LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Evening Star, Issue 19550, 7 May 1927, Page 23

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

HIS OWN HISTORIAN VIGNETTES FROM THE DESERT (‘Times Literary Supplement.’) Is it some quality of the land or of the people or of both, exerting a selective influence on explorers that makes Arabia breed extraordinary books? She repels the sportsman, the trader, the globe trotter, and the missionary she eliminates. In their stead she calls a few, a very few, of stern scientific purpose or of romantic' vision and fastidious literary taste. Doughty carried black-letter pages of Chaucer in his camel bags; Gertrude Bell cured her soul of the blind monotony of the Nefud by reading ‘Hamlet’; Lawrence passed a night ot suffering and failing hope on a frozen upland beyond Jordan absorbed in the ‘ Morte d’Arthur.’ Malory ho had always found more congenial than war business. When told to return in 1916 to Arabia and his “ veiled Prophet,” he had pleaded ” complete unfitness for the job ” I hated responsibility—obviously the position of a conscientious adviser would be responsible—and in all my life objects had been gladder to me than persons, and ideas than objects. So the duty of succeeding with men, of disposing them to any purpose, would be doubly hard to me. I was unlike a soldier—hated soldiering. Least of all did he like leading. His oy was to push from behind—to push men whither they willed not to go and often knew not they went. But his ideal was to play a lone hand. If soldier, however, he must be, he owned a body hardened by years of studio isly spare living and self-discipline; and if leader, ho had assets ready in an exceptionally quick brain, which thougot in terms of action, in a masterful will, in long clear mental vision, and in a singularly persuasive, not to say compelling, personality. Allenby could jmsent and maintain the most granite front to persuasion, but Lawrence (with Akaba, it is true, to his credit) breached the barrier at once: —

He was hardly prepared_ for anything so odd as myself—a little Barefooted, silk-skirted map, offering to hobble the enemy by his preaching if given stores and arms, and a tuna of 200.00 Q sovereigns to convince and control his converts. Allenby could not make, out low much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. _ The problem vis working behind bis eyes, and I left him unhelpod to. solve it. He did net ask many questions, nor talk mac 1 ), but studied the map and listened to my unfolding of Eastern Syria end its inhabitants. At the end he put up his chin and said quite directly, “ Well, I will do for_ you what I cqn,” and that ended it.

During four years before tbe ■war Lawrence worked and wandered witn Arabs, or at least with men who spoke Arabic. They liked to surrender their wills to him; he in turn was ittraeted by them. On the other hand, he mashed with their Turkish rulers, disKiing them excessively—most of all tne young Turks. Passionately he desired to send them back to their Central Asian steppes, and he learned something of Arab aspiration to that same end. But when lie joined up in he had no thought of helping Arabs to Freedom. That thought on y nine when by an inspiration of Kitchencr’s he had been sent out to Cairo o do Intelligence service, and thcr> learned of another of Kitcheners in-sp:rations-our anti-jehad overtme to the .’.-Emir of Mecca. The little sub-lieutenant of Intelligence began to dream of a revolt which would sweep northwards to ,the villages that he had known-; and he threw more initiative and energy than a subaltern is usually allowed to exert into a scheme tor occupying Alexandretta and raising Syria, When this scheme proved stillborn he fell back (with a grudge against its wreckers) upon plans tor raising Hejaz; and, although presently lie was to be discouraged by the bykesiMcot agreement about Syria s destiny, ho did not desist from promoting and preparing for the rising in Hejaz, which broke out at last in June, ioio. For a mere Hejaz rebellion, liowever, he had little use; and" by autumn he Found only too much ground to tear that where this rising had begun there it would end. So this book ( tevolt in the Desert,’ by T. E. Lawrence) opens with his arrival at Jidda on a joy ride ■” in quest of a leader to set the Arab world afire and carry the revolt beyond Hejaz. As he left Rabegh by night on his first camel ride ho was still Full of his dream: —

My thoughts as we wont wuro how this was the Pilgrim Road, clown which, for uncounted generations, the people of the north had come to visit the Holy City, bearing uith them gifts of faith for the shrine; and it seemed that the Arab revolt might be in a sense a return pilgrimage, to take back to the north, to Syria, an ideal for an ideal, a l>ehel in liberty for their past belief *n a revelation.

And this dream continued awhile to come true; for at the end of lhat ride the man he wanted was waiting:—

Feisal looked very tall iiui pillorlike, very slender in his long white silk robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped, and his black beard and odorless face were like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger. He looker years older than thirtyone, and his dark, appealing c-jes, set a little sloping in nis f ace, ;were bloodshot, and his hollow cheeks deeply lined and puckered with reflection. His nature grudged thinking, for it crippled his speed in action; the labor of it shrivelled his features into swift lines of pain.

To induce this man to break camp, neglect Medina, and go north Lawrence devoted ad his powers cf persuasion. Ho believed then, as did others, that if Arabs themselves could free, or at least co-operato materially in freeing, Syria, the Sykes-Picot arrangement must become a dead loiter. Nor was ho to lose that faith ut Icily for two years, Only in Paris in 1919 did the fire die out, leaving him full of gall and bitterness, and conscious at last of the toll which an amazing series of trials and hardships had exacted of his body and his mind. To this moment of deep disillusion it should be remembered, not to the days of his early hope, belongs the narrative which now sees the light after more than seven years.

