LAWRENCE
OF ARABIA
“T. E.” from a Drawing by Augustus John
.
LAWRENCE
OF ARABIA
BY
B. H. LIDDELL HART
ILLUSTRATED
WITH MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Liddell Hart, Basil Henry, Sir, 1895-1970.
[Man behind the legend]
Lawrence of Arabia / by B. H. Liddell Hart.
p. cm.–(A Da Capo paperback)
Reprint. Originally published: The man behind the legend. New
York: Halcyon House, 1937.
ISBN-10: 0-306-80354-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-306-80354-3
eBook ISBN: 9780786748235
1. Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888-1935. 2. World War,
1914-1918–Middle East. 3. Great Britain. Army–Biography. 4.
Soldiers–Great Britain–Biography. I. Title.
D568.4.L45L5 1989
940.4’15’092488-38465
[B]CIP
* * *
This Da Capo Press paperback edition of Lawrence of Arabia is an unabridged republication of the edition published in New York in 1935, originally entitled Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend. It is reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of B. H. Liddell Hart.
Copyright © 1934; 1935 by [B.H.] Liddell Hart
Published by Da Capo Press, Inc.
A member of the Perseus Books Group
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
PREFACE
THIS book has changed its form as it has progressed. I began it with the idea of writing an historical sketch of the Arab Revolt in which T. E. “Lawrence” would naturally fill a large corner. My purpose was to clear away the dust of legend that has covered this peculiarly interesting episode of the World War, and to put it in perspective, bringing out its relation to the main campaign and to the history of irregular warfare. Also I desired to establish the true proportions of Lawrence’s personal achievement—which I expected to be less than legend conveyed.
But as my study went further and deeper my picture changed. The events that had significance were seen to have their source in his action, and, still more, in his conception. The others faded into insignificance. I saw that there was a truth greater than its superficial suggestion in his deprecatory comment that his part—“was only synthetic. I combined their loose shower of sparks into a firm flame: transformed their series of unrelated incidents into a conscious operation.”
Although he was here speaking only of his relations with the Arab chiefs I have gradually come to see that it should be applied to the whole.
But for him the Arab Revolt would have remained a collection of slight and passing incidents. Through him it had an important bearing on the course of outer events both during and since the war. Also on the course of warfare.
I found him growing more distinct as the background faded, until the Arab Revolt became an emanation of him. Thus I was compelled to recast the book and to make it primarily a study of him.
I have, however, kept the original form of the opening chapters, while diminishing their content, because it may help to convey the gradual sense of how he grew out of the Revolt as the Revolt was growing out of him.
Those who are not interested in the events that led up to the Revolt may prefer to skip Book II (Chapters ii, iii, and iv). For their convenience a brief historical summary is provided as an introduction to Book III.
My grateful thanks are due to the numerous participants in the campaign, and to others with first-hand knowledge of earlier and later events covered in this book, who have generously assisted me with their evidence in checking and supplementing that of documentary records. Also for the facilities afforded me in regard to such records.
Beyond these sources of information I have been fortunate in that T. E. Shaw (sometime Lawrence) has provided me with many notes and comments that help to explain his ideas and actions, as well as the course of events. These have been of special value. My indebtedness is increased by the astonishing patience he has shown in submitting to prolonged and repeated cross-examination on questions of fact. But I would make it clear that he has no part in the opinions I express or the judgments I have formed.
In seeking evidence from many sources I have found two sharply contrasted currents of opinion as to Lawrence’s achievement, character, and qualities of leadership. One is overwhelmingly favourable, the other disparagingly sceptical. Such a difference of view is to be expected about any outstanding figure: the remarkable feature of this case lies in the contrast of the composition of the two groups. For it is significant that the first includes all those who for long periods were in close contact with Lawrence and his work in the Arab campaign; although they have an extraordinary diversity of type and outlook they are linked in a common admiration for Lawrence and an unstinting testimony to his transcendent powers. The second current of opinion, I have observed, is composed of men who had only a fleeting contact with Lawrence, or, more often, a hearsay acquaintance with his activities. Usually their adverse attitude is discovered, on deeper examination, to have its roots in a dislike of the cause for which he strove: the man is castigated merely as a symbol.
Thus it is clear which of the two currents must have the greater influence with anyone who is trying to form an historical judgment—even if the first were not confirmed by analysis of events.
