LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 3 April 1929, Page 10

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

LJL'T NOT OF AFGHANISTAN'. ••Aircraftsman Shaw,” who has just returned to England, disguises tho identity of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia, the. man about whom legends have grown thick as autumnal leaves. No man has been more a, victim of his own achievements than this elusive figure of the Near East. He escaped from fame and joined the Army as a private. His reputation followed him. .Crying eyes sought him out. Curious minds wrote myths about him. Lawrence himself broke one of his rules of life. He asked an influential friend to transfer him to the Royal Air Force, l where he had a chance of going to distant parts, learning new languages, I picking up some of the ethics of anI otliev civilisation, and at the same time avoiding the attentions of the newspapers. He isoon found himself tuning up aeroplanes in the Punjanb. His very presence there was quite sufficient to set all the busybodies of India, and half these of Europe, talking- about the dire and nefarious schemes which his brain was working out for the subversion of this or the frustration of that. And when the Afghans rose in revolt against tire precipitate action -of their Amarrullah Khan, instantly the name of Aircraftsman Shaw was connected with the debacle. Colonel Lawrence has had nothing to do with the revolt, in Afghanistan. But he was far too near Peshawar for rumour to keep its tongue still. Therefore —-he left India. Since the publication of the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and “The Revolt in the Desert,” much has been learned] about Colonel Lawrence. West people know tho salient facts about his career —his studies as an undergraduate at Oxford, his fondness for flip military architecture of tho Levant, his three weeks’ Cooks’ tour to the desert that lasted for three years. Iris rejection from the Army as an unfit, his appointment to the map-making department in Cairo, his escape to Arabia, his uncanny influence over theBedouins, the wrecking of 79 Turkish trains, the welding of an Arabian army which one day found itself the unofficial right wing of Lord Allenby’s force and at the head of which, when the young Colonel was about 29, he rode into Damascus in triumph.