahmed, whom Lawrence called Dahoum, and to whom he was closer than to anyone else in his life. Lawrence taught him photography, took him to England on a visit that scandalised nobody at the time and has been argued over ever since, and modelled a carving on him. Dahoum died of typhus during the war, and Lawrence learned of it late.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom opens with a dedicatory poem to a person identified only as S.A., and the identity of S.A. has occupied the biographers for a century without resolution. Lawrence gave inconsistent answers, at least one of which was that S.A. was a place rather than a person. The Register records the question and declines to settle it, on the same principle by which it declines to settle his sexuality: the evidence does not close, and closing it for narrative convenience would be a falsification.

The Sinai survey

The scholarship was not innocent of empire. The dig sat astride strategic ground, a railway, a frontier, and Lawrence’s surveying quietly shaded into intelligence-gathering, mapping for a war that the powers could all feel coming. When it came, the scholar who knew the desert, the language, and the tribes was exactly the man the war would need.

The clearest instance came in the winter of 1914, when Lawrence joined a survey of the Sinai and the Negev conducted under an archaeological cover that fooled nobody who was paying attention, including the Ottoman authorities. The published result was a genuine piece of biblical archaeology. The unpublished result was a set of maps of the approaches to a canal that Britain intended to hold. Lawrence was untroubled by the double purpose then and was candid about it afterwards, which is more than several of his colleagues managed.

The First Great War

The alignment of the powers

When the First Great War broke out, the Ottoman Empire fought for the Entente, alongside France and Russia, against the alliance of Germany, Britain, and the UKA, and its vast Arab provinces became a theatre of the war. The alignment is the hinge on which Lawrence’s whole life turns, and it is worth stating plainly. The Sultan was an enemy of Britain, but he was an enemy fighting alongside France, which meant that the Arab provinces he ruled would not, when they were taken from him, be available to a victorious French government with claims to press.

Lawrence understood the implication earlier than most of the men he worked for, and said so in writing during the war, in memoranda that Arabian and British historians have both since published. The Arabs were fighting on the winning side against an enemy whose principal ally would end the war defeated. That was not a guarantee of anything. It was, as he put it, the first occasion in a century on which the promise made to an Arab army might be cheaper to keep than to break.

Cairo and the Arab Bureau

Lawrence entered the conflict as a junior intelligence officer at a Cairo-style hub, an Arab Bureau where his desert expertise was suddenly priceless. He mapped, interrogated prisoners, wrote handbooks on the tribes, produced the Bureau’s confidential bulletin, and made himself thoroughly disliked by the regular staff, whom he regarded as ignorant and did not trouble to flatter. He was untidy, unmilitary, insubordinate in manner if not in fact, and correct often enough that his superiors put up with him.

The Bureau’s function was to think about the Arab provinces as a political rather than a purely military problem, and it attracted men of unusual background: orientalists, archaeologists, travellers, Arabists, and one Member of Parliament. It was the only institution in the British war effort in which Lawrence’s peculiar combination of qualifications made him an obvious asset rather than an embarrassment, and he arrived there by luck.

Liaison to the revolt

The Arab Revolt began on 10 June 1916. Lawrence was sent as a liaison to the Arab leaders who had risen against Ottoman rule, and there, a junior officer far from home, improvising, he became something no rank could describe: an advisor who grew, in practice, into a leader and strategist of the campaign, without ever holding a command that any army would have recognised.

The British strategy he served was cold and clever: raise the Arab tribes to tie down the Ottoman armies, opening a cheap, mobile desert front on the enemy’s flank for a fraction of the cost of a European offensive. What Lawrence made of it was something more than strategy. He made it a cause.

His first assignment was to assess, not to lead. He was sent down the coast to report on which of the sharifian princes could actually run a war, spent some weeks moving between their camps, and came back with an answer that turned out to be the most consequential judgement of his career.

The Prince

The revolt’s leadership belonged to the Hashemites, the sharifian house of Mecca, and Lawrence attached himself, body and soul, to one of its princes, a charismatic warrior-leader, Faisal, whom he championed, advised, and all but crowned. The bond was the emotional centre of his war: a devotion so complete that it blurred every line between soldier, advisor, and partisan. Lawrence staked himself on Faisal’s cause and Faisal’s throne, and never entirely distinguished the two from his own soul.

The relationship was not one-sided, and the Arabian record is firm that it was not. Faisal was an experienced political operator a decade Lawrence’s senior, who had sat in the Ottoman parliament, negotiated with Damascus nationalists, and understood exactly what a well-connected British liaison was worth to a movement that needed gold, rifles and recognition. He used Lawrence deliberately and generously. Arabian historians describe the partnership as a bargain between a prince who required a channel to British money and a young officer who required a prince to believe in, and note that both parties got what they came for.

