Lawrence headed out the next day, already ill with coastal dysentery. His companions turned out to be a rather ragtag lot traveling on ill-fed camels, which meant the journey would be long. Four Rifaa and one Merawi Juheina acted as his guides; Arslan, a Syrian, acted as his aide; four Ageyli, a Moor, and an Ateibi, Suleiman, acted as guard detachment. The journey took the party across the shattered granite approaches of two sugar loaves of low hills, the Sakhara and the Sukhur. The ravine between the brown rocks was rough and made slick under a gentle winter rain that began to break. The peak of the gorge was thin and sharp; the weak and laden camels had difficulty crossing at the knife of the pass. On the downslope, the passage was partially blocked by a huge granite boulder containing the ganglike graffiti of generations of travelers who had hacked their tribal signatures into the stone along the way. Here the path opened onto a jumble of jagged chips of flint. As the riders continued, the rain washed down the shards to reveal a foot-polished and rain-slicked goat path dangerous in the drizzle. The path soon trickled into a trail, and the men had to dismount and lead their beasts on foot.
BY THE SECOND day, the party found a suitable place to camp. Lawrence’s dysentery had grown worse, and he now began to suffer from a severe case of boils that had erupted on his back. The infection induced an enervating fever and hammering headaches that also caused brief fainting spells. Exhausted, he threw himself under the shadow of a shale cliff. All day long his comrades had been fighting among themselves, something he was finally able to ignore by slipping into a stupefied slumber. After some remote time, he was roused by a gunshot. Thinking that his unruly companions were plinking at the abundant rabbits and fowl in the area, he tried to return to a torpid sleep. As if in a drugged dream, Suleiman came to awaken him, begging Lawrence to follow him across the canyoned valley to the other side. The waking dream became a nightmare when Suleiman led him to a dead man lying among the rocks with a bullet through his forehead. As he looked down upon the hapless Ageyl, Lawrence reeled from the sight, catching himself on one knee and nearly falling upon the corpse. Salem, one of the four Ageyli, had been shot at close range, judging by the telltale powder burns near the temple. The other Ageyli were running about in rage and grief. Lawrence regained his footing and lunged at the nearest, catching Ali by the hem of his cloak. Hamed the Moor was the murderer, he said. Lawrence ordered Ali and the others to find the guilty Hamed, while he sought the pile of baggage that was now graced by the shadow of the rock-braced canyon. As he lay there, Lawrence’s pained mind sank back into a vigilant sleep.
The waking dream resumed with a raspy whisper of dry leaves: it was Hamed at the baggage, gathering his kit and readying his escape. When he set aside his rifle, the unnoticed Lawrence drew his Webley and ordered Hamed to stop. When the others returned, a field tribunal was held and Hamed confessed, ending the trial. The storied law of the empty desert, not the civilized courtroom, would mete out the punishment: tooth for tooth, eye for eye. Salem’s kinsmen demanded Hamed’s death for his crime. Lawrence pleaded with Ali, the most reasonable of the Ageyli, but it was to no avail: Western reason stood eloquently mute before the dock of tribal justice.
Just then, the leader within Lawrence stirred and awoke from the waking dream. The implications of a dead Moor, murdered at the hands of Ageyli tribesmen, were stark and foreboding. The Moroccans among the Arab army would rise up in vengeance. The punishment would have to be dealt to Hamed by Lawrence himself. Now Lawrence became in their eyes the outsider, the kinless stranger in the strange land: his bloodied hands would set him ironically above the blood feud.
The judgment was announced, and Hamed was led away by Lawrence: “I made him enter the narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the light rain. At the end it shrank to a crack a few inches wide. The walls were vertical. I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments’ delay which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest.”4 Lawrence botched the execution: Hamed fell screaming to the ground, thrashing and shrieking about in the narrow gulch. He fired again, and his shaking shot pierced Hamed through the wrist. After some minutes, the dying Hamed finally rolled before Lawrence’s wet feet and stony gaze. Aiming carefully, he shot Hamed under the jaw. Satisfied, the Ageyli buried Hamed where he died.
