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Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring 1995 Edited by Philip Kerrigan The Experience of the Arab Revolt as Interpreted in T. E. Lawrence's
Seven Pillars of Wisdom This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Leeds International First World War 1914-1918 Commemoration Conference, 4-11 September 1994. The theme of the conference was 'The War Experienced, 1914-1918 ' It appears here by kind permission of the conference Directors, Dr Hugh Cecil and Mr Peter Liddle. The proceedings will be published by Routledge as Facing Armageddon, 1914-1918.
This raises immediately the question of perspectives and sources. The main focus throughout this discussion will be Seven Pillars of Wisdom, not commercially published until after Lawrence's death in 1935. Quite recently, yet another 'debunking' book which attempts to cut through the so-called 'legend' of T. E. Lawrence has appeared. The tedious litany of repetitive arguments is as follows: the significance of the Arab Revolt has been greatly exaggerated by historians as has the part played in it by Colonel T. E. Lawrence, mainly as a result of the 'legend' that developed thereafter, in which Lawrence himself had a sinister hand.2 Shorn of its more absurd encrustations there is a perfectly respectable position here, although it is certainly not the only interpretation that can be advanced. Furthermore, such arguments have been advanced previously in such an absurdly exaggerated way, with a welter of hyperbole, that they have frequently obscured rather than illuminated scholarly discussion of this subject. The exasperated reader might legitimately ask 'Did the 'Arab Revolt' actually occur? Was it not a creation of Lowell Thomas or David Lean?' The Arab Revolt itself, of course, often becomes a secondary consideration, as it is the figure of Lawrence which really (no matter how much they insist upon his supreme unimportance) preoccupies such polemical (or journalistic) writers. Their utter lack of discrimination in dealing with the so-called 'legend', which has been discussed in detail elsewhere,3 and which seems to mean anything that has been written or said in Lawrence's favour, has resulted in an ironic development: in my view. It is those who seek to find the 'real' Lawrence, and do so by hyper-criticism, that are the true propagators of 'the legend' - certainly since 1950. As Jeremy Wilson reminds us, 'It seems that ordinary human scepticism has been numbed by the sheer quantity of bizarre claims'.4 And this avalanche of controversy has concealed one rather important and elementary point: that whatever its efficacy in aiding Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), the Arab Revolt was a rather important event in the history of the Middle East; indeed a pivotal one. To consider it purely in military terms, as an adjunct to the British Army, or as a vehicle for the supposed ambitions of Lawrence (which is the obsessive focus of so many writers) reveals what colleagues specialising in strategic studies would describe - with due regard for sociological terminology - as an 'ethnocentric bias'. What about sources? I am not an Arabist and cannot speak or read Arabic. The new 'Arabic sources' often trumpeted by the authors of the recent stream of shorter, popular biographies of Lawrence, like Michael Yardley's, do not amount to very much.5 The fact remains that our prime source on the Arab Revolt, and the experience of actually living and fighting through that period, remains T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. We see this experience through the eyes of a Westerner. To that extent, of course, the approach adopted here is as ethnocentric as that criticised above; that is obvious. But the connection is an important one, and cannot just be dismissed. In attempting to draw out the main themes in Lawrence's book, the assumptions that have governed my approach should be established. In the first instance, it is assumed without any fuss or absurdly exaggerated indignation and moralising, that this account is partial. What is truly astounding is that so many writers have found this surprising, or indeed even noteworthy. I have never read a memoir that is not partial. Let us consider Sir Oswald Mosley's My Life (1968) or B. H. Liddell Hart's Memoirs (1965), two of Lawrence's contemporaries. Both these men presented their view of the events they lived through, and both books were lavishly praised when they were published. Yet no matter how much these books may be criticised, no writer has demanded of their authors the superhuman standards of objectivity demanded of Lawrence; and such critics then reject, or ridicule (more often), his view on the spurious grounds that he does not meet these unattainable, if not illusory standards of perfection. Nor should we accept uncritically the methods of literary criticism. Perhaps students of the Arab Revolt should await with bated breath for the 'politically correct' or 'post- modern' or post-structural, 'reading' of Seven Pillars, imbued with the tendentious nonsense of deconstructionism. Historians should be very wary of accepting so uncritically the methods of literary criticism that have become so fashionable in recent years, especially in dealing with texts that treat of the