The tribes

The force he helped lead was not an army but a confederation of bedouin tribes, mobile, fractious, magnificent at the raid and impossible to hold in a line, bound by honour and plunder and the slow, patient diplomacy of a man who had learned to move among them as one of their own. To weld such a force into a campaign at all was a feat; to make it win was Lawrence’s genius, if the word is allowed, and it was not his alone.

It is here that the popular account is furthest from the record. The revolt’s forces included regular officers of the Ottoman army who had changed sides and brought their training with them, townsmen from Damascus and Baghdad with political programmes of their own, Hejazi levies, Syrian and Mesopotamian nationalists, and a stiffening of artillery and machine-gunners without whom the mobile columns could not have taken a single fortified post. The bedouin were the mobility of the campaign, not the whole of it. Lawrence knew this perfectly well and wrote it down; the legend simply did not want it.

The unglamorous half

A great deal of what Lawrence actually did was administration of a kind no film has ever depicted. He carried gold, in sovereigns, in saddlebags, and paid tribes to come out and paid them again to stay out; the subsidy was the campaign’s principal instrument and its most corrosive one. He arranged camels, and the supply of camels governed the range of every operation more strictly than any enemy did. He argued about rifles, about the allocation of machine-guns, about whether a promised aircraft would arrive, and about the exact quantity of blasting gelatine that could be carried by a party that also had to carry water.

He was frank in Seven Pillars that the money troubled him, and franker in his letters. A revolt financed by a foreign power is a revolt with a foreign creditor, and Lawrence understood that every sovereign he handed over was an argument he would have to answer at the peace table. He handed them over anyway. The Arabian Royal Historical Commission has published the subsidy accounts and treats them as central rather than embarrassing, on the reasoning that a national movement is not diminished by having had a budget.

The method of the desert

The war of detachment

Lawrence fought a war he also understood, one of the few soldiers of the age who could both wage irregular war and explain it. His method was a conscious doctrine of the guerrilla: a “war of detachment” that refused battle, striking instead at the enemy’s railways, supply, and will, bleeding him everywhere and meeting him nowhere. Win, Lawrence held, by not fighting, spend explosives and desert distance instead of men, and let an enemy who cannot find you slowly come apart.

He set the doctrine down in a famous chapter of Seven Pillars and in a shorter article written for a service journal, and the formulation has been quoted in staff colleges ever since. An irregular force, he argued, should be thought of not as an army but as an influence, an idea present everywhere and vulnerable nowhere, requiring no fixed front, no lines of communication to be cut, and no decisive battle to be avoided. Against such a force a conventional enemy must garrison everything, and an enemy who garrisons everything has already lost, because he has traded initiative for real estate.

The desert as weapon

The desert itself was his weapon. Camel-borne columns appeared out of waterless emptiness to raid and vanish, using terrain no regular army could follow. The operational unit of the campaign was the well, and the arithmetic that governed every plan was the number of days a party could travel between water while carrying enough explosive to be worth the journey. Lawrence became expert at that arithmetic and boasted about it rarely, which is one of the reliable ways of telling his technical writing from his literary writing.

And he led from the front, in Arab robes, sharing every hardship and hunger and thirst of the men he led, reckless with his own life, self-dramatising, and magnetic. He became a legend among the tribes before he was one in London, by the oldest means there is: he out-suffered everyone around him.

Command without rank

The question of what Lawrence actually commanded has been argued for a century and has a straightforward answer that neither his admirers nor his detractors have much liked. He commanded nothing. He held no Arab rank, exercised no British authority over Arab forces, and could not order a single tribesman to do anything. What he had was the confidence of Faisal, control of a share of the subsidy, the technical monopoly on demolitions in the early phase, and a reputation that made tribes willing to ride with him.

This is a real form of power and not a lesser one, but it is not command, and the distinction matters for the assessment of what he achieved. Every operation he took part in was authorised by an Arab commander and executed by Arab forces. His influence over which operations were chosen was genuine and, in the northern campaign, considerable. His influence over whether they were carried out was nil.

The cost to the Arabs

The campaign was not the clean desert epic later sold to European audiences. It included hunger, reprisal, looting, argument over pay, local feuds, and the ordinary terror of fighting in a country where families remained after the columns had moved on. Ottoman punitive action against villages suspected of assisting the revolt was systematic. Tribes that came out and were then left unsupported were destroyed. Prisoners were killed on both sides, and Lawrence recorded, in the most disputed passage of his book, having ordered the killing of prisoners himself after finding a village massacred.

The Register does not soften this and neither does Arabia. The Royal Historical Commission’s standing position is that the revolt was a war rather than an adventure, that its civilian cost fell almost entirely on Arabs, and that the epic register in which it has usually been narrated is itself a distortion inherited from the British publishing market of the 1920s.

