THE WONDERFUL STORY OF COL. THOS. LAWRENCE, PRINCE OF MECCA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3430, 9 December 1919, Page 67

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF COL. THOS. LAWRENCE, PRINCE OF MECCA.

No one who wants to see with their own eyes one of the romances of history and of human life should, fail to go to Covent Garden and see t"he wonderful panorama there which retells the great achievement of Lord Allenby in Palestine and Syria and incidentally reveals the wonderful story of Colonel Ihomaa Lawrence. You may go to Palestine itself, but you cannot see there again what you can see at Covent Garden. An article in the Nation gives some idea of what you do see there. . • . "Somehow, "overdone -with soldiering, popular fancy has all but missed its two romantic figures, Allenby and Lawrence. Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, his gift of organisation, his wonderful strategy in Northern Palestine, and his way with Orientals, exhibit him as perhaps the one soldier-statesman of the war. But Lawrence, save for his masterly squiring of the Emir Feisul at Paris, has remained almost unknown. Yet if Mr Thomas's picture of him is correct, we must look on this small chetif figure as on a Clive of the twentieth century. With one qualification. Clive kept the Empire he won; Lawrence will have to surrender a gosd part of his to France. It was all very thrilling; a feat of moral conquest no lees than of arms, a proud witness of the living genius of Britain. —The Milk* and Honey Express.—

"In any case the scenes of Palestine and Arabia now being shown by Mr Lowell Thomas at Covent Garden would be of extraordinary interest," says the Nation. "Of quite peculiar interest, indeed, to English and Scottish people, whose knowledge of ancient history and 'foreign parts' is still founded on the Bible, and usually

limited to it. People like to see and bo told about what they know already, and here one sees and hears about Egypt and the pyramids which the children of Israel saw; and the Desert of Sinai through which they wandered ; and Gaza of the Philistines, where, we were told, Samson strolled in the moonlight along the shore with Delilah; and Bethlehem, and Jopp'a, and Damascus, and Jerusalem itself with its Mount of Olives—all names familiar from childhood to every man and woman present. "So familiar that no one is puzzled for a moment at hearing that the train running along the new railway from Egypt through the desert to Palestine is called by our soldiers the 'Milk and Honey Express.' Long and embittered have been the contests over religious education in our schools, but the.education has its results. —What the Soldiers Saw.— "And we are shown, besides, myriads of locusts consuming e-very green thing ('the years that the locusts have eaten'), and great flocks of storks winging up from Egypt to devour' them—-one of old Nature's ways of correcting an erratum in her text. And then there is Petra—• 'a rose-red city' certainly, but by no means 'half as old as time' j not anything like half as old, for the style of architecture seems to-be very'debased Hellenic. And- in and out of all these scenes, amid Arabs and Greeks and Soudanese and nameless mixtures, move the British sok diers, inquisitive, glad to learn,- but unperturbed, unimpressed as usual. "It was a remarkable campaign, and one week of September should always be remembered as the anniversary of the most brilliant and decisive victory in the war—the victory which ended the war with Turkey, and shut th» back door of Central Europe's fortress, as the Dardanelles campaign might have shut it, if the Cabinet at home had only realised its value. Those who, 15 years ago, observed Allenby's command of the cavalry (he was then Colonel of the Fifth Lancers) when French mada his dash upon Colchester from the sea, thought they divined the touch of soldierly genius in the man, and he has not disap-: pointed them. % —ColonqJ Lawrence the Modest.—

“But everyone has been hearing the praise of Fieldrinarshal Lord Allenby this week, and praise not for his military genius alone. To-day we would rather speak of one whose name was hardly known before the war, except perhaps in a small academic circle of archaeological students. Until we listened to Mr Lowell Thomas in'Covent Carden we knew very little of Colonel Thomas Lawrence — ‘Shereef Lawrence’—beyond the name. Arid that is not wonderful, since he is endowed with an .unusual grace of modesty, and we are told that, when -ha discovered he was to receive decorations in Egypt, he jumped into an aeroplane and followed the course of the Israelites across the deserts of Sinai, no doubt singing to himself, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove! ’ Some tell us that modesty «is ■ the mark of genius. In Colonel Lawrence wo seem to find the combination, and the quality of his genius is of peculiar interest to English people. “A Remarkable Man.” “We are told that he was a young x Oxford man, whom the .beginning of the war found pottering about the Euphrates, studying archaeology and Arabic, of which, indeed, he was already a master. A small man (sft-3in in height), beardless, easily passing for a woman in' Arab dress, but so careless of appearances that, even when he got into ■ British uniform, he neither knew nor cared how many stars he had on his shoulder straps* nor whether he had three on one strap and none on the other. Entirely ignorant of military art. yet possessing such knowledge of the Arabs and their country that some general, who must have been gifted with an almost inconceivable genius for disregarding War Office etiquette, resolved to put him to use in the service, and apparently sent him down to Arabia proper. . , —Prince of Mecca. — “There the Arabs made him a ‘Prince of Mecca,’ which we are told is as high a title as it sounds. 'He was attached to the staff of Emir Feisul, and gathered a •random army of 200,000 men, Bedouins and other Arabs. A random army, indeed, it must have been, if we may judge from the pictures of the white-robed_ hosts wandering in haphazard crowds, without any attempt at formation, over the rocky hills. But somehow or 1 other he led them up through Petra to join Allenby in the north of Palestine, occupied Damascus under his command, and ruled it as Govei’nor. In any case, it was a remarkable ex-, ploit for a'young Oxford students. —His Influence with Arabs.— “But the most remarkable part of the story is the young man’s personal influence over an untamed, half-barbarous,. and exclusive people. It -has . lately been the fashion to extol, the Arabs as a noble race longing for freedom * and self-determina-lion, capable of unity; and respectable self-, government. Those who have known the Arabs at first hand do not speak of them so smoothly. Readers of Major Sandes’s book ‘ln Kut and Captivity,’ for instance, will ' remember that, however much the British soldier hated the Turk, he hated the Arab (even as an ally) 20 times more —hated him for his treachery, his meanness, his cruelty. “Yet it was among these Arabs that _ Colonel Lawrence exerted so peculiar an influence that they served him as their king, regarded him os a prophet, and endowed him with something of supernatural power. His modesty, his indifference to drees and personal state, even his ignorance of military science (from the appearance of his army we must assume that he was incapable of saying ‘Form fours’!)—all

A letter, in which a threat of exposure ■was made against the petitioner in a divorce caso, if she failed to pay the expenses connect 3d with her confinement, was produced in the Divorce Court at Wellington last week. The evidence showed that the petitioner had not been provided •With maintenance by her husband, and that

t*fter her discharge from a maternity hospital she was not in a position to pay for her treatment. The matron wrote her a letter, threatening to expose her story to her parents in England if she did not settle her account. "The woman ought to be ashamed of herself for writing such i a letter," remarked the judge.

such things do not seem to have mattered in the least. There appears to have hung a magic 'aura' about the man,' a 'daemonic' quality, eomething of that 'authority' which even mad Lear retained."