Lawrence Of Arabia Again

Taranaki Daily News, 1 May 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

Lawrence Of Arabia Again

K Man Dies But His Spirit Lives

Tiie notable career of Lawrence of Arabia is the best-known parallel to the feat of an un-named British officer who is at the present time staking his life hourly in Morocco. His story is a long chain of risk and hardship imder the tropic sun, and, apart from its stark adventure, has a very definite bearing upon current politics. It has been revealed that this Englishman, who has been dperating secretly for some time, has now been run to earth and identified. For months his work has been affecting the trend of affairs in Northern Africa, and these repercussions led to a search for him. When he was ftnally identified, that identity was kept strictly secret. It has leaked out, however, that he is an Englishman under forty, member of family noted for generations of adventurers for many centuries, and that the hothead of the present family has been in the past adviser to Abdl Krim, the Riffan leader who defied France and -Spain/for some years. The district in which this espionage officer is working has been a hotbed of German intrigue, and on three occasions, twice before the world war and once since, these intrigues brought France and Germany to the verge of war. For some time past it has been known that Nazi agents were working among the tribes, reviving old intrigues with greater intensity than ever. It was feared that the poison might take effect and issue in international trouble. An antidote was needed — a man capable of going among the tribes, living the native life, and undoing the work of the intriguers. Our adventurer was the. man. He understands the various dialects and the habits of the tribes so well that he has no difficulty in passing as a native. He has a wonderful knack of making-up. That old Arab crouching beside the kneeling camel may be he; that daring, swaggering young sheikh jostling through the m'arket place — -he may be the man; the wandering trader, making a sing-song recitation of his wares in some remote hill village — he, too, may hide the keen mind of the new Lawrence i of Arabia. Nobody can say.

But results show that he is doing his work well. In the few months of risk he has shown the French Government liow the disturbance is being organised. He has furnished complete details of the secret organisation established by the Nazis in Morocco and Aigeria. Authorities are now waiting for the right time to pounce upon the scattered agents as they pass through French territory. So cleverly has the whole coup been

brought to pass that the spies do not yet know they have been unmasked. Thanks to the English adventurer, too, France now knows that native chiefs, hitherto believed loyal, have gone over to the plotters; it has also been shown that some are ready to cast in their lot with other interests as soon.as the Government of Franco has acquired control of Spain. There is little glamour about such work as this man's. His love for the spicy side of life has led him into some strahge tangles already; and he works day and night in the certain knowledge that one false step will mean death, or worse than death. What it might mean is best revealed in the even stranger story of Walter Greenway, who by a long chain of coincidences found himself in a similar position. Greenway had been a cat-burglar in Engl&nd, and when arrested by the police his defence had always been the clever playing of a deaf-mute role. When he got a break from crime. he was billeted with a ship plying between England and Ceylon, and for a year he was an exemplary member of the crew. But that spice of restlessness which is natural to some people was in him, and in the summer of 1908 he deserted in Colombo, trekked north-west to Arabia, and before long had mastered the Bedouin tongue. The free life, haughtiness, and hospitality of the Arabs appealed to him, and he commenced to live among them. Then he met the girl . . . She was the daughter of a Bedouin sheikh. All Greenway could sce was a , pair. of eyes above her vefi, a lissom figure, and graceful carriage, which no clumsy Eastern garb could completely hido. It was madriess to think that the Arabswould consent to his marrying her. Yet •Greenway loved, and love is a potent tiiing. It drove Greenway to exploits ! which made him famous; but for it, he might have become a kind of desert beachcomber, useless and obscure. Love led, Greenway to challenge the tribesmen to feats of hardihood. He rode, bareback, horses that others i'eared to ride. He shared in tribal forays, and was most reckless of all. He could be the most silent of the silent, the bravest of the brave. The wliole tribe ideclared that, by Allah! this was a man. Then Greenway, under the noses of his rivals, asked tlie sheikh for his daughter's hand — and won. He married her under the limpid Eastern moon, and in the desert she bore three children to him. They were supremely- happy there,

and Greenway found tribal life exceedingly sweeter than anything civilisation had offered him. But war came. The Arabs rose to strike at the hated Turks. Greenway was now an Arab. He, too, must strike ... - ' Into the Turkish camp there wandered one day a deaf-and-dumb Bedouin. Since he was so obviously/ afflicted by Allah he was allowed to roam ■ freely among the trenches and artillery redoubts. The soldiers threw scraps to him, and Turkish commanders became talkish in his presence.' Then one day a Turkish spy .saw the deaf-mute Bedouin coming from the British camp. . Greenway was seized and questioned. He remained deaf and dumb. Was he really deaf? They shot off rifles behind his ears to see if he would start at the crack of them. They stood him close beside a howitzer until the vibrations made his ears and nose bleed. Even the Turks believed him deaf after that. But was he dumb? They held hot irons against his flesh, burning him to the bone! He did not moan. They tore out his finger-nails by the roots, but though tears of agony came to his eyes he did not utter a cry. So the Turks felt sure they had made a mistake. Gangrene set in where they had mutilated him. He staggered back to the British camp, had an ' arm amputated, and, it seemed, finished his career of espionage. But the urge was on him. He was wandering idly through a bazaar at Eden one day when he heard two Germans talking. He spoke . German very well, and as he listened to their plotting he plunged into a new foray. He i followed them to a warehouse where they had arranged to meet, and played cat-burglar once more. In the warehouse were scores of time-bombs that the Germans were arranging to have placed aboard British ships. They talked, too, of a Turkish arsenal near Bagdad which one of them was due to visit . soon. . One showed the other a uniform he' had concealed in a cupboard, Some little time later a one-armed German stepped - from a motor launch on to a jetty near Bagdad. He had made a three'-hundred mile journey up the Tigris in a week, and when he stood in Bagdad in his glittering uniform— the one that had been hidden in the cupboard at Aden — every Turkish soldier and offier was ready to obey his slightest wish. Greenway's brain was working feverishly. Time was short, the risk overwhelming. , He gave orders for the bombs to be transferred to the arsenal from the launch. Then he asked for a special room to do some work. The work was the setting of the time fuses in all those bombs, which were intended to blow up British ships. He left the building in a great hurry, slipped into • the motor boat, and raced down the Tigris for Basra. Behind liini came a roar that sliook Bagdad. The sky flushed crimson with j

mouiiting flames. • The German arsenal had been blown up. Greenway struggled down the Tigris a dying man. ' The exertion had been too much for him, in his weakened state of health. He managed to reach his wife. In desperation she performed an apparently impossible feat— she carried him in her arm. to the nearest hospital, 70 miles away. She was too late; a fortnight later, on August 26,' 1917, Walter Greenway, the original Lawrence of Arabia, died. There are other men who have worked like that, suffered like that, and come through. Something in their blood urges them into a life of . mad adventure. It is not a life of glamour and romance — it is a life of: hardship and suffering and sacrifiCe. On the shoulders of men like this world destinies rest. The demolition of the . Bagdad arsenal turned the tide of that Eastern w^rfare; just as Lawrence altered the compiexion of things in Arabia. and the anonymous hero of today is mayhap preventing another European war by his undoing of ~ mischief among the conquered but not subdued natives of -wild Morocco.