To read even this shortened version, which omits much of the worst that befell Lawrence personally, is to understand something, at any rate, of the reason of his strange history and way of life since the war. Consider only the ordeals that the physical conditions imposed. Here is one by liro on the central mud flats in August They blazed back the sun into our faces with glassy vigor, so we rode with its light raining direct arrows upon our heads, and its reflection glancing up from the ground through our inadequate eyelids. It was not .a steady piessure, but a pain ebbing and flowing; at one time piling itself up and up till we nearly swooned; and then falling away coolly in a moment of false shadow like a black web crossing the retina; these gave us a moment’s breathing space to store new capacity for suffering like the struggles to the surface of a drowning man.

And her© one by cold in a trams j or- j danian winter:

I dozed once, only to wak© with a start when alow fingers seemed to stroke my face. I stared out into a night 1 livid with large, soft snowflakes, They lasted a minute or two* but then fallowed rain, and after it more frost, while I squatted in a tight ball, aching every way but too miserable to move till dawn. It was a hesitant dawn, but enough, J rolled over in the mud to see my men, knotted in their cloaks, cowering abandoned against the beasts’ flanks. On each man’s face weighed the most dolorous expression of re-

signed despair. Yet there were worse ordeals still—long days of riding with fever and dysentery upon him; countless hurts by rocks and thorns, by fragments flying from his own explosions, and by falls. He renewed once more than 100 lashes at Turkish hands and was left for dead. In the end his body reached Damascus only less seared and scarred than his soul; and one can only wonder how at any moment of those two years he had found eyes for the natural beauties that he describes so well. The hardest trial of all, however, unremitting and cumulative, was moral. Abjuring his birthright, Lawrence had passed himself into an aliea world, and had stepped down the scale of civilisation, adopting another habit and dress, mimicking the ways of Stone Age men, thinking in their terms and acting as they would act. Ho had no force to comoel; he must coax and cajole'them to identify his cause with theirs; and the only way he knew was to make their cause his. No one had dealt so with them: and loud and long were the protests of others who then bud to do with other Arabs. Nor could he hope ever to attain such assimilation as would make their acceptance of him proof against accidents. Elis achievements, especially his engine-wrecking, made him a legendary hero, the “El-XJrens whom Bedouin crowds acclaimed; but when the desert men became howling beasts of rapine he had to look to himself. as no Arab sheikh so well known as he need have looked. At first he sheltered behind a sheriff, to whom he left the outward and visible signs _of command, for he knew that nothing really bound these armies of untamed individualists except the “ harpy face of a religion but later, judging this screen not enough, seeing what temptations to betrayal were on offer, Ho gathered and knit to himself a personal guard of some ninety ruffiers, of whom nearly half died in his service. Not that he grew disillusioned of Arabs. They might irritate him beyond bearing;

The Bedu were odd people. For an Englishman sojourning with them was unsatisfactory unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. They were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk, or water, gluttons for stewed meat,, shameless beggars of tobacco. Thev dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual exercises, and spent the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. Had the circumstances of their lives given them opportunity _ they would have been sheer sensualists, and he knew repentance and home-sick-ness ;

The crowd had destroyed my pleasure in Azrak, and I went oil down the valley to our remote Ain el Essad and lay there all day in my old lair among the tamarisk, where the wind in the dusty green branches played with such sounds as it made in English trees. It told me I was tired to death of these Arabs—petty incarnate Somites, who attained heights and depths beyond our reach, thougji not beyond our sight. They realised' our absolute in their unrestrained capacity for good and evil; and for two years I had profitably shammed to be their companion! But such phases passed. _Some_ emergent personality revived his quick interest, and admirably he can describe such men. Nuri Shanlan, for instance: Old, livid, and worn, with a grey sorrow and remorse about him and a bitter smile the only mobility of his face. . . . That rarity of the desert —a man without a sense of argument. He would or ha would not, and there was no more to it. Most of all, Auda abu Tayi: His face was magnificent in its lines and hollows. . . . He had large, eloquent eyes, like black velvet in richness. . . . He saw life as_ a saga. All the events in it wire significant; all personages in contact with him heroic. His mind was stored with poems of old raids and epic talcs of fights, and he overflowed with them on the nearest listener. If he lacked listeners he would very likely sing them to himself in his tremendqus voice, deep and resonant and loud. He had no control over his- lips, and was therefore terrible to his own interests and hurt his friends continually. He spoke of himself in the third person, and was so sure of his fame that he loved to shout out stories against himself. At times he seemed taken by a demon of mischief, and in public assembly would invent and utter on oath appalling tales of the private life of his hosts or guests; andyet with all this he was modest, as simple as a child, direct, honest, kind-hearted, and warmly loved even by those to whom he was most embarrassing—his

friends. All the medievalist in Lawrence went out to the figure that this man cut at Shobck:

This manner > of going displeased Auda, the old Hon, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, .cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in and shook a hand at them-, booming in his wonderful voice: “ Dogs, do you not know Auda?” When they realised it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them.

A great story, greatly written. The last third of it. which tells of the swelling of the Arab wave and its flow to Damascus, comes very near epic. In that “ fog of fighting ” with his goal in sight Lawrence looked less into himself than at any other period of the two years, and the doubts of his complicated, many-faceted mind ceased to obtrude on his memory as he wrote. For the rest—in the other two-thirds—ho found himself able only here and there to write as once ho had dreamed of writing all. But below a standard limber than most men’s best be never falls, and the book leaves from first to last an impression of absolute truth.