Lawrence staggered off to his bedroll, no longer the man he once knew. The old Lawrence of the days of innocence seeped into the sand with Hamed’s blood, and once again the ancient desert had become the blood blotter of history.
THE NEXT MORNING they carried Lawrence, exhausted, to his camel and departed the life-stealing Wadi Kitan, crossing into the tributaries of Wadi Reimi and Wadi Amk. Midday brought them into the furnace of Wadi Marrakh. The heat engulfed the riders in heavy waves. “The puffs of feverish wind pressed like scorching hands against our faces, burning our eyes,” Lawrence recalled. “My pain made me breathe in gasps through the mouth; the wind cracked my lips and seared my throat till I was too dry to talk, and drinking became sore; yet I always needed to drink, as my thirst would not let me lie still and get the peace I longed for. The flies were a plague.”5
The valley floor was strewn with powdery quartz and a fine sparkling sand that thrust dazzling daggers into the travelers’ eyes. Here patches of dry white grass shimmered in the fiery light, offering an illusion that the riders were marching atop sun-dogged clouds. The camels found the grass “clouds” especially tasty, and here the men stopped to rest. Lawrence was laid to the side of the grazing beasts in the shade of some thorn trees. The camels engorged their many-chambered stomachs in a belching, regurgitating, chomping orgy. A green slobber dripped down the sides of their working mouths and chins to fall into the sand with a quiet slap. Lawrence idly watched the feast through leadened, fevered eyelids. Close behind him, a camel pissed heavily upon a gray rock, spraying a fine ammoniated mist in his direction. The outriders had killed a gazelle that was now roasting over a fire that seemed flameless against the fiery sun.
After the men had eaten, the ride resumed up a multiterraced lava field strewn with rusty clinkered rocks. Here, Wadi Gara flowed toward the retreating horizon between two deep, irregular ditches of stagnant rainwater. The camels trod gingerly among the clinkers, trying to avoid the jagged edges. By five in the afternoon, the valley had turned into a floor of black winnowed ash, as though sifted through a colander. The powder turned a silvery gray under each of the camels’ footfalls. Farther on, the riders encountered a Bedouin campsite where Sheikh Fahad el Hansha ruled his clan. The sheikh was one of the earliest supporters of Hussein and the revolt. Now he refused to let Lawrence sleep outside the hospitable embrace of his tent and urged his guest to sit beside him. Here he regaled Lawrence with a litany of questions: What is Europe? What is your home tribe? What is the nature of the English camel pasturages? Who is winning the revolt? Who is winning the war in Europe, in Egypt? How is Feisal? Why do you seek Abdullah? And “by what perversity do you remain Christian, when our hearts and hands wait to welcome you to the Faith?” Lawrence sought to answer these and other questions between sips of warm camel milk. At ten in the evening, the guest sheep was ceremoniously slaughtered and baked over a bed of buttered rice. Lawrence ate heartily as desert etiquette demanded and, after further conversation had ended, fell into a dream-filled stupor: he dreamed that he and his party sizzled across the desert like an egg on a grill, chased by the ghost of Hamed.
Lawrence awoke the next morning barely refreshed enough to walk to his camel and mount her unaided. The ride to Abdullah’s camp continued until well into the morning, when the party at last reached Abu Markha in Wadi Ais. At Wadi Ais, Lawrence’s fever still lingered, and the thought of a tribal cure was dreadful to him. The prescribed treatment was always the same: burn holes in the affected part. In the case of fever, that meant a wholesale torching. Better to suffer the disease than submit to the cure.
At length, Lawrence found
Abdullah’s tent and delivered the documents from Feisal and recounted the situation at Medina: Abdullah’s forces were required to strike at the railway to the north of the town in order to block the escaping Turks. The sheikh received the news calmly. By now Lawrence was veritably tottering over with fever, fatigue, and exhaustion and asked to excuse himself. Abdullah offered to erect a tent for his guest, who was too weak to refuse the gesture. Within the hour, Lawrence collapsed.