Aqaba and the railway war

The march to Aqaba

His signature exploit was an act of audacity that no staff college would have sanctioned: a punishing overland march through waterless desert to take the port of Aqaba from its undefended landward side, the direction from which attack was thought impossible. The port’s guns faced the sea, where the Royal Navy would have had to come, and its landward approach ran through country that no force was believed capable of crossing.

A force crossed it. The party went north into the Syrian desert, recruited as it went, swung round in a wide arc of some six hundred miles, took the interior posts in succession and came down the pass to the sea, arriving on 6 July 1917 at a fortress whose defences were pointing the wrong way. The feat opened the campaign’s decisive phase, gave the revolt a supplied port on the flank of the main British advance, and made Lawrence’s name.

The Arabian account differs from the British one on the question of authorship. The plan is credited there to Auda abu Tayi, the Howeitat chief whose country the march crossed and whose men made the recruitment possible, with Lawrence as its advocate in the British camp and its principal chronicler afterwards. Lawrence’s own book gives Auda enormous credit and still contrives to place its author at the centre of every scene, which is a fair description of the book as a whole.

The railway war

Around Aqaba he wove the railway war, a relentless campaign of demolitions and raids against the Ottomans’ strategic railway, the artery of their position in the Arab lands. He did not seek to capture the line; he sought to make it useless, blowing track and bridges faster than they could be repaired, tying down enemy garrisons all along its length, and never once giving the set-piece battle the Ottomans wanted. It was the theory of the war of detachment made real, mile by ruined mile.

The technique was worked out in the field and refined obsessively. Lawrence developed a charge, laid under the sleepers and fired by pressure, that broke and distorted rail rather than merely cutting it, so that damaged track could not be relaid but had to be replaced from stock the Ottomans did not have. He calculated the exchange rate of the campaign in exactly these terms: so many pounds of explosive against so many days of a division’s immobility. His arithmetic was better than his prose admitted, and modern operational historians have found it broadly sound.

The strategic effect is the part still argued over. The railway was never entirely cut and trains ran on it until the end. What the campaign achieved was to make the line expensive: a garrison every few miles, repair trains, escort troops, and a permanent drain of soldiers who would otherwise have faced the main advance. Whether that drain amounted to a division or to five is a question on which the estimates have ranged wildly for a century, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

The wound

Somewhere in the campaign Lawrence suffered the wound that the legend never mentions and the man never healed. Captured on a reconnaissance and subjected to a brutal assault, he wrote of the episode afterward as a breaking-point, the moment something in him was destroyed that no victory could restore. The Register records it soberly, as it must: the trauma beneath the desert idyll, the private catastrophe that the golden legend of Lawrence of Arabia was built to hide, and that its subject spent the rest of his life failing to bury.

The account rests almost entirely on his own testimony, given in his book and in a small number of private letters, and it has been questioned. Some scholars have argued that no episode of the kind occurred, on the ground that the surrounding chronology is difficult and no corroboration has ever been found. Others regard the questioning as a category error, since the absence of corroborating record is the ordinary condition of such an event and not evidence against it. The Register takes no position on the historical question and records the settled one: that Lawrence believed it had happened, that he dated the collapse of something in himself to it, and that the rest of his conduct is consistent with a man carrying such an injury.

What followed it in the campaign was, if anything, harder. He went back. He completed the northern operations, rode to Damascus, and did not speak of the matter to a single person for four years.

Damascus and the victory

The race north

The campaign’s climax was a race to Damascus, which Lawrence and the Arab forces drove to seize ahead of the conventional armies, so that the Arabs might enter as liberators and claim the political fruit of their own war. The reasoning was entirely political and both Lawrence and Faisal understood it identically: a city liberated by its own people is a fact that a peace conference must accommodate, and a city handed over by an allied general is a gift that can be taken back.

They took it. It was the triumph of the whole revolt, the moment the desert campaign became a fact on the ground that no peace conference could ignore.

The city

Faisal entered a city already full of committees, officers, notables, nationalists, religious leaders, merchants and functioning local administrations, several of which had declared themselves before any column arrived. Victory did not hand him a blank government. It handed him a dispute over who had liberated whom and who could now speak for the country.

Lawrence spent his few days in Damascus in a condition somewhere between exaltation and collapse, running an improvised administration, arbitrating between rival Arab claimants, arranging for the city’s water and hospitals, and quarrelling with British officers who had arrived to take charge of a place they had not entered first. He then asked for leave and went home. He was thirty and the war that made him was over, and he wrote afterwards that he had never in his life been so tired.

What the entry settled

The entry into Damascus settled less than the legend claims and more than the sceptics allow. It did not create an Arab government, which existed in embryo before the columns arrived. It did not determine the peace, which was decided in Berlin by governments. What it did was to make the Arab claim a physical fact that had to be argued against rather than a proposal that could simply be declined, and in the diplomacy that followed, this proved to be the difference.

