ON THE EARLY morning of October 2, Lawrence was rudely roused by a citizen with news that Abd el Kader had returned again and was fomenting rebellion in the streets of Damascus and in the countryside. The foolish Algerian had incited the standoffish Druzes with the help of Sultan. The Druzes had been riding the fences, waiting to see which side would win. They saw their new game as a chance for plunder by launching an anti-Christian jihad against the Maronite Christians. They attacked shops and other easy targets under the political whip of Abd el Kader and Mohammed Said. But Nuri Said soon discovered the true tepidness of the uprising. Once he began cordoning off long swaths of streets with machine-gun sections, the plundering Druzes dropped their booty and ran away down dark alleys. Chauvel offered a troop of cavalry as a roving constabulary to help brace the local security. The press got wind of the violence and in rumor and repetition blew the episode into an epic of blood and destruction. Soon the echo of events reached the sensitive ears of Allenby, who enjoined calm and order in the capital.
By the afternoon, the Druzes had been driven from the city with the help of the lately mobilized city militia. The town soon returned to its celebration of liberty, taking new delight in the candies, iced drinks, and Hejaz freedom flags lining all the major boulevards. Lawrence was once again enjoying the return to the carnival atmosphere when an Australian doctor rushed up to him, almost dislodging his cold tea. The doctor wanted to know why the Arabs had not secured the Turkish hospital. Lawrence was momentarily confused. All three hospitals—the military, the civilian, the missionary—were secure and in good hands; which one could he mean? Discussion with the doctor revealed that the “hospital” in question was in fact the infirmary in the Turkish military barracks, now guarded by two Australian infantry companies. After looking dully into each other’s eyes for some moments, Lawrence and the doctor hastened to the site to investigate.
The Aussies had indeed secured the exterior of the massive building. The pair passed through the huge threshold and entered into an oppressive and stony silence inside. The great courtyard was filled with rubbish left by thousands of prisoners who had abandoned the place only the day before. Beyond the courtyard was the dark, shuttered infirmary itself. It seemed to suck the blazing light and dry heat out of the forecourt. Lawrence hesitated and then stepped inside. Never in his life had he experienced such a nauseating odor. Like spectral fingers of death, the foul mephitis cloyed his nostrils, seeking to assault his brain and corrode his senses. Only after his eyes adjusted to the dungeon-black corridor did the shock of the dead bodies break his nausea: “The stone floor was covered with dead bodies side by side, some in uniform, some in underclothing, some stark naked. There might be 30 there, and they crept with rats, who had gnawed wet galleries into them. A few were corpses nearly fresh, perhaps only a day or two old: others must have been there for long. Of some the flesh, going putrid, was yellow and blue and black. Many were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouths across jaws harsh with stubble. Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay.”
Beyond this point—this essence of putrescence—was a large dressing gallery where Lawrence heard a moan: “I trod over to it, across the soft mat of bodies, whose clothing, yellow with dung, crackled dryly under me. Inside the ward the air was raw and still, and the dressed battalion of filled beds so quiet that I thought these too were dead, each man rigid on his stinking pallet, from which liquid muck had dripped down to stiffen on the cemented floor.” Lawrence moved silently among the cots until he found the man who had moaned, “Pity … pity.” Others suddenly seemed to become conscious. “There was a brown waver as several tried to lift their hands, and a thin fluttering like withered leaves, as they vainly fell back again upon their beds.” These living ghosts had no one voice through which to communicate; their hoarse whispers sounded like reedy rustling, undulating through the corridor, where meaning was out of time, out of place. The patients were badly wrapped mummies, somehow displaced between dawn and darkness, life and death, quietly awaiting entombed extinction.