THE SICK MAN lay facedown on a stinking cot in a stinking tent in a stinking desert. A humid, cloying breeze blew in from the west, from the Red Sea. Lawrence awoke sick as ever with dysentery and infected boils that would eventually lead to a dangerous blood poisoning. The long desert rides and lack of sanitation had created the serious condition. The ensuing fever racked Lawrence’s body, but an unreasonable, looming sense of failure now assaulted his mind.
Lawrence, a rank amateur, was leading an entire nation of desert Arabs in an all-or-nothing revolt against their Turkish oppressors, and so far he—and they—had largely failed despite the success at Wejh. Through the oppressive haze of illness and depression, Lawrence saw no solution, no hope, for his dilemma. In every direct encounter with the Turks, the Arabs had been beaten and beaten badly. Even the most enthusiastic of the Arabs, the most motivated, were beginning to lose heart. Through the long dark nights of the soul that would follow, Lawrence would meet a personal crisis. Would he be forced to pack up his tent and steal away in defeat with the Arabs, or would he stand against the Turks and the very weight of history? The answer revolved around a riddle, a riddle of war as old as conflict itself. But it could not be solved in one day or with a fever-leadened brain: Lawrence would need to rest, to sleep.
To a fever-addled mind, time means nothing. All sense of it is lost; there is no temporal duration, only an unendurable pounding in the temporal lobes. Dream’s nighttime domain and reason’s daylight abode trespass each other. Both dance together in an awkward, heated embrace where human reason succumbs to a siren’s dream of past images and rememberings. All cast up in a silent fog of ambivalence, hope, and regret: the Lawrence family secret of his bastard birth, the Arab uprising, the death of two beloved brothers in combat on the western front—and more. For several days, the fevered ballet in Lawrence’s head continued, mere shadows cast by a real struggle in his febrile body.
At last the infection was driven from the field, defeated for now, and a slow recovery ensued. The mind cleared and reason returned once again to find in its midst the same riddle that had eluded Lawrence since the Arab Revolt had sparked. Even its very articulation had eluded him in the beginning. Now it presented itself before his mind’s eye: a four-sided pyramid. Gazing but unseeing at the early morning sun, he pondered what his mind had imagined.
• • •
THE ART OF war had always been a dynamic resolution of a four-sided conundrum of ends, ways, means, and risk. Even a mere private could understand and appreciate the relationship, but as Lawrence was beginning to discover, understanding did not necessarily lead to effective action: and action against a fierce enemy changed everything in the dynamic calculus. Actually, the relationship included a fifth element, the enemy, but the commander had no control over him.
In every war, the commander had to consider first the ends or aim he had to achieve in his military operation. Second, he had to consider his own means available to accomplish those ends, recognizing at the same time that he had to overcome the enemy’s means opposed to him. Ideally, the friendly means should be proportional to the ends plus the means opposed. In reality, this was seldom the case. Where means were lacking—soldiers, bullets, units, morale, will—the ends could be adjusted to create a balanced proportionality once again. But what if this latitude was foreclosed to the commander, as Lawrence was beginning to realize? The mismatch would create an ends-means imbalance or deficit. Within this deficit or gap roamed the elements of risk and chance, the third part of the relationship. A commander thus had to assume the burden of risk in every operation where his ends and means were out of whack. Yet the situation need not be hopeless, especially for a gifted commander like Lawrence—for embedded within the riddle lay its very solution: the ways.
The fourth aspect of military art, the ways, is the most creative factor, as well as the most elusive. The imaginative strategies, tactics, maneuvers, gambits, moves—all bring the static calculation among ends, means, and risk into dynamic tension when placed before an active enemy where anything becomes possible. A small army can defeat a larger force; a technologically inferior force can overwhelm a technologically advanced opponent. Lawrence would have to reinvent a way to defeat an old opponent. In doing so, he would embark on a path of military heresy into the pages of history.