experience of war.6 But Lawrence did not write an autobiography. Indeed, Seven Pillars contains very little background information about him (though he does mention his pre-war travels in Syria); but it does contain a lot of information on the Arabs, the Middle East and British policy. This book is first and foremost a war memoir, and it is surprising how little has been written on this aspect of the book. Lawrence was keenly aware that 'perhaps no one but myself in Feisal's Army had thought of writing down at the time what we felt, what we hoped, what we tried'.7 Indeed, so much nonsense has been written about Seven Pillars that it may sometimes be wondered whether some of its critics have ever read it or whether they are considering the same book as the one under consideration here. At any rate, the portrait of the Arab experience of war as conveyed by Seven Pillars of Wisdom will be the main focus of this essay. Previous discussions of this work have concentrated on questions that are fundamentally secondary to its prime concern. They have been mainly concerned with its literary features, and much of this treatment has exhibited some of the best as well as the worst features of academic, literary criticism. Needless to say, the more sensational and journalistic writers, such as Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson, are obsessed with the identity of the dedicatee, 'S.A.' Indeed, accounts such as this pay little sustained attention to the Arab Revolt. Military historians require a re-adjustment of this focus.8 The estimate advanced here of the literary qualities of this much commented on, but little understood (or misappreciated) work, is that it is a marvellous book in conveying the experience of war in the desert, depicting the conflict it describes with wonderful sweep, colour and graphic qualities, especially in dealing with topography and individual personalities. Lawrence himself acknowledged his own powers of description but envied Liddell Hart his skill at synthesis.9 I am less sure that it is the great book which Lawrence himself strove to write - perhaps too self-consciously. Some passages are over-written with sentences over-laden with adjectives. Perhaps more attention should be given to another rather obvious feature of the author, namely, that he was not trained or mentally equipped for war, but an academic archaeologist who had some experience of the desert. In other words, he was an intellectual, upper middle class, young idealist, rather typical of his class and generation. Or, to look at this another way, he sometimes showed evidence of the kind of rather neurotic self-doubt, but also simultaneously the vanity and boasting, that is rather typical of academics. He was certainly not shy in expressing his views on individuals in forthright language. This accounts, perhaps, for some of the distortions in his account. But, to emphasise once more, there is no such thing as an impartial war memoir, and if there is such a thing, it would not be worth reading. For to be successful, war memoirs must engage the emotions, sympathy and commitment of the author. As for the critics of Seven Pillars, especially of the Richard Aldington stamp, for the most part, I prefer Lawrence's account to theirs, for in their criticism, they reveal far worse sins than those of which they accuse Lawrence. The only area with which the modern reader can sympathise is with their shrill cacophony of exaggerated denunciation of the imbalance of attention devoted to Lawrence at the expense of Allenby. But regrettably, Aldington's bitter personal attack (which has all the subtlety of a personal vendetta) only served to reinforce this imbalance, and conceal Allenby behind a dust cloud raised by his invective.10 Lawrence's book, in any case, combines two traditions: pre-war and post-war. Many previous commentators have noted the seminal importance (and influence) of C. M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (2 vols, 1888, and re-published in 1921), catering to a revived post-1918 appetite for things 'Arabian' which is manifest in popular literature, the theatre and, of course, the cinema. Doughty's book is a travel book in the redoubtable Victorian tradition and details the topography, customs and peoples that he encountered. Lawrence also emulated Doughty in wearing Arab dress from 1917 onwards. There can be little doubt that Lawrence's account of the Arabs and the topography of the Middle East was influenced by Doughty. But Lawrence was too strong and individual a writer to be slavishly imitative, and the overall structure of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was different from Travels in Arabia Deserta, which is not only a great deal longer than Lawrence's book, but more concerned with direct reportage. At any rate, in Lawrence's view, 'It was an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia'.11 The other important influence is post-war liberal disillusionment with the outcome of the war and the post-war peacemaking process. This accounts for the somewhat romantic depiction of the leaders and the led, which prepares the ground for their ultimate disillusionment and disappointment; and also for the description of the Emir Feisal, who may have prevaricated as Arab leader a good deal more than Lawrence indicated in Seven Pillars.12 But Lawrence tried to fuse these two elements - the Doughty style of description with post-war didacticism - and does so through emphasising 'the fellowship of the revolt'. Thus the personal element is a key to understanding the evolution and success of the revolt. 