The thought’s horror pressed Lawrence into action. He raced from the charnel house through the courtyard into the arbor and asked the Aussies for a labor party. They declined. They had no tools, they said; they had no doctors. Then Kirkbride rushed in to say he had found the infirmary doctors; they were upstairs, in pajamas, brewing coffee. Quickly, the most fit prisoners in the barracks were rounded up and started to dig a mass grave by the garden. The Turkish doctors began a rough triage and found fifty-six dead, two hundred dying, and seven hundred undying. The last, these seeming apparitions, began digging but were stymied when they struck a stone subfloor under the vegetation. They could only manage to widen the margins of the pit, enough to embrace and bury the dead. Soon clouds of quicklime were sprinkled on the bodies, almost as a token ritual of farewell. The powdery shroud cloaked the liquefying corpses in a jellied whiteness.
By midnight it was all over and Lawrence collapsed in his bed. He had not slept more than three hours at a time since leaving Deraa four days and many graveyards ago.
THE NEXT DAY brought the old Arab army together again, for the last time, in Damascus. Pisani was there with the artillery, Joyce with the armored cars. Order had been restored again throughout the city after Abd el Kader’s abortive coup. Chauvel complained that the Arab soldiers were not properly saluting his Australian officers. Such quotidian banality mattered less to Lawrence than the immediate fact that the barracks hospital had been resurrected, even partially restored. As he was contemplating his proud achievement, a British medical officer burst in upon his reverie: “You in charge?” After a wary hesitation, Lawrence offered a casual nod of assent.
The medico then broke out with, “Scandalous … disgraceful … outrageous … ought to be shot …” He was obviously referring to the conditions at the infirmary. Abruptly, after all the months of intense combat, Lawrence’s highly strung nerves came unwired. He let out a loud cackling giggle; shuffling, he bent backward as though struck in the chest. The officer glared at him: “Bloody brute!”14 Then Lawrence let out another strained squawk, whereupon the doctor smacked him upside the head and shoulders and stalked off in a muttering dither.
At that moment, Lawrence knew the revolt was over, and more precisely, his role in it was finished. Feeling more ashamed than angry, he suddenly realized the meaning of the desolate sadness that had lurked and stalked him these many months. At that instant, he comprehended that he was like a young stepfather and the Arab Revolt the hopeful stepson he had so carefully nurtured, encouraged, supported, and sustained during its formative years. Now, at the moment of adulthood, the son was about to meet his true father, Emir Feisal, on his way up from Deraa. Lawrence, the cast-aside stepfather, had just received his ironic thanks under the generic hand of a British officer. The blow was a reminder of the duplicitous role Lawrence had played in the upbringing of the revolt in the knowledge it would likely be indentured to British imperialism. All that now remained to fill the sudden emptiness were the remnants of crushed pride and staggering loss. There would be no final closure for Lawrence, because the wholeness and fullness of his emotional investment could never be salvaged.
The idea that began while a student at Oxford City High School for Boys, that he could somehow free an enslaved people, meant a personal kind of commitment that was both audacious and presumptuous beyond imagination. Like the loving stepfather who believes he can embrace as his own a child of another’s blood, Lawrence thought he could adopt a remote race as his own true son. The long period of accommodation, already begun at Carchemish, would accelerate in the Hejaz. Though the burden of reconciliation would fall most heavily upon Lawrence as the foster father of the revolt, it would transform him, change him in ever-increasing turns of commitment until he no longer recognized himself. The conformity and congruence of father to son became too extreme, so in time Lawrence’s heart and soul would warp and be
nd beyond self-recognition.
Allenby knew that the distance between fatherhood and leaderhood was too small to notice. Perhaps he saw this at the end, when he tried to persuade Lawrence to remain for a time with his stepchild. But for Lawrence the remorseless grief was too great, and after the war his temperament could no longer recover its misshapen identity. Thus began the journey through Lawrence’s grief: a lifelong departure; a farewell to comrade; a goodbye to self. And the end of one odyssey would beget another.