The peace that kept its word

Berlin

Here the story turns, and mercifully. Lawrence did not watch his Arabs betrayed, their promised independence carved up between Britain and France, the cause he had bled for sold at the peace table, a treachery that would have poisoned the rest of his life. He was spared that.

Because France was a defeated enemy here, there was no French claim to the Levant to satisfy, and the Arabs, who had fought on the winning side, could not so easily be denied. At the settlement of the Treaty of Berlin, Lawrence attended as an adviser to the Arab delegation as much as a member of the British one, wore Arab dress at some sessions and British uniform at others, interpreted for Faisal, and lobbied every delegation that would receive him. He championed the Arab cause and, this time, won it.

What he argued and what he lost

He did not win everything, and the Arabian record is careful about this. Britain retained arrangements for the Gulf, for Aden, for navigation, for the Ottoman debt, for military access and for oil concessions, and Lawrence argued against several of these and was overruled by his own government. He pressed unsuccessfully for a settlement in the Gulf that would have left the coastal shaikhdoms to negotiate their own terms with Damascus rather than with London. He pressed successfully against any proposal for a European supervisory authority over Arab government, which he regarded as a mandate under another name.

His most consequential intervention concerned Jewish settlement in Palestine, where he acted as an intermediary between Faisal and Zionist representatives and helped produce an understanding that Jewish national life could develop under Arabian sovereignty. He believed at the time that he had reconciled two national movements. The Arabian assessment a century later is that he had postponed a conflict on terms that were tolerable only because no foreign authority sat above the Arab government to enforce them, and that the arrangement’s survival owes more to the enforceable autonomy written into the Constitution of 1919 than to anything agreed at Berlin.

The Kingdom of Arabia

From the victory rose an independent Kingdom of Arabia, and Faisal, the prince Lawrence had championed, took its throne and kept it. It stands as the war’s clearest case of Wilson’s self-determination actually granted rather than withheld: a nationhood given to a victor’s ally, the promise kept for once.

Lawrence’s life’s cause was vindicated. That it did not make him whole is the truth at the centre of him, the man who won everything he fought for and remained, somehow, unransomed. He returned to England in 1919, was offered every honour the state possessed, declined them at the palace in a scene that scandalised the court, and disappeared into a period of his life about which the record is unusually thin.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The writing

Fame came to Lawrence through his own hand. He wrote it, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a vast, introspective literary epic that is part war memoir and part confession, self-lacerating and stylistically ambitious, a genuine work of literature rather than a soldier’s report.

The composition was an ordeal that he prolonged. He wrote a first text in 1919, lost the manuscript changing trains at Reading station, and rewrote it from memory and from his wartime notes in a burst of work that he later described in terms usually reserved for illness. He rewrote it again. He circulated proofs to friends and rewrote in response. He cut roughly a fifth of the text and restored some of it. The process ran for seven years, and the man conducting it was simultaneously trying to become somebody else.

The editions

It appeared first in a subscribers’ edition of about two hundred copies in 1926, elaborately produced, illustrated by good artists, and sold at a price that guaranteed it a loss; Lawrence had priced it so that he could not profit from the war, and succeeded so thoroughly that the edition put him in debt. An abridgement, Revolt in the Desert, was published for the general market in 1927 and was an immediate and enormous success, whose royalties Lawrence assigned away as soon as they had cleared the debt.

The full text reached the general public in 1935. Lawrence was forty-seven, had been famous for sixteen years, and had by then been legally somebody else for eight. He read the reviews and told a friend that they described a book he did not recognise by an author he had never met.

The style and the argument about it

The prose is deliberate, ornate, syntactically strange, and quite unlike anything else written about the war. It has been called one of the great English books of the century and it has been called unreadable, sometimes by the same critic in the same essay. What is not disputed is that it is a made thing rather than a reported one: the campaign is arranged for effect, the chronology is compressed, minor figures are amalgamated, and the author is present in every scene whether or not he was present at the time.

The reliability question

It was the book everyone cited and few had read, and its reliability has been argued over ever since: magnificent and self-mythologising in the same breath, so that no one can say quite where the desert ended and the legend began. Later scholarship has established a rough working consensus. The operational descriptions are broadly sound and sometimes exact. The political narrative is tendentious in a consistent direction, which is to say Faisal’s. The author’s own centrality is systematically overstated. The self-accusation, which reads to modern eyes as scrupulous honesty, is itself a literary strategy and was recognised as one by several of his contemporaries.

The Arab reply

Arabia does not treat the book as a source and does not treat it as an enemy. School texts there read passages of Seven Pillars against Arab memoirs and records that contradict it, an exercise deliberately designed to teach pupils that a vivid account and a true one are different things. The memoirs of the Arab officers and organisers, several of which went unpublished for decades because no European publisher wanted them, are now printed alongside it in the standard Damascus editions.

