Revolt in the Desert

T. E. Lawrence

• Editorial: Rare Treasure Editions
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781774643129
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military Biographies

Revolt in the Desert is Lawrence of Arabia's classic military memoir, an account of the experiences of one remarkable British officer's war from his own perspective, a war of lightning raids, of blown up railway tracks and trains, ambushes and open battles of Arabs against the Ottoman Turks. Here are the Imperial Camel Corps, armoured car squadrons, daring RAF pilots and their aircraft, Ghurkha and Indian infantry and a bevy of 'specialists' who are the forerunners of today's special forces. It is unlike any other straightforward military memoir.

Revolt in the Desert

by T. E. LAWRENCE

('Lawrence of Arabia')

INTRODUCTION

"Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended—in ruins. Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the world (but not to heaven) by being shown the riches of earth and the pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head and who depended for his food on charity or birds, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration. They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more."

The strange and still mysterious figure of T. E. Lawrence has become, if not the best known, certainly one of the most famous in all the small gallery of true heroes of the war. An unimpressive, rather studious, young man of twenty-six, he was [Pg vi] rejected in the opening days of the war as physically unfit for military service. The authorities who rejected him can be forgiven; for not even Lawrence himself had guessed that he added, to the unusual combination of archæologist, philosopher, diplomat and student of military affairs, the genius of a surpassing leader of irregular cavalry. After his failure to enlist, his knowledge of Arabic and the Arabian peoples brought him a commission as a subaltern in the Intelligence Service of the British command at Cairo. For his subsequent single-handed organisation and leadership of the Arab revolt, through two years of bitter and weird adventure, in an atmosphere of incredible romance and under a veil of profound secrecy, the authorities were not to blame. It was his own masterpiece, and it was one of the miracles of the war.

In 1914, T. E. Lawrence was serving as a more or less unnoticed assistant in the British Museum's excavation of Carchemish on the Euphrates. Under the appearance of a brilliant and somewhat eccentric student of archæology, he concealed a lively initiative, a sympathetic understanding of the country, and a relationship to more than one soldier prominent in British history, including—it is supposed—a Sir Robert Lawrence who fought as a crusader under Richard Cœur de Lion. Casual travellers found him unobtrusively digging Hittite remains out of the banks of the Euphrates; he left them reassured by his tactfulness with the Arab labourers as to the future of the British Empire. He knew the Near East intimately. His first direct knowledge of the complicated peoples of Arabia had been gained while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, when he is said to have undertaken, alone and in native dress, a two-year expedition among the tribes behind Syria, in order to gather material for his thesis on the military history of the Crusades. Such experience placed him, obviously, in the direct line of those remarkable British Orientalists like Doughty and Burton who have done so much to enrich British letters. It could hardly have been anticipated that it was preparing him for the very different and more romantic achievements in reckless leadership and masterful strategy which are described in these pages.

Lawrence was not the author of the revolt; his was the more difficult, and also more dangerous, task of being its inspiration. [Pg vii] A subaltern officer with no respect for his superiors, with a sensitive and vigorous mind, undisturbed either by military regulations or a desire for glory, and with a scholarly taste in reading, he was clearly an unexpected figure among the soldiery and camp followers at Cairo. Since then he has allowed very little to be known of himself. After his triumph in Syria, the famous guerilla leader (who nevertheless remained an ethnological expert) served in the British peace delegation at Versailles, and was later a member of a special commission on Near Eastern affairs headed by the Colonial Secretary. But an almost passionate dislike of notoriety and a seemingly deliberate eccentricity have continued to conceal his character; and he is now [February, 1927] actually serving as a private soldier in the British Army, while the mists of a gathering legend have cloaked him in the obscurity of an almost mythological hero.

However, in 1919, he wrote out in a 400,000-word book the whole bitter account of his adventure and of his disappointment over the conclusion which the Peace Conference seemed to put to it. He left the book, together with some of his notes and many photographs, in a handbag in the Reading railway station; a few minutes later it had disappeared. There was a flurry of rumour to the effect that it had been stolen by high authorities; subsequently it has seemed more likely that the bag was taken by a casual sneak-thief, but Lawrence at any rate sat down with an heroic effort of memory to rewrite the account. He never intended it, however, for publication. He had it printed on a newspaper press in Oxford, in an edition limited characteristically to eight copies, of which three, in what seems almost an excess of reticence, were afterward destroyed.

Of all the honours that an astonished government tried to force upon him, the war-time rank of Lieutenant-Colonel was the only one which he accepted, and that largely because of the necessity for maintaining his status with the Arabs. The latter called him simply "El-Orens," or else by the more picturesque title of "Wrecker of Engines." The titles which the newspapers afterwards invented only annoyed him; and not long ago the astonishing discovery was made that he had enlisted under an assumed name in the Royal Air Force, presumably to avoid attention. There was, of course, another wave of notoriety, and it is [Pg viii] understood that he is now occupying the even less explicable position of a private in the Tank Corps.

The re-written book, with which Lawrence himself was never quite satisfied, was a purely personal record. His impregnable reticence was, however, broken down to the extent of allowing a lengthy abridgment for publication by "a friendly man of letters." The book in its present form opens abruptly with Lawrence's arrival with the Arabian armies, long after he had taken up, along with others of the more brilliant younger men in the intelligence service at Cairo, the enthusiastic advocacy of the Arabian revolt.