LAWRENCE’S INSIGHT, RECOUNTED in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is one of the most astonishing and creative revelations in the entire history of the art of war.6 Yet it is seldom mentioned in accounts of Lawrence. B. H. Liddell Hart, the British military historian, recognizing its historical significance in his biography of Lawrence, spends a chapter discussing its implications, though missing the theoretical import of its meaning. Most writers dismiss Lawrence’s revelation as the incoherent ramblings of a pyrexic mind. Lawrence’s powers of physical recovery were legendary, and he seemed able to transform mental energy into physical force. As he continued his slow, tent-bound convalescence, Lawrence extended his four-way assessment to focus more closely on the ways. Up until this time, he had spent several months fighting beside the Arab Bedouin against the Ottoman Turk. From this experience he derived two theorems governing the ways and methods of guerrilla warfare. These two principles provided a point of departure for the development of his new theory of irregular warfare. Lawrence asserted first that irregular troops like the Arabs were unable to defend a position against conventional forces; and, similarly, irregular troops were incapable of effectively attacking a conventionally defended position. If these theorems were correct, as he surmised, then of what value were his irregulars in the first place? Essentially, Lawrence was suggesting to himself that his means were not only insufficient and inadequate for the task at hand, they were also unsuitable.
Reflecting inward on his own education and study, Lawrence understood that his attitude toward war, like that of any officer schooled in Western military thought and tradition, was dominated by the dogma of annihilation: an obsession that “the ethic of modern war is to seek the enemy’s army, his center of power, and destroy it in battle.” The centrality of the decisive battle formed the conceptual lens through which every military professional viewed his world, the relevant problems that existed in that world, and the set of solutions that would solve those problems. In terms made famous by Thomas S. Kuhn, the paradigm of annihilation held sway over the officer corps of every major army for most of World War I. Lawrence proposed, instead, a lens-smashing alternative: a view heretical in the extreme. It occurred to him that in fact no decisive battle of annihilation had yet taken place; the Arabs were not winning, but neither were they losing. How could this be?
On his sickbed, the military implications of the victory at Wejh became more apparent and took on new significance: “As I thought about it, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. We were in occupation of 99 percent of the Hejaz. The Turks were welcome to the other fraction till peace or doomsday showed them the futility of clinging to our window pane. This part of the war was over, so why bother with Medina? It was not a base for us, like Rabegh; no threat to the Turks, like Wejh: just a blind alley for both. The Turks sat in it on the defensive—immobile, eating for food the transport animals which were to have moved them to Mecca, but for which there was no pasture in their now-restricted lines. They were harmless sitting there; if we took them prisoners, they would cost us food and guards in Egypt: if we drove them out northward into Syria, they would join the main army in blocking us.… On all counts they were best where they were, and they valued Medina and wanted to keep it. Let them!”
; Lawrence wondered, then, if there were no other wars, different in kind from the wars of annihilation that French generals like Ferdinand Foch and others advocated and wrote of so enthusiastically in their efforts to emulate the great master annihilator, Napoleon Bonaparte. He concluded, following a recollection of his study of Carl von Clausewitz, that there was indeed more than one kind of war, that the determining factors again boiled down to the relationship among ends, ways (“strategies”), means, and risk.
It was simply not within the compass of Arab interests (ends), or even within their capability (means), to annihilate the Turks. Rather, the Arab ends could change and become geographic: to occupy as much of the desert theater of operations as possible.
Now if the aim of the Arabs was one of geographic interest and focus rather than the destruction of the enemy forces, it put the ways and means of irregular warfare in a different light. Given the validity of the facts that Arab irregulars could neither defend nor attack against a strong conventional force, what way or strategy was left open to them? Clausewitz had considered a second possible strategy, a strategy of exhaustion.
LAWRENCE WAS ONE of the few modern commanders to understand the value of military theory. Theory is a conceptual device that allows us to visualize what we cannot see. The developers of the atomic bomb, for example, were unable to see the atom, but through their theories of nuclear physics they were able to visualize it. In the same fashion, an explorer is able to visualize by means of a map the underlying terrain that he does not see. Thus Lawrence used theory to help him visualize the war he was fighting and imagine its future outcome.
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