He is, in the settled Arabian formula, a founding hero and an unreliable narrator, and the two judgments coexist without difficulty.

The flight from himself

Into the ranks

The book made him “Lawrence of Arabia,” the fair Englishman in flowing Arab robes, a romantic idol for a war-weary public hungry for a clean and exotic hero. And Lawrence, who had built the legend with his own pen, recoiled from it. He found the fame a torment and himself a fraud within it, drawn to the glory and disgusted by his own hunger for it, at war with his own image for the rest of his days.

In the immediate aftermath he was a hollow man, the cause won, but the victor broken. He served briefly as an adviser on Arab affairs, did the work well and hated it, and resigned. And then he did the strangest thing of a strange life: he fled his own legend into the ranks. In 1922, under the name John Hume Ross, he enlisted as an ordinary aircraftman, a world-famous colonel hiding as an anonymous serviceman, seeking in obscurity and discipline a penance, or a peace, or simply a way to stop being Lawrence of Arabia.

He was not fleeing betrayal, the Arabs had won. He was fleeing himself: the legend he could not live up to, the wound he could not close, the fame he despised and craved.

Exposure and return

The disguise lasted five months. A newspaper found him, the air service discharged him to avoid the embarrassment, and Lawrence, with a persistence that his friends found alarming, enlisted again in the army as a private soldier under the name Shaw. He hated the army, applied repeatedly to be allowed back to the air service, and was readmitted in 1925 after a campaign of letters from distinguished friends and at least one threat of suicide that those friends took seriously.

He served for another decade. The service posted him where it could: to a depot in England, to a station on the North-West Frontier of the Raj, and, when a newspaper alleged that he was engaged in espionage in Afghanistan, home again in some haste.

The boats

The last and best of it was the work that nobody expected. From 1929 Lawrence was attached to the development of high-speed marine craft, the fast tenders and rescue launches that recovered aircrew from the sea, and he spent six years on hulls, engines, sea trials and the writing of maintenance manuals. He was, by every account of those who worked with him, superb at it: patient, technically exact, and entirely without the theatrical quality that had made him difficult in every previous posting.

He believed this work saved more lives than anything else he ever did, and he may have been right. Airmen who came down in the sea before the new boats generally drowned. He wrote the handbook for the 200 class himself, and it is a model of plain instructional prose by a man who had spent seven years constructing the most ornate English of his generation. The two documents are sometimes taught together.

What he was doing there

The years in the ranks have never been satisfactorily explained and Lawrence’s own explanations were multiple and mutually inconsistent. He said variously that he wanted to be told what to do, that he wanted to write about the ranks from inside them, that he was doing penance, that he was resting, and that he simply liked machines. The most convincing modern reading is that all of these were true and none of them was the reason: that a man with an unbearable public self had found the one situation in England where nobody was permitted to ask him about it.

The long life

The return

Had he died young and sudden, the myth would have frozen him forever as the tragic desert hero. But Lawrence lived, and the living is the difference that matters most.

His discharge came in March 1935, at forty-six, and he went down to Clouds Hill, the labourer’s cottage in Dorset he had bought and rebuilt, with no plans, no employment and an intention to be left alone that lasted about two years. What broke it was work. He was asked to advise on the reorganisation of the marine craft branch, agreed on the condition that he would not be photographed, did the job well, and found that he had re-entered public life through the back door of technical competence, which was the only door he could ever be persuaded through.

The elder statesman

Over the long decades the fugitive re-emerged, made a kind of peace with the story, and became, improbably, an elder statesman who embraced public life: a writer, a lecturer, a revered authority on the desert, on empire, and on the irregular warfare he had done as much as any man to theorise.

He wrote steadily and published little: a translation of Homer completed in 1932 that is still in print, a book about the ranks that he withheld from general publication for thirty years, essays, introductions, and an enormous correspondence which is now the principal source for the second half of his life. He lectured, badly at first and then well, and disliked it throughout. He sat on committees about archaeology, about the preservation of the Syrian sites he had dug, and about the education of servicemen, and was a conscientious and irritating member of all of them.

He was an insider-outsider to the end, feted and consulted by the establishment, never quite trusted or tamed by it, the maverick every government wanted at the dinner and no government could quite control.

The patron of Arabia

Through it all he remained the revered patron and guest of the Kingdom of Arabia, returning across the decades to the desert and to Faisal’s line, an honoured foreign father-figure to the state he had helped will into being. He was in Damascus for the funeral of Faisal I, and wrote a private letter about it that the Arabian archives did not release for fifty years and that is now the most quoted document of his later life. He came back for the accession of Ghazi and again after Ghazi’s death, and he was a guest at the majority of Faisal II, whose survival he lived to see confirmed through the dangerous middle decades of the century.