At the very outset of the war British diplomacy had remembered the unrest among the Arab-speaking populations of Turkey, and its possible value in the defence of the Suez Canal. A revolutionary movement, fostered both by powerful secret societies and the repressive measures of the Turks, had been growing ever since the Young Turk revolution of 1908. It included many high civil and military officers of the Turkish Government, while a third of the Turkish Army was Arabic-speaking and consequently disaffected. Even before Turkey declared war, Sir Henry McMahon, the representative of British civil power in Egypt, had written to Hussein, the Grand Sherif of Mecca, to promise British support for the independence of the Arabs. The secret societies did not agree that the Allies' cause against the Central Powers was identical with the Arabs' cause against Turkey; many of their members were still loyally commanding Turkish troops at the end of the war, and a doubt among the Arabs as to the disinterestedness of the British explains many of Lawrence's later difficulties. The Arabs, however, did plan a revolution on their own account, under the banner of Hussein and his four sons, but it came to nothing.

Meanwhile Lawrence had taken up his modest duties in the Intelligence Service at Cairo.

"I had been many years," he has said, "going up and down the Semitic East before the war, learning the manners of the villagers and tribesmen and citizens of Syria and Mesopotamia. My poverty had constrained me to mix with the humbler classes, those seldom met by European travellers, and thus my experiences gave me an unusual angle of view, which enabled me to [Pg ix] understand and think for the ignorant many as well as for the more enlightened whose rare opinions mattered, not so much for the day, as for the morrow. In addition I had seen something of the political forces working in the minds of the Middle East, and especially had noted everywhere sure signs of the decay of imperial Turkey."

There were other archæologists, orientalists, and younger experts of the political service, who, although wearing the unfamiliar uniforms of the army and navy, believed in the Arabian revolt as much for the sake of the Arabs as for the sake of the Allies. Lawrence was united with them in their interest in Sir Henry McMahon's correspondence with Hussein, although the more orthodox minds among the military found it difficult to understand such unconventional methods of warfare. As Lawrence adds:

"We called ourselves 'Intrusive' as a band; for we meant to break into the accepted halls of English foreign policy, and build a new people in the East, despite the rails laid down for us by our ancestors. Therefore, from our hybrid Intelligence office in Cairo (a jangling place which for its incessant bells and bustle and running to and fro was likened by Aubrey Herbert to an Oriental railway station) we began to work upon all our chiefs, far and near."

It is a process of which chiefs seldom approve; but Sir Henry continued both his correspondence and his promises. The long agony of the Dardanelles was played out and ended, the British came to disaster at Kut-el-Amara, and the Turks were as close across the Suez Canal as ever. But in the summer of 1916 Sir Henry triumphed, and at the beginning of June Hussein proclaimed the revolt of the Arab people, with British money and support.

Both Jidda and Mecca fell in the first rush of the Sherifian armies, but Feisal's attack upon Medina, the Turkish strongpoint at the end of the Hejaz Railway, failed, and the revolt began to go rather precariously astray amid the simplicities of Arab patriotism and the complex departmental and international jealousies at Cairo. The military authorities still seemed incapable of grasping the value of a war started by the civilians; and a staff perturbed by the eccentric brilliancy of an Intelligence [Pg x] Service made up of experts began to show tendencies toward suppressing them. Sir Henry was recalled to England, and the Sherifian forces, led by Hussein's son Feisal and his three brothers, Ali, Abdulla and Zeid, got neither the supplies nor the advice which they needed.

Lawrence (he was only twenty-eight years old) had never regarded himself as a soldier; he liked his work of making maps and running a secret Arab newspaper, and he felt it meanness in him to pretend to be a man of action. Yet his Arab revolt was in serious difficulties. The Turks had sent out a formal attacking column from Medina, and the Arab levies were in danger of being jammed—by the inapplicable principles of orthodox war—into the area around Mecca, instead of using their dash and mobility in the irregular combat for which they were supremely fitted. Meanwhile Lawrence found himself in danger of being politely eliminated, as an upstart, while other men ruined the plans for which he was largely responsible.

His reply was, first to make himself as obnoxious as possible to his military superiors, and then to ask for leave. It was granted with alacrity, in the hope that he could be gently put out of the way on his return. But he did not intend to be put out of the way. He boarded a naval vessel on the way down the Red Sea, ostensibly as a "joy-ride" with Sir Ronald Storrs, another of the "Intrusives," who was making an official trip to Jidda. He was without authority or passes, and Feisal, the principal commander, was in the interior, from which as a Christian he was debarred by order. But it was his precocious intention to see what he, a staff-captain on leave, could do for the confused armies of Arabia.

"Storrs and I then marched off together, happily. In the East they swore that by three sides was the decent way across a square; and my trick to escape was in this sense oriental. But I justified myself by my confidence in the final success of the Arab revolt if properly advised. I had been a mover in its beginning; my hopes lay in it. The fatalistic subordination of a professional soldier (intrigue being unknown in the British army) would have made a proper officer sit down and watch his plan of campaign wrecked by men who thought nothing of it, and to whose spirit it made no appeal. Non nobis, Domine."

---

[Pg xi]

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

It seems necessary to explain that the spelling of Arabic names throughout this book varies according to the whim of the author.

The publisher's proof-reader objected strongly to the apparent inconsistencies which he found, and a long and entertaining correspond...