For Lawrence, his leader’s grief and personal guilt continued toward Damascus and beyond. But finally, on the late morning of May 13, 1935, along the road to his cottage at Clouds Hill, T. E. Lawrence found his redemption. Here he sped to his death, as he had sped through life: driven by some creative impulse that seemed blind in its direction yet purposive in its motivation. Lawrence had lived guru-philosopher Alan Watts’s principle that “you don’t sing to get to the end of the song.” Lawrence might have said, “You don’t live to die; you live to create.” What he did say, however, was: “As far as harnessing to my go-cart the eternal force—well, no: I pushed my go-cart into the eternal stream, and so it went faster than the ones that are pushed cross-stream or up-stream.” It was his genius that showed him to push the “right way” through the eternal creative stream; though in the end, like his great hero Odysseus, he would take the long way home.
Lawrence’s intense psychological struggle in the desert brought him to a profound moral conversion that would lead ultimately to his personal redemption. He saw the central paradox of military art: In order to create one must destroy. Such a paradox can lead to only one possible conclusion: Military art by its very nature leads to its own abnegation and to the abnegation of the military artist as well. He realized at some point that in order to salvage the creative force of military art as art, some thing had to be created in the end. For Lawrence, the resolution to the paradox became obvious: a generative military art had to create a lasting peace. No other solution was possible; no other symmetry could emerge. Yet today the world waits in vain for Lawrence’s vision of peace in the Middle East.
Notes
Chapter 1: Arrival
1. Philip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15.
Chapter 2: Pale Rider
1. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Anchor Books, July 1991), 65.
2. Ibid., 67.
3. Ibid., 76.
4. Ibid., 84.
5. Ibid., 91.
6. Ibid., 96–97.
7. Ibid., 122–23.
8. Ibid., 136–37.
9. Ibid., 157.
10. Ibid., 163.
Chapter 3: A Flash of Genius
1. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, 2nd ed.), 198–204.
2. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 167–68.
3. Ibid., 175–76.
4. Ibid., 182–83.
5. Ibid., 183–84.
6. See Chapter 33, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and T. E. Lawrence, “The Evolution of a Revolt,” Army Quarterly (November 1920), for Lawrence quotes. James J. Schneider, “T. E. Lawrence and the Mind of an Insurgent,” Journal of the Royal Artillery 1, no. 133 (spring 2006): 13–16.
7. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 208.
8. Ibid., 216.
Chapter 4: Aqaba!
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 246.
2. Ibid., 250.
3. Ibid., 253–54.
4. Ibid., 256.
5. Ibid., 273–74.
6. Ibid., 277–79.
7. Ibid., 290.
8. Ibid., 302–05.
9. Ibid., 314.
Chapter 5: Lawrence in LEGO-land
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 321–22.
2. Ibid., 328.
3. Ibid., 337.
4. Ibid., 339–40.
5. Ibid., 355–57.
6. Ibid., 367–69.
7. Ibid., 374–75.
Chapter 6: To Whom the Gods Pray
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 378.
2. Ibid., 407–08.
3. Ibid., 412–13.
4. Ibid., 419.
5. Ibid., 422–23.
6. Ibid., 423–24.
7. Ibid., 431.
8. Ibid., 437.
Chapter 7: The Grief of Leaders
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 472.
2. Ibid., 475–76.
3. Ibid., 479.
4. Ibid., 481.
5. Ibid., 492.
6. Ibid., 502.
7. Ibid., 468.
Chapter 8: Thief of Souls
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 503.
2. Ibid., 510–11.
3. Ibid., 517.
4. Ibid., 523.
5. Ibid., 526–28.
Chapter 9: The Hovering Dead
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 539–40.
2. Ibid., 540–41.
3. See Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam (New York: Scribner, 1994) and Odysseus in America (New York: Scribner, 2002).
4. Ibid., 548–52.
5. Ibid., 556.
6. Ibid., 562–63.
7. Ibid., 562, 563.
8. Ibid., 564–66.
9. Ibid., 576.
10. Ibid., 578–79.
Chapter 10: Days of Wrath; O Days of Sorrow—the Road to Damascus
1. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 583.