'We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked'. Thus the personal camaraderie, the geographical conditions (including the weather), plus the aspirations he attributed to the followers of the Revolt, combined to produce an air of gleaming light and hope, which is dashed by the brutal, suffocating power of disillusioning darkness, that is invariably associated with age (a common inter-war characteristic to be found in youthful radicals as different as Liddell Hart and Oswald Mosley). From this emerged the guilt that has provoked so much discussion: 'Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises [about Arab independence].' Lawrence found this role uncongenial: 'instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed'. Thus 'some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances'.13 The progress of British policy in this region is not the subject of this essay, but it is vital to understand how it coloured Lawrence's account of his experience when he was writing Seven Pillars after the war. The writing of this book underwent a number of vicissitudes in the early 1920s. The first draft was supposedly lost by the author at Reading Station. The first text, known as the Oxford edition [but in fact a printing of eight uncorrected proof copies], was produced in 1922. The Subscriber's edition [an abridgement] appeared four years later. This was circulated privately among Lawrence's friends and supporters. Variations occur between these texts. A much abridged popular edition, entitled, Revolt in the Desert was published in 1927. The full Subscribers' text was not published commercially until 1935. In producing this long book, Lawrence self-consciously attempted to create a work of art. His concern was first and foremost literary. He did not sit down and attempt to write a monograph based on a series of learned articles. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is simultaneously an act of advocacy, a work of military theory, and an artistic evocation of a political act - a rebellion in search of political independence. Taken together, it constituted (perhaps ironically) 'The Triumph' of the subtitle. It therefore should not be judged by simplistic, one-dimensional standards. Almost every claim made in this book has been the subject of violent refutation, often in intemperate language. Yet sober and judicious estimates of Lawrence's account (though they are mainly concerned with the political and strategic aspects of the Arab Revolt) have indicated that the substance of Lawrence's interpretation of events can be verified and deemed to be reliable. Lawrence does exaggerate. He was inclined to dress up his achievements and embroider them. As Linda I. Tarver observes, 'This weakness is important because it hinders the reader from giving Lawrence credit where it is really due - a circumstance which Lawrence might perversely have intended'.14 Yet critical examination of the documents reveals that Lawrence is reliable on the central, important issues, however much he distorts and embroiders the details.15 This was Liddell Hart's claim, namely, that his account was based on a fundamental bed-rock of veracity.16 There is one further matter that requires some consideration, namely, Lawrence's own tortured odyssey around the perpetual, inescapable, unavoidable, hard granite islands thrown up by the periodic volcanic eruptions in his private life. Most of these pertain to his illegitimacy and the struggle to master his sexual urges. It is his desire to simultaneously conceal and yet hint at the cloaked truth, which accounts for many of his inconsistencies - confirmations that certain actions occurred to some individuals, followed by emphatic denials to others.17 But it should always be remembered that Lawrence was a perverse character who enjoyed playing mental games with his friends and acquaintances. This is part of his fascination; indeed the claim can be made that even if Seven Pillars of Wisdom was completely bogus and Lawrence the fraudulent, self-publicist proclaimed by his many critics and detractors, that such is his fascination that he would still be worth serious study. That a steady stream of books are published continuing to make such claims, seemingly unaware that they have been made before, is testimony to this belief. Does all this matter in a study of the Arab experience of war? Surely it does. If the serious and sober studies by Linda Tarver and Jeremy Wilson indicate convincingly that Lawrence made an incontestable and significant contribution to the Arab Revolt, then his picture of it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is important in two further aspects. There can no longer be any doubting that the graphic account that Lawrence gave of the gruelling (and sometimes harrowing) experience of the Arab Revolt is seen through the eyes of a man with real political influence. Colonel Edouard Brémond, the Head of the French Military Mission in the Hejaz, thought that Lawrence was the only one of the score of British officers