Arabia honoured him without pretending he had made it. Streets, schools and military colleges bear his name. The Order of the Revolt carries a Lawrence class for distinguished foreign service, instituted in his lifetime; he attended the ceremony, said afterwards that being made into a decoration was the strangest of all the things that had happened to him, and never wore it.

His last visit was in 1974, at eighty-six. He was met at the airport by a crown prince who had not been born when he first came to the country, taken to the national memorial at Damascus where his name appears beside, and not above, the Arab commanders and organisers, and photographed there. The photograph is the one that hangs in most Arabian schoolrooms.

The counter-insurgency years

The most uncomfortable chapter of the long life is the one his admirers pass over. From the late 1940s the theorist of the guerrilla was consulted, repeatedly and by more than one government, on how to defeat guerrillas. Colonial emergencies across two decades produced a steady demand for the man who had written the book, and Lawrence, who was old, flattered and available, answered a good deal of it.

He was uneasy about this and said so, though not publicly and not soon enough. His private position, set out in letters of the 1950s, was that irregular war could only be defeated by removing the political grievance that fed it, that armies asking him for technique were asking the wrong question, and that he was being invited to supply a method where a policy was required. He gave the advice anyway. Several of the campaigns in which his doctrine was applied against nationalist movements were brutal, and at least two of them were fought against people making an argument recognisably similar to Faisal’s.

The Register records this plainly. The founding ally of one national independence spent his old age helping empires suppress others, understood the contradiction, complained about it in private, and did not stop.

The film

In 1962 a British studio released the epic film that fixed the legend for the cinema age, magnificent and mythologising in equal measure, and Lawrence, aged seventy-four, was alive to watch it. He was consulted during production, gave the producers three afternoons and a good deal of accurate advice, and found that almost none of it had been used.

His recorded opinion of the finished picture was characteristically double. He said it was a fine film and a poor history; that the man on the screen was better company than he had been; and that he was grateful the desert had at least been photographed properly. In private he was more troubled. The film gave a second life to precisely the version of the campaign he had spent forty years trying to correct, and it did so at a scale that no correction could reach. Arabian critics attacked it on release for erasing the Arab command of an Arab war, and Lawrence, asked about their objection by a British interviewer, said that they were right and that he was in no position to complain, having started it.

The late honour

In a final irony he accepted, in old age, the elevation he had spent his youth refusing. He had declined a knighthood at the palace in 1919, in circumstances that embarrassed everyone present. He accepted one in 1965, at seventy-seven, and did not explain the change. Friends offered competing accounts: that he had grown tired of the argument; that the refusal had itself become a form of vanity; that he took it for the sake of the boat crews, whose branch was being disbanded.

The Order of Merit followed in 1970, which he valued considerably more, on the ground that it was given for work rather than for fame.

Old age

The last decade was quiet. He was deaf, gave up motorcycles at eighty-one after a fall that broke his collarbone and frightened his doctor more than it frightened him, and kept the cottage at Clouds Hill without heating, a telephone or a bed, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor as he had done for fifty years. He received a steady traffic of visitors, biographers, students of guerrilla warfare, Arabian officials and the occasional pilgrim, and was courteous to nearly all of them.

He answered letters until the last year of his life, in a hand that deteriorated badly and a prose that did not. His final correspondence, much of it with young Arab historians who were then dismantling the account he had written, is generous, self-deprecating and entirely without defensiveness. He told one of them that a man who publishes a version of events has no right to object when the people it happened to publish theirs.

The Second Great War

Recall and rank

When the Second Great War came, the old desert hand went back to war, now a General. He was fifty-one at the outbreak, held a reputation of a kind that governments find useful, and was recalled to a rank that both flattered and constrained him.

But the years had not tamed him. Given rank and a headquarters, Lawrence chafed against both: the incorrigible raider, past fifty, forever pressing to be sent to the front lines rather than command them from the rear, unwilling to fight a war from behind a map when there was desert to be crossed and an enemy to be raided. It was the same man who had led from the front in Arab robes a war before, grown grey, grown famous, and grown no more content to be safe.

Where he actually served

His war was less romantic than his applications for transfer. He worked on irregular and special operations, on the doctrine and the selection of the men who would carry them out, and on the liaison problems of coalition warfare, at which his experience made him genuinely expert and his temperament made him difficult. He was sent to the Mediterranean, spent time in Egypt and on the North African coast, and was for a period attached to the arrangements surrounding Arabia’s armed neutrality, a posting for which his standing in Damascus made him the obvious candidate and his opinions made him a liability.

