LAWRENCE OR LEACHMAN?

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 208, 3 September 1934, Page 6

LAWRENCE OR LEACHMAN?

Not everybody will be. 'surprised on reading that an English officer, in a book just .published, has attempted to put another man above Lawrence of Arabia as the greatest English influence in the Arab world during the war. In the public mind Lawrence stands alone, the embodiment of romantic daring, dashing leadership, and that domination over primitive peoples of which the English believe their race holds the secret.. But Lawrence has not lacked critics among those who have special knowledge of the Near East. Between the careers of Lawrence and Colonel Leachman, whose claims are now championed, there are differences that account for the fame of the one and the obscurity of the other. Lawrence was a civilian who sprang into prominence through his extraordinary understanding of the Arab mind. The spectacle of a previously unknown scholar jumping over the heads, so to speak, of professional soldiers and political officers, appealed at once to the British public, who aire always impressed by the amateur. Lawrence is undoubtedly a genius. He is one ■of those masterful, independent eccentrics, thoroughly at home among primitive peoples, that England has produced from time to time. Burton of Mecca and "Arabian Nights" fame, was, another. It is a type that cannot work well under discipline. Lawrence could never have endured the routine of the regular army. He was helped by two opposite kinds of advertisement—publicity and mystery. His own book and the more popular account written by Lowell Thomas made his work known throughout the world. But the man himself hated ordinary publicity,, and tried to hide under the name of Aircraftsman Shaw, which, of course, whetted the public's appetite. ■ Colonel Leachman, so one may surmise, was a different type. A professional soldier, ho 'would work in the service tradition of rules and self-effacement. Before the war he had won a reputation as an explorer in Arabia, and it is as an explorer, and not as a soldierdiplomatist, that he receives his three-line mention in the current "Britannica," in which Lawrence is given a column and a half.. In the Great War he fought and organised without limelight, and died, virtually on the field of battle, four years later. Leachman seems to have been a very exceptional man, but he is not the first officer to lie in a forgotten grave after doing wonderful things. Round the borders of the Empire can be found lonely graves of his type —men who had a gift for frontier work, and laboured there in the simple path of. duty, prevailing more by force of, character and understanding than by bayonet strength, until bullet or germ or flood took them. One would say that the biographer of Leachman does not wish to discredit LaAvrence, but to do justice to the other man. In doing this he is writing a memorial of a class.