2. Ibid., 594.
3. Ibid., 604.
4. Ibid., 615.
5. Ibid., 615–16.
6. Ibid., 622.
7. In Seven Pillars, Lawrence refers to Young as “Sabin.”
8. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 623–24.
9. Ibid., 627.
10. Ibid., 631.
11. Ibid., 638.
12. Ibid., 648.
13. Ibid., 651–52.
14. Ibid., 659.
Acknowledgments
Following the 2003 debacle in Iraq, our learning institution (the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies [SAMS] in the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas) underwent a major curriculum review to better prepare our officers intellectually for what was proving to be a long, drawn-out war. In my reflections on the problem, I began to be attracted to the tutor/student method of instruction, which demonstrated great utility in advanced military education and seemed to offer a possible solution to the army’s postinvasion concerns with officer education. Coincidentally, in April 2004, I happened to attend a conference on learning and education at Oxford University, where the tutor/student method—known as the Oxford method—originated. I was also aware that T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had studied there and realized he would make the perfect “poster child” for the kind of officer education I had envisioned. With that in mind, I began serious research in the Lawrence archives at Oxford in September 2004. Here I also attended a conference conducted by the T. E. Lawrence Society and was able to meet the leading experts on Lawrence, including Jeremy Wilson, Malcolm Brown, and others. I was especially intrigued by Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Lawrence entitled A Prince of Our Disorder. I was able to have several personal conversations with Mack about my research, and his generous response encouraged me to continue with my research. Tragically, however, Mack was killed by a drunk driver in London the day after the conference ended.
After further research, I began seriously to propose that the Oxford method of instruction be formally adopted into the SAMS curriculum, but for various reasons this proposal was rejected. Nonetheless, I continued to pursue my conviction that advanced military education of the sort that informed Lawrence was crucial to leader development in the kinds of wars we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2006, I decided to write a book using Lawrence as an example of the successful educated, intellectual leader in action. This became the basis for an article I published in Army
magazine entitled, “T. E. Lawrence and the Mind of an Insurgent.” In March 2008, I retired from SAMS and began to write the first draft of the book.
Apart from the profound debt of gratitude I owe the late John Mack for his initial insights, kindness, and encouragement, there are many others I wish to thank as well: Tom Ricks, Jim Dubik, Shimon Naveh, Huba Wass de Czege, Mike Steele, Mike Pearlman, Deborah Charles, Bruce Menning, Jake Kipp, Leah Stevens, Bruce Reider, Tim Challans, L. D. Schneider, Ellen Kaplan, Bob Kaplan, Mark Bowden, Bob Epstein, Rolly Dessert, Dan Schneider, Maria Clark, Sadaf Ardestani, Bob Berlin, Dave Hable, Ken Gams, Dan Paulick, Tom Bennett, Dave Paulick, Bob Mayes, Jeff LaFace, Kevin Benson, Michéle Robien, Robin Swan, Jim Greer, E. J. McCarthy, Jonathan Jao, John Flicker, Nabil Barghouti, Ofra Graicer, Ron Davids, C. C. Franché, and Orrick White; Letta, Kevin, Jason, Jenifer, Julie, Joey, Cameron, and especially my late parents and my students; the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; the staff of the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives, King’s College, London; the Imperial War Museum, London; the staff of the Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; the staff of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the staff of the university library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; the staff of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; and the T. E. Lawrence Society.
ALSO BY JAMES J. SCHNEIDER
The Structure of Strategic Revolution:
Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES J. SCHNEIDER is Professor Emeritus of Military Theory formerly at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A recognized international expert in his field, Schneider has taught and written extensively on military theory, having helped develop some of the key theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings to contemporary operational art for a whole new generation of military officers. Schneider served in Vietnam with the First Infantry Division and received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Kansas. He is currently a consultant on military affairs for a global strategy firm and working on his next book, How Generals Think.
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