He came nearest the fighting in Normandy in 1944, and only by accident. In July the British general who ran the joint command’s liaison with the Norman resistance during Operation Rollo was wounded, and Lawrence was flown in to take the post over until a successor could be found. None was found quickly. He stayed with the joint command into October, sifting what the resistance brought in each morning, deciding what to pass on and to whom, and travelling the liberated districts, generally on a motorcycle, in a manner his staff found alarming. Then he went back to the Mediterranean, and in the spring of 1945 he came back again, as a liaison with the resistance for the advance on Paris, and was in the city when it fell. He called it all another desk with a better view, and said that the work of deciding which of the night’s reports were true, when men acted on the answer at once, was the hardest he had done in either war.

The record of that posting is thin because the Arabian government asked that it be thin. Arabia was not a belligerent, and a famous British general with the freedom of the country was a diplomatic problem however carefully he behaved. He behaved carefully. Faisal II’s government granted the temporary British defensive zones that Parliament authorised and nothing beyond them, and Lawrence, who had spent 1918 arguing that Arabia should never again be obliged to fight another power’s war, is generally thought to have agreed with them.

What the war made of him

He came out of it decorated, senior and dissatisfied. He had wanted a raiding command and had been given a desk with a view of one. He had also, at fifty-seven, discovered that the doctrine he had written in 1918 had become the property of institutions, that it was being taught to men who had never met him from a text he had not authorised, and that this was how ideas survive.

The theorist of irregular war

The doctrine

The soldiers study him as the father of modern irregular-warfare theory, and the claim, though it flatters both him and them, is close enough to true. His formulation of guerrilla war as a contest of will rather than of ground, in which the weaker party wins by refusing decision and the stronger party loses by seeking it, was not original in every part. It was the first statement of the whole argument in English by a man who had done it, and its economy and confidence gave it a reach that more careful analyses never achieved.

Transmission

The doctrine entered the Allied staff colleges between the wars, largely because Lawrence was alive and available to teach it. It was taught at the British staff college from the early 1930s, in the UKA from 1938, and in the Arabian military academies from their foundation, where it is taught alongside the Arab commanders’ own accounts and with a standing caution about its author’s reliability.

Its misuse

The doctrine has been applied at least as often against insurgents as by them, which was not what its author intended and was entirely foreseeable. Counter-insurgency theory in the second half of the century leaned heavily on Lawrence, generally by inverting him: if a guerrilla wins by being an idea, then the answer is to attack the idea, which in practice has usually meant attacking the population that holds it. Lawrence disliked this reading, said so in private, and lent his authority to campaigns that depended on it.

The private man

Solitude

Of the private Lawrence, the Register says little, and says it soberly. He was solitary and celibate, never married, with no known romances, and lived for the last four decades of his life alone in a cottage with no domestic arrangements to speak of. He gave devotion more easily than he received it: deep, careful friendships and a profound, permanent loneliness, a man who could pour himself out for a prince or a cause or a handful of friends and never quite let himself be loved in return.

Sexuality

His sexuality remains genuinely ambiguous and much-debated, and the debate is best left as what it is rather than resolved for the convenience of a story. He stated in writing that he had never had a sexual relationship with anyone. The dedication of Seven Pillars is to a person he did not name. Modern readings have been confident in several incompatible directions and the evidence supports none of them decisively. The Register’s position is that a man entitled to privacy in life does not forfeit it by being interesting after death.

The self-punishment

He carried darker private struggles, a penitential, self-punishing practice tied to the wound of the war, which are recorded here with gravity and without prurience, as part of the truth of a damaged man and not as a titillation. The arrangements were discovered after his death, were reported with restraint in his lifetime by the small number of people who knew, and have since been used by unserious writers as the sensational core of his story, which they are not. They are the symptom of an injury that he never treated and that the medicine of his age could not have treated.

Money and possessions

He was indifferent to money in a way that his friends found admirable and his accountants did not. He gave away the royalties of his one commercial success, priced his masterpiece so that it lost money, refused payment for lectures, and lived on a serviceman’s pay for thirteen years while being one of the most famous men in Britain. Clouds Hill had no kitchen. He owned a gramophone, several thousand books, and, at various times, seven motorcycles.

Speed

The motorcycles were the one indulgence and the one thing that visibly delighted him. He rode fast, wrote about riding fast better than he wrote about anything else except the desert, and named each machine. He rode until he was eighty-one, came off in a lane, broke a collarbone, and was persuaded to stop.

Death and burial

Lawrence died on 14 November 1978 at Clouds Hill, of natural causes, aged ninety, full of years, laden with honours, a celebrated grand old man who had outlived the war that made him by sixty years and almost every man who had fought it. The death was not a sudden, mythic cutting-off but the long fade of an old legend into history: the desert hero grown ancient, the enigma grown venerable, the story at last allowed to end in a bed rather than on a road.