who exercised this kind of influence. This leads to the second important aspect. Lawrence threw so much of himself into his role. He convinced Arab leaders of his sincerity and value. This was in part due to his shrewd insight into the motives and aspirations, both noble and base, of the Arab insurgents, but also because Lawrence lacked the pomposity and preened sense of superiority of many of the other British officers dispatched to the Hejaz. This sense of commitment would lead Lawrence into further personal difficulties when Seven Pillars of Wisdom was composed in the 1920s. Yet it did not prevent him from offering in his book a stimulating survey, set in artistic terms, of those elements that shaped the Arab experience in 1917-18.18 I want to begin my survey of these elements with the geographical conditions that governed the revolt and gave it a particular shape. First, 'the elements' can be interpreted literally. There can be no ambiguity over the influence of the weather and the ordeals inflicted by the sun. Lawrence is extremely successful in conveying the atmosphere in which most decisions were taken and then carried out. In April 1917 Lawrence describes the coming of a sandstorm during some of the first raids on the railway line. 'When it got near, the wind, which had been scorching our faces with its hot breathlessness, changed suddenly; and, after waiting a moment, blew bitter cold and damp upon our backs. It also increased greatly in violence, and at the same time the sun disappeared, blotted out by thick rags of yellow air over our heads. We stood in a horrible light, ochreous and fitful. The brown wall of cloud from the hills was now very near, rushing changelessly upon us with a loud grinding sound. Three minutes later it struck, wrapping about us a blanket of dust and stinging grains of sand, twisting and turning in violent eddies, and yet advancing eastward at the speed of a strong gale'.19 This is one of many such passages. The Commonwealth troops fought in Sinai and Palestine in the Great War and again in North Africa in 1940-43 under similar conditions without too much inconvenience, and Westerners did so again for some months in 1991 in the Persian Gulf. But these campaigns featured all the advantages conferred by modern technology. The Arab Revolt was fought under primitive conditions where there were few or no roads and no logistic system with its dependable supplies of water. Furthermore, these primitive conditions prevailed far distant from the coastal littoral to which the Allies hugged so tightly in the Second World War. Such conditions in 1917-18 contributed to a preference for raids rather than set-piece military actions that in turn would have demanded a logistical infrastructure and organisation20 beyond the Arabs' ken. But Lawrence is emphatic in underlining the toll these conditions exacted on Arabs as well as non-Arabs. 'Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers terrible: a death in life'.21 In the same way that climatology and physiography determined geography, so Lawrence drew a link between the Middle East's restless peoples and the countries they inhabited. The Arabs were difficult to define, save that, 'the people of the desert were as little static as the peoples of the hills'. The character of the Bedouin was determined by 'the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert'; 'In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness'.22 Because of these conditions a perpetual rivalry developed between the Arab townsman and the Bedouin whom Sherif Hussein was arming and supplying. The outlying areas were prosperous, while the urban areas suffered. Incidentally, the mode of transport in covering the great expanses was by camel - an exacting and cantankerous beast. 'It was easy to sit on a camel's back without falling off ', Lawrence explained, 'but very difficult to understand and get the best out of her so as to do long journeys without fatiguing either rider or beast'.23 A prime consideration in disrupting 'the fellowship of the desert' was Turkish brutality in suppressing the rebellion. This characterised the Arab Revolt from the outset and did much to shape its experience. Indeed, the Arab failure to seize Medina (in part due to the Arabs taking fright at the sound and effect of Turkish artillery) was followed by suppression of an indiscriminate and medieval character in the suburbs of Awali. 'Hundreds of the inhabitants were raped and butchered', Lawrence recorded, 'the houses fired, and the living and dead alike thrown back into the flames'. Lawrence informed us that 'the first rule of Arab war' was that women and children were inviolate, and 'that property impossible to carry off should be left undamaged' .The result was that for many of the Arabs the revolt took on the character of a tribal 'blood feud'.24 The tribal character of the Revolt is essential to understanding its experience. This accounts for the shifting, ever changing composition of Feisal's army, which fits Lawrence's general portrait of the restless, shiftless bedouin, always on the move. Its tribal character also explains Lawrence's objection to the landing of British troops at Rabegh in 1917, because 'they [the Arabs] would scatter to their tents again as soon as they heard of the landing of foreigners in force'.