B.H.L.H.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“T. E.” from a drawing by Augustus John
The Kaaba, Mecca
Dawn in Nakhl Mubarak (Feisal’s encampment) December, 1916
Feisal’s army coming back into Yanbo. December, 1916
The triumphal entry into Aqaba. July 1917
Feisal’s Ageyl bodyguard. January, 1917
Captain Lawrence, early in 1917
Outside Feisal’s tent at Wejh
Railway Raiding Party, Newcombe on left; Hornby on right
Lawrence amid the results of a raid
The “Blue Mist” in Wadi Ithm
Lawrence’s “Ghazala,” and foal
“Tulips” exploding on the railway near Deram
Ja‘far Pasha and Sherif Nasir at Shobek
Lawrence, at Aqaba
Azraq
Aqaba
Lawrence on arrival at Damascus
MAPS
The Near and Middle East
The Hejaz Railway
Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia
Turkey’s Life-Line
The Hejaz
The Northern Theatre
‘Aqaba-Ma‘an Zone
‘Amman-Der‘a Zone
Battle of Tafila
The Palestine Campaign
BOOK I
PERSONAL PROLOGUE
CHAPTER I
THE “CRUSADER”
THE County of Carnarvon in North Wales points like an arm into the Irish Sea. At the armpit lie the villages of Portmadoc and Tremadoc, close beneath the foothills of Snowdon. This resemblance, which catches the map-gazing eye, offers a convenient method of indication. It is also an apt symbol for the career of one who was born here on August 15th, 1888. History hardly offers a clearer case of a man born for a mission, of a life moving along a path pointed out by fate—even though twists in its course may have hid the direction.
He was of mixed race. His father’s family were Elizabethan settlers from England, favoured in gaining land in County Meath by Walter Raleigh, a connexion. During three hundred years of Irish domicile they never married into Ireland, but chose their wives from intruders such as themselves, from England, from Holland ev
en. His mother was Island Scottish in feeling and education, but her parentage was part English, part Scandinavian. The sympathy of his home was Irish, all the stronger for being exiled. Wales had no share in him, after his first year.
The friends of his manhood called him “T.E.,” for convenience and to show that they recognized how his adopted surnames—Lawrence, Ross, Shaw, whatever they were—did not belong.
The father’s self-appointed exile reduced his means to a craftsman’s income, which the landowning pride of caste forbade him to increase by labour. As five sons came, one after the other, the family’s very necessaries of life were straitened. They existed only by the father’s denying himself every amenity, and by the mother’s serving her household like a drudge.
Observers noticed a difference in social attitude between the courtly but abrupt and large father, and the laborious mother. The father shot, fished, rode, sailed with the certainty of birth-right experience. He never touched a book or wrote a cheque. The mother kept to herself, and kept her children jealously from meeting or knowing their neighbours. She was a Calvinist and an ascetic, though a wonderful housewife, a woman of character and keen intelligence, with iron decision and charming, when she wished.
The father’s family seemed unconscious of his sons, even when after his death recognition of their achievement might have done honour to the name. The five brothers, accordingly, were brought up to be self-sufficient, and were sufficient till the war struck away two and left in their sequence gaps in age that were overwide for sympathy to cross. Then their loneliness seemed to rankle, sometimes. To friends who wondered aloud how he could endure the company of the barrack-room and its bareness T.E. might retort, almost fiercely, that he had gone back to his boyhood class and was at home, “The fellows” were his—but this declaration of birthright seemed to strain the truth.
Once when I remarked this he replied—“not perhaps as much as you feel. I can be on terms with scholars, or writing people, or painters or politicians; but equally I am happy with bus conductors, fitters or plain workmen: anybody with a trade or calling. And all such classes are at home with me, though I fancy none would call me ‘one of them.’ Perhaps my upbringing and adventures—and way of thinking—have bereft me of class. Only the leisured make me uncomfortable, as I cannot play or pass time.”
His first eight years were wandering—Scotland, the Isle of Man, Brittany, the Channel Islands, Hampshire. Eventually, the family’s migrations brought them to Oxford, for reasons of education. T.E. arrived there with a child’s lip-knowledge of French, and a fund of book learning. He had learnt his letters through hearing his eldest brother taught them, and in his fourth year was reading newspapers and books. Latin at six, through private tuition, and then at eight began his attendance at the City of Oxford School, a day-school small in numbers and low in fees. The fees he made lower for himself from the age of twelve upwards, by winning scholarships in a series that covered his tuition till he had taken his degree at the University.
“School,” he said later, “was an irrelevant and time-wasting nuisance, which I hated and contemned” Here he shared the experience of most men of original minds. His career was yet another example of the truth that self-education is the only form of education. Formal lessons were small beer against his private reading, which had already ranged relatively far and wide in the three languages he understood. The discovery of grammars for English, French and Latin was an unpleasant interruption to the enjoyment of their books; just as the long school hours, and the plague of homework cut into the pursuit of archaeology that was already the child’s passion. He hunted fragments of Roman or mediæval pottery on every site or in any chance excavation and went off alone on long cycling tours to collect rubbings from country church brasses and to photograph castles. His study of mediæval art was linked with that of armour, and led on to a new interest in the military art.