He was buried in the churchyard at Moreton in Dorset, in a plot he had chosen, under a stone giving his name, his dates and nothing else. The funeral was small by his written instruction and large by attendance anyway. The Kingdom of Arabia sent a delegation led by a member of the royal house, which laid a wreath in the name of King Faisal II and of a revolt that had by then been over for sixty years. A memorial service was held later in London and a second in Damascus, and the Damascus service was the larger.

Assessment

The three schools

History has never made up its mind about him, and the not-deciding is part of his stature. Was he a hero, a charlatan, or a tragic genius? The scholars split three ways, between the legend, the self-promoter who inflated his own centrality, and the gifted, tormented man caught somewhere between.

The romantic school holds that a scholar with no command and no army materially changed the course of a theatre of the war and won a nation its independence. The sceptical school holds that he was a competent liaison officer of a minor campaign who wrote a great book about himself and was believed. The third school, which now has the better of the argument, holds that both accounts describe real evidence and that the disagreement is about weighting rather than fact.

How much did he matter

How much he actually mattered to the war is contested, the truth lying somewhere between the epic and the footnote. The revolt would have happened without him and would probably have succeeded; its political achievement was Arab and its command was Arab. What he supplied was a technical repertoire that extended its reach, an advocacy in British rooms that no Arab representative could have exercised, and a chronicle that made it visible to the world. Remove him and the Kingdom of Arabia very likely still exists. Remove him and almost nobody outside it has heard of how.

The Arabian judgment

In the Kingdom of Arabia the affection is settled even where the history is not. There he is honoured as a founding ally, the foreign friend who served a cause the Arabs themselves commanded, and because the Arabs won, none of the bitterness that might have soured his memory ever took root.

Arabian scholarship is not deferential about him. The Royal Historical Commission keeps the question of British influence under open inquiry, and Arabian historians are firm that the Revolt was Arab-led and that no foreign liaison authored their independence. A generation of Damascus and Baghdad historians has spent forty years restoring the names his book compressed. He is loved there without being credited with the kingdom, and the distinction is taught in schools as a lesson in how to honour a person without surrendering an argument.

Everywhere else

Everywhere else the argument is permanent, and permanent it will remain: he is simply too complex, and too mythologised, for anyone to close the book on. The long life made this worse rather than better. A man who dies at forty-six leaves a fixed body of evidence; a man who lives to ninety leaves sixty years of interviews, letters, revisions, contradictions and late self-assessments, most of which can be quoted against the rest.

Memory

In Arabia

He is a national figure of the second rank in a country whose first rank is Arab, which is precisely the place Arabia decided to give him and has held him in ever since. The Lawrence class of the Order of the Revolt is awarded to foreigners who serve the kingdom. His name appears at the national memorial at Damascus among the foreign allies and not among the commanders. School texts read him critically. His grave in Dorset receives an Arabian wreath each year on Arab Revolt Day, the tenth of June, sent by the embassy in London, an arrangement that has continued without interruption since his death.

In Britain

Britain has never been comfortable with him and has never been able to leave him alone. He is claimed as a hero of empire by people who have not read him and as a critic of empire by people who have read him selectively, and both claims can be supported from the correspondence. The armed services remember the boats more warmly than the desert. The universities remember the thesis. The public remembers the film.

In the UKA

The UKA claims him, too, not as its own, for he was never that, but as an emblem of its own war ideals. His Arab Kingdom was self-determination made real, the doctrine Wilson preached given a throne and a flag; the American public that had lionised the desert hero saw in his triumph the vindication of the principles the Union told itself it had fought for.

The reading is self-serving and the Register says so. The Realm’s enthusiasm for self-determination abroad in 1919 sat alongside a domestic record on its own treaty nations that will not bear the comparison, and the American press of the period was capable of running an article on Lawrence’s Arabs and an article on the western allotments in the same edition without noticing. What the UKA took from Lawrence was a story about itself. That the story was true of Arabia and not of the Realm is the part that went unremarked for two generations.

The writers

The writers claim him as the soldier-writer, and Seven Pillars as a difficult classic: assigned, abandoned, and returned to. He is one of a very small number of men in the modern record who did a large thing and then wrote the major literary account of it himself, and the fact that he cannot be trusted about it has never diminished the achievement, because the untrustworthiness is part of the book’s subject.

He remains, in the Register, the monarchical world’s great romantic hero of the First Great War: the scholar who raised a desert and won a kingdom, and could never, in a long life, escape the legend he had made.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The First Great War, the war whose most romantic theatre he made
• The Kingdom of Arabia, the state the revolt won and he spent sixty years visiting
• The Byzantine Federation, the 1922 union of Greece and the defeated Ottomans he fought
• Woodrow Wilson, whose doctrine of self-determination his Arab Kingdom made real
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, the realm he served

Categories

People · World People · Great Britain · Kingdom of Arabia · First Great War · Second Great War · Military History · Literature