It is this tribal character and the makeshift camps and the allure of the Middle East which gives much of Lawrence's account its glamour and colour. It also reminds us of accounts of Red Indian encampments to be found in some of the popular literature of the period, so well documented in Henry Nash Smith's
book Virgin Land (1950). Lawrence writes of Feisal's army that it was It is on his knowledge and awareness of this tribal environment that Lawrence develops his shrewd, and accurate, estimate of Arab fighting qualities. That does not stand or fall on either the validity of the strategy that Lawrence devised for the Arab Revolt, or the effectiveness of the Arabs in the overall Palestine campaign. Lawrence thought the Arabs best in defence. He describes Feisal's troops as follows:
It was not unusual for a whole tribe to take themselves off for a rest when they thought they had earned it, or when they saw fit,27 without recourse to higher authority. Arabs were very enthusiastic indeed on plunder. This was a side of the Arab character which the ordinary British (or Commonwealth) soldier found rather unpalatable. Lieutenant Love of the Camel Brigade Regiment approaching Amman during the first Trans-Jordan raid in April 1918 on meeting the Arabs wrote home:
Despite this, it is clear that the soldiers of the EEF despised all Arabs and were prejudiced against them. Their successors of 1940- 43 were to be no less so. But Lawrence's account rather accepts their keenness for plunder in a matter of fact way. It was a facet of the Arab character, in Lawrence's view, and should be accepted as such. Lawrence had a realistic understanding of the military capabilities of the Arab tribesmen. This was in part because, unlike so many Westerners, he had a real empathy for, and understanding of, ordinary Arabs. He did not despise them and, therefore, could grasp accurately their strengths and limitations. 'One company of Turks firmly entrenched in open country could have defied the entire army of them; and a pitched defeat, with its casualties, would have ended the war by sheer horror'. Hence the need to take advantage of space. 'In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline, nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks'. It is this bedouin fear of casualties that made the Arab Revolt such an attractive vehicle for post-1918 theorists, like Liddell Hart, who wished to emphasise economy of force. 'The Arab's chivalry is guided by a sound business morality', noted the latter.29 But it is important to emphasise, for all the gloss put on these observations by later commentators who had preoccupations of their own, that these were Lawrence's observations made in 1917 to his superior Colonel C. E. Wilson, and all this material is incorporated into Seven Pillars some years later. The colour, vigour and sheer excitement of the Arab advance clearly stirred Lawrence's imagination. He wrote to Colonel Wilson:
In short, Seven Pillars of Wisdom was not a post-war rationalisation of views whose import Lawrence only grasped after 1918.31 All the same, his account would appeal to post-war readers because it showed that romance and drama had not been banished from war. They could turn to it with relief after the industrialised slaughter of the Western Front. The discomfort of fighting in the desert spaces was more oppressive for the Westerners than the bedouin, though they were by no means immune to it. Lawrence remarks on the omnipresent flies, creeping over his face, and the perils of medical treatment in the hands of the bedouin: 'The treatment of every sickness was to burn holes in the patient's body at some spot believed to be the complement of the part affected. It was a cure tolerable to such as had faith in it, but torture to the unbelieving. . . ' Not least, for a man of Lawrence's background and monkish proclivities, one aspect of the desert he found particularly vexing. 'A weariness of the desert was the living always in company, each of the party hearing all that was said and seeing all that was done by the others day and night'. Lawrence experienced a craving for solitude.32 It is, of course, Lawrence's faith that this collection of disparate and perverse tribal warriors could be melded into a movement that could establish 'Arab independence' under the Hashemites which underlies his account. His sympathy with the Arabs, his intellectual ability, and intimacy with Feisal, has been quite convincingly demonstrated by Jeremy Wilson in his authorised biography, and distinguishes Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt from that of other able men, like Lieutenant Colonel S. F. Newcombe. Clearly, Seven Pillars of Wisdom dwells on this and on Lawrence's role. For military historians, describing the Arab Revolt in military terms, and indicating the limitations of regular military methods and the importance of diplomacy and bribery, cajoling and persuasion - what Lawrence calls the methods of peace - is where the main importance of Seven Pillars lies. But a final plea should be made: that writers should not be drawn obsessively to exaggerate the deficiencies of this book and compare it with some factitious and largely illusory 'legend', which is largely the creation of their own imagination. It is high time that the so-called 'legend' was subject to systematic and scholarly investigation, and separated from serious discussion of the Arab Revolt. References Back to the contents page for this issue You can buy issues of the Journal
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