While still at school, he spent his holidays in tours through France, where he pursued cathedrals and castles with impartiality and equal zest, while travelling as light in luggage as in pocket. During one of these tours, when sixteen, he had his first dose of malaria, probably contracted sleeping out in the marshy delta of the Rhône while studying the fortifications of Aigues Mortes. Within the span of a few years he saw every twelfth century castle in France, England and Wales, and became an expert in roof climbing through his practice of going up towers and roofs in order to get new angles of photography for architectural purposes. But the study of military architecture led him on, especially through reading the works of Viollet-le-Duc, to study the siege operations to which castles gave rise, and then to the campaigns of which they formed part.
The theme of the Crusades caught his imagination, although his sympathies were attracted by the opponents of the Crusaders, or “by those Crusaders who settled in Syria and learnt civilized ways, only to be cried out against by the rougher new arrivals.” But the idea of a Crusade, the idea underlying it, revolved in his mind, giving rise to a dream Crusade, which implied a leader with whom in a sense he identified himself yet remained as himself a sympathetic observer. “Naturally, it would be a Crusade in the modern form—the freeing of a race from bondage. Where, however, was he to find a race in need of release and at the same time of historical appeal? The Arabs seemed the only suitable one left, and they fitted in with the trend of his interests.
Thus, early, did the dream of his mission come, if it took a curiously detached form. It quickened his interest in the military side of history and archaeology, and, unconsciously moving towards its fulfilment, he began to study the history of wars, especially of wars that were risings. He ranged widely, reading all he could about the Risorgimento, the wars of the Condottieri, and even translating extracts from Procopius.
The mischance ol being laid up with a broken leg, which abruptly ended his physical growth, was turned to the profit of his mental growth. The accident occurred when wrestling with another boy. That was the sort of physical contest he could relish, because it was a natural form. For organized games, football or cricket, he had no liking. They were competitions governed by conventions and attaining only a figurative end. While he was more full of physical energy than most boys, he preferred to expend it not in kicking goals, but in exploring towards some goal. One aspect of this bent was his love of tracing the source of streams. Another was his ceaseless search for fragments of ancient and mediæval pottery, a search in which he acquired not only an uncanny flair but a remarkable knowledge. And he was always elusive, going off by himself, avoiding observation while on his wanderings, returning when he chose—the individual among yet apart from the herd.
But although he loved the sense of freedom, he acquired while still young the power of being free in a deeper than the physical sense. In his teens he took a sudden turn for military experience at the urge of some private difficulty, and served for a while in the ranks. He has remarked since on the difference between the pre-war and the postwar Army, especially the hard drinking and the brutality of conduct and manners in the former as compared with the latter. But this experience, if its restrictions irked him, rather strengthened than weakened his essential apartness.
It became more marked in the greater freedom of his next phase, as an undergraduate. At school they had wanted him to try for a mathematical scholarship, but a consequent surfeit of the subject led him to change over suddenly to history just before he was eighteen. After six months he tried for a history scholarship at St. John’s College, but failed. At the next shot he gained an exhibition at Jesus College, Oxford, where the fact that he had been born in Wales gave him official preference. He had rooms in College only for one term; otherwise he lived at home during the years he was in statu pupillari. The conditon, laid on his mother, of reporting that he was “home by twelve” allowed of elastic interpretation. He was often out again soon after midnight. The still hours of darkness were the time he favoured for working, for his walks abroad or even for visiting his friends. These were fe
w, if rich in variety, as he only seemed to care for company when it offered some fresh and different facet to his intellectual curiosity. But the few with whom he made contact quickly came, then as in later years, under his spell. That much overworked word expresses the effect of his personality as no other word can.
He refused to take part in the ordinary College life, and the other undergraduates would hardly have realized his existence if his imperceptibility had not been pressed so far as ultimately to provoke curiosity. He had then as later the extreme unobtrusiveness which compels notice. If undesired, this may yet have been enjoyed, for he had an impish streak. The curiosity he aroused appealed to his sense of humour, which lay deep beneath the surface, as intangible as himself. His was the sense of humour that is synonymous with a philosophy of life. I suspect that Socrates consoled himself thus.
In his studies Lawrence was equally “free.” He had decided to read for the History School, but he paid little attention to the prescribed books, and perfunctory attendance at the prescribed lectures. His reading widened with every opportunity, pursuing many interesting if academically irrelevant avenues, from mediæval poetry to modern strategy. He used to borrow six volumes at a time from the Oxford Union library, in his father’s name and his own, and often changed them daily. For he thought nothing of reading all day and half through the night, lying on a rug or mattress, a habit that had the convenience of allowing him to go to sleep where he lay—he has preserved it, slightly adapted, for later life in the cottage where he intends to settle down. He not only read fast but absorbed quickly, for he had a way of “sensing” a subject, as a bee draws in the nectar as it flits from flower to flower. It was always the unexpected, the undiscovered, or the inaccessible sources that he sought—“Originals and sidelights, not compilations.”
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